On Sunday’s episode of ABC’s This Week, host Jonathan Karl furrowed his brow somberly and, with the resonant tones honed at anchor school, looked into the camera and declared, “The murder of Charlie Kirk was not a political act.”
Legacy news talking heads have twisted themselves into human drill bits to obscure Tyler Robinson’s motive for assassinating Kirk. First, the crazed effort to cast Robinson as a “Groyper” swept through the establishment’s media channels, culminating in Jimmy Kimmel’s recitation of this blatant lie to his audience on Monday. Others have been more subtle, blaming the killing on “gun violence” and stressing the “both sides” nature of political violence.
EDITORIAL: WHAT THE MURDER OF CHARLIE KIRK MEANS
Karl’s brazen lie Sunday — that politics didn’t play a role in the shooting — topped off a week of this propagandistic drivel, underscoring why the public trusts them less than ever before and detests them personally. Perhaps to understand why this is, the elite media class might consider a simple thought experiment:
Imagine a comparable liberal figure had been gunned down ten days ago. It could be a high-profile Democratic politician or media member — it doesn’t matter, only that it’s someone as influential as Kirk was on the Right.
Now imagine that the ammunition used in the shooting had right-wing phrases engraved into the casings, something like “Make America Great Again” or “Men can’t become women.”
What’s more, imagine that all of the available evidence suggested that the shooter was in fact a member of the Right who’d been radicalized by President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
What would the legacy media’s reaction have been? Would they have attempted to play down the political angle of the story? Or would they have emphasized it at every opportunity? Would they have suggested that “Trump’s rhetoric” might have been to blame? Or would they have blamed “both sides”?
OPINION: CHARLIE KIRK’S HONORABLE LEGACY OF CIVIL DISCOURSE
The worst part is that these folks think they’re being slick. But that’s what bubble living does to you — it makes you blind to the way your perceived by those who live beyond it.
The legacy media’s greatest blind spot isn’t their bias — it’s their inability to see how clearly we see through it. Their zeal to protect the narrative regarding Kirk’s killer is only the latest reminder of how dumb they think we are.