Antifa’s actions during the current riots continue to be a hot topic. While governments from the local to the federal level are largely pointing the finger at these anarchist groups, the media continue to largely obfuscate. One PBS reporter claimed yesterday that Trump’s assertion about Antifa had “no evidence” while at the same time posting a picture of someone spraying the anarchist’s A on a building. It’s all so ridiculous.

Dan Bongino noticed the trend and said what we are all thinking.

If a group of conservatives appeared regularly in liberal cities wearing black masks, carrying weapons & incendiaries, breaking windows, setting fires, attacking innocents, & looting, there’d be an outcry in the media to shut them down. But, because it’s ANTIFA, they make excuses

— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) June 1, 2020

Heck, you don’t even need these hypothetical conservative groups to do any of that bad stuff. All you need them to do is protest at all and the media will have a meltdown. How do we know? Because they quite literally melted down at peaceful protests just a few weeks ago in places like Michigan. But let Antifa show up, along with other groups, to burn stuff down and those concerns are suddenly gone. Notice the lack of teeth-gnashing articles over coronavirus and mask usage now.

None of this is accidental. The media see these left-wing groups and the demographics that populate them as allies, even though they’d never admit that. There’s a reason CNN’s Don Lemon was still making excuses for the violence last night. He’s pandering to people he believes are vital to defeating Trump in November.

When it’s conservatives peacefully protesting, the media are very quick to demean their motives and accuse them of terrorizing people. When it’s Antifa actually committing acts of terrorism, it’s just people’s voices being heard or some such nonsense. Do these media figures actually not see how transparent they are being? Or do they just not care? It’s likely a bit of both.

You want an example of just how much the media try to cover for these people? While searching our AP library for a featured image for this story, I could not find a single picture of Antifa that was labeled as such from the current riots. The media are so scared to speak against these groups that they won’t even use the word Antifa in their captions. It’s like they don’t exist outside of right-wing Twitter. But as Bongino says, if these were conservatives, there would be a national outcry for swift punishment.

I can’t imagine all this is lost on independents and swing voters. If the soft middle feel the authorities won’t keep them safe, they are more likely to shift to a more “law and order” candidate. The real question is whether Republican governors and Donald Trump are willing to put themselves in the position to be that. Talk is cheap.