Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. So much has been said about the media, the mainstream media, the legacy media. There’s not really much to add because we all know that it’s not really a disinterested media but it’s kind of a Pravda-like propaganda organ. I’ll give you a few examples.
More recently, when Cyril Ramaphosa came to the White House, the president of South Africa, did you see the word “ambush”? It was in every mainstream paper, every left-wing website, every radio—NPR, PBS, CBS, MSNBC. It’s like the Democratic operatives issue a Pravda-like order and then these mindless people just say, “Okay, today’s talking points are…”
He met President Donald Trump. He wasn’t really surprised that Trump was going to confront him because he bragged that he was gonna confront Trump. There was no secret place. It wasn’t a sudden, unexpected attack from a secret place—the definition of an ambush. Yet, it was ”ambush,” “ambush,” “ambush,” “ambush.”
And when some questions arose about the visit, it was just typical. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, fielded a question from an NBC journalist. She was very angry because Donald Trump mentioned to President Ramaphosa, “See this picture of a thousand graves.” She said, “Well, he was lying. There weren’t graves.” And the press secretary replied back, “They were commemorations.” Each one of those crosses represents a dead South African who was murdered by virtue of his race. And she said, “Yes, but it’s not…”
So what they were arguing about—NBC—was semantics that Trump had improperly—and he had improperly—confused “grave” with “cenotaph,” a cenotaph. That’s “kenos” in Greek, meaning “empty.”
So, these crosses were not on top of a dead person but they represented a dead person. But NBC was so fixated on embarrassing the president that they didn’t even want to discuss the fact that there were a thousand crosses and they did represent individual lives destroyed because of their race. But she just wanted to make the point that you could nullify all of that and excuse it by saying they were not graves but cenotaphs. And there you have it.
