Two Pastors, Two Candidates, Two News Cycles
Two Pastors, Two Candidates, Two News Cycles
The media continues to give Donald Trump preferential treatment.
An American political candidate has a connection to a pastor who has been using incendiary rhetoric and disparaging the United States. What is the right amount of media coverage for that situation?
Is it none? Is it a deep dive into the candidate's relationship with the pastor? Does it still matter if the candidate simply went to the pastor’s service or only if the candidate has endorsed the Pastor somehow?
As it turns out, the only thing that seems to matter to the news media is the candidate.
Donald Trump has endorsed Pastor Mark Burns for South Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District. Burns has said the following:
“Do I have anybody who is ready to go to war for Donald J. Trump, for this nation? I can’t hear you? Anybody? Ready to go to war!“
“God is raising up armies. We are going to start having civil disobedience in America. We are going to shut down this America led by racist, liberal, race-baiting Democrats.”
“The LGBT, transgender grooming our children’s minds is a national security threat because it is ultimately designed to destabilize the republic we call the United States of America. That’s why when I’m elected, I don’t want to just vote, I want to start holding people accountable for treason to the Constitution.
I am going to push to reenact HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee. It is a committee that we should reenact that starts holding these people accountable for treason. Lindsey Graham should be held accountable for treason for supporting Joe Biden’s gun-grabbing Second Amendment law that he’s trying to push forward. … Mitch McConnell just [urged] other Republican senators to support Lindsey Graham to come after our guns, to confiscate our guns. That should be held for treason.
We need to hold people for treason, start having some public hearings, and start executing people who are found guilty for their treasonous acts against the Constitution of the United States of America, just like they did back in 1776.”
The Republican presidential nominee has endorsed a candidate for Congress:
that has labeled Democrats as racists (including posting a caricature of Hillary Clinton in blackface)
that has called for the execution of LGBT individuals simply for existing and members of Congress for supporting gun reform
and who has called for a civil war to eliminate Trump’s enemies.
Why aren’t the major news outlets reporting on this daily and hounding Trump for answers?
You’ll more easily find reports from 2016 when Burns was caught lying about his background, including claiming:
to be in a fraternity, he never was a part of
he had received degrees that he had not
he had been in the Army Reserves when he was actually in the National Guard.
Newsworthy given his connection to Trump at the time, but less so than his atrocious statements.
Newer details about the history between Trump and Burns have been revealed by Steven Benen for MSNBC.
Trump and his fixer, Michael Cohen, had sought to make an ally of Burns back in 2016. They felt that having a prominent South Carolina pastor on their side would provide them cover if the affair and subsequent hush money payments to Playboy model Karen McDougal were exposed. Burns has been an outspoken supporter of Trump ever since.
This rhetoric and these revelations should be a major national story. All of America should know the name Mark Burns, yet almost no one does.
We can be confident that this would be a bigger story for any other candidate because years ago, a major national news story surrounded a pastor and a presidential candidate: Pastor Jeremiah White and then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.
In March 2008, ABC News released an investigation into Jeremiah White, who was a pastor at the church attended by Barack Obama. These were the main quotes they found objectionable from his sermons:
“I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday. Did anybody else see him or hear him? He was on Fox News. This is a white man, and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out — did you see him, John? — a white man, he pointed out, ambassador, that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true — America's chickens are coming home to roost.
We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye ... and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.
Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that, y'all. Not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people that we have wounded don't have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that.”
And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton field, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing "God Bless America". No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America — that's in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.
The first sermon was given just five days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
While White was discussing what another person had said in an interview, attempting to point out America’s unpleasant past and saying that our nation was “indignant” so soon after 3,000 innocent lives were lost in the worst terrorist attack in American history was callous and hurtful.
The second sermon was far less inappropriate. There’s nothing wrong with pointing out the abuse of non-white people throughout our nation’s history. Nor is there anything wrong with being angry and upset about that history. Saying “God damn America” is going to rile people up, and was likely his intention, but White wasn’t advocating for violence, or a civil war, or saying people should be executed for their political positions.
The news harped on White’s sermons endlessly as a way to question if Obama was fit to sit in the Oval Office. It was the biggest news story of the day. Even after Obama condemned those sermons and other offending remarks by White, the media didn’t relent.
It wasn’t until Obama addressed the issue head-on with a powerful speech titled “A More Perfect Union” that the public began to move past it.
How did America go from having intense news coverage about sermons that had happened years prior by a pastor in a church that Obama happened to attend to now ignoring the violent, hate-filled speeches of a pastor that Trump has outright endorsed as a candidate for Congress?
How has our media become so numb to the horrible things Trump says and does that it has normalized such actions to the point of not even reporting on them?
It is a disservice to our nation to give Trump a free pass simply for being Trump while holding other candidates to a much higher standard. The news media should inform the public about political candidates, sitting politicians, and the government as a whole.
The news is failing America. It has accepted extremism as mainstream and simply a byproduct of a “deeply divided nation,” as Kristen Welker framed it just the other day on Meet The Press.
We must stop normalizing Trump’s extremism.
https://www.newsweek.com/pro-trump-candidate-says-god-raising-armies-shut-down-democrats-1680904
