Posts Tagged ‘washington post’

By John Ruberry

In an op-ed from last month that was credited to the Washington Post editorial board–ominously, it was published to mark Thanksgiving Day–readers are warned about the continuous ideological divide among young people. 

Ideological polarization is now a mainstay of American politics. Millions of young Americans went home this Thanksgiving and potentially found themselves in uncomfortable situations with relatives — especially uncles, apparently — who love former president Donald Trump, hate vaccination or think the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection had very fine people on both sides. 

Of course, the Washington Post doesn’t mention in that op-ed the many failed and unpopular leftist policies of the Joe Biden administration, such as reckless spending and an attack on fossil fuels that have caused the worst inflation rates in decades, open borders that have migrants sleeping in police stations and worse, an American-weakness approach to foreign affairs that has led to wars in Ukraine and Israel, and ramming anti-nature transgenderism down our throats.

Locally, our major cities are becoming unlivable because of rampant lawlessness caused by full-time criminals who are emboldened by catch-and-release Democratic so-called prosecutors. 

When, you are a liberal, you are never wrong. Never. Just ask a liberal about that.

More from that editorial:

The problem with polarization, though, is that it has effects well beyond the political realm, and these can be difficult to anticipate. One example is the collapse of American marriage. A growing number of young women are discovering that they can’t find suitable male partners. As a whole, men are increasingly struggling with, or suffering from, higher unemployment, lower rates of educational attainment, more drug addiction and deaths of despair, and generally less purpose and direction in their lives. But it’s not just that. There’s a growing ideological divide, too. Since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, the percentage of single women ages 18-30 who identify as liberal has shot up from slightly over 20 percent to 32 percent. Young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative.

 However, that polarization is the fault of libs. Yes, I said it.

Look at what Axios, in a biased piece, said in 2021. The stats come from a Generation Lab/Axios poll:

Between the lines: Democrats argue that modern GOP positions, spearheaded by former President Trump — are far outside of the mainstream and polite conversation [bold print emphasis mine].

  • Some have expressed unyielding [again, my emphasis] positions on matters of identity — including abortion, LGBTQ rights and immigration — where they argue human rights, and not just policy differences, are at stake.

Women are more likely than men to take a strong partisan stance in their personal choices.

  • 41% of women would go on a date with someone who voted for the opposing candidate, compared to 67% of men.

A woman named Lyz, who has a Substack titled Men Yell at Me, doesn’t think the Post op-ed goes far-leftist enough. Her post has the headline “Liberal women should not marry Republican men.” Lyz used to be married to a conservative man. And her idea of “compromise” is that liberals–by now a theme will be apparent here–are always right. 

The use of the word “someone” here is particularly nefarious, because it’s not just “someone” being asked to compromise. It’s women. It’s women being chided for not partnering with men who do not agree that they should have the right to an abortion, equal pay, a living wage, and childcare for those inevitable children they ought to have. (Because, in case you missed it, there is a moral panic about women not having babies as well.) It’s women being asked to martyr themselves on the cross of heterosexual marriage in order to prop up the status quo.

I’m a conservative and many of my friends are. Not one of us doesn’t believe in “equal pay.” Some conservatives are pro-abortion–but almost no liberals are. I could go on, but for the sake of brevity I won’t. 

Returning to marriage: Successful relationships involve compromise. And that does not mean changing your political stances. What happened to, “We agree to disagree?”

Some liberals–maybe most–don’t get it.

“It’s my way or the highway,” leads to traffic jams filled with cars with no passengers.

Dan Bongino often says, “The problem is we as conservatives think liberals are people with bad ideas. Liberals think conservatives are bad people with ideas. There’s a big difference there.”

Indeed, there is.

John Ruberry, who has been happily married for nearly three decades, regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

By John Ruberry

On Friday night Substack journalist Matt Taibbi released the first installment of the Twitter Files, which outlined the efforts by Twitter, with assists from the Democratic National Committee, to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020. It’s a dynamite story–a political party worked behind the scenes with a Big Tech company to suppress a damaging news story about a presidential candidate, in this case Joe Biden, so he could defeat the incumbent, Donald J. Trump.

That tale of intrigue is something that you would think that you would find only in political thrillers. You know, the stuff of books, movies, or TV series. Except the Twitter scandal really happened. In response, the elitist mainstream media chose one of three tactics, or a combination of them, to confront this scandal: ignore, bury, or insult. In this post I’m going to discuss the first one in depth, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

But first a look back at an incident from 2005, the year I started my own blog, Marathon Pundit. What was then called the blogosphere was a relatively happy place. In comment threads and in behind-the-scenes emails, there was regular communication between conservative and liberal bloggers and journalists, even some camaraderie, at least here in Illinois. Politically our two camps didn’t agree on much–but there was one subject where we were in unison. All of the Illinois bloggers and mainstream media reporters hated the Reverend Fred Phelps and his twisted house of worship, the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. 

Some background: Phelps, who died in 2014, would bus in the few dozen members of his church, which then, as it does now, consisted only of the extended Phelps family, and protest at the funerals of soldiers and sailors killed in action in Iraq or Afghanistan. They held signs that read, among other things, “God Loves Dead Soldiers.” Phelps, who probably was in need of intensive psychiatric care, based his opinion on God and US military deaths on America’s acceptance of the gay lifestyle. 

Back to Illinois: There was a Phelps protest in East Peoria, Illinois in 2005 at the funeral of a US Marine gunnery sergeant, who was killed in Iraq, which the local paper, the Peoria Journal Star reported on, but it left out the Westboro Church protest. And that infuriated Bill Dennis, who wrote the now-inactive Peoria Pundit blog. 

Dennis had this say 17 years ago:

More than once, I’ve read the opinion that the media shouldn’t give Phelps and his people any “publicity.” Whether or not any particular groups gets publicity from news covering isn’t important. The news media needs to cover the news, whether or not it’s news we want to hear. It’s not the media’s job to keep us from having to hear ugly messages. The people who work in the information business need to reject the notion that the public is better off when it is kept in the dark. We wouldn’t tolerate the government doing that to us. Why does the media think it has the right to keep unpleasant news away from us?

It’s the news media’s job to answer questions, not to turn their head and pretend they didn’t hear the question.

The media’s opinion of what information should be provided to its consumers has now become dangerous. Big Tech, meaning of course Twitter, and as well as Google and Facebook, as well as traditional sources such as the legacy newspapers and broadcast networks, actively worked to suppress or ignore the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was revealed in October 2020 by the New York Post, as the presidential election season was underway. Yes, season–voting was already underway just about everywhere. Those media villains–I believe it’s fair to include those three Big Tech behemoths are part of the media–committed election interference. Think of a football game where the beat reporter for an NFL team is standing on the sidelines when the opposing team is about to score a touchdown–who then runs on to the field and tackles the player carrying the ball. Let’s call that wronged player “Trump.”

That’s what happened in 2020. 

What is the slogan of the Washington Post, which has so far has written just one story about the Twitter Files? Oh yeah, “Democracy dies in darkness.” At least the most recent time Clay Travis checked, which was this morning, the New York Times hasn’t reported on Taibbe’s Twitter revelations. Travis Tweeted a few hours ago, “It has now been two days since @twitter & @elonmusk posted actual emails & correspondence of internal documents relating to the Hunter Biden laptop censorship in 2020. The @nytimes has still not covered the story at all.”

In a story published today CBS news barely mentions Taibbi’s scoop–but it attacked Twitter owner Elon Musk. Oh yeah, attacking. A whole bunch of leftist journalists, propagandists really, went into that attack mode I discussed earlier, vilifying Taibbi for performing superb journalism.

And in regard to that Phelps story from ’05, it wasn’t just the Peoria Journal Star committing the sin of omission. You remember I said that back in the day conservative and liberal bloggers and journalists used to interact regularly about stories. I can’t find the email I sent so long ago, but I reached out to a big shot left-wing Chicago newspaper columnist about what the Peoria Pundit and I saw as media malpractice. His polite reply to me was something like this, “But if we report on Phelps and his hateful protests, then we are only doing what he wants–giving him publicity.” 

No, Mr. Newspaper Columnist, it is your job is to report the news. Not hide it, shape it, or twist it.

Democracy dies in darkness. So does the truth.

John Ruberry regularly blogs from the Chicago area at Marathon Pundit.

Yesterday I was at Workers Credit Union at the Twin City Mall. It’s the only branch of that bank I now go to because it’s the only one that is still manned by actual human beings not behind a television screen.

While I was there a man at the counter with the teller was commenting on how like me he only goes there because there are real people. The teller commented that they are thinking of converting this branch as well. When I got to the window she said the decision hasn’t been made yet but it’s a cost issue but their branch is constantly swamped BECAUSE they are the only one with real people and actual tellers at the windows.

She seemed to miss that in terms of profitability the fact that this branch is attracting customers tells you all you need to know about if getting ridding real people is a smart move.

This came to mind instantly when I read this from Stacy McCain’s piece on our mutual friend Dave Weigel who has been suspended from the Washington Post:

 I feel obligated to point out that Dave is an actual honest-to-God reporter, the kind who goes out on the road, talks to real human beings and takes notes, rather than sitting in front of a laptop making up phony narratives about people on social media, which seems to be Taylor Lorenz’s job description.

It was the same way a dozen years ago, when some of Dave’s “friends” on the Left decided to get him fired from the Post because he had the audacity to defend Ron Paul. Some of my conservative friends were doing a sack dance over Dave’s firing, but I called him up and offered him some advice: Where you go next, make sure that a travel budget is part of the deal. He signed on with Slate a few weeks later and, sure enough, a travel budget was included. Because that’s what Dave does best, really — The Man on the Scene, in an era when every other “journalist” in America seems to spend most of their time ranting on Twitter.

There is still a need for basic shoe-leather reporting in America, and that’s what Dave Weigel is best at. So this suspension from the Washington Post ought to be seen as an opportunity for some other news organization to grab Weigel and put him to work with (a) a guaranteed travel budget and (b) a promise he’ll never be fired for RT’ing a joke.

If you want actual reporting that people would find interesting the example of Dave Weigel actually going to places and talking to people rather than just sitting and pontificating might be a clue, particularly when you see the response to Salina Zito.

Of course there is a disadvantage that Dave has in the sense that last think the left wants is either for people of the right or their own people to be seen as they are in person.

David Ignatius took less that 48 hours after the new republican congress to be in office to lead with this headline:

Is Darrell Issa the new Joe McCarthy?

The meat of the article is even worse:

When you see the righteous gleam in Issa’s eye, recall other zealous congressional investigators who claimed to be doing the public’s business but ended up pursuing vendettas. I think of Robert F. Kennedy’s ruthless pursuit of labor “racketeering” when he was chief counsel of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. And, more chilling, I think of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s use of that subcommittee to probe what he imagined was Communist Party subversion in America.

I don’t think the POST PARTISAN column needs to be renamed. I just think it needs to have punctuation added. Name it. POST: PARTISAN! At least that would be accurate.