Media coverage of protests is so ideologically biased as to deceive the public. Tea Party protests were law-abiding, and so orderly that they usually left no trash behind (unlike the recent Women’s March in Washington, or attendees of the 2013 Obama inauguration, who left behind lots of trash).
Virtually no Tea Party members were ever arrested at a protest, in contrast to the many crimes committed by Occupy Wall Street protesters; more than 6,000 left-wing Occupy protesters were arrested for offenses such as rioting and defecating on police cars, and they did hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to a city hall.
A featured speaker at the recent Women’s March once kidnapped, raped, starved, and tortured to death an elderly man. The Daily Caller reports on the disturbing past of Women’s March speaker Donna Hylton. She is a convicted felon who — along with others — kidnapped a 62-year-old man in 1985 and murdered him. As the Daily Caller notes:
Hylton’s name is listed on the Women’s March website alongside prominent liberals like Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, actress Gloria Steinem, filmmaker Michael Moore and CNN commentator Van Jones.
Hylton, along with three men and three other women, kidnapped 62-year-old real-estate broker Thomas Vigliarole and held him for ransom, before eventually killing him. As noted in a 1995 Psychology Today article, when asked about forcibly sodomizing the victim with a three foot steel pole, one of Hylton’s accomplices replied: “He was a homo anyway.”
Speaking about Hylton, New York City Detective William Spurling told Psychology Today: “I couldn’t believe this girl who was so intelligent and nice-looking could be so unemotional about what she was telling me she and her friends had done. They’d squeezed the victim’s testicles with a pair of pliers, beat him, burned him.”
After the victim perished, “Hylton delivered a ransom note to a friend of Vigliarolo’s asking for more than $400,000, even though the victim was already dead by that point.”
The Daily Caller is a conservative publication, so most swing voters will never see this information. Certainly, it is not being reported in the mainstream media, such as the Washington Post and New York Times.
By contrast, the mainstream media did everything they could to blacken the reputation of the Tea Party. ABC News’ Brian Ross falsely implied that the Aurora mass shooter was a Tea Party activist. As Ross told viewers, “There is a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado on the Colorado Tea Party site…Talking about him joining the Tea Party last year.” But as Jack Kelly noted, the shooter had nothing in common with the Tea Party activist other than a very common name: “The James Holmes of Aurora who police arrested is a 25-year-old white man. The James Holmes … who is a Tea Party member is a 52-year-old Hispanic.”
The media dug up irrelevant dirt on Tea Party activists. One news story covered how a Tea Party leader had had his business license suspended years earlier due to late payment of taxes. The New York Times covered the “arrest record for shoplifting” of a Tea Party political candidate, although the arrest had occurred years before she got involved in the Tea Party. (See Jeremy W. Peters, GOP Leaders Face Challenges from Right, International New York Times, Feb. 26, 2014, at p. 5.).
In 2011, the New York Times prominently reported the arrest of a California Tea Party leader for carrying an unloaded pistol. So did Reuters and many other newspapers. But as the New York Post noted, he had no criminal intent, and apparently thought his valid California permit for the gun allow him to transport it. He “was arrested at La Guardia Airport after presenting an unlicensed firearm to security officials.” He was trying to board an airline flight when he alerted a TSA “agent that he had an unloaded gun in a locked box.” He “produced a valid California permit” for it, but authorities said the license doesn’t allow him to possess the gun in New York. He “told authorities he was carrying the weapon because he has received threats.” His arrest said much about the draconian way New York enforces its gun laws — and very little about the Tea Party. His lawyer said he had “been arrested despite the fact that he was ‘in temporary transit through the State of New York in possession of an unloaded, lawful firearm,'” and argued that he “had behaved in accordance with all laws.”
ABC’s Brian Ross was not the only reporter to falsely link the Tea Party to violence. Other journalists falsely attempted “to link Tucson shooter Jared Loughner to the tea party,” even though “Loughner wasn’t linked in any way to the tea party and was, in fact,” hostile to conservatives “in his political ideologies.” One of Loughner’s favorite books was The Communist Manifesto. In her Dec. 6, 2016 Washington Post column, “When spreading fake news leads to real consequences,” Petula Dvorak baselessly blamed the shooting of former representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) on Sarah Palin supporters. Giffords was shot by Jared Loughner, in a shooting that also took the life of Judge John Roll, a Republican appointee.
There is no evidence that Loughner was a Palin supporter or saw the political “map with crosshairs” put out by “supporters of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin” that Dvorak mentioned. (That map “targeted the districts of 20 House Democrats,” including Giffords’). Yet Dvorak strangely claimed the map’s “consequences” were that “Jared Loughner showed up with a gun” and shot Giffords. But images of crosshairs do not cause violence. As one journalist noted, “crosshairs and bull’s-eyes have been an accepted part” of the political lexicon.
To add insult to injury in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, the Washington Post and New York Times enlisted race-baiter Al Sharpton and ex-Congressman Paul Kanjorski, who had called for a Republican governor’s death, to lecture America about the need for “civility” in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, falsely implying that conservative rhetoric had somehow spawned the shootings.
