Dennis Prager and journalist Nancy Rommelmann discuss the New York Times firing Donald McNeil Jr. for using the N-word in a classroom discussion about racist language. They argue that removing context from offensive words erases history and that intent has become irrelevant in modern media accountability.
Or I'll get the exact detail from Nancy Rommelmann in a moment. She's on the line. She's written an important piece on this. And he was let go because he used the N-word. It came out 2 years ago with a New York Times-sponsored trip with young people to Peru. Now, Nancy, one of the things that people following this story don't seem to ask or conclude is how loathsome The Daily Beast is.
Yeah, well, I have two thoughts on that. As a journalist, when I first read the piece, I thought it was bad reporting because I would never— as an editor or a reporter, I never would have filed a story that didn't offer context. I mean, that's a horrible thing to do. It's unethical. I did have someone speak to me who's a media reporter, and he said, you know, someone gets a scoop, they write about it. They didn't have all the details. That said, it seemed to me they were sort of doing the bidding of, um, some people at the Times that wanted— I mean, somebody at the Times leaked this internal investigation to the Daily Beast. Why? Why, 2 years later, something that had already been put to bed? Why would you do that? Well, you do it because you do know that it's probably going to get this guy canned.
Right. But he's not a conservative.
He was not. Oh my goodness. Donald McNeil Jr. is not a conservative. And he was— he fought for the unions. He was— he was a very, you know, a hardworking guy. Definitely old school, older than most of the people that are complaining about him. Certainly older than the high school students on the trip he was in. But the problem is he used the N-word during a conversation about racist language. Right, right.
Again, I want to make that clear because this happened to me where I didn't even say the word. I just said that what the left has done, making it impossible to say it in any context. And I said it was evil to call somebody the N-word. But just opposing the ban on the word in— if you're describing Mark Twain's literature, it's like only literally the only word in English that cannot be said in any context. So McNeil says it. Now, how did he say it exactly? Repeating what the student had asked?
Yeah, someone asked him, do you think the student should have been suspended for using the N-word? And he said, well, Was she, was she like saying it to someone, or was she like quoting from a rap song or a book? And he basically said back to the student what had been said to him. So that is context, right? So let me just, let me just piggyback onto something you just said. So I have written 3 pieces about the McNeil situation, and if your, if your, your listeners are interested, I have a Substack under my name. They can go read the pieces. They are all there. And in one of the pieces I said, look, These people don't want to be able to use this word. They want to be able to weaponize it. They turn it into little pellets of plutonium. So they, of course, they don't want it used. First of all, there's no reason to use the word, but if you're using it in context, they don't even want that to happen because they want it to continue to be a weapon that they can use. And I just don't think that's okay. I do not think that's okay at all.
Right. You know, even The Guardian wrote a piece about how stupid, and it's on the left, about how stupid it is that, you know, quoting Mark Twain, you can't say the word.
I think obviously times change, and for the most part that's a great thing.
Yes, right, but never is it— it's just moral showing off. And anyway, it's not a healthy thing. And on my show it came up because I had mentioned that Truman, who Dennis Prager, who against the State Department recognized Israel the day it announced its independence in 1948, used the word kike regularly in his correspondence, like when he visited New York, and this is reported, and he used the N-word. But I can't, but I don't want the thing to become the K-word. I don't want any Jew, I'm a Jew, I don't want any Jew called it, that's evil. But to cite the— Alan, who wrote the great biography of Truman? McCullough, which is where I got it from, David McCullough's biography. And he uses the N-word in the book. But I can't— if I were to read the book, I wonder if the Audible actually says the word. And would the guy be fired if he said the word?
I have a friend of mine, Jesse Singal, has a book coming out and he's writing about a lot of social psychology. And he realized when he was doing the audiobook, was there and he said to the director, maybe we should just, you know, not say the word. They said, absolutely, we should not say the word.
But right, even though it's written in the book, so the order— this is what we've come to.
Yes. But, and here's a— to echo a bit of what you're saying, it's a very, very bad idea to scrub history. It is a very bad idea because how are you going to learn? Okay. How do you learn to do better? And maybe what wasn't a great idea if you get rid of everything in the past? Well, never forget, right? Isn't that what we're supposed to do? We're not supposed to forget.
No, there's no question. So just tell me, what is the— what did you learn in the McNeil story that we may not know?
Well, I mean, it's pretty obvious that it's an activist contingent at the New York Times who has either got, you know, upper management shaking in their boots or agrees with them. You've got Dean Baquet, who's the, you know, he's the executive editor who at one point said intent doesn't matter. Can you imagine being a newspaper person?
Well, Bret Stephens wrote a great piece in the New York Times on this notion of intent doesn't matter and how this ends the human race. I mean, we become automatons. It doesn't matter if somebody says, I hate the word, and says it versus this is what I use when I speak about black people. The intent doesn't matter.
Well, you certainly can't run a newspaper that way. You certainly can't be a storyteller that way. You certainly can't be a lawyer that way. And, you know, that they backed off of that a couple of days later saying, of course, intent matters. But, you know, people, you know, people right now want to be upset. They're inflamed and they're poised to be upset.
Boy, do you know that. All right. You are special. See her video at PragerU, and her articles are up at DennisPrager.com. Thank you.
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