blaming Trump for violence highlights establishment media's shameless double standard

foxnews |  When MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow says she’s practically concluded that Trump wanted the confrontation in Chicago, where he canceled the rally, it’s clear that some in the media are making this all about the candidate and not those who would silence him.

Imagine how different the coverage might be if protestors were shouting down Hillary Clinton, as they briefly did to Bernie Sanders earlier in the season.

Everyone has the right to peacefully demonstration, something that’s deeply embedded in our country’s DNA. But nobody has the right to stop someone else from speaking. That is an assault on free speech—and one that’s been too prevalent on college campuses in recent years, where some liberals have tried to block speakers whose views they don’t like.

In the short term, this probably helps Trump in the Republican primaries, where voters will see him taking on mostly minority protestors who they don’t have much sympathy for. The danger in the long run is that the outbreaks of violence will come to be seen as a metaphor for a campaign that critics will say is tearing the country apart.

Joe Scarborough, in his Washington Post column, continues his turn against Trump, insisting that “a political campaign whose security has been so stifling as to draw angry comparisons to fascist regimes would plan a key rally for Trump in the middle of a racially diverse urban campus. The fact that this campus sits in the middle of a city that is so Democratic that it has not elected a Republican mayor since before Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in as president makes the venue’s selection even more bizarre.”

I have to disagree on that point. Why shouldn’t a presidential candidate—especially one who hopes to attract Democratic votes in the fall--be able to campaign anywhere he wants?

National Review, which detests Trump and is backing Ted Cruz, faults the protestors, but adds this:

“Trump — Saddam Hussein to the ayatollahs of political correctness on the other side — is of course far from blameless in all this. That is not to say that Trump’s irresponsible, wild-eyed, and meat-headed rhetoric, which has included explicit calls for violence against his critics, is responsible for having provoked the protests. Rather, Trump’s rhetoric has been unworthy of a presidential candidate — and unworthy of an American — in and of itself.”