These days it’s hard to tell where sincerity ends and parody begins. Reality has become nearly indistinguishable from satire. As a case-in-point consider the recent article on Gizmodo complaining that billionaire Jack Ma has donated $14 million to develop a coronavirus vaccine. Author Matt Novak says that this apparently paltry sum is “roughly equivalent to the average American household donating $33.” He concludes, somehow, that Ma’s generosity is proof that the government should “take that obscene wealth through taxes and [spend] it to make the world a healthier place for everyone.”
Of course, arguing that $14 million is effectively worthless because it’s such a low percentage of the giver’s overall wealth is nonsense, both logically and morally. $14 million to develop a vaccine is equivalent to $14 million to develop a vaccine, period. If I were starving and a man with 600 sandwiches offered me one, I wouldn’t refuse it on the grounds that one sandwich from a man with 600 sandwiches is like 3 crumbs from a man with one sandwich. I guess Matt Novak would. At least if he has the courage of his profoundly deranged convictions.
But this article was not the best example of leftist self-satire to grace the internet yesterday. That title must go to an article published Thursday on CNN.com, a website whose content would feel right at home on the Babylon Bee.
Headline: “Coronavirus task force another example of Trump administration’s lack of diversity.”
At length, CNN writer Brandon Tensley complains that the experts tapped to combat and contain the deadly coronavirus are too white and too male. “Who are these experts?” Tensley asks indignantly. “They’re largely the same sorts of white men (and a couple women on the sidelines) who’ve dominated the Trump administration from the very beginning.”
He reminds us that President Obama was far more progressive and race-conscious with the Ebola outbreak in 2014. This lies in stark contrast, he contends, to the unsubtle racist message Trump is sending with the team he assembled. The task force “telegraphs the kinds of people the administration deems worthy of holding power,” Tensley says. And those people are “mostly white men who are mirror images of the President himself.”
One wonders if the writer of this CNN article has noticed the CNN TV lineup. I haven’t seen so many white people since my wife dragged me into a HomeGoods. Or maybe since I watched the last Democratic primary debate. But CNN has never seem too concerned with hitting the sort of arbitrary racial quotas it wishes to impose on the Trump Administration. That’s probably because CNN tries to hire the people best suited for the job, regardless of demographic. They appear to fail rather miserably in that regard, but the strategy makes sense in theory.
It makes even more sense for a team of people tasked with the job of monitoring and containing a deadly virus. If Trump emphasized ethnic and sexual diversity over expertise, I’m not sure I’d be able to find much comfort in the diversity of his failed task force as I take my last gasping breaths. Perhaps Tensley would feel different. If it were up to him, I’m sure he’d fill the team with fashionable ethnic minorities, transgenders, pansexuals, and drag queens, irrespective of their epidemiological backgrounds, and then tell us to take heart as the virus kills our families, knowing that they lay down their lives in service to racial inclusion.
Am I exaggerating? I don’t think so. Exaggeration is no longer possible. Satire is dead. And leftists have its blood on their hands.