Washington Post writer Callum Borchers lost it in a Thursday morning post reacting to the beating of a disabled white Chicago man by four African-Americans, lashing out at conservatives for condemning the mainstream media’s slow response and lampooning them as concerned with anti-white racism.
Writing for its blog The Fix (overseen by Chris Cillizza), Borchers uncorked this doozy of a lede with the first paragraph employing a strawman argument when it came to how those not on the left characterize crimes like this (and what transpires in Chicago):
If you believe discrimination against white people is rampant, that Donald Trump supporters face persecution, that Chicago is a war zone, and the media is dishonest, then your entire worldview is likely to be confirmed by one awful story.
Chicago police have detained four black teenagers after one of them streamed a live video showing the group striking and shouting at a young white man, who was bound and gagged. In the video, the assailants say “f--- Trump” and “f--- white people” and say that the victim “represents Trump,” though it is unclear whether the man actually backs the president-elect.
<<< Please support MRC's NewsBusters team with a tax-deductible contribution today. >>>
Let’s play a game, Callum, shall we? How about we replace white with black, Trump with Democrats, and Chicago with, say, Los Angeles? How’s the story sound now? The answer is people do and should care about heinous crimes like this one and it shouldn’t matter what the make-up of the perpetrators and victims are.
Back to the item at hand, Borchers went next to Infowars of all places to be his cartoonish representation of where conservatives get their news :
The pro-Trump Infowars website described the episode under a provocative headline: “White man kidnapped, gagged, beaten by racist black anti-Trump gang.”
“Will the media even cover this footage or will news networks like CNN bury the story?” the article asked.
The cruel act captured on video is, in fact, receiving extensive media coverage — and universal condemnation — on CNN and elsewhere. But some conservatives are not satisfied by the response.
“If the attackers had been white and the victim had been black, the incident would have, of course, conjured America's ugly history of white mobs committing violence against black people. There is no parallel history of the reverse happening on anything remotely approaching the same scale,” Borchers later claimed.
Relax. They all should receive media coverage, but where conservative media correctly went on Wednesday night was that mainstream media were too slow to cover it. Further, most of these same pundits and sites wondered if it’d be different if a few characteristics were changed.
Downplaying the reality that Chicago is actually a very dangerous city with 762 murders in 2016 (according to CNN), Borchers didn’t really seem to care about that fact when he again smeared anyone right of center who are outraged at what happened:
The message in conservative media is clear: Reverse discrimination — particularly against white Trump voters — is a big problem that the liberals in the media refuse to acknowledge. Oh, and by the way, Chicago (the part inhabited mostly by black people, anyway) is a super-dangerous place, just like Trump said.
“The worldview of many Trump voters might not be supported by data. But now they can find support in one awful video out of Chicago,” Borchers snidely concluded.
