With Portland and Seattle being inundated with waves of chaos and violence at the hands of extremist leftists Antifa and Black Lives Matter, the silence from the liberal media is deafening. Despite nightly clashes in both cities (and murders in Seattle’s CHOP zone), there was nary a word from the cable and broadcast networks. But this is by design. Seeing as how the media spent years covering up, downplaying and even normalizing their base’s radicalism and the resulting violence.
Sadly, such behavior was entirely predictable after the press spent the 2016 general election blatantly suggesting one of the candidates would be the new Adolf Hitler and his supporters are modern-day Klansmen. And thus, a movement to “resist” was born.
The violence that gripped Washington D.C. following President Trump’s inauguration was only the beginning. At the time, then-Washington Post national correspondent Wesley Lowery was one of the early journalists to run defense, comparing Antifa to “the Boston Tea Party.”
Following the August 2017 unrest in Charlottesville, the self-proclaimed political referees actively worked to nurse Antifa’s image. In August of 2017, NBC political director Chuck Todd treated MSNBC viewers to Antifa apologist Mark Bray, allowing Bray to romanticize the terrorist group’s violent history, ignore their ties to communism and promote violence as a legitimate form of political dissent.
And despite the fact that Bray was publicly disavowed by Dartmouth, where he was a lecturer at the time, Todd sullied the set of Meet the Press by inviting Bray on to debate Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Shockingly, Cohen was the voice of reason as he stood against Bray. The following day, Todd’s MTP Daily cautioned viewers of the “pitfalls of free speech.”
Around the same time, CNN’s late-night hosts Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon came out in support of Antifa. “There’s a lot of about what-aboutism and spin going on. And it’s kind of sickening to me,” Cuomo pontificated. “But I argue to you tonight, all punches are not equal morally.”
That’s right, CNN was telling viewers that the leftist domestic terrorist organization had morality in their side. It was an argument he would repeatedly fall back on; one time claiming they fought for a “true” and “good cause,” saying they must “fight fire with fire,” and comparing them to Allied forces landing on D-Day.
But CNN’s normalization of violence against their political opponents didn’t stop there.
In the spring of 2019, CNN’s United Shades of America and host Kamau Bell gave a nod to violence by downplaying their tactics and weapons. While speaking with an Antifa member who only went by the name Ariel, Bell let her claim the group only believed that “people deserve love.” And he sat in awe as she pulled out pink brass knuckles, a large knife, and wanted posters she made for a local ICE officer.
But as Black Lives Matter exploded onto the scene with nationwide protests, riots and looting, the media took the lessons they learned with Antifa and applied it to their new favorite group. In fact, in early June, Cuomo kicked off his show by demanding: “Show me where it says that protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful.”
When a combination of Antifa and BLM militantly seized a portion of Seattle and declared themselves the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, the broadcast networks initially didn’t find it newsworthy. They would eventually cover the occupation, but they used spin to downplay the group’s radical demands.
But as the body count started to rise, the networks largely covered up the killings until they were forced to report them when the city finally took back the area. Of course, they also ignored legitimate area businesses and residents suing the city for putting them in danger.
We’re more than halfway through July and we’ve already seen NBC hide a BLM mob beating multiple NYPD officers (including the chief of police) in the head with a weapon. And while the media clutched their pearls over federal agents arresting Antifa assailants in Portland, none of them cared to mention that the group had attacked agents with rocks, cans, shining powerful lasers into their eyes, launching fireworks at them, and using slingshots. One was arrested for trying to beat a U.S. marshal with a hammer.
By not critically covering the violence and not being honest about the perpetrators, the liberal media are enabling it to continue. They are so driven by the ends that they don’t care about the means. And their willingness to cover up this violence proves they are oriented toward victory for the radical left.
Nicholas Fondacaro is a news analyst for the Media Research Center