NBC Interview Of Nick Sandman: The Media Just Can't Help Itself

Fox's breakdown of the NBC interview is amazing. Maybe it's partially selective editing...but it doesn't look that way. (The smartass Fox tone is a bit hard to stomach...but it's pretty much warranted in this case, I think.) The best part is the pre-3:30 part. After that it's just mostly crappy crosstalk, with Juan Williams making some lame arguments on behalf of the mainstream media. 

   Anyway: the leftward bias of the NBC interviewer is clear. The media are still trying to spin the facts, and seem incapable of admitting error--as is the progressive echo-chamber in e.g. the comments section of the Washington Post.

   If the media can't be trusted in this very simple case, where the facts are carefully recorded on video, and nothing substantial hangs on the outcome, then it seems to me that we shouldn't trust them in any more complicated cases--cases where issues are more complex, some of the facts are obscured, and the outcomes are politically consequential.

   Similarly: if progressives can't admit error in a completely clear and trivial case like this (and like the McEnroe-Williams case), they're never going to admit error in any more complicated or consequential case. 

   Obviously the same sorts of things can be said of conservatives--politics make dogmatists of us all. But this epistemic sickness is epidemic on the contemporary left. It seems to me that it's become far more acute than usual. And: this is the essence of political correctness: the subordination of truth to politics. This isn't coming out of the blue. This is part of a trend that many of us have been yelling about for years now. It's a predictable consequence of certain political and philosophical views embraced by the vocal vanguard of progressivism. In part, it's a feature, not a but: it's a principle, not a violation of principle. This is an Orwellian ideal of the far left: facts ought to be subordinated to political doctrine. And the more moderate left--or what used to be the more moderate left--is just going along with it, because they can't bring themselves to criticize anyone to their left, nor to agree with the right. The right is used to criticizing the far right; in this respect, the two sides are, IMO, asymmetrical. This asymmetry makes the left more irrational, therefore more dangerous.

   I'm a broken record. But IMO we really have swerved into dangerous territory. The godawfulness of Trump is part of what obscures all this for some people, I think. But, honestly, liberals knuckled under to this same totalitarian PC madness in the 80s-90s, and they had no such excuse then. I don't think Trump can excuse it all.