More than five months after violent rioters stormed the United States Capitol in protest of the 2020 presidential election results, Americans should be rejoicing that the waves of copycat insurrections that the media predicted never occurred. Instead, the media redefined the term “insurrection” to include commonsense policies embraced by the vast majority of Americans. Apparently insurrection, like infrastructure, is a broad and elastic category that defies easy definition. In part, they may be trying to heighten concerns over a future attack, but by watering down the term to the point of meaninglessness, they’re crying wolf with a charge that should be reserved for real and actionable threats to public safety.
The media mostly acted this way for one reason: The more malleable the definition of “insurrection,” the more rhetorically useful it is. Last month, everything was infrastructure; today, everything is insurrection. Here are a few recent examples.
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