Earlier this week, washed up Hollywood D-lister-turned-gay-rights-activist George Takei went on a vicious racist rant against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, calling him a “clown in black face.” Takei was regularly trotted out by numerous media outlets as a friendly, familiar, happy mascot for gay marriage in the U.S. But if you get your news from liberal websites like BuzzFeed, ThinkProgress, Huffington Post, or Talking Points Memo, you’d know nothing of Takei’s racist rant.
It’s kind of a big story, but you don’t need to take my word for it. On Twitter, for example, the story is trending. If you search for Takei’s name on Google, the rant is the first result supplied by Google News.
As of 4:15 p.m. today, however, BuzzFeed had published exactly 0 stories about Takei’s accusation of race treason against Clarence Thomas. That’s especially weird considering that BuzzFeed has published 50 stories about Takei, including breaking news items such as “George Takei Reads ’50 Shades Of Grey’” and “14 Movies Improved By George Takei.”
A search for “George Takei” on Huffington Post‘s website returns 2,280 results. Unfortunately, none of them is about how George Takei called the only black Supreme Court justice a race traitor.
ThinkProgress is no different. If you search that site for “George Takei” using Google, you’ll get 34 results. Not one of them mentions how George Takei called Clarence Thomas a “clown in black face.”
But what about Mother Jones? They’re usually pretty good about giving big stories that are regularly shared on Facebook and Twitter. And they also enjoy publishing stories mentioning George Takei: 11, to be exact. Alas, not one mentions his racist attack on Thomas.
As you might expect at this point, Talking Points Memo is no different. According to Google, they’ve posted 234 stories mentioning George Takei, but haven’t seen fit to publish anything about how he might be something of a gigantic racist.
The biggest shock of the day, though, is that the Vox piece on Takei’s rant is not riddled with egregious errors. That’s unusual for them. On the flip side, that’s probably only because Vox hasn’t published anything at all about Takei’s racist take on the news of the day. It’s not that they don’t like Takei — after all, Vox has published seven pages worth of individual stories about him. It just turns out that “When did George Takei become such a filthy racist?” is apparently not a question the smartest thinkers feel like answering.
For whatever reason, these sites don’t seem to want their readers to know what one of the primary cheerleaders of same-sex marriage has to say about minorities who disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell. If Takei were a conservative, a Republican, a Christian, or a defender of natural marriage, I have to assume his racist attack on a black man who wrote something he didn’t like would be front-page news. But it’s not. And the only surprising thing about that is that it’s not surprising at all.