Several weeks ago, leftist pundit and comedian Bill Maher took on his increasingly common role as an unlikely voice of reason when it comes to dealing with the neo-racist, neo-fascist, woke progressivism that has taken over the heart of modern liberalism and the Democrat Party these days.
Responding to the raving lunacy of actor Kevin Hart's statement that white power is "at an all-time high" right now, Maher remarked, "This is one of the big problems with wokeness, that what you say doesn't have to make sense or jive with the facts."
Recent events convince me we should take that one step further and acknowledge that there doesn't seem to be any expectation that progressive activists make even the slightest attempt to determine the truth before speaking. Narrative first, accuracy if it's convenient.
Several days ago, woke ESPN analyst Jay Williams couldn't wait to publicly celebrate the fact that the lily-white Boston Celtics NBA franchise had finally hired its "first head coach of color," Ime Udoka. Apparently in his excitement, Williams couldn't conduct a mere five-second internet search to find out that the Celtics have had 5 black coaches in their history, and were actually the first franchise in the league to hire one.
When Williams tried to cover up his embarrassing error by claiming his Twitter account was hacked, even fellow ESPN host Jalen Rose mocked him. If you're wondering why that is significant, consider it was Rose who humiliated himself shortly thereafter by committing nearly the same offense. Deriding the selection of NBA All Star Kevin Love as a member of the 2020 U.S. Olympic basketball team, Rose claimed the center was only selected because he was white.
"Kevin Love is on the team because of tokenism," Rose said on a podcast. "Don't be scared to make an all-Black team representing the United States of America. I'm disappointed by that."
Besides being just the latest example of Rose viewing all of life through the lens of race, it was also a claim that wasn't even close to reality. All it would have taken was five seconds on the internet to find out that the last Olympic basketball team the U.S. fielded (in 2016) was an all-black team.
But notice there's no cultural price to pay for these two refusing to do even a modicum of research before hurling unjustified accusations into the ether. Intellectual laziness has become completely acceptable as long as it's committed as part of the effort to further progressive ideology.
That privilege extends far beyond the woke walls of ESPN. Corporate behemoth Amazon's propaganda periodical, The Washington Post, has become one of the most egregious perpetrators of this offense. In the anxious hours immediately following the horrific collapse of the Surfside condo building, Post reporter Hannah Dreier ran with a completely un-researched claim that proved to be stunningly false:
That is an indefensible total manipulation of reality, all floated to advance an anti-DeSantis political narrative. And the most disgraceful part of it is the gall it takes to publish something that could have been debunked with a couple moments of journalistic inquiry.
The Urban Search & Rescue teams that FEMA deploys in situations like this were on the ground almost immediately. And the national authorization Dreier is talking about is first originated at the local level. Mayor Cava, a Democrat, signed the emergency declaration at 4:30 pm the afternoon after the early-morning collapse. DeSantis followed within the hour, signing the state declaration, and President Joe Biden signed the national authorization for FEMA the next morning.
Where's the personal responsibility for Ms. Dreier? If she wants to publish these kinds of partisan broadsides, so be it, but she should do so as a paid employee of the Democrat Party rather than maintaining this charade of being a credible journalist. Beyond that, where's the employer accountability wherein the Post demands that their reporters perform even elementary-level research before running false allegations under the mock-worthy slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness?"
Then again, if the President of the United States isn't held to such a standard, why should Dreier be? Last week, beating the drum for increased gun confiscation, Biden stammered,
"And I might add: The Second Amendment, from the day it was passed, limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own. You couldn't buy a cannon!"
There's no way to sugarcoat it – that statement is flagrantly, demonstrably false. Privateers in the late 18th century all had their own cannons. There were no federal or state laws in 1791, the year the Second Amendment was adopted, that prohibited ownership of any type of gun.
I grant that there's a general sense President Biden isn't functioning at full capacity, but are we to the point where we're willing to accept that the supposed leader of the free world is no longer expected to perform even a simple Google search before citing facts to advocate his policy agenda?
It's a paradoxical development that in the age of nearly unlimited access to information, where research has never been so easy or convenient, that one of the greatest challenges our civilization faces is the preponderance of elites who are too lazy to do it.
