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Opinion

Media Manipulation

Gore Vidal once said, “”The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world.” I like that and believe if the press would report the truth, that would be the outcome.”

Sadly, though, the media in 2019 believes their job is to manipulate the minds of Americans and convince them that President Trump and his supporters are evil. Rob Gunther writes, “If you support Trump, you’re a racist. There’s really no way around it.” Matt Ford writes, “At this stage, to not object to the president outright is to be complicit in his racist presidency.” Goldie Taylor of The Daily Beast wrote, in an especially hate-drenched diatribe, “Trump is not a fine person. His words Sunday were not racially ‘charged,’ ‘fueled,’ or ‘tinged.’ They were unapologetically racist. And, if you support him, so are you.” It is this column that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) shared on her Twitter account.

I don’t remember the outcry about Rep. Omar calling Trump voters racist, do you? The mainstream media doesn’t care about being fair. Balance and honesty rarely see the light of day in most 2019 media centers. Consider the terrorist group, Antifa.

In August of 2018 Chris Cuomo of CNN argued Antifa protesters are wrong to hit people, police, and reporters, “but fighting hate is right” and in a clash between hate and those who oppose it, “those who oppose it are on the side of right.” Cuomo is defending Antifa and making the argument that they have some moral authority to oppose hate. Again, this is the terrorist group, Antifa. So, what are these misguided but morally right people doing?

Over the weekend, police killed an Antifa activist after he tried to assault an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Tacoma, Washington. Willem Van Spronsen, 69, was armed with a rifle and incendiary devices, though law enforcement is saying they haven’t pinned down a motive. Van Spronsen armed with a rifle and “incendiary devices”, set a car on fire and was shot and killed by police officers who were responding to the scene. He also attempted to light a propane tank on fire, which “could have resulted in the mass murder of staff and detainees housed at the facility had he been successful,” according to Shawn Fallah, head of the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility.

You didn’t hear much about this in the mainstream media either, did you? James P. Sutton, in National Review, notes, “This hardly registered in the national media. Granted, all the major outlets ran news stories — but there was no outcry of protest, no concern over political violence directed at government officials.”

There is a political double-standard at play. It has gone virtually unreported that Van Spronsen echoed Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s description of detention centers as “concentration camps” in a manifesto he published before the attack. Now, let’s be clear. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is not responsible for the attack. Having established that, though, look at media coverage of similar events. Not one news organization has connected, and most haven’t even mentioned, the connection between Van Spronsen and AOC. However, CNN ran multiple articles on its website suggesting that President Donald Trump’s rhetoric was responsible for the white supremacist terror attacks on the synagogue in Pittsburgh and the mosque in New Zealand.

The media’s double-standards are obvious and reprehensible. What I find even more galling and more apparent is the hate that they seem to have for the regular people who support the president. I believe the media elites (and the Democrats) believe they are smarter and better than us, regular folks. It also seems they despise you and me. Rush Limbaugh, as usual, is right. “Unity isn’t what this is about. And to me, it never has been. I’m not of the belief that getting along with these people is the route to the solution to our problems. Defeating them is.”

Bill Thomas

Bill Thomas lives in Washington, Missouri and is a professor at St. Louis Christian College. He's also on staff at First Christian Church in Washington, Missouri. He's authored two novellas, From the Ashes and The Sixty-First Minute published by White Feather Press of MI and three Bible studies, Surrounded by Grace, The Critical Questions and More and The Road to Victory published by CSS Publishing of OH.

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