The latest effort to bully Americans into Science and history has been seen on the editorial pages. The Wall Street Journal.
One notable editorial headline?
Pilgrims being Censored
The left wants to cancel the WSJ’s annual Thanksgiving editorials
Regular readers of The WSJSince 1961, when editor Vermont Royster started the Vermont Royster opinion page, they have been aware of and appreciative. WSJ would run Royster’s recounting of the Pilgrims and America’s first Thanksgiving. The Royster piece is exactly as the current editorial describes it: “…a contemporary contrast from the mid-20th century about the progress a prosperous America has made that we can all be thankful for.”
The WSJRightly noting that that 1961 editorial was reprinted annually is:
…popular with readers, who tell us they appreciate the sentiments about hardship and gratitude during what should be a unifying national holiday. For decades we’ve run them with nary a discouraging word.
But this year, however, left-wing cancellation culture bullies have turned the tables on identity politics mob members and demand an end. WSJPilgrims are celebrated in tradition
Change.org has initiated a petition which, at the time of this editorial’s publication, had received 50,000 signatures. They argued:
Let the Wall Street Journal that it’s 2021. It’s time to stop publishing 17th century racism.
The [editorial] includes lines such as, ‘What could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of Wilde beasts and Wilde men?’ The pilgrim writes that they were separate from ‘all the civil parts of the world.’
Our nation celebrates Thanksgiving because the Wampanoag native people saved colonists from starvation. This disturbingly low level of gratitude goes beyond the fact that America was ruled by primitive people. This worldview led to centuries of genocide that decimated 90% of my ancestors’ indigenous people.
The left-wing petition is accepted.
You can find the following: WSJ says in its current responding editorial, this is a “willful misreading of the editorial, which recounts the bravery and trials of the Pilgrims as they sought a better life in new land.”
Exactly.
The real issue in this controversy is leftist cancelculture at work. With the leftist media playing along with its silence about yet another episode of the left demanding censorship of ideas they don’t like.
It just so happens that this episode features the WSJThis horror follows the one at Waukesha in Wisconsin.
After months of media attention on Kyle Rittenhouse and an incense over the not guilty verdict, media soon retreated as it was revealed that the Waukesha parade murderer turned out to have been Darrell Brooks. A Trump-hating, black man, Brooks is now per The New York Post: “…a career criminal who’s spent more than half his life trapped in a revolving door of incarceration, drug abuse and violence.”
Among Brooks’ crimes: “..abusing his partners, raping and impregnating a teenager and a consistent streak of other violent crimes.”
As my NewsBusters colleague Tim Graham has pointed out: “….some liberal media outlets are energetically attempting to spin away from the suspect Darrell Brooks and his left-wing politics on social media.”
Exactly.
Here is the Leftist Playbook again at work. To borrow from Bill Clinton guru James Carville’s 1992 campaign mantra (“It’s the economy, stupid”), what is at play in both the attempt to silence the Wall Street Journal editorial on the Pilgrims, and to quietly walk away from Rittenhouse-style coverage of lefty Darrell Brooks is “It’s the censorship, stupid.”
It is possible to close down an editorial from 60 years ago in the WSJIt is, in other words, to keep Rittenhouse-style coverage a criminal that has committed mass killing, it’s of a part.
These two events alone show the leftist mania for rewriting American history, to silence others whose views are not acceptable, or simply ignore career criminals who share their views about Trump and race, or censorship.
The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker has noted correctly that the left’s attack on the American legal system is in reality a demand for “revolutionary justice.” He adds:
If the left’s reaction to this (Rittenhouse) case doesn’t scare you, I’m afraid you don’t understand what it represents, or how rapidly and how far the poison of this subversive and illiberal dogma has already spread through a political movement and ideology we once called liberal.
Indeed. And that “revolutionary justice” is visible in pockets across America – with two examples showing up in the form of the demands to silence that Wall Street Journal editorial on the Pilgrims and another, seemingly unrelated effort in the media, to downplay a mass killing in Waukesha by a crazed career criminal who holds leftist views.
While America is heading into the hopeful unifying spirit that the holidays bring, it’s smart to grasp the realities of America’s left and right.
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