They Aren't Alright

Erick Erickson on Aug 1, 2025

A few weeks ago, press outlets globally ran a horrific story about Israel shooting at starving Palestinians trying to get food. The story was not true. Before the press began retracting it, a man in Colorado attacked several Jews, killing, among others, a Holocaust survivor.

Earlier this week, the New York Times, on its front page, showed a malnourished toddler starved to death by Israel. The picture came with growing claims of genocide in Gaza. The Times was not alone in showing the picture of the dead toddler. Later, on its little-followed social media account for New York Times press releases, different from the Times's main Twitter account, the Times noted the toddler had a birth defect and other health problems and was not, in fact, starved to death by the Jews.

France, Britain and now Canada insist they will recognize a Palestinian state if Israel does not agree to a peace agreement that Hamas walked away from. Hamas, which murdered over one thousand Israelis, will be rewarded by left-wing Western governments for a successful public relations campaign, ignoring that Hamas started this fight and still has Israeli hostages.

The left has embraced a moral judgment that blames Israel for the deaths of Israelis and wildly claims a war is genocide when Hamas itself is blocking aid from the people of Gaza. The worse Hamas treats its own people and its Israeli hostages, the more the left blames Israel.

Concurrently, progressives are melting down over Sydney Sweeney posing in jeans for American Eagle Outfitters. Angry and affluent white female urban liberals (AWFULs) stormed onto LinkedIn and TikTok to denounce the ad campaign as Nazi-like, with Sweeney doing a word play from genes to jeans. Most Americans couldn't care less, but the white progressive women were outraged. The AWFUL outrage on TikTok inspired ludicrous cultural commentary from a lazy press corps that seeks clicks, not truth.

Prior to this outrage, the left had worked itself into a lather over an illegal alien in Los Angeles kidnapped in Los Angeles by federal agents and a man from Pennsylvania who ICE claimed died in their custody, but was actually in a hospital in Guatemala, deported by the government. Neither story was true, but the media ran both before correcting them.

All of these stories have a few common threads. The first is the American press corps manufacturing clicks for itself and outrage for its readers. With trust in the press collapsing, the press has embarked on the path of internet-assisted suicide. With a common desire to be first, not accurate, the press is continually seeding urban legends only to retract them later. They spend their energies fact checking President Donald Trump and not themselves.

Second, the progressive hive mind on TikTok is festering. After COVID-19, repeated studies showed white progressive women had the most mental health problems in the United States. Those women, on social media and in the newsrooms of America, are advancing lazy cultural critiques defined by their mental despair and animosities amplified by nuts online.

Lastly, the left has internalized its opposition as heroism and its opponents as enemies. In polite society, everyone should agree that Nazis are bad. Unfortunately, as the left valorizes its political fights, it sees Nazis everywhere. The Israelis, in their well-documented ancestral lands, are accused of colonizing a land from Arab migrants who attempted to colonize the area after the Romans purged the Jews. Sydney Sweeney is a Nazi for an ad campaign. Donald Trump is worse than a Nazi.

The desire to turn everyone into Nazis has allowed actual Nazi sympathizers to rear their heads as the term has lost its power and meaning. On the right, people like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are increasingly advancing Nazi sympathetic voices. On the left, progressives fester antisemitism and violence against Jews.

America is realigning less between the left and right now and more between normal and crazy. The press, captured by craziness, amplifies views and voices that will get more normal people killed unless the normal people, regardless of politics, stand together even in disagreement.

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To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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