“All I really want in a journalist is for someone to tell me what went down in that place that I could not be because my wife was making me mow the lawn.”

I tweeted that remark. It proved popular. “Activism journalism” was under fire that day, and the remark fit in. Where did I first write it? Ah—it came from a passage in ‘Tom Irregardless and Me’ that I removed because it was too political. Laura is right when she says that “even among our friends, it's getting to be super hard these days to remain completely neutral—Satan is driving wedges into our brotherhood very effectively.”

The original context was that of some professor of journalism lambasting Charlie Rose because Charlie had interviewed Mitch McConnell without grilling him over the professor’s pet peeves. “Get off your rear end and go interview him yourself instead of lolling about cushy academia ‘teaching journalism!’” I wrote. “Who says it needs to be taught, anyway? All I really want in a journalist is for someone to tell me what went down in that place that I could not be because my wife was making me mow the lawn.”

I took the passage out of the book. The pithy remark about “telling me what went down in that place I could not be” could have remained, I suppose, but absent the bit about Mitch McConnell and Charlie Rose, there hardly seemed a point. It would have sounded like a complaint about my wife which she might come across one fine day and I, as a consequence, might find myself sleeping in the garage for a month. Why go there?

“Activation journalism” was getting people’s blood boiling the day I posted it the second time on Twitter. It started when Jonathan Key griped about how its become “difficult to impossible” to be editor because underlings feel free to “shame their bosses publicly” for engaging in “wrongthink.” Mr Fiend, using his most pristine Sunday language, shot back, “You all created this society. Your opinion pages have all fueled biased, idiotic thinking for years and years. Suck it up. It's what you wanted.” No sympathy from him—that’s for sure.

All the world is a struggle for whose ideas will prevail. Journalists have as much right to take part as anyone. Lord knows that I take part, spinning things the JW way. Put it on the Opinion page, and it is fine. The JW channel in itself is an opinion page and everyone understands that. It is the orchestrated, pre-planned onslaught of journalists to hijack the narrative that rankles.

The day before, Lancet had retracted its own study that said hydroxychloroquine was no good for Covid 19, and in fact was even dangerous. The reason they retracted it is that it was an study that had not been submitted to peer review. The reason it had not been submitted to peer review is that it would have failed—it was a very sloppy study, sabotaged in numerous ways. The reason it was taken up by the media anyway, despite being so sloppy, is that it discredited Trump, who first said he liked the stuff and later that he even took it. Everything is politicized today—everyone gets into the fray of battling over who will rule the world.

Hydroxychloroquine has been around forever, a mainstay of treatment for several ills. It would have been run off the road long ago were it so dangerous. It is extremely cheap—another reason to attack it from an entirely different quarter—Remdesivir, a competing treatment, costs $1000 per dose! Does the cheaper drug have side effects? Just listen to the side effects of drugs relentlessly hawked on TV today—it is enough to scare your socks off. Cardiologist Dr. William O’Neill, medical director at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, Michigan where they’re studying both remdesivir and hydroxychloroquine, said: “I've never seen science [so] politicized in 40 years of practice.”

I answered Laura when she called me out for going over the edge of neutrality—or at least appearing to, and then apologized, with: “I don’t mind a bit—you’re being critical, that is, not of Satan driving wedges. A brother should be challanged when he ventures over the edge....I just get tired at how many appear to take for granted that the media reports without bias, when nothing could be further from the truth. Studies do not suggest that there is any especial police racial bias in shootings. though media all but insinuates that the very purpose of police is to war against black people. The struggle for who will rule the world is reflected in almost every remark from anyone these days, and these guys are as fully involved, if not more so, as anyone else.”

If one was go ‘go biblical’ at this point, one would refer to the “unclean inspired expressions that looked like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the mouth of the wild beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet,” that serve to gather “the kings of the entire inhabited earth...to the war of the great day of God the Almighty.” (Revelation 16:13-14) Everyone has his own frog in the race.

You don’t even get a break from it at church—churches divide themselves along one side of human-rule or the other. Will it be ‘My country—right or wrong?’ rule? Or will it be human-rule by international body, such as the U.N? Either way, the ‘Christian’ expectation is for God to somehow bless this hash of human devising. Surely it isn’t his will for the earth to be carved up into 200 squabbling entities, but they carry on as though it is right as rain.

Very few see the frogs at work, as Jehovah’s Witnesses do. Very few point to the time when God will remove human rule of the earth and govern by means of his Kingdom. Very few have a clue as to what Jesus means when he says to God, “Let your kingdom come.” Very few realize that it is only then that “Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”