The FBI should consider stopping by the homes of New York Times reporters Michael Barbaro and Peter Baker after their slew of public remarks about Donald Trump that could incite more violence against the former president.
It’s been all of two days since Trump again narrowly averted an attempt on his life, the second in just as many months, and the national news media have paused not for a minute in blaming the former president for the attempted attack. Barbaro and Baker went further on Tuesday’s episode of the “The Daily” New York Times podcast, asserting that virtually all future political violence, regardless of a potential perpetrator’s party or ideological affiliation, is because of Trump.
Barbaro raised the question on the show as to “whether the United States has now officially entered a new era of political violence with Donald Trump at its center.” To answer that question was Baker, who had conveniently just written an article headlined, “Trump, Outrage and the Modern Era of Political Violence.”
Without hesitation, Baker immediately pivoted to the Springfield, Ohio, animal-eating migrants controversy that Trump’s campaign has highlighted and corporate media have hysterically insisted is not real, despite on-record, eyewitness testimony confirming it. “The former president just last week said that these immigrants are eating people’s pet dogs and pet cats,” he said. “Not true, no evidence of that.”
There is literally a recorded call to local law enforcement, since corroborated by other news outlets, of a man who says he’s watching Haitian migrants walk around with dead geese, plus other evidence. Baker went on to say that Trump’s campaign rhetoric about the migrants, who have also overwhelmed local public resources, “seems to have provoked some sort of reaction.”
The “reaction” Baker referenced was a series of hoax bomb threats that originated overseas, according to Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who suggested they were intended to agitate the election. In other words, Baker may have very well been spreading foreign propaganda intended to interfere in U.S. elections. Nevertheless, Baker said it’s Haitian migrants who are “feeling particularly threatened” at the moment and that the fear “comes back to Trump, actually.”
Barbaro took his cue from there: “Right, in some sense Trump is the through-line in this new era of political violence,” he said. “But that’s a pretty complicated equation to think about… This idea that Trump has at times inspired political violence through his rhetoric. We know that.”
The “political violence” Barbaro referenced was of course the single riot within the last decade that government-amplified media have chosen to condemn— Jan. 6, 2021, in which the only gunshot fired was from a cop at an unarmed Trump supporter he struck in the neck and killed.
Baker agreed, adding that Trump “has elevated the temperature in our society to the point where therefore politics is an existential fight and it’s not just enough to have a debate… He inspires such anger at himself because of the way he is “
To recap, in an episode of the Times’ flagship podcast that was nominally about a second assassination attempt against a former president who is campaigning for president again, the two reporters were rehashing Jan. 6, 2021 and attempting to diminish a legitimate controversy in a region of the country critical to the outcome of the election. To them, the only apparent problem in Springfield is that Trump is scaring the migrants Kamala Harris dumped on the town.
Nice!
To be sure, Baker admitted that Democrats’ rhetoric, including from Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, is “pretty strong.” (That’s when they’re not criminally prosecuting him, I’d add.) But, he said, Trump is so much worse, of course.
“He doesn’t seem to have any compunctions about using language like that against them and in fact, he’s used much worse,” Baker said. “He has over the years directly encouraged beating up protesters or hecklers at his rallies, shooting unarmed people like looters or immigrants.”
Setting aside that it’s perfectly legal in some cases to shoot looters and immigrants, if a TV anchor gets to determine whether Trump is speaking sarcastically, then I’m more than qualified to determine whether he’s joking, and Trump was definitely joking when he “encouraged” assaulting the hecklers at his rallies.
Democrats have called Trump an existential threat to democracy, taken his economic “bloodbath” remark out of context to make it seem violent, and likened him to Adolf Hitler every hour on the hour for nearly a decade. But, Baker said, Trump “has gone much further than the language he complains about Democrats using in his own rhetoric.” So, again, it’s Trump’s fault he was twice nearly murdered in broad daylight.
If the price to pay for running for president as a Republican is constantly worrying you’re about to be taken out, and the media blame you for it, that’s the definition of encouraging and justifying future violence. FBI?
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