In 2009, as the tea party formed to fight against the growth of government and Obamacare, media talking heads depicted the tea party as racist and violent. In the August recess of 2009, there were six arrests at congressional town halls, each of which the media trumpeted as proof the tea party was violent. In fact, all six arrests happened at a single townhall meeting and five of the six were union activists beating up a conservative black man.

But the tea party was violent.

In 2008, around the time of the Republican National Convention, a still unknown white twenty-something male approached the Texas Governor’s Mansion and threw a molotov cocktail at it. The mansion burned down. The case remains unsolved, though federal and state authorities have long presumed it was a left-leaning anarchist. In fact, around the same time, leftwing anarchists were fighting police in the streets of St. Paul, MN during the GOP’s convention and some plotted to go back to Texas to commit acts of violence.

In 2010, Andrew Joseph Stack crashed a plane into an IRS building in Austin, TX. Members of the media immediately concluded he must have been a deranged tea party activist. In fact, Stack was both a nut and a Marxist whose suicide note attacked corporations and the Catholic Church.

Also in 2010, John Patrick Bedell opened fire at the Pentagon. Again, the media jumped to the conclusion the shooter was of the tea party. But the Christian Science Monitor noted Bedell was an “anti-Bush registered Democrat who believed 9/11 was planned and carried out by the US government.”

Also in 2010, James Jay Lee took hostages at the Discovery Channel and members of the media again initially presumed it was a tea party activist doing it. But it turned out Lee was a leftist who was upset about global warming.

When Jared Lochner attempted to assassinate Congresswoman Giffords in 2011, the media rushed to tie it to both the tea party and Sarah Palin. More than once, while I was on CNN, I had to defend “warlike rhetoric” from the right, with everyone pretending politics had never used war metaphors before then. It turns out Lochner, to the extent he was political, was of the left, but was actually just mentally ill.

In 2012, during the Republican National Convention, leftwing protestors stockpiled 300 tiles, bricks, pipes, and even riot gear to violently disrupt the RNC.

Over and over, the media rushed to blame the tea party, and over and over it turned out the violent extremists were on the left. They all got memory-holed.

Even James Hodgkinson quickly disappeared from the headlines the moment it turned out he was a Bernie Bro after his mass assassination attempt on Republican members of congress.

It is worth noting that in 2010, three leftwing nuts committed acts of violence, but even today the Democrats and their friends in the media claim political violence only began with the rise of Donald Trump.

In 2014, Ismaaiyl Brinsley traveled from Baltimore, MD to New York City and executed two New York police officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. The execution-style assassinations came on the heels of several public comments from Barack Obama and Eric Holder critical of American law enforcement after the Eric Garner situation. After Rudy Giuliani rushed out to blame the rhetoric from Obama and Holder, liberal editorialists in the press pushed back saying only the perpetrator could be blamed, not anyone’s rhetoric.

The historic revisionism and excuse-making continues.

Yesterday, Joe Biden gave a speech in which he sounded like he was in on the extortion. He claimed the violence would continue so long as Trump remained President. He claimed that Trump, uniquely, fostered the violence.

Joe Biden is a man who once told black voters that Republicans would put them “back in chains.” He worked for a man who told his supporters to take guns to knife fights, told Hispanic voters to punish their enemies who he identified as Republicans, and encouraged his voters to get in their neighbors’ faces. Obama’s campaign also pioneered sending postcards to voters and setting up websites where they could see if their neighbors were Republicans or if they had voted.

Again, the media revisionists ignore all of this to claim Trump is uniquely bad.

When Democrats, including Joe Biden, denounce the violence, they do just that. They only denounce violence. Republicans are specifically asked to denounce individuals and groups while Democrats get to just denounce violence generally. When Donald Trump denounced the violence on both sides in Charlottesville, VA, he was excoriated by the press. Biden denounces both sides and gets a pass.

Democrats have settled on a line that the current violence is happening in Donald Trump’s America. They ignore it is only happening in Democrat-controlled cities and is being committed not by Trump supporters, but by far-left activists. They move on from that point as quickly as they moved on from the attempted mass assassination of members of Congress when they found out a Bernie Bro pulled the trigger.

Three weeks ago, in Portland, the media claimed the violence was unique to a federal troop presence. Three weeks removed the violence still rages and Trump is still to blame. The Mayor of Portland has again blasted the President for his rhetoric and refused help in quelling the riots.

At CNN, in fact, while using a picture of a burning building that was burned during the riots, Chris Cilizza is trying to dismiss the dictionary definition of riots by claiming they are really just protests. To be fair, cancer being bad and Chris Cilizza being an idiot are about the only two things on which the right and left find common ground these days.

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Riots and violence have happened since the moment Donald Trump was sworn into office. Should we forget the cars set on fire by protests in DC that day? That was not the Russians or Chinese. It was progressive activists who have consistently and constantly been given a pass by the media.

Chris Cuomo and other members of the press praised Antifa. They compared Antifa to the American soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy. They cannot now admit they were wrong. In fact, they do not want to admit they were wrong. Instead, they blame Donald Trump.

It is really weird how Donald Trump provokes all this violence, but it is not his supporters who are burning down American cities. Right now, the press is demanding President Trump condemn Kyle Rittenhouse, the Kenosha shooter who allegedly shot three and killed two in self-defense. Concurrently, the media has not asked either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris to repudiate Harris’s effort to raise money to get out of jail the people burning down America.

This actually does make me angry. There are issues on which to hold the President accountable for provocation, etc. But the media only and ever always insists Republicans denounce specific people and groups while claiming purity of purpose for the Democrats and giving them a pass.

They claim the political violence did not happen before Trump and, if it did, Republicans were to blame then too. The record shows otherwise so the media ignores it.

On August 15, 2012, inspired by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website, much like James Hodgkinson, Floyd Lee Corkins walked into the Christian conservative Family Research Council with a gun and a bag of 15 Chick-Fil-A sandwiches. He intended to murder the employees of FRC and stuff their mouths with the sandwiches. “They endorse Chick-fil-A and also Chick-fil-A came out against gay marriage, so I was going to use that as a statement,” Corkins told investigators.

Thankfully, Corkins never got past the guard. The guard took a bullet to the shoulder but was able to tackle Corkins.

2008 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2014 were before Donald Trump ever rode that escalator. They were in an apparently blissfully peaceful age where the President of the United States was just telling supporters to take guns to knife fights, get in their neighbors’ faces, and setting up a White House office to turn in your neighbors for “lying” about Obamacare.

To paraphrase Donald Trump, peaceful my ass.

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