The Media Research Center continued its defensive ranting in the wake of the shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk:
- Demonic Jezebel Called on ‘Witches’ to Curse Charlie Kirk Before Assassination
- MSNBC Guest: Charlie Kirk’s Murder Might Flip Utah’s GOP Legislature on Open Carry
- The View Once Erroneously Claimed Kirk Palled With Nazis, Now Mourn
- In Conversation With Scarborough After Kirk Shooting, Trump Praised Him As A ‘Great Man’
- Editor’s Pick: Erick Erickson Calls Christians to Show God’s Light After Kirk’s Murder
Curtis Houck had another meltdown over Oliver Darcy, this time for calling out right-wing hate:
While most on CNN and the broadcast networks kept it civil and even eloquent at times in covering the murder of Charlie Kirk, former senior CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy chose to go the opposite direction on Wednesday night at his site Status, raging at conservative media for “particularly alarming” rhetoric “ratchet[ing] up the language” and sending America down “a darker path” unlike “cooler heads” in “mainstream media and progressive voices.”
Darcy had the gall to trumpet “many prominent voices in mainstream and progressive media” showing up on scene in this tragedy as “leaders who lower the temperature, not raise it.” His example? Mehdi Hassan, who insisted he was against Kirk’s murder even though “Kirk called me a ‘lunatic’ and a ‘prostitute’ and demanded I be deported.”
“It was a model of how to respond: empathetic and clear about the bright red line that must never be crossed. Fortunately, it’s how the vast majority of mainstream media personalities and progressive figures reacted,” he added.
Then came the pivot: “The reaction on the right, however, has been markedly different.”
Darcy cited Jesse Watters, Laura Loomer, Elon Musk, Clay Travis, and the despicable Andrew Tate as examples of dangerously “influential voices in MAGA Media” who “have chosen instead to ratchet up the language”[.] […]
Darcy sneered at Kirk from the get-go, tagging him as a “right-wing activist and MAGA Media personality” and had “long embraced fierce debate on culture war issues, often taking contrarian and outlandish far-right positions, while relishing the verbal combat[.]”
Only then did he concede that “his killing was nothing less than a horrific and intolerable act of violence” and “no matter how deep the disagreements, violence is never the answer.” But the niceties ended there.
Before launching into his attack on the right Darcy found a cause in “online algorithms feed[ing] people a steady diet of outrage and extremism” creating a nation “increasingly polarized and political violence is breaking out into the open.”
At least Houck somehow refrained himself from smearing Darcy as a “Benedict Arnold,” as he usually does — maybe he has been reminded to tone down his hateful rhetoric. But he also failed to prove Darcy wrong.
Alex Christy was similarly annoyed that hateful right-wing rhetoric was highlighted:
After conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot but before he was pronounced dead on Wednesday, former NBC and MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner declared on The Jim Acosta Show that we all have to tone down the “insane rhetoric,” but claimed that is hard to do because of President Trump’s crime crackdown in Washington, D.C.
Kirschner’s initial thought was decent enough, “I fear that where we are is, if not at a boiling point, we are, you know, at this simmering stage where it feels like people are maybe so desperate, so anxious, so despondent at the circumstances that political violence is going to become a viable, you know, possibility for them to sort of deal with their frustration, their anxiety, and their despair.”
Unfortunately, he then derailed, “And we all have to find a way to cool it down and ratchet that back, which is hard to do when you have the streets of Washington, D.C. militarized. You know, what signal is the administration sending that, you know, we are willing to do anything to expand our control of the people? So I wish we could find a way to begin to reduce the heat and pull back from this insane rhetoric that has been going on.”
That’s the problem. Everybody believes it is somebody else’s fault because their cause is the just one. Liberals cannot on one hand claim Trump is militarizing D.C. and this is such a threat to the American way that it makes level-headed political discourse extremely difficult while simultaneously making jokes about how the National Guard soldiers have been put on leaf-blowing duty.
Why not? The fact that National Guard soliders were put on leaf-blowing duty instead of the crime-fighting duties they were supposedly brought by Trump to D.C. to do is inherently mock-worthy. Don’t think that Christy and the rest of the MRC crew wouldn’t be doing the same thing if a Democratic president had done something similar.
The MRC’s nepo-baby leader, David Bozell, got mawkishly silly in lionizing Kirk during an safe-space right-wing radio appearance:
On a reflective episode of The Dana Show podcast, simulcast on The First, host Dana Loesch sat down with MRC President David Bozell to honor the extraordinary life and tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk. Bozell’s opening words captured the weight of the loss: “Charlie Kirk was certainly the best at creating an activist organization in the conservative movement. He was one of, if not the best, public speakers we had in our ranks. He combined all of that and started a podcast, and then started his family. He had this prolific career; he was the Rush Limbaugh of our time in that respect.”
No refernece to Kirk’s hateful and borderline racist rhetoric, of course — that would have made Bozell’s Limbaugh comparison a little too on the nose. The post, written by MRC PR dude Kurt Etheridge, made sure to insert a little self-promotion:
Loesch praised NewsBusters for exposing “media malpractice.” She wondered aloud if the media’s failure to recognize their missteps in covering Charlie’s death might finally erode their credibility. Bozell noted that while “95% of the coverage was measured” initially, with even liberal anchors offering condolences, the tone shifted quickly.
Tim Graham got somewhat mawkish, but stayed on message, in his Sept. 11 podcast:
The shock of Charlie Kirk being gunned down in Utah just doesn’t go away. There’s no one who’s been involved in conservative politics who doesn’t know about Charlie – even if some of us never met him – and there’s no one who doesn’t feel like this could have been the fate of any conservative speaker out in public.
We don’t know everything about the shooter yet, but we certainly know that the national media have long carried a partisan message that Donald Trump and his supporters are an “existential threat” to democracy. It’s not hard to imagine that this constant message would lead someone to feel that it would be heroic to eliminate this threat.
[…]Of course, a variety of journalists lamented “permissive” gun laws, as if they can prove that this shooter didn’t acquire their rifle legally. In so many cases where liberals preach gun control, their “solutions” wouldn’t stop bad shooters from acquiring their weapons.
Of course the gun must be defended. That’s what the MRC does.