There’s nothing like giving a college commencement address to stir the pot.
This latest example would be the case of CBS 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley and his recent commencement speech at Wake Forest University.
Interestingly, Pelley used his speech to set about whacking Paramount, the corporate owner of CBS, with Pelley staunchly defending, of course, those pesky DEI initiatives that Paramount was ditching.
He began by saying that:
I fear there are some people in the audience who don’t want to hear what I have to say today. But I appreciate your forbearance in this small act of liberty.
We’re all for free speech and liberty in this space, so I read on.
Said Pelley:
'Diversity' is now described as 'illegal.' 'Equity' is to be shunned. 'Inclusion' is a dirty word. This is an old playbook, my friends. There is nothing new in this. George Orwell – who we met on the street in London – in 1949, he warned of what he called ‘new speak.’ He understood that ignorance works for power.
Well now. Ignorance does indeed work for power. And reading Pelley’s description of DEI is a classic of ignorance grasping for power.
It would be most accurate to say that Pelley’s description of this DEI business is considerably different than the way DEI works in reality. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 specifically bans judging Americans by skin color - making it illegal.
“Diversity”, I would respectfully suggest, in reality is not about diversity at all. The “D” in “DEI” is in reality the 21st century version of this infamous line from the 1963 inauguration of the then-new Democrat Governor of Alabama, George Wallace. Said Wallace in a line that instantly found its way to the history books:
In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
Which is to say, Wallace was insisting that Americans be judged by their skin color, and that blacks were inferior. Insisting that systemic racism never ends, as if the Wallace view is still dominant, is the demand of today’s “Diversity” in DEI. And opposition to the “D” in DEI is precisely because it effectively appears to bring back the days when judging Americans by skin color was so widespread it had to be specifically banned.
And “Equity”? Hmmm. Scott Pelley is, as mentioned, an anchor of CBS’s 60 Minutes. But mysteriously, everybody at CBS, not to mention in the larger media and beyond doesn’t get the “equity” of holding that job-or any other. These things are earned, not handed out like candy. The freedom to have hard work is the real equity -- not dispensing the same exact rewards to everyone in the name of equity.
And “Inclusion?” It seems in this quarter that the “DEI” movement is anything but “Inclusive.” To cite but one example?
What brought Fox News into existence? The hard fact was that the media as it existed in 1996 - the year Fox went on the air - was completely left-leaning. Inclusivity when it came to political discussion in the media was practically invisible.
The very reason for the creation of Fox as a conservative network was because the lefties running the so-called “mainstream media” were anything but “mainstream. They were not only Left, they wanted no part of anything “Right.” Inclusive they decidedly were not. There were no conservative anchors or commentators of note. All revolved around the liberal political discussions of the day.
This problem surfaced in a very big fashion with the presidential campaign of Arizona’s decidedly conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. In his memoirs years later, Goldwater would write:
The bad press I got in New Hampshire set the stage for the ultimate image of Goldwater - as a trigger-happy, pugnacious, somewhat uninformed candidate who would destroy Social Security.
And why did Goldwater get “bad press”? It was because he was a conservative. And there was no room for a crowd of conservatives in the decidedly liberal media of the day.
Indeed, two years earlier in 1962, then-former Vice President Richard Nixon had been defeated in a controversial race for Governor of California. The liberal media of the day pilloried Nixon, so much so that when it was time for him to concede at his post-election press conference he famously began by saying that "now that all the members of the press are so delighted that I have lost, I'd like to make a statement of my own.”
Nixon went on to attack the press for its deliberate, decidedly left-leaning treatment of him, ending by saying:
I leave you gentlemen now. And you will now write it. You will interpret it. That's your right. But as I leave you, I want you to know—just think how much you're going to be missing. You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore. Because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.
As history records, this decidedly turned out not to be Nixon’s last press conference. He was around and eventually in the White House for a long time to come - and the liberal press couldn’t stand a minute of it.
In a nutshell, Nixon’s view of the press as left leaning had become gospel with Republicans and conservatives - and eventually this is what provided the audience foundation for Fox News and, over time, Rush Limbaugh, talk radio, Newsmax TV, The Washington Times and more in what has become known as “conservative media.” Including NewsBusters and the Media Research Center, where you are right now as you read this.
All of which is to say, in Pelley’s media world as it existed in the days of Nixon, Goldwater and well beyond there was not a shred of ideological “Inclusion.” In practice, it took the creators of Fox, Newsmax, the MRC, The Washington Time, Rush and talk radio and oh so many others to, in essence, buy, write, televise and broadcast their way into a media world that liberals in the media had quite deliberately excluded them from.
Without any apparent sense of irony, Pelley favorably cites this quote from George Orwell:
If liberty means anything at all, it means something worth saying that some people don’t want to hear.
That description could easily apply to the way the American Left in media has treated those with conservative views. The objective was for Pelley’s predecessors in the media to keep conservatives and their views out. Or, if not possible, to simply trash them. The reason: Lefties in the media simply didn’t want to hear what conservatives had to say - much less debate or broadcast it.
In days gone by the targets of the liberal media were a Goldwater or Nixon or Reagan and others on the Right. In today’s world, without question the Leftist media has targeted Donald Trump - from the moment he came down that Trump Tower escalator to right this minute as he serves his second term in the White House.
Pelley closes by saying that the Trump administration has sent “masked agents to abduct a college student, a writer of her college paper who wrote an editorial supporting Palestinian rights….”
To which Secretary of State Marco Rubio replied that he has revoked more than 300 visas. And he has defended those decisions. Said Mr. Rubio, the son of immigrants:
We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campus. We've given you a visa and you decide to do that — we're going to take it away," Rubio said in a recent news conference.
Perhaps Mr. Pelley would be willing to take his concerns about the foreign college students-turned-social activists-when-once-in-America to the governments of their native countries and request those governments to have the same free speech/activist rights for visiting Americans. Or better yet? Perhaps Mr. Pelley should travel to one of these foreign countries and give a version of the same speech as he has given at Wake Forest - but applying those standards to the government of that country.
One can only imagine the results if Scott Pelley turned up outside the Kremlin with an organized crowd to protest Vladimir Putin!
In other words? Mr. Pelley gave a thoughtful address - yet it was a talk that was blissfully avoiding the way the liberal media has treated conservatives - be they candidates, office holders or activists - over the decades.
Something they continue to do.
Ask President Trump.
