Michael Knowles
Imagine being in a relationship with someone on the Kansas City Star editorial board…
No matter what the topic, they’re always right. For each and every issue that makes the news, they and they alone know the answers.
And who doesn’t like being treated to daily doses of finger wagging?
Case in point, the recent unsigned “editorial” trashing highly regarded conservative columnist and honors Yale grad Michael Knowles speech at UMKC.
“At UMKC, a D-List conservative was sad to be squirted with the makings of a bubble bath,” reads the headline.
Talk about “catty,” it reads more like a high school hit job than a newspaper editorial.
“OK, so that wasn’t bleach that one of a handful of protesters squirted on a D-list conservative speaker at a poorly attended event at UMKC…” it begins. “Video of it shows rows and rows of empty seats at (Knowles) talk ‘Men Are Not Women.'”
Hey, nice put down!
That said, the editorial ran unsigned – which all things considered was kin of gutless – but I can tell you from experience, they’re generally written by a single writer.
For example in the not too distant past, it wasn’t hard to tell the editorials written by longtime former Star firebrand Yael Abouhalkah.
Now I’m going to inch out on a limb and tell you that the betting money on who authored this snidely snipe was Star librarian-turned editorial also ran Derek Donovan.
That’s right, because Donovan – who is gay and a huge David Bowie devotee – has the thinnest skin of anybody I ever worked with at the newspaper.
Donovan
Not to mention Knowles put forth the proposition that while the LGBT community (who taunted him throughout his speech) is welcome to assume whatever gender identity they wish, it doesn’t change their underlying sex.
Pointing specifically to transgender men starting to dominateUnfortunately women’s sports.
Unfortunately for the Star and Donovan, Knowles point is backed by science:
“In humans the presence of the Y chromosome determines if an offspring develops as a male and the absence of the Y chromosome results in a female offspring.”
And just like the LGBT audience members who taunted Knowles with childish chides and offensive gestures, so did Donovan’s editorial.
“The editorial reads like he’s writing it in his ‘Mean Girls’ diary,” says one local reader. “Ever see that movie? UMKC let the protesters go on for too long. They should have kicked them out and let him give his lecture.”
Anyone who’s dealt much with Donovan knows he’s ultra thin skinned.
A few years back former Star editor Jim Fitzpatrick – generally speaking a supporter of the newspaper – asked Donovan for his opinion on its corrections policy:
“Nope, I don’t have any comment,” Donovan snapped. “I learned the hard way that interacting with anti-Star bloggers is a losing game for me.”
Uh, so who exactly now is the D-lister here?
At this point, how do we define a “reasonable person”?
Is it reasonable to attack, physically a speaker whose politics, or cultural views are different than yours? Is it reasonable to wear a mask and sucker punch someone from behind whose politics, or cultural views are different than yours? Is it reasonable to postulate a position that defines your views as unassailable and political, or cultural views different than yours “Hate Speech” and then expect acquiescence? Is it reasonable to claim that violence in ANY form, is justified by way of your subjective opinions on the definition of “Hate Speech”? Is it reasonable to redefine “Free Speech” on a ad hoc, subjective basis deriving from your solipsistic views?
The megaphone in the American public square is in possession of the Progressive Radicals who expect exactly that. The Main Stream Media is 95% Progressive while adamantly insisting that you pretend they are objective. The Entertainment Industry is 98% Progressive while “finger wagging” at you through endless reenactments of evil whites, discriminating, murdering, raping and robbing innocent minorities and gays when, we all know, it’s agitprop. The Federal/State Governments, in league with their Liberal masters, legislate pejorative, pernicious, racist laws that favor minorities and in many Democrat Cities, deny moral agency to certain favored groups of law breakers. Politicians openly call for an ex post facto, penalty tax on whites for “reparations” in spite of 19 Trillion Dollars already spent on Affirmative Action, Set Asides, Quotas, Lowered College Standards and a now legendary list of constraints on whites by virtue of their “White Privilege”.
The Overton Window moves at Light Speed in pursuit of a new definition of a “Reasonable” person, opinion and position.
Derek Donovan and millions of other ‘journalistic’ wallahs who populate news rooms in print, radio and TV, again, have the megaphone. As in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, we are tilted towards a uni-party that controls our thoughts, words and deeds. This is the first phase. Conform. Shut up. Kneel to the power and salute the new Commissar.
In Mao’s China, ca. 1966 the decibel level and repetition of the “New Truth” pathogen was injected into the conversation under the scrutiny of Commissars like Donovan. The results were blood, tyranny and the further subjection of the populace into slavery to their “Thought Leaders”.
The low level Civil War, now taking place in the streets, here in America, instigated with de facto permission from ‘journalists’ like Donovan, sees Anti-Fa, BLM, violent Fascist, ersatz Brown Shirts intimidate, shout down and draw blood from those that THEY consider, unreasonable.
That’s you.
I would probably still subscribe to The Star if it wasn’t for the editorial page.
They do make it harder…
Even at fire sale prices of $10 a month.
I was talking to one of former higher ups prior to the Mark Zeiman / Mile Fannin era who was moree than a little surprised at how far left – and devoid of news balance – the Star has become. Something to the effect that they’re losing so much dough they’re just letting people write whatever they want sans anything approaching the editorial balance of days gone by.
Kinda like the inmates running the asylum.
Put another way, todays Star has morphed into the Pitch
I agree,the Star piece has all the trademarks of Donovan’s signature bitchiness. What really bothers me, though,is the bizarro McClatchy logic. Because you are a nobody you have no rights. Because you tried to express your point of view,you left the protestors no choice but to disrupt you and prevent you from speaking,i.e.it’s your own fault that you were physically assaulted. Blame the victim,in other words.
It’s a brave new worlds at the Star these days, Dwight…
As it is at CNN and other so-called “mainstream media.”
Nobody is playing it straight down the line news wise anymore.
As a guy who voted for Obama, Nader, Perot and Reagan, I’m in shock to admit that the most straight down the line political reporting these days (Sean Hann its aside) is Fox News!
At least they line up opposing views and let them air their opinions, unlike MSNBC, CNN, the Star and others who’s attempts at striking anything approaching a balance is token at best.
Weird
Derek doesn’t write editorials, dickweed. Yet another Hearne screwup
If a speaker gets the “heckler’s veto”, the hecklers don’t have a legitimate point to present, period. The frequent use of Stürmabteilung tactics from the 1930s, in which “[g]roups of National Socialists invaded meetings, interrupted the speaker, attempted to attack him, and endeavored to make sufficient disturbance so that the meetings would have to be cancelled”[1], don’t give a cause more legitimacy now than they did 90 years ago.
As for the current furore, a lot of the trouble here is with imprecision in language. Sex is a biological trait, and can be determined by experiment – biological males have XY chromosomes, biological females have XX chromosomes. There are people – rare mutations – who have combinations of these chromosomes, such as XXXY, as seen in Klinefelter’s syndrome, and others. They’re usually sterile, and may present as one biological sex or the other.
Gender, on the other hand, is a sociological construct, and is dependent on the mores and expectations of society. In general, there are masculine and feminine gender roles that people play out in their lives, which correspond to certain stereotypes created by people who find those stereotypes useful for one reason or another. Biological males may play out masculine gender roles, feminine gender roles, or a combination of those roles, and these roles may shift from time to time. The same holds for biological females. It’s an individual choice, and is not determined by biological sex.
So “transgender” is a meaningless concept, given that analysis.
And it’s impossible for people for one biological sex to change into the other biological sex, by means of drugs or surgery which mimic characteristics of the desired biological sex, and when the drugs are taken away, the mimicry goes away, in most cases, except for the gynecomastia in biological males, which is permanent. The surgery tends to revert in various ways, as well, hence the long-term need for “corrective” surgery. In essence, these medical and pharmacological methods are a fraud, and their known effects – sterility, cardiovascular disease, etc. are medical malpractice, a violation of the Hippocratic Oath which states “First, do no harm.”
Sex and gender are two very different things and you cannot use transformations of gender to transform biological sex. It’s a lot of fuzzy-headed sociology, a field which has had a bad reputation for putting out garbage science for a long time, and now, with a profit-oriented medical-industrial complex, with its interest in creating new streams of cash flow from “profit centers”, great and irreversible damage is being done to a lot of people.
And having the Kansas City Star aid and abet this latest round of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist nonsense helps no one, least of all, the Star, whose March 31 circulation is down to 53,000, 15,000 less than three months ago. Making a vigorous stand *against* freedom of speech is something that *no* newspaper should aid or support.
[1] https://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/document/DOCNAC8.htm
Someone Needs to Write a Book titled How To Destroy an iconic Newspaper
Ch 1. – At the first sign of an industry shift and possible austerity.. Start running off your best talent.. you know… the talent with the best local angles and appointment readership. Just keep swinging the sword.. blame their egos, or their justification for good pay.
Ch 2- End the separation of advertising and news. Try to piss off everyone on both sides.
Ch 3- Elevate and esteem the editorial board. Make sure you have at least 8 or 10 of them if you can. Make sure they are uber liberal academic types that absolutely hate Midwestern culture– After a while, fire a bunch of them and replace with the exact same types.
Ch 4- Work hard to make sure you are nothing but a stepping stone for nationally famous sports columnists. Writers never have egos, so make sure you put those pesky sportswriters in their proper place. You only need 1 or 2 significant sportswriters.
Ch 5 – Endorse local election candidates that you know absolutely nothing about.. because your local reporters have all been fired. Rely on your cabal of the ultimate wisdom editorial board. Have an editorial board member who never leaves Brookside decide who to endorse in a KCK or Lenexa commissioner position.
Ch 6- Interest in entertainment, food, and lifestyle just keeps declining and declining drastically. Stop covering it. Just publish restaurants that are closing.
Ch 7- Make sure you spend lots of time submitting for national awards. This is really important and matters to your local readers.
Not too shabby, Rainbow…
You maybe missed a couple of ’em, but I’ll give you a B+, A-.
FYI, they’ve always treasured the winning of awards. Alway reminded me of grade school children vying for ribbons.
I never participated.
My accolades came in the former of being mostly either No. 1 or in the top two or three highest reads columns.
Former Starbeams and Faith columnist Bill Tammeus tried to enlist me in the National Society of Newspaper Columnist organization early on in my career. Bill is a former president of the group.
But I was too busy.
Putting out four or five columns a week – each with a main lead story and two to four smaller news items – took a ton of time. That’s because I was heavy duty edited on even the smallest of “tidbit items by a bank of at least four to five highly protective, skeptical editors.
But most Star editors and writers live to win these inside baseball awards from their like-minded industry peers.
And to this day – even as they continue to circle the drain with a tiny fraction of the staff they had 10 years ago – they run full page color ads celebrating pyrrhic victories by lightly read newcomers like editorial columnist Melinda Henneberger.
Henneberger didn’t even win – was only a “finalist” – but from the way the award’s been promoted you’d think Hollywood was about to produce a major motion picture about her.
I don’t know which is the more frightening / puzzling: the drop in circulation and readership or the cluelessness of Star’s editorial management in their continued policy of pissing off and running off of more than 80 percent of then former faithful.
It’s crazy
Dead on.
I’ve always wondered why so many newspapers don’t play it more “down the middle” so they don’t lose so many subscribers who don’t agree with them. Judging by how many newspapers are having financial trouble, I think I might actually be on to something. Why alienate about half of your prospective customers? Also, articles written under the “Editorial Board” byline seem like a cowardly way to express any view and often remind me of an internet “tough guy” who blasts out juvenile and vitriolic posts from his mother’s basement.
Roger, I’ve been saying that for years “Why alienate about half of your prospective customers?”. I’ve been in business for 45-years and I know who my prospective customers are. Why would I ruin my chance at attracting them as customers? Once you turn them off they tell their friends and family. And maybe some of those people are currently my customers who shouldn’t be put in the position of defending why they are my customer. Media companies don’t know a lick about business. All they know is ideology and they will take that to their grave.