Vice News sells Biden narrative: white conservative men are a grave threat, without facts
June 16, 2021
Vice News tells its young readers to be frightened of conservative white men in a recent article about the Biden administration’s anti-domestic terrorism strategy. With 4.4 million followers on Facebook and a million Twitter followers, the outlet reaches a bevy of millennial readers often influenced by identity politics ploys.
The article begins dramatically, “President Joe Biden was sworn in under the shadow of the January 6 mob-attack on Capitol Hill, and now, his administration has revealed their strategy to combat the clear and present threat of homegrown extremism.”
The foreign terrorists of yesteryear have been replaced by white, male domestic terrorists of today. Biden is brave and defiant, “the first commander-in-chief to single out the white nationalist and supremacist threat in recent memory as a top danger facing the nation,” the article says.
Vice claims – without evidence – that “the main perpetrators are white, racist men who are targeting people of color, women, religious groups, and the LGBTQ+ community.”
“And [the Biden strategy] acknowledges that in American history domestic terrorism didn’t begin on January 6, but has been a feature since the beginning.” In other words, America has always been an endemically racist country because of white, male domestic terrorists.
“Overall, the strategy, whether full of actionable policies or not, is a step in the right direction of labeling the threat of homegrown terrorism in America as a critical problem facing the country,” Vice says.
The article never provides objective, statistical evidence of the scope of the problem. Saying something exists does not make it so, no matter how loudly or repeatedly Vice says it does.
An overreaction to domestic terrorism only exacerbates it. Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan romanticized her city’s near month-long insurrection (CHAZ) last summer as a “block party atmosphere.”
On the other hand, the less-than-a-day-long Capitol riot is in the same vein of “tragic history” as the Oklahoma City bombing or the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, according to the Biden administration’s report.
Like the Biden administration, Vice News demonizes straight, conservative, white men to pit its young readers against them. The once-edgy, countercultural outlet falls in lockstep with liberal mainstream media orthodoxies rather than asking tough questions and challenging the powers that be.