RUSH: Yesterday on the program I happened to mention that a New York Times writer, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, must not have gotten the memo because she sent out a couple of tweets acknowledging that the hate in Charlottesville was equally distributed. That there was as much hate on the left and violence on the left as there was on the so-called right here. She admitted that the Antifa — by the way, who is this Antifa? They keep naming this. All this is Occupy Wall Street. All this is is Black Lives Matter. There’s nothing new here. It’s not a brand-new group of protesters who are minding their own business, decent, hardworking Americans who became outraged at Donald Trump. These are the same bought-and-paid-for malcontents that are lurking at every World Trade Organization meeting, every G20 economic summit.
These are the famed anarchists that show up and try to burn buildings and start fires and throw little firecracker bombs and so forth, same group of people been out there for years and years and years. It’s Occupy Wall Street, which was a manufactured group of people bought and paid for. It’s the same bunch. And Sheryl Gay Stolberg has now been forced to backtrack.
This is a quote from the tweet we shared with you yesterday. “For noting that the ‘hard left seemed as hate-filled as the Alt-Right’ — citing ‘club-wielding Antifa beating white nationalists being led out of the park.'” Those were in her tweets yesterday. She got “hammered online, even after repenting and issuing a correction that depicted the violent left in more heroic terms.”
She actually did that. It wasn’t just Trump that they made rework what he said. They went to Sheryl Gay Stolberg, the leftists, and they treated her as a traitor. How dare you report this that way. So she had to rewrite her tweets and her statements and make it appear that the Antifa people were heroic in their response to the brutality and the meanness and the viciousness of the Nazis and the white supremacists.
She also pointed out in her original tweet: “Striking how many of the white nationalists were young people, almost entirely men.” She said: “The hard left seemed as hate-filled as Alt-Right. I saw club-wielding Antifa beating white nationalists being led out of the park. Among my unanswered questions: police response. Why did things get out of hand so quickly? Could violence have been prevented?”
For pointing all of this out she was corrected online. One responder warned her, “Don’t buy into the false equivalency like Trump and sympathizers. Only one group would commit genocide against the other if given power.” In response, Sheryl Gay Stolberg apologized and noted that she had made a correction about her hate-filled comment. She tweeted, “Yes, fair enough. See my TL for a correction. Sheryl Gay Stolberg.”
And here is the correction that she submitted. “Rethinking this. Should have said violent, not hate-filled. They were standing up to hate.” She was casting the left’s violence in heroic terms. But of course the first reaction, the instinctive reaction, is always the truth. But she was faced with pressure.
Her tweet about the police — this was a major focus on this program yesterday. (interruption) Oh, no. She got more than that. I mean, some of the other things she received from her tweet: “Why are you normalizing Nazis? Bad, bad take, Ms. Stolberg. A leftist woman is dead because she protested Nazis. How dare you think you can compare them.”
She was hammered. I guarantee you she was afraid. Damn guarantee you she was afraid over the reaction she got, so she marched into her Twitter account and she did a reversal. But, remember, she is a journalist and she responded to the pressure and probably joined the chorus of people who criticize Trump as a coward. “You don’t really mean it. You’re just saying this because we forced you to say it. You don’t really mean it. You don’t believe it. You can’t make us believe that you really mean it,” which is how they reacted to Trump’s statement yesterday.
Charlottesville chief of police is categorically denying that the police were evacuated because it was too dangerous. We had the report from Doug McKelway at Fox News yesterday. “Source says cops were ordered to make no arrests without explicit prior approval of the mayor.” I think if you dig deep into this you’ll find that the mayor of Charlottesville is very much involved in the decision to keep the police on the sidelines.
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