Republican attacks on the media outlet CNN are so commonplace that an automated campaign email attacking the network went out during the evacuation of CNN facilities. This one went out under the name of Lara Trump, Eric Trump's wife, promoting a faux "media accountability survey" being peddled by the Trump-Pence campaign.
“It felt like we weren’t in America anymore...”
That’s what CNN said about being at a Trump rally in Florida...
I have some breaking news for CNN... That is the real America that exists outside of the liberal bubble.
It's time for us to give the media another wake-up call from the America people.
The CNN quote, for those who are wondering, was from CNN's Jim Acosta after yet another Trump rally descended into aggressive mass heckling of himself and other reporters sent to cover Trump's regular hatefests; at the recent Montana rally, Acosta described a Trump supporter making a throat-slitting gesture toward him after Trump celebrated Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte's violent attack on a reporter during Gianforte’s 2016 race.
In a terse statement, Trump-Pence campaign manager Brad Parscale only said the email attacking CNN "unfortunately" went out as a "pre-programmed, automated message." He specifically did not apologize for its contents or for his own efforts to single out CNN repeatedly and incessantly as a supposed enemy of Trump and Pence.
Indeed, none of the other usual Republican suspects appear to be taking any steps to pull back from their attacks on those targeted by bombs today. Again mainstreaming anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, the National Republican Campaign Committee only last week was again demonizing supposed worldwide string-puller George Soros, and continued to do so today in a newly produced ad aimed at defending Republican House candidate Jim Hagedorn.
That ad, too, was planned before its target was the victim of an attempted bombing. Like Brad Parscale, NRCC spokesman Matt Gorman refused to apologize, instead calling the new attack on Soros "entirely factual." Whether their conspiracies result in violence is beside the point; the campaign against Soros, and against CNN, has always been an explicit effort to intimidate them into silence.
The goal was to make their targets fearful, by rallying millions of supporters into hating those specific individuals and groups with incessant, conspiracy-laced accusations against them. The goal was intimidation. It continues. This is the manner in which proto-authoritarian movements deal with their enemies; they demonize them, they target them by name, and then they shrug as those perceived “enemies” are attacked by the very crowds they incited into doing it.