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The SCOTUS Ruling Brings Out Affirmative Racism

Brad Slager
Brad Slager  |  Jun 29, 2023
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

06.29.23

Race to the Bottom – MSNBC

  • Screen doors in a hurricane are not as unhinged as the network is today.

Holy cow, where to even begin?! The Supreme Court ruling today against Affirmative Action (AA) regarding college admissions has the entire MSNBC lineup and its guests losing their collective minds. There are so many examples from this gaggle of reactionaries at MSNBC it is tough to know where to start!

How about kicking off with the always rational and balanced Al Sharpton?

Charles Coleman declares that admitting students by merit is actually segregation.

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Catherine Christian essentially states blacks are not smart enough to succeed without AA helping them into careers.

Maybe the best display is in regard to Justice Clarence Thomas. The president of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson, states Clarence Thomas only reached his level today through AA.

But then we get told that the only reason Justice Thomas ever succeeded was because of his opposition to AA.

This has been a fun, if exhausting, day of watching the press unravel.

Race to the Bottom – THE NEW YORK TIMES

Taking an approach that was maybe less hysterical, though no less intolerant, The New York Times addressed today's ruling with a jarringly racist approach to things. If anyone is looking over the coverage of things today and wondering why Asian students are frequently mentioned, it stems from a central issue found in the Affirmative Action programs at colleges.

Years ago, after AA was instituted, some black leaders looked into the resulting admissions and saw that blacks were not being represented at an approved level. The initial cries that this was systemic racism that still favored whites were beaten back when it was learned that white admission numbers were in line with where they were supposed to be. It turned out that more Asian-American students were getting into schools beyond their population percentages.

This meant that if AA was applied strictly, admissions would be taken away from a minority group, and one getting into schools based on merit.

That is why today, The Times was giving this assessment of things and coming off sounding like it was a pre-reconstruction news outlet.

Pre-Written Field Reports – CNN

  • Seriously, by this point, Carl can just hold up a placard and be done with his segment.

Last night, Anderson Cooper was covering the severity of the revelations of the Donald Trump recording where he is heard declaring to commoners the classified documents he was showing them, a seemingly damning piece of audio. Cooper invited Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to join him and analyze this news story, and it went exactly as one might have scripted ahead of time, as we have learned over the years, the Wood-Stein Show is very well established.

Woodward began with his usual ploy of laying out particular facts and tying those in with his books and past interviews with Trump. 

Bernstein – the one trick pony he is – delivered exactly what you would expect, right on cue. As he has for the past six years, any Trump story is related back to Carl's career-defining exclusive, and then he declares some variation of, "This is far worse than anything we have seen with Watergate and Richard Nixon."

DNC PR Firm – MSNBC

When you are a journalist with a narrow field of vision and report from inside your bubble, you deliver items that unintentionally undermine your central point. At MSNBC, Rachel Maddow producer Steve Benen looked at a proposal from Ron DeSantis where he pledges to shut down four large government agencies and describes this idea in the most angered of tones.

Of course, for him, even constricting the government to any degree is unthinkable. But in his shouting manner of losing major pieces of the federal government – including the IRS –  Benen manages to endear DeSantis to far more people than he thinks he is scaring off.

Democratic Custodial Services – USA TODAY

Joining others, like Bloomberg, we now have USA Today choosing to edit out President Jose Biden's comment that he believed Vlad Putin was losing the war in "Iraq." Francesca Chambers became another White House correspondent who elected to edit out Biden's inaccuracy.

We just enjoy considering the outrage from these very same truth experts had Fox News selectively reported on Donald Trump's quotations.

"Riffed from the Headlines" is Townhall's daily VIP feature with coverage of the deeply flawed aspects of journalism in the nation, where Brad Slager looks to bring accountability to the mishaps, malaprops, misdeeds, manipulations, malpractice, and manufactured narratives in mainstream media.