OPINION:
Just two weeks since an assassin’s bullet came within a fraction of an inch of killing former President Donald Trump during a speech on live national television, Google has already begun vanishing the story.
Type “assassination attempt on trum” and Google’s search engine directs you to internet pages about an attempt by Puerto Rican nationalists to assassinate President Harry Truman in 1950. They never made it past the front door.
No wonder Google’s corporate motto when it first launched had to be “Don’t be evil.” It remains a struggle for the company.
Google’s disdain for free speech and determination to undermine democracy is rivaled only by the dishonesty of the political media, whose fortunes today rely entirely on Google’s whims. Together, the media and Google work feverishly to erase from public consciousness the attempt on Mr. Trump’s life, lest it garner sympathy for him among voters before November’s election and reveal him to be the bravest man in American politics today.
These are some seriously sick and twisted people.
It is no different from what the media have done since Mr. Trump arrived on the political scene. They spun crazy conspiracy theories about Mr. Trump and his family while lying to the public to prop up and protect any Trump political opponent who came along.
Remember the silver-tongued porn lawyer Michael Avenatti? He was going to be the next president, according to CNN, but instead, he is serving time in federal prison for extortion, fraud and embezzlement.
As for Mr. Trump’s near-assassination, the American political media have strained to disappear the story. Even when forced to report the biggest news of the year, The New York Times cropped the photograph of Mr. Trump — blood gushing from his wound — being rushed off stage so that it would make Mr. Trump appear less brave and heroic.
Google eventually retired the “Don’t be evil” slogan. The New York Times has no such excuse.
Amazingly, the best reporting to come out of the assassination attempt came from Gary O’Donoghue, the North American correspondent for the BBC. Within an hour of the shooting, he aired an interview with a witness who said the gunman had been spotted on the roof well before the shooting but authorities failed to do anything.
In the most fitting irony of this moment in American political media, Mr. O’Donoghue is blind.
Not only was an actual blind man able to see the story that the entire American political press refuses to see, but he would have done a better job than the Secret Service at protecting Mr. Trump from getting shot in the first place.
By the time the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee rolled around a few days after the assassination attempt, the media were in no mood to listen to Republicans or the half of the American population who vote for Republicans.
The whiny scolds at MSNBC boycotted the convention. But they did not want to miss an opportunity to lie to their viewers about the GOP convention. So they set up a fake background screen showing the floor of the convention and provided hours and hours of lies and fake “analysis” from their fake studio in New York.
Again, I am not making up any of this.
In one of the most deranged rants before the fake convention screen, the lady who normally wears a Trump wig on TV hyperventilated that President Biden (who was still in the race at the time) would prove just as heroic as Mr. Trump’s assassination survival if he were to survive a bout of COVID-19.
Of course, we now know that Mr. Biden survived COVID-19 but did not survive the election campaign. Mr. Trump beat him before the first ballot was cast.
Now comes Kamala. Or at least it appears the Democratic pooh-bahs are poised to dismiss the will of Democratic primary voters and install Vice President Kamala Harris as their nominee.
Ms. Harris — a lifelong politician — has attacked Mr. Trump’s VP pick as weird and somehow disloyal to the country. Sen. J.D. Vance grew up poor, served his country in the Marines and is new to politics. Naturally, the cackling hyena Mr. Biden picked as VP because she was a “woman of color” thinks Mr. Vance is the “weird” one.
Good luck with that. Also, Trump voters are racist for attacking the “woman of color.”
Meanwhile, Ms. Harris — the experienced politician — is hosting openly segregated rallies for “White dudes” who support her. And Democrats in the media openly warn Ms. Harris against picking the popular governor of Pennsylvania for vice president because, well, he has a problem.
That problem — which they are openly talking about — is that Gov. Josh Shapiro is Jewish, and an alarming portion of the Democratic Party today openly hates Jews. If she picks Mr. Shapiro as her running mate, the Democratic media warns, she will lose the support of enough Democrats that she could lose Michigan and even Minnesota — and thus the election.
Weird times indeed. But not weird in the way Democrats claim.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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