Why the left keeps smearing its political rivals as Hitlers or Mussolinis

 

Want to be Hitler? You don’t have to hate Jews, invade Poland or grow a silly mustache. There’s only one thing you have to do: Win an election against the left, or even look like you might.

We’ve seen that for years, of course. Democrats have likened every GOP presidential candidate back to Tom Dewey to the Austrian corporal.

When the Tea Party movement — best known for leaving the sites of its protests cleaner than it found them, in stark contrast to lefty groups like Occupy or BLM — appeared on the scene, they were immediately likened to Hitler’s brownshirts.

To listen to the Democrats and the media (I repeat myself), the Trump administration was a Nazi reign of terror over America, though none of those critics wound up targeted by the Gestapo. (That fell to pro-life activists and Trump supporters under the Biden administration.)

It’s not just in America....

They’re doing it again in response to this week’s election in Italy, which elevated Giorgia Meloni to be Italy’s first female prime minister. She identifies as a mother, a Catholic and an Italian and says she wants what’s best for the Italian people, not what serves the agenda of the Western gentry class.

This makes her . . . well, not Hitler exactly, but since it’s Italy, Mussolini.

Read the whole thing.  

National news media and federal law enforcement are now as indistinguishable in America as in any autocratic country anywhere

 

Matt Tsaibbi's latest Substack column headlined "Sweeps Week on FBI TV!" shows just how far in the tank that the Corporate Media are as the propaganda arm of the Biden Regime. 

But this corruption has infected so much of the Ruling Class that you have to ask how deep we need to cut, how much needs to be excised, to restore the country to health?  

CNN Newsroom anchor Jim Acosta, famed for being the WWE version of a media tough guy during the Trump years, curled up like a kitten last weekend when interviewing Phil Mudd, onetime head of the FBI’s National Security Branch. Also a former CIA man, Mudd is now an Acosta colleague, a “senior intelligence analyst” on the CNN payroll.

“You know, there are real consequences,” said Acosta, “when people go out and trash the integrity of the FBI…”

It was less question than invitation, and Mudd jumped at it. The FBI man seethed that even if you’re upset about the raid of Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, if you think state police can deal with the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese, white collar crime, mortgage fraud and cyber-porn involving kids, you suck.

“If you say defund the FBI,” he went on, “let your kid be abused by an adult!”

“Yeah,” said Acosta. “It doesn’t add up.”

Mudd — who’s supposed to be both retired from law enforcement and a member of the media now — then went on about how difficult things are for FBI agents now that the unredacted warrant was out, releasing names and robbing agents of their birthright anonymity just as “our kids are going back to school.”

[snip]

We’re a week into one of the biggest stories of our time, and the feds and media have spent most every minute acting as an unembarrassed unified front. One after another, national security “analysts” lined up to give breathless, hyperbolic, and and eerily synchronized commentary about the Mar-a-Lago raid. If the message on day 1 was about how they “must have” probable cause of a crime, that was the word up and down the dial. If by the weekend it was “I’ve never seen this level of threat,” you heard that in more or less the same words from the likes of Mudd, McCabe, and others on multiple channels. What’s the public supposed to see, other than an American analog to China Central TV or Rossiya-1, when they tuned in to all this? 

Read the whole thing. 

 

MOST LIBERAL JOURNALISTS OK WITH PRES BIAS

Most liberal reporters OK with news bias https://t.co/cSjwTjbBAp

— Paul Bedard (@SecretsBedard) July 14, 2022

When Andrew Sullivan begins to agree with Conservative critics of the Press it's a Big Deal.

 

 

The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.

But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

And these mass deceptions have consequences. We are seeing this now in the Rittenhouse case — a gruesome story of a reckless teen with a rifle in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. The impression many got from much of the media was that a far-right vigilante, in the middle of race riots, had gone looking for trouble far from home and injured one man, and killed two, in a shooting spree.

Here’s the NYT on August 26, the morning after the killings: “The authorities were investigating whether the white teenager who was arrested … was part of a vigilante group. His social media accounts appeared to show an intense affinity for guns, law enforcement and President Trump.” Rittenhouse’s race is specified; the race of the men he killed and injured were not (they were also white).

Almost immediately, the complicated facts became unimportant. The far right viewed Rittenhouse as a hero — which he surely wasn’t. He had no business being there with an AR-15. The MSM and far left viewed him as a villain, appalled that he was being elevated, in Jamelle Bouie’s words, “as a symbol of self-defense.” (Another NYT article, painting Rittenhouse as a MAGA fanatic, did note at the very bottom of the page: “Supporters of Mr. Rittenhouse said he was being attacked by the mob and acted in legitimate self-defense.” So they did have a caveat.)

But notice how the narrative — embedded in a deeper one that the Blake shooting was just as clear-cut as the Floyd murder, that thousands of black men were being gunned down by cops every year, and that “white supremacy” was rampant in every cranny of America — effectively excluded the possibility that Rittenhouse was a naive, dangerous fool in the midst of indefensible mayhem, who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense. And so when, this week, one of Rittenhouse’s pursuers, Gaige Grosskreutz, admitted on the stand that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz pointed his pistol directly at Rittenhouse’s head a few feet away, it came as a shock.

Money quote from the defense lawyer: “It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him, with your gun (and your hands down) pointed at him, that he fired? Right?” To which Grosskreutz answered: “Correct.” Here’s how the NYT first described this a year ago, on August 26: “Video footage from the scene of the shooting appears to show Mr. Rittenhouse running and then firing his gun, striking a man in the head. He then flees and is chased by bystanders before tripping, falling to the ground and shooting another man.”

A day later, in another NYT piece (which I relied on at the time), here’s the account of video footage they embedded: “As Mr. Rittenhouse is running, he trips and falls to the ground. He fires four shots as three people rush toward him. One person appears to be hit in the chest and falls to the ground. Another, who is carrying a handgun [Grosskreutz], is hit in the arm and runs away.” Any sense of self-defense there? (And when you watch the full version of the same video on YouTube, you see that, for some reason, the NYT cut off the key moment showing Rittenhouse’s self-defense — the moment that proved so critical in court!)

I haven’t watched the whole trial. But if you watch for any length of time, you realize you’ve been led to believe a media narrative that was way off. (Independent journalists last year, like Jesse Singal, were more clear-eyed.) Because of that narrative whiplash, we may have more rioting and violence if he’s acquitted. The judge is already being targeted. I’m not defending Rittenhouse. And I understand news gathering is fallible. But there’s a media pattern here. And it reaches far wider than Rittenhouse.

We found out this week, for example, that a key figure in the emergence of the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko, has been indicted for lying to the FBI. He is also charged with asking a Clinton crony, Charles Dolan Jr: “Any thought, rumor, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump.”

The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian — touted across all media, including the Washington Post — has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors’ notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: “No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.

This doesn’t mean that Trump wasn’t eager for Russian help. But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the “corrections” have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.

Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty “white supremacy” narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate,” even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.

As Greenwald noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.

More recently, the MSM were telling us for months that inflation is a phantasm. We were told that the “2021 Inflation Scare is another in a series of false alarms going back several decades.” We were assured that “the numbers at least for now are on the side of those expecting the trend to subside and then stabilize at lower levels.” Any concern was “fearmongering politics.” And now we wake up to the highest inflation in 30 years, counter-balancing wage increases. Still, they tell us, all will be well.

We were told that vaccines would end the Covid pandemic. But they merely altered Covid to a manageable disease that you could still contract while vaccinated. We were told that the migrant surge at the border was just seasonal, and nothing out of the ordinary, even as 1.7 million migrants were illegally trying to get into the country in the last year. We were told that sending migrants back to their home countries was a wicked and unconscionable Trump tactic — even as the Biden administration swiftly copied it with Haitian immigrants — to much success. The cruelty is the point, eh?

We were — and still are! — being told by most of the media that critical race theory isn’t in high schools at all. Meanwhile, a tsunami of evidence is out there showing that it absolutely is — in every subject, and every class, as the central philosophy behind many states’ education policies.

We all get things wrong. What makes this more worrying is simply that all these false narratives just happen to favor the interests of the left and the Democratic party. And corrections, when they occur, take up a fraction of the space of the original falsehoods. These are not randos tweeting false rumors. They are the established press.

And at some point, you wonder: what narrative are they pushing now that is also bullshit? One comes to mind: the assurance that the insane amount of debt we have incurred this century is absolutely nothing to be concerned about because interest rates are super-low and borrowing more and more now is a no-brainer. But when inflation spikes and sets off a potential spiral in wages to catch up, will interest rates stay so quiescent? And if interest rates go up, how will we service the debt so easily?

I still rely on the MSM for so much. I still read the NYT first thing in the morning. I don’t want to feel as if everything I read is basically tilted through wish-fulfillment, narrative-proving, and ideology. But with this kind of record, how can I not?

We need facts and objectivity more than ever. Trump showed that. What we got in the MSM was an over-reaction, a reflexive overreach to make the news fit the broader political fight. This is humanly understandable. It is professionally unacceptable. And someone has got to stop it.

The Big Lie

 IT WAS ALWAYS A LIE: Salena Zito: Our Bargain for Normal is Failing. “Leading into Election Day last year, two of the biggest reasons people gave in interviews for voting for Joe Biden were to sense a return to normal and a little empathy for their struggles.”

The funny thing is, the stuff that the left hated about Trump — an America-first approach to trade and foreign policy, a pushback against wokeism, border controls — is all actually normal stuff. That’s why the left hated it. And Trump had more empathy for the struggles of normal people than the left, which hates normal people, could even pretend to have.

The only thing abnormal about Trump’s presidency was the four-year hysterical shit-fit thrown by the left and the media. That should have been punished, not rewarded. Instead, well, we have this disastrous presidency that unsurprisingly turns out to have been founded on a big lie.

Origin of Covid — Following the Clues

 

Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: the political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel. is busy covering up. [fixed that for the author] ...

Dr. Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature....

“If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” said Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris....

From the hindsight of 2021, one can say that the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the SARS2 epidemic was zero. The risk was catastrophic, if indeed the SARS2 virus was generated in a gain-of-function experiment....

Dr. Shi returned to her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and resumed the work she had started on genetically engineering coronaviruses to attack human cells.

How can we be so sure?

Because, by a strange twist in the story, her work was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). And grant proposals that funded her work, which are a matter of public record, specify exactly what she planned to do with the money....

What this means, in non-technical language, is that Dr. Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells....

The lab escape scenario for the origin of the SARS2 virus, as should by now be evident, is not mere hand-waving in the direction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is a detailed proposal, based on the specific project being funded there by the NIAID....

the SARS1 virus has proved a true escape artist, leaking from laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan, and no less than four times from the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing....

For the lab escape scenario, a Wuhan origin for the virus is a no-brainer. Wuhan is home to China’s leading center of coronavirus research where, as noted above, researchers were genetically engineering bat coronaviruses to attack human cells. They were doing so under the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 lab. If a virus with the unexpected infectiousness of SARS2 had been generated there, its escape would be no surprise....

“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said....

People round the world who have been pretty much confined to their homes for the last year might like a better answer than their media are giving them. Perhaps one will emerge in time. After all, the more months pass without the natural emergence theory gaining a shred of supporting evidence, the less plausible it may seem. Perhaps the international community of virologists will come to be seen as a false and self-interested guide. The common sense perception that a pandemic breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said can’t be true.

And then let the reckoning begin.

LOCAL PRESS RUNS INTERFERENCE ON VOTER FRAUD IN MINNESOTA

 The Star Tribune reluctantly reports on Project Veritas’s explosive video on voter fraud in Minnesota. Mostly, the Strib runs interference for its party, starting with the headline: “Trump seizes on conservative group’s claim of fraud in Minneapolis election.” When Republicans “seize” or “pounce,” you know Democrats are short on answers.

The Strib tries to poison the well against Project Veritas:

The local press is all for voter fraud if it helps Democrats.

Read the whole thing.

Dems starting to panic that voters will blame them for riots

Despite the best efforts of the propaganda media (aka, MSM) to sanitize as “mostly peaceful” violent, property-destroying and federal agent-blinding demonstrations that have engulfed Portland, Seattle, and other cities, the American people are catching on that Antifa is the armed auxiliary street force of the Democrat party, just as the KKK was a century and more ago. 

While the Dems thought that their strategy of making conditions terrible so that voters would throw out the incumbent was sound, it turns out that the availability of dramatic footage of real violence on social media has put the lie to the media coverups.

Tucker Carlson, the highest rated host in cable news history, regularly calls the rioters “Biden voters,” and that is an easier sale to the public than Nadler’s fantasy [he called the riots a myth].

The Democrats, including the Biden campaign, are riding a tiger. If they attempt to dismount, they will be eaten by the tiger, as Libby Schaaf [Mayor of Oakland CA} discovered. ... the hysterically angry rioters, many of them white, college-educated women in their twenties, could turn on Biden as with ample ammunition from his past career befriending KKK Kleagle Robert Byrd and enriching his family with his political connections.

President Trump, to their dismay, has played the riots perfectly, with his administration expressing resolve but refraining from oversteps that would hand a Kent State-like massacre, complete with martyrs

When Did You First Notice The Left’s ‘Epistemic Breach’?

When did you first realize that reality - and the way reality was distorted by the leftist press - were not even close?  That funhouse mirrors were more real?

The Travon Martin story?

Hands up don't shoot?

The Covington kids?

The Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax?

 The Bubba Wallace "racist" noose?

 And the endless examples of racism, sexism, and bigotry that turns out to have been manufactured by the "victims" themselves?

Author Jesse Singal made a statement last night about the moment he first noticed what he calls an “epistemic breach” on the left. In context, he means the moment when it became obvious that people on the left could maintain opinions that were verifiably false by simply opening their eyes. For Singal, the moment he noticed it was the Covington kids

Read the whole thing.

‘I Want a Coronation; Politico Co-Founder Offers INSANE Biden Defense on Reade Claims

When the press reveals the naked truth about itself.

In Tuesday’s print edition of The New York Times, admitted Marxist, former Times editor, Politico co-founder, and The Hill co-founder Martin Tolchin penned a letter to the editor demanding that not only should journalists cease all attempts to report on Tara Reade’s allegations against Joe Biden, but all investigations should end so as to ensure Biden defeats President Trump in November.

Is he so sure about being able to steal the election that he's actually willing to go "Open Kimono" with this opinion in a newspaper?   Things that make you go Hmmm. 

Conrad Black: The inconvenient truth about Trump — he's doing what he said he would

In fact, by the ultimate litmus test of the integrity of holders of high political office, the extent to which his record in office conforms to pre-electoral promises, Trump’s record has been the best of any U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929), who promised, and did, nothing, in the piping days of American isolationism, Prohibition and complete absence of requirements for collateral in borrowing to buy equities. (This was a bi-partisan policy trifecta that eventually gave us Al Capone, Hitler, the Great Depression and the Second World War.)

Trump promised prosperity, tax cuts, renegotiation of disadvantageous trade deals, the annihilation of ISIL, the establishment of a southern border that would control entry to the country, the shaping up of the military, revival of the concept of nuclear non-proliferation regarding Iran and North Korea, withdrawal from the inane and self-punitive Paris Climate accord, a resuscitation of education through non-unionized schools and incentives to the reintroduction of free speech in academia and the end of NATO’s condition as a gang of defenceless freeloaders (such as Canada), generously accepting a military guaranty of their territory by the United States without paying for it.

The fact that he has delivered wholly or partially on all of this is, to borrow a phrase from one of the great charlatans ever elected to U.S. national office, Al Gore, “an inconvenient truth” that the conventional media of the Western world have great difficulty acknowledging. The Canadian media would have to be scrutinized by a veritable Sherlock Holmes to unearth the facts that the United States now has 1.6 million more positions to be filled than unemployed people, that per capita GDP growth has tripled, the economic growth rate is more than three times that of the European Union, more than 50 per cent above the Obama record, and that working- and middle-class income and purchasing power are growing for the first time this millennium.

Of course, if you read the press here and in Europe, you would conclude that Trump is a dolt who never amounted to anything.

The Virginian Pilot in one cartoon

AOC Weeps Over Empty Parking Lot

Here's how AOC, the press that covers her and the images they show ... lie to you right in your face.

Here's the image they want you to see:
 

Your imagination fills in the rest.

But here's the picture from another angle

Note carefully how the photographer chooses his angle and carefully avoids showing that AOC is just looking at a fence next to a parking lot. This picture is a lie, it's propaganda and it's how the Left lies to you. Blatantly. In. Your. Face. Lies.

Mark Steyn: "Fire and Faith"

When the iconic house of worship at the heart of French Christianity decides to mark Holy Week by going up in flames, it's too obviously symbolic of something ...but of what exactly? Two thousand churches have been vandalized in the last two years: Valérie Boyer, who represents Bouches-du-Rhône in the National Assembly, said earlier this month that "every day at least two churches are profaned" - by which she means arson, smashed statutes of Jesus and Mary, and protestors who leave human fecal matter in the shape of a cross. This is a fact of life in modern France.

How the media covers up for politicians they like

How Reuters uncovered Beto O'Rourke's teenage hacking days.

They wouldn’t confirm that it was this person unless I promised that I wouldn’t write about it until after the November election. That’s because the member of Congress had decided to run for Senate. Beto O’Rourke is who it was.

So Reuters waited until the election was over.

Academic Stabbed to Death for ‘Insulting Mohammed’ During Lecture

The original reporting was in the Daily Mail (UK) because this is something the MSM typically covers up..

Deadly refutation of multiculturalists who claim all cultures are equal.

Is diversity really our strength?

An Irish lecturer was stabbed to death by a student outside the Paris university where he taught on Wednesday for allegedly insulting the prophet Mohammed by displaying a drawing of him during class.

John Dowling, 66, was speaking with a student, identified by authorities only as Ali R., following a lecture when the 37-year old student fatally stabbed him 13 times in the throat and chest.

French authorities have said there is no existing evidence that Ali, a native of Pakistan, was radicalized by a terrorist organization but rather that he was simply very “pious” and an “obsessive patriot.”

“We don’t have proof of radicalization, but rather a feeling that we’re dealing with someone who is very religious, very pious, very practicing.”

From Germany: "When should the media report on murders by refugees?"

Do newspapers focus too much on crimes committed by refugees, thus creating an exaggerated public fear of the danger they pose? Or do they too often ignore them out of a misplaced concern that they would be fuelling racism?

Depending on who you talk to in Germany, you will get very different opinions. Left-wingers believe the press over-report, cynically exploiting the fact that refugee crime sells newspapers. The right meanwhile harangue the “politically correct” media for failing to inform the public of a growing crime wave.

...

On August 16th, its Tagesschau evening news bulletin chose not to mention a grim murder in the central German town of Offenbach. A doctor had been stabbed to death in his practise that morning with no obvious explanation for why. Hours later police arrested his suspected murderer - an asylum seeker from Somalia who arrived in the country in late 2015.

After receiving complaints from the public for its decision not to cover the crime, Tagesschau’s editor-in-chief Kai Gniffke publicly justified the decision.

He explained that Tagesschau only reports on news that has “a societal, national or international relevance - things that are meaningful to the majority of the 83 million Germans.”

...

In summary: refugees are more likely to be suspected of murder. The most significant reason for this is because they are young and male. Choosing not to cover these murders means one accepts the argument that the government could not have done things differently in 2015; choosing to cover them is to give a nod to the argument that they had different policy options.

Kai Gniffle, what a name for a liar.

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.

The Press can't help itself

A reminder