Chuck Todd is terrified for his life. He announced he won’t attend any events with Donald Trump anymore. He doesn’t feel safe. It’s too dangerous. Trump, he insists, will throw everyone else under the bus to protect himself.

That’s awfully convenient, considering the media is largely responsible for the collective mental health crisis in this country regarding Donald Trump. How do I know? I used to exist inside that insulated Doomsday Cult, and most of the people I know in real life still do. I can see what it’s done to them. Ten years of worry, fear, hysteria, and hatred have consumed them.

When I talk to my mother, I know she exists in that world defined by hate, as she spends the last few years of what’s left of her life as part of this “all of society” effort to bring down the enemy of the Democrats, of Barack Obama. That’s all it is. But she has no idea because she takes them at their word, and her perception of reality is limited to the confines of the Doomsday cult.

My mother is like I used to be, a committed soldier to believing everything that was pumped into my nervous system from my social media feed, to the headlines at the New York Times, to the opening monologues on Morning Joe, The Daily Show, and MS-Now. Like her, I trusted them. Like her, I couldn’t believe they would lie about something so serious. It had to be true, all of it.

It’s just that it wasn’t true, and it was easy to figure it out. All it took was watching Trump’s rallies, listening to him talk, getting to know his supporters, seeing things from their point of view, and humanizing them. And yet, even suggesting such a thing, and you watch them flip out.

I’ve always known all it would take is a little bit of courage from the legacy press to help people like my mom, and millions of Americans who believe the lies they pump out every day on behalf of the Democrats. Just a little bit of sanity would go a long way. But instead, they are playing with fire. They are assuming guys like Cole Allen can tell the difference between extreme hyperbole and the truth.

Any column about the Left’s violence begins and ends with Trump, and all that means is they don’t get the message. At best, they “both sides” it, they can’t see what they’ve done to whole generations who actually believe they’re growing up in a dictatorship, a regime that disappears people off the streets, wants to turn every woman into a birthing slave, and is shooting protesters just for exercising their First Amendment rights. Who wouldn’t want to pick up a gun?

At best, the Democrats came out of the potential massacre screaming about gun control, as though they’ve done anything to protect the students or the schools in 20 years, but all that does is change the channel away from common sense and empathy back to where they want it, right on target.

Cole Allen took the press at their word, which is why he couldn’t understand how they could have dinner with a “rapist, traitor, and pedophile.” He has a point. After all, why would they if they really meant everything they’ve been telling us for ten years?

Had he been better at breaching security — if he’d had a better weapon that could fire multiple rounds, there is a good chance members of the press could have been mowed down too, along with the very pregnant Karoline Leavitt, who thankfully just welcomed her baby into this world. It feels like a miracle for anyone paying attention.

The press didn’t seem to get it. None of them even took a pause, except to blame Trump, to say he was nice for a second there, but then turned hostile again at Norah O’Donnell on 60 Minutes.

The media focuses intensely on acts of violence by the Right and has for ten years, while ignoring violence from the Left. They do this without even thinking about it, which is why Americans conclude the Right is more violent. The media told them. So why wouldn’t it be true?

Alex Pretti and Renee Good shouldn’t have been shot, but they were attacking federal officers. They aren’t the violent ones to the media. It’s ICE, the Gestapo. If you aren’t aware that there are two sides to every story in America now, what in the world would you think? You wouldn’t just be terrified. You would be radicalized. You would think violence is the only answer because everything else has failed.

The press, however, should have better discernment. If they could just tell the truth for once, or at least try to correct the record, maybe we wouldn’t be here now, where yet another assassin felt he had no other choice but to do the world a favor by killing Hitler.

It was the job of the media to push back on the hyperbole and hysteria, but instead they became the delivery device, injecting irrational fear and rage into the veins of this country every second of every day - in airports, gyms, gas stations, and in the living rooms of people who still watch the news, like my mom.

Why don’t they think of us? Why doesn’t just once Joy Behar or Whoopi Goldberg say, “Oh, we don’t really mean he’s a fascist. We just say that because we want to win elections, but it isn’t really true.”

They always think of the next round of elections - keep the people afraid, keep them engaged, then we can win. But what has this done to the soul of our nation, and no, they can’t keep blaming Donald Trump because look at where that has gotten us. Semi fascists, ultra MAGA, racists, rapists, Nazis.

Here is Ben Shapiro.

Cole Allen’s entire adult life has been shaped by Trump Derangement Syndrome, due almost entirely to the legacy media’s partnership with the Democratic Party and their efforts to run a “hearts and minds” campaign on the American people since 2016.

They took a side, along with all of our once-shared culture, institutions, corporations, and universities, with no consideration to what that level of sustained hysteria and rage might do to impressionable minds who know no other kind of America, one before the Democrats and the media turned their world into a Doomsday Cult.

I also know that all it would take is a little bit of courage from the media to start calling the Democrats out for what they’ve done to all of us all of these years. Have they ever even thought about what comes next after Trump? There will be nothing left of them. Their entire existence revolves around ridding the world of this evil force, and they wonder why people are picking up guns.

Cole Allen, Tyler Robinson, Luigi Mangeone, and Thomas Matthew Crooks are playing out a mainstream, in-the-light-of-day version of the CIA’s MK Ultra.

They didn’t need a secret lab. They didn’t even need drugs. They just needed the internet, social media algorithms, and our inability to maintain our sanity while doomscrolling. They knew all this long ago. But it was too useful in growing their “resistance.” Shaping public opinion with influencers who mirror the Democrats' messaging, and before long, for many of them, there was and is no way out.

There used to be cultural touchstones that would offer us some kind of relief - like comedy, like movies, like commentary. Instead, we have a monoculture on the Left all pushing the exact same message: we’re helpless, we’re occupied, please someone just do it.

Even now, when we look to them for the truth, we get cherry-picked information stripped of context. Most people only read the headlines now; they don’t even bother to dive into the story or check how true it is. It is just Two Minutes of Hate, Orwell style.

Like this headline at USA Today. It was obviously a joke; even the reporter laughed.

The first paragraph of the story once again does not say it was a joke:

Amid renewed scrutiny of his personal security, President Donald Trump said he has resisted the idea of wearing a bulletproof vest, not for safety reasons, but because of how it might make him look.

Here are the first two comments under the tweet.

Does the distortion of reality even bother the press now? Did they think about that as they entered the Correspondents’ Dinner? Did they realize that their messaging had almost caught up with them?

Cole Allen was an incompetent assassin, as it would turn out. But it should serve as a warning, one that they should not ignore. This is not a “both sides” issue. Only one side is growing political assassins who echo the exact same messaging of the legacy media and the Democrats. They can deny it all they want, but on that night, it almost caught up with them.

Sooner or later, though, they will have to reckon with having lied for so many years, especially if they plan on toasting a glass of champagne, let alone sitting in the same room, with an “existential threat” like Donald Trump. Who knows who else might be out there who takes them at their word?

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The Would-Be Massacre That Was a Wake-Up Call for the Press