I don’t know why this kind of thing surprises me anymore, but it does. I cannot conceive of anyone with Rachel Maddow’s history and habits being so self-deluded and divorced from reality as to say something like this out loud, much less on national television.
And yet in the midst of the gnashing and wailing last night on MSNBC over Terry McAuliffe’s SO richly deserved defeat in Virginia, Maddow actually said, “To have the Fox News channel, our friends at the Fox News channel, building their programming, particularly the prime time programming, around this for months. They’re building a campaign platform for conservative candidates to run on it everywhere.”
“Even though it’s not actually taught anywhere. Even though it’s not a real thing,” Maddow continued, referring to critical race theory—-which is a real thing and is taught and evoked in various forms all over the country. “There’s nothing you could pay for in any campaign that would equal the kind of free help you’d get from that kind of conservative media, just fire hose on the issue.”
Isn’t Maddow, of all people, making that statement amazing?
This comes from an esteemed member of the mainstream media that built its programming for four years on attacking, smearing, and denigrating Donald Trump. Speaking of not being a “real thing,” Maddow in particular throttled the air-waves with breathless tales of supposedly smoking gun evidence that President Trump had actively conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 election. It was completely untrue. When that lie ran out of gas, she moved over to two illicit impeachment theories, periodically interrupted by guests who swore that Trump had to be removed under the 25th Amendment, as Rachel nodded. Six networks joined her in this assault on an elected President to ensure his defeat (if they couldn’t get him removed before the election), none more relentlessly and shamelessly than MSNBC, and no journalist on any of the six more enthusiastically than Maddow.
She’s complaining about Fox News’ “free help” from the side of journalism that buried the Hunter Biden laptop revelations so Joe Biden wasn’t burdened with an October surprise. Wow. I just wrote about the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent making making the same Fox News excuse for McAuliffe’s defeat, and now here’s Maddow trying the same thing. Do memos circulate to all the mainstream media hacks with these talking points? Will someone please tell them why this one is insane? This makes all of them look ridiculous.
Is it possible, as I mused in the last post, that these people don’t know they are biased, dishonest, partisan blights on the culture and enemies of a functioning democracy? But how could that be?
Maddow’s complaint is like the Hillside Strangler opining that Ted Bundy is a menace to society, and expecting to be taken seriously, even as he wipes the blood off his hands.
[Incidentally, the animation above is courtesy of Steve Witherspoon. It has become indispensable, unfortunately.]
Ethics Alarms 
Rachel Maddow is a really “special” human being, quite a piece of work.
That graphics is certainly getting used a lot!
You do know that that graphic isn’t illustrating our host’s head literally exploding, right? It’s not as though he works with Alec Baldwin.
P.M.Lawrence wrote, “You do know that that graphic isn’t illustrating our host’s head literally exploding, right?”
Well yeah. I don’t get why you wrote that?
Do memos circulate to all the mainstream media hacks with these talking points?
In a word, yes.
Will someone please tell them why this one is insane?
I doubt it.
This makes all of them look ridiculous.
That’s because they are.
Is it possible that these people don’t know they are biased, dishonest, partisan blights on the culture and enemies of a functioning democracy?
Absolutely.
I always remember Rachel Maddow, years ago, during the Obamacare ramming through. She was adamant the Dems had to take every advantage of their slim majority in Congress to push through healthcare reform with any miniscule margin, consequences be damned. She’s a psycho. But she’s not alone. I do get a kick out of seeing her androgynous face when she puts on her sad puppy pout. It’s always good for a guffaw. Aw gee, Rachel, not getting your way? Let’s work on playing well with others, shouldn’t we?
I won’t even watch a clip of Rachel Maddow. The first thing that comes to mind any time I hear her name is “can’t understand normal thinking”.
I’ll probably get admonished for this comment but so be it.
She’s a Bolshevik. She wants to remake the entire country. And she’s relentless and ruthless. She doesn’t look at reality, she only sees the coming Marxist Utopia where everything is run perfectly by gay and lesbians. You know, the smart set.
These “journalists” believe the mainstream media is “objective and fair,” and Fox News isn’t (no argumetn for or against Fox here). They play hard ball and act like a Republican mouthpiece, vs the saintly reporters at major media organizations just doing their jobs and fact checking all those idiot Republicans.
This liberal narrative is hard to break. Even in school, students are still told the mainstream media is a “reliable source” and no alternative media is reliable. Colleges are not teaching critical thinking skills when this type of analysis passes for actual substantive thought.
The Democratic party is an abusive boyfriend that mistreats you, uses you to get what he wants and gaslights you when you complain about how he treats you. He always coaxes you back with sweet promises that are never kept for long.
The news media is his family that rationalizes his behavior and tries to convince you to take him back.
This is about as good an assessment as I’ve read.
Thanks, Joel.
I, perhaps, should have included how , while in his clutches, he controls you “for your own good”.
A.M, for all our sakes, I hope your excellent analogy to abusive boyfriends is based on astute observation rather than first hand experience
Thanks, OB. No personal experience in this area, thank God.
Somehow, it occurred to me today that all this behavior fits those endless descriptions I’ve read from women who’d lived the life.
Atta girl.
I am reminded of the interaction between John Belushi and Carrie Fisher in The Blues Brothers.
Our Esteemed Ethicist asked, “Is it possible, as I mused in the last post, that these people don’t know they are biased, dishonest, partisan blights on the culture and enemies of a functioning democracy?”
No, they don’t think they are biased. They think they are reasonable, well-informed, and mainstream. That is the scary part, as their mindset is “you’re either with us or you’re against us”. For example, most Ethics Alarmists here know of my incontrovertible and immutable deep love for Rush, the Canadian Triumvirate. There is a certain media person who worked at WMMS in Cleveland, in the 1970s who had the good fortune of receiving their debut album and playing “Working Man” which exploded in Northeast Ohio, setting Rush on the path toward their inevitable and rightful dominion over modern music. In that one instant, she recognized raw talent and what the known universe would (finally) come to realize as their future influence. Prescient she was. Yet, she considers herself a liberal, as evidenced by her blog posts. She is a wonderful person, having met her and spent time with her – she is really bright, highly educated, engaging, and quick-witted.
I have followed her on social media since the early 2000s, and I think I have posted links to her blog on here before, mostly because her posts drive me nuts in that her reasoning and argument are superficial and sophomoric. Yet, I understand where she comes from, and it is this: She thinks that her positions are middle of the road, based in/on compassion and goodwill. How could you argue with that? She doesn’t want anyone to suffer injustice or inequity. She is not evil and does not intend ill will on those who disagree with her. She thinks she is a centrist or moderate because she has redefined her concepts of what “progressive”, leftist, centrist, right-wing, or fascist mean,
If you couch taxes as a means of promoting a social safety net to provide for those less fortunate, then you don’t have to think about whether a wealth or death tax is confiscatory, or if Bezos or Musk or (insert your favorite millionaire or billionaire) really needs that extra $15 billion in wealth – people are suffering and that money could help them. That ideology also redefines what is considered free speech, and forms the basis of restrictive speech codes and hate-speech law. It also redefines the Second Amendment, not as a fundamental right to prevent governmental intrusion into the citizenry’s privacy, but or whether someone really “needs” an AK47 or AF15 for self-defense because the amendment was intended to allow frontiersmen the ability to have firearms for hunting. .
But, there is a certain moral superiority, if not nascent narcissism, in that mindset, which says that those who disagree with it are either ill-informed or wrong. Taken to its extreme, though, is the mentality that the disgreeable ones are deplorables, social lepers and outcasts, or pure evil, all of whom must be re-eductated or destroyed. Pick one.
When you peel back the onion in her posts, though, you see the teeming, morally bankrupt and unsuccessful left-wing (progressive) ideology writhing underneath, all couched in nice, friendly words of “universal healthcare” or a “livable wage” or “sustainable technology” or the wealthy should pay “their fair share” to promote “the common good” or celebrating/promoting “diversity, inclusion, and equity”. I suspect that yard sign we eviscerated the other day would be displayed proudly in her front lawn, along with “Black Lives Matter” and “Defund the Police” and a host of other lofty mottoes because love is all we need to move our Great Society forward toward paradise, and if we could only “imagine” what would happen if we “gave peace a chance”, ad nauseam.
It is all nice and sweet sounding but little thought is given to the damage done by these social policies. For instance, what damage did Johnson’s Great Society do to the black community? It rendered black males irrelevant and unnecessary because the state would take their role in black families, which will take generations to repair. Defund the police has had the biggest impact on those communities in most need of police protection, as crime rates sore in underprivileged and poor neighborhoods: yeah, Walgreen’s can afford to close a bunch of San Francisco stores and not hurt its bottom line because of crime but the small, family-owned businesses crushed by theft, vandalism, or other crimes aren’t so lucky to weather the storm and eventually close and/or go out of business. It sends the message to that community that the social protection mechanisms don’t exist in those areas, further fracturing social cohesion. Or, and I know it sound silly to say, but diversity programs now what to recast “Halloween” from the annual costumed candy shakedown to some nebulous Fall gathering, giving little regard to a few hundred years of tradition where people – mainly children – dress in silly costumes and ring doorbells looking for sweets (I prefer Snickers, though that may be gone because Snickers has gone woke), and all because “marginalized communities” can’t, don’t, or otherwise won’t participate in the tradition.*
jvb
^Ed. Note: Where that idea comes from is a mystery** to me. I walked Lord Remington, Hound of Letters Extraordinaire, on Sunday night, only to see hundreds of children of every race, creed, and tradition – many not from our neighborhood – out in droves wearing silly costumes of all sorts ringing doorbells, knocking on doors asking for treats, and simply having fun wearing silly costumes of all sorts and ringing doorbells, knocking on doors asking for treats. .
**Ed Note: It’s not really a mystery to me. It says two things: white traditions are racist and non-whites reject their racist traditions.
Really nice piece, John. Worthy of its own post.
Nice, useful idiot Lefties don’t understand unintended consequences or what motivates and demotivates human behavior, or human behavior at all, for that matter. I’m big on capitalism because I consider it the only economic system which relies solely upon the one, single, solitary common denominator in all humans: self-interest. Communism, in all its various forms, purports to be based upon concern for our fellow man but inevitably is hijacked by … wait for it … the self-interested who end up controlling the levers of power.
Thanks, OB.
jvb
That’s a pretty good write-up, John. (I mean that.)
Still, I wonder; are there any clues, that you know of, that might indicate a relationship between your media person’s views and her hearing disability?