Bass-Ackwards Dog

Robert Spencer, in an article today on FrontPageMag.com, writes:

The Internet, for all its faults, has delivered the coup de grace to the control the politically correct media have long had on the news. Neither liberal or conservative news outlets dare to face the truth about the global jihad in any thoroughgoing or realistic way, but you can get it at Jihad Watch.

Here, Spencer has framed the problem exactly bass-ackwards. It is not that the politically correct media have had control on the news: it is that those who own, manage and work in the news media have, for 50-odd years now, had their thought processes guided by political correctness—a vast, massive, dominant and mainstream sociopolitical atmosphere extending much more widely and broadly and deeply above, below and around the media than Spencer’s simplistic parenthetical statement implies.

And it has not merely been those who are in the news media whose thought processes are guided by the PC Multiculturalist paradigm; nor has it merely been the news media and those in politics (particularly those convenient scapegoats, the “liberals”), those in the entertainment industry, those in the arts and those in academe—all the “Elites” of our Western societies. No, over the past 50-odd years, it has become purt near every damn body whose thoughts and feelings have become guided and filtered, in one way or another, to one degree or another, by the PC Multiculturalist paradigm.

Of course, the influence of PC is not monolithic, nor uniform: different individuals will manifest different constellations of axioms. Interestingly—and comic-tragically—enough, when it comes to the particular axiom that governs views on Islam (linked directly to views on non-Western cultures and the Third World), PC Multiculturalism has seemed to have had the widest and deepest influence.

Spencer’s observation, in fact, manifests the classic tail wagging the dog syndrome: When it comes to the problem of PC, Spencer has lost sight of the “dog”—if he ever had sight of it at all in the first place—and consistently, persistently frames the whole thing in reverse. As long as he continues to do this, he will tend to tilt his lance at windmills, and lead his followers to do the same.