It’s stunning to watch journalists become so thoughtful, with a renewed view of the world and all its complexities, once they’re caught pushing a demonstrably fake story.
Regarding the infamous scene with the Covington Catholic High School students and the Native American man provocatively banging his drum in their faces, liberals in the media are doing the same thing they do when they immediately assume any act of violence must be linked to President Trump, Republicans, or the Right, only to find out that the perpetrator was either mentally ill, or worse, a Democrat.
As in those cases, journalists are now finding that there’s an equal amount to blame among everyone for the fiery havoc they themselves caused.
It was the media and the Twitter mob (almost exclusively a liberal phenomenon) that initially pushed the narrative that a bunch of white and privileged kids were attempting to intimidate a defenseless minority. This was clearly fake. Yet New York Times columnist Frank Bruni somehow finds equal fault in conservatives who are now pointing that out.
“Some conservatives are gleeful about how this went down,” he wrote Tuesday. “But isn’t their vengeful joy its own rushed celebration, its own self-serving simplification of a complex sequence of events?”
Why, no, Frank, it was neither “rushed” nor “self-serving” for anyone to identify the inaccuracy of the media/mob portrayal of events — and especially not a full day after they pushed the fake story line, ruining reputations and lives with their recklessness. Not only is it not rushed, but it can’t come soon enough — so many false and libelous stories have now circulated on social media thanks to his colleagues that half of Twitter seems to have chosen to believe the fake story over the video evidence.
Jonathan Capehart at the Washington Post offered what amounts to a parody in his column that posted last night. If his aim was to prove that big city liberals live in a bubble, incapable of understanding the life experiences of anyone outside of New York and Washington, he succeeded.
Capehart writes that the students and their chaperones, all of whom live in Kentucky, where the school is located, should have known better than to cross paths with fringe Black Israelite protesters who were first on location. But the kids had been told to converge on that spot. It was their meetup, and somehow it’s their fault that the kooks were there that day, to taunt them with a torrent of hate speech.
“If the ranting and raving Black Hebrew Israelites are the kind of folks who necessitate my crossing the street or altering my path before I make it into their line of sight, why would the Covington kids and their minders think it’s okay to engage crazy, hateful people raising hell in a national park?” wrote Capehart. “They should have ignored the Black Hebrew Israelites the way most everyone else does …”
The location of the incident with the Covington kids, by the way, was the Lincoln Memorial. That’s a place you can reasonably expect visitors to the city to show up — unlike, say, at a lecture by Jonathan Capehart on deductive reasoning.
Why would Capehart assume that anyone outside of Washington, D.C., would be familiar with the habits of a little-known black nationalist cult? In Kentucky, it’s possible that towns aren’t peppered with radicals shouting words like “faggot” and “n—-r” at children, as the Black Israelites were doing for long stretches on end. But it isn’t likely. And if Capehart admitted that much he wouldn’t be able to distribute the blame that the media and the mob deserve to carry all on their own.
This is another version of what the media did in 2017 after James Hodgkinson, a Democrat who hated Trump, shot up a baseball field of Republicans, critically injuring Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La. In the face of all evidence that Hodgkinson was a left-wing Democrat who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for the 2016 Democratic nomination, and that he was animated to go on a shooting rampage by his own political frustrations, New York Times political reporter Glenn Thrush looked to Trump to assign the blame.
“Any debate about civility in politics begins with Trump,” he said at the time on Twitter. “No one has degraded discourse more, while embracing the fringe.” Yet whatever “fringe” Trump appealed to, none of them have ever picked up a rifle to gun down multiple members of Congress. That was a Bernie Bro.
In an effort to even the score between the GOP and Democrats, the New York Times editorial board chalked the incident up to “vicious American politics” and repeated the false claim that “the link to political incitement was clear” between 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and the 2011 shooting of then-Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. (The paper later had to remove that part from its editorial, admitting nearly a decade after it happened that there was “no such link.”)
Hodgkinson’s Facebook page showed that he belonged to the groups “Terminate the Republican Party” and “The Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans.” One note on his Facebook said, “It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”
But a bemused editorial in the Washington Post asked, “Who knows what mixture of madness and circumstance causes someone to pick up a gun and go on a rampage?” Indeed, who knows?
The paper then helped spread responsibility for the tragedy, saying that it should “cause a gut check about what passes for political discourse in this country.”
Hodgkinson was a partisan Democrat. Before his shooting spree, he asked then-Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., and Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., as they left the field early, whether it was Republicans or Democrats practicing. He wanted to make sure he was attempting to murder the right people.
And yet a willfully-clueless Scott Pelley of the CBS “Evening News” ended one night’s news program decrying unspecified “leaders and political commentators who set an example” for having “led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric.”
When an outspoken Democratic voter opens fire on a group of Republicans practicing baseball, the media blame everyone. Likewise, when a group of high school kids are found out not to have been the instigators in a confrontation with an old man banging his drum in their faces, we should all sit back and reflect on what we’ve become.
Sorry, but no, we shouldn’t. We can justifiably call out who was responsible for this mess. They, the media and the Twitter Left, can sit there and take it, and the rest of us won’t take part in the misery they’ve spread.
