The protest in Richmond for Lobby Day went about as well as you could hope. No violence, though some apparently disagree. More than that, though, protestors were model guests, picking up after themselves and even prying up stickers at fell and affixed themselves to the roads.
Yet despite that, the media is still bound and determined to paint the protesters as violent extremists.
For example, CNN continues to invoke Charlottesville in their discussions.
Despite the peaceful pro-gun rights rally this past week in Richmond, Virginia, CNN continued to bring up the 2017 Charlottesville rally that resulted in the death of a woman. The 2017 rally was a white supremacist rally, far different from this past week’s rally in Richmond.
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But, further down in the article, CNN again brought up the 2017 Charlottesville rally.
“The rally ended peacefully despite earlier concerns of the potential for violence similar to what had erupted more than two years ago at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, which left one counterprotester dead and several others injured.”
Of course, Accuracy in Media notes that CNN also published several articles comparing the protests to Charlottesville leading up to Monday.
Why, though, would they focus so heavily on Charlottesville when the purposes were so clearly different?
After all, Charlottesville wasn’t billed as a gun rights rally by any stretch of the imagination. Even though it was ostensibly about “uniting the right,” it became very clear very early that it was a white supremacist rally. In fact, the only real cover Charlottesville had was simply the fact that the media screamed “racist” so much over the years that it was difficult for many of us to take it seriously. My initial reaction was to dismiss the racism claims because they’d called so many other things racist that weren’t it was impossible to believe them on face value.
It took time to determine that yes, it was actually racist.
By contrast, Richmond was very clear in its intentions. It was about gun rights and not race relations or any other issues. There were numerous minority activists among the crowd, particularly the crowd carrying firearms.
So why do networks like CNN keep bringing it up?
That answer is, unfortunately, pretty simple. The partisan hacks at the network simply want people to associate a non-violent protest for gun rights with the violent protests in Charlottesville.
It should be noted, however, that while one counterprotester lost her life, she was hit by a car. This at a protest where, again, there were a number of firearms present.
Yet few people remember that. They just remember that someone died and that the boogieman of the decade–the racist–was responsible. So, CNN plays on that. It helps that Charlottesville and Richmond are in the same state, thus connected by geography. That made it even easier to build connections in people’s minds.
Over and over again, the mainstream media outlets like CNN claim to be unbiased, but then do things that make their own biases quite clear. They’re not news, they’re progressive activists masquerading as journalists.
The invoke Charlottesville because they want to silence us, they want to stigmatize us into crawling back into the dark corners of social media where we associate with ourselves, but with no one else on the topic of guns and gun rights. If we’re silent, they can say whatever they want about guns and there’s no one to call them on their foolishness.
Yet they can’t do that as easily by just demonizing guns. So, they try to link us to racists by linking our protests to protests carried out by racists.
We can’t allow it to work.
