Erick-Woods Erickson
The left in the United States has incredible clout to push their narratives nearly frictionlessly through cultural institutions. CNN has now multiple times had on Justice Sam Alito’s former neighbor who is revealed to be an admittedly partisan progressive actress who admits she called Justice Alito’s wife a “c*nt.” By virtue of a Supreme Court Justice and his wife unwilling to perpetuate the story, the neighbor gets to go unchallenged on television over what was viewed as a neighborly dispute until CNN and other media outlets consciously decided to discredit the Supreme Court as an institution the left does not control.
And let’s be really clear here — CNN made an editorial decision, as did other press outlets, to go with the left’s narrative that, at the time the events happened, were judged to be a neighborly dispute. Then, to also go with the left’s characterization of the Appeal to Heaven flag as problematic — so problematic that San Francisco’s City Hall was flying it until two weeks ago when the left’s fabricated narrative won out.
The New York Times hears Sam Alito openly discussing his faith and values and deems it sinister — sinister enough to put words in his mouth that he did not say. The national press has no curiosity about fly over country and thinks anyone to the right of Joe Biden is a white nationalist or, worse, a Trump supporter.
How can we forget the media cheering on Twitter for censoring the New York Post over the Hunter Biden laptop story? Many of those outlets, to this day, employ those who either urged censorship of the Post or claimed the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation plot. It’s all so easy to be a progressive and have the media take your side so quickly.
Leftwing agitprop has become de rigueur. A Christian firefighter in Los Angeles has been disciplined for his conscious objection to hoisting the rainbow flag. In Seattle, three teens have been prosecuted for their scooters leaving tire marks across a rainbow flag painted on the ground. Businesses that do not embrace June as Pride Month get attacked and most fold. Employees are forced into DEI training seminars. Disney has revised Star Wars into a woke intersectional cult where the Jedi are colonizers, the lesbian witches use the Force to conceive, and the dialogue and acting are awful, but the actors are nonbinary.
In Washington, D.C. Merrick Garland takes to the pages of a major newspaper insisting the Biden Justice Department is not political all while prosecuting a seventy-five year old wheelchair bound Christian for praying inside an abortion clinic and also prosecuting a Texas doctor who has blown the whistle on transgender medical activism at his hospital. But leftwing protestors who, last weekend, defaced federal monuments, assaulted park rangers, and chanted “kill the Zionists” outside the White House will not been prosecuted. The press will applaud the former and ignore the latter. Oh, and remember, the DOJ won’t enforce the law prohibiting protests outside federal judges’ homes, even after the Kavanaugh assassination attempt.
In the spring of 2023, multiple suspicious persons illegally crossed into the United States. Six of the individuals, all Russians, have suspected ties to the terrorist organization ISIS. In November of 2023, several months after these suspected terrorists crossed into the United States, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared on a debate stage, “If you look at the threats we face, terrorists have come in through our southern border.” Eileen Sullivan of the New York Times fact-checked DeSantis reporting, ‘This is false.” It was absolutely true. The New York Times will probably bury a correction, if they bother to correct themselves at all.
It has been obvious to tens of millions of Americans that if the Border Patrol is regularly detaining people from Middle Eastern countries, some of whom have questionable ties, and a lot of illegal aliens are crossing and getting away, the odds are some of those who got away also have questionable ties and affiliations. But the left and press demand we set aside our common sense and rely on experts of questionable expertise. What is a woman? Female Biden appointees to federal courts are actually saying they cannot answer that because they are not biological experts.
In the last week, in multiple locations in the United States, leftwing activists supporting Hamas have been caught on tape with a parade of horribles. A black man in New York openly wished Hitler would come back. Activists in Manhattan held up a sign that read, “Long Live October 7th.” In Brooklyn, the Jewish head of the Brooklyn Museum and several of the museum’s board Jewish members had their homes vandalized. In Washington, activists chanted, “Kill the zionists.” All these are leftwing agitators.
Were these Trump supporters, the press would give it all ample coverage and tie it all explicitly to the politics of the right. But because these are leftwing agitators, many of whom voice the views of members of the newsrooms of the American press, they are given a pass and President Biden is given a pass.
Donald Trump conjures a funny little hypothetical about getting electrocuted or eaten by a shark and its gets a studied consideration in The Atlantic. Joe Biden, yet again, gets lost on a stage or in an thought and the media assures us behind the scenes he’s the second coming of Albert Einstein.
The press must protect their precious, Joe Biden. They fear Trump more. They must discredit the Supreme Court because the left does not control it. Meanwhile, leftwing antisemitism is festering. The right will predictably reciprocate. Our nation does not head to a Civil War, but to an American version of Northern Ireland’s Troubles. Neighbor hates neighbor and the press and cultural institutions, captured by the left, cannot mediate national discourse fairly. This will end badly for all of us.
In 1933, Peru’s President, Oscar R. Benavides, uttered a famous line about how he would execute and enforce the law. “For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law.” Both the left and the right see each other doing that. But Biden is now in charge. Prolifers go to jail. Antisemites get put on the federal bench.
The media gives Biden a pass on double standards while obsessing about what Trump might do if he returns to power.
You know damned well that if Trump supporters were the antisemites in the town square, Joe Biden would speak forcefully against it, and the press would praise him. But Biden cannot and will not call out forcefully his own side. The press will not force him. To the extent he does, he has to soften it with denunciations of “Islamophobia.” The problem festers because the press and Democrats let it fester. There can be no Sister Souljah Moment in a tied election when Biden cannot risk alienating a single member of the progressive left.
Without the press as a fair and honest mediator, the right will cease engaging with it. The left is already violent. The last two mass assassination attempts in the nation were from MSNBC viewers. The media fixates on right-wing violence. It will come.
In Atlanta, a man has been arrested trying to start a race war. Leftwing and rightwing agitators push “post-constitutional” nonsense, both sides increasingly convinced they must capture power and keep it. Agitators on both sides are flirting with a “national divorce.”
Joe Biden tells audiences that those with guns need F-15s or else and implicitly says he’ll kill conservative activists with the military — incendiary rhetoric brought to you by the man who said Mitt Romney would put black people back in chains. The press that obsesses over Donald Trump’s joking remark on Hannibal Lecter will excuse Biden on this. It’s just words, after all.
No divorce is coming. No civil war is coming. Paramilitary operations are coming. Violence is coming. It will be neighbor on neighbor, neighborhood through neighborhood. It will be the left attacking the right, fixtures of the right, and governmental entities of the right. It will be the right attacking the left, fixtures of the left, and government entities of the left. It’ll be car bombs and buses exploding. It will be assassinations and reciprocations.
It will be the Weather Underground and James Hodgkinson at scale. It will be because the Democrats and the American press corps allied together, captured cultural institutions, and made the right defend every manufactured scandal the left said was a scandal, all while adding as much friction as possible to the right’s advance of its own narrative and refusing to clean their own house. It will be because the right captured their own institutions and repaid the left in kind and targeted journalists, too, and refused to clean their own house.
It has already been building steam for some time.
The press corps blamed the right when Jared Lochner attempted to murder Congreswoman Gabby Giffords. On CNN at the time, I had to defend the right’s rhetoric. Anchors and Democrats, in high dudgeon about Sarah Palin using the word “target” and putting targets on a map of targeted congressional districts, pounced and condemned. The New York Times explicitly blamed Palin for inspiring the shooting. Lochner, we know, was nuts and there was no political motivation.
James Hodgkinson, a Rachel Maddow fan and MSNBC viewer, attempted the mass assassination of Republican members of Congress after being fed a steady diet of leftwing talking points from a supposedly objective press. The moment the press learned Hodgkinson was of the left, the story was over.
In 2008, around the time of the Republican National Convention, a white 20-something male approached the Texas Governor’s Mansion and threw a Molotov cocktail at it. The mansion burned down. The case remains unsolved, though federal and state authorities have long presumed it was a left-leaning anarchist. In fact, around the same time, left-wing anarchists were fighting police in the streets of St. Paul, Minnesota, during the GOP’s convention, and some plotted to go back to Texas to commit acts of violence.
In 2010, Andrew Joseph Stack crashed a plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. Members of the media immediately concluded he must have been a deranged tea party activist. In fact, Stack was both a nut and a Marxist whose suicide note attacked corporations and the Catholic Church.
Also in 2010, John Patrick Bedell opened fire at the Pentagon. Some in the media jumped to the conclusion the shooter was of the tea party. But the Christian Science Monitor noted Bedell was an “anti-Bush registered Democrat who believed 9/11 was planned and carried out by the US government.”
Also in 2010, James Jay Lee took hostages at the Discovery Channel, and members of the media again initially presumed it was a tea party activist doing it. But it turned out Lee was a leftist who was upset about global warming.
This has been building and growing and festering. The right is held accountable. The left is given a pass. What is coming will be nasty and brutal — a long, violent grind spread over decades.
It could be disarmed and defused right now. But the press corps hates Trump too much. The left hates the right too much. The right hates the left too much. The partisans have captured the churches and silenced the prophetic voices calling all to repent. Hating your neighbor is profitable. And Joe Biden needs every vote so badly that he cannot lead us through to the light.