Reminder: You Can't Hate the Media Enough

Or has the media been taken over by its enemies and being deliberately made into a laughing stock on purpose?

• The shooting of Donald Trump in Butler, PA, was a year ago today. Let’s remind ourselves once again why it is impossible to hate the mainstream media too much:

• Speaking of the New York Times, it seems the Babylon Bee or some cabal of the Times’s enemies has somehow taken over the place and is publishing droll satire. I already noted this one in last week’s headline highlights:

The actual story is just as ridiculous as this headline:

Ms. Monaco-Vavrik studied political science and communications at Davidson College. It became a habit, she said in a recent interview, to “always connect random things that don’t seem to relate.” In that moment, she juxtaposed two concepts that had been on her mind: Pilates and President Trump.

Grinning at the camera, and lip-syncing to a popular TikTok clip about the Broadway musical “Wicked,” Ms. Monaco-Vavrik made her case: “Does anyone want me to explain the connection between the popularization of Pilates & running instead of strength training… and the rise of extreme American authoritarianism?” . . .

The tenor of the comments ranged from skepticism to personal affront. Many were outraged by the suggestion that they might be supporters of Mr. Trump, while others seemed irritated by the notion that a form of exercise could be described in partisan terms.

“The backlash was a lot,” Ms. Monaco-Vavrik said. “I think it just deeply offended these wealthier white women who claim progressive alignment but just really couldn’t see what I was saying.”

To update an old saying about trees being killed to print drivel like this: electrons died to get this message online?

But wait, there’s more!

A striking and headline-making fraud case resulted in a convictionlast Friday, when Charlie Javice was found guilty in federal court of conning JPMorgan Chase out of $175 million. . . But in a Manhattan courthouse hearing this week, the deliberations about Ms. Javice’s bail terms turned into an absurdist episode, as her legal team argued that an order for her to wear an ankle monitor would hinder her ability to teach Pilates. . .

“To have your legs in the air and the monitor going up and down on your leg, it is a significant encumbrance,” Mr. Sullivan said, also noting that the monitor “would remove the possibility of the one thing she can now do, which is teach her classes.”

About an hour of arguments on the matter ensued. . .

What’s with the Times’s obsession with Pilates?

But wait. . . Oh never mind. Let’s just keep going with the Times hit parade:

[O]ur ever-present diet culture once again has a conservative, Christian bent to it. . . There have been many times over the past several decades when conservative Christianity and weight control were explicitly linked, according to Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, who is a correspondent for Christianity Today and is working on a book about wellness, diet culture and Christian women.

Okay, there’s one book that won’t make it to my “might someday pick it up” list.

Finally, for today anyway, there’s this waste of pixels and paper, though it is a museum-grade exhibit of embedded liberal presumptions:

. . . Shunning as a form of accountability goes back millenniums. In ancient Athens, a citizen deemed a threat to state stability could be “ostracized” — cast out of society for a decade. For much of history, banishment was considered so severe that it substituted for capital punishment. The whole point of Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter was to show she had violated norms — and to discourage others from doing so. . . those of us who feel an obligation to shun strategically need to ask: What has all this banishing accomplished? It’s not just ineffective. It’s counterproductive.

Notice the presumption that “right-wing” people are ipso facto bad people who deserve shunning, and if shunning worked, there would be no reason even to question the practice.

Cue Robert Conquest here: “The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”