It was quite the scene on Monday’s New Day as the panel of CNN analysts and hosts continued the liberal media drumbeat to try and (at least culturally) criminalize and ostracize conservative speech as the root of evil, demanding Fox News be punished and the President be condemned for his “racist dog whistles” against the caravan. All told, they deemed “right-wing terrorism” as responsible for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.
Faux conservative and liberal media darling Max Boot led the way, telling co-host and former FNC host-turned-FNC hater Alisyn Camerota that “there has been a radicalization of the right, Alisyn, which has been going on for a number of years and you’re now seeing the consequences of it” in the form of actual and attempted violence last week.
Boot explained that “a lot of people...bear responsibility for creating this hateful climate,” led by President Trump and Republicans for doing things like condemning George Soros. No word if Boot is okay with the liberal media’s attacks against other megadonors like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers (the former is Jewish too).
The CNN analyst continued, suggesting that last week has shown there’s a “right-wing terrorism” problem in America (click “expand”):
They’ve been demonizing and vilifying George Soros as a symbol of Jews for years and it's not just the Republican Party, think about the right-wing media machine, especially Fox News. Just last week, for example, Lou Dobbs had a guest on that was talking about the Soros-occupied State Department, which is echoing neo-Nazi propaganda and there are a lot of people that need to be held accountable and responsible for what is going on. I mean, this is like — you know, imagine what happens after we have a lone wolf Islamist attack, some jihadist shoots up some location, somewhere. We ask, what was — what influenced them? What radicalized this person? We need to ask the same thing about all these right-wing terrorism — all these right-wing terrorists because there's more right-wing terrorism in the United States than jihadists terrorism.
Camerota saw no problem with Boot’s demonization of people who don’t share their views, telling political analyst David Gregory that the President and those opposed to the illegal immigrant caravan were an inspiration for the Pittsburgh shooting:
David, you can draw a direct line from all of the vitriol and hate rhetoric about the caravan that’s, you know, some 2,000 miles away from our border and the gunman in Pittsburgh who referenced that — who referenced that and somehow turned it into an attack on Jews.
Gregory applied a now-tired liberal media trope, which was to suggest that the press must be careful in not assigning blame to the President to only then use a handy-dandy transition phrase or word to do just that.
The former Meet the Press moderator opined that “we cannot ignore the relationship between the President criminalizing immigration” and having “waged rhetorical war...on immigrants and suggesting that they’re vermin and they’re infesting the country.”
Again acting like Trump was an accessory to murder, Gregory concluded that Trump “has a special obligation” to speak out “given the language he’s used that are anti-Semitic dog whistles” and “racist dog whistles,” regardless of whether assilants supported him or not. Spoiler alert: the synagogue gunman didn’t support him.
Playing the role of MSNBC’s Steve Schmidt on CNN, Boot kept pouring it on, lamenting that Trump would dare criticize impeachment-obsessed billionaire Tom Steyer since he was “one of the targets of the MAGA bombing.” Sorry, Max, but be more accurate and say bomber. The bombs didn’t actually go off.
With a brief interlude by co-host John Berman about the rise of anti-Semitic attacks in America (citing statistics from the liberal Anti-Defamation League), Boot demanded consequences against conservative media for enabling violence and even a boycott of Fox News advertisers (click “expand”):
[W]e should not accept this as being an acceptable way for President Trump to behave, but the other point I would stress again as I was saying earlier, it's not just Trump, okay? There are a lot of Republicans who are doing exactly what he is doing and there is a vast right-wing propaganda machine led by Fox News, which needs to do some major soul searching here, and what I suggested in a new column this morning is advertisers and investors need to boycott Fox News until they pull back from their promotion of extremism and hate....He is turbo-charging it. I mean, let me tell you. I have lived in the country for more than 40 years and I have never encountered this kind of open anti-Semitism that I started seeing in 2015 when Donald Trump started running for President. I mean, I’ve — maybe I was naive. Maybe I lived in a bubble on California and New York ans so forth, but I just did not see it and then all of a sudden, my inbox started filling up with this filth. You cannot divorce the President's words and actions from the words and actions of these extreme supporters.
Gregory replied in agreement that the other part of it is a “hateful connective tissue on social media” that the President is also responsible for. Then again, this is the same person who claimed that the media are not responsible for the state of our American discourse. Way to pass the buck, David.
To see the relevant transcript from CNN’s New Day on October 29, click “expand.”
CNN’s New Day
October 29, 2018
6:08 a.m. Eastern
MAX BOOT: Well, I think there has been a radicalization of the right, Alisyn, which has been going on for a number of years and you’re now seeing the consequences of it, and it’s — a lot of people, I think, bear responsibility for creating this hateful climate. President Trump certainly, the way he talks, for example, about globalists, or George Soros, or embraces nationalism, that sends out the signals pretty clearly, but a lot of other people in the Republican Party are doing the same thing. They’ve been demonizing and vilifying George Soros as a symbol of Jews for years and it's not just the Republican Party, think about the right wing media machine, especially Fox News. Just last week, for example, Lou Dobbs had a guest on that was talking about the Soros-occupied State department, which is echoing neo-Nazi propaganda and there are a lot of people that need to be held accountable and responsible for what is going on. I mean, this is like — you know, imagine what happens after we have a lone wolf Islamist attack, some jihadist shoots up some location, somewhere. We ask, what was — what influenced them? What radicalized this person? We need to ask the same thing about all these right-wing terrorism — all these right-wing terrorists because there's more right-wing terrorism in the United States than jihadists terrorism.
(....)
6:12 a.m. Eastern
CAMEROTA: David you can draw a direct line from all of the vitriol and hate rhetoric about the caravan that’s, you know, some 2,000 miles away from our border and the gunman in Pittsburgh who referenced that — who referenced that and somehow turned it into an attack on Jews.
DAVID GREGORY: Well, First of all, I just want to say we have to be careful about having a discussion that is going to blame the President or another political leader for these acts of violence and in that way, tone does matter and in that way our words do matter —
CAMEROTA: But I mean, he didn't pull the trigger, right?
GREGORY: Hold on, but at the same — let me just — let me just
CAMEROTA: But you don’t —
GREGORY: Let me finish.
CAMEROTA: Go.
GREGORY: — is that, at the same time, we cannot ignore that relationship, we cannot ignore the relationship between the President criminalizing immigration and saying, you know, this shooter — what was so painful among the things that were so painful about what he did is not just targeting Jews in such a vulnerable time during Shabbat, but to target this immigrant group HIAS which is the immigrant which is doing group as a fundamental Jew issue value but, in a secular way, it's a fundamental American value, which is looking after the stranger and immigrant. So there’s no question that a President who as waged rhetorical war, and worse, and you think about family separations on immigrants and suggesting that they’re vermin and they’re infesting the country, you cannot ignore how that can be heard by people who hate immigrants, who are afraid of anything that is going to change their way of life and who hates Jews. So, yeah, I think that part is awful. I don't fully agree with Charles in a sense that I do think words matter — all words matter, so when the President says the right thing, and the speech writers work for the President and they write out his speeches, but he has a special obligation given the language he’s used that are anti-Semitic dog whistles just like he uses racist dog whistles to go to be much — to go much further to denounce this kind of hate because rightly or wrongly there are people who support him, who think he is sympathetic.
CAMEROTA: Well, yeah, if he said some of those things at his rallies and meant it off script I think that it might be more convincing.
GREGORY: Yeah.
CAMEROTA: But there’s this, as we know, bifurcation, between what he says at Teleprompter Trump and then what he says at the rallies where he continues to insult people and gin them up.
BLOW: If he is flipping back and forth, literally, one moment to one hour to the next, and saying one thing in the teleprompter, and then literally signaling sometimes in the speech — signaling that he doesn't really believe what he is saying, or right after that, in Twitter form or coming out to go to a helicopter or to a plane and saying something completely different, he is reducing the importance of those words, not me, right? So he is making — he is saying those words don't matter, not me.
MAX BOOT: Right and he is still engaging in attacks, you know, calling Tom Steyer, one of the targets of the MAGA Bombing, calling him a crazed and stumbling lunatic and attacking the so-called fake news media. I mean, this is not normal. This is not how any President of the United States should behave and we should not accept this as being an acceptable way for President Trump to behave, but the other point I would stress again as I was saying earlier, it's not just trump, okay? There are a lot of Republicans who are doing exactly what he is doing and there is a vast right-wing propaganda machine led by Fox News, which needs to do some major soul searching here, and what I suggested in a new column this morning is advertisers and investors need to boycott Fox News until they pull back from their promotion of extremism and hate.
BERMAN: Anti-Semitic attacks are up 57 percent. They were up 57 percent in 2017. They were up 30 percent in 2016 after being very low for a number of years. The question is why. Jonathan Greenblatt, who runs the Anti-Defamation League, who will be on later in the show, says this existed and this trend exists independent of Donald Trump. This is not happening because of him, but the question is though is he doing anything to make it better.
BOOT: He is turbo-charging it. I mean, let me tell you. I have lived in the country for more than 40 years and I have never encountered this kind of open anti-Semitism that I started seeing in 2015 when Donald Trump started running for President. I mean, I’ve — maybe I was naive. Maybe I lived in a bubble on California and New York ans so forth, but I just did not see it and then all of a sudden, my inbox started filling up with this filth. You cannot divorce the President's words and actions from the words and actions of these extreme supporters.
GREGORY: And the hateful connective tissue on social media, too, which is, you know, and what he has said, and not taking responsibility when he uses dog whistles like the globalists and going after Soros is just not — inexcusable.
