We Told You So

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, October 26, 2023

 

Two weeks ago, Playboy’s “creator community” website fired former porn actress Mia Khalifa after a string of social-media posts in which she cheered on Hamas terrorists who had killed, wounded, and abducted thousands of Israelis, including women and children. Among other things, Khalifa referred to Hamas as “freedom fighters.”

 

Last week, 20-year-old environmental “it girl” Greta Thunberg posted a photo of herself holding a “Stand with Gaza” sign and called for a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, directing her followers to a number of anti-Israeli websites. Consequently, the Israeli education ministry has removed Thunberg from their list of “education role models” and pulled mentions of her from school curricula.

 

And, of course, American media appears to be caught off guard by the amount of antisemitic hate that has erupted on U.S. college campuses in the past two and a half weeks. The horror in Israel, and Israel’s response to it in Gaza, has shaken the antisemitism tree in America and, as predicted by conservatives, all the usual left-wing suspects are falling out. (This will no doubt shock mainstream-media progressives like Paul Krugman who have argued it is actually Republicans that are more dangerous for Jews.)

 

Consequently, university presidents who have spent years coddling their campus activists are now scrambling to denounce their Hamas-supporting students. From signing anti-Israel letters to marching on the quad to projecting antisemitic sayings on library buildings, activists siding with terrorists is now de rigueur on campus.

 

The media might be asking themselves, “Who knew there was so much antisemitism on America’s far left?”

 

The answer: Conservatives. That’s who knew. You just had to ask.

 

For years, news sites on the right have been chronicling the rampant antisemitism on college campuses and on the left more generally. Remember when Indiana University had to set up a task force to combat antisemitism on its campus? Or when 225 Oberlin College alumni signed an open letter asking the school to combat antisemitic acts at the school? Or when a 2017 report found the suppression of Jewish students’ speech had doubled on campus during the previous year?

 

Many most likely don’t remember those things, because they were largely covered by conservative outlets. And once a right-leaning news site publicly notices something, the traditional media treat the story like a toothbrush at a garage sale. Going anywhere near it would force old-school publications to admit they were scooped by a guy who probably has a Steve Bannon tattoo.

 

And, of course, that doesn’t even touch on the fact that conservatives have written column after column about how, just maybe, we shouldn’t be idolizing attention-starved teenagers when they regurgitate climate-science talking points they have been fed. That right-leaning guy in your office? He could have told you the same. The “wisdom of children” has now morphed into antisemitic tropes.

 

In fact, just imagine how many big stories the traditional media outlets could have jumped on earlier had they just had a conservative somewhere among their ranks.

 

Take, for example, the recent implosion of Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. In 2020, the Washington Free Beacon noticed something odd about Professor Kendi’s operation: He had raised millions of dollars for a number of research projects that never materialized. But it was only this year, after BU started to notice that the center was effectively devoid of any work product, that the national media took notice.

 

Conservative media had spent years chronicling how Kendi was effectively running a scam bankrolled by wealthy liberals presumably overcome with guilt. But nobody in the traditional media seemed to care until their fellow liberals — university administrators and Kendi’s own colleagues who had begun to reveal poor working conditions and other problems — launched an inquiry into Kendi’s activities.

 

Or remember the case of Lia Thomas, who went from being an average male swimmer at Penn to breaking school records after identifying as female and joining the women’s team? Right-leaning news outlets like the New York Post noticed in late 2021 that males taking away awards from female athletes might cause a controversy. But the New York Times treated Thomas much as the swimmer’s teammates in the locker room did — by averting their eyes and pretending it wasn’t happening. Except Thomas’s teammates had little choice.

 

Finally, two months after conservative news sites had been discussing the controversy, the Times relented and chimed in on the Thomas imbroglio.

 

The Times was also late to acknowledge the painful discussions happening around America regarding children identifying as transgender, while LGBTQ activists were forcefully advocating prescribing puberty-blockers and “gender reassignment” surgery for minors. (The Times has since run a number of fair-minded articles on the topic, although doing so led to a revolt by many of its employees who claimed the paper was “magnifying” anti-trans rhetoric.)

 

Perhaps you recall reading decades’ worth of mainstream-media articles about how America would turn into a dystopian nightmare for women if the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion case was overturned. Well, it happened, and it turns out abortions have by some estimates increased since Roe’s reversal over a year ago. Legal experts on the right had argued that overturning Roe would simply allow states to regulate it as they wished. Hardly anyone on the left listened to them, but these right-wing court watchers were entirely correct.

 

Some of the media’s condemnation of conservative concerns turns into outright ridicule. Earlier this year, Republicans expressed worry when U.S. Consumer Product Safety commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. let it slip that the commission was looking at regulations to restrict gas stoves. Media outlets rushed to mock the idea that the Biden administration would steal our beloved natural-gas cooktops.

 

But there was indeed plenty to worry about. California has already announced a ban on gas hookups in new construction, and New York has followed suit. As noted by National Review’s Noah Rothman, a spokeswoman for New York governor Kathy Hochul said her state’s ban would “not have any loopholes,” promising “there will not be any option for municipalities to opt out.”

 

What the progressives in the media don’t see is that they would actually be doing themselves and Democrats a favor by being earlier to report accurately on these things. People outside the New York–D.C. bubble appear to see these extreme left-wing positions before the media do, and as a result, normal voters attribute these extreme positions to the whole Democratic Party.

 

Democrats like to paint Republicans as anti-vaxxers and election deniers (because there are plenty of them) and demand that Republican politicians denounce them. Now Democrats have antisemites (plenty of them) in their midst and are being called on to denounce them. Had their backers in the media acknowledged this antisemitism among progressives beforehand, the more reasonable progressives could have denounced Jew-hatred before it spread.

 

This doesn’t mean, of course, that legacy-media outlets need to investigate every fever dream they see on right-wing websites. By reading some MAGA clickbait sites right now, you would think soccer star Megan Rapinoe is in Gaza fighting on behalf of Hamas by injecting Israelis with a Covid vaccine cooked up by Anthony Fauci in a basement lab.

 

But if a charge is realistic, look into it. Then your “legacy” publication won’t look so foolish when you are forced to play catch-up.

 

As the old saying (frequently misattributed to Mark Twain) goes, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read it, you’re misinformed.” National outlets continue to misinform their readers, repelling conservatives just as those outlets are struggling for more subscriber revenue. A media company doesn’t need a Taylor Swift or Beyoncé reporter to boost readership. Just show half of the country you hear them.