“Protestors in California,” tweeted ABC News about an incident in Oakland, “set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station and assaulted officers, after a peaceful demonstration intensified.”
If you’d presented your ninth-grade teacher with that sentence in your weekly writing assignment, she might have taken out her red pen and asked you, “How does a peaceful demonstration intensify?”
This sentence, however, was written not by a ninth-grader but by an adult, a professional journalist working for one of the world’s major television news organizations. It was not an accident. As Modern Age Editor Daniel McCarthy noted, “George Orwell could not improve on this.”
Any “peaceful demonstration” capable of “intensifying” into setting fire to a courthouse, damaging a police station, and assaulting law enforcement personnel was never really “peaceful” in the first place.
As New Criterion editor Roger Kimball writes, “The overriding criterion of which narrative to plug is this: Which will do the most damage to Donald Trump and Republican prospects in the November election?”
The narrative that serves that purpose is that the demonstrations that broke out after the death on May 24 of George Floyd are peaceful and that the demands of many demonstrators to “defund” the police are a reasonable response with no downside risk. Video footage suggesting the contrary has appeared sparingly, if at all, on broadcast news, CNN, and MSNBC.
Demonstrations that have continued for more than 60 days in cities like Oakland, Portland, and Seattle are described as “largely peaceful” — which translated into English means “violent.”
Setting fires in federal buildings, shooting pellet guns, and aiming blinding lasers at law enforcement personnel are to be either ignored (as the Associated Press’s Mike Balsamo’s reports from Portland have been) or characterized as, in House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler’s words, “a myth.”
In that spirit, committee members questioning (and permitting few replies from) Attorney General William Barr declined his invitation to condemn violent attacks on federal courthouses and to endorse federal law enforcement attempts to defend them.
Major journalistic organizations seem uninterested as well in learning just who the mostly white and mask-clad violent protesters are and whether they are part of an organized antifa network. Some, such as MSNBC’s Joy Reid, are willing to take antifa’s anti-fascist label literally despite its use of tactics reminiscent of Benito Mussolini’s blackshirts and Adolf Hitler’s brownshirts.
It’s interesting as well that journalists sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement seem either puzzled by or blithely ignorant of the sharp rise in post-May 24 homicides in cities ranging from New York and Chicago to Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Denver, and Los Angeles. It’s the fastest rise in murder rates since the late 1960s, another era of urban riots and complaints (more justified then than now) about police conduct.
Democrats and journalists have struggled to explain the spike. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, fresh from Les Miserables, suspects fathers are stealing to feed their children. The New York Times indicts summer heat waves.
They resist the obvious explanation: Less policing plus lighter punishment and delegitimization of law enforcement yields more violent crime. Almost all the extra victims, including children, are minorities in underprivileged neighborhoods. Some black lives evidently don’t matter so much.
That’s not a story most journalists want to cover. Falling in the same category is the continued unraveling of the Russia-collusion hoax. The theory that President Trump was in cahoots with Russia was rendered “inoperative” (to borrow a word from the Watergate era) by Robert Mueller and his report last year.
Now comes information that Barack Obama and Joe Biden were kept aware of the FBI spying on Trump and his campaign, supposedly justified by the Clinton campaign-financed Steele memorandum. Now, it turns out that the supposed Russia expert Steele’s primary source was a D.C.-based bibulous operative connected with the Brookings Institution.
Thus, media outlets that could not produce enough Russia collusion stories suddenly have no interest in the subject now that their conspiracy theory has been debunked. They evidently have no interest in the Obama administration’s violation of the American norms of refraining from using legal and intelligence agencies against political opponents and of accepting election results.
That’s “willful blindness” and “deliberately ignoring the facts,” says law professor Jonathan Turley. In the process of exaggerating Trump’s departures from norms and ignoring those of Trump’s opponents, much of the media are doing a good job of tearing down American norms themselves. A case, perhaps, of a peaceful demonstration intensifying.
