December 18, 2012
Matt Drudge
Lefties across the Internet exploded in a mass hysterical outbreak of moral posturing and denounced…Matt Drudge. As a “race baiter.” For quoting someone. Who was, in turn, quoting make-believe characters in a fictional movie directed by one of hipsterdom’s (white) cultural icons.
This sorry spectacle of messenger-shooting resembled nothing so much as a herd of stupid naked fat people trying to play Twister.
These rituals of Two Minutes Hate occur throughout cyberspace almost daily. (See “Derbyshire, John.”) I feel like a nerd is trying to pick me up with a line from Star Trek: “Sonny, does this kind of thing actually work?”
It certainly used to. According to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Hannah Arendt once reportedly said something along the lines of, “One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”
Today, these kinds of bad-faith drive-by smears are easier to spread but also easier to counter, due in part ‘another paradox’ by the very citizen-journalist revolution Drudge personifies.
The trouble is, the truth never filters down to everybody. Worse, even if it did, “everybody” is getting dumber and more literal-minded all the time. Boring old-fashioned concepts such as “irony” and “sarcasm” and “correctly using funny-sounding words such as ‘niggardly'” and even “quoting other people, accurately and in context, to make a point” can get you fired or hauled into court.
And it’s so exhausting having to patiently explain that when Rush Limbaugh called Barack Obama “a Magic Negro,” he was simply quoting a black cultural theorist who’d used the expression (one with some provenance) to describe…Barack Obama. I’m nodding off just having to type all that. Again.
No doubt almost every one of Drudge’s accusers immediately surfed over to his site when a story broke on Friday about a shooting at a Connecticut elementary school. I’ll bet they continued to revisit the site all weekend, too.
I’d also bet fewer of them noticed a headline, lower down the page, but there just the same:
It turns out that the same day dozens of white women and children were murdered at Sandy Hook, ten African Americans had been wounded by assailants with firearms in one of the strictest gun-control cities in the nation.
Chicago could be said to experience a slow-mo Sandy Hook all year long, year in and year out, except the victims and the assailants tend to be black.
Neither the mainstream media nor Drudge’s excitable foes have expressed much outrage about this ongoing loss of life. Doing so might spoil their gun-control narrative.
If I was Matt Drudge, I’d be tempted to wonder who the real racists really were.
