I value your insights. Still, I grasp your concern… I have it myself. But given MSM bias now, it feels important that journalists like you provide ‘the other side’ and truth.
"Young people today may not grasp how tough it was to scour a library for an elusive book that held the facts you needed."
This may be beside your main point but it raises something interesting - information is so readily available that it is often unappreciated. The stickiness factor is not the same as having to go to the library, navigate the Dewey Decimal System (how many younger people even know what that is?), find the book(s) needed, read it/them while taking notes, and so forth. When finding something out takes that much time, you tend to remember it.
You do, but even after all that work, you usually would only find 1 or a few books on the matter. Maybe out-of-date. Maybe biased. The current system has flaws but it literally plugs us into the knowledge of humanity ... if we know and take the time to properly injest it.
My son said something to me interesting yesterday: he's not a big fan of information pushed to him via news feeds or apps, but when he proactively goes to the internet to find information, it works amazing.
Today’s feed is why I read your email exclusively, I trust you. I hope you enjoyed your time off over Labor Day. Although I missed your emails, I am glad you take time off as needed. We all get brain fried with life’s “news” these days. Keep up your great, honest work of exposing the truth.
I think that some news subjects, such as teachers unions and teacher misconduct, sexual grooming and abuse of students, while the headlines may be sensationalized, are also absolutely worthy of reportage to keep concerned parents, grandparents, and legal guardians fully informed and knowledgeable about these scandals.
There were a couple news reports by the NY Post that showed that during the year 2022, some 350 school teachers were arrested for abusing students in the US. This amounts to almost one arrest per day!
I think that there was a strong point made that if on average, one police officer was arrested per day then the BLM/Antifa looting and rioting over police brutality and racism would be non-stop and America’s cities would all be thoroughly burned and trashed. Venal and incendiary politicians would ride such arrests of cops all the way into re-election for the next few cycles
As a rhetorical question and thought experiment … Why are there no protests out in the streets whenever a teacher is arrested for abusing a student? Why aren’t civil rights violations also filed against such abusive teachers? Aren’t the teachers also acting (or rather misbehaving) under the color of their in loco parentis authority as state licensed educators and as paid school district officials?
Anyways … I largely agree with your sentiment while also realizing that some of these stories have become so sensationalized because they are also so shocking. There are so many of these kinds of news reports that you are left just feeling numb, and perhaps even de-sensitized after so many of these incidents.
Societal behaviors that were widely deemed and considered illegal, corrupt, and otherwise completely debased just even a decade or so ago, are now seemingly accepted and widely tolerated by most of our American instituons, including academia, media and entertainment, government, and transnational corporations.
Our American landscape more and more seemingly resembles a 21st version of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone …
You make some interesting points that I think have different answers.
First, the BLM stuff. I'm not sure if comparing those riots against any bad behavior gets us much. They're incomparable for a few reasons.
By a pure numbers perspective, the police shootings/killings of people who weren't actively trying to attack the cop or someone else is exceedingly rare. Like really rare. The reactions against that are pushed not only by the false narrative that blacks are being indiscriminately shot, as well as the larger notion that many blacks, rightly or wrongly, feel mistreated by police in lesser but insulting ways. We could write books here, and rational people should.
Child abuse by teachers is horrifying, and it's interesting to ask whether that should be reported more. The Fox numbers come out to about 1 teacher/admin/etc. arrested per day, so guess 365 a year. It's likely low since they just compiled stories that hit the news. "Child related sex crimes" isn't defined, so presumably is as bad as forcible rape, and include other things such as child porn, statutory rape, exposure and a whole host of nastiness. And that's only the ones that got caught, so the number is clearly higher.
But it's hard to really fathom how big America is and what a small percentage of awful things hit the national news.
About 2,000 kids under 18 are murdered each year. Estimates of sexually abused kids range from 60,000 to millions. About 1,500 commit suicide. In 2021, over 1,500 kids overdosed just on fentanyl alone.
That's a whole lot of misery, which is only somewhat softened by the fact that we have about 75 million children in the U.S. It's no comfort to any victim, but, for perspective, something that happens to 1,500 of them means that it's happened to 0.002% of them, or 1 kid out of 50,000.
Anyhow, I'm just throwing out stats now, but the numbers are both horrifically large and thankfully small, depending on how you view it.
Lastly … yes the stats too. Have we always had weirdos, perverts and other sexual deviants living amongst us? Are they now just seemingly more prevalent and numerous because we have high speed Internet and 7/24 news coverage?
The numbers you cite make sense, but that is no comfort if you’re the victim who drew the crappy lottery ticket.
I suppose I am trying to get at issues beyond just statistical numbers, but something deeper that has to do with who we are as a people. Hopefully this makes some sense …
Oh … I agree that the incidence of bad or unjustified police shootings are quite rare. Agitation groups like BLM and particular politicians, civil rights activist and lawyers just seem to wait, like political vultures, for any police use of force incident to occur so that they can exploit it for their own gain.
And I know I am using sort of an apples vs. oranges comparison when it comes to incidents of police abuse and brutality vs. the abuse (sexual and otherwise) of kids by teachers and school officials. I suppose the point I am trying to make is that we do not seem to see or experience the same kind of outrage when a student is sexually abused by a (supposedly) trusted teacher or school official as when a police officer uses deadly force. Note: many times when an officer uses deadly force the usual demagogues immediately want a scalp and protest, while later on independent investigations reveal that a police shooting was indeed legitimate.
Anyways … I just saw another recent story in which a Democrat candidate for the Virginia statehouse has been reportedly making $$$ doing online pornography, as first reported by the WaPo.
BTW … I am currently in The Philippines right now on an extended visit, and this tawdry Virginia news story is even getting coverage over here too … the story has gone international!
I suppose the point that I am making, and yes this Virginia news is also sensationalized, is that just a few years ago a political candidate with such a secret story revealed to the public would have been embarrassed, and would have quickly dropped out of the race and public spotlight.
Remember the 1980s when then US Senator Gary Hart (D) was running as a Presidential candidate and he was exposed by the media as having an extramarital affair with a woman (not his wife) on some boat called the Monkey Business?
As I recall, Hart quickly dropped out of the race and profusely and publicly apologized.
This Virginia candidate for the statehouse seems to be portraying herself as a “victim” and maybe even using it as badge of honor(?) … more like dishonor … for her campaign. I don’t even understand why she would do this for money as she is a RN Practitioner and her approving husband is an attorney. I would think that their combined incomes put them into a rather successful top 10% or even 5%, maybe even higher.
Note: I really feel sorry for their two young kids, who will likely be teased and humiliated constantly now at school.
Anyways … I also remember that the late Federal Judge, and SCOTUS nominee, Robert Bork once penned a book titled something like Sliding Towards Gomorrah. I haven’t read the book but I remember some of the coverage about it, and now at least I think Bork had a very valid point. Perhaps this is better called defining deviancy down as the late Democrat US Senator Patrick Moynihan once also so wisely observed.
Much like you coming from those pristine camping trips you had as a kid and returning back home to smoggy and dirty Los Angeles … I can very much relate to this as I too grew up in SoCal and we would take similar camping/hunting trips.
I love following you and I truly believe you are one of the most honest conservatives out there!! I definitely trust and believe the news you deliver to us. Thanks Ken
As information consumers, we are now responsible for personalizing the segments of our own news wheel. Below are listed mine, too short on cultural features, and open to suggestions.
Not bragging, but I allocate the first 5-10 minutes to news of my currently ascendant Atlanta Braves to set a positive tone. Then it's off to the aggregators and substacks. CFP is good for some headlines and features, not to be trusted on certain subjects, but expansive enough to serve up threads from wide sources including The Atlantic and the NY Times (the latter is unblocked if you Google their headline). WSJ has useful TV and book notifications from time to time, but their political biases seem designed for angry rebuttal in the comments section. I read three substacks: Ken LaCorte, Christopher Rufo, and Jessica Valenti's Abortion Every Day, which monitors choice-related legislative and legal developments around the country. My only podcast feed is Rob Long's Martini Shot, part of The Ankler substack. Rob's bemused perspective on the entertainment industry is a cheerful 10 minutes every week. My wife conveys highlights from City Journal's news feed from time to time, and clues me in to humorous cartoons or published works she finds or gets from friends. Morning shows from Fox Business and CNBC cover important business developments and interviews. This leaves most of the day free from toxic media intrusions such as local shopping mall invasion footage, presidential doddering, "X", and that ranting pillow salesman.
Welcome back. You raise an interesting question for those of us who grew up in the ‘40s and ‘50s, college in the early ‘60s. Did the books we took from the college libraries already have political slants? Did the reports, essays, stories we typed on our little portable typewriters with carbon paper contain more truth, real facts, unvarnished history than internet searches people do today?
It's a really good question. My best guess is that they had their biases, but generally nothing like what happened to our press corp in the early 2000s (for a lot of reasons, mostly internet based), culminating in 2016 where they literally decided that preventing Trump trumped what remained of their journalistic ethics.
There were things hidden (today called censored) back then too. I remember well being horrified when I first learned about what Roosevelt did to American Japanese, confiscating their property and confining them in prison camps during WWII. I was not generally ignorant, but had no clue about this until a few years after college graduation, Chinese friends on the west coast mentioned having to wear little buttons as children that said “China” so that they would not be scooped up. Complete news to me, even with a full academic scholarship. And I remember running around my college campus campaigning for Barry Goldwater in 1964, something I’m sure couldn’t happen today. I actually remember hearing Reagan’s original speech supporting Goldwater that launched his own political career. Memory is a wonderful thing. 😊
My parents fondly remembered that Reagan speech as well.
They also had a different perspective on the internment camps. That perspective was borne from living through a war that people were terrified of losing, especially to the Japanese, who were barbaric conquerers. When I studied WWII, I knew the ending beforehand, so it was difficult to place myself in their shoes. It makes it tricky to judge actions taken in a different generations.
Great points, Ken. I'm also a news junkie who loathes algorithms. I've tried to limit my exposure to them by reading in print whenever possible, staying off social media, and downloading browser extensions to prevent websites from sucking up my data. For example, I have an extension that turns off YouTube's video recommendations, so I'll only see videos I've searched for.
I also try to treat outrage like it's money -- I only have a finite amount of it to spend, so I'd better not waste it on trivial garbage.
And as a journalist, I try to avoid anecdotal outrage bait. It's one thing to use an example to illustrate a broader issue, as responsible journalists do. It's another to say, "Did you see what this idiot did? He and all those other idiots are trying to destroy our way of life. Build yourself a bunker, stock up on gold, and buy these nutritional supplements."
Finally, I'm dying to hear some fun Burning Man stories...
I value your insights. Still, I grasp your concern… I have it myself. But given MSM bias now, it feels important that journalists like you provide ‘the other side’ and truth.
"Young people today may not grasp how tough it was to scour a library for an elusive book that held the facts you needed."
This may be beside your main point but it raises something interesting - information is so readily available that it is often unappreciated. The stickiness factor is not the same as having to go to the library, navigate the Dewey Decimal System (how many younger people even know what that is?), find the book(s) needed, read it/them while taking notes, and so forth. When finding something out takes that much time, you tend to remember it.
You do, but even after all that work, you usually would only find 1 or a few books on the matter. Maybe out-of-date. Maybe biased. The current system has flaws but it literally plugs us into the knowledge of humanity ... if we know and take the time to properly injest it.
My son said something to me interesting yesterday: he's not a big fan of information pushed to him via news feeds or apps, but when he proactively goes to the internet to find information, it works amazing.
Today’s feed is why I read your email exclusively, I trust you. I hope you enjoyed your time off over Labor Day. Although I missed your emails, I am glad you take time off as needed. We all get brain fried with life’s “news” these days. Keep up your great, honest work of exposing the truth.
Thank you Marvel, that means a lot. I don't make money here, but at least I can help spread truthhood.
I love this.
I too and back from a wonderful no news vacation. Good for the soul. First day drinking coffee at home reading emails glad to see yours among them.
I think that some news subjects, such as teachers unions and teacher misconduct, sexual grooming and abuse of students, while the headlines may be sensationalized, are also absolutely worthy of reportage to keep concerned parents, grandparents, and legal guardians fully informed and knowledgeable about these scandals.
There were a couple news reports by the NY Post that showed that during the year 2022, some 350 school teachers were arrested for abusing students in the US. This amounts to almost one arrest per day!
See: https://nypost.com/2022/10/14/nearly-270-k-12-educators-arrested-on-child-sex-crimes-in-first-9-months-of-this-year/
See: https://nypost.com/2023/01/15/teacher-sex-crimes-show-progressives-love-to-stay-silent-on-abuses-of-power/
Also, here are the source reportage from your old Fox News Digital sources …
See: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/at-least-269-k-12-educators-arrested-child-sex-crimes-first-9-months-year
See: https://www.foxnews.com/us/nearly-350-k-12-educators-arrested-child-sex-crimes-2022
I think that there was a strong point made that if on average, one police officer was arrested per day then the BLM/Antifa looting and rioting over police brutality and racism would be non-stop and America’s cities would all be thoroughly burned and trashed. Venal and incendiary politicians would ride such arrests of cops all the way into re-election for the next few cycles
As a rhetorical question and thought experiment … Why are there no protests out in the streets whenever a teacher is arrested for abusing a student? Why aren’t civil rights violations also filed against such abusive teachers? Aren’t the teachers also acting (or rather misbehaving) under the color of their in loco parentis authority as state licensed educators and as paid school district officials?
Anyways … I largely agree with your sentiment while also realizing that some of these stories have become so sensationalized because they are also so shocking. There are so many of these kinds of news reports that you are left just feeling numb, and perhaps even de-sensitized after so many of these incidents.
Societal behaviors that were widely deemed and considered illegal, corrupt, and otherwise completely debased just even a decade or so ago, are now seemingly accepted and widely tolerated by most of our American instituons, including academia, media and entertainment, government, and transnational corporations.
Our American landscape more and more seemingly resembles a 21st version of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone …
You make some interesting points that I think have different answers.
First, the BLM stuff. I'm not sure if comparing those riots against any bad behavior gets us much. They're incomparable for a few reasons.
By a pure numbers perspective, the police shootings/killings of people who weren't actively trying to attack the cop or someone else is exceedingly rare. Like really rare. The reactions against that are pushed not only by the false narrative that blacks are being indiscriminately shot, as well as the larger notion that many blacks, rightly or wrongly, feel mistreated by police in lesser but insulting ways. We could write books here, and rational people should.
Child abuse by teachers is horrifying, and it's interesting to ask whether that should be reported more. The Fox numbers come out to about 1 teacher/admin/etc. arrested per day, so guess 365 a year. It's likely low since they just compiled stories that hit the news. "Child related sex crimes" isn't defined, so presumably is as bad as forcible rape, and include other things such as child porn, statutory rape, exposure and a whole host of nastiness. And that's only the ones that got caught, so the number is clearly higher.
But it's hard to really fathom how big America is and what a small percentage of awful things hit the national news.
About 2,000 kids under 18 are murdered each year. Estimates of sexually abused kids range from 60,000 to millions. About 1,500 commit suicide. In 2021, over 1,500 kids overdosed just on fentanyl alone.
That's a whole lot of misery, which is only somewhat softened by the fact that we have about 75 million children in the U.S. It's no comfort to any victim, but, for perspective, something that happens to 1,500 of them means that it's happened to 0.002% of them, or 1 kid out of 50,000.
Anyhow, I'm just throwing out stats now, but the numbers are both horrifically large and thankfully small, depending on how you view it.
Lastly … yes the stats too. Have we always had weirdos, perverts and other sexual deviants living amongst us? Are they now just seemingly more prevalent and numerous because we have high speed Internet and 7/24 news coverage?
The numbers you cite make sense, but that is no comfort if you’re the victim who drew the crappy lottery ticket.
I suppose I am trying to get at issues beyond just statistical numbers, but something deeper that has to do with who we are as a people. Hopefully this makes some sense …
Oh … I agree that the incidence of bad or unjustified police shootings are quite rare. Agitation groups like BLM and particular politicians, civil rights activist and lawyers just seem to wait, like political vultures, for any police use of force incident to occur so that they can exploit it for their own gain.
And I know I am using sort of an apples vs. oranges comparison when it comes to incidents of police abuse and brutality vs. the abuse (sexual and otherwise) of kids by teachers and school officials. I suppose the point I am trying to make is that we do not seem to see or experience the same kind of outrage when a student is sexually abused by a (supposedly) trusted teacher or school official as when a police officer uses deadly force. Note: many times when an officer uses deadly force the usual demagogues immediately want a scalp and protest, while later on independent investigations reveal that a police shooting was indeed legitimate.
Anyways … I just saw another recent story in which a Democrat candidate for the Virginia statehouse has been reportedly making $$$ doing online pornography, as first reported by the WaPo.
Here’s a link to Fox News Digital …
See: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/virginia-democrat-candidate-posted-sex-acts-husband-online-soliciting-tips-report
BTW … I am currently in The Philippines right now on an extended visit, and this tawdry Virginia news story is even getting coverage over here too … the story has gone international!
See: https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1830414/virginia-candidate-performed-sex-acts-with-husband-in-live-videos
I suppose the point that I am making, and yes this Virginia news is also sensationalized, is that just a few years ago a political candidate with such a secret story revealed to the public would have been embarrassed, and would have quickly dropped out of the race and public spotlight.
Remember the 1980s when then US Senator Gary Hart (D) was running as a Presidential candidate and he was exposed by the media as having an extramarital affair with a woman (not his wife) on some boat called the Monkey Business?
As I recall, Hart quickly dropped out of the race and profusely and publicly apologized.
This Virginia candidate for the statehouse seems to be portraying herself as a “victim” and maybe even using it as badge of honor(?) … more like dishonor … for her campaign. I don’t even understand why she would do this for money as she is a RN Practitioner and her approving husband is an attorney. I would think that their combined incomes put them into a rather successful top 10% or even 5%, maybe even higher.
Note: I really feel sorry for their two young kids, who will likely be teased and humiliated constantly now at school.
Anyways … I also remember that the late Federal Judge, and SCOTUS nominee, Robert Bork once penned a book titled something like Sliding Towards Gomorrah. I haven’t read the book but I remember some of the coverage about it, and now at least I think Bork had a very valid point. Perhaps this is better called defining deviancy down as the late Democrat US Senator Patrick Moynihan once also so wisely observed.
Much like you coming from those pristine camping trips you had as a kid and returning back home to smoggy and dirty Los Angeles … I can very much relate to this as I too grew up in SoCal and we would take similar camping/hunting trips.
That kind of honest introspection is why you are always my first read of the day.
Thank you Nick! Nice to hear.
I love following you and I truly believe you are one of the most honest conservatives out there!! I definitely trust and believe the news you deliver to us. Thanks Ken
What a wonderful thing to read. Thanks, Gina!
I appreciate your insight. Welcome back.
As information consumers, we are now responsible for personalizing the segments of our own news wheel. Below are listed mine, too short on cultural features, and open to suggestions.
Not bragging, but I allocate the first 5-10 minutes to news of my currently ascendant Atlanta Braves to set a positive tone. Then it's off to the aggregators and substacks. CFP is good for some headlines and features, not to be trusted on certain subjects, but expansive enough to serve up threads from wide sources including The Atlantic and the NY Times (the latter is unblocked if you Google their headline). WSJ has useful TV and book notifications from time to time, but their political biases seem designed for angry rebuttal in the comments section. I read three substacks: Ken LaCorte, Christopher Rufo, and Jessica Valenti's Abortion Every Day, which monitors choice-related legislative and legal developments around the country. My only podcast feed is Rob Long's Martini Shot, part of The Ankler substack. Rob's bemused perspective on the entertainment industry is a cheerful 10 minutes every week. My wife conveys highlights from City Journal's news feed from time to time, and clues me in to humorous cartoons or published works she finds or gets from friends. Morning shows from Fox Business and CNBC cover important business developments and interviews. This leaves most of the day free from toxic media intrusions such as local shopping mall invasion footage, presidential doddering, "X", and that ranting pillow salesman.
That's not a bad curated list at all. And that's really the key these days, getting info from various sources to fill in the blanks and biases.
Welcome back. You raise an interesting question for those of us who grew up in the ‘40s and ‘50s, college in the early ‘60s. Did the books we took from the college libraries already have political slants? Did the reports, essays, stories we typed on our little portable typewriters with carbon paper contain more truth, real facts, unvarnished history than internet searches people do today?
It's a really good question. My best guess is that they had their biases, but generally nothing like what happened to our press corp in the early 2000s (for a lot of reasons, mostly internet based), culminating in 2016 where they literally decided that preventing Trump trumped what remained of their journalistic ethics.
There were things hidden (today called censored) back then too. I remember well being horrified when I first learned about what Roosevelt did to American Japanese, confiscating their property and confining them in prison camps during WWII. I was not generally ignorant, but had no clue about this until a few years after college graduation, Chinese friends on the west coast mentioned having to wear little buttons as children that said “China” so that they would not be scooped up. Complete news to me, even with a full academic scholarship. And I remember running around my college campus campaigning for Barry Goldwater in 1964, something I’m sure couldn’t happen today. I actually remember hearing Reagan’s original speech supporting Goldwater that launched his own political career. Memory is a wonderful thing. 😊
My parents fondly remembered that Reagan speech as well.
They also had a different perspective on the internment camps. That perspective was borne from living through a war that people were terrified of losing, especially to the Japanese, who were barbaric conquerers. When I studied WWII, I knew the ending beforehand, so it was difficult to place myself in their shoes. It makes it tricky to judge actions taken in a different generations.
Great points, Ken. I'm also a news junkie who loathes algorithms. I've tried to limit my exposure to them by reading in print whenever possible, staying off social media, and downloading browser extensions to prevent websites from sucking up my data. For example, I have an extension that turns off YouTube's video recommendations, so I'll only see videos I've searched for.
I also try to treat outrage like it's money -- I only have a finite amount of it to spend, so I'd better not waste it on trivial garbage.
And as a journalist, I try to avoid anecdotal outrage bait. It's one thing to use an example to illustrate a broader issue, as responsible journalists do. It's another to say, "Did you see what this idiot did? He and all those other idiots are trying to destroy our way of life. Build yourself a bunker, stock up on gold, and buy these nutritional supplements."
Finally, I'm dying to hear some fun Burning Man stories...
https://www.thefp.com/p/apocalypse-not-i-got-engaged-in-the
It was a shock having such a mellow time away, then clicking on the Daily Mail and seeing so much manufactured drama thrown at me.
And I'll have a few BM stories tomorrow AM.