As you might recall, in the wake of a school shooting, Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance said this:
Now, look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding American citizens’ guns away from them. That is what Kamala Harris wants to do. But we have to ask ourselves, we actually have, have been able to run an experiment on this because you’ve got some states with very strict gun laws and you’ve got some states that don’t have strict gun laws at all. And the states with strict gun laws, they have a lot of school shootings and the states without strict gun laws, some of them have school shootings, too. So, clearly strict gun laws is not the thing that is going to solve this problem.
What is going to solve this problem? And I really do believe this is, look, I, I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you’re, if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets, and we have got to bolster security at our schools so that a person who walks through the front door … we, we’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to.
In context, this is a perfectly sensible statement. We have said over and over again that we know how to secure a building. As a lawyer, this author regularly goes into buildings where 1) the general public is prohibited from carrying a gun, but 2) we still feel very safe, anyway: Courthouses. Every courthouse we have ever been in has had several features that make them ‘gun free’ zones that are actually safe:
1) limited exits and entrances,
2) metal detectors at those entrances, and
3) strong presence of armed guards/bailiffs throughout.
We keep asking people on social media if there has ever been a massacre inside a courthouse. No one seems to have even heard of such a thing and neither have we. And even if someone can tell us about one or two, it definitely is less common than school shootings.
So, Vance calling for more security is entirely sensible. But as regular readers know, the AP took all of that and said that Vance said school shootings are a ‘fact of life’—not even quoting the entire sentence that ‘I don’t like that this is a fact of life’—in order to make him seem nonchalant about them. And before they corrected this lie (and we do think this misrepresentation is deliberate), the Harris campaign pounced on this out-of-context quote, as we reported here.
All caught up, now?
But Dr. Naomi Wolf—feminist author, former Democrat and now an apparent Trump supporter(?)—knows who to blame for all this and, weirdly, it is not anyone at the AP. No, it is JD Vance’s fault, or something:
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It's the responsibility of the candidate to phrase things to make them difficult to take out of context. I could have told him this would be decontextualized. Anyone could have. https://t.co/rSS3xqUwwb
— Dr. Naomi Wolf (@naomirwolf) September 7, 2024
All of which is patently ridiculous. Her whole argument is that people should never say anything anyone else can take out of context in order to give a false impression about their words, but the truth is no one can live up to that.
For instance, did you know that Wolf once said ‘mass murder the elderly’? Can you believe that she would advocate for killing people just because they are old? That monster!
Except she really didn’t. She said those words, but she was alleging that Andrew Cuomo had done it:
Gov Cuomo’s face when he began to mass murder the elderly… pic.twitter.com/6w2pzBpME5
— Dr. Naomi Wolf (@naomirwolf) April 6, 2024
So not even Wolf can live up to her own rules.
Now, she might come back and say ‘but I’m not a politician.’ Still, even if we accept that these rules should only apply to politicians, but we can’t think of a single politician. alive or dead, who can live up to that standard.
For instance, we are hard pressed to think of a better wordsmith who has served as a president than Abraham Lincoln. We truly think he was a genius, especially in the written word. In the fourth Lincoln-Douglas debate, Lincoln attacked the claim that when the Declaration of Independence said ‘all men are created equal’ it didn’t apply to black people in part by saying the following:
I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, may not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bad as to do it!
[Voices — ‘me’ ‘no one,’ &c.]
If it is not true let us tear it out!
[cries of ‘no, no,’]
Let us stick to it then, [cheers] let us stand firmly by it then. [Applause.]
We suppose we would call it reverse psychology. But we suppose if the AP existed back then, the headline would have been ‘in debate, Abraham Lincoln advocates the destruction of the Declaration of Independence: ‘Tear it out!’’ And Wolf would blame Lincoln for the falsehood.
Or take Ronald Reagan. Many called him The Great Communicator, but even he could not communicate so well that no one could take him out of context.
Don’t you know that once Reagan said ‘abandon the American revolution’! My God, he actually said we should abandon the principles that founded this country, can you believe it?
Well, you shouldn't believe it. He didn’t really say that. In his ‘A Time for Choosing Speech’ he actually said:
This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
So not even The Great Communicator can protect himself from such dishonesty. Thus, the claim that Vance could just protect himself by wording what he said more carefully, is just silly.
Umm no. It's the responsibility of the media to report accurately.
— Sandra Madigan (@SandraMadAgain) September 7, 2024
That is ridiculous. EVERYTHING can be taken out of context.
— Dana (@OhMelodylane) September 7, 2024
You don’t just stop talking to accommodate liars and charlatans.
Focus on reaching the normal people in America and don’t worry about the losers.
Exactly.
No, it was deceptively edited and no amount of careful word choice can stop that. You severely underestimate the media’s willingness to manipulate whatever they want to get what they want
— Truth Tripping (@TruthTripping) September 7, 2024
Seriously, Aaron Rupar exists. Judging by his behavior, it's apparently in his job description to take his political opponents out of context.
You underestimate their willingness to straight up lie about ANYTHING Trump or Vance says. So it really doesn’t matter how they phrase anything. Biden is still spouting the “suckers & losers” lie, the “fine people on both sides” lie, etc.
— RGLH (@PatriotMtnGirl) September 7, 2024
When the media is your enemy, virtually anything can be twisted. Trump & Vance actually talk. A lot. Extemporaneously. They aren't going to be perfect every time, they're human after all. And the media magnify every stumble. Harris & Walz barely do, & the media cover for them.
— Imperfect America (dudes/r/dudes!) (@ImperfectUSA) September 7, 2024
And for the record, what Vance said was just fine. Lawyers are taught how to speak precisely and he did. But no one can avoid the effects of complete dishonesty.
By your logic, they would have to talk like 6th graders. But that doesn't work either. Case in point: Kamala Harris. The reasonable thing to do is listen to what the candidates say and decide for yourself. Don't let the MSM create your perceptions. They lie like a rug.
— Bob Anders 🇺🇸 (@bobof_the) September 7, 2024
To be fair, Kamala is trying to win talking like a sub-sixth grader.
Policing your words to such an extent makes you too guarded and fake. Speak truth, as ugly as it may be.
— Suzanne Prose 🇺🇸 (@SPUSN84) September 7, 2024
Another good point.
— Notionally Accurate | Hosted by Captain Kirk 🇺🇸 (@notionallyacc) September 7, 2024
We might have to steal that meme.
This is wrong, Naomi.
— Greg Scott (@GScottSays) September 7, 2024
It is the responsibility of the liars to not lie.
This is some next-level bs. How about it’s the responsibility of media to not be lying, dishonest slanderous hacks & not inaccurately report and deliberately mislead? Why do libs always misplace blame for wrongdoings onto the everyone but the wrongdoers? https://t.co/uVkBUB0EUm
— Clown World Refugee (@LeftDefeat) September 7, 2024
This is blaming the rape victim for wearing a skirt. The job is for the media to report what he said and let people decide, not intentionally take it out of context (a lie) to mold opinion. "Journalists" are equivalent to rapists and should be treated as such. https://t.co/lduA2Y3cIi
— Freedumb4U (@ejkrevolution) September 7, 2024
Seriously, to borrow a phrase from a departed friend, the AP buys pixels by the terabyte. Yes, actual physical newspapers are short on space, but an online article isn’t—as this author has proven with more than one of his deep dives. Limited space is not an excuse in the digital age.
It is blatantly obvious that the media should not take a partial sentence to falsely defame a speaker.
— MargeeMcC (@MargeeMcC) September 7, 2024
As a practical real world matter we lock our doors, but the crime is the robber's.
Exactly. Obviously, you should lock your front door because you don’t want to make it easy on a thief, but in the end, if someone comes in your home and steals something, the fault is entirely with the criminal.
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