“He’s a fascist!” Those well-worn words are back as the Trump administration deals with the lawless lack of order plaguing the streets of America’s cities. The gaslighting has been truly phenomenal.
Rioters in Portland, for example, have been setting fires and causing havoc for nearly two months. Less than two weeks ago federal officials moved in. Somehow, throwing basic math out the window, our progressive media concluded that the feds caused the riots weeks before they even arrived.
A gander around the media reveals without much effort an insane amount of teeth gnashing about a president who is acting entirely within the law to protect federal property and officers. This effort would be entirely unnecessary if the local officials actually, you know, did their job and restored some semblance of order.
Let’s take have a look. Here is Lawrence Tribe:
Trump’s tactics conjure memories of Argentina in the 1970s or El Salvador in the 1980s, with “almost daily reports of kidnappings and killings carried out by what were chillingly described as ‘heavily armed men . . .” https://t.co/NFeejEfzOV
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) July 24, 2020
Daily kidnappings and killings? What on earth is this lunatic talking about? If he watched the widely available videos from Portland night in and night out what he would see is federal officers peacefully taking the fireworks, bricks and bottles fired at them and the lasers in their eyes from the “peaceful protestors.”
Now let’s have a look at the New Yorker which ran a piece laughably titled, “America is a Country Besieged By Its Own President.” Here’s a little sample, “Mercifully, Trump’s ‘law and order’ gambit hasn’t led to any fatalities yet, although Mayor Wheeler has warned, ‘My biggest fear is that somebody’s going to die.'”
Now, credit where credit is due, at least this hysterical read doesn’t lie about daily killings, but it does ignore that people have died during the riots, just not at the hands of police. They have died at the hands of the rioters.
The Boston Globe got in on the act with an article titled “Trump’s Portland Tactics are the Stuff we Decry in Other Countries.” Really? When have we ever decried a country stopping rioters from burning buildings? Is there even one example of this in the history of American journalism?
You know The Atlantic needed to weigh in. Anne Applebaum was game, with this gem of a sub-header. “The president is deploying the kind of performative authoritarianism that Vladimir Putin pioneered.” She writes, “Any rank amateur could have predicted that unprepared troops with guns would increase tension and prolong the crisis.”
Just a reminder, the “tension,” which is a nice way of saying arson, was going on well before the “troops” got there. Portland handled it by doing nothing. Perhaps Applebaum thinks that doing nothing would have eventually worked.
The paper of record in my childhood home played a hand in this ridiculous card game as The Philadelphia Inquirer ran Will Bunch’s column, “Trump’s made-for-TV fascism in Portland won’t get him reelected. It may get someone killed.”
Here’s a taste of this breathless master class in idiocy: “These hazy, tear-gas-soaked nights in the Pacific Northwest have been five years in the making — the inevitable climax of a storyline that began on a morning in June 2015, when Trump descended a gilded escalator to start building a movement of right-wing rabble with hate speech against Mexicans.” So it’s not just the federal officers that are the problem, or police brutality, its Trump’s very candidacy, I mean, why not just say it all started when Trump was born?
I won’t bore you with further examples but they are boundless. The fear mongering and lies are like a steady rain. Remember when we were told that these federal officers were not wearing badges and that was a lie? Remember when Susan Rice who might soon be running for Vice President promoted a false tweet suggesting these were mercenaries, not federal officers?
The Trump administration’s actions in Portland are a perfectly reasonable response to chaos in a city where local leadership refuses to lead. These are not secret police. Nobody is being “disappeared,” or “kidnapped.” What’s more, none of these very comfortable journalists are under even the slightest bit of threat for their absurd lies about the federal efforts. They fearfully claim that America is turning into Putin’s Russia, or East Germany, or Nazi Germany, without even thinking about the fact that in those places such journalism was dangerous, it could get you killed. Here it is about as dangerous as a newborn puppy.
None of these writers actually think that America is tumbling into fascism because it demonstrably isn’t. They just don’t like Donald Trump and don’t want him to be president. These writers who would never in a million years throw a Molotov cocktail at police to save America, but they give a pass to those who are because opposing Donald Trump and getting invited to progressive dinner parties matters more to them than cops being blinded or assaulted.
There is an all out war going on, but not in Portland, its going on in newsrooms across the country and it is a war on the truth. They are counting on the American people to be stupid enough to believe these lies. I am counting on the fact that they are wrong about that.
