What Word the Media Refuses to Use For the College Riots: Insurrection

May 4th, 2024 4:00 PM

No one who's politically aware can be unaware of January 6, 2021.

Tens of thousands of Americans descended on Washington to protest the counts and Covid-related conditions of the 2020 election. A riot took place at the US Capitol. The riot resulted in the charging, per ABC News three years later, of over 1,200 and “incarceration for more than 460 people.” 

The coverage since then of that day in the mainstream media is typified by headlines like this from the New York Times: 

Jan. 6 Panel Accuses Trump of Insurrection and Refers Him to Justice Dept.

Or like this from Forbes

Jan. 6 Insurrection 2 Years Later: How Many Arrested, Convicted And What Price Donald Trump May Still Pay

The Washington Post has an ongoing section titled: 

THE JAN. 6 INSURRECTION

There’s more of this kind of thing out there. And that’s before you get to Democrats like Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden.

Here’s NPR on Pelosi: 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Launches Select Committee To Probe Jan. 6 Insurrection

And CNN on Biden: 

The big lie being told by the former president, and many Republicans who fear his wrath, is that the insurrection in this country actually took place on Election Day.

There’s more like this out there in the media, but you get the drift. When the subject of the riot at the Capitol on January 6th comes up, the “I word” is always nearby.

So let’s take a moment to check the definition of “insurrection” and move on to the events of our current day and what is curiously missing in the coverage of these multiple upon multiple anti-Israel, anti-Semitic riots on one college or university campus after another.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “insurrection” as follows:“…an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.”

As of today, America is awash in multiple upon multiple “acts or instances revolting against civil authority” - the civil authority of one American college or university after another. And the mainstream media coverage is curious indeed. 

Here’s a sample headline from the Washington Post

Riot police and over 2,000 arrests: A look at 2 weeks of campus protests

CNN headlined: 

What we know about the protests erupting on college campuses across America

The CNN story said:  

New York CNN  —  College campuses across the United States have erupted with pro-Palestinian protests, and school administrators are trying — and largely failing — to defuse the situation.

And on…and on and on…went the media coverage of these riots on multiple college campuses, the resulting arrests and financial damage.

Good for them. 

But the missing word in all this coverage? The missing word used routinely in the media and by progressive politicians to describe one solitary -- and admittedly decidedly wrong -- riot on January 6, 2021?

That would be, of course, “insurrection.”

All one has to do is turn on the television or start streaming current network coverage and there is decided violence on display. At Columbia University in New York the insurrectionists smashed windows and occupied the university’s Hamilton Hall. The Los Angeles Times headlined: 

Nationwide, police make almost 2,000 arrests at college campuses since protests started

All of which is to say that what’s happening collectively on some 70 college campuses across the country - riots, vandalism, violent clashes with police -is decidedly an insurrection against the “civil authority” and “governing” of those colleges and universities. 

Yet mysteriously, silence on that fact from the media.

Which in turn suggests that because the culprits of January 6 were Trump supporters the media says they were all about insurrection.

But when the culprits of infinitely larger riots, replete with violence and attacks on police, involve far-left, anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas students and “outside agitators” - oh well, no big deal.

If ever there were a naked example of how liberal media bias operates, there it is. Relentless coverage of “insurrection” for January 6th, (and in fact, no one was ever charged with the actual crime of “insurrection”) shrugging off massive campus unrest as just mere good ole American protests.

The good news? Americans are on to the game. 

And in the hierarchy of the liberal media’s friends in the Democratic Party, word seeps out about concern on how all of this reflects on President Biden and his re-election chances.

As headlined here in the Financial Times

Campus protests become a political liability for Joe Biden and Democrats

Exactly. Which says just why the liberal media is not eager to exacerbate Biden’s problem by describing these events as an “insurrection.”

Things are bad enough as they are.