Holman Jenkins: "The Media Fesses Up"

For those without a subscription to the Wall Street Journal

“After weeks of hype, white supremacists managed to muster just a couple of dozen supporters on Sunday in the nation’s capital. . . .”

This column has not always praised the New York Times, but let’s belatedly credit its lead sentence (to which we’ve added emphasis) in its story about the sparsely attended Aug. 12 white-power rally in D.C. As the paper made clear, the “hype” it mentions was supplied by the media itself, working off what the Times called a “template.”

Here’s how it goes: “A group like the Ku Klux Klan announces a rally. Next comes news coverage, fevered and intense. That prompts a huge number of activists, police officers and everyday people to turn out, dwarfing what is often a pathetically small band of extremists in hoods or armbands.”

Bingo. And the top practitioner of this left-right symbiosis is Jason Kessler, a 34-year-old University of Virginia graduate. He began as a Barack Obama supporter, then shifted into promoting white identity politics. As well as being the permittee for this month’s tiny D.C. rally, he was the permit holder for last year’s highly instructive debacle in Charlottesville, Va.

Those Charlottesville events, as a painstaking official report would later document, got out of hand when local police deliberately allowed a violent confrontation to develop between a small group of neo-Nazis and a large number of counterprotesters. The goal was to create a pretext for the state police to declare an emergency and unleash riot forces while local cops stood on the sidelines. A woman would later be killed when a mentally ill neo-Nazi (almost a redundancy) drove his car into a crowd.

The reality of what happened in Charlottesville remains lost on much of the media, but it wasn’t lost on the people of the overwhelmingly liberal city. They got rid of the police chief, the mayor and the town manager. It also was not lost on cities elsewhere. Witness D.C.’s successful effort to keep its tiny number of legally sanctioned white nationalist demonstrators (about 20) isolated from thousands of peaceful antiracism demonstrators, and, most important, from hundreds of helmeted, masked “antifa,” or antifascist, militants adorned in black.

The absurdity was apparent even in less knowing press accounts. “Thousands of counter-protesters struggled to even catch a clear glimpse of the white nationalist rally,” noted the Associated Press. With nobody else to oppose, the mostly white counterprotesters turned their free-floating rage on D.C.’s predominantly black police with chants of “cops and Klan go hand in hand.”

If neo-Nazis didn’t exist, the left would have to invent them. And to some extent have. This same template has now been applied in Boston, Berkeley, Calif., and Portland, Ore., mostly in cases where few or no white supremacists showed up and activists battled solely with police. Meanwhile, the press has contributed by letting itself be terrorized into silence about the left’s predilection for violence. Or else we get sad performances like CNN host Chris Cuomo’s last week in which he felt compelled to parse words about who was worse than whom.

Mr. Cuomo did not need to say this. Fear is why he did. But such episodes shouldn’t surprise us anymore. It comes not long after a Netflix executive was publicly fired for using the “N-word” in an internal discussion about when it’s permissible on TV to use the “N-word.”

This is the same Netflix that offers uncountable hours of TV programming in which the “N-word” is heard at frequent intervals.

When people who palpably have no desire to give offense are being strung up, and their employers are too chicken to defend them, it’s no wonder workaday reporters and editors collapse into incoherence. The antifa left is ready to attribute racism to anybody who defends the right of racists to speak. To its discredit, the press has gone along.

Take National Public Radio: In its own excessive coverage in the run-up to this month’s D.C. rally, it brought on a First Amendment lawyer who is defending conspiratorialist Alex Jones, and who has defended white racists in the past, to be harangued by an interviewer who seemed unwilling to acknowledge that defending somebody’s right to speak is not the same as agreeing with what he says. Ironically, this came the same day that NPR, under attack for interviewing Jason Kessler, issued a plaintive statement insisting that “interviewing the people in the news . . . does not mean NPR is endorsing one view over another.”

The point here is not to encourage satisfaction that the left’s racial terrorism is now consuming its own. What’s bad for Netflix and NPR and CNN is also bad for America. The left’s obsession with identity politics was founded not in reason, but in the discovery of its power to induce fear, a power that has proved irresistible and addictive. As with any addiction, recognizing the problem is the first step to addressing it.