The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

No, Trump Did Not Incite Violence

Posted on | January 9, 2021 | Comments Off on No, Trump Did Not Incite Violence

Twitter banned President Trump last night, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Note the word “further,” an implied assertion that on some previous occasion, Trump incited violence.

If you have watched CNN or MSNBC the past few days, you know that this assertion has been repeated as a certainty multiple times every hour, 24/7, ever since the mob stormed the Capitol, as if there were no doubt that (A) the President’s speech caused (B) the subsequent riot.

This is the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy as “journalism.”

Ann Althouse — who, I remind you, is a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin — took the time to read the transcript of Trump’s hour-long speech Wednesday and found no such incitement. It simply never happened, no matter how often the media say it happened.

“It’s like they had the narrative ready to go regardless of the facts,” says Glenn Reynolds, professor of law at the University of Tennessee.

Do you think that maybe these law professors know something that the talking heads on CNN don’t know? The evident assumption by the anti-Trump media is that anything Trump says is bad and wrong, and that anytime something bad happens, Trump is to blame. But there were some 200,000 people in D.C. for the “Stop the Steal” rally, and only a small percentage of that crowd — perhaps 2,000 people — were involved in breaching the Capitol. If everybody heard the president’s “incitement,” why didn’t everyone storm the Capitol? Of course, you can’t expect million-dollar TV news anchors to be capable of logical deduction, but wouldn’t you think that someone in the media would become tired of the stench of bovine excrement exuded by their fact-deficient “reporting”?




 

Category: Donald Trump, Media Bias

Comments

Comments are closed.