Worst in Media No. 5: Vice asks ‘Why are so many Marines Neo-Nazis’
December 27, 2021
Accuracy in Media is counting down the worst media blunders of 2021. Come back tomorrow to see No. 4 on our list.
One of the more outrageous pieces of misinformation this year, especially by Vice Media, is the attempt to smear members of the military as a bunch of wide-eyed fanatics, dominated by white supremacists and super nationalists.
Vice ran a story in August asking in all seriousness, asking, “Why Are So Many Marines Neo-Nazis?”
That the Vice piece on the Marine Corps came as 13 service members were killed in Afghanistan and the administration bungled the withdrawal from there, just made them look even more foolish.
As we outlined in a piece on AIM, Left wing media elite try to frame military and GOP as violent radicals, by using Vice’s own data, the number of Nazis in the Marine Corps is smaller than the number of adverse events caused by Covid vaccines.
But it’s not just Vice.
Last week VoteVets, an undisguised arm of the Democrat party organized to get Democrats elected, used the pages of Washington Post for an op-ed that all but called for a purge of conservatives from the military so that the military could prepare to put down a potential 2024 “insurrection.”
“On Jan. 6, a disturbing number of veterans and active-duty members of the military took part in the attack on the Capitol,” said three retired general officers on behalf of VoteVets. “More than 1 in 10 of those charged in the attacks had a service record. A group of 124 retired military officials, under the name ‘Flag Officers 4 America,’ released a letter echoing Donald Trump’s false attacks on the legitimacy of our elections.”
1 out of 10 people at the Capitol being either former members of the military or current members of the military isn’t that much higher than their overall representation in the population. In fact, it’s probably about right if one looks at just the veteran populations of the Washington D.C., metro area from which the Capitol protests drew.
And while you can fault the logic of any political argument, the “Flag Officers 4 America” are simply exercising their right to free, protected political speech.
Journalists and journalism used to support free speech, but now they want to suppress it because any view that doesn’t agree with progressive groupthink is now labeled by them as “Neo-Nazi.”
Unfortunately, we’ll likely see this as a continuing top story in 2022.