By Tobias Hoonhout
Thursday, September 03, 2020
After months of daily unrest and violent crime surges in
major American cities, some media figures finally felt compelled to ditch the
“mostly peaceful” canard and discuss the violence — only to pin the blame on
nebulous actors such as Russia and white supremacists.
Cities such as Portland, Ore., which has
seen a spike in shootings and an unrelenting wave of arson and vandalism, and
Kenosha, Wis., which suffered
nearly $2 million in riot damage last week, have borne the consequences of
daily protests transforming into nightly chaos. But rather than reporting on
the groups and actors we know to be behind the surge in lawlessness, pundits
are choosing to push their own recycled conspiracies.
Take MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, who warned — “without
evidence,” as the pundit class has become so fond of saying — that the unrest
was being “perpetrated” by Trump supporters and “white nationalist mobs.”
“The ‘riots’ are not Black Lives Matter marches gone
wrong. Armed white nationalists are mobbing these cities to take advantage of
protests and scare fellow white people into quietly siding with them. It’s an
old, tried and true strategy: using fear & anti-blackness for politics,”
Reid tweeted.
Reid’s diagnosis ignores that leftist agitators had been
torching and vandalizing businesses and assaulting people at random for
months in Portland before Trump supporters showed up in any significant
number. She also has the cause and effect exactly backwards in the most recent
instance of political violence, the one she was ostensibly referring to, in
which a Trump supporter was shot and killed on Saturday by a suspect who has
publicly declared his allegiance to Antifa and who has the balled fist of the
Black Power movement tattooed on his neck.
Rather than accept and report on the fact that there is a
growing contingent of black-bloc anarchists intent on tearing up American
cities, CNN’s chief political correspondent, Dana Bash, went looking for a
familiar — yet conveniently distant — culprit.
Bash asked Adam Schiff — the same Adam Schiff who
breathlessly claimed for more than a year that he had seen “evidence” of
Trump-Russia collusion, even after closed-door hearings found none — whether
Russia “is trying to fuel some of the civil unrest.” The California congressman
did not bat an eye: “We have to worry about their aggravating these tensions in
our cities,” he stated. While Russia is undoubtedly trying to help along the
self-destructive elements now ascendant on the American left, it isn’t Russian
meme-makers who are burning down city blocks.
The obscurantism isn’t confined to talking heads and
detached national politicians, either. In May, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey
blamed “white supremacists, members of organized crime, out-of-state
instigators, and possibly even foreign actors” for the violence in his city,
despite arrest records indicating
his claims were baseless.
Many have pointed to Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old
who is charged with murder for killing two men in Kenosha, as a totem of white
supremacy, and proof that President Trump is baiting his supporters into a
“race war.” According to these analysts, Rittenhouse was the kind of white
supremacist who kills white people hours after showing up to a demonstration
with the express
purpose of providing medical care to injured BLM protesters.
And for every Kyle Rittenhouse, there are dozens of
far-left activists and provocateurs — many of whom have lengthy criminal
records — who have been arrested for instigating chaos, as journalists such as
Andy Ngo have meticulously catalogued. Even as the New York Times attempted
to explain away the violence as the inevitable result of “right-wing
activists . . . bent on countering the racial justice protests with an opposing
vision of America,” it quoted a Portland activist “who helps organize security”
for Black Lives Matter protests and carries a baton and a Taser.
The tactics the BLM enforcer discusses mirror those
discussed on Telegram — an anonymous messaging app used to orchestrate protests
— and anarchist websites such as CrimetheInc, which provides anonymous
first-person accounts of riots, illustrating how many of the “protesters”
actively seek conflict with police. Diagrams shared on far-left Telegram
channels and reviewed by National Review instruct the woke how to
construct “shield wall formations” and counsel them to consult “gear
checklists,” which include weapons and defensive combat equipment, before
heading out to the day’s “mostly peaceful” protest. The diagrams also include
descriptions of various “protest roles” such as “range soldiers,” whose
responsibility it is to throw projectiles at police, and “fire mages,” who set
fire to objects and launch flaming projectiles.
“There is room for chanting and dancing and joyful noises
and there is also room for rage. We make that space for each other,” one woman
told the Times in July, before the alleged appearance of the lunatic
white supremacists who have supposedly disrupted the formerly peaceful
protests. “I don’t consider property destruction violence,” another added.
“Violence is when you attack a person or another living, breathing creature on
this planet. Windows don’t cry and they can’t die.”
Not content to attribute the recent wave of political
violence to nefarious foreigners or white supremacists, some have continued to
argue it doesn’t exist or has been blown out of proportion. Former FBI agent
and current CNN correspondent Josh Campbell falls into the former camp,
tweeting a picture of an idyllic Portland park during his lunch hour on Tuesday
as proof that “the city is not under siege and buildings are not burning to the
ground.” He made no mention of the situation the night before, which police declared
a riot after activists broke windows and attempted to start a fire in a store
on the ground floor of the condominium building of Democratic mayor Ted
Wheeler.
Later in the day, Campbell conceded that “there is nightly violence,” only to argue that “neither local nor federal leaders seem to have a clue how to stop it.”
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