Panic and cowardice at 30 Rock
This is the story of a letter written by a peacock, who was once proud. It is now abused by the owners of a new zoo that have drooped its tail and dulled its plume. Known once for integrity, the bird is now riddled with a necrotizing cancer, which has sentenced it to a slow, miserable, degrading and public decomposition in front of the glazed eyes of the last customers who stare at the peacock, and wonder why.
How did the peacock lose its feathers and write this letter, which would have made all of the other peacocks that came before so very, very sad?
Dear Comcast NBCUniversal Team,
The tragic loss of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father, husband, and advocate for open debate, whose faith was important to him, reminds us of the fragility of life and the urgent need for unity in our nation. Our hearts are heavy, as his passing leaves a grieving family and a country grappling with division. There is no place for violence or hate in our society.
You may have seen that MSNBC recently ended its association with a contributor who made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event. That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions. We should be able to disagree, robustly and passionately, but, ultimately, with respect. We need to do better.
Charlie Kirk believed that “when people stop talking, really bad stuff starts.” Regardless of whether you agreed with his political views, his words and actions underscore the urgency to maintain a respectful exchange of ideas – a principle we must champion. We believe in the power of communication to bring us together. Today, that belief feels more vital than ever. Something essential has fractured in our public discourse, and as a company that values the power of information, we have a responsibility to help mend it.
As employees, we ask you to embody our values in your work and communities. We should engage with respect, listen, and treat people with kindness.
I want to tell you how that letter came to be.
When something so shallow and vapid rises high in the sky we must ask why, and how it rose so high, so fast when all that was required was for a resolve to see what was real, and say it was true.
Saying out loud what is true and real is something that cannot be compromised under threat, or otherwise. The knee once bended cannot be easily straightened.
I want to let you know about the committee that wrote the letter, and the cowards that signed it.
You should know about the panic that produced the letter, and the fear that drove the panic. This is what Matthew Dowd, who was fired from MSNBC, said:
He was constantly pushing this sort of hate speech aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to: Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. … You can’t say these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place.
What Dowd said was true, and is consistent with preeminent Holocaust memorial institutions and the #ItStartedWithWords educational campaign, who have stated the obvious, like this:
The building blocks upon which we strive to reconstruct and understand the historical past, including the Holocaust, are primarily words; words supplemented with personal images and artifacts, which, in turn, we explain with words.
It was with words – and images – that the Nazis and their adherents articulated their extreme antisemitic hatred and fanned its flames. With words they determined all Jews to be their archenemies and blamed them for all of the ills of society as they perceived them to be. Undoubtedly, without such hateful words, the brutal and murderous actions would not have followed; furthermore, it was with words that they justified perpetrating the crime of the Holocaust. [Continue reading]
Dr. Robert Rozett, Senior Historian, International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem
Once upon a time, I was the vice chairman of the world’s largest public relations firm, and I know a thing or two about how letters like the one this story is about come to life.
Emails were firing back and forth between Comcast/NBCUniversal/MSNBC executives and their PR teams about the raging extremist reaction to the murder of a racial supremacist and demagogue, who debased the public discourse with conspiracies, bigotry and sophistry at the expense of debate, discourse and reason.
The emails would undoubtedly have shown panic and incoherence by the leadership of Comcast, a $123 billion company. There were no adults in the room to comprehend the moment and understand what was happening. The moral failure at Comcast was absolute, and it was profound.
What Charlie Kirk excelled at was propaganda and cynicism — not reasoned debate. He was a performance artist, skilled at the art of humiliation and debasement who punched down, not up.
He didn’t do it “the right way,” as Ezra Klein of The New York Times asserted.
He did it the wrong way. Cases in point:
If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ’Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’
Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You're not in charge.
Case closed.
He served an appalling political movement, and was an apologist for political violence. He was a denier about the outcomes of legitimate elections, which lit the fuse for the violence that has metastasized and grown ever since political extremists tried to overthrow the 2020 election during a violent coup. It is not only now denied, but celebrated by the pardoned criminals Trump incited to attack the Capitol.
Charlie Kirk sought to tear down the American republic, and replace a rule of law with the rule of men who get to exercise arbitrary power as they see fit.
Many of them claim God’s mandate to rule over the United States. Many of them, like Pete Hegseth’s pastor, are twisted zealots and political extremists who advance a sick dogma that is oppressive, evil and something advocated by Charlie Kirk during his lifetime.
Here is Pastor Doug Wilson talking about women:
My objection to Charlie Kirk and his ministry was not that it was hateful, divisive and un-American — which it was, and I deplore — but that Charlie Kirk wanted to eliminate your ability to choose how to live.
He wanted to impose his derangements on you. His cleverness at packaging racism to ignorant young people isn’t something to be cheered, celebrated, or heralded. It is something to be debated, challenged and disdained.
It should never be celebrated, and it should never be shaded as less than what it is. It is a throwback philosophy that disdains freedom, liberty and civil rights.
I will denounce this evil for as long as I breathe.
Should this inconvenient truth not be spoken out loud?
Comcast (CMCSA) has no values, no soul, and no commitment to the United States of America.
Comcast executives owe you nothing, and they see it that way too. What they care about is the bottom line.
NBC News, once the home of Tom Brokaw, fired a truth teller, and apologized to raging fascists in an hour of national crisis because the leadership of the network was terrified, flinched and bowed to an online mob, breaking glass like their cousins from 90 years ago.
During this online terror feckless leaders at a fatuous table convened a spineless group of bullshitters and moralizing preeners to write a self-serving indictment of reality to be approved by a kangaroo jury of cowards.
Together, they made the collective judgement that the right thing to do was indict the truth for the crime of hitting the mark, and releasing a spigot of crocodile tears from violent men and women who witnessed a murder and seized an opportunity to claim any person who opposes their extremism is a terrorist and criminal — a co-conspirator in not just murder, but an unpardonable political crime.
MAGA has reared its head like a cobra aiming to strike at freedom. It has declared that opposing Trump is terrorism, and any institution that tolerates terrorism are terrorists, and any thought otherwise is evidence of terrorism.
The logic of a Nazi should be appreciated when Nazis are being appeased in the United States, and fascists in the White House are inciting violence and stoking racial hatred using the theories of the Nazis.
Opposing Donald Trump and his authoritarian inanities are an urgent moral necessity. There are things that need saying, and they must be said.
I do my utmost to say them with integrity and conviction. I will debate this position anywhere, anytime, any place, and say things that need to be said.
Here is reality, my friends. Any crime will do when it comes to matching 100 million terrorists with their waiting prisons.
We are all terrorists now — at least according to the people calling for civil war, mass arrests, and the destruction of civil liberties and civil rights in this country:
The firing of Mathew Dowd should be understood as part of a consistent pattern of audience abuse through acts of contempt — big and small — by indifferent executives who are proof of the ‘Peter Principle,’ and evidence that, while cream does float to the top, so too does a lot of other yucky things, like sewage.
The record clearly shows that Comcast executives have no problem with Joe Scarborough lying into the camera and saying this:
Epic gaslighting does not meet the standard to remind Comcast’s anchors, producers, and news teams that they “should engage with respect, listen, and treat people with kindness.”
Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, was paid $33.9 million last year.
He is no dummy.
After the 2024 Trump victory, faster than Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski could race to the Palm Beach Berghof to grovel for the favor of the man they had repeatedly called “Hitler” on MSNBC, Brian Roberts announced the spin-off of the liberal network, valued at $7 billion from the parent company. He didn’t want the parent to be accused of having a disloyal child who is not nice to Trump, which is bad for business.
Comcast, like all cable companies, operates under significant government regulations. It jettisoned MSNBC because telling the truth about Trump is an enormous risk for any person, corporation or news reporter in 2025.
Stephen Miller, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem — and maybe Palantir too — are watching.
Only the most idiotized amongst us were unable to see the clear meaning of this picture and its repetitive recasting and re-orchestration:
The richest and most powerful technology executives in the history of the world have yoked themselves to the American state and the leader of a political faction out of fear and intimidation.
They have surrendered themselves and their companies to the MAGA mob.
Here is how Brian Roberts, Comcast president Mike Cavanagh and Mark Lazarus, who is CEO of Versant, the spinoff company that will include MSNBC, see the world: they see it through the mirror of their self-interest and pay check.
None of them stand for anything — and never will — beyond their ambitions and desires for bigger bonuses.
More, more, more is their creed, ethos and identity.
They are hollow men and women (including Rebecca Kutler, president of MSNBC), who stand for nothing, and believe in less. They are flinchers, cowards and ludicrously smug high priests of a deep delusion that they have credibility, integrity or standing to make judgements about anything, anywhere in America.
Their false pieties and committee-written corporate pablum is as empty as Joe Scarborough’s most recent absurdism that Trump “has the cards” after the Anchorage summit between Trump and Putin.
Nothing is on the level.
Roberts, Cavanagh and Lazarus are three fools who tragically run an American news organization in a moment during which fascists are consolidating power, masked men are kidnapping gardeners off the street, the president is calling opponents terrorists, the military is being deployed to American cities to crush non-existent rebellions, universities are being intimidated, news rooms are being threatened, and civil rights are being obliterated by illegal decrees and lawless Supreme Court decisions.
Comcast’s top executives and the new honcho of what will be MS NOW signed an extraordinary letter to their employees that set a new bar for Trump era fecklessness, appeasement and moral cowardice in an American newsroom. This is no small feat.
I will not be forced to kneel by empty corporate moralists who fancy themselves as decency police when they have become vessels for an indecency that is known and rising that they see clearly but fear immensely.
I’ve often wondered why the United States is heading toward a society that subjugates women. That pastor and the former Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina both said the 19th Amendment was a mistake.
In Arizona, a woman running for State Senate said that if we can take away the female vote, it will end blue states. These statements make me wonder why, and another tragic aspect is that there are many women who support such sentiments.
Marsha Blackburn won the female vote in Tennessee by 60 percent even though she opposes equal pay for women. We live in a bizarre country.
Brian Kilmeade announced on Fox yesterday that homeless people should be executed, so need to make sure he’s fired as well. Those camps are not just for immigration purposes.