After the conclusion of an episode of “This Old House” on PBS, a self-congratulatory promo came on about the high standards of PBS News. Various personalities made glowing comments on the importance of watching the news on PBS, including for this reason: “The country is as divided as it’s ever been.”
Wow, I knew that the country was divided, but not to the same extent as it was prior to the Civil War and then during the conflict, when over 600,000 soldiers died, as well as large numbers of non-combatants.
You better fill your haversack with hardtack, polish your musket and bayonet, and say goodbye to your loved ones, for another civil war must be imminent if the country is as divided as it’s ever been.
PBS must think that members of Congress are caning each other and challenging each other to duels while the House and Senate are in session, as they did in 1820 while quarreling about the Missouri Compromise.
Admittedly, it would be great fun to watch Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell go at it.
On another note, PBS must believe that labor relations are as bad as they were in 1892, when hundreds of thugs from the Pinkerton Detective Agency exchanged gunfire with striking workers at the Carnegie Steel Company in Pittsburgh. Two weeks later, the top executive at the site, Henry Clay Frick, was shot twice in an attempted assassination.
PBS has a point. Some Starbucks’ locations are trying to organize. Rumor has it that baristas are throwing their nose rings at management, and management is responding by spraying them with whipped milk.
Perhaps PBS believes that race relations today are as bad as they were in the past, such as when Blacks were lynched with regularity during Jim Crow, when eleven Italians were lynched in New Orleans in 1891 because Italians were seen as non-White, when a German American was lynched outside of St. Louis during World War I, when Irish Catholics didn’t want Woodrow Wilson to come to the aid of Britain during World War I due to their hatred of English Protestants, and when the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed to stop the flow of smelly and stupid undesirables from southern Europe, especially “dagos” from Italy.
The Progressive policy of lobotomizing undesirables took hold under Wilson and continued for decades. The practice continues today, but instead of jabbing ice picks into frontal lobes through eye sockets, American kids are sent to college for a kinder, gentler lobotomy. The result is the same: They come out of the experience not being able to think for themselves.
PBS and other American institutions are doing their best to return race relations to what they used to be. Their proven methods are DEI, Critical Race Theory, and the reductio ad absurdum of force-fitting hundreds of unique racial/ethnic groups into the seven crudely contrived categories of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, and Middle Eastern. Afflicted with cognitive dissonance, they don’t see the contradiction of doing this under the name of diversity.
Nor do they recognize that their stereotyping and demonizing of Whites while glorifying all non-Whites is the opposite of what the Third Reich did but is based on similar convoluted thinking. The Third Reich did intellectual somersaults in trying to prove that Aryans were a master race. Today’s racial classifiers do intellectual somersaults in trying to prove that Whites are uniformly privileged, racist, unjust, and fragile. As a result, in their lobotomized state, White college graduates feel guilty for being White.
In believing that America is as divided as it’s ever been, PBS has apparently forgotten about the turmoil of the sixties—the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK; the shooting of Kent State students by the National Guard; the race riots in Detroit, Watts, and other places; the corresponding torching of neighborhoods; the bashing of long-haired protestors by Mayor Daley’s cops outside the Democrat National Convention; German shepherds being sicced on the freedom marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama; George Wallace running for president and later being shot and paralyzed; LBJ announcing that he wasn’t going to run for reelection, thus paving the way for the election of Richard Nixon, who was hated by the left almost as much as Trump is hated today; and a generation of hippies and flower children who went on to capture academia.
The turmoil continued into the 1970s, led by the Weather Underground, which was responsible for killing cops and for scores of bombings.
At least PBS hasn’t forgotten about the yellow journalism of the 1890s, a time when journalism was marked by biases, political agendas, and sensational headlines. PBS has not only remembered yellow journalism but is emulating it.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].
