STACY MCCAIN: American Journalism Is Decadent and Depraved.
[Wes Pruden of the Washington Times] died three years ago, but his memory lives on, and I have to wonder what he would make of a headline that appeared this week in the Huff Post: “RFK Jr.’s Latest Tweet Is Being Widely Interpreted As A Nazi Dog Whistle.” The key phrase there is “Widely Interpreted,” by which they mean, random people on Twitter are saying stuff.
Where did it come from, this business of turning Twitter content into “news”? The root cause of this phenomenon is probably laziness. Rather than pick up the phone and call some sources about what’s happening in the real world — or, God forbid, leave Mommy’s basement to see for yourself what’s happening — it’s much easier just to cut and paste something you found on the Internet and pretend that this is “reporting.” But I digress.
What was the “dog whistle” transmitted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that was, according to Huff Post’s “sources,” a secret signal of his admiration for the Third Reich? To quote his Tweet in its entirety:
Since the assassination of my father in 1968, candidates for president are provided Secret Service protection. But not me.
Typical turnaround time for pro forma protection requests from presidential candidates is 14-days. After 88-days of no response and after several follow-ups by our campaign, the Biden Administration just denied our request. Secretary Mayorkas: “I have determined that Secret Service protection for Robert F Kennedy Jr. is not warranted at this time.”
Our campaign’s request included a 67-page report from the world’s leading protection firm, detailing unique and well established security and safety risks aside from commonplace death threats.
Does that make you want to blitzkrieg Poland or what? But perhaps you don’t have a Secret Nazi Message Decoder Ring (which various kooks on the Internet seem to possess) and so you missed the Telltale Clue, i.e., the proximity of the number “14” to the number “88.” Indeed, these numbers do have a significance for neo-Nazis, the “14” referring to the notorious “Fourteen Words” creed of terrorist David Lane, and “88” referencing the eighth letter of the alphabet: “HH” = Heil Hitler.
As James Taranto famously wrote, if you can hear the whistle, then you’re the dog.
And it’s good to see that Andrew Breitbart’s Eeeevil Plan For The Huffington Post Continues To Bear Fruit, even at this late a date.