You can draw a direct line between the media irrecoverably soiling themselves on the fake “Palestinian hospital bombing” story and an op-ed published on Thursday in which the author gleefully predicted that someone, somewhere, will go on a violent rampage in the name of Donald Trump.
The media absolutely adore violence when they can link it to someone or something that they hate. That anyone might die because of it is neither here nor there.
The Times must have decided it still has some dignity it would like to shed, so the paper ran the piece by Jeffrey Toobin that all but encouraged some lunatic to shoot one of the judges overseeing Trump’s criminal cases. “The day is fast approaching when someone picks up a gun or builds a bomb and then seeks to follow through on Mr. Trump’s words,” wrote Toobin under the discreet headline, “Donald Trump is going to get someone killed.”
And how giddy Toobin will be should that day come. It will make for a head rush that rivals any one of his slippery work-from-home Zoom calls.
“Follow through on Trump’s words,” you say?! Sounds terrible! What was it that he said?!
In the op-ed, Toobin did what all the dishonest journalists (excuse the redundancy) have been doing since 2015: He lied about a bunch of things that are easily verifiable. Namely, things Trump said in public.
Look at this paragraph:
Mr. Trump has always employed invective as a political tool, but as his days of courtroom reckoning have arrived, his rhetoric has grown more menacing. He’s suggested that Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could have been executed; that shoplifters should be shot; that the judge’s clerk in the civil case against him is Sen. Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend; and that “you ought to go after” the state attorney general who is prosecuting him. In language evoking Nazi eugenics, he has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”
The only one of these references I didn’t know about, and therefore wasn’t sure of (I like to check things before being sure, almost like a real journalist), was the “You ought to go after” quote.
Toobin’s suggestion is that the former president was egging his supporters to either harass or even assault one of the 50 million Democrat prosecutors charging him with crimes. Naturally, that’s not what happened.
What happened is that ahead of a legal hearing in New York earlier this month, Trump approached a gathering of cameras and reporters inside the courthouse to make some comments. He complained about the charges and said the prosecutor was unfair. “This is a disgrace,” he said. “And you ought to go after this attorney general because she’s turning off everybody from coming in. You know, I don’t know— if you take a look at the outflow of business. Businesses are fleeing New York because of horrible, horrible attorneys general and judges like we have.”
In short, Trump told reporters to scrutinize the prosecutor on his case, which involves a ridiculous set of victimless fraud allegations. (Trump might have overstated the value of his assets to get bigger loans with lower interest rates. I’m sure the creditors will never have another peaceful night’s sleep.)
That, according to Lubin’ Toobin, is just the kind of thing some nut needs to hear before committing murder. And he would surely lament the tragedy while closely monitoring royalties for the new book he’s promoting on “right-wing extremism.”
When the media hyped up the since proven false claim that Israel had blown up a hospital in Gaza, it was because they wanted it to be true. When Toobin says, without anything to substantiate it, that Trump’s speech is about to get someone killed, it’s because he wants it to be true.
