The appalling media double standard on political violence

When left-wing Indymedia writer Andrew Mickel ambushed and killed a Red Bluff, California, police officer in 2001 in hopes of triggering an insurrection, he was caught and sentenced to death, but his story was all but ignored. A solitary Washington Post story chronicled his saga of murderous left-wing rage.

Carlos Hartmann is another left-wing kindred spirit of Mickel’s. A soldier-hating radical furious over the war in Iraq and the NATO commitment to send troops in support, Hartman left his home in Michigan and flew to the Netherlands in 2007, hoping to murder U.S. or allied soldiers. Unable to find a soldier to ambush, he instead decided to kill a defenseless Dutch student at the Roosendaal train station — with an axe.

Once again, the mainstream media in the United States all but buried this sensational story even though it was freely available on the AP wire. Hartmann’s militant soldier-hating mindset was too eerily similar in tone to those of the left-wing anti-war protesters the media has continually championed for the past half-century. It was (and is) better for their narrative to pretend that left-wing political violence is an anomaly instead of a constant theme.