After a peaceful Monday rally by Second Amendment activists in Richmond, Virginia, CNN and MSNBC deserved thoughts and prayers seeing as how their fear-mongering about “violence” a la Charlottesville by “thousands” of “heavily armed” “guns rights activists, white nationalists, militia groups swarming” the Capitol fizzed into puddles of lies.
MSNBC Live host Craig Melvin needed perhaps the most sympathy, given his hour of attacks on those in attendance. Repeatedly, he bashed the event by placing peaceful attendees alongside “militia groups” and “white nationalists” to tar and feather it as one of hate with “fears of a dangerous confrontation.”
MSNBC colleague Andrea Mitchell also stated that “Virginia residents praying today's rally at the State capitol is not a repeat of the horrible 2017 Charlottesville disaster” and suggested that Second Amendment activists were synonymous with those who clashed (with Antifa) in Charlottesville.
The NAACP’s Sherrilyn Ifill told Mitchell that the Virginia Citizens Defense League-organized event featuring “weapons of war is at odds with the very essence of who Martin Luther King was” by demonstrating violence instead of “non-violence.”
Filling in for Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC Live, Chris Jansing fibbed that “several hate groups” were “protest[ing] on the steps of the Virginia State Capitol,” which would be news to the VCDL and planned speakers like Bearing Arms’s Cam Edwards, State Delegate Nick Freitas (R), and WRVA’s Jeff Katz.
Already having a hilariously bad morning, NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez reluctantly told viewers that “thankfully, so far, it’s been a peaceful protest” even though “there was a lot of concern about the potential for violence.”
Unfortunately, the Jeffrey Zucker-led CNN was just as egregious. This was despite the fact that they interviewed numerous peaceful attendees and, hours earlier, the mother of the late Heather Heyer on her opposition to the gun control proposals by Virginia Democrats.
Correspondent Ryan Nobles huffed on Early Start that “[t]here are a lot of people nervous about what's going to happen there today, but they do feel like law enforcement has it under control.”
Co-host Laura Jarrett replied that Governor Ralph Northam (D) was “clearly trying to avoid another Charlottesville.”
Despite having a long career being around the military, CNN Newsroom co-host Jim Sciutto seemed triggered and spooked by the presence of people lawfully carrying guns:
A State of emergency in place as a massive gun rights rally gets under way at the State Capitol. A large but peaceful crowd is there protesting legislation to restrict access to firearms. For today, the government has banned weapons on the Capitol grounds, but outside Capitol grounds, many demonstrators are, in fact, heavily armed. They look like soldiers there. Look at those weapons. Look at the gear.
Along with that nonsense, Sciutto boasted that Old Dominion was “on edge” because of “fear extremists” and “white supremacists could spark violence.”
Fortunately for the sake of the truth, CNN correspondent Sara Sidner didn’t engage in the nonsense her colleagues (and competitors) engaged in. During At This Hour and CNN Right Now, she engaged in real journalism by explaining that not one of the concerns heading into the rally came to fruition (click “expand”):
Look, those threats which caused the governor to call for a State of emergency have simply not emerged. The police very clear in saying they have not had a single arrest during this rally and we’ve been standing here all morning, since the very beginning. There are thousands if not tens of thousands of people here. I want to give you a view. We are standing right outside of the area where you go in to the Capitol there, and what you'll see are just throngs of people lining not just this street, but all the streets around the Capitol. There are folks that are there to lobby their legislators because this is actually Lobby Day, where they are trying to tell them how upset they are with some of the gun restrictive law that they are looking to pass. There are several that folks are upset with and people want their voices heard, but there are people here from all over the country, not Virginians, to be sure.
(....)
But all this talk about gun legislation has brought out tens of thousands of people. There are so many people out on the streets. They have dispersed as the police came through and said, okay, the rally permit time is over. People peacefully left. What you're seeing the remnants of the security apparatus that was in place. We're literally standing on the other side of the fence from where the Capitol is. Those who were going into the Capitol had to go in without their weapons, which angered folks because this was a second amendment rights rally. And those who were out here, some of them were armed to the teeth to show off the fact that they can have their guns and it is their right to be able to display the Second Amendment in any way they please.
