WashPost Highlights Right-Wing Extremists, Coddles Leftist Extremists

May 22nd, 2016 12:42 PM

The Washington Post announces it’s a liberal newspaper by highlighting right-wing extremism and coddling left-wing extremism. Both of these happened in Sunday’s paper. The front page carries a story on the threat of “patriot” groups in Oregon – the only times the Post wants to present people defending liberty and the Constitution is when they’re 9-11 truthers who conduct paramilitary exercises on weekends.

But The Washington Post Magazine carried an article that made a platform for “The New Language of Protest,” asking campus leftists to explain “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and “microaggressions.” Shutting down speech is somehow described as “a new civil rights movement.”

Black student Roquel Crutcher says “People ask me to touch my hair. That’s a microaggression.” Fadumo Osman explained her headscarf and cultural appropriation: "When I wear my traditional clothing I’m a foreigner and I’m criminalized for it, but when you wear it....it’s cute.”

Teddy Amenabar of the Post set up this one-sided dialogue:

Just as the social turmoil of the 1960s generated new vocabulary -- turn-on, sit-in, sexism -- this latest wave of activism and upheaval is adding to our lexicon, with terms such as safe space, trigger warning, microaggression and cultural appropriation, which we explore here. We asked student leaders and activists from local universities to define these terms for us and to elaborate based on their own thoughts and experiences.

Many students believe these concepts foster inclusion, increase sensitivity and set up parameters in which difficult conversations can occur and marginalized voices can be heard. But critics, both on campus and off, call the concepts limiting, unrealistic, even un-American. They argue that creating safe spaces and using trigger warnings, for example, serve only to stifle free speech, coddle students and ignore both history and the reality found off campus.

The student leaders and activists we talked to have a ready answer to that last point. "I don't think it's outrageous for me to want my campus to be better than the world around it," says Sasha Gilthorpe, outgoing student government president at American University. "I don't think that makes me a stupid, naive child. I think that makes me a good person."

That's a "ready answer"? Other petulant pouting is included, like Osman saying "I didn't think that respecting people's existence is coddling, to be very frank."

The front-page story by Kevin Sullivan on the Central Oregon Constitutional Guard is surely meant as Pulitzer Prize-bait -- it stretches all over two entire inside pages under the headline "For some citizens, the government is the enemy." But the Post doesn't recognize that there's an anti-government movement with fringy ideas and violent members called....Black Lives Matter.

This story could be mistaken as a promotional pamphlet for the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center and their mission of warning about the radical right, somehow always expanding at a dangerous rate. (The SPLC tracks but never emphasizes leftist violence and extremism, which means that they are not nonpartisan or non-ideological, as they are portrayed.)

Law enforcement officials and the watchdog groups that track the self-styled “patriot” groups call them anti-government extremists, militias, armed militants or even domestic terrorists. Some opponents of the largely white and rural groups have made fun by calling them “Y’all Qaeda” or “Vanilla ISIS.”

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremism, said there were about 150 such groups in 2008 and about 1,000 now. Potok and other analysts, including law enforcement officials who track the groups, said their supporters number in the hundreds of thousands, counting people who signal their support in more passive ways, such as following the groups on social media. The Facebook page of the Oath Keepers, a group of former members of police forces and the military, for example, has more than 525,000 “likes.”

President Obama’s progressive policies and the tough economic times have inflamed anti-government anger, the same vein of rage into which Donald Trump has tapped during his Republican presidential campaign, said Potok and Mark Pitcavage, who works with the Anti-Defamation League and has monitored extremism for 20 years.

The central character in Sullivan's story is B.J. Soper, who unsurprisingly has wild conspiracy theories. Otherwise, the Post wouldn't find him newsworthy.

Soper said he could not rule out the possibility that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks. He suspects that the government and the “medical community” have had a cancer cure for years but won’t release it because cancer treatment is too profitable for pharmaceutical companies.

“I’m not saying that’s the case,” he said, “but I like to look at all avenues.”

Soper knows those ideas sound crazy to many people, but, he said with a laugh, “It shows I just don’t trust my government.”

Those who track these groups say paranoid conspiracy theories and armed occupations undercut often-legitimate disagreements with federal policies.

Tom Gorey, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the lead agency at the Bundy ranch, said Soper and the others have “taken an aggressive anti-federal, anti-BLM posture because of [their] bizarre and discredited interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and paranoid views of the federal government.”

Said Potok: “People having nutty ideas is of very little importance except when those ideas begin to affect their actions. An awful lot of people have acted violently in defense of some of these ideas.”

To close, let us recall for  the record that Floyd Corkins entered the Family Research Council with the intention of mass murder, and he was carrying a "hate map" by the SPLC to find them. That "hate" was a one- or two-day story in the Post.