S5 E16- Pulse Orlando 10th Anniversary: Shadows Looming on America's 250th

Pulse at 10 Years: ISIS, Lone Wolves, and the Media’s Narrative

On the 10th anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting, the episode argues that mainstream coverage from outlets like ABC’s GMA First Look and CNN frames the event primarily as an attack on a gay nightclub while minimizing the documented ISIS link, including Omar Mateen’s 911 pledge of allegiance and ISIS’s lone-wolf doctrine. It contrasts this framing with related ISIS-inspired attacks in 2016—Nice on Bastille Day and the Ohio State attack—and claims the press treats them as disconnected stories while emphasizing guns and domestic culture-war angles. The host also cites a lesser-covered June 7, 2016 Kalamazoo cycling-group tragedy to argue that victim identity drives national attention. The episode urges journalists to examine patterns, symbolic-date targeting, and broader geopolitical chains of accountability ahead of July 4 and America’s 250th anniversary.

00:00 Media Anniversary Framing
01:13 Missing Terror Context
03:16 What Pulse Really Was
05:12 Target Was Americans
06:39 Lone Wolf Myth
08:15 ISIS Franchise Pattern
09:50 Blaming America Narrative
10:42 What Newsrooms Should Ask
12:09 Kalamazoo Contrast
14:23 Chain of Accountability
16:15 Final Warning and Wrap

#PulseNightclubShooting #ISIS #SecondAmendment #IlhanOmar #AmericanExceptionalism

Commentary on trending issues brought to you with a moderate perspective.

Transcript

The Tenth Man 0:13

Remembers the Pulse nightclub attack 10 years ago in Orlando with tributes to gay victims when they should be warning you about your own safety on America's 250th anniversary today on The Tenth Man This morning, ABC News Good Morning America First Look, that's a half-hour show that comes on at, like, 5:00 AM. It's a good, uh, short, concise, uh, picture of the news. But they did a First Look today on the 10th anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, and they called it an attack on a gay nightclub, and that pretty much was their whole story. As far as they're concerned, that is the whole story. CNN ran, ran a piece as well. I didn't watch it, I actually read it, and it's the same thing, an attack on a gay nightclub. Now, the CNN piece is actually worth pausing on for a moment because they did something interesting. They wrote that Pulse was the most violent terrorist attack on American soil since September 11th, and they used the word terrorist one time in a subordinate clause. That's what the English teachers would call it. And then they spent the rest of the piece talking about LGBTQ+ grief, survivor recovery, and memorial being built in Orlando. And the memorial, that's not a bad thing. The Senate had a resolution, I believe, as well, 'cause it was terrorism. But in their reporting, the word Islam does not appear. ISIS does not appear. The 911 call that Omar Mateen, yeah, it wasn't Sean Douglas, it was Omar Mateen, that he made during the attack while people were dying around him, in which he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, to ISIS, that also does not appear. So they know it was terrorism. They said so. They just decided that that was the one detail that didn't need developing, and 10 years later, that editorial decision is still intact. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. And I guess, uh, this is what I was gonna call a bonus ep- episode. We do an episode, we try to do an episode every Monday, and this is a Friday episode, and, uh, uh, my apologies if I don't get it out on time. We usually try to launch these at 3:00 PM. But that's what we're doing on the anniversary. And, uh, oh yeah, tell a friend about The Tenth Man podcast, blah, blah, blah, uh, so we'll keep it going if you do. Now, let me tell you what Pulse actually was, because it's a very different story from what you saw on GMA First Look this morning. Omar Mateen walked into a nightclub and killed forty-nine Americans. He used a SIG MCX. Well, that's a SIG Sauer is the company. We call it SIG for short. Not an AR-15, which was reported, though you would have a hard time finding that correction if you go looking for it now. The specific model didn't survive the news cycle because what the press needed was the category. They needed to say it was an AR-15. So when it was not, they just stopped talking about it, because it's the category that drives the frenzy about gun legislation. But never mind the gun for a moment, because the gun is genuinely the least interesting part of this story. While people were bleeding out on the floor around him, Mateen stopped and called nine one one, and he pledged allegiance to ISIS. That's a recorded statement. The FBI documented it. So right from the start, you have an ISIS attack on American soil, the worst since nine one one, and the press-- nine one one, nine eleven. And the press spent the following week explaining why it wasn't really about ISIS. It was about his self-loathing. It was about, oh, the gun, of course, and it was about American culture, and about toxic masculinity, about anything but the phone call he made while he was conducting this murderous act The framing that replaced those facts went like this. Gay Americans were attacked because they were gay. And look, uh, that's half true, which makes it completely a lie. These were Americans in a public space targeted by a soldier of an organization that murders homosexuals as a matter of settled theology, but also murders Christians and Jews and Yazidis and anyone else who gets in the way. The motive was Islamic supremacy, and the vix- victims, victims s-sexuality was incidental to the attacker. In fact, here's a fact that didn't make the anniversary coverage since they were focused on the site. Before settling on Pulse, Mateen actually scouted Disney Springs. Not a gay venue at all, just a crowd. The target was Americans. The gay nightclub was a target of opportunity, but the press turned it into the point. The victim's sexuality was not incidental to the press because hate crime against gay Americans routes the story to domestic culture war, and ISIS attack on American soil, on the other hand, routes it to a place that they didn't wanna go. Now, you'll hear the term lone wolf applied to Mateen, and it's applied as a form of lessening. It's applied as an excuse. It sounds like it means something. But what it actually means in practice is that the press can sever the chain of accountability. Without a chain, there's no pattern. And without a pattern, there's no uncomfortable questions about what we're importing to the United States and where we're importing it from. But here's what the press never explains about lone wolf attacks. The lone wolf methodology is ISIS' exact doctrine. They designed it. They promoted it. They instructed sympathizers in the West to use whatever weapons they could, anything of any weapon of opportunity, whether it be a car, a knife, or indeed a firearm, just to attack any crowd. So no coordination required, no operational contact needed, and then when an attack does happen, ISIS rightfully claims the attacker as their soldier, as they did in this case. That's not just opportunism. That's the mechanism working exactly as intended. Mateen wasn't a lone wolf who happened to like ISIS. He was ISIS' distribution model operating inside the United States. The franchise doesn't need a direct line to headquarters, and that's the whole point of the franchise. Because talking about that chain, here's the chain they never drew for you. Pulse was on June 12th. 32 days later, July 14th, Bastille Day, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a 19-ton truck through a crowd celebrating on the waterfront in Nice, France, and killed 86 people. It's the same franchise, the same playbook, and the same post-attack claim admission acknowledging him as one of their own from ISIS. Now, it's a different continent, a different weapon, but the same organization. And then in November, Abdulrazak Ali Artan, a Somali refugee resettled in Minnesota from what would become Ilhan Omar's congressional district, drove his car into a crowd at Ohio State University and attacked people with a butcher knife. 13 were injured. The same chain again, the same inspiration, and the same ISIS claim. Ah, but with these two, there was no gun involved, which is probably why you probably remember them less clearly than you do Orlando, because the press will never remind you of those two 10-year anniversaries. Three attacks in six months on two continents. Hmm. And one franchise. Now notice how the press handled the geography. Nice was covered as a French tragedy, a foreign story, sad, distant, no American implications. Pulse was covered as an American gun problem requiring American gun legislation. That is a remarkable editorial conclusion given that the same organization directed both attacks within thirty-two days of each other. The gun didn't cross the Atlantic, the ideology did. But in the press narrative, Europe's tragedy is Europe's business, and America's tragedy is evidence of America's sickness. That framing has a name. It's called blaming America Now, here's what an honest newsroom would be doing right now on the tenth anniversary of Pulse with July fourth twenty-two days out. They would be noting that this franchise has demonstrated a specific appetite for symbolic dates. Bastille Day, the French national holiday, was not a coincidence. These are not random Tuesdays. The press would be asking what the threat posture looks like heading into the most symbolically loaded date on the American calendar this year, in the year we celebrate two hundred and fifty years of independence. They would be drawing the line from Orlando to Nice and asking whether that line points anywhere in particular this summer. And I don't know whether you've noticed that the Muslim world is not that happy with the US at the moment. That's what journalism looks like when it is not managing a narrative. But you won't see it on GMA First Look. You won't see it on CNN. What you'll see is the memorial construction schedule and another conversation about gun laws that wouldn't have stopped a truck in Nice or a knife at Ohio State And that brings us to the anniversary this week of another event that you didn't see on GMA, and won't. Because if the press is going to use Pulse to talk about who gets targeted in America and why, there's a parallel case five days earlier that belongs in that conversation. On June 7th, 2016, five days before Pulse, a drugged driver plowed his pickup truck into a cycling group called the Chain Gang on a rural highway outside Kalamazoo, Michigan. Five people died and two others were injur- injured. Four of the dead were active Christians, three of them Catholic. This week, ten years later, just a handful of survivors held a quiet memorial ride. Local Michigan television covered it, but there's no national story, no presidential statements, and no think pieces. Now ask yourself what would have to be different about those five people for Kalamazoo to be wall-to-wall national coverage today. If the chain gang had just happened to be a gay cycling club, you know the answer. The grief would be identical, the dead would be equally dead, but what changes is whether the victim identity is editorially useful. The press has a variable it runs every story through before deciding how much coverage it gets, and Kalamazoo didn't pass the test. Pulse did, and the difference between those two outcomes is not the tragedy, it's the narrative What Pulse was, stated plainly, an ISIS franchise attack on American civilians by a domestic actor executing ISIS-designed tactics within an ideological network that was simultaneously running operations in France and would run another one at Ohio State five months later. Ten years of anniversary coverage and the burial of the real story is still intact. The Nice chain goes unmentioned. Ohio State goes unmentioned. Kalamazoo goes unmentioned. The lone wolf framing, improperly framed, stays in place because that way you don't have a pattern, and a pattern would require an answer to a question the press has decided just not to ask And here's the full chain of accountability the press will not draw. Europe spent a century drawing borders across the Middle East, carving up peoples and tribes into nations that were never nations, creating the failed states and grievance cultures that incubate the ideology that produced ISIS. Then Europe imported that population instability directly into its own cities, allowed radical enclaves to form and fester, and watched the ideology metastasize inside its own borders. And then that ideology, born in Europe, crossed the Atlantic and killed Americans in Orlando. That's the chain. Europe made the mess. Europe exported the mess. But America got the body count. And the American press responded by demanding that Americans give up their guns, not by asking what European immigration policy had to do with a nightclub in Orlando, not by asking why a Somali refugee resettled in Ilhan Omar's Minnesota was consuming ISIS propaganda and driving into crowds at Ohio State, not by drawing the line from European colonialism to European multiculturalism to European-exported terrorism to American casualties. None of that. Just the gun. Always the gun. Because the gun is the one variable in this story that points at America, and pointing at America is what this press does CNN told you this morning that Pulse was the most violent terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. They were right. And then they told you it was an attack on a gay nightclub and moved on to the memorial construction schedule. That is not journalism. That is narrative maintenance, and it is still running this morning, ten years later, without a single correction July 4th is 22 days away The same franchise that chose Bastille Day chose it deliberately Nobody in the mainstream press is going to tell you that, but now you've heard it from The Tenth Man. Thank you for listening