Why death doesn’t halt the media attacks on Scott – Latest News
Among the many indignities suffered by outstanding normies and conservatives is that information of their death will practically all the time embody an accounting of their ideological sins.
No one else will get this remedy, not even Third World despots.
Consider this week’s protection of the death of “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams.
In saying the cartoonist’s passing, main newsrooms discovered it obligatory to notice that Adams was guilty of holding problematic views.
“Scott Adams, whose comic strip ‘Dilbert’ was a sensation until he made racist comments on his podcast, has died at 68,” went a New York Times information blurb.
The subhead to Adams’ official obituary reads, “His chronicles of a corporate cubicle dweller was widely distributed until racist comments on his podcast led newspapers to cut their ties with him.”
The Washington Post’s blurb concludes: “Adams drew criticism after he veered into far-right political terrain.”
Its obit subhead states, “Publishers cut ties with Mr. Adams after he made racist comments on a YouTube live stream.”
For context, the humorist’s “racist” remarks had been spurred by a 2023 survey during which 26% of black respondents disagreed with the assertion “it’s OK to be white,” whereas 21% stated “not sure.”
“If nearly half of all blacks are not OK with white people, that’s a hate group,” Adams stated on his podcast. “And . . . the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people.”
The editorial alternative to guide protection of Adams’ death with nods to these feedback can be defensible had been it constant.
But it’s not.
Consider how these similar newsrooms lined the death of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.
The Times: “Hugo Chavez: A Polarizing Figure Who Led a Movement.”
WaPo: “Hugo Chavez, passionate but polarizing Venezuelan president, dead at 58.”
Passionate. Fiery.
Good factor Chavez wasn’t a racist, as a result of then the people he starved, tortured and murdered would’ve been in actual hassle.
When radio host Rush Limbaugh died in 2021, the Times’ obituary headline accused him of turning “talk radio into a right-wing attack machine.”
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Yet when the godfather of fashionable terrorism died in 2004, the similar paper gave us this doozy: “Yasir Arafat, Father and Leader of Palestinian Nationalism, Dies at 75.”
When Thomas Monson, the longtime president of the Mormon church, handed away in 2018, the Times’ headline famous that he “rebuffed demands to ordain women as priests and refused to alter church opposition to same-sex marriage.”
In distinction, the murderous tyrant who held Cuba for half a century obtained a Times tongue tub in “Fidel Castro, Cuban Revolutionary Who Defied US, Dies at 90.”
Its accompanying information blurb learn, “Castro’s legacy has been a mixed record of social progress and poverty, of racial equality and political persecution.”
When the late Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe died in 2024, his WaPo obit accused him of being a “climate-change denier.”
But when the United States obliterated an notorious Islamic State chief, the paper gave us this timeless traditional: “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at the helm of Islamic State, dies at 48.”
Then there’s the egregious distinction in how two so-called “election deniers” are memorialized primarily based on occasion affiliation.
In 2022, when Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana died in a car crash, her WaPo obit concluded with a blatant political assault: “A Donald Trump supporter, Walorski voted against impeaching the president in 2021 for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, which resulted in the deaths of one police officer and four others and injured more than 100 law enforcement officers.”
One 12 months earlier, the similar paper marked the passing of Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings with a sentimental obituary describing him as “charismatic” and “pathbreaking.”
Yet in 2001, Hastings helped lead the unsuccessful effort to dam the certification of George W. Bush as president, becoming a member of a Democratic walkout staged during the certification course of and standing as the first to register his objections to alleged — however by no means confirmed —voter fraud.
The Washington Post’s tribute to Hastings made no point out of his attempt to overthrow the outcomes of an election.
The discrepancy is apparent, and it stems from the worldview so common in the left-leaning media — that politics is, and may, be all-consuming.
That’s why, even in death, conservatives are granted no peace: Death is no excuse for a cessation in hostilities.
When leftists say all-consuming, they imply all-consuming.
Thus, the death of somebody like Scott Adams is seen simply as one other alternative to assault a political enemy for a supposed litany of -isms and phobias.
Meanwhile, those that’ve managed to fall into the unfastened hierarchy of left-wing “allies” are allowed to bask of their legacies, with even the worst of them romanticized as charming rebels and dreamy iconoclasts.
T. Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington, DC.
