The legacy media spend their time alternately accusing conservatives of demonizing their political opponents and … caricaturing conservatives as hate-filled extremists. Right-of-center Americans have been blamed for anti-Asian hate crimes, covering up America’s legacy of systemic racism, the continued spread of COVID-19 variants, and turning their backs on the Lord Jesus Christ.
Media commentators continued their name-calling bender over the last few weeks, adding the following smears to their collection.
Confederate soldiers
Discussing Republican comments about the January 6 Capitol riot, Joy Reid opened the June 17 episode of MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” by likening Republicans to postwar Confederate soldiers and members of pro-Confederate terrorist organizations. “It’s impossible to overlook the parallels to another insidious effort to mythologize a seditious undertaking, the ‘Lost Cause’ of the Confederacy in the years following the Civil War and the twisted logic and outright lies that laid the groundwork for the revisionist history found in American textbooks for generations, pushed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy,” she said in a sweeping indictment.
“There was the denial of the original American domestic terror organization, the Ku Klux Klan,” she continued. “As the KKK terrorized and lynched black people throughout the south during Reconstruction, politicians denied the group even existed and argued that whites were the true victims. The same kind of denial and deflection and — call them what they are, lies — that Republicans have pedaled, that you have already heard time and time again.”
In reality, the Confederates and their postwar terrorist arm, the KKK, were so committed to the Democratic Party that after Reconstruction the region became known as the “Solid South.” The party’s grip only began to wane when the Democratic Party embraced abortion-on-demand at the same time that the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, under the leadership of Dr. Richard Land, became more outspoken in its support of the right to life.
Vladimir Putin
CNN’s Don Lemon is no stranger to wavering between playing the victim and assaulting his political enemies. When Lemon invited CNN White House Correspondent John Harwood to discuss President Joe Biden’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin last Wednesday, Harwood saw clear parallels between Putin and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
Harwood said Biden’s hopes of passing an infrastructure bill through the evenly divided Senate “actually is an analog to his hopes for dealing with Vladimir Putin. That is to say, you can’t change another person’s [character], but you can try to influence their behavior by the incentives that you give them. So, when Biden is dealing with Putin, he says, ‘Let him know that we have significant cyber capability, and if he crosses certain lines that we have laid out for him, he knows that we have the ability to hit back.’ He hopes that will have an effect. We will see,” said Harwood.
“With Mitch McConnell, what he is saying is, ‘Yes, Mitch McConnell will want to block any Supreme Court nominee that I offer. The question is, is Mitch McConnell going to have the throw weight within the Republican caucus to make that stick?’ He could with Obama in 2016. Could he do it against Joe Biden, who has been consistently popular? Maybe he can, maybe he can’t.”
In addition to the comparison of incentives being inapplicable — recent polls have shown even liberals find themselves indifferent toward Joe Biden — comparing Mitch McConnell to an autocrat who has injected his political opponents with radioactive chemicals should be beyond the pale.
Chinese state-run media
CNN ratings failure Brian Stelter introduced his much-mocked interview with White House spokesperson Jen Psaki by promising to reveal “how Chinese and Russian state TV helped White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki prepare for her current role.”
Psaki defended her decision to shut down conservative news outlets by saying, “I also have a responsibility not to allow the briefing room to become a forum for propaganda, or a forum for pushing forward falsehoods or inaccurate information.”
“My best preparation from that was actually serving as the State Department spokesperson, when there were representatives of the Russian and Chinese media in the briefing room asking me questions that were directed by their government,” she said. “So, we see that from time to time in the briefing room, not every single day at all, but I have a responsibility to the public to make sure they’re getting accurate information. And the premises of questions that are propaganda-pushing are not giving them inaccurate information.”
Likening Fox News and Newsmax to state-run TV seems ironic, since the Chinese Communist Party — which had a famously antagonistic relationship with President Donald Trump — celebrated the advent of the Biden-Harris administration. The state-run Xinhua news service referred to Biden as “a safe pair of hands to salvage and lift the world’s most important bilateral ties” on November 5. But accuracy hardly figures into media coverage, especially of conservatives.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.