Vice pays the ultimate price for woke extremism
March 1, 2024
In the words of a former president, “Everything woke turns to s–t.” That certainly includes news media, with Vice Media joining the ranks of NowThis News and BuzzFeed News as outlets that have shuttered or slashed staff over the last year.
The company will no longer publish content on Vice.com, in addition to laying off “several hundred” employees.
Rather than celebrate their dismissals, let’s look at some of the articles that doubtlessly are to blame for Vice’s demise.
When an article demonized conservative white men as white nationalist, supremacist domestic terrorists, our response largely explained why the media industry is in free fall. It fails in the same ways that we said Vice did: “The once-edgy, countercultural outlet falls in lockstep with liberal mainstream media orthodoxies rather than asking tough questions and challenging the powers that be.”
And as we noted of a more recent Vice piece, its chosen faux-martyrs for Palestine got a glamorous puff piece from an establishment platform while AIM President Adam Guillette has gotten multiple attempts on his life through swatting calls. What’s more, Vice was recently partially owned by Disney of all companies. How’s that for being “anti-establishment”?
Without strong support from the establishment, Vice wouldn’t have been able to get away with an explicit call to violence, for example. It incited violent eco-terrorism to (checks notes) fight climate change.
“No new fossil fuel infrastructure can be created, and we need, as a society, to dismantle what we already have,” Vice wrote. “[I]n order to have the maximum impact, both nationally and internationally, protesters who are able need to consider property destruction as a tactic. In order to rebuild, some destruction of the old normal is necessary.”
Some destruction of the new normal was also apparently necessary for Vice. In the wake of the leak of the Supreme Court opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, the headline of a Vice piece warned that an arson attack on an abortion clinic “predicts our future.” The future after Roe may be violent, the piece said, while ignoring the dozens of crisis pregnancy centers nationwide that had been firebombed and vandalized shortly after the leak. By fearmongering about a single attack on an abortion clinic while not saying a word about pro-abortion violence, Vice condoned the latter.
In doing so, Vice more than lived up to its name, promoting what many would call sin, as it did throughout its 30 years of life. Now that its life has come to an end, the wise words of the apostle Paul serve as an apt epitaph: The wages of sin is death.