![]() Your kind is extinct we are the inheritors. “If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. ![]() Earlier in the novel, when Winston thought O’Brien was a secret recruiter for the anti-Party resistance, Winston and Julia swore that they would do any number of vile things to fight Big Brother and the Party. In it, the interrogator O’Brien is breaking down Winston Smith. It is a norm of civilized life that cannot be abrogated.įor Whataboutists of the Left and the Right, I invite you to consider this passage from Orwell’s 1984. It should be true that ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE IT IS WRONG TO COMMIT ACTS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST JOURNALISTS OR PEACEFUL PROTESTERS. ![]() ![]() But so far - correct me if I’m wrong here - the only actual assaults on journalists have come from Antifa.Īnyway, whataboutism isn’t the point, or shouldn’t be the point. Here I slammed him for using the phrase “enemy of the people” to describe journalists, and here, back in 2016, I criticized Trump for encouraging his supporters to use violence to eject anti-Trump protesters from his rallies. For the record, I have criticized Donald Trump for potentially inciting violence against the media. It’s important to state at this point that as much as I believe the news media are unfair in how they report on social and cultural issues, nothing justifies the way the president and some of his supporters talk about journalists, in a way that comes very close to justifying violence against them. Through my eyes, this is a crystal-clear manifestation of the double standards at work in our media culture. We talked a bit about the Covington Catholic thing, versus the Andy Ngo incident. He asked hard questions of me about my own religious and cultural views, and said to his listeners more than once that he was asking not so much to argue with me, but to understand why people like me believe the things we do, and feel so besieged in this culture. This morning I spent a genuinely enjoyable 90 minutes recording a podcast with Ezra Klein. Still, it’s interesting to compare the reaction of individual progressive writers and commenters, as well as media organizations, to the undeniably true Ngo beating, versus the fake allegations lodged against these high school boys. Mind you, Reza Aslan is not obliged to comment on everything that happens. I just checked his Twitter account, and he has said nothing about Antifa’s attack on Andy Ngo. In the Ngo case, not only was there video that day (captured by a reporter from the Oregonian) showing Antifa attacking Ngo, there was also the undisputed fact that Ngo was taken to the hospital, and kept there overnight because doctors detected bleeding in his brain.Īnd yet, this hasn’t become a national news story, except on Fox, and on conservative outlets. What jumps out at me about the situation are the dogs that haven’t yet barked: many in the mainstream media, who were quick to make a national issue out of demonizing the Covington Catholic boys, even before the full story was in. Singal is a leftist journalist who is scrupulously fair, so I take him at his word that “a lot of fairly big-name progressives and leftists” said that Ngo was asking for it. He’s completely right that it’s crazy that wrongness of this is even an issue. Singal identifies other journalists who have been physically assaulted by Antifa. To respond to this with “He was asking for it,” which is what a lot of fairly big-name progressives and leftists did, is insane. In the course of filming antifa, which he does regularly, some members of antifa physically assaulted him, and not for the first time, which would certainly seem to lend credence to his claim. Ngo is a conservative journalist whose goal is to document what he claims are the violent excesses of antifa - an argument progressives tend to reject. This extended pretty high up the progressive hierarchy. Plus a lot of silence from those too scared to weigh in on the apparently controversial question of how one should react to masked vigilantes assaulting a journalist. ![]() The reaction online from a disturbingly big subset of the left was glee, rationalization, or both. It’s insane that in this, the Year of Our Lord 2019, there is any controversy over whether or not it is acceptable to physically assault a journalist, sending him to the emergency room. The progressive journalist Jesse Singal is rightly outraged over the Andy Ngo situation. ![]()
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