Conservative Daily Beast columnist Matt Lewis wrote Wednesday about the culture wars that surfaced sooner than the sub exploring the Titanic has.
In case you've been underwater, "the media is currently obsessed with a missing submersible carrying five people who paid a quarter of a million dollars per person to view remnants of the Titanic" in person, Lewis explained.
It has prompted questions about how the sub was approved to explore the Titanic when it's illegal and requires authorization from the U.S. government. There are also questions about the construction of the sub and a former employee that warned of safety issues.
Donald Trump Jr. took to Twitter on Wednesday to allege something more nefarious was afoot with the sub.
"Literally everything I’ve seen about this missing submarine is insane and sketchy AF… almost none of it makes any sense whatsoever. How long till we find other external factors making it even more so???" the younger Trump tweeted before turning to COVID conspiracies.
"Love the lefties screaming about conspiracies when it seems virtually all of the supposed 'conspiracy theories' that we were told were nonsense (despite almost always being the most plausible answer) have been proven to be dead on. See Wuhan Lab Leak etc.," he later said.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk was infuriated with fact-checking site Snopes, which reported that OceanGate, which was overseeing the expedition, used Starlink for communications. Starlink is a subsidiary of SpaceX, which is run by Musk. It's true, but it leaves out a lot of information about the way that the sub was communicating with those at the surface. Musk was furious seeing the link. Rather than trying to correct the claim, he tweeted it was part of a government conspiracy psy-op.
Lewis pointed to those showing photos of the Titanic billionaires and a massive boat carrying hundreds of migrants off the coast of Greece.
"If you want to get meta, I am now proposing a third story: instead of tragedies being unifying events, as might be the case in a healthy society (the smartest brains in the world rallying to rescue Matt Damon in The Martian is pure fiction), they must now be filtered through the hierarchy of victimhood," said Lewis.
He suggested resisting prayers for those on both vessels and instead, "sending good vibes into the world that tragedy might be averted."
Then there's the idea that the sub went missing due to "woke politics." The OceanGate Titanic CEO once told an interviewer he didn't want to hire a bunch of "50-year-old white guys" to operate the subs, saying that they weren't "inspirational."
"The last time I heard a similar allegation was when the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed (once again, rich people being bailed out, so to speak), and some alleged that their policies regarding diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) were to blame," Lewis recalled.
All of the discussion made Lewis think about the O.J. Simpson murder trial or the non-stop CNN coverage of the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.
There are likely millions of other tragedies that happened over the years that were just as deserving or more of attention, but don't get the coverage.
"It’s fair to say that our news media is screwed up and that certain types of stories (fair or not) receive a disproportionate share of coverage. It’s also fair to say that arguably more deserving stories receive less coverage. It’s fine to lament this media landscape," he said.
