The media abdicated their responsibility last summer by minimizing the violence.
The media abdicated their responsibility last summer by minimizing the violence.
L ast summer, New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof headed to Portland to try to locate the “radical-left anarchists” then–president Donald Trump kept mentioning in his campaign speeches. “Help Me Find Trump’s ‘Anarchists’ in Portland” Kristof implored his readers, as he roamed the city, running into well-meaning musicians, activists, technicians, and doctors, but, alas, no anarchists. The masked “protesters” who had thrown mortars, M-80s, and bricks at cops guarding the federal courthouse in Portland only a few weeks earlier were nowhere to be found. The “protesters” who in the week before Kristof’s column was published had been involved in dozens of acts of vandalism, destruction, and violence, including assaults on cops with “flaming projectiles” and bricks, had disappeared. Kristof’s piece is the equivalent of writing a column about the January 6 riot and focusing on the protesters who didn’t go into the Capitol.
Kristof’s piece was one of the most ham-fisted efforts, but he wasn’t alone. The day before left-wing CNN pundit Josh Campbell flew into Portland to mock concerns about violence — “I also ate my breakfast burrito outside today and so far haven’t been attacked by shadowy gangs of Antifa commandos” — a pro-Trump marcher had been shot to death, allegedly by an Antifa member. There was a concerted effort by many in the national media to play down the extent and damage of protests that summer, which turned out to be the most expensive domestic upheaval in insurance history, with costs exceeding $1 billion. Minority neighborhoods and city centers were often left to looters at night, as elected officials were often paralyzed by the fear of offending Black Lives Matter protesters. Some pundits would even argue the property destruction wasn’t “violence” at all — from the comfort of their homes, of course.
Turns out, as the Washington Post reports today, that the extremism Kristof and Campbell couldn’t locate anywhere within Portland’s city limits has done great damage to the city’s poorest communities. It turns out that de-policing efforts — the Portland city council cut $15 million as a “defund” effort and now has a cop shortage — have left some of the most vulnerable neighborhoods open to spikes in violent crime. Anarchists, writes the Post, have hijacked Portland’s “social justice movement,” exacerbating the problems BLM protesters were supposedly trying to fix.
Not that this is surprising to anyone who wasn’t in the liberal bubble. Local stories about black leaders attempting to distance themselves from Antifa were already being written in the summer. A month after Kristof’s column, Mark Hemingway detailed the corrupt 50-year influence of hard-left radicalism in the city in the Wall Street Journal. None of this was useful at the time. An election was coming.
A few weeks before Kristof’s piece, Portland mayor Ted Wheeler had even asked Governor Kate Brown for National Guard troops. One imagines it was not to stop peaceful schoolteachers from being heard on criminal-justice reform. Soon, the feds sent agents to protect the courthouse, which was under nightly attack. Hysteric Charles Pierce claimed that cops had “softly Pinochet’ed in broad daylight.” In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg did him one better, writing that “Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun.” (No hyperbole was left on the table during the Trump years.)
This April, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general report found that the Trump administration had authority to send agents to protect federal buildings from violent rioters, though law enforcement had been spectacularly “unprepared,” lacking any comprehensive strategy to deal with the situation. Unsurprising, as well.
Now, I’m not sure if Chris Cuomo still believes Antifa members are just like GIs landing on Omaha Beach, but that position was rampant in last year’s op-ed pages. Last June, for instance, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Antifa champion Mark Bray — who once told Teen Vogue that the group named after the Stalinist Antifaschistische Aktion “aspires toward creating a better world” — that “Antifa isn’t the problem. Trump’s bluster is a distraction from police violence.” Well, Trump is no longer president, and Portland just had its 30th homicide this year — five times more than it did during the same period last year.
“The protesters aren’t all peaceful, nor are they primarily violent,” Kristof finally conceded in his piece. “They’re a complicated weave, differing by time of day.” This is the “mostly peaceful” narrative adopted by much of media during the riots. It describes virtually every domestic political disturbance in history. It’s always complicated. Very rarely does a clear majority engage in insurrection. “Sure there are anarchists and antifa activists in the Portland protests,” added Kristof, “just as there are radiologists and electricians, lawyers and mechanics.”
I’m sure that radiologists and electricians, lawyers and mechanics march with extremist right-wingers, as well. Only one group of radicals is coddled in this way. Left-wing violence is either treated as a figment of the collective conservative imagination or as a movement completely disconnected from the wider liberal causes. And just as the media abdicated responsibility when it came to origins of the Wuhan virus so as not to have to entertain the notion that Donald Trump might be right about anything, they abdicated their responsibility by minimizing last summer’s eruption of political violence.