CNN Special’s Delusions a Recipe for More Political Violence
CNN Special’s Delusions a Recipe for More Political Violence
We can debate the wisdom of CNN’s decision to suspend elementary journalistic ethics and give Taylor Lorenz a platform from which she laundered her neurosis into the respectable discourse. When she’s not fantasizing about former President Joe Biden’s death, the onetime mainstream reporter now spends her days broadcasting her fear that those who do not wear surgical masks in all public settings are out to kill her. Her capacity for sound political analysis is, to say the least, questionable.
What’s less debatable is that CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan believed that Lorenz provided valuable perspective. Through an eerily permanent forced smile, the pundit said she found it “hilarious” that anyone would be hypocritical enough to object to the perverse cult that accreted around United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson’s alleged murderer, Luigi Mangione. “This is the United States of America,” she said through wry chuckles, “as if we don’t lionize criminals.”
Lorenz revealed that she saw her “biggest audience growth” after she restyled herself a champion of the delusions that allegedly compelled Mangione to murder a father of two whom he had never met and whose company’s services he did not patronize. Her eyes widened as she gushed over the alleged killer: “Here’s this man who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart,” she beamed. “He’s a person who seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.” The two reporters laughed heartily. Both concluded that the thrilling ritual sacrifice of the innocent, while antisocial, is understandable in these barbaric times.
If O’Sullivan was attempting to establish a ghoulish equivalence between those on the right who pursue violent remedies to the thoughts that torment them and those on the left who succumb to their delusions, Lorenz might have been a useful foil. Although Sullivan did shine a spotlight on the left-wing rabble in the streets aping Lorenz’s moral vacuity (while giving short shrift to the prominent Democratic lawmakers, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chris Murphy, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, who do the same), that was not the reporter’s intention. He made that clear.
In promoting the special in which Lorenz appeared, “MisinfoNation: Extreme America,” O’Sullivan preemptively apologized for his program’s halfhearted attempt to appear balanced. “It is important to point out off the top here that we’re most of the time speaking about right-wing extremism in this country,” he said. “That is because that is, by a massive margin, where the extremist attacks have come from, right? From Charlottesville to January 6.” That is, Mangione’s worshippers are a curiosity who never act on their mania. Right-wing violence, by contrast, is the statistical norm.
O’Sullivan’s dismissal of the threat posed by left-wing political violence tracks with the assessment retailed by a cottage industry of media outlets, NGOs, and governmental entities that claim either that “far-right violence” is “the biggest domestic terrorism threat facing the country” or that very idea of a “violent left” is a “myth.” That would have made it far harder to compose and publish a 7,000-word piece on the growing threat posed by the violent expression of left-wing pathologies. The obstacle to clarity that reporters like O’Sullivan refuse to overcome is their deference to activist organizations and refusal to connect the dots.
“When it comes to extremism in this country, I mean, the issue very much so is on the right, on the far-right from — you know, from Charlottesville to — to January 6,” O’Sullivan told another CNN host. “There isn’t exactly an equivalent on the left in this moment.” Only if you’re not looking for one.
In the period O’Sullivan presents as one typified by right-wing violence, we experienced the 2020 riots, the mainstream commentary around how “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society,” and claims that the “demand to protest peacefully is a trap.” We lived through the attempt on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s life, the attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers and the agitation for more of the same, and the savage beating of Marco Rubio’s campaign canvasser “because he was a Republican.” We endured the trauma of pro-Hamas savagery in America’s cities and on its campuses, and we remember the violence and vandalism that followed.
Even after Charlottesville, where there absolutely was “violence on both sides,” the sophisticates’ response to this outbreak of Weimar cosplay wasn’t to condemn violence but rather to beatify one side of the conflict. That was what prompted Dartmouth College lecturer Mark Bray to argue that “physical violence against white supremacists is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective.” It led Mother Jones to praise resistance that “sometimes goes beyond non-violent protest — including picking up arms.” It compelled then–CNN host Chris Cuomo to speculate that “all punches are not morally equal.” The violent Antifa movement that came together amid this advocacy operated on the well-supported delusion that its actions were necessary and justified.
Right-wing violence is not a “myth.” It happens more than anyone should be willing to tolerate, and to tally individual episodes of political violence on a scorecard is to miss the point. Still, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s statistics, there were just 27 successful or attempted right-wing terroristic events between 2017 and 2019, up from just seven between 2005 and 2007. That figure rose to 40 between 2020 and 2022. Even if the absolute numbers are modest, the trend is troubling.
And yet, only if you elide acts of violence explicitly designed to beget political change — only if you discount the popular outlook on the left that regards violence as a romantic and vivacious feature of the revolutionary ideal — could you take the oft-repeated notion that the right alone is preternaturally violent at face value. That’s what Lorenz represents: the smiling face of a belligerent paranoiac who finds catharsis in the meting out of street justice, all while projecting that derangement onto everyone else. It’s one thing to see that sort of person barking madly on a street corner; it’s quite another to see her expound her philosophy alongside a chortling representative of the establishment press.
Political violence does not happen in a vacuum. It is a reciprocal phenomenon that grows in response to violence committed by the other side and the consequences, or lack thereof, that follow. Increasingly, the loudest fringes of American politics, which command undue influence over their respective political homes, are inclined to make excuses for their own maniacs. That has only created conditions that beget political violence. So long as there are Donie O’Sullivan specials that will go to tendentious lengths to maintain that there is no equivalence between those on the right and those on the left who see violence as an instrument of political utility, we should expect more violence.
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