I am so old, I can remember when liberals invented the term “fake news” to refer to pro-Trump commentary on Facebook. Those days are long gone, of course, and President Trump has made the phrase his own. “Fake news” now refers to the partisan falsehoods that dominate the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and many other news outlets.
Which you can tell by the fact that when the phrase appears, reporters understand that they are being called out. In the proud tradition of free speech totalitarianism, which they so often represent, they are trying to stamp out use of the phrase that they invented. Bloomingdale’s inadvertently transgressed by selling a t-shirt that included the legend “Fake News”:
Like Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, that couldn’t be allowed to stand. Reporters swung into action, as detailed here. Of course, Bloomingdale’s hadn’t intended to transgress against liberalism, so it groveled as you would expect:
“Thank you for bringing this to our attention and we apologize for any offense we may have caused,” the company said in a statement posted to Twitter. “We take this feedback very seriously and are working quickly to remove this t-shirt. Again, thank you for taking the time to alert us.”
That apology was deemed inadequate and insincere by reporters–sort of like Ilhan Omar’s–and reporters continued their assault on the company. Which was only trying to sell t-shirts, not delegitimize and destroy a foreign country. But I digress.
It isn’t surprising that the totalitarian impulse is strong in lots of Americans who consider themselves superior to their deplorable neighbors. But it might be considered newsworthy that the totalitarian impulse is strong among American journalists.
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