Opinion

Anderson Cooper: ‘Other Networks’ Are ‘Promoting’ Second U.S. Civil War

   DailyWire.com
Democratic presidential hopeful former US Vice President Joe Biden (L) laughs with moderator CNN's Anderson Cooper during a town hall devoted to LGBTQ issues hosted by CNN and the Human rights Campaign Foundation at The Novo in Los Angeles on October 10, 2019.
Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

Anderson Cooper told CNN’s viewers that “other networks” — presumably Fox News Channel and Newsmax — are actively “promoting” a second Civil War in the United States and “relish the idea of the destruction of society.”

“There’s a lot of people, who throw around the term civil war, and some on podcasts seem to kind of relish the idea of the destruction of society,” said Cooper. “The very people who are, kind, of promoting that here, on podcasts, right now — and other networks — who probably have not done service, and have not seen it for themselves.”

Cooper made the remarks during Thursday night’s two-and-a-half-hour special, “January 6: One Year Later,” amid a panel of Democratic elected officials, especially Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ). “You two … have seen what civil wars look like up close,” Cooper said to Rep. Crow, a former Army Ranger who served three terms in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Rep. Gallego, who served as an infantryman with the U.S. Marines in Iraq. “You both have seen up close, through the window of a Humvee, and out on the streets, what happens when a society collapses.”

The host — whom CNN has increasingly tried to promote as its central anchor since the departure of its top-rated anchor, Chris Cuomo, last year — did not specify which television networks or podcasts “relish” or are “promoting” the taking up of arms to overthrow the U.S. government. A scan of the transcripts of Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News Network turns up no incitements to violently seize power in the U.S. Capitol, while showing many condemnations of politically motivated violence.

Yet Cooper forecast that these unnamed malefactors “will be swept up in [the forthcoming civil war] and destroyed, as well as everybody else. I mean, that is not anything anybody should even talk about, or wish, ever think about happening.”

“Absolutely not,” replied Rep. Gallego.

None of the elected officials pushed back at the misinformation that broadcast television networks are praising terroristic violence.

Despite the lack of specificity, Cooper spent much of this week warning CNN of an impending civil war. On Tuesday, he interviewed Barbara F. Walter of the University of California at San Diego and author of the forthcoming book “How Civil Wars Start: And How To Stop Them.”

“In the civil wars you looked at, how do civil wars get started? And how close do you think is the United States?” he asked.

“Over the last five years, I’ve been watching what’s happening here in my own country, and one of the things that I’ve seen is that these same factors are emerging here in the United States — and they’re emerging at a surprisingly fast rate,” she replied.

“What factors are you talking about? What specifically do you look at?” Cooper asked. “What are the parallels?

“So, we don’t look at individual cases,” Walter replied, saying that her research revolved entirely around a “predictive model” generated by a computer.

She eventually named a loss of “democracy” and the instability that takes place when societies “broke down along racial, ethnic and religious lines; formed political parties along those lines; and then tried to capture power, to exclude everyone else.”

Neither addressed the role of theories like Critical Race Theory in balkanizing the United States along those very lines.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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