I'm pro-choice. My preference is to see Roe v Wade upheld. That said, if you're up for a challenge, try to find the word "women" in any recent article or tweet about abortion by the Washington Post, NYT, ACLU, NARAL or MSNBC.
Nellie Bowles, writing at Common Sense points out one of many deranged articles about Elon Musk, this one at the New York Times (image of the NYT headline below). Nellie's comments:
Pretty bad that baby Elon Musk didn’t solve apartheid: The Times has a new profile of Musk, who grew up in apartheid South Africa until he was 17, then emigrated to Canada so he wouldn’t have to serve in the military.
No matter, the Times’ effort is to smear him literally because he happened to be born into a country with a reprehensible government. Here’s what the reporter wrote: “Elon Musk grew up in a South Africa that saw the dangers of unchecked speech: Apartheid government propaganda fueled violence against Black people. Musk didn't experience that. He grew up in a bubble of white privilege.”
The word the Times was searching for to describe information flow in apartheid-era South Africa the exact opposite of “unchecked speech. It’s censorship. Newspapers blacked out their own columns in protest of government censorship. So determined are these writers to smear Musk and jam history into our modern language, they are literally rewriting apartheid as a problem of misinformation and too much free speech.
In 2019, Caitlyn Flanagan published a noteworthy article about abortion that recognized that most "arguments" about the legality of abortion are dishonest. Most of these "arguments" have zero chance of moving a person on the other side of the issue to a new understanding or a new position. Most such "arguments" fail because they refuse to give the other side its best foot forward. They are worse than straw man arguments or least charitable readings. They are like athletic competitions where only one team takes the field. Most of these "arguments" are thus political rants and rallying cries, not good faith discussions.
Here is an excerpt from Flanagan's excellent article, titled "THE DISHONESTY OF THE ABORTION DEBATE: Why we need to face the best arguments from the other side":
The argument for abortion, if made honestly, requires many words: It must evoke the recent past, the dire consequences to women of making a very simple medical procedure illegal. The argument against it doesn’t take even a single word. The argument against it is a picture.
This is not an argument anyone is going to win. The loudest advocates on both sides are terrible representatives for their cause. When women are urged to “shout your abortion,” and when abortion becomes the subject of stand-up comedy routines, the attitude toward abortion seems ghoulish. Who could possibly be proud that they see no humanity at all in the images that science has made so painfully clear? When anti-abortion advocates speak in the most graphic terms about women “sucking babies out of the womb,” they show themselves without mercy. They are not considering the extremely human, complex, and often heartbreaking reasons behind women’s private decisions. The truth is that the best argument on each side is a damn good one, and until you acknowledge that fact, you aren’t speaking or even thinking honestly about the issue. You certainly aren’t going to convince anybody. Only the truth has the power to move.
Photo Credit: Creative Commons with permission by Mark Baylor
I enjoy listening to Tara Henley's podcasts, even though she unable to get along well with her former employer, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Here is how Bari Weiss describes her departure from CBC:
The story of Tara Henley is the story of countless liberals. Until recently, they were the ones pushing everyone else to be more tolerant, more understanding, more open-minded, more compassionate. Then, something happened — call it ideological succession or institutional capture or the new illiberalism — and, all of a sudden (or so it felt to them), they found themselves to the right of their friends and colleagues. Their crime? Refusing to abandon their principles in the service of some radical, anti-liberal dogma. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know well what we’re referring to. (See under: Paul Rossi or Maud Maron or Dorian Abbot.)
And so it was with Henley, an accomplished Canadian journalist whose book, “Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life,” kind of says it all. Last week, she resigned in style from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and struck out on her own here on Substack.
Henley's most recent article offers a list of many of the issues that left-leaning news media currently refuse to cover. The title to her article is "Meet the press: Why much of the media looks and sounds much the same."
Here’s a good place to start: Ask yourself how many liberal media pieces you’ve seen over the past two years that, say, interrogate COVID restrictions critically (especially early on, with school closures, lockdowns, and mask mandates). Or evaluate Black Lives Matter as a political movement, assessing its strengths and weaknesses. Or offer opposing viewpoints on transgender athletes in women’s sports; or mass immigration; or diversity, equity, and inclusion philosophies, trainings, or policies. Or acknowledge the excesses of #MeToo, or prejudice against the white working class. Or present critiques of identity politics. Or explore downsides of puberty blockers and gender transition surgery for teens; or delve into the growing censoriousness on social media and in education, Hollywood, the arts, and NGOs. Or probe inner city gun violence. Or reflect the positive sides of masculinity. Or talk about God. Or reference anything that’s currently deemed a conspiracy theory in non-derogatory terms (see: the lab leak theory). Or express genuine curiosity on the reasons behind the rise of independent media, whether that’s Joe Rogan or Substack.
This, I would argue, is the no-fly list. These are the tripwires.
I’ll admit that, months after leaving legacy media, I still feel an instinctive trepidation even running down this list — that’s how ingrained this is.
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