Numerous journalists are worried sick that President Donald Trump incited violence against them during his raucous rally in Phoenix last week.
The New York Times published an article reporting that Trump’s claim reporters are “sick people” shook the media.
The article noted several journalists who claimed the president was going to get them murdered due to his comments. The very apparent concern among journalists led Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to author a sanctimonious piece declaring, “We’re Journalists, Mr. Trump, Not the Enemy.”
With all the worry over Trump supporters coming to kill them, it may come as a surprise to the press that some of their colleagues were beaten and harassed over the weekend by the president’s most violent opponents.
At two different demonstrations in the California Bay Area, Antifa made sure that anyone who recorded their activities and looked like “Nazis” would face serious consequences.
On Saturday, a man simply recording a demonstration by leftists against a cancelled pro-Trump rally resulted in protesters surrounding him and forcibly taking his phone from him.
He had to plead he was just a reporter and that he was definitely not a Nazi in order to persuade organizers to try to retrieve his phone.
Worse things happened for a photographer at the Antifa riot in Berkeley the following day. As black-clad anarchists swarmed the city to attack anyone they thought might be a Trump supporter, they set their sights on a cameraman for the offense of taking their picture.
Antifa chased the man down and beat him bloody with clubs. Police eventually came to his aid and had to help him stand up and walk after the thrashing.
The two incidents both arose over the fact that the target of abuse was recording Antifa. That alone justified violence against both reporters.
This has unfortunately become a common affair at Antifa demonstrations. During the chaos in Charlottesville, Va., earlier this month, Antifa assaulted Taylor Lorenz, a reporter for The Hill, following the infamous car plowing that left one woman dead.
Lorenz filmed the terrible tragedy in her role as a journalist. That earned her an assault from a left-wing protester, who knocked her phone out of her hands and then punched her in the face.
The next day in Richmond, Va., a cameraman for a local news affiliate was beaten for the offense of filming an Antifa rally held in response to the violence in Charlottesville. He had to receive several staples to his head as a result of the beating.
The self-declared “anti-fascists” are openly in favor of violence and maintain a deliberately broad definition of who qualifies as a Nazi. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that they would attack journalists that they confuse for being white supremacists.
In the case of the photographer attacked in Richmond, Antifa defended their actions by claiming their victim charged at them with a camera and was white.
“Due to the intensity and context of this time people are very scared of white men running full speed at them with iPhones as this is the exact behavior of a white supremacist trying to out identify people of color and anti fascists in order to invoke fear,” read a post published by the local Antifa group responsible for the attack.
The group also claimed the man was drunk and essentially picked a fight. The anarchists also absurdly claimed his actions were akin to “perpetuating rape culture,” in addition to “purposefully incite[ing] anger.”
This ridiculous response shows that Antifa doesn’t care if it attacks innocent journalists and will deploy leftist gobbledygook to defend the beatings. Nowhere in that group’s response was there support for a journalist’s ability to do their job. The only concern was for the black-clad demonstrators’ ability to exert their power.
Antifa clearly don’t like being filmed and will attack journalists who don’t follow orders. In spite of the contempt they have for the profession, multiple media outlets have published paeans to the masked leftists in the wake of Charlottesville.
CNN infamously said the group tries to achieve peace through a violence — a line eerily similar to George Orwell’s 1984. The network even later scrubbed the mention of violence in the headline when it offended the anarchists. (RELATED: CNN Changes Headline After Antifa Complains)
Antifa aren’t stupid and have done a good job of downplaying their violence and who they target as a part of their strategy of appealing to mainstream liberals. For instance, in NBC News’ puff piece of the movement, Dartmouth professor Mark Bray — who wrote a book championing the cause of “anti-fascism” — dismissed any concerns about slippery slopes.
Bray’s argument for disproving slippery slopes: “I don’t know of any Democratic party events that have been ‘no platformed’ by anti-fascists.” Knowing liberal journalists political biases, the professor reassured his intended audience that Democrats don’t have to worry about coming under attack.
Curiously, he left out the many cases of journalists being attacked and his interviewer failed to specifically ask about that matter. Guess it might’ve changed the headline that strongly suggested Antifa violence is “ethical.”
For all the glowing press of Antifa and the lack of attention given towards their attacks on journalists, the positive feeling for the movement may be dissipating among the establishment Left. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi formally condemned the leftists by name in a statement Tuesday.
If they continue to assault reporters just doing their job, we can expect more denunciations from other pundits and politicians who previously compared the group to D-Day vets.
Until that occurs, it’s time for the press to stop wailing any time Trump criticizes them and focus instead on people who would murder them for holding an iPhone.
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