Last night the New York Times took a running jump and broke a new "both sides" record with a hot take originally titled “In the Era of Trump, Incivility Spreads in a Divided Nation.” The title was quickly revised (the Times has been obliged to do quite a bit of that of late), but the premise was not: A both sides comparison of the sitting president's white nationalist rhetoric, deployed to defend his order to separate refugee children from their asylum-seeking parents at the southern border in order to "deter" future refugees, with the resulting usage of swear words by his opponents.
Whether it be Robert De Niro’s four-letter condemnation at the Tony Awards or a congressional intern who shouted the same word at Mr. Trump when he visited the Capitol this week, the president has generated so much anger among his foes that some are crossing boundaries that he himself shattered long ago.
That is indeed the premise: Opponents of prison camps for children have been saying angry things, and this is coarsening our discourse.
Outside an arena in Duluth, Minn., where the president was speaking on Wednesday night, protesters waved signs that said “My Grandpa Didn’t Fight Nazis for This” and “Liar. Racist. Fascist. Sociopath. Twitter Troll. Idiot.”
Samantha Bee makes a token appearance, as do both sides quotes debating whether or not it is proper to make "comparisons" between the construction of new detention camps for children with the rhetoric and policies of Nazi Germany.
This does not require a response. It is, however, of a pattern at the Times and a particular obsession of national pundits and editors. When the Bush administration authorized and defended the torture of prisoners of war—an international crime—the same stories were written contrasting the rhetoric of those that endorsed those atrocities with opponents who said fuck. The same was true in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, when demonstrable lies by government figures were met with the equivalent public crime of impolite signage.
And it is a symptom of the corruption in our discourse that brought us to this point, and to those recent others. It is widely taken for granted, among the punditry that grace us with their omnipresent wisdom on the television sets, that coarse language is a sin of equal magnitude to the advocacy for atrocities. Of course it is; many in the pundit ranks have themselves advocated for atrocities, for war crimes or for human rights violations, and the notion that this might damage a career to the extent that saying fuck in front of a network camera is, to them, an existential threat.
You can advocate for murder—so long as you are wearing a tie. You can insist that preschool-aged children represent an existential threat to American security—so long as you avoid the seven deadly words that will cause your microphone to go dead. You can endorse the notions of white supremacy freely and eagerly, or advocate for the dissolution of existing American norms because they have come into conflict with the emotional needs of a particular authoritarian lout—there will be no scorn from the studiously neutral press.
To the arbiters of our discourse, human rights crimes by public officials and intemperate speech from the citizenry are, forever, pitted against each other as equivalent sins against that discourse. It is a particular sort of sociopathy, perhaps, but one that it is deeply ingrained in our national press as the only possible way to make the Sunday shows happen, and the editorial pages legitimate, and for the great national delusion that says America is a shining beacon that cannot, by definition, do wrong.
It is a symptom of the press corruption—not government corruption, but press corruption—that brought us here. The proper reaction to an indecent act is outrage; we have been told by the survivors of every horrific world atrocity that it was silence, not the indecency of critics, that allowed it to happen. To meet human rights abuses or the degradation of our democracy with anything but white-hot rage is an unforgivable sin, and to treat that anger as itself worthy of scorn is to stand, plainly, on the side of indecency.
If our political discourse were not fully captured by this peculiar sort of willful amorality—from pundits and reporters alike—this wouldn't even be in question.