The NY Times has some interesting columnists and then it has some who are routinely awful. I think I'm ready to put Tressie McMillan Cottom in that latter category after her latest effort. It's titled "Mourn, or Else" and it's sort of an attack on Charlie Kirk and, less directly, a defense of all the people who celebrated his death.
I learned that Charlie Kirk was dead by seeing a video of his assassination on social media. It is an unfortunate sign of our times, when “If it bleeds it leads” has been replaced with “Monetize misery.” I hate it. I also hated the feelings of the next few days, of watching so many professional thinkers, writers and public figures serve, whether intentionally or unwittingly, the president’s agenda.
A text from a smart, well-informed friend snapped me out of my emotional paralysis. “Who,” she asked incredulously, “was this guy?” She had never heard of Kirk, his organization or the political infrastructure that had produced him, but his grand public funeral rites and the lionization that accompanied them were inescapable. With few exceptions, people looking for an answer to that question found that broadcast, legacy, print, digital, cable, streaming and independent outlets were speaking with a remarkably singular voice.
Her key takeaways from Kirk's murder are as follows:
- Watching video of an assassination is unpleasant.
- Watching the media say nice things about the victim was really unpleasant.
If you had any doubt which of the two upset her more, it's clearly the latter. That's what her whole column is about. As for Kirk's murder, she devotes no more time or thought to that. There is no mention of the shooter, Tyler Robinson, or the politics that appear to have motivated him.
As for her claim that the media was speaking with a "remarkably singular voice," that's what tends to happen after a political assassination. Most people have a reaction which involves some empathy for the victim and, in this case that was especially true because Charlie Kirk wasn't a threat. He was there to talk to people who disagreed with him and he was murdered by someone who literally wrote "some hate can't be negotiated out." The irony of that statement from the mouth of a murderer is worthy of several columns, but again Tressie Cottom isn't interested.
Instead, she wanders off to an argument about looming MAGA control of the media.
Larry Ellison, the second-richest man in the world and a certified friend of Trump. The Ellison family is poised to make a series of deals that would make it one of the most powerful dynasties in the history of corporate media. The question of who will own TikTok — a platform that has more than 170 million users in the United States — looks as though it’s finally going to be resolved, after Trump signed an executive order that will hand control over to a coterie of his admirers that will probably include Ellison.
Ellison’s son, David, took control of Paramount this summer in a deal that reportedly came with political concessions. The Paramount portfolio includes CBS, among other media brands. Credible reporting says another merger is on the horizon, between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns — among many things — CNN. If this merger goes through (and industry watchers expect it will face little opposition), CNN, CBS News and a host of lifestyle stations will all be under Ellison family leadership. They aren’t pitching this deal as the MAGA Media Empire industry analysts see it as, but the Ellison family also hasn’t signaled a commitment to remain nonpartisan or independent.
After decades of defacto one-party control of the media, it's enlightening to see progressives suddenly worried about control of the media. From there we get a complaint about conservative cancel culture.
For at least the past 15 years, my colleagues in academia have grappled with angry letters to university officials for doing their jobs. They have weathered campaigns for their firing. They have contended with an internet army obsessed with doxxing them, their parents, their kids...
...an army of trained provocateurs stands ready to destroy their lives to prove their bona fides as conservative activists. That threat has been chilling speech on campuses for years. Now it’s coming for all of you.
Again, there's no mention of progressive cancel culture or the many attempts to silence, dox, shout down, ban and violently attack conservatives. In a column tied to an actual assassination of a conservative by a leftist, you'd think some of that would come up. But no, it's just another thing the author isn't interested in. Conservatives are the only villains in her mind. Speaking of conservative villains, did you know that they've weaponized debate.
An obscene amount of money has turned debate into a weapon, deliberately honed to punish good-faith participation by making us feel like fools for assuming the best of an ideological opponent who only wants to win. Since the days when the conservative scion William F. Buckley Jr. started planning for a conservative resurgence, activist organizations have spent millions of dollars to teach conservative foot soldiers the art of coercive “debate.” Over decades, the right has methodically built institutional safe spaces for conservative thought, poured millions into training young conservatives, legitimized first talk radio and then conservative TV news and then the alt-right blogosphere. This machine built, in some respects, Charlie Kirk, and then he built others like him.
The weaponization of debate is so well known that it is a meme: a guy with a table and a sign that says “Change my mind.” On the day he was killed, Kirk was sitting in a tent with a similar label, “Prove me wrong.” Sounds harmless enough in theory, but performative debate metastasizes. Whether in the form of abortion opponents who show up to “debate” women about why bodily autonomy is a sin or scientific racists who show up to “debate” Black and Indigenous thinkers about the rational arguments of their human depravity, the aim isn’t debate but debasement.
Open debate. Sounds harmless enough but in fact it's a cancer and a tool of anti-choice racists! She doesn't directly say that Kirk was a villain for debating college kids but that's clearly the implication. Everything he did, even conversing with people who disagreed was proof of his evil intent.
And from there she wanders off again to the end of democracy because...well, because conservatives exist and talk to people. That's really what she's saying here.
A rage farmer who monitors late-night shows for supposed liberal bias harvested one of Kimmel’s milquetoast comedy bits and posted it on X, where it was amplified by a network of conservative influencers and radio and television hosts until the administration had an opportunity to silence its enemies. The message, delivered by an F.C.C. chairman and overreaching broadcasters, was simple: Shut Kimmel up, or we will shut you up. Disney made the cool, calm, rational decision to violate this country’s most deeply held beliefs in First Amendment speech because the company read the room. Trump is the state, and the internet is the market that gives Trump his power to rule it. To rule all of us.
There is another way to see all of this of course. There was a lie circulating in the days after Charlie Kirk was murdered. The lie was that his killer was a far-right ideologue who hated Kirk for not being conservative enough. This lie circulated so widely, despite there being absolutely nothing to support it, that by the end of the week a plurality of Democrats believed it. One of those Democrats was Jimmy Kimmel who repeated the lie on his show Monday night.
In fact, well before the show was taped, we knew that claim wasn't true. The shooter was left-wing. By Tuesday, when people on the right started objecting to Kimmel's words, we knew that Tyler Robinson had views about trans issues probably very similar to Tressie Cottom's. But behind the scenes, Kimmel had apparently refused to apologize and instead planned to deny he'd even suggested Robinson was right-wing. At that point, Disney pulled him off the air.
Yes, there was some pressure from the FCC which was inappropriate, but ultimately Disney made the call.
The bottom line is that people were angry about someone they liked and knew was murdered. Then they were angered more by the progressive psychopaths who celebrated the murder. Then that anger peaked with a smirking late-night host lying about the killer's motive well after the motive was pretty obvious. It was a gruesome spectacle of left-wing hatred and dishonesty. It was a lot to take as people were still grieving.
Tressie Cottom isn't interested in any of that sort of detail about what happened. In her view the reaction has nothing to do with normal people reacting to a horrific assassination and everything to do with some conspiracy involving Trump and billionaires and whatever else she can throw in the pot and stir up.
I don't know much about her beyond this column, but based on this Cottom seems to be a person incapable of seeing any humanity in people who aren't part of her ideological bubble. She just isn't interested in finding any common ground beyond politics. Let's not celebrate assassination is too much to ask in her view.
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