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Man Has Racist Beliefs, Finds Dog Who Bit Him “Scary”
Here are the first two paragraphs of an AP piece, as printed in the Washington Post this morning:
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — A libertarian author who has been called a white nationalist said college students who protested his guest lecture this week were “scary.”
Middlebury College said a professor was injured by a protester following a demonstration against guest speaker Charles Murray on Thursday.
Putting aside the libelous description of Murray — though wow — let’s consider some basic journalism: Is the proper lede an opinion about Murray followed by a banal observation from him, or the fact that his speech was disrupted and a professor injured (briefly hospitalized, in fact, as we learn several paragraphs later)?
As the answer is obvious, let’s procede to the next two paragraphs:
The Southern Poverty Law Center considers Murray a white nationalist who uses “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.” Protests of Murray’s lecture forced the college to move it to another room.
The college said Murray and professor Allison Stanger were surrounded by a group of protesters who became violent after the talk and a protester pulled Stanger’s hair, twisting her neck. It said the group climbed onto the hood of a car carrying Murray and Stanger and threw a traffic sign in front of it.
Again, the Post not only gave opinions about Murray as much attention as it did descriptions of what transpired, but literally placed those opinions above their treatment of the events.
Compare this with how the same events were described in Addison County Independent:
MIDDLEBURY — Middlebury College Professor Allison Stanger was injured by protesters Thursday evening as she was escorting a controversial speaker from campus. She was treated at Porter Hospital and released.
Charles Murray, a political scientist who has been criticized for his views on race and intelligence, was invited to speak on campus by a student group. He was greeted late Thursday afternoon outside McCullough Student Center by hundreds of protesters, and inside Wilson Hall, students turned their backs to him when he got up to speak.
College officials led Murray to another location and a closed circuit broadcast showed him being interviewed by Stanger, the Russell J. Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics.
As Stanger, Murray and a college administrator left McCullough Student Center last evening following the event, they were “physically and violently confronted by a group of protestors,” according to Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing.
Much better! Here, we learn that a college protest turned violent and are then provided some (albeit, horribly biased) context as to why the speaker is controversial. In contrast, it’s barely an exaggeration to say that the Post’s treatment discusses the violence in order to provide context for a story about what a racist Charles Murray supposedly is.
Published in Education, Journalism
Why do you want provide a way for these thugs to portray themselves as martyrs? Are you tired of winning?
You don’t understand the problem I was addressing with my comment.
I was very disappointed to hear that Murray was hassled and the professor injured. But not surprised. For such a mild mannered man Murray elicits such fervent passion against him. When discussing speech with a person on the left some years ago I recall him saying: “our free speech is shutting down his free speech”. Violence at shouting down is a good option for people who don’t have a persuasive argument.
There is a very simple tactic being employed by the extreme left and condoned by the elected left in general; Pelosi, Shumer and the ‘genius’ Maxine Waters… its very simple- we need to create a ‘crisis’ then we can neutralize Trump, the GOP congress and TAKE BACK the power.
The narrative- ‘On campuses the level of ‘unrest’ is out of control, students and immigrants fear for their lives, deportations and camps are coming, people are going to be thrown in the street as their healthcare is taken away from them… the people need to rise up and take back the power!‘
A little support from the MSM and this is the next 4 years… silence the right, the conservative and the libertarian include the religions and every event is an ‘effect’ of this current ruling system and burning it down is the preference.
What’s wrong with killing Nazis?
The higher education establishment has carved out a “safe space” where local law enforcement has been banished from ” no go zones”. Local and/or State law enforcement must reassert their jurisdiction over law in regards to “demonstrations” and “rape” on college campuses; the definitions of which have been hijacked by leftists aided and abetted by the Obama Department of Education’s Dear Colleague Letters. Time to drain the Swamp.
MAGA!
Tom, concur.
But given the dearth of LE follow-up we’ve seen in most of these pre-planned, violent demonstrations, I am saying that Republican/conservative students need to organize to defend themselves and their civil rights, physically, on their own. I know doing this could be exploited and perverted to deliver awful optics, I don’t care.
If police won’t protect and serve, then there’s only one way to stop a bully: Knock the snot out of him.
God, I hate having to agree with @jamielockett!
We wrongly fear creating martyrs, making them stronger somehow by trying to shut them down, going after their funders. But It doesn’t really work that way unless it’s a Gandhi or a MLK. These kids are just hired thugs and nobody cares about them. These are organic processes and every successful action by them is fertilizer strengthening their roots. We, local government as demanded by local residents and serious college students, should arrest them and then sympathetically (in their view) interview the average of the participants and quote them, and show just how ignorant, empty and clueless they are. Then turn them loose after they tell us who paid them and how much.
While I very much appreciate the sentiment of our people knocking the snot out of theirs, I’m afraid it would play into their narrative. Better to apply political pressure locally to have law enforcement take control of the leftist thugs and enforce the law. If State or Federal ( less favored choice) legislation is needed to enforce the rule of law – well, we control most of the legislatures.
Let’s pressure our politicos to stop the madness!
Of course I don’t. I was saying how to avoid, not ameliorate the problem.
Not going into the wilderness today. It’s nice out and almost time for the Score with Edmund Stone.
Concur, but…one of the reasons for the pro-Trump movement is that he has scrapped the “yes, but there are time honored and sacred standards of conduct, and if we violate those we lose” operating system.
We’ve been losing.
These people are looking for the chance to incite and commit violence. Eventually, they will kill someone. As it is, they are terrorizing people.
And the police do little, if anything.
So, a free-born American citizen has three options:
-Avoid the public square, and you Creator-given right to say whatever you want, there.
-Go to the public square, and hope the prog crowd doesn’t get violent, and hope LE does its job if they do, and hope the University (in this case) sanctions the aggressors.
-Go prepared to defend one’s rights, no matter what.
You don’t know me, could be digital muscles, so salt this to taste: I’ve spent decades becoming a human weapon, because I hate bullies.
Must we stop killing terrorists for fear of inciting more terrorist violence? Frankly any amount of force these scumbags dish out should be responded to tenfold. I am sick and tired of hearing stories of good people going to give a lecture at a college just to see those colleges turned into war zones. And then we see that it is our fault!! No it is time we meet these people with the same ferocity which they show us.
They could have written of President Obama, “A liberal politician who has been called a terrorist sympathizer” and it would literally be a true statement, because he has been called that. That doesn’t make it an appropriate introduction for a news story about him.
And, remember, the jurisdictions where these campuses reside skew left. The police can’t act against the perps without getting their butt handed to them by the local brass. But they can “stand down” during retribution, thus raising the cost to these thugs for their behavior. So, @bossmongo is onto something. Campus republicans need to be prepared to defend themselves vigorously as the local authorities are helpless to the extent they have not been corrupted.
The shelf life of this post has probably expired, but I give your comment about 3.4 billion likes, sir.
Do you even understand how supercilious your answer is? C’mon.
And now it begins. <Sigh>
Yup, except with the notable difference that I’m not taking the bait. Indeed, sigh. This post was dumb to begin with, and got even worse. I’m off to listen to some soothing classical music. Signing off…
Why do you want to shut them down? What perverse, dark spot lurks in the Republican soul that makes them want to do this?
What do you have against winning?
Tom,
This explains everything that’s wrong. The Southern Poverty Law Center was an important Civil Rights Organization 50 years ago. Since that time they have morphed into a paranoid extreme left wing pressure group that defames people in a totally unwarranted fashion. That this madness is then matched by a violent on-campus group that physically attacks professors and students is no surprise.
The irresponsible news story lead is the icing on the cake. This is a paradigm of everything that is wrong.
Regards,
Jim
I wonder what will happen when we can program a computer to achieve a perfect score on the SAT (or an IQ test) in five seconds. Will we begin to care a little less about the SAT or IQs? If and when the AI is developed, I hope we will reassess what we think these tests measure. In my view these tests are quaint, twentieth-century relics that, like film cameras, are obsolete.
Wha…? Huh?
Dahling, you have no idea…
Let’s say it takes person X an hour to finish an IQ test with a score that’s sky-high. We might say that person X was really intelligent. Let’s say person X spent 45 minutes on the SAT and got a perfect score. We might say person X had some academic potential. Now let’s meet AI. AI got a perfect SAT in five seconds. And AI’s IQ is so high that it can’t be measured. X is basically a house plant compared to AI.
I read The Bell Curve and Murray did not even mention race until the very end of the book. Yes he chronicles differences in IQ between races but that doesn’t make him a white nationalist because he further chronicles that whites have lower IQs than Asians.
People forget that Murray is a social scientist and when he wrote that book he was just presenting data.
So you’re saying that in the future it will be up to the AI’s to beat up on conservative/libertarian college speakers?
Anyone have a problem seeing the press as the enemy NOW?
The Fourth Estate is a Fifth Column.