“Mainstream media are normalizing anti-social behavior against Donald Trump,” former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino tells Breitbart News in an exclusive interview.
Bongino, who served in the agency’s Presidential Protection Division for both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, says “unlike many in the mainstream media, I’ve actually interviewed people who have threatened the president. These are the ones who can have trigger moments that can happen based on something they’ve read or seen.”
“That’s the problem I have with the media now,” Bongino says, noting that it applied a very different standard of reporting to President Obama than they are now applying to President-elect Trump.
“The media had that gatekeeper role, when it came to reporting on comments about President Obama,” Bongino, who lost the Republican primary in Florida’s 19th Congressional District in 2016, says.
“But with President-elect Trump, they are reporting every outlandish allegation, often without providing any balance in the story,” the former Secret Service agent and New York City Police Department officer says.
The result, he says, is to “normalize anti-social behavior” against the President-elect.
While it is hard to say exactly what triggers psychologically unbalanced individuals to undertake violent actions, one recent story sounds a warning bell that President-elect Trump’s personal security may require unprecedented levels of protection over the next four years.
In Ithaca, New York, for instance, a licensed master social worker and former employee of the state of New York has been charged with the murder of a UPS driver in a Walmart parking lot on December 8.
At his arraignment on Monday, the suspect, Justin Barkley, told the court, “I shot and killed Donald Trump purposely, intentionally and very proudly.”
Some in the mainstream media began immediately after Trump’s election to argue that their role is to “not normalize” Trump’s political positions.
“For some of us, Trump’s attempts to win votes by any means necessary are jeopardizing our ability to get along across racial and ethnic lines,” Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, a long time liberal icon, wrote two weeks after Trump won the general election.
“We must not normalize his racial dog-whistle rhetoric that appears to have fed a spike of more than 700 incidents of hateful harassment and attacks since Election Day, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Page added.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is one of the most well-known left wing propaganda outlets in the country.
As Breitbart’s Lee Stranahan reported on December 10, for instance, “The Southern Poverty Law Center, aka the SPLC, has published a list of what they call ‘Terror from the Right’ that categorizes two Islamic terror attacks—including the deadly assault on Orlando’s Pulse nightclub that left 49 dead and the Black Lives Matter-inspired murders of police officers in Baton Rouge and Dallas—as ‘radical-right terrorist plots.’ ”
David Remnick, author of a highly favorable biography of Barack Obama and editor of The New Yorker, told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria a week after the election that Trump is “outside the acceptable range.”
“When I hear him described as not a sexist, not a racist, not playing on white fears, not arousing hate; when he’s described in a kind of normalized way as someone in absolute possession of policy knowledge, as someone who is somehow in the acceptable range, I think I’m hallucinating, and I am in fear for our country,” Remnick said of Trump.
Just two days after Trump’s election, CNN aired a live report of a protester at an anti-Trump rally in California.
“If we don’t fight, who is going to fight for us? People had to die for your freedom where we’re at today. We can’t just do rallies, we have to fight back,” the protester told a CNN reporter during the live coverage.
“There will be casualties on both sides. There will be, because people have to die to make a change in this world,” the protester added.
CNN’s Don Lemon ended the segment by noting “no one should be advocating violence, I want to make that very clear.”
Many mainstream media outlets have given filmmaker Michael Moore, a well known far left activist who disputes the legitimacy of Trump’s pending presidency, plenty of air time since Trump’s victory.
“We have to fight all the way to inauguration day and then be ready for them to start the day after the inauguration passing law after law after law,” Moore told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes earlier this week:
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC: And you think protesting on Inauguration Day —
Protesting, obstructing, disrupting, civil disobedience. I mean, the man has no right to enter that house. There are too many questions about whatever collusion was going on. I mean, they admitted that they were in touch with the Russians during the campaign. They have said that.
HAYES: Right.
MOORE: So we would need to know as Americans what the hell was going on there and he does not have a mandate. He does not have a mandate. And that just needs to be said over and over and over again. And the media, for God’s sake, please do your job.
HAYES: We try.
MOORE: You’re not trying hard enough, Chris.
Based on their conduct since Donald Trump’s election, traditional mainstream media outlets are likely to continue to normalize anti-social behavior against Donald Trump throughout his administration.
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