When you interviewed him, did you have any sense at all that something was off about him, and did your instincts suggest a deeper look. Who is this person, what are his motivations, how is he funding his activities, how consistent is his reasoning? I’m usually thinking about motivations and follow the $$ trail when I read a story. I’m mostly skeptical and occasionally cynical when too many pieces of the puzzle are missing.
Well, this guy is extreme, but for a time he was actually doing stuff in Ukraine. Over time it all kind of fell apart as his crazy shown through. So, while I agree that journalists should do better sourcing, this is the sort of miss that had credible backing at the time.
It is quite amazing to see the compilation of clips of people on the left calling either directly or indirectly for violence against Trump or anyone who follows him. The media has done such a good job with the rhetoric (yes you Joy Reed) over these past years that it's almost like we have forgotten that we are all on the same team. We are all Americans. It must be so funny to the politicians who have created this environment on purpose.
As we fight among ourselves like little children who want "our side" to be right they laugh and steal all the wealth and continue to get us into wars with no end. We cheer and argue that "the other side" is going to raise our taxes more. And we have forgotten how they spend our money recklessly and not even on us but in faraway places. But we're okay with it as long as "our side" wins. How pathetic we have become. Toys for them to play with.
We don't even seem to value human life as we used to. It's okay to kill Trump because we were told he's evil. Not that he actually DID anything bad. Just because we are told he's orange man bad. We always laughed at Pravda being state sponsored propaganda while growing up. Yet here we are in the same situation and half the country has been captured by the same kind of mind control and has no idea they are captured. But the jokes going to be on all of us soon. It's only a matter of time until something happens, maybe they do succeed in killing Trump, and we reach the point of no return. And the tolerant left will regret their actions and calls to do violence as the other side finally says no more. Then the politicians will get what they really want. An event that allows them to take away even more of our rights and liberty's. Seems like the end of the republic is not far off. I never thought I'd be glad to be an old man at the end of a wonderful life. But here we are.
"“Trump supporters are just as despicable as he is,” with the show’s host Joy Reid nodding in agreement. Trump supporters, Mystal said, are “just as ungenerous and have just as little compassion and empathy for others.” It was just another night on cable news. The fact that statements like these generate so little outrage is a clear sign of how degraded our public discourse has become."
Right?
Remember that 2016 NYC Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar where they made DJT the Caesar character and had so much fun stabbing him? It was so entertaining? I was pretty horrified by that - and it was on top of all the #Resist and "Not My President" declarations and bumper stickers by the folks who later claimed to respect elections? Can you imagine if they had used Joe Biden, or Hillary (because they are gender bendy she could be Julius Caesar) or Richard/Rachael Levine (uh?) - the guy who thinks it is OK to make eunuchs of American children for an ideology?
The woke witch hunters who participate in cancel culture by maliciously ruining the lives and livelihoods of those with whom they disagree (in the name of preening liberal purist piety) demonstrate the same level of intolerance as Ryan Routh and the same level of narcissism as Trump. Ideological narcissism that is what woke ideology really is.
The left owns the burden of the two "Biden Harris" inspired assassination attempts on DJT...what the small minded left fails to recognize is their DJT hate is fueling these attempts and they fail to contemplate the consequences for the nation if DJT is harmed during the election process. Saw Hillary today...what a POS troll...can't get over the fact that the US voters wanted someones else a couple of times...guess she is pissed about Billl hanging out with Epstein...as for Joy Reid...what a fucking moron....Harvard should be proud.
Legacy media is already happy to memory hole Routh. Just a crazy Trump voter (since he said he voted for Trump in 2016 and yes I’ve seen that angle multiple times). I hope TFP does some investigative follow ups. Where did he get the money for international travels and activities? Where did he get the rifle (he’s lawfully prohibitied from owning guns)?
While I appreciate the self-reflection I your article, I think you just need to dig a tiny bit deeper to answer your own question of why you took Routh seriously. You even said the answer in your article: “I consider the Russian war against Ukraine an unjustified act of aggression.” You call yourself a journalist and yet you wrote about a war that you had no interest in covering objectively. You had an agenda, that is, to convince your readers of your already determined perspective. That’s not the job of a journalist!! Your job is to search for truth and question your preconceived notions. If you continue to carry the “journalist” moniker, then commit to it! Otherwise, please change your title to propagandist or provocateur.
I really wish that we'd all stop using terms like "crazy" or "nut" when describing assassins or would-be assassins. We've done this since at least the JFK assassination. The idea is that only a crazy person could become an assassin. But there have been assassins since the dawn of time. Few have been crazy. The truth is, the lone gunman lunatic is a convenient way of memory holing these things, without looking into the powerful people who may have a lot to gain from the assassination.
A big premise of this article was that the author should have realized that Routh was a nut. But Routh was in no way mentally ill. He was a radical, and obviously quite dangerous, but he was rational and functional, and able to build an organization that was profiled very positively by all sorts of big time media.
And, as the article alludes to but doesn't quite have the courage to explore, Routh's political views are actually very mainstream Democrat. His Twitter feed could have come straight from the pages of The Free Press. The idea that Trump-Hitler is an existential threat to democracy and all that is good, who must be stopped at all costs or else all life will cease, is the central message of the Harris campaign, just as it was the central message of the Biden campaign. We've been inundated with this message, wall-to-wall 24/7 for the last decade. Not by rando nutjobs, but by the most prestigious Establishment outlets. Important people have been quite vocal about wishing Trump dead. There have been prestigious theatre productions fantasizing about Trump's murder. The Guardian (I think, perhaps it was some other similar outlet) ran an article entitled "Where is John Wilkes Booth when we need him?"
These assassination attempts are not unintended consequences of overly heated rhetoric. I think they're pretty clearly very much the intended outcome, the logical next steps in the decade-long effort by the Democrats/Establishment to destroy him, as he is the leader of the reform movement. They started out with the illegal investigations/infiltration of his 2016 campaign, then moved on to the Russia hoax, where the Obama Justice Dept and FBI consciously decided to derail the Trump presidency with all of those investigations predicated on manufactured evidence that they knew was fake. Then all of the clearly-visible irregularities in the 2020 election. And more recently all of the "lawfare" where they've indicted and convicted him on transparently absurd charges. He's currently facing up to 144 years in prison for the New York conviction, with the others still pending. And he's similarly had a close to half-a-billion dollar judgment against him for borrowing some money and then paying it back on time to the satisfaction of the lender. All of the censorship, and pathologizing of free speech. (Today, you can't be a Democrat in good standing if you support free speech in any fashion. As they constantly point out, only a Nazi or White Supremacist would support free speech). And let's not forget all of the attempts to remove him from ballots. These are all lighter versions of political assassination, in that their intent is to remove the adversary from the field rather than engage with him politically.
And, notwithstanding the standard pox-on-both-houses ploy that TFP seems to be using in discussing this latest attempt, there is nothing on the MAGA side of the ledger that comes remotely close to what the Dems are doing. (Although I will note that TFP is at least better than the rest of the MSM in this, in that those are actually blaming Trump for the attempts). This is an entirely one-sided affair. While Trump certainly uses heated rhetoric, he's at least talking about policy. Or if he does get "personal," it's either in response to personal attacks on himself, or about something truthful, such as the Biden family's corruption. There's nothing that Trump or any prominent MAGA says that even remotely encourages violence. Conversely, the leftist political philosophy that the Democrats openly and proudly now embrace explicitly accepts violence as a legitimate political tool. That may either be active physical violence like the Antifa/BLM riots, or more passive violence like cancel culture that tells everyone that they may lose their jobs if they voice unauthorized opinions.
And I'm not sensing any kind of vibe that anyone in the MSM (or TFP for that matter) is actually upset that people are trying to kill Trump. I suspect that secretly most are disappointed that the attempts so far have failed. Or perhaps they fear that there may be some political fallout. TFP's coverage of both attempts has been almost non-existent. There's certainly no sense of indignation, like they project when covering topics that are important to them.
Articles like this are a good first step, but really, some serious soul-searching is in order here. A recognition that this creeping totalitarianism and violence are all coming from the Democrats, and that this has become a central pillar of their ideology, would be a good start. And it wouldn't hurt if TFP communicated that they're at least somewhat uncomfortable with it.
Well said. Two attempts on Trump by people that donated to Democrats in the space of two months. How many assassination attempts on Harris or Biden, ever? Zero. Leftists are totalitarians at heart. If the childless cat ladies and beta males could have all Trump voters rounded up and put in camps (by someone else, of course) they absolutely would.
> In the coming weeks, journalists should ask him about his motives, his rationale, his plunge from advocacy into violence, and his broader descent into extremism.
I confess I would probably read that. But it strikes me as a perfectly terrible, horrible, irresponsible idea. Giving that animal a platform will just encourage more like him.
I don't care what Routh did or did not post. The bigger issue is the fact that he "made his way into" Ms. Lukyanova's article. She did not vet him properly. If she did she might have the answers as to how this unemployed, broke career criminal, was able to become " one of the more capable foreign volunteers in the Ukraine effort, someone who got things done" in Ukraine, and was then able position himself two days ago in an attempt to assassinate former President Trump at a time and place where only a handful of people knew where President Trump would be. I think it makes PERFECT SENSE to find out Routh thinks. I hope Ms. Lukyanova and the other "Journalists Like Me" are on this.
From BBC: BBC Verify has found social media profiles matching Mr Routh's name. They indicate that he called for foreign fighters to go to Ukraine to battle against Russian forces.
“I am coming to Ukraine from Hawaii to fight for your kids and families and democracy.. I will come and die for you,” a post on X reads, according to the BBC's US partner, CBS News.
There are also pro-Palestinian, pro-Taiwan and anti-China messages on his profile, including allegations about Chinese “biological warfare” and references to the Covid-19 virus as an “attack”. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3611zjjnd2o The guy is an obvious wacko so trying to make sense of what he thinks is a waste of time. There is apparently no consistent theme to his various obsessions.
Tanya,
When you interviewed him, did you have any sense at all that something was off about him, and did your instincts suggest a deeper look. Who is this person, what are his motivations, how is he funding his activities, how consistent is his reasoning? I’m usually thinking about motivations and follow the $$ trail when I read a story. I’m mostly skeptical and occasionally cynical when too many pieces of the puzzle are missing.
Well, this guy is extreme, but for a time he was actually doing stuff in Ukraine. Over time it all kind of fell apart as his crazy shown through. So, while I agree that journalists should do better sourcing, this is the sort of miss that had credible backing at the time.
xyz
It is quite amazing to see the compilation of clips of people on the left calling either directly or indirectly for violence against Trump or anyone who follows him. The media has done such a good job with the rhetoric (yes you Joy Reed) over these past years that it's almost like we have forgotten that we are all on the same team. We are all Americans. It must be so funny to the politicians who have created this environment on purpose.
As we fight among ourselves like little children who want "our side" to be right they laugh and steal all the wealth and continue to get us into wars with no end. We cheer and argue that "the other side" is going to raise our taxes more. And we have forgotten how they spend our money recklessly and not even on us but in faraway places. But we're okay with it as long as "our side" wins. How pathetic we have become. Toys for them to play with.
We don't even seem to value human life as we used to. It's okay to kill Trump because we were told he's evil. Not that he actually DID anything bad. Just because we are told he's orange man bad. We always laughed at Pravda being state sponsored propaganda while growing up. Yet here we are in the same situation and half the country has been captured by the same kind of mind control and has no idea they are captured. But the jokes going to be on all of us soon. It's only a matter of time until something happens, maybe they do succeed in killing Trump, and we reach the point of no return. And the tolerant left will regret their actions and calls to do violence as the other side finally says no more. Then the politicians will get what they really want. An event that allows them to take away even more of our rights and liberty's. Seems like the end of the republic is not far off. I never thought I'd be glad to be an old man at the end of a wonderful life. But here we are.
"“Trump supporters are just as despicable as he is,” with the show’s host Joy Reid nodding in agreement. Trump supporters, Mystal said, are “just as ungenerous and have just as little compassion and empathy for others.” It was just another night on cable news. The fact that statements like these generate so little outrage is a clear sign of how degraded our public discourse has become."
Right?
Remember that 2016 NYC Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar where they made DJT the Caesar character and had so much fun stabbing him? It was so entertaining? I was pretty horrified by that - and it was on top of all the #Resist and "Not My President" declarations and bumper stickers by the folks who later claimed to respect elections? Can you imagine if they had used Joe Biden, or Hillary (because they are gender bendy she could be Julius Caesar) or Richard/Rachael Levine (uh?) - the guy who thinks it is OK to make eunuchs of American children for an ideology?
The woke witch hunters who participate in cancel culture by maliciously ruining the lives and livelihoods of those with whom they disagree (in the name of preening liberal purist piety) demonstrate the same level of intolerance as Ryan Routh and the same level of narcissism as Trump. Ideological narcissism that is what woke ideology really is.
The left owns the burden of the two "Biden Harris" inspired assassination attempts on DJT...what the small minded left fails to recognize is their DJT hate is fueling these attempts and they fail to contemplate the consequences for the nation if DJT is harmed during the election process. Saw Hillary today...what a POS troll...can't get over the fact that the US voters wanted someones else a couple of times...guess she is pissed about Billl hanging out with Epstein...as for Joy Reid...what a fucking moron....Harvard should be proud.
Hating Trump is, to much of our legacy media, “doing good work” so the leftist nutjobs are “the right kind of crazy.”
Legacy media is already happy to memory hole Routh. Just a crazy Trump voter (since he said he voted for Trump in 2016 and yes I’ve seen that angle multiple times). I hope TFP does some investigative follow ups. Where did he get the money for international travels and activities? Where did he get the rifle (he’s lawfully prohibitied from owning guns)?
While I appreciate the self-reflection I your article, I think you just need to dig a tiny bit deeper to answer your own question of why you took Routh seriously. You even said the answer in your article: “I consider the Russian war against Ukraine an unjustified act of aggression.” You call yourself a journalist and yet you wrote about a war that you had no interest in covering objectively. You had an agenda, that is, to convince your readers of your already determined perspective. That’s not the job of a journalist!! Your job is to search for truth and question your preconceived notions. If you continue to carry the “journalist” moniker, then commit to it! Otherwise, please change your title to propagandist or provocateur.
I really wish that we'd all stop using terms like "crazy" or "nut" when describing assassins or would-be assassins. We've done this since at least the JFK assassination. The idea is that only a crazy person could become an assassin. But there have been assassins since the dawn of time. Few have been crazy. The truth is, the lone gunman lunatic is a convenient way of memory holing these things, without looking into the powerful people who may have a lot to gain from the assassination.
A big premise of this article was that the author should have realized that Routh was a nut. But Routh was in no way mentally ill. He was a radical, and obviously quite dangerous, but he was rational and functional, and able to build an organization that was profiled very positively by all sorts of big time media.
And, as the article alludes to but doesn't quite have the courage to explore, Routh's political views are actually very mainstream Democrat. His Twitter feed could have come straight from the pages of The Free Press. The idea that Trump-Hitler is an existential threat to democracy and all that is good, who must be stopped at all costs or else all life will cease, is the central message of the Harris campaign, just as it was the central message of the Biden campaign. We've been inundated with this message, wall-to-wall 24/7 for the last decade. Not by rando nutjobs, but by the most prestigious Establishment outlets. Important people have been quite vocal about wishing Trump dead. There have been prestigious theatre productions fantasizing about Trump's murder. The Guardian (I think, perhaps it was some other similar outlet) ran an article entitled "Where is John Wilkes Booth when we need him?"
These assassination attempts are not unintended consequences of overly heated rhetoric. I think they're pretty clearly very much the intended outcome, the logical next steps in the decade-long effort by the Democrats/Establishment to destroy him, as he is the leader of the reform movement. They started out with the illegal investigations/infiltration of his 2016 campaign, then moved on to the Russia hoax, where the Obama Justice Dept and FBI consciously decided to derail the Trump presidency with all of those investigations predicated on manufactured evidence that they knew was fake. Then all of the clearly-visible irregularities in the 2020 election. And more recently all of the "lawfare" where they've indicted and convicted him on transparently absurd charges. He's currently facing up to 144 years in prison for the New York conviction, with the others still pending. And he's similarly had a close to half-a-billion dollar judgment against him for borrowing some money and then paying it back on time to the satisfaction of the lender. All of the censorship, and pathologizing of free speech. (Today, you can't be a Democrat in good standing if you support free speech in any fashion. As they constantly point out, only a Nazi or White Supremacist would support free speech). And let's not forget all of the attempts to remove him from ballots. These are all lighter versions of political assassination, in that their intent is to remove the adversary from the field rather than engage with him politically.
And, notwithstanding the standard pox-on-both-houses ploy that TFP seems to be using in discussing this latest attempt, there is nothing on the MAGA side of the ledger that comes remotely close to what the Dems are doing. (Although I will note that TFP is at least better than the rest of the MSM in this, in that those are actually blaming Trump for the attempts). This is an entirely one-sided affair. While Trump certainly uses heated rhetoric, he's at least talking about policy. Or if he does get "personal," it's either in response to personal attacks on himself, or about something truthful, such as the Biden family's corruption. There's nothing that Trump or any prominent MAGA says that even remotely encourages violence. Conversely, the leftist political philosophy that the Democrats openly and proudly now embrace explicitly accepts violence as a legitimate political tool. That may either be active physical violence like the Antifa/BLM riots, or more passive violence like cancel culture that tells everyone that they may lose their jobs if they voice unauthorized opinions.
And I'm not sensing any kind of vibe that anyone in the MSM (or TFP for that matter) is actually upset that people are trying to kill Trump. I suspect that secretly most are disappointed that the attempts so far have failed. Or perhaps they fear that there may be some political fallout. TFP's coverage of both attempts has been almost non-existent. There's certainly no sense of indignation, like they project when covering topics that are important to them.
Articles like this are a good first step, but really, some serious soul-searching is in order here. A recognition that this creeping totalitarianism and violence are all coming from the Democrats, and that this has become a central pillar of their ideology, would be a good start. And it wouldn't hurt if TFP communicated that they're at least somewhat uncomfortable with it.
Well said. Two attempts on Trump by people that donated to Democrats in the space of two months. How many assassination attempts on Harris or Biden, ever? Zero. Leftists are totalitarians at heart. If the childless cat ladies and beta males could have all Trump voters rounded up and put in camps (by someone else, of course) they absolutely would.
Very well thought out and worthwhile critique
> In the coming weeks, journalists should ask him about his motives, his rationale, his plunge from advocacy into violence, and his broader descent into extremism.
I confess I would probably read that. But it strikes me as a perfectly terrible, horrible, irresponsible idea. Giving that animal a platform will just encourage more like him.
He’s obviously a Beltway bandit. These organizations are funded by the deep state.
Response to Mr. Mitchell
I don't care what Routh did or did not post. The bigger issue is the fact that he "made his way into" Ms. Lukyanova's article. She did not vet him properly. If she did she might have the answers as to how this unemployed, broke career criminal, was able to become " one of the more capable foreign volunteers in the Ukraine effort, someone who got things done" in Ukraine, and was then able position himself two days ago in an attempt to assassinate former President Trump at a time and place where only a handful of people knew where President Trump would be. I think it makes PERFECT SENSE to find out Routh thinks. I hope Ms. Lukyanova and the other "Journalists Like Me" are on this.
George E Wich Jr.
Calling a big group of people despicable, while also attacking their lack of compassion, is a singularity of hypocrisy created by Low Budget Don King.
From BBC: BBC Verify has found social media profiles matching Mr Routh's name. They indicate that he called for foreign fighters to go to Ukraine to battle against Russian forces.
“I am coming to Ukraine from Hawaii to fight for your kids and families and democracy.. I will come and die for you,” a post on X reads, according to the BBC's US partner, CBS News.
There are also pro-Palestinian, pro-Taiwan and anti-China messages on his profile, including allegations about Chinese “biological warfare” and references to the Covid-19 virus as an “attack”. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3611zjjnd2o The guy is an obvious wacko so trying to make sense of what he thinks is a waste of time. There is apparently no consistent theme to his various obsessions.