Rep. Andy Ogles and How the Mainstream Press Distorts Reality to Aid a Racist Agenda
It's really dismaying how easy it is to prove this title
“I think we should kill them all, everybody.”
That’s what Republican Congressman Andy Ogles said in response to an activist saying to him “I’ve seen the footage of shredded [Palestinian] children’s bodies, that’s my taxpayer dollars. You’re going to bomb those kids.”
Rep. Ogles then replied, “I think we should kill them all.” The argument had more back and forth, and it began with Ogles talking to the activist about Hamas, but the video is worse than just reading the quote. You can tell he’s agitated when he says it—my read on the situation is that he’s not talking about eradicating Hamas like his office claimed he was when actual journalists asked them (“all” is a pretty tough word to navigate around here), but to punch back at an activist who has gotten under his skin.
This is pure genocidal language from a sitting Congressman. This is genuinely shocking…but apparently not to the Very Serious People who oversee the nation’s discourse. You’d think at the very least our self-described defenders of The Truth™ would reach out to his office for a comment like The Tennessean did. Or hell, at least just aggregate The Tennessean’s reporting. Right? Right??
Nope.
Searching the New York Times for “Andy Ogles” returns nothing about it.
A Washington Post query of “Andy Ogles” brings up results with the most recent article on him from last year.
CNN’s search function turns up a lot of unrelated nonsense, but Googling “Andy Ogles CNN” yields no stories on this statement either.
NBC doesn’t have anything on it. Neither does ABC, nor CBS, and of course Fox News didn’t cover it either.
The Associated Press has nothing on the video for Rep. Ogles—same with Reuters—and the Los Angeles Times ignored it too.
“I think we should kill them all, everybody”
Just imagine how this chattering class of self-appointed righteous “leaders” in the Age of Trump would react if Ogles had said this about them. This is journalistic malpractice, and it is perhaps the best example I have ever seen demonstrating how the vainglorious bastards who run these institutions genuinely believe that nothing is real until they “report” it.
Now let’s run the first Palestinian American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s name through these same search engines. I wonder if we’ll see any differences in the kind of coverage this other member of Congress gets!
The latest article on her from the New York Times is titled “The White House condemns Rashida Tlaib’s embrace of the phrase ‘river to the sea.’” The entire article is presented from the point of view of critics of Tlaib, and it makes no effort to provide context to her side of the story while baselessly claiming that the phrase is “widely regarded as a rallying cry for the eradication of Israel,” which is presented as a statement of fact in the sub-headline with no attempt to provide evidence for its “widely regarded” assertion.
I am a Jew who grew up hearing this phrase in Jewish circles too (the phrase is in the original platform of the Likud party for Jehova’s sake!), it’s not genocidal, even though it is used by genocidal groups on both sides of the conflict—it’s mainly a geographical statement outlining the parameters of the conflict and American media sounds really fucking stupid speaking in absolute terms about this common phrase in a region they repeatedly demonstrate they know nothing about.
The Washington Post published a good profile of Tlaib after the censure vote that did introduce nuance and more details to the story, but they also published an opinion column titled “The House was right to censure Rashida Tlaib for an incendiary smear,” where Jim Geraghty’s opening line back on November 8th was “Even by the standards of today’s Washington, this video from Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D) is the most incendiary and provocative statement you’ll ever see from a member of Congress.” (fun fact: Senator Tom Cotton called slavery a “necessary evil” back in 2020 and also published an op-ed in the NYT calling on the military to put down the George Floyd protests.)
“I think we should kill them all, everybody”
Searching Geraghty’s Twitter timeline for “Ogles” returns nothing, which I guess in his defense he doesn’t know anything about if he only gets his news from mainstream sources.
CNN’s search function returns all sorts of non-Ogles related content, but plenty of Tlaib articles show up when you search her name. Sorting by newest makes it useless again, but sorted by relevancy, the first three articles are titled “Democrat accuses Tlaib of ‘fanning the flames’ in Israel-Hamas conflict,” “House passes resolution to censure Tlaib over Israel comments,” and a video is embedded under the title “Tlaib tears up on House floor as she defends herself against censure.” In CNN’s defense, the story on the censure vote is much better than the NYT’s and WaPo’s, in that it presents Tlaib’s side first as a defense before getting to what Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said on her rabid attack, but these matter-of-fact titles presented from the accuser’s side of the equation still do her no favors.
After opening with a couple anodyne sentences providing the basic outline of the censure vote and what it passed by, here’s how NBC News described what happened:
The resolution censures Tlaib, D-Mich., for “promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and for calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.”
"It is a sad fact, but this type of antisemitic hate is being promoted by a small group of members in this body, chiefly Rep. Tlaib," [Rep. Rich] McCormick [R-GA] said on the House floor before the vote. "We must hold her accountable."
The vote comes one month after the deadly Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and amid the devastating Israeli bombardment of the densely populated Gaza Strip.
Republicans have seized on Tlaib’s words and actions criticizing Israel, joining several Democrats in condemning a video she posted on social media showing protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” — a phrase that has been used by Hamas and that Jewish groups consider an antisemitic call for the elimination of Israel. The video also says that President Joe Biden “supported the genocide of the Palestinian people,” and Tlaib herself warns Biden, “We will remember in 2024.”
Tlaib’s positions have divided Democrats, who are wrestling with how to respond to the new conflict in the Middle East. They have condemned the horrific Hamas terrorist attack, which Israel says killed 1,400 people, but many Democrats also have been critical of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians, according to health officials there. A growing number of Democrats have called for a humanitarian pause to provide aid to innocent civilians in Gaza, while a smaller group, including Tlaib, have pushed for a cease-fire.
NBC includes a statement from Tlaib on the House floor defending herself, but then pivots right back into flat-out publishing the Republican line of attack, presenting very serious accusations from a politician that they told us they were unable to confirm.
The vote also comes the same day that McCormick said he was “temporarily closing” his district office in Cumming “due to serious threats of violence against my staff.”
“These threats have been reported to Capitol Police and will be investigated fully,” McCormick said in a post on X.
U.S. Capitol Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday night, while a spokesperson for McCormick’s office said it was “unable to share any of the details about the threat or its circumstances at this time.”
The only real original reporting in that entire article (that took three people to write??) being that NBC can’t confirm the unfounded accusation they just published is so perfect I might cry.
The rest of these publications don’t do much better. While writing for Paste I became fond of writing the phrase “the mainstream press treats Trump and the GOP like their assignment editors” and this is a perfect demonstration of what I mean. Because an activist and not a Very Serious Professional Journalist pulled a “kill them all” quote out of a GOP Congressman, that quote effectively does not exist (because vanity is the lodestar of the mainstream political press, I do believe that they would have made a big deal out of this quote if they had recorded it”).
But when the GOP Congress points the press in the direction of their preferred story, they follow the trail they are given without questioning it, even when the FBI says the trail was laid down by Russian intelligence!
The mainstream press has a lot of good journalists working within it—more good than bad in the aggregate—but their most widely consumed outputs of political coverage are generally failures of journalism. It is stenography of the powerful presented as real journalistic effort, and the world the Peter Baker’s of the world have built for us is an insult to the profession, let alone to their readers.
“I think we should kill them all, everybody”
The swarms the mainstream press help create around Rashida Tlaib and other Squad members every time the Republican Congress tells them to jump and they ask how high—compared to the deafening silence in response to a genocidal statement by a Republican Congressman—is a tacit approval of the Republican Congressman’s words. If anyone in the mainstream press takes offense to this assertion, I’m happy to be proven wrong and retract it once I read your report on Representative Andy Ogles’ “incendiary and provocative statement” in the pages of one of our benevolent purveyors of The Truth™.