The double standard of a biased media
With some people, there’s a phrase: “If it weren’t for double standards, they’d have no standards at all.”
There are far too many people in this world that it applies to, but perhaps none more so than the modern, mainstream media.
On Sunday, a gunman was noticed and engaged by former President Donald Trump’s security detail. He was chased off, but it was clear he intended to kill Trump. That’s not even a matter up for debate.
It’s not even the first time this year that it’s happened, though the last one was a lot closer to succeeding.
And in the aftermath of both of these assassination attempts, we’ve seen something from the mainstream media. Namely their double standards.
First, let’s back up and talk about the term “stochastic terrorism” for a moment.
This is a term the left used for years, claiming that criticism of any group was responsible for someone else committing acts of violence against that group. Even if there weren’t explicit calls for violence against the group, mind you, it was still stochastic terrorism because it gave deranged people some kind of permission or something.
It’s nonsense, of course. No group is above criticism and if that’s all it takes to inspire terrorist acts, the left’s hands are far from clean. In 2019, for example, in the midst of a heated debate over illegal immigration and how we handle those who were caught, Democrats routinely derided Trump and his policies, acting as if everything he did was as inhumane as it could.
Then there was an attack on an ICE detention facility by a man who claimed to be part of the leftist group Antifa.
At no point did the left apologize for their own stochastic terrorism. They’re the ones pushing the term, so they can’t say they don’t believe it exists, but they somehow didn’t figure they had anything to do with it.
In fact, time and time again, they ignore that. Here’s a long but good piece someone linked to about how this all works.
The short and overly simplified version is that it’s a one-way street. It’s stochastic terrorism when it happens to a group the left favors, but it’s always spun so the left doesn’t have to take responsibility for it.
Remember just a short time ago when a young man took a shot at Trump but instead killed an innocent man and injured others, including Trump? It didn’t take long for the media to start laying the groundwork that this really didn’t have anything to do with politics, that a 19-year-old climbed up on a rooftop with a rifle, tried to shoot a former president who also was his party’s nominee this time around, and that it had nothing to do with him donating to leftist causes.
Sure.
And it’s happening again.
Time published a piece all about how the guy this time around, Ryan Routh, had some unknowable politics, all despite evidence of his support for the left. “But he said he voted for Donald Trump!”
Yes, because no one would lie about who they supported eight years ago in order to leverage some kind of advantage.
I mean, the guy’s own son not only said his dad hated Donald Trump but that “all reasonable people” did. If dear old Dad had been a Trump supporter in the past, it seems to me that he might have had a slightly different view of Trump supporters.
Both of these attempts on Trump’s life—two in just a matter of months—come after years of Democrats demonizing the man, calling him “literally Hitler” and “an existential threat to democracy.” They’ve called him everything except a decent human being.
Meanwhile, Sen. JD Vance was blamed for a bomb threat in Springfield, Ohio. How? He brought up the allegations of Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets. That caused someone else to make a bomb threat because of stochastic terrorism, but someone trying to kill Trump yet again?
Nah, can’t be. The dude’s politics are undetermined.
Yeah, right.
Yet when they engage in bombastic language, their rhetoric is irrelevant. As the above-linked Substack piece notes, they claim any criticism is whataboutism. It’s a shield they throw up to pretend that their history is irrelevant to their criticism of you.
Let’s keep in mind that Vance only really said, “Folks are calling me and telling me that yes, this is happening,” and he’s responsible for literally anything that happens. They can hold up a mocked-up severed head of Donald Trump and it’s a big old nothing. Pointing it out is just deflecting from the sins of the right, as they see them.
In an ideal world, the media would call this out. When politicians engage in this nonsense, they’d point out what was actually said and how no reasonable person would call that a call to violence…or they’d call it out when it happened regardless of which side said it.
Instead, it’s the media that’s engaging in it. They’re the ones invoking the specter of stochastic terrorism whenever anyone says anything.
Why?
It’s imperative to control speech.
The Constitution prevents laws regulating what people say, though we make some exceptions when it actually causes harm. Yet many people want just that. They talk about regulating misinformation or hate speech, but that’s a hard sell in the halls of Congress.
So, they try to exert a different kind of control over what people say.
The issue is that if Republicans can fight back, Democrats aren’t going to win in the long term. Too many of their policies are based on little more than unicorn farts and dreams.
So, in order to hold onto power—the goal of literally every Democrat everywhere, including in the media—they need to control what people can say. If they point out the problems that leftist policies create, especially their pandering to identity groups, then folks might start to realize there’s a problem.
They label that criticism stochastic terrorism, chalk every crime committed on a member of that identity group up to that stochastic terrorism, then eventually, they hope everyone else will just stop pointing out the very real issues.
Meanwhile, when some of them are excusing violence and/or calling for more, that’s different. That’s protected speech and you’re just engaging in whataboutism.
And, of course, the media is knee-deep in this. They advance it. They accept it as fact and never even think of criticizing any of it. That would require a level of self-awareness most in their line of work simply don’t have.
They’re perpetuating a double standard and I’m not sure if any of them are capable of even realizing it because of their own biases.
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