No Republican should ever escape an interview or news conference without being asked to condemn this monstrous event. The cynical GOP leaders who know that Trump is unfit for office and that many of his cult followers have become violent should not be treated as ordinary party hacks. They are enablers of a dangerous movement. Yet they continually evade persistent, aggressive questioning.
Compare this with the mainstream media’s response to Biden’s recent speech condemning the MAGA movement. Biden — though he generously (and inaccurately, in my book) distinguished the movement from the Republican Party writ large — highlighted the MAGA movement’s far-right extremism and its refusal to ascribe to the basic tenets of democracy (e.g., renunciation of violence, sanctity of elections). Yet many in the mainstream media turned up their noses. “Biden should have been more welcoming,” they said. “He’s too divisive!”
And herein rests the fundamental failure of the mainstream political media. Far too many continue to disguise the political reality we face. They refuse to use appropriate descriptors to describe Republican conduct, such as “fascist” or “racist.” Instead, they mislabel radical authoritarians as “conservatives.”
If this were a foreign country, the media would accurately describe the MAGA movement as a far-right cult. Yet in the United States, too many reporters cannot help themselves in normalizing the movement.
“It seems to be very deep in the mainstream press’s DNA to strain for equality when none exists,” said Margaret Sullivan, media critic and author of the upcoming memoir, “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) From an Ink-Stained Life.” She adds, “Maybe journalists just don’t have the language to truly get across how disturbing and abnormal some of this stuff is. If so, it’s high time to grapple with that.”
And it’s not just Trump who has displayed the GOP threat to democracy. Consider also Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s inhumane transportation of asylum seekers to liberal states or cities to make a political statement. News reports suggest these people may have been tricked or lied to about where they were going and what awaited them at their destination. If so, there may be criminal as well as civil implications. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and others have asked the Justice Department to investigate.
Regardless of the legalities, the tactic is straight from the Jim Crow handbook. Though the GOP applauded DeSantis’s disdain for human beings fleeing dictatorial repressions, his actions followed in the steps of White citizens’ councils from the 1960s that bused thousands of Black Southerners to Northern communities. Politico reports:
Throughout the South, Citizens’ Councils as far and wide as Macon, Ga., and Selma, Ala., Shreveport, La., and Jackson, Miss., lied with impunity, assuring Black residents that jobs and housing awaited them in their new home states. This was never the case, particularly on Cape Cod, where the off-season unemployment rate normally hovered near 20 percent. One man whom the Citizens’ Council had explicitly promised a job and home on the Cape told reporters that he felt hoodwinked. “I’d like to get my hands on those two men who shot me full of baloney about coming up here,” he fumed.
DeSantis is the alternative to Trump, we are told….
Read More: Opinion | Trump’s frightening rally in Ohio shows the media still doesn’t get it
