“Civility is a weapon wielded by the powerful.”
"I was screaming before you interrupted me." Civility under seige.
I remember what it was like being laid off. I was one of many, and it occurred at the height of a recession in early 1991. Fortunately, my unemployment didn’t last long, but it wasn’t a very “civil” experience with a one-year-old at home, little savings, and a realtor spouse with no clients in a down market.
So I sympathize with workers, especially as we are now hurtling towards a full-blown recession, who are suddenly out of jobs. It’s easy to feel like a victim.
But does it give you the justification, or the right, to suggest that civility is a “weapon” or a “privilege” wielded by the “tone police” or suggest that civility is a racist cudgel wielded by the powerful?
National Public Radio, supported in part by your tax dollars (roughly 8 percent of their budget via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting), announced plans to lay off 84 workers last week and cancel several productions over a drop in private donations. Despite giving the employees 30 days to wind up their work, the Zoom call led by NPR’s CEO didn’t go well. This is from Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman:
A group of executives, including president and CEO John Lansing, presented various financial metrics and updates on the diversity levels at the organization following the layoffs. As of March 24th, for example, NPR had booked $28.9 million in sponsorship revenue for the first quarter, compared to $41 million the year prior. The team highlighted that diversity levels remained roughly consistent before and after the cuts, though trans people in the programming department dropped, going from 2.5% of the workforce to 1.2%. . .
Throughout the presentation, employees raised their hands on video or submitted questions through the webinar’s Q&A feature. They responded to the answers from executives in real time through the virtual chat, often adding more questions there, too.
Among the requests: employees wanted to see more specific breakdowns around the number or percentage of employees of different races and identities who were laid off, rather than those of the remaining employees. They also wanted to know more information about their audiences, what the plans would be for hiring a chief content officer and more clarity about how the layoffs were carried out.
But the already tense environment boiled over during an exchange between CEO Lansing and a laid-off Black employee. That employee voiced concern that some podcasts hadn’t received marketing support and wondered how a show could gain audience without it. This person also listed executives’ names and repeated statements they had made in the past, asking for more accountability.
The individual then asked how NPR would make diversity work essential. Lansing replied that all the organization’s programming should be relevant to all of America — a stated mission for NPR
After replying, he then added that the group needed to “turn down the rhetoric” and not call executives out by name in an all-hands with hundreds of attendees.
“I would never, ever, on your worst day, call you out by name in a meeting with 827 people,” he said. “Let’s please keep in mind nobody is happy about this. Nobody is more unhappy about it than those affected, but certainly everybody in the company, beginning with me, this is the last thing we wanted to do.”
Some employees interpreted this as tone-policing and felt uncomfortable.
Oh, there’s more.
A few questions later someone referenced the earlier exchange and asked how attendees could be as specific as possible without using people’s names. Lansing re-committed to his answer and said that the conversation should have been more civil, which some employees interpreted as a direct attack on the earlier employee.
They immediately took to Zoom and called Lansing’s response “racist” and out-of-line. Another staff member dropped a link to a segment from NPR’s Code Switch titled, “When Civility Is Used As A Cudgel Against People Of Color.”
What, no one questioned the 50 percent programming staff cut for transgender staff? Dark days at NPR, indeed. Where will Ashley Hale find a job now? Oh, wait.
Talk about tone deafness. Perhaps NPR’s woke leadership and staff should ask why they are losing donations, not to mention listeners and especially corporate sponsors. True enough, the pandemic eliminated many workers’ commutes and a major NPR audience (not me, not ever, even though I once appeared on the Diane Rehm show to discuss food issues).
NPR is hardly alone with cutbacks in the legacy media world. “NPR is the latest of several major media companies to announce layoffs and other cost-cutting measures. The Washington Post, CNN, Vox Media, and newspaper giant Gannett have also slashed jobs in recent months while citing a worsening economic outlook,” reported the New York Post.
But in fairness, this was buried by another uncivil moment, this time in our nation’s capitol featuring US Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Republican Thomas Massie (KY), who co-chairs the House’s Second Amendment Caucus.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley perfectly describes my sentiments here.
One could shrug this off as just desserts for an outlet that embraces “advocacy journalism” and often fuels identity politics. However, it is a sad example of how even civility is now being denounced as a tool of repression in our age of rage.
That is why I recently wrote about the outburst of Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., who screamed about gun control in the Capitol as colleagues left after a vote. Various Democratic members, including former House Majority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md, tried to calm Bowman. However, after Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky, asked him to stop yelling, Bowman shouted “I was screaming before you interrupted me,” which could now go down as the epitaph for our age.
“I was screaming before you interrupted me,” US Rep. Jamaal Bowman, an epitaph for our age.
To be clear, as a congressional veteran and former insider, these “outbursts” are rare. But they get a lot more attention than the genuine civility and work that occurs behind the scenes. I respect Bowman’s passionate intensity, but let’s recall what the great writer William Butler Yeats said. It rings more true today than when he said it.
And then we have the horrific reaction to the murder of young children and administrators at Nashville’s Covenant Christian School. Instead of mourning the victims and their families, trans activists used violence to defend the killer. There’s no other way to describe it. From the Washington Stand:
In the United States, comedian Alex Stein had coffee thrown on him during a rally in New York City’s Union Square on Friday, shortly after he voiced his opposition to cross-hormone injections and body-altering surgeries for minors. “Children cannot consent!” Stein told a crowd of LGBT activists, who promptly surrounded him, grabbing his phone and stealing his hat. Video shows one of them throwing coffee on Stein.
“They throw water on me. They assault me. You got the cops here — they don’t do anything about it,” Stein told the camera, which captured someone in the surrounding mass of humanity spit on him. “They just literally spit on me,” Stein continued.
On the West Coast, members of the radical group Trans Rights Activists (TRA) congregated at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue in Los Angeles on Friday, blocking passing cars and chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets!” Conservative activist Storm Robinson described being surrounded, “shoved and shoulder checked several times by several different ANTIFA members.” He also identified one potential leader as Jasmine “Abdulluah” Richards, who told Robinson she was affiliated with Black Lives Matter. Richards served 90 days in jail after being convicted of felony lynching in 2016.
Between the two coasts, two Christian schools in the same town — Resurrection Christian School and Loveland Classical Schools in Loveland, Colorado — canceled classes Friday after receiving multiple threats.
We even have one Wyoming Democratic legislator (yes, they exist in one of our most Republican states) suggesting murder. Jane Fonda, call your office.
These are tough times for civility. And the media, with a big assist from a heavily politicized federal law enforcement juggernaut, blames people on the right, including parents who protest at school board meetings. Aside from what I consider the obvious, I wish I had an answer to the growing violence and hatred. Charleston’s Immanuel Church showed the way, starting with forgiveness.
As I’ve reported previously, the good news is that glimmers of light are breaking through dark clouds of incivility that crowd out civil discourse such as it is. Organizations such as Braver Angels are doing yeoman’s work. My friend Ed Goeas and his Democratic counterpart, Celinda Lake, have penned an important book.
Despite the growing incivility, we must not lose hope or succumb to the hatred that shrouds the nastiness in our increasingly divisive culture. Once you escape Washington’s beltway or head west of the Hudson River from New York City, which too few of our elite media do, it’s a very different world. Journalist Salena Zito writes about it all the time. Follow her work, not that of CNN, MSNBC, or even Fox News.
Civility is neither a cudgel nor racist, far from it. It is an essential value that makes civil society possible. And it’s time our media and government better realize it and begin to reward it, starting by not rewarding the Jamaal Bowmans and the violent trans-radical activists among us with the attention they do not deserve.