Dear Ms. Richardson:
The steady stream of hate
directed at Donald Trump and his supporters on the pages of the Virginian Pilot
really has to be seen to be believed.
The idea that Republicans are Nazis from whom women, Blacks, LGBTQ or those-of-to-be-determined-sex
need to be protected is widespread on these pages. In this, the Virginian Pilot has a lot in
common with academia.
The paper reflects academia’s
profound shock of Hillary Clinton’s defeat last year, reflecting the profound
shock of many inside the media/campus bubble.
Academia offers “grief counseling” to students “traumatized” Trump’s
election. The Virginian Pilot offers
unlimited access to the “letters to the editor” department. At Virginia Tech the morning after the
election, officials sent an email to students “waking up with fear, anxiety,
concern, questions, and confusion among many other emotions,” directing them to
campus services offering “support.” The
Virginian Pilot assured them that no one they write about voted for Trump so
Trump can’t be a legitimate President.
Every day brings another story about a march, a demonstration, a riot
and a claim that Putin put him in office.
In Greenwich Village, a woman who
sounds exactly like any number of letter writers to the Virginian Pilot, let
loose an obscenity-filled tirade against the police officers who were
attempting to keep order outside New York University’s Kimmel Student Center,
where College Republicans were hosting a speech by comedian Gavin McInnes.
Screaming that President Trump’s supporters at the event were “Nazis,” the
woman unleashed more than a dozen obscenities in less than two minutes. “Why
are you here?” she screamed at the NYPD officers. “You’re not here to protect
these students from Nazis. No, you’re not! This is completely [bleeped] up. And
these students had to [bleeping] face them on their own. You should be ashamed
of yourselves! You should be standing up to those Nazis!” The woman was Professor Rebecca Goyette, an
adjunct professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Professor
Goyette last year staged an exhibit that included her fantasies of castrating
Donald Trump. You can see her “art”
here: (http://archive.is/yO3a9)
There’s a certain playbook that
Liberals follow: Nixon was Hitler, Goldwater was Hitler, Reagan was Hitler,
Bush was Hitler and how Trump is Hitler.
Of course conservatives have also worried about presidents who abused
their power. But calling Trump Hitler, or Mussolini, is now so common that it
simply means that the writer simply doesn’t like Trump and has lost the
intellectual battle. Name-calling is simply overdone and foolish, just as
accusations of racism have become devalued; people stop paying attention and
those who use these terms lose all credibility.
It’s really simple. If Trump is a Nazi, his supporters must be
Nazis. Someone voted for Trump? Nazi.
Someone voted against Hillary? Nazi. Someone doesn’t agree with same-sex
marriage? That was Barack Obama in 2008, so he’s a Nazi?
Polls show that over half of the
country supports Trump’s temporary ban on refugees, only 38% disapprove. An Emerson College poll found that the public
views the Trump administration as more truthful than the news media, with 48%
saying Trump is truthful, compared with only 39% who say the media are being
truthful.
Among Independents 62% say
they're not confident that the media will cover Trump fairly in the IBD/TIPP
poll, and fewer than 19% describe the news media as truthful in the Emerson
poll.
What's more, 59% of independents
— and 57% of those who are ideologically moderate — say Democrats should find
ways to work with Trump rather than try to obstruct him.
When Republicans lose elections
they grumble and write letters to the editor.
Before the election, Leftists said if Trump won, that there would be
violent mobs of hate; intolerant fascists would try to silence those with whom
they disagree. And they were right. Did they know that they were talking about
themselves?
How did we get to the point that
when Democrats lose they take to the streets and beat their opponents
bloody? Part of the problem is that the legacy
media provides cover for them; they are their publicity department. It whitewashes the violence and intimidation. Every riot is downgraded to a “demonstration”
which is always “mostly peaceful.” The
LA Times referred to the murder of five police officers as part of a peaceful
protest in which the chant of “hands up don’t shoot” was heard just before the
killing began. It was described by one participant
as “… the most peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration I'd been to.”
They said that if I voted for Trump,
that groups of people would be identified and persecuted. And again, they were
right. The press and the rest of the media identify anyone who supports the
current president as either an extremist or a bigot. Yet Trump won the Electoral College by 70
votes, which means his support is hardly extreme; in fact it’s mainstream. Look at a map of voting patterns. Democrats are concentrated in a few urban
islands while the rest of America is Trump country. Based on the narrative presented in the
Virginian Pilot you appear to believe that most of America is out-of-step with
America.
Day after day, week after week,
the Virginian Pilot encourages anti-Trump vitriol, hate and violence by its
editorial choices demonizing the President and his supporters, effectively
justifying the violence done to those supporters who dare to raise their
heads. Do you really want to be the
heirs of the editorial writers of the Jim Crow era? They whipped up racists to do violence to
innocent people who have the “wrong” skin color. Is the Virginian Pilot going back to the days
of “Massive Resistance?” It remains to
be seen how this will end, but I suspect it won’t end well.
It’s a mistake to go back to a
time when the motto of the Virginian Pilot was
"True to the Democratic Party in victory or defeat." I understand being partisan, leaning to the
Left, being avowedly Liberal on the editorial pages. But there are lines that should not be
crossed. In those ugly times newspapers didn’t
actually urge the KKK to lynch black people, they just wrote about “uppity
blacks” sullying the virtue of white women.
People who were on the edge of violence got the hint, and innocent
people died.
The press is always pressuring
conservatives denounce hotheads on their side.
But when it comes to lunacy on the left, the media looks away when it’s
not actually supportive. That gives a
green light to the conclusion that political opponents can be beaten, bloodied,
or even murdered. After all, what
right-thinking social justice warrior would not kill Hitler if he could?
Don’t encourage urban warfare
with a wink or a nod; it’s never a good idea.
Despite the fact that most of the violence has been directed at Trump
supporters, there are hotheads on both sides.
The optics of masked rioters setting fires and smashing windows, and
protesters standing in the schoolhouse door, as Democrats did in Washington DC
the other day brings back memories of George Wallace. Is this really the end of the political
spectrum you want your newspaper to represent?
Your story about the local women
who attended the Women’s March on Washington stands out in my mind as a great
example of cherry picking, shaping the news to promote a Leftist worldview. The story said that the hats were “cat-eared.” What
an interesting euphemism. In reality they
were shaped like vaginas. The march was
led and organized by people who wanted people to dress as women’s
genitalia. And women did. Observers were blown away by the vulgarity of
the speakers. The celebrities like Ashley
Judd who spoke to the women shouted obscenities, spewed hatred for the duly
elected President who they denounced as a moral monster bringing the dark night
of Fascism to this country. One speaker,
Madonna, told the crowd that she thought about “blowing up the White House.” Another featured speaker, Donna Hylton, was a
felon who spent decades in prison for
kidnapping, sodomizing and killing a real-estate broker, Thomas
Vigliarolo. If this is really: “… the
best of what we are all about” as the story says, I would hate to see the
worst. The women from our area may be
nice people, but they lent their presence to a bizarre and hate-filled event
while your story omitted any reference to what the organizers were actually
saying and doing.
On a closing note, I question the
wisdom of aggressively alienating over half your readership.
Very truly yours,
The Virginian
No comments:
Post a Comment