Michigan Democrat state Rep. Cynthia Johnson posted a cryptic video to her social media this week. In that video, she warned “Trumpers” to “be careful” and “walk lightly.” Johnson adds, “We ain’t playing with you. Enough of your shenanigans.” She also called on unnamed “soldiers” to take unspecified, but violent-sounding, actions against the “Trumpers.”
Her violent, eliminationist rhetoric got her stripped of her committee assignments in the Michigan legislature. She has since back-tracked, like so many politicians who do bad things and then express regret for getting caught.
Tom Elliott, owner of Grabien Media, posted Johnson’s threat on his YouTube channel. YouTube blocked the video and hit Elliott with this bizarre reason.
.@YouTube doesn’t want people knowing about Democratic lawmakers threatening the lives of Trump voters — not newsworthy I guess pic.twitter.com/Javw5lRmc9
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 11, 2020
We can only assume that the “violent criminal organization” to which YouTube refers is the Democratic Party, of which state Rep. Johnson is a member. That’s the only organization that’s relevant to Elliott’s post.
The Democrats do have a violent and sordid past. After the Civil War, Democrats founded the Ku Klux Klan which terrorized blacks and Union sympathizers in the South. It violently drove some Republicans, and particularly black Republicans, from office.
Republican President Ulysses S. Grant prosecuted the KKK and subsequent presidents drove it nearly to extinction — until President Woodrow Wilson, a progressive Democrat, screened a pro-KKK movie, Birth of a Nation, in the White House and lavished praise on it in 1915. Wilson enacted racist segregationist policies, throwing out decades of progress for black Americans, and the Klan was reborn. That all happened thanks to the same Democratic Party to which state Rep. Cynthia Johnson belongs.
Perhaps YouTube’s censors are aware of this sordid history.
Or perhaps YouTube is aware that Democrat mayors and city councils allowed violent antifa/BLM riots for months in the cities they control across 2020.
But if YouTube is now censoring such content, it should take a look at every other Democrat candidate, officeholder, party, and other related channel that’s out there. Elliott does own a company, Grabien, but he isn’t an organization. He’s a guy. I know him from our days as executive producers of Laura Ingraham’s radio show, so I know he’s not violent at all. So he can’t be YouTube’s target here.
