Communists March with Democrats in Atlanta, but the Media Doesn’t Care
Today, social justice warriors took to the streets of Atlanta to protest the election of Donald Trump. (The Atlanta Journal Constitution has this report on the activities of the marchers.) Former President Jimmy Carter, U.S. Representative John Lewis, and former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin were the Democratic headliners of the event. Sponsors of the rally include the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Democratic Socialists of America, the NAACP, and the Sierra Club. (A full list of the sponsors can be found here.)
Joining these Democratic heavy weights were members of the Industrial Workers of the World. According to this article in The Guardian, they marched “with a red and gold hammer and sickle flag, [and] chanted ‘no more presidents.'” The IWW, of course, is a Marxist organization that believes (according to the preamble of its constitution) that “the workers of the world [must] organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.”
Has anyone seen any headlines in the mainstream media reporting that “Democrats and Communists Rally in Atlanta”? Of course not. One could argue that the IWW is an insignificant organization that hasn’t had much influence since the death of its founder Eugene Debs, who ran for president five times in the early 1900s. Thus, coverage is not warranted.
Well, maybe. But insignificance sure didn’t stop the mainstream media from reporting over and over when Richard Spencer and a couple of hundred knuckleheads gathered after the November election and discussed white nationalism in Washington, D.C., and shouted “Heil Trump.” The Spencer meeting was big news covered by all the major networks despite the fact that his following is minuscule.
The favorable press received by the Atlanta marchers despite the Wobblies in their ranks is just another example of the mainstream media’s bias. It is no wonder that Americans’ trust of the mainstream media has dropped to a historic low. If the media is going to blow out of proportion the activities of groups who are an embarrassment to folks on the Right, they should do the same with the embarrassments on the Left.
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William J. Watkins, Jr. is a research fellow at the Independent Institute and the author of Crossroads for Liberty: Recovering the Anti-Federalist Values of America’s First Constitution.
