Media Bias Maybe Not So Surprising . . . But Where Did Anti-Trump Street Mobs Come From?
By DEXTER DUGGAN
“Shock and awe” was war architect George W. Bush’s style of military assault against the Iraq dictatorship in 2003. His big blueprint ultimately failed, despite early overwhelming force. Manhattan billionaire developer Donald Trump opposed that war.
“Shock and awe” might also describe the fury and flailing fists against Republican Trump’s new steely high-rise presidency by leftists and their dominant media allies who also could be overplaying their scarred hands.
Anti-Trump rioters had their rehearsals in 2016. Now the curtain has gone up on the main performance.
Remember mobs that popped up last year against Trump’s presidential candidacy, trying to suppress his rallies from Chicago to California. This included rioting in the Windy City, getting rough in New Mexico and tough in Arizona, and beating and bloodying Trumpsters both north and south in the Golden State.
You may have spent your entire life without trying to burn up or break apart a police cruiser, but California’s unrestrained Trump haters, often some Latinos who didn’t seem fond of the United States, battered the law-enforcement cars.
Then the violent demonstrations quickly ceased, as if a spigot was turned, as if plot leaders figured out the violence wasn’t helping their cause.
But with Trump victoriously in the White House now, leftist mobs have re-emerged, demonstrating violently sometimes and vowing to remove the new president from office as soon as can be. Where might they have been lying low? More on that in a few moments.
When Trump in late January announced restrictions including a 90-day pause on entry from seven terrorist-linked countries in order to help protect the U.S., media sensationalists howled that he was banning Muslims from immigrating.
Even a slice of the judiciary pushing back against the president seemed to have overlooked the fact that there already have been Islamist attacks right on the U.S.’s insecure soil.
However, writer Timothy Carney at the conservative Washington Examiner was able to express this commonsense provision simply enough: “Places a 90-day moratorium on entry to the U.S. from the seven countries named in a 2015 law aimed at requiring stricter vetting for people entering from Iran or countries overrun by jihadist violence.”
And conservative radio talk hosts including Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity read from the U.S. Code to show plain justification for Trump’s order.
Dominant news media that snored in boredom during eight years of Democrat Barack Obama’s outrageous lies and lawbreaking suddenly boiled over every day with faked-up outrage over flakes of orange dandruff on Trump’s collar that no one else could even see.
The aim not only is to destroy Trump but also anyone aiding him.
When Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway lightheartedly said people should buy Ivanka Trump’s fashion products, after the president’s daughter’s goods were discriminated against by some department stores, Conway actually was pummeled by ethics complaints, which theoretically could lead to her being fired from government service.
Conway, smiling broadly, had replied to the Ivanka topic on the Fox & Friends television program by saying that people should “go buy Ivanka’s stuff” after the daughter was the victim of a possible politically motivated merchandising decision to take a swipe at her father. Conway didn’t stand to make a personal penny from her remarks, nor desired to punish anyone who didn’t follow her cheerful shopping ideas.
How different when it wasn’t Ivanka’s jackets or blouses going into the shopping bag, but powerful rifles for foreign criminals.
In 2012 the Republican-led U.S. House overwhelmingly and historically voted for contempt against Democrat Attorney General Eric Holder over a cover-up in the Obama administration’s deadly Operation Fast and Furious gun-running scandal. But Barack Obama meted Holder no punishment.
This had involved an Obama scheme to give dangerous Mexican gangs U.S. firearms as a way supposedly to prove new weapons restrictions were needed in the U.S. Month after month, the scandal generated little interest among dominant U.S. media, even though many dozens of innocent Mexicans were killed with the weapons.
On another border matter, Obama purported to have the power to rewrite immigration law by himself so as to benefit his Democratic Party, rather than winning congressional approval. Even though Obama previously said repeatedly he had no such authority, his back flip didn’t trouble these media much at all.
And — just one more example — what about Obama’s blatantly, repeatedly lying about the big advantages for Americans if Congress would approve his government medical program? Instead, Obamacare caused skyrocketing costs and declining benefits. Obama’s plan was a sham that would have put any big-business executive in federal prison for similarly deceiving hundreds of millions of consumers.
Key Obamacare planner Jonathan Gruber bragged about the deceptions used to push through Obamacare.
Meanwhile, there seemed no surer proof that the Communists no longer controlled modern-day Russia than liberal U.S. media flaying Moscow every day as a dangerous conspirator with Trump to destroy democracy and the law. If only the officially atheist Soviet Union still existed, how delighted these media would be with a U.S. president wanting better relations with the Kremlin.
Even Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, OFM Cap., noted in passing his surprise at the extent of media animosity to Trump. Chaput, certainly no cheerleader for Trump’s presidential campaign, told national talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt on February 13 that these media “seem to be in a greater spirit of despair and anxiety. It’s just amazing to me how hostile the press is to everything that the president does.”
Michael Wolff posted at Newsweek on February 14 that, according to the flagship New York Times’ view, “journalism should be anti-Trump.” In the Times’ eyes, Wolff said, “you are either for Trump — a moral no-man’s land — or you are against him. There is no journalism in between.”
Recall Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg writing indulgently during the presidential campaign about reporters believing that Trump was just too dangerous to be allowed to win the White House.
Such is the imperative for big media to destroy the new, non-liberal president quickly that the Wall Street Journal’s top editor, Gerard Baker, met with his reporters on February 13 to respond to newsroom complaints that Journal news coverage wasn’t being tough enough on Trump.
Imagine that. And try to imagine Times or venomously anti-Trump Washington Post reporters meeting to express contrition about being too tough on Trump. Well, that would be imagining the unimaginable about arrogant left-wing writers.
Now, add to the media assault the left-wing street mobs re-emerging to do battle.
Paul Sperry wrote at the New York Post on February 11 about Obama having “an army of agitators,” more than 30,000 of them, to fight Trump at every turn, through “a network of leftist nonprofits led by Organizing for Action” (OFA).
What better role for Obama than to return to his early identity as a “community organizer” skilled in applying radical leftist Saul Alinsky’s methods?
OFA is “gearing up for battle, with a growing war chest and more than 250 offices across the country,” Sperry wrote. He added:
“Far from sulking, OFA activists helped organize anti-Trump marches across U.S. cities, some of which turned into riots. After Trump issued a temporary ban on immigration from seven terror-prone Muslim nations, the demonstrators jammed airports, chanting, ‘No ban, no wall, sanctuary for all!’”
Maybe your own flight was disrupted by Obama’s foot soldiers.
Now think back to the radical Alinskyite Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Thriving on U.S. government funding, it had chapters across the U.S., but collapsed after conservative undercover filmmaker James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas exposed some of its shenanigans.
The Project Veritas website recalls that ACORN, “now defunct and disgraced . . . was a massive, unaccountable taxpayer-subsidized group that the Obama administration was using to conduct the Census, register voters, and sign people up for government programs. At its height, ACORN had over 500,000 members and more than 1,200 chapters in over 100 U.S. cities.”
O’Keefe and an actress, playing the roles of pimp and prostitute, visited multiple ACORN offices on both coasts, seeking advice on how to obtain a loan to start a brothel, the funds of which would be used for a political campaign, or other illegal activity.
The ACORN offices eagerly complied, with one worker exclaiming, “I have experience on how not to get caught!”
Before 2010 ended, with funding having disappeared, ACORN filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
But do the foot soldiers of powerful left-wing activist groups simply go away, or bide their time for another day? Like 2017 under a Trump White House.
Identity Theft
As left-wingers complained that Trump actually planned to carry through on deporting criminal aliens, the Pew Research Center posted an article on February 9, “20 metro areas are home to six in 10 unauthorized immigrants in U.S.”
Using what it said were 2014 estimates, Pew said, for instance, that 1,150,000 unauthorized entrants were in the greater New York area alone, 1 million were in the Los Angeles area, 575,000 in the Houston area, 425,000 in Chicago’s metropolitan area, 400,000 around Washington, D.C., 250,000 around Riverside, Calif., and 250,000 around the Phoenix metropolitan area.
Pew said that among the top 20 top metro areas, only one city for which data were available, Phoenix, had the majority of the illegal immigrants right within the city’s boundaries. “In the others, most of the unauthorized immigrants living in the metro area lived outside the borders of the largest city,” Pew said.
The Phoenix population was estimated at 1.54 million in 2014. If 140,000 of the Phoenix metropolitan area’s 250,000 total illegal aliens were within the city limits, that would mean nearly one of every 10 Phoenicians was an unauthorized immigrant.
When one of the 250,000 or so finally was deported for the crime of identity theft in early February from the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, the broadsheet-size Arizona Republic, the state’s largest daily, covered the entire top half of its front page below its nameplate with her photo and the all-caps headline “IMMIGRATION UPROAR.”
Left-wing newsrooms may have been roaring, but legal residents and citizens more likely were cheering Trump.
