On Saturday, a gunman opened fire in Jacksonville, FL, killing three individuals. According to law enforcement, the shooter, who is white, had left behind several writings indicating the shootings were racially motivated.
It wasn’t long before the press moved beyond just reporting the facts on the ground and into politicizing the matter, though. As expected, because one nutjob (who police say was not part of a larger group) did something terrible, the press immediately moved to suggest Republicans were at fault. Of course, such standards don’t apply when a far-left militant transgender shooter kills six people at a Christian school in Nashville, but that kind of media hypocrisy is baked into the cake at this point.
Sure enough, CNN decided to make Ron DeSantis the issue. In a hand-wringing segment hosted by Jim Acosta, the fact that the governor hadn’t teleported overnight to the site of the shooting was decried. One reporter also claimed that she had “specifically” asked “if he plans to deviate away from his campaigning” in order to fly to Jacksonville.
“I've been texting with DeSantis’ press secretary. I asked specifically if he plans to deviate away from his campaigning for president of the United States to go and fly to Jacksonville… and he said we will let you know” pic.twitter.com/HuWvjrFAwZ
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 26, 2023
There’s a bit of a twist to share about the above clip, but before we get there, can we all just marvel at the shameless hackery on display by everyone on that panel? Joe Biden waited 13 days to visit Maui after it was devastated by fires that may have killed upwards of a thousand people. He didn’t even show up until he finished one vacation in Delaware and had already started a second one in Lake Tahoe. When pressed on the death toll prior to his visit, the president answered “no comment” while smirking at reporters.
Worse, when Biden finally did arrive nearly two weeks after the fires were brought under control, he presented himself as a sociopathic rube, cracking jokes and showing no actual empathy whatsoever to those who had just lost everything. The good news is that he only appeared to fall asleep in public once.
In the face of all that, CNN never found the will to criticize not only Biden’s tardiness but his tone-deafness as well. In fact, they wrote glowing profiles about his visit instead, gaslighting the nation into believing it all went well.
Yet, because DeSantis didn’t appear in Jacksonville less than 24 hours after the shooting, he gets a full segment of negative coverage and six people on a panel throwing barbs. It’s incredible to witness how biased the press is sometimes, though it never surprises me at this point.
To put things in perspective, every shooting death of an innocent person in the United States is a tragedy. Still, there is a fair bit of difference between a partially government-caused disaster that killed a massive number of people and a local shooting that killed three people. The former should demand far more accountability and presence from elected officials, including Joe Biden, but CNN only cares about the latter. The reason is completely transparent.
Moving past that, it turns out the reporter wasn’t telling the whole truth and that by “specifically,” she meant that she didn’t ask that at all. We know that because DeSantis’ press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, released the text messages between he and the reporter.
And by “specifically” she meant to say “that’s not what I asked at all.”
Seeing as @RosalesReport decided to lie about the context of our conversation, I’m going to do something that I wouldn’t normally do and put our conversation on the internet.
Here is our brief exchange: https://t.co/TyN6r7gSRH pic.twitter.com/A8aUkgJfDR
— Jeremy Redfern (@JeremyRedfernFL) August 27, 2023
The CNN reporter wanted to frame DeSantis as being too busy campaigning to go to Jacksonville when in reality she never even brought up that angle. Redfern’s answer, which was just hours after the shooting occurred, was more than fair.
To be sure, there’s every reason to believe that DeSantis will visit Jacksonville in the coming days. The idea that he’s ignoring the shooting is simply a manufactured controversy by dishonest actors in the press. What’s more stunning is how those same dishonest actors are so comfortable in wearing their biases on their sleeves. To not go after Biden for his horrific response to the Maui fires but to attack DeSantis for not jumping on the first flight back to Florida is obviously politically motivated.
