The Perfect Media Storm: Speilberg’s Lincoln, Ken Burns, David Brooks, and Al Sharpton on Race Relations in the Age of Obama

Last Sunday’s “roundtable discussion” on “Meet the Press” contained the “perfect storm” of guests to match the topics under discussion in the show’s final segment. Speilberg’s Lincoln, that fountain of historical accuracy from Jewish gay screenwriter Tony Kushner, and Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five, a “documentary” on the highly publicized Central Park “wilding” rape case, were just some of the featured racial topics chatted about in this “post-racial,” post-reelection era of Obama. Weighing in on all of this was that insightful bastion of wisdom: the Rev. Al Sharpton. (Where the hell was Doris Kearns Goodwin, the show’s resident “historian/expert” on Lincoln when you need her?) The segment wouldn’t be balanced without the input of resident “conservative” New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Members of the so-called “hive” (media and political elites in the words of the late Joe Sobran) seem to have flocked to movie theaters this past weekend to sponge-up the Speilberg/Kushner production of Lincoln as if this fictional portrayal is historically flawless. Between Lincoln and The Central Park Five, at least “progressives” had something to be thankful for on Thanksgiving weekend!

The incredible omission when discussing the injustice of the falsely accused in a New York-based, high profile criminal incident is the silence over Sharpton’s role in the Tawana Brawley case. How supposedly unbiased journalists could sit around the same table with a convicted slanderer and not raise the point in a broader discussion of race, crime, and false accusations is astounding! One outcome of the Brawley hoax was Sharpton’s conviction for slandering Steven Pagones, an innocent Dutchess County prosecutor falsely accused of being one of the perpetrators, and $345,000 judgment against Sharpton and two “civil rights attorneys (Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason). According to Wikipedia,

In 2007 Sharpton said he would have accepted the case the same as he does today. The only difference would be he would not have made it so personal with Pagones, but he still felt Brawley had a good case to go to trial. “I disagreed with the grand jury on Brawley,” said Sharpton in an interview. “I believed there was enough evidence to go to trial. Grand jury said there wasn’t. Okay, fine. Do I have a right to disagree with the grand jury? Many Americans believe O.J. Simpson was guilty. A jury said he wasn’t. So I have as much right to question a jury as they do. Does it make somebody a racist? No! They just disagreed with the jury. So did I.”

Amazingly, none this was brought up from our so-called “Best and Brightest” in the “news” profession.

Near the end of the segment, Ken Burns makes a pitch for extending the Thirteenth Amendment “in sort of spirit as well as in fact,”

You can’t take your foot off the accelerator here…. And that means there’s still work to do and whenever we take the eye off the ball, then you get birther movements.

Lincoln is a propaganda piece that has little to do with what happened in 1865 but much to do with reaffirming the culture of Western suicide. Spielberg says that he intentionally released Lincoln after the election because he “didn’t want it to become political fodder.” But of course, his movie is yet another political statement reaffirming the cultural status quo.

And this segment of Meet the Press is a perfect example of elite media promulgating these messages, completely in lock step with Hollywood, the New York Times and the rest of the elite media. One can hardly blame the average educated White person who is exposed to these mantras 24/7 for simply believing that there really is no other alternative than to submit to the moral imperative of their own displacement and disempowerment.

Someone once astutely observed, “We are living in the world Madison Grant warned us against.” Proof of this maxim is the MSM portrayal of two extraordinarily divisive figures (Lincoln and Sharpton) as presumably insightful leaders and learned elders on race relations.