One manifestation of the Media Research Center’s CNN Derangement Syndrome is to assume that every single story CNN airs or publishes has some secret “liberal bias” that must be called out. Hence, we have Matt Philbin’s manufactured distress that CNN’s website published an article marking the 100th anniversary of a notorious racist massacre in Florida in which the Ku Klux Klan murdered dozens of black people in a Florida community, then burned down the community:
Fancy the surprise of CNN.com’s Harmeet Kaur when she flipped the page on her 365 Reasons to Hate America desk calendar and discovered that Nov. 2 is the 100th anniversary of the Ocoee, Florida race riots. That’s editorial gold in a “news” organization that runs on race baiting, resentment and lefty smugness. And with the election tomorrow, Kaur must have felt like she’d hit the lottery.
And lest you think the glee wasn’t general at CNN, check out the headline someone came up with: “On this day 100 years ago, a White mob unleashed the deadliest Election Day violence in US history.”
Needless to say, Philbin offers no evidence that such a calendar even exists, let alone that Kaur owns a copy — which means he’s spreading lies. Philbin then made up more stuff by inventing a motivation for Kaur to have done the story in the first place:
We know CNN wants to remind us that America is bad, and white Americans are the worst. We know CNN would like us to think whites are always scheming to keep black people from voting, and we know that CNN likes to imagine whites are always just a disputed election away from mass lynchings and arson. We know CNN has an interest in keeping us divided, and wants our collective guilt to be top of mind when we enter the voting booth.
The reality a century on from the Occoee massacre is the political violence major cities are preparing for will come, if it does, at the hands of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. The political left are now the intimidators, ready to burn it all down if the election doesn’t turn out their way. But that doesn’t have a place in CNN’s narrative.
Whatever CNN’s motivations, there’s a good and productive reason for marking the 100th anniversary of Occoee: to marvel at how far we’ve come. This was the real, crushing institutional racism and race hatred of Jim Crow. It should remind us of the heroism of the Civil Rights movement, undercut the pretensions of multi-millionaire athletes grumbling and musicians grumbling about “systemic racism.”
Philbin is effectively saying that any racism today deserves a pass because it’s not as bad as it was in the Jim Crow South — and, anyway, Antifa. Way to play whataboutism there, Matt.