Why can’t the media call antifa terrorists what they are?

A jaw-dropping headline in last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal regarding last summer’s antifa attack on an ICE detention center made me think I’d fallen down the rabbit hole alongside Alice. “Protesters Sentenced to Decades in Clash at ICE Facility,” it said.

The paper described the attack in which a police officer was nearly killed as “an incident” and “protest.” In a 12-paragraph story, reporter Victoria Albert manages to call the defendants “protesters” eight different times.

Seriously?

That’s nothing like the Justice Department’s account. The “protesters” were members of the North Texas antifa. They amassed an arsenal of fifty weapons, body armor, and ammunition, and trained for an attack on the Prairieland ICE Detention Center to free detainees being held for deportation. Last July 4, they converged on Alvarado, Texas, and launched a diversionary attack outside the ICE center by igniting explosives and torching vehicles. When ICE officers and police responded, a “protester” later identified as the ringleader barked orders to “get to the rifles” and then opened fire. One officer was shot in the neck.

Multiple perpetrators were apprehended at the scene, and 11 firearms were recovered. Other arrests followed as FBI, Homeland Security, and Texas investigators uncovered evidence detailing the plot. The perpetrators faced charges ranging from riot and material support to terrorists to conspiracy and attempted murder of U.S. officers. Prosecutors won multiple convictions after a twelve-day trial involving forty-six witnesses. You’ll be hard-pressed to find those facts in news coverage of the sentencing.

Defense attorneys attempted to portray the accused as peaceful protestors unwittingly drawn into joining a demonstration that turned violent. That argument failed to convince jurors, and, based on the sentences, didn’t dupe the judge either. But apparently, some reporters bought it. The Wall Street Journal‘s account of the attack parrots the defense attorneys. To drive home her point, Albert concludes with this reality-defying quote from a defense lawyer first reported by the Associated Press: “This is a bunch of kids and young adults who have a really big heart and really wanted their voices to be heard. It was never intended that anybody get hurt.”

It’s the worst case I’ve seen of media gaslighting by a respectable newspaper. This is propaganda, not journalism. By adopting the language of the defense to describe the assailants, a reporter is taking sides. In this case, they’re not only siding against the prosecution but also the jurors who heard and weighed the evidence before pronouncing guilt.

But I shouldn’t be too hard on Albert. She’s simply following directives from Emma Jane Tucker, the Wall Street Journal’s editor-in-chief. Since taking over the paper, Tucker has pushed it far leftward with investigative pieces attacking the use of firearms for self-defense, targeting Elon Musk, and alleging that President Donald Trump gave a salacious birthday card to Epstein.

To be fair to the Journal, the PBS News Hour’s coverage of the antifa sentencing was even more unbalanced. In a segment titled “Anti-ICE protestors sentenced to decades in prison in latest crackdown on dissent,” PBS maintained the defendants were “protesters” arrested during a “demonstration” and claimed their sentences exceeded those of Jan. 6 Capitol rioters.

It’s a strawman comparison. The crimes were in no way equivalent. No police were shot at the Capitol, no firearms used, no conspiracy to kill federal officers. A better comparison for the Jan. 6 sentences would be the lenient treatment afforded to law-breaking George Floyd protesters, by which standard the Jan. 6 rioters were treated harshly.

PBS also denied that antifa is a terrorist group. It proclaimed the Justice Department’s prosecution as an attempt to stifle political dissent. A former prosecutor-turned-professor was interviewed to bolster PBS’s claims. The program had no opposing viewpoints.

There’s a benign and a sinister explanation for this bizarre reportage. The benign one is that journalists are intellectually stuck in the past regarding terrorism. Back then, terrorist groups were organized in cells under centralized, hierarchical leadership.

Those were pre-social media days. Technology has changed the terrorist threat. Flash mobs take over city streets for drag racing or to loot stores without a leadership structure. Terrorism, whether by antifa or ISIS, is similarly decentralized. Lone wolf radicals of all stripes find one another online, learn online how to make bombs and use weapons, and coordinate terrorist attacks through encrypted apps without a rigid organization. Maybe journalists just don’t get it.

There’s a more sinister possibility. Perhaps journalists at PBS and the Wall Street Journal are willing mouthpieces for what the Rutgers Network Contagion Research Institute calls assassination culture. From the multiple assassination attempts on Trump to Charlie Kirk’s murder and the thousands of social media posts lauding this violence, it’s clear that no organizational structure is needed to foster domestic terrorism.

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So how should we understand the antifa defendants’ draconian sentences?

The answer is that they are a desperate attempt by our legal system to deter the rising tide of political violence through long jail sentences. It’s desperate because if legal deterrence fails, our government will have no alternative but to resort to even harsher measures to quell the terrorist violence, as it did with al Qaeda and ISIS.

John B. Roberts II served in the Reagan White House and is a former international political strategist and executive producer of The McLaughlin Group. He is an author and artist.