Linda Qiu, the resident "fact checker" of The New York Times, took on rising Republican star Vivek Ramaswamy after his breakout performance in last week’s GOP presidential debate, and her interesting choice of terminology unwittingly demonstrated the paper’s liberal mindset.
In response to Ramaswamy’s claim (one not even made at the debate, but to The Atlantic magazine) that there were armed federal agents present at the Capitol Hill riot on January 6, 2021, Qiu, formerly of the slanted liberal fact-checking service PolitiFact, harrumphed in Sunday’s edition:
False. Mr. Ramaswamy has echoed the right-wing talking point that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol did not involve weapons and was largely peaceful.
There was a deplorable riot on Capitol Hill, but most of the people present at the Capitol were not violent. If "largely peaceful" is morally and factually offensive, then consider the several dozen times that Qiu’s employer the New York Times echoed left-wing talking points by insisting that Black Lives Matter-related riots, which caused over $2 billion in insurance claims (a staggering figure, but one confirmed by that rabid right-winger, Times economist Paul Krugman) were “largely peaceful” or “mostly peaceful.”
During that endless summer of 2020 BLM and Antifa rioting, the Times did its best to cover up the left-wing mob violence that often accompanied such gatherings, with over 100 protesters nationwide having either been convicted or pled guilty to federal crimes and some two dozen deaths.
Here are just a few of the myriad examples of the Times calling the often-violent protests as “largely peaceful” or “mostly peaceful”:
In June 2020, reporter Jennifer Steinhauer found then-President Trump’s military support crumbling for standing up for law and order in the nation’s capital: “But the president’s threat last week to use active-duty troops on American streets against largely peaceful protesters, and his flirtation with invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act, have rattled the military world, from its top leaders to its youngest veterans.”
In July 2020, reporters made a nauseating attempt to streamline Antifa violence in Portland, Oregon: “The crowds have been largely peaceful and have included high school students, military veterans, off-duty lawyers and lines of mothers who call themselves the “Wall of Moms.”
In July 2020, the sports department got in on the labeling, criticizing former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for saying “Support for BLM, which is provoking attacks on our law enforcement and innocent people all over America, is disgraceful.”
Baseball writer James Wagner huffed: “Those comments, which incorrectly said the Yankees knelt during the anthem and mischaracterized largely peaceful protests, were countered by Yankees President Randy Levine, who worked under Giuliani during his mayoralty.”
In July 2020, the Times blamed the cops: “Protests around the country have been largely peaceful, with spikes of conflict usually arising in clashes with law enforcement.”
In August 2020, Times reporters petulantly accused Republicans of “using selectively edited scenes to exaggerate violence from the summer protest movement….warping momentary scenes of violence from largely peaceful protests earlier this year into scenes of chaos.”
In January 2021, Times reporters claimed of the protests in D.C.: “During those protests, Mr. Trump walked across Lafayette Square for a photo op after the authorities used tear gas and rubber bullets against mostly peaceful protesters.”
In January 2021, the Times approvingly cited Michelle Obama compared the two, criticizing the “gulf” “…between the police response to the violent mob of Trump supporters that marched on the Capitol a day earlier and the more forceful actions taken by officers in response to largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests in American cities last year.”
