Opinion

Donald Trump Jr: The Media Was Complicit In A Brutal Assault On An Innocent Journalist

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No responsible journalist would support a domestic terrorist organization that assaults the members of the press, yet here we are again with another clear example of the liberal media’s complicity in Antifa violence.

Last week, a group of Antifa thugs brutally attacked Quillette editor Andy Ngo in Portland, Oregon. They left the gay, 5-foot-5-inch Asian American journalist with a brain hemorrhage that required hospitalization. Ngo wasn’t the only victim of Antifa violence that day, but the attack against him was particularly appalling because he was clearly targeted for his work as a journalGnist who has covered Antifa in his published work.

One would expect the victim’s professional peers to promptly come to his defense. To their credit, a few journalists from the mainstream media did acknowledge Antifa’s long-running, deliberate practice of assaulting journalists who threaten to expose them.

But most members of the establishment media, many of them recently exposed as de facto pro-Antifa activists in a report by one of Ngo’s colleagues, decidedly did not speak out against this criminal attack that was caught on film in broad daylight.

Instead, many of the people who consider themselves vocal defenders of “journalistic freedom” remained silent, or even disgustingly implied that Ngo got exactly what he deserved for daring to expose the truth about Antifa’s acts of political violence.

One HuffPo writer, for instance, has made a career out of working closely with Antifa members to dox and harass people they believe are “fascists” under the guise of “journalism.” Perhaps still annoyed after Quillette revealed his affiliation with Antifa “contacts,” he leaped onto Twitter to justify Ngo’s beating, calling him a “fascist enabler” and a “giant f***ing snowflake” for daring to complain about a cement-laced milkshake being thrown at his head.

A staff writer at Slate went even further, arguing that Ngo’s work exposing hate crime hoaxes such as Jussie Smollett’s “MAGA Country” farce makes him worse than the masked thugs who mercilessly punched him in the face so hard that his brain started bleeding. According to Slate, words — especially true words that hurt his left-wing causes — create an “atmosphere of violence.” In the value system of today’s left-wing “journalists,” that’s apparently worse than actual violence.

Another anti-Trump columnist, meanwhile, asserted that Ngo was attacked “not because of his race or sexual orientation, but because he’s a Muslim hating fascist who panders to and promotes white supremacists.” Antifa members, according to Werleman, are just like American soldiers in WWII, so their violence is comparably justified.

It wasn’t just knee-jerk reactions, either. Journalists and left-wing trolls continued to mock Ngo for days after the attack, making it clear that they don’t think Ngo deserves any sympathy because they disagree with his political views.

Sadly, the liberal media’s outrageous reaction to Ngo’s assault wasn’t surprising. The goal of these people — which they share with Antifa — is to deplatform, intimidate, and banish anyone who opposes their agenda from the public sphere, and many of them seem to consider bloody, physical assaults fair game. In their view, anyone associated with Breitbart, Fox News, Quillette, or other non-leftist publications is the enemy.

You would think that a news industry monitor like the Columbia Journalism Review, which is considered the ultimate authority on journalistic ethics throughout the establishment media writ large, would stand stalwartly against support from the ranks of journalists who have justified and enabled Antifa’s acts of violence in the past, but it did not. Instead of expressing concern when Ngo’s colleagues revealed the many bothersome links between progressive journalists and Antifa shortly before the attack against Ngo, CJR published an all-out hit piece against the author.

In response to the attack on Ngo, an editor for the far-left Media Matters for America, initially made fun of Ngo for tweeting a picture of his damaged backpack, noting that it “looks like you were attacked by a small family of pigeons.” And while she ultimately deleted the tweet and apologized to Ngo after viewing the full video, her tweet showed that the liberal media’s first reaction to leftwing violence being perpetrated against a conservative is to mock the victim and celebrate the attackers.

But the mockery, denials, and complicity always flow in one direction. The liberal media routinely demonize Trump supporters, and they excuse violence and harassment against conservatives.

When radical liberal activists in Washington, D.C. aggressively confronted students from Covington Catholic High School, the media instantly manufactured a fake narrative of the events that falsely portrayed the students — who simply stood their ground when they were approached by protesters — as aggressors.

The Ngo affair is simply the latest incident in a game the liberal press have been playing for the last two-and-a-half years or more. They relentlessly attack my father for his attitude toward the media, suggesting that his accurate references to some biased reporters and media outlets as the enemy of the people puts reporters at risk. When a conservative journalist actually gets assaulted by a mob of vicious thugs, though, they desperately attempt to justify and downplay the violence against him.

Ngo did not “ask” to be attacked by a group of domestic terrorists when he reported on a political protest in Portland. Of course, as revealing as the original attack on Ngo is the hypocrisy of the mainstream media in its coverage of this act of pure evil and hatred. In Ngo’s own words, the denial and outright victim-blaming by the media in response to the attack against him proved that he was clearly “not the right type of victim” in their eyes.

All Americans should be outraged by Antifa’s wanton violence against conservatives as reflected in this latest bloody incident purposely targeting a journalist, but none more so than the liberal “journalists” who have been shamelessly complicit in promoting and defending that same violence throughout Antifa’s existence.

Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) is executive vice president of The Trump Organization.


The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.