I can't tell you how proud I am to work with my news-side colleagues (@bern_hogan, @postsloane, etc.), who broke the biggest Cuomo stories of the last year.
And I'm extremely proud to work for a punchy *tabloid*. As someone like Christopher Lasch would tell us, 1/x
An opinionated tabloid with a definite worldview, like The Post, is much more attuned to the democratic function and spirit of the earliest American journalism. Pretend-objective, highbrow journalism came much later, with men like Walter Lippman creating its ideology.
And of course, the pretense of total objectivity has been shattered in the digital age. The faux-objective newsrooms are the ones most beholden to ideological orthodoxies. Meanwhile, The Post carries on doing what it's done since the early days of the republic; Hamilton smiles.
Argh, *Lippmann.
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Hofstadter on Herbert Hoover’s prose and oratory — DYING 😂!
In a way, Hofstadter is kinder to Calhoun than he is to Hoover. Calhoun he interprets as an evil genius; Hoover comes across as this naive, bumbling, inarticulate believer in the mythology of economic individualism.
The more it became apparent that his free-market fundamentalism wasn’t solving the problems of the Depression, the more ardent and defiant Hoover became in telling a starving nation that everything was fundamentally “sound,” prosperity just around the corner. Sounds familiar.
Facebook LAST YEAR banned/flagged a New York Post column by @StevenWMosher thoughtfully laying out why a lab leak was a plausible COVID origin.
Now 20 elite scientists have signed a letter in the journal Science arguing the manmade origin must be “taken seriously.”
/Thread/
In justifying its ban, Facebook cited as a “fact-checker” a researcher with a clear conflict of interest: Danielle E. Anderson, assistant prof at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, personally attested to the lab’s “strict control and containment measures.”
But Anderson has regularly worked with Wuhan’s researchers, and even done her own experiments at the suspect virology facility.
The right liberal’s one reflex besides tone-policing is to suggest that adopting any but liberal principles risks bringing about intolerable oppression: You have to start by disclaiming all sorts of past and potential future horrors that liberalism supposedly guards against. 1/x
It’s a form of intellectual blackmail, and we shouldn’t stand for it. And the best defense is to go on offense: to turn the tactic around: “No, you, Professor Christian Right Lib, have to account for your compromises and to own all the horrors of our actually existing dystopia.”
“What would happen to religious liberty and pluralism? We don’t all agree about the good!”
“What’s happening to those things now? Look around you. The Church feels more politically squeezed by the day. The ideology of pluralism in practice means the liberalism’s coercive reign.”