The Media's Radicalization Machine And The Bullet Meant For Trump

GOP candidate Trump narrowly avoided assassination at a Pennsylvania rally. The media point fingers at everyone but themselves.

An hour ago someone took shots at former president Donald J. Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. He was winged, either by a bullet or debris, then while bleeding and surrounded by a bungling secret service he raised his fist in a photo that will be talked about a hundred years from now. Someone in the crowd took a bullet and is reportedly dead along with the shooter. Initial reactions seem strangely dull all things considered, this being served up not as an escalation of tensions in an increasingly divided America but just another talking point for podcast fodder. No need to ask how we got here. That’s a stupid question.

Here’s a better one. What do you think happens if the media tell the population a country that worships its own mythology of having been born from overthrowing tyrants that a potentially incoming leader is going to be a dictator? What if that population were to have legal access to firearms, the justification for which is born from that history? What if the go-to comparison for that political party is Hitler’s National-Socialist regime? Do you think maybe someone out there might get it into their head that they should follow in the footsteps of their forefathers and get a rifle? Do you think they might mentally run the “baby Hitler” thought exercise over and over as they watch MSNBC in the dark? Do you think they believe the situation to be so critical that political violence isn’t only justified but it is necessary? You already have your answer and not for the first time.

Large swathes of the American media are to blame for this incident. It’s easy to shrug and be dismissive given the propensity for hyperbole in the US political landscape… I’d be hard pushed to think of a Republican in my life time who wasn’t compared to Hitler. Yet there has never been anything like the sustained campaign to portray Trump as a uniquely dangerous candidate that must be stopped at all costs. The Hitler comparisons are the entry point when you discuss Trump, not the breathless conclusion of an evening bout of terminally online hysteria. If you listen to his detractors they tell you he is the harbinger of the end of the world itself and you can listen to them nightly on your TV.

In reality the four years of Trump weren’t close to the authoritarian backslide we were told they would be nor was he activated as the Russian sleeper cell we were told he was by a dossier entirely invented to cost him the 2016 election. Is his attempt to subvert an election outcome shameful and disqualifying? Absolutely… Yet for those of us who know that America is and always has been the world’s largest banana republic it’s hard to be uniquely outraged. Both political parties have been fine-tuned to subvert elections by any means they can, whether it’s ballot harvesting, gerrymandering or even relying on a partisan Supreme Court to deny the right to a recount to support their candidate of choice. In that sense Trump is just another pig rolling around in the shit. He has always been a symptom rather than the disease.

I’ll spare you a lament about the state of American politics because honestly the corruption is and always has been the point. The past nine years though have been uniquely poisonous to the American psyche… A young country turned foul at the hands of a gerontocracy and its people divided into two cults. Party affiliation has replaced religion for the left and become an extension of it for the right. Where once you had neighbours with differences you now have bitter enemies utterly convinced that if the country is given over to the other side it will spell the end. It has been good for almost nobody but the media.

There was a time, although you’d be hard-pushed to remember it, when most news channels and publications adopted a sombre tone. Editorial and reportage clearly divided, aspirations of balance around the topics of the day and a seriousness that imbued them with credibility. Corrections were rare and felt shameful when dispensed, typically accompanied by pledges to do better the next time. Then there was FOX News that disregarded all of those rules, populating their desks with screeching demagogues that didn’t so much blur the line between opinion and fact as take a sledgehammer to it and piss all over the pieces. They were rightly regarded as a joke in journalism circles… Until the ratings sheets were passed around. Each time there was a renewed commitment to do good work, that ratings weren’t everything, that they’d trip up eventually and wind up bankrupted by a lawsuit and abandoned by sponsors.

Fast forward a few decades and every network is FOX News now. Loss leader newsrooms that serve corporate interests or the vanity of billionaires that understand fully the benefit of serving up propaganda in two flavours, reassuring or enraging. That’s the secret sauce in the media burger, the FOX News recipe that worked so well for so long. So now every day, no matter where you are on the political spectrum, you wake up to an apocalyptic crisis… That’s right the world is going to end and only us are smart enough to realise it and maybe stop it and to do that we’ve got to beat the others in every conceivable battleground… Stay tuned for more.

What the networks are reliant on is creating the worst possible avatar of the party they rail against. If you consume only FOX or Breitbart a Democrat is a seven foot, blue-haired, transgender, kefiyah-wearing communist pedophile with a DEI degree from Berkeley and a desire to shred the constitution. If you consume only MSNBC or NPR a Republican is a gun-toting, racist, Christian fascist servant of Putin that wants to imprison women and reduce them to breeding stock while they spend their lunchbreak executing queers. They then sift through news stories to find anything and everything that even vaguely fits these archetypes and fuck it if they don’t they’ll just say they do. The goal is simple… Reassure their audience they are the good folk resisting an existential enemy and exaggerate the threat that “enemy” represents.

This model has been great for viewership, a phenomenon known in media circles as “the Trump bump” though in reality it goes further back. It’s been great for journalists who get to frame themselves as the resistance and spin it into book deals and podcasts. It’s also been great for those exiting their respective regimes as they have a direct path into the media world, so you get Sean Spicer (who the media compared to Goebbels when he was the White House Press Secretary) on Dancing With The Stars and Jen Psaki gets her own news show where she repeats White House talking points. So everybody wins right? I mean this is fine.

Except it isn’t and what it has done has driven everybody insane. You know it and I know it. We’ve all got that friend whose life went off the rails and suddenly all they do is talk about US politics, posting Qanon or Blue Anon bullshit every hour exposing a worrying lack of a sleep schedule. We don’t ever want to say it out loud but we know what has happened to them. They’ve been radicalized and not by some fringe group they found on the deep web… They’ve been radicalized by news anchors on six figure salaries that spew their invective from every TV set in the country.

And so we get to what happened just moments ago. A bullet whizzed past a presidential candidate’s head and likely killed someone who had done nothing more than attend a political rally in America. This is no doubt what the media view as acceptable collateral so they can have their ratings spike although I am sure they won’t have the courage to openly say so. This is what happens when you spend close to a decade saying one political figure IS the next Hitler and his supporters are the pre-Nazi Germans that will get swept along to the point they’re perpetrating a holocaust by December.

The worrying part is that if you believe any of that that even for a second then the shooter’s actions are logical. What else would you expect? America as a nation is one that historically equates political change with violence. Their history is drenched in it. This is why the media’s messaging is especially irresponsible. At a time where a big part of programming is dedicated to hand-wringing about disinformation they see no problem with baselessly speculating about how America might be plunged into a fascist dictatorship under a candidate that already had four years to do exactly that and couldn’t even get a border wall built. They are also going to betray the fact they don’t even believe their own bullshit. Watch as the same networks that have called Trump Hitler wish Hitler a speedy recovery decrying political violence for 48 hours before getting back to encouraging political violence for views.

Initial, unconfirmed reports are saying that the shooter is twenty years old. Think on that for a moment. That means he has spent close to half his life listening to Trump as Hitler and has done so as part of a generation that has had politics sold to them as entertainment, teenagers told that the best years of their lives need to spent LARPing as the French resistance in World War 2 or they’re not good people. Do you think this might have had an affect on his brain? The media doesn’t and they won’t learn a single thing from this. I know because this has happened time and time again this past decade with all the signs of inevitable escalation.

The signs were there when a reportedly mild-mannered Bernie Sanders supporter went to a baseball field and started firing at a group of Republicans including Steve Scalise. The shooter was in Facebook groups called Terminate The Republican Party, The Road To Hell Is Paved With Republicans and Donald Trump Is Not My President. The signs were there when someone dressed in black went and armed with a gun, knife and zip ties went to the home of Justice Kavanaugh because they wanted to stop Roe vs Wade being overturned. The signs were there when Rand Paul was given six broken ribs by his neighbour over a purported political argument turned extreme, something networks such as CNN thought was hilarious. The signs were there when Paul Pelosi was attacked at his home by a man who said he was on a suicide mission to kill him, Gavin Newsom and Hunter Biden, something networks such as FOX thought was hilarious. And yes, the signs were there on January 6^th and CHAZ and Sandmann and Rittenhouse and every other fucking insane thing that has happened as the media stokes fires just so they can talk about how hot it is in here.

Don’t think for a second the media will assume any responsibility for this nor are they going to pump the brakes as we crash into November. There isn’t anyone to hold them accountable beyond their own editorial standards and they universally gave themselves permission to throw them out with other such outdated concepts such as objectivity and impartiality. Even as the country was approximately one inch from a constitutional crisis that would have led to violent reprisals across America they can’t believe their luck. More revenge, more radicals, more ratings.