CNN’s embattled afternoon anchor Jake Tapper has spent much of the last few days defending Robert Mueller’s increasingly tainted investigation into President Trump. But when he attacked Fox News over “extremist rhetoric,” Tapper was undoubtedly hoping we all forgot about the dangerous rhetoric he himself has been guilty of hurling for years.
On top of his pathological lying about Trump, the left-wing Tapper often uses what I call “assassination dogwhistles” against the president. What I mean is that the rhetoric is intentionally meant to not only enflame hatred against Trump, but to justify action against him — to portray Trump as such a unique danger to America that taking him out in some way can only be seen as a heroic act of patriotism.
At various times, Tapper has publicly described Trump, the man with his finger on the nuclear button, as dangerously “unmoored,” disturbingly “unhinged,” and worst of all, outright “un-American.”
Tapper is also the reporter who also told the world about the now-discredited Russian dossier, a document that we now know was funded in part — and to the tune of millions — by both the Hillary Clinton campaign and the very same FBI Tapper is so desperate to protect.
When you tell an already bitter and angry left, without any evidence, that the sitting president is a Russian stooge who urinates on prostitutes… When you abuse your media power to inform the public that a sitting president is “unmoored” from reality, “unhinged” even as he holds the power to start a war, and “unAmerican,” that is the act of a man who believes something drastic needs to be done, the act of a man looking for a “hero” to take that action.
Let us also not forget that “assassination dogwhistles” are what CNN has built its last-place network on in the age of Trump; a network that broadcast what looked like a sniper snope pointed directly at the Oval Office, a network whose parent company sponsored Trump-assassination porn, a network that regularly compares Trump to Hitler.
Tapper’s record of inflammatory rhetoric dates all the way back to 2014, when, in the aftermath of an anti-police riot (based on the infamous “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” lie relentlessly spread by Tapper’s own network), Tapper grandstanded in the middle of that racial tinderbox to vilify the very police officers protecting him, his crew, homes, and businesses — an act on Tapper’s part that some saw as an attempt to reignite the racial violence CNN chief Jeff Zucker is always so eager to orchestrate.
Here is Tapper’s monologue blasting first responders, assailing police officers risking their own lives to protect a predominantly black neighborhood, and whose presence, despite Tapper’s cynical efforts to enflame the rioters, did in fact keep the city safe that night:
What is going on in Ferguson, Missouri, in downtown America. These are armed police with semi-automatic rifles, with batons, with shields, many of them dressed for combat. Now why they’re doing this, I don’t know. Because there is no threat going on here, none, that merits this. There is none. Absolutely, there have been looters. Absolutely over the last nine days there’s been violence, but there is nothing going on right now that merits this scene out of Bagram. Nothing. So if people wonder why the people of Ferguson Missouri are so upset, this is part of the reason. What is this? This doesn’t make any sense.
Tapper was once universally seen by both the left and right as a professional, respected journalist. Now he is unable to attract more viewers than MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace. His serial-lies, virtue-signaling, and hypocrisy, continue to take a toll, not only on whatever residual credibility he might have left, but the institution of journalism itself.
Sadly, despite massive conflicts of interests in the Mueller investigation that CNN is aggressively downplaying, Tapper’s dishonesty in defense of this obvious wrongdoing is no longer a surprise, but rather what we have come to expect from an elite member of the #Resistance.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.