Nolte: CNN’s Climate of Hate Comes Home to Roost

For nearly five years, going all the way back to the Trayvon Martin uproar, Breitbart News has aggressively documented CNN’s devolution into a 24/7 hate network. This week, CNN’s climate of hate finally came home to roost when a Michigan man, provoked by CNN’s fake news crisis, allegedly made death threats against the far-left network.

CNN chief Jeff Zucker has not only driven his network into last place (by a wide margin behind MSNBC and Fox) and turned it into a national laughingstock, he has used the network as a propaganda weapon to foment violence against police officers, his political enemies on the right, and President Trump. In furtherance of Zucker’s Cloward-Piven political strategy, CNN has also sought to gin up race riots in predominantly black neighborhoods.

CNN’s embarrassing ratings and well-documented fake news crisis are the least of the embattled network’s sins. More than anything else, it is CNN’s indecent and unceasing validation of political violence that is the most disturbing and dangerous.

A quick but far from exhaustive summary…

• To turn the Trayvon Martin story into a black vs. white narrative, CNN falsely identified George Zimmerman (the man who shot and killed Martin in self-defense) as white. Zimmerman is Hispanic.
• CNN fabricated evidence against Zimmerman with the false claim he used a racial slur while calling 9-1-1.
• CNN’s Jake Tapper stood in the middle of the Ferguson, Missouri, tinderbox and poured gasoline all over it with a hysterical anti-police rant.
• Just after the riots in Ferguson finally ceased, to gin things back up, CNN released unverified audio of what they claimed was the shooting of Michael Brown. The audio has still not been verified and there is one gunshot missing.
• No other news outlets pushed the incendiary Ferguson lie about “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” more than CNN.
• CNN openly called for rioting in Baltimore.
• CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Marc Lamont Hill, and Miguel Martinez, openly attacked and sewed seeds of mistrust against those police officers trying to bring calm to Baltimore.
• CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin suggested Baltimore cops were staffed with unstable war veterans.
• CNN attempted to turn the man who tried to assault then-candidate Donald Trump into a folk hero.
• CNN regularly encourages the idea that Trump is another George Wallace (who was shot in an assassination attempt); that violence against Trump and his supporters is legitimate and Trump’s fault; that he is mentally unstable — or in the words of Jake Tapper “unmoored, unhinged, and un-American.”
• CNN compares Trump to Hitler; claims that he is Putin’s Manchurian candidate; that he is an illegitimate president; and then after presenting the president as a unique threat and danger to the country, CNN points what looks like a sniper scope at Trump’s Oval Office window.

Thus far, CNN’s ever-increasing climate of hate has only brought misery, fear, and violence to others — to CNN’s intended victims on the political right. Last week, however, CNN got its own taste of that misery and fear.

Citing his frustration with fake news, authorities report that a 19-year-old man was arrested for making death threats against CNN. Apparently the man called the CNN switchboard some 22 times, hurled racial slurs, and finally threatened to come to CNN’s Atlanta headquarters with a gun. Thankfully, authorities were able to quickly trace the call, which led to his arrest.

It is probably not a coincidence that the threats began after an especially provocative week of fake news at CNN, a week where the far-left network went into hyper-drive to spread the lie that President Trump is mentally ill and unfit for office. Using only Michael Wolff’s widely discredited book as a source, and never once speaking to a medical professional who has examined or even met Trump, the anti-science CNN relentlessly spread this hoax, which was eventually debunked by the president’s White House doctor.

This was also the week that Brian Stelter openly trolled the president with a campaign to get him booted from Twitter. Moreover, the alleged death threats came the day after Jake Tapper hurled a countless number of childish insults at White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller.

No matter how deliberately provocative or intentionally dishonest CNN chooses to be, nothing justifies or excuses violence or death threats — even against a network that itself stokes violence. But it is not unreasonable or uncharitable to hope that some good can come from this.

Maybe now that CNN has provoked threats of violence against itself, Zucker and his on-air surrogates will ease up a bit on the belligerent trolling and provocations in order to adapt a New Tone that includes tolerance of outside ideas and a focus on integrity, facts, and honesty — as opposed to the fire hose of fake news.

And who knows, this approach might even improve the network’s humiliating ratings.

So far, though, these death threats appear to have only emboldened CNN to spread even more provocative fake news against Trump — which is unfortunate.  The idea that CNN is willing to play with fire when no one wants to see anyone over there get hurt is, to say the least, a disturbing spectacle.

 

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.