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March 8, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
07:12
NYT Devours its Own
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Or, I'll get the exact detail from Nancy Rumbleman in a moment.
She's on the line.
She's written an important piece on this.
And he was let go because he used the N-word.
It came out two years ago with a New York Times-sponsored trip with young people to Peru.
Now, Nancy...
One of the things that people following this story don't seem to ask or conclude is how loathsome the Daily Beast is.
Well, I have two thoughts on that.
As a journalist, when I first read the piece, I thought it was bad reporting because I would never, as an editor or a reporter, I never would have filed a story that didn't offer context.
That's a horrible thing to do.
It's unethical.
I did have someone speak to me who's a media reporter, and he said, you know, someone gets a scoop.
They write about it.
They didn't have all the details.
That said, it seemed to me they were sort of doing the bidding of some people at the Times that wanted to.
I mean, somebody at the Times leaked this internal investigation to the Daily Beast.
Why?
Why two years later something that had already been put to bed?
Why would you do that?
Well...
You do it because you know that it's probably going to get this guy camped.
Right, but he's not a conservative.
No, he's not.
Oh my goodness, Donald McNeil Jr. is not a conservative.
He fought for the unions.
He was a very, you know, a hard-working guy.
Definitely old school, older than most of the people that are complaining about him.
Certainly older than the high school students on the trip he was in.
But the problem is, he used the N-word.
A conversation about racist language.
Right, right.
Again, I want to make that clear because this happened to me where I didn't even say the word.
I just said that what the left has done, making it impossible to say it in any context, and I said it was evil to call somebody the N-word, but just opposing...
The ban on the word, if you're describing Mark Twain's literature, it's literally the only word in English that cannot be said in any context.
So McNeil says it.
Now, how did he say it exactly?
Repeating what the student had asked?
Explain.
Someone asked him, do you think the student should have been suspended for using the N-word?
And he said, well, was she like...
Was she saying to someone, or was she, like, quoting from a rap song or a book?
And he basically said back to the student what had been said to him.
So that's context, right?
Yeah.
Let me just piggyback onto something you just said.
So I've written three pieces about the McNeil situation, and if your listeners are interested, they have a substack under my name.
They can go read the pieces.
They're all there.
And in one of the pieces, I said, look, Right.
You know?
Even The Guardian wrote a piece about how stupid, and it's on the left.
About how stupid it is that, you know, quoting Mark Twain, you can't say the word.
I think, obviously, times change, and for the most part, that's a great thing.
Yes, right, but never.
It's just moral showing off.
And anyway, it's not a healthy thing.
On my show, it came up because I had mentioned that Truman, who...
Who, against the State Department, recognized Israel the day it announced its independence in 1948, used the word kike regularly in his correspondence, like when he visited New York, and this is reported, and he used the N-word.
But I don't want the thing to become the K-word.
I don't want any Jew.
I'm a Jew.
I don't want any Jew called it.
That's evil.
But to cite the...
Alan, who wrote the great biography of Truman?
McCullough.
McCullough, yeah, which is where I got it from.
David McCullough's biography.
And he uses the N-word in the book.
But I can't...
If I were to read the book, I wonder if the audible actually says the word.
And would the guy be fired if he said the word?
I have a friend of mine, Jesse Single, has a book coming out, and he's writing about a lot of social psychology, and he realized when he was doing the audio book, it was there, and he said to the director, maybe we should just, you know, not say the words.
I said, absolutely.
We should not say the words.
Right, even though it's written in the book, so this is what we've come to.
Yes.
And to echo a bit of what you're saying, it's a very, very bad idea to scrub history.
It is a very bad idea.
Because how are you going to learn, okay?
How do you learn to do better and maybe what wasn't a great idea if you get rid of everything in the past?
Well, never forget, right?
Isn't that what we're supposed to do?
We're not supposed to forget?
There's no question.
So just tell me, what did you learn in the McNeil story that we may not know?
Well, I mean, it's pretty obvious that it's an activist contingent at the New York Times who has either got, you know, upper management shaking in their boots or agrees with them.
You had Dean Bate, who's the, you know, he's the executive editor who at one point said, intent doesn't matter.
Can you imagine being a newspaper person who says intent doesn't matter?
Well, Brett Stephens wrote a great piece in the New York Times on this notion of intent doesn't matter.
And how this ends the human race.
I mean, we become automatons.
It doesn't matter.
If somebody says, I hate the word, and says it, versus this is what I use when I speak about black people, the intent doesn't matter?
Well, you certainly can't write a newspaper that way.
You certainly can't be a storyteller that way.
You certainly can't be a lawyer that way.
And, you know, Bacay backed off of that a couple days later saying, of course, intent matters.
But, you know, people, you know this, people right now want to be upset.
They're inflamed and they're poised to be upset.
Boy, do you know that.
All right, you are special.
See her video at PragerU and her articles are up at DennisPrager.com.
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