CBN News Senior Correspondent Gary Lane talks with Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center about the rise of incivility in our politics. Click play to observe the interview.
Actor Peter Fonda tweets hateful feedback about the president, his son, and spouse. Congresswoman Maxine Waters requires harassment of Trump administration officers. And, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her party are compelled to depart a Lexington, Virginia restaurant. Is this the new norm in America? Are we coming into an period of incivility?
Dan Gainor, the vice chairman of enterprise and tradition for the Media Research Center, says it's a actual downside that have to be introduced below management on either side of the political spectrum.
He mentioned the assaults on Trump started throughout his marketing campaign for the presidency with folks charging the stage at marketing campaign rallies and worse.
"Since then, we just passed the one-year anniversary of an attempted assassination of multiple Republican congressmen that sent two to the hospital, one seriously. And let's not rule out a liberal attacking Sen. Rand Paul at his home," Gainor defined.
"We see not just these incidents, but the tenor of things has been ratcheted up to the point that the Left doesn't want anyone they disagree with to be able to go to a school without confrontation, a restaurant, a movie, go shopping, and certainly even go to your work or go to your home. They are protesting in all of these places," he mentioned. "They are using the same tactics we saw in the 1930s to silence opposition. And the people who did that then were Brown Shirtsthat's the big difference."
But what's the impact when a member of Congress requires administration officers to be harassed?
"I think it basically says 'Oh, if Congress is okay with this, then that's fine.' This is where if the media did a vaguely legitimate job, they would be lined up out the doors of Congress today to go up and confront Democratic officials and say ' do you agree with what she said? Or, are you with the Left, taking this kind of incivility or harassment to the max?'" Gainor questioned.
Could this be a end result of the president's tweets? Obama administration officers weren't harassed, regardless that some of the administration's insurance policies have been very unpopular with the public. Gainor believes the response would have been excessive.
"You would have had media people calling for widespread harassment, silencing of speech, and people to be banned from social media," he mentioned.
Gainor says there's a disturbing development he is seen taking place in media that basically crosses the line of civility.
"I bear in mind one other context right here as we have seen three examples of liberal media shops brazenly declare, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, and most lately, Splinter News, which is a division of Univision, all of them doing what's known as 'doxing' of folks on the proper, the place you voluntarily launch information about that particular person," he mentioned.
"In one case, it cost the woman's husband his job. They ending up harassing people at a restaurant. The woman's brother's daughters were harassed. It cost them advertising clients," he continued. "This is a dangerous trend where they think anything goes. And yet, if the reverse had happened, they'd be screaming so loud you could hear them across the country," Gainor informed CBN News.
Members of the Tea Party used harassment methods in opposition to Obama administration officers a number of years in the past. Then there's President Trump's inflammatory tweets. CBN News requested Gainor if this sort of habits is any completely different than what is going on now?
"One is they're exaggerating things. There's been an ongoing sort of street combat we've had since Occupy Wall Street where the Left has tried to confront people and also commit widespread examples of crime, as Occupy Wall Street did, as Black Lives Matter groups did, etc.," Gainor identified.
"Twenty police officers were injured during a Black Lives Matter protest in Minnesota a few years back and the five police officers who were killed by a Black Lives Matter supporter in Texas," he went on to say.
"The Left is really doing push-back on President Trump. 'Trump said mean things and said people should be confronted aggressively at his rallies. Trump said this.' But they forget the Left was actively trying to silence Trump's rallies. They ended up shutting down one of them. And they had professional disruptors going to these events trying to silence them. So compare that to having a member of Congress calling for people to be harassed -- there's just no comparison at all," he defined.
Some of these protests appear to be well-planned and well-organized. Gainor says he would not know who's doing it.
"I know some people on our side will say that George Soros is tied to it. Part of the problem with that is George Soros funds almost everything on the left. You can say that, but it doesn't necessarily mean that its true," he mentioned.
"If you go back to the Women's March, you could definitely say that in that case," he mentioned. "We did the analysis and a hundred of the groups in the Women's March received $246 million from Soros' foundation. That doesn't mean they did it because Soros told them to," he mentioned.
He says there may be a lot of "group thinking" at play.
"They think they can get away with that stuff. And then they take action. We see media outlets either supporting it or not making a big deal about it," Gainor defined.
"You don't see everybody panicking about what Maxine Waters did here, because the media don't want to make it a big controversy," Gainor continued.
When it involves Hollywood celebrities and TV commentators, Gainor says they play an influential position.
"Peter Fonda's heyday was 49 years ago when Easy Rider came out, so maybe he's not super influential. He says a lot of controversial things. But when you think about it, his movie just came out on Friday and Sony Pictures didn't pull it," Gainor identified.
"That might have something to do with the fact that Sony executives and staff have given $190,000 almost exclusively to liberal and Democratic causes since the election," he additionally mentioned.
"They're influencers. Here's the scary thing though for their side. They might be influencers in the opposite direction," he advised.
"Ordinary Americans see a Peter Fonda calling for Trump's son to be put in a cell with pedophiles. And, they look at that and they find it to be so unhinged, so demented and evil that I think it pushes Independents toward Trump and I think it pushes even moderately strong Republicans toward Trump," he defined his pondering.
So what do we have to do to cease all of this and turn out to be extra civil in our politics?
"I think we're all guilty of it," Gainor mentioned. "We saw with the passing of Charles Krauthammer, a giant who worked for both sides and was very much an honorable, civil guy. I think we ought to learn from that. But then you look at it and you say 'you've got people who are calling for harassment,'" he mentioned.
"Harassing people at their homes, their businesses. It's hard to be civil in the face of that. So I think it's the responsibility of both sides to try to damp down what's going on here. Because if we don't, then we head to a path that's not a good place and we'll all suffer for it," Gainor concluded.