The All-Encompassing Naïveté of The True Believers

Nicholas Kristof is entirely unimportant. His laughable article claiming that Israel uses trained dogs to sexually assault Palestinian prisoners is clownish and will disappear without a trace, except for a small group of rabid Jew-haters who will dredge it up occasionally, even though it has been thoroughly debunked.

He is a reliable leftist who has spent his entire professional life cultivating an air of moral superiority, coupled with the arrogance to claim that he is in fact detached...merely an observer of the human condition.

He is unimportant because there are thousands of people exactly like him who produce a fungible product for their media masters. One ardent progressive's article about [fill in the blank] is functionally and stylistically identical to the next. Whether it is Palestine or Global Warming or EVs or clean water or racism in American policing; the stories are all the same blend of pseudo-intellectual rigor combined with hyper-emotional rhetoric designed to do one thing...sway the reader toward the progressive cant.

And they reek of that moral superiority and smugness that is so, so grating to the observant consumer. But it is mostly honest and heartfelt. Sure, some of these progressive drones pumping out identical articles about X or Y or Z are in it for the influence they believe they can exert on the body politic to sway them, and their manipulation of reality is entirely intentional.

But Kristof is almost certainly an earnest and honest reporter. That he is an ignorant fool without any understanding of the human condition is secondary to his feeling that his reporting is absolutely correct on his elevated moral plane, even if that pesky thing called "fact-checking" is conspicuously absent. Is he an anti-semite? Maybe? But he is certainly a fool.

No...the blame for that ridiculous but politically expedient article lies with the senior management of the New York Times, who knew quite well that the article was mostly nonsense...but published it anyway!

And why? Because they have a carefully constructed and longstanding policy of antagonism toward Israel and traditional Judaism. They also have a curated list of other causes that they support, including socialism. And that goes back a very long way. The editors of the New York Times were aware of Stalin's systematic starvation and murder of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-1933, yet they chose to ignore it because it guaranteed them access to Soviet leadership, and it furthered the cause of world socialism. Walter Duranty, the correspondent, was a useful idiot in the process.

So the next time the NYT or the WaPo or any number of reliably leftist rags and media outlets publishes such a rank and obvious propaganda piece; don't blame the writer or talking head. He may very well be complicit, but it is also likely that he is an ignorant, poorly educated, insular knucklehead who simply doesn't know enough to have an educated opinion on anything other than ketchup or mustard on a hot dog.

Blame the media bosses who have a plan, and execute it very well.

posted by CBD at 11:50 AM

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