When are conservatives going to stop clucking and cucking, wringing their hands, and lionizing noble surrender rather than wholeheartedly supporting the Right That Fights?
Over the weekend, the hashtag #CNNDirt popped up in my timeline. I clicked on it and found that a Trump operative named Jack Posobiec had come up with a very simple and cost-free method of digging up dirt on current CNN employees–punch CNN into the search function of Linked In, then sift through the personal Twitter accounts attached to CNN employees’ Linked In accounts.
It didn’t take him long to find a CNN editor who’d tweeted out rape jokes and comments about how watching the movie, Roots, made him hate white people. The editor quickly locked his account, but the tweets had, of course, been preserved with screen shots.
I’m not going to name the guy here. He’s not an on-air personality. But I would like to point out that this is a natural and predictable outcome of the war on privacy and free speech that CNN journalists began when they decided to hunt down a Reddit user and threaten to expose him simply for posting a tweet that poked fun at their organization.
Low level, behind-the-scenes CNN employees now find themselves in exactly the position in which their management and on-air people have put conservative America–one of fear, frustration and worry that anything said on social media that could be construed as offensive will be used mercilessly by partisans to damage their careers and livelihoods.
This is not the world I want to live in. When I first saw that they’d embarrassed this guy, I laughed. I thought he was an on-air personality and at least a minor political player. After I realized he was just an editor, I cringed a little. I can’t bring myself to endorse it, but neither can I condemn it. This is what they’ve done to time and time again us and they won’t stop. What alternative is there?
Reprisals are intrinsically fair and just. Reporters and editors deserve being investigated as deeply, and treated every bit as brutally, as they treat the members of the public they target. This is a cultural war, not a cultural tea party. For the record, the CNN employee mentioned was Rashard Elijah, rashard_elijah on Twitter, who demonstrated his racial sensitivity, commitment to social justice, and fine command of the English language in tweets such as these.
And, of course, we know why Jack Posobiec was targeted by the All Defamatory Lies hit list. Because he is among the most effective culture warriors in the Alt Lite.