January 31, 2018, By David Harsanyi



Is it ever acceptable for elected officials to associate with racists? And if they do associate with racists, is there a statute of limitation on covering the story?

I’m asking for Republicans. Because after Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address yesterday, former Klansman and all-around bigots like David Duke and Richard Spencer tweeted approval of one of the president’s most memorable lines. A number of journalists, as is their wont, took the opportunity to point out that white supremacists were cheering on Trump.

Whether or not the president meant it this way? Well, polls seem to indicate that a majority of Americans construed Trump’s speech as straightforwardly patriotic, but obviously, many liberals heard a string of dog whistles instead. Certainly the line “Americans are dreamers, too,” which refers to debate over the fate of younger illegal immigrants, is going to be difficult to frame as bigoted when Trump is offering a generous number of these people a pathway to citizenship — probably amounting to the largest amnesty in American history.

Whatever the case, when I saw reporters tweeting out Nazi praise for Trump, I wondered if any of them had asked Congressional Black Caucus members (many of them boycotting the State of the Union and readily available to the media) why some of them had been taped hugging and meeting with the racist conspiracy theorist Louis Farrakhan?

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There’s already a striking double standard in the coverage of both major political parties. While every comment from a conservative is parsed for deeper racist meaning, a former Nation of Islam lackey like Keith Ellison became a rising star without any real scrutiny over his ugly past by the larger outlets. Is it bias, or are journalists are too intimidated to ask?

You can imagine, I’m sure, that if there had been a video of members of Congress hugging Richard Spencer or David Duke — both whom, incidentally, get most of their oxygen from media coverage rather than popular support — then boycotted Hillary Clinton’s State of the Union speech, it would be a massive story. And rightly so.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/01/31/medi...ouble-standard/