On Friday, five young Democratic operatives toting tiki torches attempted a white-supremacist hoax on Glenn Youngkin, the dark-horse Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia who is panicking his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe.
There they stood in the pouring rain next to a Youngkin campaign bus looking suitably ashamed in their neo-Nazi disguises.
The anti-Trump Lincoln Project took the blame for the fraud, which has been dubbed Tikigate.
But it sure looked like a McAuliffe operation; at least two members of the group have been identified online as working for Virginia Democrats.
McAuliffe spokeswoman Christina Freundlich was quick to retweet a photo of the Tiki Five: “This is who Glenn Youngkin’s supporters are.”
Her colleague Jen Goodman tweeted: “This is disgusting and disqualifying” for Youngkin.
Democratic strategist Max Burns tweeted that the image proved Youngkin’s campaign “counts white supremacists among its most enthusiastic supporters.”
Left-wing media operatives energetically spread the lie on social media, but when the farcical hoax was exposed later in the day, tweets were suddenly deleted, accounts were set to private, and the Lincoln Project narrative emerged.
The next day, The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN either ignored or made misleading claims about one of the most damaging acts of self-harm by a political campaign in living memory.
The Times published a shameful column downplaying the rape of a 15-year-old girl in a school bathroom in Virginia and a snarky piece portraying Youngkin as a closet Trumper, but nothing on Tikigate.
In the WaPo, once you scrolled past all the Trump clickbait, there was a single Tikigate story blaming the Lincoln Project — if you can call it blame. The WaPo explained that the racist hoax really was a noble stunt to draw attention to the white-supremacist tendencies of Youngkin and his supporters. Huh?
Just as with the “fine people” smear against Donald Trump, the Jan. 6 riot which had nothing to do with “white supremacy,” and the Jussie Smollett and “Covington kids” race hoaxes, leftist media lapped up the story with wilful naivete and promoted it to a willing audience.
This is one reason leftists ultimately are doomed in this country. They are flying blind in a fog of delusion, unaware of half of what goes on, while conservatives are forced to imbibe left-wing news along with their preferred media, so end up knowing exactly what the enemy is thinking.
The only solution for the left is to try to destroy or censor conservative media outlets.
A prime example was the censoring of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story with the able assistance of Big Tech and 50 dishonorable former intelligence chiefs.
But smaller outlets are vulnerable to attacks on their advertising base and can be hounded out of business by a few malicious actors.
That is what has been happening to The Post Millennial and its crime reporter, Andy Ngo, who has been physically attacked and driven out of his hometown of Portland, Ore., over his fearless reporting on Antifa.
Two hard-left activists have been targeting TPM’s advertisers: self-described Antifa member Chad Loder and Nandini Jammi, who is behind the anti-conservative outfits Sleeping Giants and Check My Ads.
The pair told advertisers that TPM is Ngo’s personal alt-right “disinfo site” where he promotes neo-Nazis, “incites violence” and supports violent right-wing extremists and white supremacists. All lies, but cowardly firms pulled their ads, including Surfshark, Monday.com, RingCentral, Logitech, Triple Lift, OpenWeb, and SimpliSafe.
“Others have been targeted, and that is ongoing,” says editor-in-chief Libby Emmons. “We are standing up for Andy, but we are small and this is hurting us.”
The jihad against Ngo began on Sept. 3, after he tweeted about a temporary restraining order issued against Loder, 45, in an Los Angeles court.
On Sept. 9, Loder tweeted: “Hey @surfshark, why do you run ads on a site run by Andy Ngo? He works with Proud Boys and Capitol rioters to target journalists with death threats.”
It was a lie and Loder deleted it, but Surfshark still buckled.
Loder messaged TPM’s publisher, Matthew Azrieli, on Sept. 17 demanding he “censure and fire your editor-at-large Andy Ngo.”
Meanwhile, Jammi was writing to advertisers, falsely claiming that TPM “features content by neo-Nazis,” and Ngo “directs harm” toward Haitian refugees and “has assembled kill lists of journalists and activists for Atomwaffen, a violent neo-Nazi organization.”
“They’re trying to cancel me in any way possible in the digital world and the real-life world with real-life manifestations of violence,” Ngo said by phone from an unspecified country.
“To make me appear as far right or a fascist makes liberals or people on the center-left disregard my reporting.”
Gay and Asian-American, Ngo calls himself a “small ‘l’ liberal.”
“I think freedom of speech is for everyone, but Antifa thinks the right should not only not have a voice but be subject to violence.”
Ngo’s trials began in 2019, when he was attacked by an Antifa mob and sustained a brain injury. Last week, a Portland Antifa member finally was indicted over the incident.
As Emmons says, “Andy is a crime writer and people . . . commit crimes trying to stop him from reporting their crimes.”
If center-right media outlets such as TPM aren’t able to continue reporting without fear or favor, we all will end up flying blind in a fog of delusion.