When a burning cross was found at a Chicago park last week, the media and Democrats already apparently knew who was responsible.
“A large burning cross — a historic symbol of hate and intimidation against Black Americans — was discovered in a Chicago park where former President Barack Obama famously delivered his acceptance speech when he was elected the nation’s first Black president,” The Associated Press (AP) reported on June 10.
Given the framing, readers may have been under the impression that police were searching for a white supremacist, a racist, and, given how the left has broadly painted Republicans as both of those things, a Republican.
Gov. JB Pritzker said while speaking at Rainbow PUSH’s Coalition annual conference the very next day after the incident: “The fact that it even occurred at all speaks to what happens when the seeds of racism and fascism grow unchecked in our country.”
Given how Pritzker himself has compared Trump to the Nazi regime and Democrats writ large have accused Republicans (and Trump) of being fascists, it’s hard not to suspect that Pritzker was subliminally blaming Republicans.
Frank Chapman, a Chicago resident and executive director of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression “pointed to how people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were ultimately not punished. President Donald Trump pardoned, commuted prison sentences, or ordered the dismissal of cases for all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attack,” as described by NBC News.
“The same kind of people got the same white supremacist mentality as a cross-burning,” Chapman reportedly said. “So, they figured like they got a license now … with people pardoned and more or less shaking hands with the devil.”
Gina Miranda Samuels, faculty director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago, blamed the cross burning on Trump.
“I do think we’re living in a time when we have a president that stokes this kind of thing and invites this type of stuff,” she said. “People feel emboldened and are invited to see how far they can go.”
Before any facts were known, the assumption that the culprit must be associated with Trump or the right was publicly disseminated by the left.
It turns out that the man who is at least publicly claiming responsibility is Merlin Lu, a University of Illinois Chicago student who said he lit the cross to protest President Donald Trump.
The burning cross was found against a tree in Grant Park, with authorities immediately launching an investigation. Lu told NBC5 he “did know about this historical relevance beforehand, but I didn’t know the severity, how racially motivated it may seem from what I did. Cause my protest has nothing to do with race, nothing to do with gender.”
Police have not confirmed nor denied whether Lu is the suspect they have in custody.
In a separate video previously shared with NBC5, Lu said he was protesting Trump and didn’t “want to wait till his term ends … I want him gone right now.”
But instead of waiting for the investigation to complete — or (apparently) for the suspect himself to come forward — Democrats pounced on the incident to try and use it to smear Republicans as racist and evil.
Of course the facts got in the way of that narrative — much like they have in previous acts of Democrat violence or vandalism.
When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, several figures on the left tried to blame Republicans for the murder. Jimmy Kimmel said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them …”
Harvard law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe said on X: “Kirk’s apparent assassin seems to have been ultra-MAGA, exploding the GOP/MAGA attempt to pin the blame for this tragedy on liberals.”
Heather Cox Richardson, a leftist “historian” said in a post that “the alleged shooter was not someone on the left. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.”
Robinson, however, was reportedly in a relationship with a man who thought he was a woman and, according to prosecutors, Robinson’s mother “explained that over the last year or so, Robinson had become more political and had started to lean more to the left — becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.”
Messages purportedly between Robinson and his lover/roommate show Robinson saying he had “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
Robinson also engraved the bullets with slogans like “Hey Fascist! Catch!”
But the left immediately rushed to try and blame Republicans for Kirk’s murder in order to cover for the radicals that their own party has been breeding for years, for acknowledging that Kirk’s alleged murderer was a product of the left’s “fascist” discourse on Republicans would force them to confront the toxicity of their brand — something they’re unwilling to do.
The same knee-jerk reaction to blame Republicans for violence or “hate crimes” happened just days after Trump won the 2016 election. St. David’s Episcopal Church in Bean Blossom, Indiana was vandalized with a swastika, a message saying “Heil Trump,” and “fag church,” according to WKYC.
WKYC framed the incident as evidence that Trump’s election unleashed a wave of bigotry, noting that the “hate crime” came “days after students in vice president-elect Mike Pence’s hometown taunted other students by chanting ‘build that wall.'”
The article included comments from Rev. Kelsey Hutto, who (according to WKYC’s description) “said there is no doubt the atmosphere in the country has changed since President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate, Pence, were elected on Tuesday.”
The story made national headlines too, with Stephen Colbert including an image of one of the graffitied walls in his monologue.
But it turns out, the perpetrator wasn’t some right-wing MAGA nut.
According to investigators, the vandalism was actually committed by the church’s own gay organ player.
All too often, acts of left-wing violence and extremism are ignored because the left is obsessed with the rather non-existent threat of right-wing extremism so much so that it blinds their ability to see an increasingly radical left and as a result, (as is the case with Chicago), the knee jerk reaction from Democrats and the left is to blame Republicans.
But maybe — just maybe — it’s time for Democrats to instinctively blame their own side at this point.
