The Media's Vietnam Sedition Redux: 2020

Last week I touched on this subject but I wanted to expand on it now.

There are a number of similarities between 2020 and 1968. There are riots in the streets with the National Guard being called in to try and restore order. There’s a viral pandemic and there’s a highly contested election in November.

Americans entered the long hot summer of 1968 unsure of exactly what the future held. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy left the country badly shaken. King was in many ways the spiritual Sherpa of much of the nation, seeking to lead the country to a better place vis-à-vis race, equality and freedom through peace and prayer. Kennedy was the heir to Camelot and was expected to pick up where his brother left off.

Today, Americans are similarly unsure of the future in the wake of unprecedented economic and social upheaval. Tens of millions of Americans went from employed to unemployed in a matter of weeks. Businesses across the country, big and small were shuttered almost overnight. Now, on the tail end of that economic strangulation there are millions of Americans in the streets in response to the murder of George Floyd. What started out as peaceful protests quickly became riots and looting and absolute chaos.

There is a similarity to 1968 that not many people have noticed however… it’s the Tet Offensive. Not just Tet itself, but how it and the war played themselves out in the American media. If you ask most Americans – if they know anything about the Tet Offensive at all – they probably think the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese won that campaign. They didn’t. Indeed, after initially catching the American and South Vietnamese troops off guard on the 30th of January 1968, the Americans regrouped and proceeded to win virtually every battle thereafter. Despite the fact that staggering losses suffered by the NVA and the Viet Cong they never quit. Why? Because they didn’t have to. In observing the American landscape it became clear to the Communists that they didn’t have to actually win on the ground, they only had to wait it out and the American media would do the rest. Which is exactly what happened, from Tet until the end of the war. Despite American victories across the Vietnam, the American media, with their body counts, selective reporting and sometimes outright fabrications told the American people that we were losing an unwinnable war. The media did what the enemy could not do, convince Americans that they were wrong, couldn’t win the war and in doing so ushered in worst military defeat in the nation’s history. General Giáp, the commander of the North Vietnamese forces stated that the Tet Offensive was a victory because it brought the war to the American living room and precipitated the de-escalation of the bombing, which in turn allowed them to survive a war they were losing.

In media in 2020 is a redux of 1968. By characterizing the riots, looting and violence as “mostly peaceful protests” and propagating the fiction of systematic police brutality of black Americans – see Heather MacDonald’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week about the myth of systemic police racism – they are mimicking the role they played for Giap and the Communists fifty years ago. Most Americans recognize that the country is not perfect and that police brutality does exist, as does racism, but they understand that neither is systematic or widespread. Nonetheless the mainstream media seeks to convince the American people that the chaos and brutality they see on their screens are aberrations and that those Molotov Cocktails are understandable responses to police brutality from concerned citizens simply trying to protest in peace.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. There are people in America who seek to loot, whether it’s after a city’s sports championship or a Facebook coordinated flashmob. There are people in America who seek violent revolution and will seize upon any premise to foment such, be it a meeting of the WTO, the Occupy Wall Street movement or the sorrowful death of George Floyd. Whether it’s looting high end shops, throwing rocks and bottles or setting police cars on fire, these thugs and anarchists have no vested interest in the nation and see the government and many of their fellow citizens as the enemy. They’d rather burn the country to the ground than actually do the work necessary to make their circumstances better in the world’s best, albeit imperfect system.

Who knew that fifty years of media and academic messages telling a generation of snowflakes that they’re victims, that they don’t control their own destinies and that America is a racist and unfair place could instill such hate for the country that has given so much opportunity to so many people of all backgrounds? The media is guilty not only of obstructing the truth about America, particularly as it relates to volatile topics of racism, oppression and opportunity, they have indoctrinated millions of Americans in the progressive fiction that their country is so fundamentally flawed that blacks and women and anyone other than white males faces a lifetime of discrimination, injustice and persecution. The reality on the ground tells a different story and is proven so each day, but that of course doesn’t really matter… General Giap would be proud.