Charlie Kirk: It's Not About the Milkshakes - How the Left-Wing Media Is Encouraging Violence
The American media’s enthusiastic endorsement of the British phenomenon of “milkshaking” politicians is even more insidious than it might appear at first glance.
By media accounts, the practice of throwing milkshakes at people began spontaneously this month when a British man thought that was an appropriate response to a political candidate saying something that “offended” him.
Now American outlets such as CBS News — not to mention American companies such as Burger King — are laughing and cheering as leftists chuck milkshakes at Nigel Farage, the Brexit leader who heads the most popular British party in Thursday’s European Parliament elections, and other candidates.
I immediately suspected the most sinister motives, and The New Republic quickly validated my suspicions with an article extolling political violence as an “effective” way to “humiliate” one’s political opponents with virtually no downsides.
“Milkshaking” is undoubtedly an assault. If it were committed against a liberal politician, it would be time for a “national conservation” and there would be journalists calling for lengthy prison sentences. We’d probably even have to listen to Democrats declare that we must ban certain “dangerous” dairy products while accusing conservatives of secretly loathing people who are lactose intolerant.
But milkshaking is also undoubtedly a milder form of political violence than, say, trying to massacre politicians on a baseball field. Frankly, the practice is more embarrassing than injurious to its victims, and that’s part of its appeal to the media here in America.
By defending “milkshaking,” the media are trying to whitewash their cozy and accommodating relationship with left-wing radicals willing to commit violence against conservatives and anyone else they disagree with. They’re putting a friendly, “harmless” face on the left’s shameful legacy of condoning political violence.
From the moment they realized it was even remotely possible that Donald Trump could become president, the American media hasn’t been able to get enough of violence against conservatives. In 2016, for instance, they largely ignored the violent leftists who attacked attendees at Trump rallies in Chicago and San Diego, preferring to craft an alternative narrative that sought to shift the blame onto Trump supporters.
This was the beginning of the now ubiquitous “violence breaks out” headlines, which journalists use when they want to disguise who was being violent to whom.
By 2017, some “mainstream” journalists were writing puff pieces extolling the communist and anarchist criminals who flocked to the “antifa” banner in order to engage in organized violence against conservatives.
A year later, the pro-antifa sympathies of those “woke” columnists spread to the very heart of cable news. In 2018, CNN’s Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon made their first impassioned moral defenses of a group that smashes people over the head with bike locks for supporting the president.
As of this April, Cuomo had upgraded his already-glowing assessment of antifa. Whereas he once merely praised antifa members for being “on the side of right,” he now equates those violent leftists to the American soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy.
None of this is coincidental. One recent analysis shows that, at their fringes, journalists are working closely with antifa members to advance their mutual political goals.
You might ask whether these journalists know that they’re playing with fire. You might wonder if they realize that normalizing political violence can easily backfire.
The unfortunate truth is that they simply don’t care. The same antifa groups that leftists lionize now attack journalists with striking regularity, yet remain darlings to the media.
At this point, they commit as much violence against people they think are journalists as they do against people they think are “fascists,” although there’s certainly some degree of overlap.
In the minds of those who set the left-wing media agenda, the safety of their own colleagues isn’t nearly as important as making it safe for violent communist and anarchist criminals to attack conservatives. If a few entry-level journalists get pummeled, too, that’s just collateral damage in the crusade against Trump and his supporters.
“Milkshaking” may not be quite as thrilling for leftists as outright assault and battery, but it does convey a less threatening image than masked thugs wielding clubs menacingly as they prowl the streets looking for their next conservative victim.
When you hear the American news media applauding British activists for “milkshaking” politicians they don’t like, don’t forget that they were actively encouraging far more egregious forms of political violence long before anyone ever thought to weaponize desserts against Nigel Farage.
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