The happening featured Donald Trump Jr. and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle.
The couple was on stage at UCLA to promote the president’s son’s book, when they were jeered by dissident Deplorables for shutting down the Question-and-Answer segment.
The taunting of Donald Jr. by the hecklers was covered very differently by the American Daily Beast and the British Guardian.
Descriptions of positions and personalities were prefaced by the Daily Beast with “edifying” editorializing. The hecklers the Beast described as “fringe-right.” Their alleged instigator and inspiration was said to be “a white nationalist.” Their perfectly legitimate demands for a “Q&A” and for “America First” the Daily Beast deemed tantamount to a right-wing insurrection or civil war.
Discrediting dissent is all in a day’s work for the American press.
What do you know? The disgruntled audience at Trump Jr.’s book event was also “known” by the Daily Beast to be “Holocaust deniers.” As far as this reader can tell, the group challenging those on stage for refusing to answer questions had not said a word about the Holocaust. Nor had the disrupters been interviewed by the Daily Beast about their views on the Holocaust.
More to the point: Why is participation in our democracy predicated on one’s views on the Holocaust? What does an individual’s opinion about that topic have to do with his right to solicit answers from members of Donald Trump’s politically active family? I say this as a Jew whose family tree was truncated by the industrial-scale mass murder of millions of Jews that was the Holocaust.
Perhaps the Daily Beast is of the Daily Northwestern’s school of journalism. The Daily Northwestern, a campus Newspaper, had recently said “no” to fact-gathering if this, apparently archaic, journalistic practice proves too unsettling to campus snowflakes.
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There are many Deplorables, among them Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin, who refuse the ditto-head designation. Instead, these dissenters perceive President Trump and his emissaries as reneging on doable promises to build a wall, to place a moratorium on legal immigration, and put the United States and its long-suffering people first.
But to the Daily Beast, these positions are cause to libel those who hold them as awful, Israel-averse, anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. Trump voters inquiring about campaign promises hitherto unkept were wrapping “racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic messaging” in the raiment of Trumpism. Or so we were instructed.
Contrast the Daily Beast’s emotive, ad hominem laced invective with coverage of the same event by The Guardian, a British daily newspaper.
It was not racists who “drowned out” Trump Jr. and his paramour, but “diehard Make America Great Again conservatives,” reported The Guardian.
It was not the adjudication of the Holocaust that these “hostile conservatives” were demanding, but the need for a “Q and A! Q and A!”
The fury of the “fringe group” was not white-hot racism, but that “of America Firsters who believe the Trump administration is captive to a cabal of internationalists, free-traders, and apologists for mass immigration.”
There was a “factional rift on the Trump-supporting conservative right,” reasoned the Guardian,” intelligently. By skedaddling, rather than staying to face the music, the president’s son, ventured The Guardian, had sundered his own case that it was he who was “willing to engage in dialogue, but that it was the left that refused to tolerate free speech.”
And, OMG! Contra the new journalistic credo established by the Daily Northwestern; The Guardian interviewed two dissenters and published their pungent criticism, namely that “the pro-Trump movement was being infected with ‘fake conservatism’ and that the president himself was at the mercy of a cabal of deep state operatives who wouldn’t let him do many of the things he campaigned on.”
“We wanted to ask questions about immigration and about Christianity, but they didn’t want to face those questions.” Not a word about the Holocaust.
Yes, Deplorables aren’t dittoheads. They dare to question The Donald. And some reporters dare to give them a fair shake.
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