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The AP's Vile Blame Game on the Racist Murders in Jacksonville

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  August 30, 2023 12:01 PM

Whenever someone who might be even vaguely associated with the right wing does something horrific, members of the 'news' media engage in an eager, demagogic orgy of finger-pointing.  Conservative rhetoric, they warn, is growing dangerous and contributing a "climate of hate."  They sometimes even say this when an assailant has no discernible ties whatsoever to the right wing.  Journalists just want them to, or assume they do. Republican officials are shamed, blamed, and hounded for comment.  It's a ghoulish but familiar ritual.  By contrast, when someone who can be associated with left-wing politics does something horrific, virtually none of that happens.  Leftists and Democrats aren't treated as culpable, largely because journalists are mostly leftists and Democrats.  Let's be blunt: Many of the progressive activists who populate newsrooms just flat-out don't care as much about certain victims of violence -- depending on their identities, and the identities of the perpetrators.  They care far more about the electoral success of their partisan tribe than they do about offering even-handed and fair accountings of the news, which is supposedly their profession. It's politics, ideology and identity, above all else. They don't relish innocent people dying, but they do relish the opportunity to use those deaths to punish the 'bad' tribe.  

Among the many reasons Americans widely distrust the 'news' media, and many conservatives hold the journo class in utter contempt, this phenomenon is probably the most disgusting.  The contempt is, in many cases, richly earned and well deserved. Consider the below Associated Press coverage of the racist triple murder in Jacksonville, Florida, carried out by a demented white supremacist.  The state's conservative governor stepped away from the presidential campaign trail to deal with the aftermath of the horror (as well as to lead the state through a pending natural disaster).  He showed up to assure the grieving community that the state would provide all the needed resources, and to condemn the attack in the strongest terms, calling the deceased killer a "scumbag."  He did so knowing he would not be greeted warmly by many in attendance.  He was right.  But that's the nature leadership:

Kudos to the councilwoman in that clip (most of the videos circulating online of that exchange cut off just before she smacks down the hecklers, shared by people who feel good watching a Republican they loathe dealing with public scorn).  In contrast to that elected Democrat, here is the chief political correspondent at the AP framing the shooting as an outgrowth of Republican campaign themes.  This vile smear is indistinguishable from random left-wing fever-swamp Twitter replies, just formatted with adherence to the AP style guide:

Vague claims about the GOP's "increasing appeal among white supremacists," which Peoples links to Republicans' opposition to woke (replete with a so-called and scare quotes) excesses.  Let's first note that polling shows large majorities of Americans reject many of those woke excesses, across racial demographics.  Radical policies favored by leftists/journalists -- like "anti-racist" racial discrimination, and sex change interventions for minors (euphemized here as "LGBTQ rights") -- are wildly unpopular, including among people of color.  Is the move away from the latter in Western Europe partly responsible for the shooting in Florida?  Under the media's unfalsifiable, Calvinball standards, it's possible.  But Western Europe isn't the intended bogeyman to attack; Republicans are.  In that vein, are GOP candidates of color like Nikki Haley and Tim Scott wrong to "downplay" racism by rejecting the notion that we are a fundamentally racist country, or to note that we've made immense progress on the racial front?  Did they somehow have an indirect hand in the racist killings, too?  The AP story (I'm not linking to it) suggests as much: 

[Tim Scott] avoided answering directly when asked if the Republican Party has done enough to denounce white supremacist violence.  “The question is, have humans done enough to talk about racism and discrimination and the use of violence? And I think that’s the responsibility of every single American — the Republican Party, Democrat Party, no party affiliation,” Scott said. In a radio interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley said there was no clear explanation for such violence...Haley, whose parents immigrated to South Carolina from India, declared in her presidential announcement speech that America is not a racist nation.

She declares that because America isn't a racist nation.  We are a great, welcoming, inclusive, free nation with a checkered history and some existing racism and racists -- attitudes and people who exist everywhere on earth, sadly.  We work to overcome and move past that ugliness, but it does not define us.  Republicans say the murderously bigoted monster who ripped three lives away over the weekend does not represent them or our country.  Many on the Left, especially journalists, evidently disagree.  Furthermore, Ron DeSantis was absolutely right to scoff at the NAACP's ridiculous and partisan travel advisory.  With crime at a five-decade low in Florida, people of all races in the state are dramatically safer in any number of places, especially those run by journalists' political party.  The authors of the AP story, and the editors who green-lit it, deserve all the opprobrium and loss of credibility and trust heading in their direction:

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As a point of comparison, I searched this particular journalist's Twitter footprint following two high-profile acts of extreme violence targeting conservatives, perpetrated by leftists (there are many other such examples): 

After a left-wing Democrat attempted a mass assassination of Congressional Republicans, this same correspondent tweeted very little about the incident, according to the website's archive search feature.  I could find very few posts about the assault at all, let alone content questioning the role Democrats' vitriolic anti-GOP ranting (Democrats accuse Republicans of racism, fascism, and policies that will kill people on a daily basis) might have played in sending that shooter over the edge.  Nothing about a "shadow" being cast over Democratic politics, or "uncomfortable questions" being asked of Democrats.  After all, that would require someone to ask such questions.  And after a trans individual targeted a Christian school in Nashville, murdering children and faculty, the only searchable Peoples tweet citing 'Nashville' or 'Covenant' (the name of the school) I could find was a reference to what the Left decided was the real victimhood story: The temporary expulsion of rule-breaking Democratic lawmakers from the state legislature, amid left-wing agitation over gun control and trans rights.  

In that case, very quickly, the actual victims became an afterthought, in favor of preferred political 'victims.'  The Biden administration even dispatched the Vice President to meet not with the families of the dead, but with the cause celebre politicians and trans activists.  This sort of morally backwards, politics-obsessed fixation is only possible with a complicit media.  Ditto the almost immediate memory-holing of an assassination attempt against Justice Kavanaugh (barely covered), the target of incendiary vitriol from the highest reaches of the Democratic Party.  Ditto the Family Research Council attempted massacre (which was briefly covered then rapidly memory-holed, meriting a one-line statement from the president, via a spokesman), which presented the extra Narrative inconvenience of featuring a target map from a left-wing group -- very much unlike what happened in the Gabby Giffords attempted assassination, for which Sarah Palin was completely baselessly blamed.  That lie was so deeply ingrained that the so-called 'paper of record' was still regurgitating it years later.

I'll note that NBC offered similarly ghastly Jacksonville coverage, essentially citing lefty-generated, divisive racial controversies like the ones we've covered out of Florida as 'proof' of how Florida leaders created a dangerous environment that led to bloodshed.  This is absolute garbage.  Those policy debates over school curricula were legitimate and fair.  They were distorted dramatically by Democrats and their media allies, as usual, partially for this very purpose.  Referencing those legislative and cultural battles in reporting on a mass shooting is disgusting emotional blackmail.  Let our side have our way, or we'll blame you for murders.  They want to shut dissenters up.  The appropriate, if spicy, response to this is a simple three-word sentence once described but the great Charles Krauthammer as "a straightforward directive containing both a subject and an object -- charmingly, the same person." 

When fringe, sick right-wingers commit atrocities, it's presented as an indictment of the Right writ large.  When fringe, sick left-wingers commit atrocities, the 'blood on hands' slanders are nowhere to be found, from the very same people.  Suggesting such a thing would be unfair and unseemly, you must understand.  These are two sets of rules, wielded as weapon against one political coalition, and held up as a shield against the other.  It's the most despicable form of media bias and corruption, and if there's anything worth going 'scorched earth' over, it's this odious brand of slander.  I'll leave you with this: