SOCIAL ETHICS UNDONE

I was offended by a recent article I read on the NPR web site. The article confirmed my decision several years ago to cancel my NPR membership. It was a trendy puff piece on the anniversary of the death of a certain Minnesota felon at the hands of a deranged police officer. That death has brought a scourge of pro-criminal rhetoric into the public space. Rhetoric which would have been mocked in a saner time. 

The economic result of the anti-law and pro-crime trend that followed the exploited death of that felon, which was filmed and edited for effect, has cost Americans billions of dollars from unrestrained rioting and arson. The social result has most detrimentally impacted neighborhoods of poor people of color. Crime rates and murder rates are up over 100% following the unbridled chaos of 2020 in some Democrat-governed cities. 

Public safety is no longer an American priority. This is particularly ironic after those in Washington crashed our economy and locked us down over a virus with a mortality rate of less than 1% of the population of the US. Social distancing and wearing masks were promoted as sound policy, while shutting down riots, arson and looting was avoided as being politically incorrect. 

The scapegoats of frustration over the needless oppression inflicted by The Chinese Communist Party, the CDC and WHO on Americans are those who protect us from real threats from violent criminals. Municipal police have been tarred and feathered by an out-of-touch media, dominated by armchair progressives who live far from gang violence. The talking heads of most mainstream media would not last an hour doing the job of inner-city cops, but they spend hours critiquing them.

And what of the politicians who have led the charge to defund police? The most obvious example is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. You know, the young Congresswoman who faked a near-breakdown at the Mexican border during the Trump administration. She is now claiming that she has post-traumatic stress from the January 6th Capitol Riot, despite being uninjured and protected by security. Yet she did not hesitate to condone racialist rioting, arson and looting all over America throughout 2020. 

As for the Mexican border, AOC and her compadres are fine with the influx of illegal migrants that President Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris have intentionally allowed into the country without any democratic mandate from American citizens to do so. Yet they have supported a pogrom against opposition supporters in the name of routing out the "insurrectionists" of January 6th in DC. In their alternate ethical universe, they have condoned the catch-and-release actions of Democrat prosecutors across the US in response to mob violence, arson and looting, but inflate the danger of those who trashed the Capitol in a rage of similar frustration with DC politics. 

Social media and news media has capitalized on the deterioration of American public safety for money. A frightened and confined public relies more heavily on their screens for information and connection. Manipulating the post-pandemic world with propaganda has become easier than ever. And those who own social media and digital news media are taking full advantage. 

The silencing of voices of reason and common sense is evidence of the lack of ethics in the digital world of information and social interaction. The promotion of domestic terrorists and racialists is also evidence. This is a fear-promoting gold mine of clicks and conformist group think. Once they have banned dissent and corralled users into conformist cancel-cultures, those who control digital media potentially can control everything. Ethics, skepticism, informed democracy and real science become irrelevant in the trends controlled by the media conglomerates for power and money.