Reporters and pundits downplay the impact of critical race theory while quietly implementing its core tenets.
Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we wonder what else the Washington Post might ascribe to whiteness, why 60 Minutes would lean on Miles “Anonymous” Taylor, and hit more media misses.
CRT’s March Through the Media
Critical race theory, if progressive journalists are to be believed, is merely a lens through which adults can analyze history, law, and policy. What it’s not, they argue, is race essentialism being taught in public schools. When Glenn Youngkin made expunging CRT from Virginia’s education system a cornerstone of his successful gubernatorial campaign, he was accused of inventing a racial boogeyman.
MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace spent last election night insisting that CRT “isn’t real.” Her colleague Chris Hayes declared that Youngkin had stoked “white grievance politics.” NBC’s Chuck Todd called it “a new dogwhistle,” while the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent deemed it “race-baiting demagogy.”
These arguments would be much more salient if race essentialism’s march through American institutions wasn’t so thinly disguised by the press itself. Take Sargent’s employer as a case study. Over the last two weeks or so, the Post has leaned into publishing pieces that – whether its editors realize it or not – betray an underlying belief in race essentialism.
In one instance, the authors of a news article quoted Congressman Bennie Thompson as saying, “If you know that a person has been vetted by [House Majority Whip] Jim Clyburn, you know that person won’t go to the court and end up being a Clarence Thomas,” whom the piece describes as “the Black justice whose rulings often resemble the thinking of White conservatives.”
It would be an interesting exercise to ask Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Marianna Sotomayor what, precisely, they meant by those words. Do they suppose that Thomas takes his cues from white conservatives? That they do his thinking for him? Or did they merely mean to convey that his own thinking tracks with “white thinking” – using “white” and “black” in the same way that we use “feminine” and “masculine”?
And few days earlier, in a column on the Canadian trucker vaccine-mandate protest, University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. candidate Taylor Dysart asserted that “the belief that one’s entitlement to freedom is a key component of White supremacy.”
“One’s entitlement to freedom” sounds more like something Braveheart’s King Edward “Longshanks” might sneer at than what a purported advocate of racial equality would call “white supremacy.” But such is the distorting effect of CRT.
The press can continue object to the classification of CRT as a form of race essentialism, but for as long as its most vaunted institutions champion both, its protests will fall on deaf – and righteously vexed – ears.
A Bizarre 60 Minutes Segment
60 Minutes aired a segment on Sunday narrated by Scott Pelley on “Havana Syndrome,” the mysterious set of symptoms reported by a number of U.S. diplomats and officials over the last several years. A Central Intelligence Agency investigation into the phenomena found that almost all of the reported cases could be explained as being caused by environmental and personal medical factors, and that it was “unlikely that a foreign actor, including Russia, is conducting a sustained, worldwide campaign harming U.S. personnel with a weapon or a mechanism.”
Nevertheless, the segment leans on Miles Taylor, the former Trump administration official who penned the infamous “Anonymous” New York Times article explaining that many in the administration were committed to protecting democracy from the former president, to imply that the symptoms are being elicited by a foreign power utilizing a new kind of weapon.
Taylor described waking up one night in his Washington, D.C., home hearing “sort of a chirping, somewhere between what you would think is a cricket or sort of a digital sound. I didn’t know what it was, but it was enough to wake me up. What was really strange about it is, I went to the window, opened up my window, looked down at the street. And keep in mind, Scott, this is probably 3– 3:30 in the morning and I see a white van. And the van’s brake lights turned on, and it pulled off and it sped away.”
And the next day feeling “off. Off, not ready to go to work, you know, kinda wanting to take the day off, you know, sick.”
It’s impossible to disprove a kind of foreign effort to harm U.S. officials generally, or Taylor more specifically. But any good-faith attempt to expose such an effort would be well-served by excluding Taylor, a monomaniacal fabulist with delusions of grandeur and a tenuous relationship with the truth, both of which hurt the credibility of any claims he backs up.
Headline Fail of the Week
The Atlantic published an article on Sunday that seemed to openly admit what many Democrats have been thinking for the past two years: “Mask Mandates Don’t Need to Make Sense.”
The article’s author, Rachel Gutman, notes that Washington, D.C., recently shifted its mask mandate so that residents will need to wear face coverings to attend school, visit a library, or ride in a taxi, but will not need masks inside gyms, sports arenas, concert venues and houses of worship or, as she writes, “all the places where people like to breathe hard or sing and shout in close proximity.”
“If the goal of mask policies is to reduce transmission of the coronavirus as much as possible, then D.C.’s new rules are difficult to reason out,” she writes. “Why should children, who are generally at low risk of severe disease, have to mask while sitting quietly in class when their more vulnerable elders can sing, unmasked, in church? It seems arbitrary, inconsistent, absurd.”
Then, Gutman sails right past the point and argues that in spite of all that, mandates can still be useful if they “align with communities’ goals,” as the subheadline puts it.
“A mask mandate may not magically swaddle the faces of everyone in its jurisdiction, but it could remind already enthusiastic maskers to avoid large gatherings, or lead non-maskers to give the people around them a little more space,” she wrote.
“But no mandate is ever going to be perfectly consistent, and that’s okay. Mask policies can still make sense, so long as they serve a community’s shared goals,” Gutman added.
After much online criticism, the piece’s title was amended to read: “Mask Mandates are Illogical. So What?”
Media Misses
–White House press secretary Jen Psaki again attributed the rise in violent crimes being committed against Asian Americans to “hate-filled rhetoric and language around the origins of the pandemic.” While there have certainly been instances of pandemic-caused anti-Asian hate crimes, the real explanation is much more complicated and multi-causal — and is in part a result of more-progressive approaches to criminal justice.
-While doing a hit for MSNBC, CTV journalist Glen McGregor was shouted down on-air as he complained about the “harassment” at the hands of Canadian truckers participating in the vaccine-mandate protest. Neither he nor the truckers acquitted themselves as well as they could have in the clip, with McGregor clearly dead-set on portraying the protesters poorly and some truckers slipping angry vulgarities into their shouts. But then again, only one of the two parties is paid to tell the truth about the situation on the ground.