River News: Our View

It’s hard to miss the irony.

For years, much of the corporate press has seen itself as the nation’s cool-headed referee, the adult in the room who separates truth from fiction, who explains to us the settled science of the experts and why those who disagree with government narratives are, you know, tyrants and Hitlerians and existential threats to democracy.

In so doing, the corporate media, in its helicoptering parental way, has also helped to transform some progressives from their modest beginnings as merely disoriented and depressed admirers of totalitarian authority into gun-wielding domestic terrorists and would-be assassins.

They have brought Kens and Karens from their parents’ basements and turned them into modern-day button men and women. They have cheered one side as Hope and Change; they have jeered the other as evil incarnate, and then they act surprised when the crowd storms the field. 

To be sure, no one was any more surprised than corporate journalists themselves when one of that tiny number of deranged lunatics stormed the very field they were sitting in at the White House Correspondents Dinner last week, moments before ducking beneath their tables.

It was a moment that could have turned tragic. It didn’t, and we should all be grateful for that. There is no upside, no political dividend, no moral victory in violence. Not when it is threatened, not when it is attempted or carried out, and especially not when it is celebrated.

We wish everyone long, prosperous, and happy lives — that is what the pursuit of liberty is all about — and politics is, or should be, just a civil discussion about the best way to get there. It shouldn’t be about killing or hurting people or ruining their lives, or celebrating the perpetrators’ profanation of humanity.

Still, close calls have a way of clarifying things. And what this close call revealed, once again, is that the media ecosystem we now inhabit is not merely biased — it is poisonous and dangerous. Progressive Democrats have been going on about how Trump and MAGA politicians are an existential threat to democracy for a long time now, and of course, when people are coached into believing that political officials are an existential threat to them, sooner or later, some of the nuttiest of them act.

It’s only a short distance from celebrating the murder of their opponents, as the left is increasingly doing, that is to say, it’s just a spit and a whisper from encouraging people to commit murder to actually committing murder yourself. You can just hear them say after the latest failure, “Man, if you want something done, you might as well do it yourself.” 

Which is precisely when a school teacher rides a train across the country and somehow thinks he can just waltz into a high-security ballroom and murder people. Little did the corporate press realize that the next nut would try to mow through a crowd of their own as they sat blithely drinking their wine.

Oh, yes, the irony of it.

The uncomfortable truth is that the place we find ourselves in now is, in part, the product of years of narrative-building, selective outrage, and ideological posturing that have deepened polarization and eroded trust across the board. It is partly due to a massive media industrial complex that distributes the daily talking points of the progressive left.

A recent analysis from AllSides found that major news aggregators overwhelmingly are biased to the left. In non-customizable sections of Google News, the survey found, just 1 percent of sources came from right-leaning outlets, compared to 73 percent from left-leaning outlets. Apple News, Microsoft’s Bing News, and Yahoo News showed similar disparities.  

The bottom line is, tens of millions of Americans are receiving a curated version of reality every day, and it is not a balanced one. And when information is filtered through a single ideological lens, something subtle but powerful happens. People stop encountering opposing views as arguments to be engaged. They begin to see them as threats to be neutralized.

Only a handful may ever act — and even some of them are likely groomed — but the actions of a few have great consequences for the many. They extend into what gets covered and what doesn’t, and that impacts the outrage meter. Allegations against conservatives are often front-page, wall-to-wall coverage. Allegations against Democrats? Sometimes they surface, sometimes they land on page 10, and more often they’re quietly ignored.

Take the case of former Congressman Eric Swalwell. According to multiple reports, journalists and political insiders expressed concerns about his conduct for years. Yet those concerns rarely made it into any public forum. Or consider how language is used to distort the truth. When a man allegedly committed a violent crime with a machete in Green Bay, the press labeled the suspect a “Green Bay man,” instead of what he really was: an illegal immigrant from Nicaragua. 

Neither does the ongoing gaslighting help the mental health of the legions who follow these news organizations. One morning, Trump was a madman when he said he would “wipe out an entire civilization,” meaning Iran; the next morning, when he didn’t follow through, the same leftist media said he was a TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out.

Whatever temperature suits the media goes, until it boils over and the most unstable of the population start to wonder that, if they want something done, they might have to do it themselves.

We in no way believe the media “causes” violence. The media has a right to call someone “Hitler,” or to say their policies threaten democracy. Otherwise, all policy discussion and political jousting would soon be criminalized. Then, too, human beings are responsible for their own actions. 

Still, rhetoric matters, and when a steady drumbeat tells people that democracy itself is on the brink and they use dishonesty about what someone is doing as a weapon — the Russia collusion hoax and the fake Steele dossier is a prime example — it’s not surprising that a small number of unstable individuals try to take that message to its logical and horrifying conclusion.

More, when unstable people see that their murderous, evil fantasies are being incentivized into action by people offering them hero-worship and celebrations if they just pull the trigger, the republic’s stability is threatened even more.

It’s not just the media’s fault. For decades, we have surrendered our children to ideological panhandling, otherwise known as government education. Critical thinking has been replaced with victim-blame-fixing; social justice, which once opposed capital punishment, now carries out executions in the streets and attempts them in hotel ballrooms, and celebrates them in taprooms and social media chat rooms.

An invitation to “be a Luigi” is a pass to a party of people who purposely sold their souls to a dark, inhuman world. Imagine them in power. There indeed would be No Kings, but there would be plenty of executioners.

The answer is not censorship. We must never allow our side to stoop to the violence and oppression practiced by the progressive class. Calls to regulate media or to substitute it with government (“public”) media, to crack down on misinformation, or to fix the problem by controlling speech are wrong and would lead to a heinous outcome.

Because who would decide what counts as misinformation? Who would determine which viewpoints are acceptable? Who draws the line between violent rhetoric and protected speech?

Whether laying seashells in an “86-47” pattern or promising free beer for the assassination of Donald Trump is protected speech or actionable conduct lies with whoever holds power. The answer to each of those examples could vary widely, depending on the decision-maker.

That’s why the power to answer should lie with no one, as a rule. We quote Charlie Kirk here: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

And on those rare occasions, when the line between violent speech and violent conduct carried out as speech (active threats of a person, or promotion of violence against that person) is too close to clearly discern, only the people, through legitimate courts of law, must decide, not powerbrokers in the Swamp.

It’s cliché to say it, but the answer really is more speech. It is alternative media. It is exposing those who call for or celebrate violence and calling for consequences, such as ostracizing them from society or firing them when they fail to meet the ethical standards of the people they work for.

Free speech does not mean that violence can be encouraged; that is not speech but conduct. And free speech doesn’t mean society cannot stand up and say, “This won’t be tolerated.”

Ultimately, the answer is simply to advocate for what conservatives have advocated for all along — a return to a society of individual liberty bound up with personal responsibility and accountability.

When we have free schools in which children are taught the critical thinking skills they need to navigate right from wrong, when strong families thrive and are able to build for their children a foundation of strong moral values, when censorship regimes are dismantled inside government so that propaganda is not an official narrative, the impulse to violence will recede.

The answer to a sick society is to heal it, not kill it. 

To solve the crisis of violence before us does not demand that we exorcise our constitutional liberties; it demands that we strengthen them.