Points of honor

After 15 people were murdered and scores more injured at Sydney’s fabled Bondi Beach in mid-December, The American Prospect ran an article headlined: “Australia Proves Gun Control Works.” The article, by the magazine’s managing editor Ryan Cooper, is not quite so spectacularly misconceived as the headline would suggest — Mr Cooper handsomely allows that “the Bondi shooting was still plenty bad” — but the doubtful and unprovable assertion that it “would have been a lot worse if not for Aussie gun regulation” can hardly make up for the flat untruth of the article’s title. Whatever else either “Australia” or its recent massacre may be said to “prove” it is a mere absurdity to say that it proves gun control works.

The second most remarkable thing about Mr Cooper’s article was that it made no mention of the ethnicity of either the murdered or their murderers — apart from whatever inferences the reader might or might not choose to draw from the fact that the former were at a Hanukkah celebration and the latter were “reportedly inspired by ISIS.” There were numerous comparisons to other mass shootings but none that could be characterized or explained by anything other than the legal availability of the firearms used in them. Of course there was no mention of the Bondi Beach massacre as part of a recent and growing pattern of violence against Jews merely as Jews.

Would any editor in the English-speaking world have passed that article or that headline if such a mass murder — especially a mass murder of Jews — had happened ten years ago? Maybe. But there can be no doubt, I think, that in the decade since Donald Trump came down the Trump tower escalator, what the media regard as “news” has come to exclude almost completely anything that does not contribute to the dominant media “narrative” about the news — the need for gun control, for example. And if, like violence against Jews, it does not contribute to the media narrative — about “Free Palestine,” for example — it isn’t news anymore.

I hasten to add that this is almost equally true of the media rump known to the left-wing legacy media as “right-wing,” though right-wing media, such as they are, have the excellent excuse that they only exist in the first place in order to cover the news that the left can’t or won’t cover. Not quite a week after the article mentioned above, Ryan Cooper again took to the pages of American Prospect to call Bari Weiss a “moron,” among other opprobrious names, for ordering, in her new role as head of CBS News, the withholding of a typical piece of anti-Trump propaganda on “60 Minutes” for “further reporting.” This, according to the doubtless very non-moronic Mr Cooper, made her “the Propagandist Donald Trump Deserves.”

The rest of big media seems to have taken more or less the same view of the matter. Even Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. of The Wall Street Journal wrote that “Bari Weiss Delivers for CBS’s Parent”:

Grown-ups know what they’re getting into. Ms. Weiss has so far upheld what I will courteously assume was the implicit bargain that landed her the CBS job. Don’t gasp. She knew why she was being hired. Her editorial decisions, even if made for the purest of journalistic reasons, were intended to be factors in the Ellison family’s stalking of the Warner properties.

For The Atlantic Jonathan Chait wrote in the imperative: “Stop Defending Bari Weiss: It is impossible to take her actions at face value given the context in which she is operating.” Elsewhere, Elie Mystal based his year-end fund-raising for The Nation on “what,” he says, “Bari Weiss is doing to once-proud CBS News” — which is to show how “corporate media has fallen under the jackboots of authoritarians.” This, you will not be surprised to hear, leaves “only independent media” like The Nation “to do the work” — the work, that is, of propagandizing on behalf of the left’s belief that all who oppose them are jackbooted authoritarians.

This kind of language, like Mr Mystal’s characterization of “the likes of Trump, [Chief Justice] Roberts, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and the rest of the regime’s lackeys in Washington” as sunk in “moral depravity,” obviously depends for its effect on the assumption that readers already share the author’s prejudices about the jackbooted authoritarians and moral reprobates and don’t need any persuading to see them as such. This used to be called “preaching to the choir,” but it is the characteristic mode of all media these days. That’s what the media audience, such as it still is, seems to want.

But it produces some bizarre results for anyone with one foot still planted in the real, extra-narrative world. Thus, Harold Meyerson wrote on another page of Mr Cooper’s magazine of “Trump’s Imaginary 2025,” explaining that “not surprisingly, his look back at his first year as our re-elected president bore no resemblance to anyone else’s 2025.” What? Anyone else’s? Such Trumpian hyperbole, like the title of Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right
suggests that there is a whole lot of projection going on, at least among the left-oriented media. The allegedly imaginary worlds, like the furious minds, of their hated enemies are really their own.

Ryan Cooper leads his attack on Bari Weiss by comparing her to “Baghdad Bob,” the nickname given by the media of the day to Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, Saddam Hussein’s spokesman during the Second Gulf War in 2003. Baghdad Bob, as those of a certain age will remember, was then as unabashed about announcing victory in the midst of defeat as Mr Cooper himself is today about announcing that Australian gun-control “works” — or that propaganda by his own ideological confreres isn’t “propaganda” while any attempt to moderate or “balance” it with another point of view is. But it’s Bari Weiss who is supposed to be out of touch with reality.

Yet the line between news and propaganda has been crossed so often and so promiscuously in the last decade that even the attempt to re-trace and re-establish it as a recognizable border between truth and mere truthiness is itself almost certain to take the form of propaganda rather than news. When we say that everything we disagree with is propaganda, we cannot but be engaging in propaganda ourselves, it seems.

One of the rare voices on the left that was raised in Bari Weiss’s defense, that of Joe Klein, goes on to scold his fellow left-leaning journalists for “cynicism”:

Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre. Beneath the casual sneer, there was a default position — against the police and small business, and the culture of the military and people of faith. This is accompanied by the reflexive blessing of well- intentioned, but ineffective, government programs. The mainstream press, like the Democrats, think a government program has “succeeded” when the bill is passed and the funding distributed. Rarely do we ask: is this well-managed, well-conceived? Does it actually work? (Tim Walz, ineffably clueless, is Exhibit A.)

But of course the journalists who have given Tim Walz a pass over the massive Somali fraud in Minnesota have been the reverse of cynical. I think that what Mr Klein is complaining of is not cynicism but ideology — or that on behalf of which propaganda was first conceived and named as such. Someone like Joe Klein can’t see this, though he sees so much besides, not because he is blinded by ideology, like so much of the rest of his tribe, but because he thinks ideology is a trivial thing, or just another word for “opinions.” Ideology, however, the ravening monster of the last century, lately re-awakened from its thirty-year, post-Cold War slumber, is not something that everybody has, like opinions. Instead, it insists on its right to rearrange the world — your world and my world — to its own liking, and to hell with you and me.

A propos of the Minnesota fraud, Jason Riley asks in The Wall Street Journal: “Can Minnesota’s Somalis Rise Above the Fraud Scandal?” The better question is: Do they want to rise above the fraud scandal? Do they even see it as a scandal? And the answer, it seems obvious to me, is no. Because, although people steeped in a tribal honor culture like that of the Somalis are exquisitely sensitive to shame over anything happening within it, they are virtually certain to have no shame at all about having criminally bilked a system to which they regard themselves as outsiders at best and enemies at worst.

Thus, in the same day’s Journal, Barton Swaim writes that

The Somali fraud story is in some respects akin to the so-called grooming scandal in Britain, in which gangs of mostly Pakistani men sexually abused young girls, even as the country’s government and news media looked the other way, terrified by accusations of racism or “Islamophobia.” In the Twin Cities, state authorities couldn’t rouse themselves to stop the theft — hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned from Medicaid, housing and other welfare programs. . . Both scandals, in the U.K. and Minnesota, raise a question most of us would rather not consider: that of large-scale immigration from predominantly Muslim countries.

Other writers, too — notably Armin Rosen in County Highways, Christopher Rufo of City Journal and Kevin Cohen in The American Spectator — have lately tiptoed up to the idea that the Somali Muslims, perhaps any Muslims, just might not be assimilable in a liberal democracy like ours, founded on assumptions of human equality and high social trust.

But the ideology which has allowed the Somali fraudsters in Minnesota, like the Pakistani rapists in Britain, to get away with criminal behavior for so long was not that of Islam. They, like the Sicilian or Neapolitan immigrants of a century ago, were only doing what comes naturally to those raised in primitive honor cultures. It is, rather the smelly little orthodoxy (to use Orwell’s words) of multiculturalism which has taught two generations of Americans and Britons to regard the expectation of “common decency” and ordinary, law-abiding behavior on the part of anyone with a claim to membership in the class of the oppressed, including virtually all immigrants, as illegitimate — which is to say “racist” or “Islamophobic.”

The horror of being branded, or “cancelled,” with such epithets has created the “Culture of Innocence” of which I wrote in these pages last spring (see The New Criterion of April, May and June of 2025) and which has for so long protected the Pakistani rapists and the Somali fraudsters as well as the domestic corruption which looks the other way. Left-wing mayors, governors and other officials derive their own immunity from scrutiny from their championship of the same ideology on behalf of the notionally oppressed. The horror of being thought “racist” or “Islamophobic” also, presumably, produces an incentive for the likes of Ryan Cooper, when confronted with mass murder, to blame not the murderers but the guns they used.

As others have pointed out, the story of the Somali fraud in Minnesota, if not its full extent, has been known about for at least a decade and is only now being brought to people’s attention, perhaps, because similar stories suggesting the unassimilability of people from similar Islamic honor cultures have reached a kind of critical mass. Writing for The American Mind, for example, Jeremy Carl took the occasion of the murder of a National Guardsman and the serious wounding of another by an Afghan refugee, about which I wrote here last month, to suggest, no doubt fancifully, the expulsion of all Afghan immigrants from the US:

Wade Miller, the Executive Director of Citizens for Renewing America and a U.S. Marine combat veteran (he writes), responded to the claim that resettling Afghans was the moral thing to do since they “[f]ought alongside our own” soldiers, rightly calling it a “bs metric.” As he noted, “1. Many played both sides. 2. Many only did it to make money. 3. Many were plants. 4. Many had long standing tribal grudges against the Taliban.” And none of them necessarily has a long-term loyalty to America, which is the first step to assess before even beginning to consider a claim of residency. All of this would be obvious to anyone who does not let good sense overwhelm suicidal empathy. But unfortunately, we have lost that common sense, even among many of our supposedly hardened fighting forces.

I think he meant, “who does not let suicidal empathy overwhelm good sense,” but I doubt that “suicidal empathy” is the real villain here. It is rather, the same ideology that requires toleration of criminal behavior on the part of those he calls the “protected” classes — protected, that is, by the ideology which has identified them as entitled to the justified grievances of the oppressed and all the claims those grievances imply upon the good will of their supposed oppressors.

Something similar is surely at work among the privileged college students demonstrating on behalf of the primitive honor culture of the Gazan Arabs and against the Westernized Israelis who seek to tame it. “Post-colonial studies,” which is the name that ideologically-informed history goes under most often these days, has largely replaced in our universities the old-fashioned kind of history which taught, if it taught nothing else, the important distinction between civilization and barbarism. As James Hankins wrote on leaving Harvard after 40 years for the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida,

The reason why is that the Hamilton School is committed to teaching the history of Western civilization. When late liberal pedagogy replaced Western civilization courses with global history, serious harm was done to the socialization of young Americans. When you don’t teach the young what civilization is, it turns out, people become uncivilized.

Mr Carl, quoted earlier, may be leading the way in consideration of the big question of whether or not those, like the Afghan refugees or the Minnesota Somalis, are capable of assimilation into a non-tribal, liberal America. Or will they, rather, convert America into the sort of tribal society and primitive honor culture like those they come from? Some might say, in view of the increasingly tribal nature of our politics, that they have already done so. In any case, there is no honest answer to the question that would encourage much hope of the survival of our liberal institutions as anything but hollow shells and husks of their former selves.

But then we haven’t yet tried expecting assimilation from the new huddled masses allegedly (as some of them surely are) yearning to breathe free, not as we did with the Sicilians and Neapolitans of a century ago. If we could ever do that again by holding immigrants from non-civilized countries to civilized standards, we might be pleasantly surprised. But maybe, in order to do that, we would have to get back our own, long-lost honor culture, as revised by its long collaboration with anti-honor Christian morality to create the civilized society on these European and North American shores that the oldest among us can still remember.