GLENN GREENWALD: Your Top Priority is The Emotional Comfort of the Most Powerful Elites, Which You Fulfill by Never Criticizing Them.
It cannot be overstated how often and casually corporate media employees like this destroy people’s lives. They confront old women on their Florida front lawn for having promoted a pro-Trump event on Facebook that was supposedly organized by Russians. They threaten to expose their critics unless they promise to cease voicing critiques. They dox workers or the crime of producing videos that mock the richest and most powerful politicians in the country such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
And Lorenz has left behind a long list of victims — from teenagers whose old tweets and family history she dug up and published to a businesswoman whose life she destroyed to journalists and others about whom she maliciously lied. She was one of the media leaders mocking and shaming a college student for having published an op-ed in The New York Times on how intolerance for dissent from liberal pieties on college campuses has made her afraid to speak out. She’s the vintage mean girl. So malignant and deceitful and destructive are Lorenz’s shoddy journalistic methods that it took more than an hour for this investigative reporter to document in this great YouTube video all the lies and destruction Lorenz has left in her wake.
Yet look at what NBC just did. While flamboyantly displaying his newly minted credential as a Great Male Ally, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd ended the segment with this sermon: “folks who live online know exactly what they’re doing when they target a journalist.” Do Todd and his fellow weeping actors not realize that they just spent five minutes doing exactly that: targeting journalists by blaming us for the trauma and suicidal ideation of the weeping Washington Post columnist? Why is it permissible for employees of NBC and The Washington Post and the rest to constantly use their platform to malign and demonize journalists, but we cannot criticize them without being accused of unleashing misogynistic violence?
And what about all of Lorenz’s victims? Why do their trauma and the wreckage of their lives from her reports not matter? The answer is obvious. What elites have succeeded in training people to believe is that, somehow, what matters most is the emotional comfort of the society’s most powerful and influential political and media figures. They have the unfettered right to demean and denounce and vilify whomever they want, no matter how powerless, but you cannot speak up or object when they do just that.
Read the whole thing. Back in 2010 at the New Criterion, the late Kenneth Minogue warned:
My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us.
And their leftist operatives with bylines, as well.
