Morons writing half-wit stories: journalism now corrupted by leftie activists

Moronification: the educational process that turns promising, intelligent, and semi-sentient young people into fully-functional halfwits.  Moronification has so corrupted modern journalism as to make it almost impossible for news-consumers, unversed in moronification’s duplicitously cretinous ways, to make head or tail of what they read and hear. 

For example, take last Monday’s headlines which starred President Trump’s observation that “Ukraine may not survive” and Russia’s advances against Ukrainian forces. What the media-morons did not hear or understand was Trump’s clear assertion that the pause in intelligence sharing between the US and Ukraine (if it ever happened, and it probably did not) was now over. The following is a direct quote from The Daily Telegraph.

Donald Trump has said Ukraine “may not survive” as the White House put pressure on Volodymyr Zelensky to give up territory seized by Russia.

Ahead of the start of peace talks in Saudi Arabia this week, Mr Trump suggested Ukraine might cease to exist as a sovereign state.

Mr Zelensky has been told he must show he is willing to cede land occupied by Russia if he wants Washington to lift its ban on weapons and intelligence sharing.

Mr Trump has repeatedly called for Ukraine to sign a minerals deal that would give the US access to 50 per cent of Ukraine’s mineral wealth. It may be signed as early as this week.

However, the US president has privately decided that the deal will not be enough to restart the flow of military assistance and intelligence, sources in Kyiv told The Telegraph.

On Sunday night Mr Trump suggested that the pause on sharing military intelligence with Ukraine could be lifted.

Speaking to reporters, he said “we just about have” when asked if he would end the pause.

He is now demanding that Mr Zelensky agree to give up territory to Russia – something the Ukrainian president has said he will only consider as a means of joining NATO, which Washington has ruled out. 

The most important – indeed, sensational – part of Trump’s conversations with journalists was the assertion (in bold) that intelligence links between the US and Ukraine, if they were ever severed (which I doubt) had been restored. But this came 163 words into the report, and the attention of few readers, having been influenced by the headline and the opening paragraph, would have been capable of assessing such a major revelation so deep into the news story. Likewise, had a (hypothetical) disclosure that the Fourth US Marine Corps Division would be landing in Odessa this morning, come so late in the report, few eyebrows would have been raised. For along with the moronification of journalists, readers have been so stupefied by systematic editorial misjudgements that that they now unquestionably accept the assessments made by journalists. The latter know what’s real and what counts, surely?

Not anymore, they don’t. The collapse of editorial standards in the Anglophone media has been through a steady process over the decades, and its main engine has been the capture of journalism-schools by left-wing activists. This was not a conspiracy orchestrated by some mastermind or central committee, but an almost natural process by which lefty-journalists, usually not being very good at their job and attracted by the amazing holidays and generous salaries offered by colleges and universities, have steadily colonised media-studies courses. 

This process has normalised the insertion of a left-wing terminology in mainstream media. The term “far-right” has served as the barium-meal that measures the penetration of left-wing jargon across the media. “Far right” is now routinely used – even by “conservative” media – to describe any political movement that wishes to protect the ethnic national identity of any western society or intends to control inward immigration. Once “far-right” had become standard terminological fare, then next on the agenda came the use of the term “hate-speech” to describe any utterance that violated the core beliefs of the government-subsidised non-government-organisations or the similarly financed single-issue advocacy groups. These only work in one direction: towards immigration, feminisation, multiculturalism and secularisation of native religious institutions. Islam was – and is – seen as being intrinsically a benign force, while Christianity is at best an intrusive and schismatic influence on secular values, while Judaism – the foundation creed of western civilisation – is often (if covertly) presented as the sinisterly religious face of Zionism. Our defining values are being remorselessly undone from within.

In this bizarre world, intellectual oxymorons or outright lies are made palatable by remorseless repetition, with terms such as “affordable housing”, “largely peaceful”, “carbon-neutral” and “eco-friendly”. What is the opposite of “affordable housing”, and how is it politically or economically viable? Is violence not implicit but unspecified in “largely peaceful”,  in other words probably meaning that the journalist using the term in effect approves of the demonstrations? What precisely is “carbon neutral” when all respiration and virtually all oxidation generate carbon-compounds?  What is the opposite of “eco-friendly”, and is it therefore not implicitly damnable?

As the heart-breaking, bloody crisis in Ukraine continues, its mysteries are deepened by the appalling terminological imprecision with which it is covered, even as another potentially catastrophic horror-story is unfolding in Romania. This too has been characterised by lazy or tendentious and invariably moronified journalism, with the gallant exception of Brussels Signal’s own  Gabriel Elefteriu. (See Zero evidence: the bogus ‘intelligence’ behind Romania’s cancelled election). 

The EU-supported cancellation of Romania’s elections last December is a truly scandalous departure from the self-proclaimed values of the European Union.  This violation is being concealed by the usual invocation of the left-liberal terminology against the disqualified politician, Călin Georgescu, that he is “far-right” and “pro-Putin”. Neither term, even if accurate, would implicitly justify his exclusion from the democratic process, but just as bad, no attempt is made to explain such damning language. The accusation itself merits a guilty verdict, and nothing further need be said. It is surely a searing indictment of both the EU and its leadership that this crisis had so deepened that Vice President Vance recently felt authorised to speak out about it. 

Let us hope we are in the final stages of a truly evil war, the terrible truths about which probably remain very secret, and are likely to remain so for a very long time. That the EU was guilty, by smugness, turpitude, laziness and cowardice, for allowing the developing crisis to become a military and moral catastrophe is indisputable. Moreover, the German chancellor Merkel even argued over a decade ago that sending arms to Ukraine would worsen the crisis. Even if she was not an active agent for Russian interests (and no evidence has ever been adduced that she was) she nonetheless gave a pretty good impression of working on Putin’s behalf. The criminal responsibility of various US governments under Obama and Biden for this monstrosity is similarly irrefutable. 

Central to all this are these questions. How can democracies, with their electorates being averse to war in any circumstances as well as being addicted to both the welfare state and ever-rising prosperity, cope with the actions of a democratically-endorsed rogue-leader such as Putin? He has “legitimacy”, while also being a psychopath and mass-murderer. Classically, these are not mutually compatible qualities within any democracy. Moreover, as his maniacal tendencies grew, the Chinese were perfecting the Covid virus, which they unleashed on the world five and a half years ago – in other words, about the same amount of time as the Second World War lasted.

Yet, over the same period, the US was waxing hysterical over both the accidental manslaughter of the serial criminal George Floyd and the utterly cruel delusions of transgenderism, the latter being as morally wicked and scientifically-deranged as the witch-trials across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Why would Putin not think a war against Ukraine yield quick results? Could he not see how cultural moronification had made the West, especially the US, quite incapable of opposing him? Well, as it happened, Ukraine’s gallantry and its superb military intelligence revealed how wrong he was. But half a million dead and injured later, we should be aware that that was probably just the beginning. Far worse might yet await us, this time from the far side of the world. 

For if our media are bad, and they really are, Europe’s political classes, who have shaped the ladies and gentlemen of the reporting classes around their own selfish, short-sighted priorities, are even worse. To put it all in terms of the 1930s, Ukraine, Romania and Taiwan might well be (if only roughly) the equivalent of Manchuria, Abyssinia and the Anschluss. But at least in those days, democracies were protected by large armies and the political and cultural acceptance of the need for conscription. Poor befuddled Generation Z stand between the West and a global disaster like Emperor Haile Selassie’s light cavalry against Mussolini’s mustard gas, aircraft and tanks. We did not tell them they had to grow up, and so naturally they haven’t. May God now help them, because we catastrophically failed to do so.

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.