On Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed “the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy.” On Thursday night, there was no mention of this speech on evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, NBC, or PBS. PBS did feature eight minutes for former Trump legal aide Ty Cobb unspooling conspiracy theories about Trump spoiling the midterms.
National Review writer and author Noah Rothman has a new book out titled Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, which explains how the media and their chosen extremism “experts” combine to claim there’s not a serious amount of left-wing political violence. Managing Editor Curtis Houck and I explored the phenomenon with him.
On NPR's Morning Edition, Odette Yousef, their so-called Domestic Extremism Correspondent, offered some coverage of this speech -- but she shamelessly sought to rebut Rubio, dismissing his entire argument: “The data have consistently shown what Islamist extremism and right-wing extremism have accounted for a far larger share of violence than the left wing.” That’s some interesting blur, that somehow pro-Hamas extremism is not on the Left. October 7 could be a "far right" attack abroad?
NPR has a record of promoting left-wing violence and insurrection. ln 2020, NPR’s blog "Code Switch," with the slogan "Race in Your Face," posted an interview promoting a new book titled In Defense of Looting. On The NPR Politics Podcast in 2021, they promoted a book by Yale law professor Elizabeth Hinton saying that protests against police shouldn’t be called riots; they should be called ‘rebellions.’ On NPR’s Fresh Air in 2023, the movie critic John Powers praised the movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline, hailing it as a "hugely timely" message on climate change.
You could see the contrast in the coverage of riots in 2020 and in 2021. While they blurred the post-Floyd race riots into a "rebellion" framework, the January 6 riot was presented as a horrific example of right-wing violence. The creation of a special House Committee on January 6, the Pelosi-Picked Panel, refused to seat any Republican who would focus on left-wing violence in 2020. That was banned from the proceedings. This blatant framing exemplifies the Left's double standard on political violence.
A truly nonpartisan news media would discourage political violence of all stripes -- left, right, and just mentally disturbed. Rothman's book compares today's America to previous outbreaks of leftist violence, in the Woodrow Wilson era and in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Enjoy the podcast below. The audio is here.
