Pierce: 'We' Did Not Miss the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism. You Did. [View all]

[mcar]

'We' Did Not Miss the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism. You Did.
The New York Times plays itself—but offers a useful window into how establishment media has enabled all this.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
DEC 13, 2018

Now that the full scope of this administration*'s political vandalism and base criminality is largely being copped to in broad daylight in various federal courthouses, a good chunk of the elite political press is moving into the Hoocoodanode? stage of political journalism. This is best exemplified by Thursday's New York Times podcast, the headline of which—"The Rise of Rightwing Extremism, and How We Missed It"—got dragged like Hector's corpse all over the electric Twitter machine until someone at the Times sharpened up and changed the last half of it to "...and How Law Enforcement Ignored It," which is a little better, but not much.

To take the simplest argument first, "we," of course, did no such thing, unless "we" is a very limited—and very white—plural pronoun. The violence on the right certainly made itself obvious in Oklahoma City, and at the Atlanta Olympics, and at various gay bars and women's health clinics, and in Barrett Slepian's kitchen, and in the hills of North Carolina, where Eric Rudolph stayed on the lam for five years and in which he had stashed 250 pounds of explosives for future escapades.

It's not "our" fault that the NYT hired Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat, and not Dave Neiwert or JJ McNab, to write for their Opinions section. It's not "our" fault that the NYT and other elite political media outlets hand-waved the fact that allegedly respectable Republican politicians, national ones as well as the local variety, attached themselves to various "respectable" extremist outfits like the Wise Users out west and the Council of Conservative Citizens, the modern manifestations of the Citizens Councils that were the polite face of American apartheid during the Jim Crow era in the South.

It's not "our" fault that the prion disease spread so wildly on AM radio and on television and, ultimately, on social media as well. It's not "our" fault that white supremacy and outright fascism has become fashionable in pockets of our military, and in our militarized local police forces. And it's certainly no surprise to "us" that the election of an African American president sent the well-nurtured crazies into dangerous hysterics.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a25574930/new-york-times-rightwing-extremism-white-supremacist/