Kerby Anderson
Earlier this month, Jim Geraghty wondered if the killing of Paul Kessler would start a national conversation. You probably don’t even understand his question, which is an illustration of the fact that the media usually determines what event should spark a national conversation.
Paul Kessler is the 69-year-old Jewish man who died of a head injury at an event in Thousand Oaks, California. The Los Angeles Times reported the incident that occurred when pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protestors were in the street. The editors could have reported it as the first time a Jewish death occurred at a time of rising antisemitism. Instead, it was just a story of a clash in a suburb outside of Los Angeles.
Jim Geraghty reminds us that “this wasn’t random violence. Paul Kessler went to a demonstration seeking to exercise his God-given, constitutionally protected rights to assemble and speak, and somebody on the other side felt entitled to knock him around and ended up killing him. This should horrify and outrage us.”
In the past, we have seen the media take a local incident and turn it into a national story followed by calls for a national conversation on a controversial social issue. A mass shooting, an anti-gay comment, racist graffiti, and a threat to an abortion clinic are local stories that became national stories because the media decided to use the incident to spark a national conversation. “If newsrooms wanted to make the name Paul Kessler famous, they could. He could be depicted as a martyr to free speech and the First Amendment.”
Once again this is a reminder that we should use discernment when watching the news and reading news stories. The media elite still work to determine what is important enough for a national conversation.

Kerby Anderson
Bari Weiss is Jewish and the author of the book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism. She noticed something 20 years ago when she was a college student and started writing about an ideology that seemed to contradict everything she had been taught since she was a child.
She admits she may not have perceived the nature of this ideology if it had not been for the fact that she was a Jew. She noticed that she was being written out of the equation and that the whole system rested on an illusion. It was “a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad).”
Over the past two decades, she has seen this inverted worldview swallow each institution in America. She has seen it in the universities. As a staff editor at The New York Times, she saw it pervade the media. She has seen it influence everything from major corporations to medical schools, law schools, and high schools.
It also showed up in the Jewish community. Important Jewish organizations accepted this worldview to signal solidarity with the fight for equal rights. The problem is that this worldview measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, she is talking about wokeness and especially DEI,  “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” She acknowledges these three words represent noble causes but are camouflage and justification of arrogating power. That is why she says: “It is time to end DEI for good.”
Wokeness and DEI are undermining America and the principles that make this nation great. We should be fighting for those principles and against a social scoring system that punishes hard work and success.