Reporter Lara Logan made an important point Tuesday morning on Fox & Friends First, saying it’s long past time to expose the “powerful political entities” behind antifa and other violent-protest activists.
The establishment media have largely ignored the radical, communist, and even domestic terrorist roots of antifa, Black Lives Matter, and some of the other violent protesters. While the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy has done yeoman’s work in reporting on the Leninist-terrorist roots of BLM’s lead organizers, the nation’s big dailies have mentioned only in passing the movement’s backgrounds and financing.
This lack of attention to, much less angst and anger about, protests causing hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage (not to mention injuries, hospital stays, and even deaths) stands in stark contrast to how so many news organizations had conniption fits trying to assign nefarious designs and secret Koch brothers funding to the entirely peaceful Tea Party movement a decade ago.
The evident hypocrisy is major journalistic malpractice.
Let’s start with Logan.
“There has been a very dishonest agenda that’s been pushed by civil society organizations, the political establishment on the Left, and journalists working hand-in-hand,” she said, “[namely] that antifa is a nonviolent organization, that even when they do use violence, it’s somehow justified because they’re fighting fascists.”
And she said, “There is Marxist literature and philosophy that goes back to the 1920s in this country talking about how to use race and sow division and divide people in order to destroy this country, and that’s exactly what’s happening right before our eyes.”
Logan is right. As the Washington Examiner’s Dunleavy reported, BLM was founded by three women who are avowed Marxists who cite as mentors and financial backers some noted communists and a domestic terrorist. Clearly, there is at least some central organizing involved in the violence, such as when police in Columbus, Ohio, interdicted a bus stockpiled with weapons. In Portland, where often-violent protests have continued for more than 100 days, police regularly confiscate body armor, stun guns, dangerous lasers, Molotov cocktails, and other injurious, possibly deadly paraphernalia.
Again and again, police in cities with violent protests report that large percentages, often majorities, of those arrested for mayhem are not locals but agitators from out of town.
Surely, this level of outside organization, especially of riots that leave some American cities in flames almost nightly, should merit big investigative stories from the major coastal dailies, right? After all, that was the standard set during the Tea Party heydays, when publication after publication tried to prove that the peaceful, grassroots movement known for politely cleaning its own trash was actually a threateningly nefarious, “astroturfed” plot by the libertarian Koch brothers.
Not only was the Koch’s involvement with the Tea Parties much more minimal than liberal news organs insisted, but there was nothing villainous about it or the Kochs themselves. Rather than being known for communism and domestic terrorism, such as BLM and antifa’s organizers, the Kochs were noted philanthropists who financed classic arts and cancer research through what even anti-Koch writers admitted were “spectacularly large donations.”
Instead of such investigations and aspersion-casting, the establishment media today can’t be bothered with investigative work, and they write sympathetically even about the violence. In the telling of the New York Times, it is only in response to harsh police tactics that protesters have resorted to more aggressive actions. Even those quoted who do question the riots do so not because of the riot victims, but because the violence is a “distraction” from the supposedly saintly protest goals.
This is sickening. What we see with regard to this insurrection isn’t journalism; it’s fellow-traveling with evil.
