The Patriot Post® · Don't Let the Media Tell You What to Think

By Thomas Gallatin ·
https://patriotpost.us/articles/50809-dont-let-the-media-tell-you-what-to-think-2017-08-16

At a press conference Tuesday, President Donald Trump responded to questions from reporters about the violent and deadly riot that transpired in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend, and he again leveled blame on both white racists and the “alt-left.” Naturally, “reporters” and politicians on both sides of the aisle raced to the microphones to offer their statements condemning Trump’s words. This is becoming par for the course. The Leftmedia tells Americans how to think; no nuance or caveat allowed. You either express your absolute hatred of neo-Nazi white supremacists or you are one. And if you’re a Republican, you are one either way, they say.

We in our humble shop have been more than willing to call out Trump for foolish things he has said, but we find ourselves more often than not having to push back against and correct the mainstream media narrative. These pontificators — even some conservatives — have become so biased and hostile against Trump that they’re unable to accurately and objectively report on what he says. It appears now more so than ever that the MSM’s primary objective is to instruct Americans on what to think and not to report the news and trust Americans to freely come to their own conclusions. For the MSM, propaganda has replaced reporting.

The MSM’s practice has been to intentionally conflate conservatives with white supremacists, and more specifically to tacitly suggest that anyone who voted for Trump is a closet racist. Secondly, the MSM has inferred that Trump, by defending the right of white supremacist groups to express their speech via protests, must secretly be in agreement with their views, irrespective of his repeated rejection of those views.

Here are a few of Trump’s statements from Tuesday’s press conference; decide for yourself what he said:

“What about the alt-left that came charging in at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in the hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do.”

“You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent, and nobody wants to say that. But I’ll say it right now.”

“I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. But not all those people were neo-Nazis. Believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.”

“This week it’s Robert E. Lee. I notice that Stonewall Jackson’s [statue is] coming down. I wonder, is George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You really do have to ask yourself, when does it stop?”

“I think there’s blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you [reporters] don’t have any doubt about it, either. And if you reported it accurately, you would say it.”

“You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people — on both sides. … You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue, and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

That last statement — “fine people on both sides” — was problematic in that it was easy to take out of context. But what Trump meant is where he ended up — that decent people come down on both sides of the statue debate. It was not decent people dominating either protest. His muddling of the point doesn’t invalidate it. In any case, watching the press conference or reading all of Trump’s remarks leaves one with a very different perspective than reading the Leftmedia’s cherry-picked quotes. And that’s their intent.

Finally, the video below is from a black police officer. He offers some of the best analysis we have seen to date on the whole Charlottesville protest and its aftermath.