AP writer David Bauder: Yay for racist South African government, boo to Tucker Carlson's exposing it

It's a human truth so basic and widely understood that reiterating it shouldn't be necessary. Punishing individuals who have not themselves committed crimes, but share immutable characteristics with actual offenders, is wrong. It is wrong, logically, and it is wrong, morally.

Who doesn't grasp that?

David Bauder is an Associated Press television writer. In a recent AP article, he hurled brickbats at Fox News host Tucker Carlson for condemning presently looming South African government racist policies. 

"Carlson argued against a proposal that would allow the South African government to seize some white-owned agricultural land, part of an effort to address inequities left over from apartheid," wrote Bauder, as if such racist confiscatory assaults would be heroic.

A government taking land from people who had not stolen it, and giving it to people from whom it had not been stolen -- that's the left's beloved notion of 'restorative justice' based on group membership and not individual responsibility. 

The AP writer's attempt to justify race-based governmental policies as legitimate steps in redressing historical grievances does dirt to the equality faith.

It is not unthinkable that many persons who participated (as did I) in the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s and '90s feel they have a moral investment in current South African governmental affairs. After all, they helped bring down prior injustice and enabled today's leaders to assume standing. To a degree, they own this.

For that reason, perhaps, they refuse to criticize terrible contemporary policies, despite those being essentially identical to ones against which they previously rallied. 

In his initial segment on this, Carlson may have misstated a point or two. But that's a meager quibble. His presentation was an overwhelmingly sound statement of unvarying contempt for racism and vigorous belief in fair treatment for all under civilized societies' laws.

To Bauder's credit, he did include a couple of Carlson quotes. The FNC host delivered pithy truisms the AP writer should have learned from: 

"This is an appeal to universal principles that protect all racial groups that are true regardless of people's skin color. We don't mete out justice based on what people look like."

And:

"It's confusing to me why it's controversial to say that it's wrong to mete out punishment on the basis of ethnicity. It doesn't matter who it's happening to. It's just wrong. I don't know why many of our journalists defend that. It says a lot about them and it's upsetting."

This hideous embrace of racism-as-policy-justification is of a piece with the currently faddish philosophies that America is an illegitimate concept; white men are genetically evil; rights of the accused are as nothing when contrasted with the welfare of supposed victims (all of whom are to be uncritically believed, their accounts never tested by inquiry); disputatious voices are to quashed by any means necessary; and democracy is to be respected only when electoral outcomes benefit one's preferred lot.

Bauder revealed something very ugly about his thinking in the final paragraph. "Fox News Channel's prime-time audience is 91% white, according to the Nielsen company. It's 69% white at MSNBC, and 57% at CNN." 

Judging news outlets by their viewers' hues, and not by observable journalistic standards? 

To some, only skin color matters, whether in public policy or media analysis.