After being pelted with a series of questions about President Trump's condemnation of white supremacy Thursday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany berated the press for their lack of interest in accurately covering violence perpetrated by leftist organization Antifa.
"[President Trump] wants to prosecute the KKK as domestic terrorists and make lynching a federal crime. Again all of that lost on the media as they misreport, take out of context, ignore the verbatim words of this President when he denounced white supremacy yesterday, when he denounced it at the debate, when he's denounced it more than any president in modern history," McEnany said. "Something else lost upon the media is the absolute turning of a blind eye to Antifa. Carrying the water for Democrats, the media apparently agrees with Jerry Nadler that Antifa violence is a myth. In August Senate hearings, Democrats refused to condemn Antifa. Again, no journalistic curiosity here despite the fact that Andy Ngo, who is a victim of Antifa, said Democrats have mastered, Democrats, he should add the media too, have masted the art of making its violence appear innocuous."
"Their violence isn't innocuous. Antifa is not an idea. Andy Ngo can tell you that because he was beaten by a group of protestors, Antifa protestors, suffering brain bleed. Another man can tell you this who, in 2019, the victim, his name is Adam Kelly, suffered from a concussion and got 25 staples in his head, but still silence from Democrats, ignoring this group," she continued. "In fact, as we just saw recently, there was a Trump supporter who was killed by a '100 percent Antifa man,' that is how he described himself. And again, no reporting here, but I guess I did the job of the media here by getting this information myself...ideas do not target police officers. Ideas do not burn down buildings. Ideas do not kill innocent Americans. Organizations do and Democrats should condemn this shameful group in the same way President Trump continues to condemn white supremacy."
.@PressSec on Antifa:
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) October 1, 2020
"Ideas do not target police officers. Ideas do not burn down buildings. Ideas do not kill innocent Americans. Organizations do. And Democrats should condemn this shameful group in the same manner President Trump continues to condemn white supremacy." pic.twitter.com/NaN9ACJkLw
Attorney General Bill Barr has expressed similar frustration with the media's coverage of Antifa led riots around the country.
"They're basically a collection of liars. Most of the mainstream media. They're a collection of liars and they know exactly what they're doing. A perfect example of that were the riots. Right on the street, it was clear as day what was going on, anyone observing it, reporters observing it, it could not have escaped their attention that this was orchestrated violence by a hardened group of street fighting radicals and they kept on excluding from their coverage all the video of this and reporting otherwise and they were doing that for partisan reasons, and they were lying to the American people. It wasn't until they were caught red-handed after essentially weeks of this lie that they even started feeling less timid," Barr recently told Townhall in an interview. "The press has dropped, in my view - and I'm talking about the national mainstream media - has dropped any pretense of professional objectivity and are political actors, highly partisan who try to shape what they're reporting to achieve a political purpose and support a political narrative that has nothing to do with the truth. They're very mendacious about it."
