In the Virginia race for Governor, the polls have been tightening as the Republican candidate shifts his focus from bland etherial government management issues and into culture war issues that people actually care about. To counter this progress, Democrats have focused less on issues and more on fear and personal smears, amplifying their attempts to focus the race as a referendum of the previous president who has been out of office for a year and on alleged dangers of racism that require Democrats in power to protect people from.
In service to this strategy, Democrats manufactured a white supremacist hoax to scare the electorate by playing on the “fine people” hoax – one of the most widely debunked hoaxes in history where a protest organized by conservatives was hijacked by a different group of racists. Groups like The Proud Boys smelled the hijacking and condemned it before it happened and forbid members from going but it was too late for all to get the memo and the protest between Democrats and Conservatives was crashed by terrorist Antifa members attacking people and a goofy march of racists who carried tiki torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us”. Following the debacle, Democrats and the corporate press invented a race hoax to smear the president by making the false claim that Trump called the racists “very fine people” despite him actually saying the opposite and condemning them several times, unprompted. The hoax was achieved by reporting Trump observing that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the Conservative and Democrat debate that comprised the original protest, but then editing out his following sentence from his remarks that went out of his way to clarify that he was not talking about racists of any kind and then condemned those groups. That was in 2017.
Now, in 2021, Democrats sought to rekindle the fear they successfully stoked with the 2017 hoax by having Democrat operatives dress like the 2017 race marchers, complete with tiki torches, and stand in front of the Republican candidate for Governors bus for photo ops in order to scare people into thinking that those wascally wacists are at it again and only an elected Democrat can keep us safe from them:
VA Democrats are apparently so racist that they think black Americans will fall for this obvious stupidity pic.twitter.com/POAyUrI7pB
Charlie Olaf, McAuliffe’s social-media manager, wrote: “Disgusting reference to the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville.”
Democratic strategist Max Burns claimed Youngkin’s campaign “counts white supremacists among its most enthusiastic supporters.”
For posterity, in case these come down later, two McAuliffe campaign communications flacks were pushing this as if it was a real thing: pic.twitter.com/kNjZYAXDQu
The bet being made here was that the Charlottesville hoax was so successful that if the Democrats could suggest that the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia had a similar support base of people with bad views about race then that will terrify voters against that Republican.
Let me get this straight: Democratic operatives in Virginia are so sincerely concerned about the grave threat of "white supremacy" that they think it's perfectly OK to orchestrate an outright hoax featuring fake white supremacists?
The root of this tactic reveals how Democrats use fear of racism that isn’t actually prevalent as a way to trick vulnerable minds into voting them into power.
Useful of Virginia Democrats to prove beyond all doubt that they're willing to literally fabricate the purported threat of "white supremacists" for explicitly electoral purposes
Democratic Party operatives, MSNBC analysts, and their Lincoln Project allies got caught perpetrating a deliberate fraud today, all with racism and racist discourse as their plaything. None will suffer any career consequences because their circles are happy they did this.
The fraud here also wasn’t just in putting the bait out there and trying to hook suckers that bit on it, either – part of the plan was to feign outrage over the bait they knew was fake in an attempt to create a larger buzz over the claim:
The Lincoln Project's Twitter account also retweeted the McAuliffe campaign's outrage over it until they gotcaught.
McAuliffe's social media manager deleted the tweet pushing the racist fraud by the Lincoln Project soon as I noted he had promoted it and left it up all day. Here's the deleted tweet, along with a great timeline showing how coordinated this fraud was.https://t.co/OGSIiiWB0Ipic.twitter.com/s8EMCEJpai
When the hoax was uncovered to have been orchestrated by the pro-war, anti-Trump Democrat group The Lincoln Project, the McAuliffe campaign finally “condemned the stunt” after they spent all day pushing it as proof of Youngkin’s racist ties.
After the uncovering, the main excuse was that the Lincoln Project was the sole party to blame and not the Democrats who helped push it – ignoring of course the ties and partnerships the Lincoln Project has with the Democrats in exactly these media stunts:
And don't even try claiming @ProjectLincoln, perpetrator of this fraud, isn't associated with the Dem Party. Aside from the fact that @SteveSchmidtSES announced he's now a registered Dem, their biggest funder — aside from liberal billionaires — is this DNC-associated SuperPAC: pic.twitter.com/vCYizJ8hsr
That the Lincoln Project "admitted" to perpetrating this racist fraud means that it was engineered by Democrats and operatives for the Democratic Party, but everything they say is suspect. It's possible they're taking the blame for someone else, but either way, it's a huge fraud.
Corporate media outlets and their members that label themselves as journalists dutifully volunteered in spreading the false story without doing any acts of research, fact checking, or verification (eg: Journalism) and only some of them had the dignity to delete the lies when exposed.
Dem Party operatives and MSNBC "analysts" spent the day spreading a photo that was dubious from the start – staged to make it appear neo-Nazis were supporting Glenn Youngkin – and now it turns out that, yet again, they spread disinformation. Over and over: the same people do this https://t.co/5Pmr2Oku1j
MSNBC contributor Glenn Kirschner condemned the “blatant display of racism, hatred and intolerance,” urging Virginians to vote for McAuliffe, who represents a “kind, welcoming, diverse Virginia.”
Then there came the damage control spin. The first cover-up was to call the group “Republicans”, which is of course a total lie. It is true that the Lincoln Project was founded by *former* John McCain operative Republicans but the group is not just “anti-Trump” – it is a pro-war org that abandoned the Republican party completely when Trump shifted the platform away from the Bush Doctrine method of bombing and invasion that Biden has always supported and Democrats have followed into. The group endorses and campaigns for Democrats and against Republicans. It is in no way a Republican organization. Further: at least 3 of the people that were later identified as performers in the stunt are all Democrat party operatives that have never been Republicans or affiliated with any Republican organization.
Democrats get to have a SuperPAC funded by liberal billionaires and other DNC PACs, whose only function is to elect Democratic candidates and defeat Republicans.
But then, when this group does something scummy or scandalous (always), the media will say: "GOP group did X": pic.twitter.com/ykWUgOCc1k
Within 24 hours of the scandal, The Lincoln Project spokespeople were invited onto CNN not to be grilled on why they perpetrated such a cynical fraud and why they thought it was okay to attempt to fool voters in such an ugly lie – but to explain themselves in a piece so favorable to them, The Lincoln Project itself tweeted out the video as damage control:
CNN's primary marketing claim is it is devoted to combating disinformation and lies.
Yesterday, @ProjectLincoln perpetrated a racist fraud on, one that caused Fake News and lies to spread all over social media.
And: note the hilarity of CNN's glaringly fraudulent attempt to pretend they're a non-partisan news outlet rather than a DNC arm by introducing Stevens as a "GOP strategist" alongside Carville when the only goal each has in life is to elect Dems and, now, McAuliffe specifically🤣
Why does the corporate press help big government politicians in these ways? Edward Snowden tangentially explains with the observation that the “neo” factions of each party have merged:
The distinction between neoliberal and neoconservative seems to have disappeared—the neos each push for the same self-destructive wars, corporate domination of politics, and unlimited authoritarian power.
On the issues that matter, a neo is a neo. Don't differentiate. Retaliate.
Meanwhile, the grift of the Lincoln Project is failing every day, dying hour by hour, but remains alive with Democrat millions in support:
With Trump gone, @ProjectLincoln has been losing followers almost as fast as they buy new boats and pay off personal debts with their liberal followers' cash. They bleed followers daily. In January, they had more than 2.8m. They're now headed to 2.6m. Collapsing by all metrics.😢 pic.twitter.com/5l5rW1Fmfc
President Trump held a news conference regarding the improving job market but diverted from the subject of economics to also comment on the pertinent subject of equality and justice as they pertain to police interactions. He honored George Floyd and noted that equality is “really what our Constitution requires and it’s what our country is all about“ and hoped that Floyd might be gazing from heaven with gladness that the country is going through that focus. Nice words. So naturally, every liar who hates him lied about it…
Trumps actual quote + my imagined paraphrase of the collective voices crafting the response went exactly like
“President Trump: “Equal justice under the law must mean that every American receives equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement regardless of race … Hopefully George Floyd is looking down right now & saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country … in terms of equality”.
-followed by something like:
Corporate Press: “crap. Way too unifying and positive. um… lets go with ‘Trump sez Floyd would be impressed by the current jobless rates’, or something. No one googles this shit anyway lol”…
Not very classy, guys… It’s one thing to run with the “Trump sed to drink bleach!” type of fake quotes without looking up the actual video because you think its funny and doesn’t need to be accurate because “it sounds like something he’d say anyway” but you’re really gonna bring George Floyd into that game of liars telephone?… Rude.”
I didn’t examine the time stamps to located which chickens came before which eggs on when the media’s domino of dishonesty started toppling on this narrative, but they all went with the basic theme of cutting out the separation of topics between the economy and equal justice in policing in order to squish Trumps words about the George Floyd together with the other topic of the U.S. economy. The context and separation of topics was in no way unclear, but most news media knows people don’t fact-check anti-Trump reports to any degree of consequence, so it was an easy editorial choice to go with the lie.
I encourage you to follow the link to the other examples of how this was reported, but the award for most boiled-down version of the narrative was this Bloomberg post that basically just took the talking points of the smear and made it a news report. The headline reads “Trump Invokes Floyd in Jobs Remarks as Black Unemployment Soars” as a double misleader that both lies about the President invoking Floyd “in jobs remarks” (he didn’t. It was a conference on job growth but Floyd was never mentioned in any context of anything about jobs) and adding the “as [this other negative thing happens]” technique of leading the reader (as opposed to reporting on Trumps thesis that a strong economy will bring racial justice). The byline bullet point below the headline contradicts it by admitting that Trump said ‘A great day for him’ ‘after remarks on equality’ (not remarks on jobs…), and then reports that black unemployment rose to 16.8%. Then they use *this* photo of Trump mid-action of getting up or down from his seat, just to make sure the point is driven home to the reader that we’re not supposed to be viewing this favorably.
With the number of outlets that ran with the fake narrative in the mainstream media – you can imagine the level of less stringent fact checkers repeating it all over social media. I scrolled through 4 different people posting 3 different links with the lie on Facebook before I even looked other areas to see the ditto’s echoing the line that Trump claimed a deified figure of history would be their fan.
President Trump has expressed concern about states, particularly the key election states of Michigan and Nevada, changing their voting rules this election year to shift to mail-in voting in the name of safety because of the Wuhan Coronavirus.
Increased mail-in voting increases potential for fraud, so naturally this should be a bipartisan issue, right? You would think the Democratic party might have an interest in protecting Democracy and specifically – the citizens rights to have their vote counted and not illegally cancelled out by a fraudulent tally. But no… the Democrat party and its partisan defenders take the opposite position and ridicule the concern in the first place.
Straw-manning the issue
The first tactic to ridiculing a point with merit to it is to remove the merit and argue against an alternate dumber version of the argument in a technique known as the Strawman Fallacy.
While Trump has been rightfully suspicious of the fast track attempt to use mass mail-in voting as the standard for this years election, Trump critics bashing him on this strawman his position into “any vote by mail is bad” which is a much easier position (that he never took) to tear down, especially since military votes are by mail and Trump himself votes absentee ballots. This technique was used to roast the President as a hypocrite by media who made no attempt to give readers a glimpse into what the actual concern expressed is or might be.
CNN’s Chris Cillizza summed up this dumb non-point on a CNN.com article (which is notable because it would be one thing if a journalist displayed this level of lack-of-journalism on their blog or social media profile but to do so on their platform of alleged journalism only validates via illustration, Trumps claim that CNN is Fake News):
President Donald Trump made very clear that voting by mail — an alternative many are suggesting to deal with the ongoing stay-at-home directives — is a very bad thing. And more than that, he suggested, it’s deeply corrupt.”No, mail ballots, they cheat,” said Trump. “OK, people cheat. Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country because they are cheaters.”
You might have noticed that Trump is not terribly thorough and precise with every sentence that casually references another that he’s said in that moment or the week prior when he speaks off the cuff to an audience that knows (or he thinks knows) what he’s talking about (like supporters at a rally or members of the press) and this makes for easy attack points by dishonest media critics to just isolate those moments instead of doing that journalism thingy where they aggregate the facts on the topic together and report them in a way to inform the people of the Presidents position. Instead, these corporate press outlets pluck these moments out of any further explanatory context and rebut the literalness of those isolated phrases rather than the collective explanation. The above quotes are not the only comments the President has said, yet Cilizza uses those and those alone to dishonestly summarize his position. With the false premise that “Trump thinks no one should ever vote by mail”, the premise is set for the “gotchya”. In reality, the lines above were spoken, as I noted, in reference to his previous comments on the subject regarding hastily expanded mass mail-in voting and Trump made the mistake of mentioning it in a press conference where he assumed the reporters attending would have been good enough at their jobs to know the subject matter.
Nah. Instead of referencing the larger issue, a reporter was all “uhhm, didn’t you just recently vote by mail?” and Trump was all “Duh. Yea. You can do that in Florida and I was in the White House so I voted absentee” and the reporter was like “how do you reconcile that?” and Trump was like “Wtf b*ch”. *(Paraphrased / not a real transcript).
Cilizza used the actual back and forth, where the reporter actually did say “How do you reconcile that” and Trump said he was in the White House, probably not even catching on that the reporter was trying to trap him and thought she was just being stupid, and then called it “obvious hypocrisy” instead of the non-contradictory reality it is. The lying title of that Cilizza article, btw, is “Donald Trump’s blatant hypocrisy on voting by mail” even though only an approximate 26 lines of the post (including the “how do you reconcile that?” transcript) are dedicated to that false premise and 56 lines afterward acknowledging the higher propensity of mail-in fraud, but making excuses for it as not a big enough deal to do anything about…
The problem with mail-in fraud
Cilizza gets to the point that “The problem is that Trump thinks absentee voting is good for him but not for other people. Because of, er, fraud.” – which again, is false. Trump never said or implied anything about the current absentee voting system in place – his comments were only about rushed state wide mass mail-in voting – but Cilizza can’t just be out there writing posts like “Trump is right about this issue” – so first came the false “lol what a hypocrite” thesis that headlined the post, and then buried underneath comes the acknowledgement of the issue at hand:
Now, what Trump is right about is that absentee voting and vote-by-mail have been the places in the recent past where the small amount of voter fraud that exists has been discovered. (Nota bene: The only difference, effectively, between absentee voting and vote-by-mail is that in the former you have to request a ballot while in the latter a ballot is sent to you.)
Yea… doy…
The concern is, again, not that registered voters who mail in their ballots are currently doing a bad thing, but that a new policy automatically mailing ballots to millions of people that didn’t ask for them, comes with the obvious potential of mailing voter fraud opportunities. Without a thorough review to do this right, you’re potentially sending millions of ballots to people who don’t exist or are ineligible voters.
For such a policy to avoid this obvious loophole for election theft, the voter rolls would have to undergo a re-indexing to update the Governments inefficient system of doing seemingly simple tasks it manages to fail at like keeping track of people who moved, are registered in multiple states by accident or on purpose, who have died or have been convicted of a felony that makes them ineligible to cast a vote.
Trying to make the non-controversial a controversy
Situations like this where journalists want to editorially slant a message but not completely bald-faced-lie about it entirely do so by couching the truth they don’t want focused on in a swarm of “yea, but still”. Again – I’m picking on CNN’s Chris Cilizza here, but only because his article on the subject was so exemplary of the others who did the exact same thing in the same way. In his pre-mentioned article he admits to national mail-in fraud but when talking about specific examples, makes sure they are only ones that are obscure, hyper-local, and from a long time ago, such as one in the Democratic primaries for local offices like sheriff in “the late 1990s” (couldn’t give an exact year, bro? “1997” is in both the top of the article and its URL…), quoting from what “The New York Times wrote back then“:
“Many of the absentee voters were assisted in voting by supporters of various candidates after claiming that they could not read (sometimes despite high school or college degrees) or that they suffered from physical maladies (one saying he had been kicked in the head by a mule).”
The NYT caption on this photo reads: “An absentee ballot in Florida. Almost 2 percent of mailed ballots are rejected, double the rate for in-person voting.” -Credit… Sarah Beth Glicksteen for The New York Times
The Times article reports that election administrators say that just the increasing trend of more people choosing to vote by mail “will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud”, noting in particular that voting by mail contains “vastly more prevalent” fraud than the in-person voting fraud that most media attention surrounds. Despite being from 2012, it offers more pertinent historical record highlights than CNN-Cilizza’s 1997 Georgia sheriff primary example, such as:
In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time. Before this year’s primary, for example, a woman in Hialeah was charged with forging an elderly voter’s signature, a felony, and possessing 31 completed absentee ballots, 29 more than allowed under a local law.
The flaws of absentee voting raise questions about the most elementary promises of democracy. “The right to have one’s vote counted is as important as the act of voting itself,” Justice Paul H. Anderson of the Minnesota Supreme Court wrote while considering disputed absentee ballots in the close 2008 Senate election between Al Franken and Norm Coleman.
Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner.
Which is exactly Trumps stated concern that Cilizza and other Trump critics are trying to dismiss. One has to wonder why that might be…
Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans. @foxandfriends
Vox writer Aaron Rupar responded to this with the headline “Trump isn’t even trying to hide his self-interested reasons for opposing mail-in voting” with the byline quoting Trump saying “For whatever reason, [it] doesn’t work out well for Republicans”, calling that an example of President Trump “saying the quiet part loud” when it comes to his opposition to mail-in voting. The reality is just the opposite: disproportionate Democrat votes in increased mail-in ballots than exist in the rest of the voting tallies suggests evidence to exactly Trumps concern about fraud.
In that same Vox piece, Rupar totally makes stuff up about to boost mail-in voting by claiming Trump totally makes stuff up to discredit mail-in voting:
"You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody's living room, signing ballots all over the place. No. I think that mail-in voting is a terrible thing" — Trump totally makes stuff up on Tuesday to discredit mail-in voting pic.twitter.com/bsUjFxPwIP
A bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and former secretary of state James A. Baker III, concluded in 2005 that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” and that “vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.” Carter and Baker also pointed out that citizens who vote at nursing homes “are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation.” In Florida, there is even a name for this: “granny farming.”
Thiessen also notes items of consequence that the higher rates of mail-in ballots not even being counted are undisputed.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that in the 2008 presidential election, 7.6 million of 35.5 million mail-in ballots requested were not counted because they never reached voters or were rejected for irregularities. That is a failure rate of more than 21 percent. In 2008, it did not matter because the election was not particularly close and mail-in ballots only accounted for a fraction of votes cast. But imagine the impact that would have in a close election in which mail-in voting is tried on a massive scale.
Again: more than a tiny bit suspicious that so called “Democrats” would be downplaying these known threats to democracy, no?
As admitted by Cilizza (again – in his article that calls Trumps absentee voting “hypocritical”), Thiessen also cites the difference between absentee votes and a state-wide change to mass mail voting:
Moreover, there is a huge difference between sending ballots to a small number of citizens who request them and requiring that they be mailed to every registered voter, as Democrats are demanding. Under the Democrats’ plan, ballots would inevitably be sent to wrong addresses or inactive voters, putting millions of blank ballots into circulation — an invitation for fraud. Add to that the danger of what Democrats call “community ballot collection” (a.k.a. “ballot harvesting”) where campaign workers collect absentee ballots in bulk and deliver them to election officials, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Seems more like the validation of Trumps concern about a rushed change of plans to enact state-wide mail-in voting this election year is far from controversial – it’s nearly universally agreed upon by data published and opined in the same sources that are attacking this concern (NY Times, WashPo, CNN, just to name the 3 quoted in this post by me).
Know who else agrees? Chris Cilizza…
In the same article mentioned several times in this post – the one dubiously calling Trump a hypocrite in the title and claiming that voter fraud shouldn’t be a concern, Chris Cilizza says the same thing as Trump. Specifically that:
So, there’s no question that past history has suggested that absentee balloting and vote-by-mail are more likely than in-person voting to be subject to bad actors. Which makes sense since the vote is being cast, usually, in the privacy of your home, as opposed to at a polling place with official poll watchers and election officials not only keeping an eye out for any irregularities but also taking the ballot from you as soon as you cast it.
Specifically: The mainstream media coverage of the Wuhan coronavirus and its editorializing of its severity and effects vs the severity and effects of local and federal governments reaction to it, is making people act irrationally hysterical, panicked, and without critical thinking. But “insane” is a shorter and accurate summary (that is not an attack on those actually afflicted with cognitive illnesses).
Recording his show from his back yard, Bill Maher tries to talk some sense into his viewers on the subject.
“Now that we’re starting to see some hope in all this, don’t hope-shame me” is the bizarre but necessary plea someone in the logical position on this issue at this time faces from the unwashed masses.
“You know the problem with nonstop gloom and doom is it gives Trump the chance to play the optimist. And optimists tend to win American elections.”
As I’ve noted before about the bizarre “Trump was too optimistic” attacks – the anti-Trump doomsday media is only helping his re-election. Maybe it’s a secret conspiracy to manipulate media consumers with a little Bugs Bunny style reverse-psychology but that still makes it my duty to tip you off about it in the event that you don’t want to be one of those manipulated tools aiding the Donald Show into a Season 2 renewal.
Maher cited FDR’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” which has been a winning inspirational theme for him and politicians after him, most famously “the other 3 letter president”, JFK. Maher doesn’t fear the Chinese virus so much as he fears that “as s*** as he is, I can see Trump riding that into a second term. And then there will be no hope left for you to shame.”
I selfishly assume that one of his writers must have heard me point out the “early seasons of Nickelodeons Rugrats cinematography” technique fearmongers are using to make a micro organism appear visually scary by showing the scrubbing broccoli ball image. As Maher put it: anything “you magnify a thousand times” looks scary, and illustrate the point with a micro-zoomed image of a pubic hair.
Update (May 14th): Dave Portnoy’s take
The CEO of Barstool Sports had a similar thesis with slightly different words.
Emergency Press Conference – When Did Flattening The Curve Turn Into Finding The Cure pic.twitter.com/ZaSTxL6Tuc
3 women at an Illinois day care were arrested for giving melatonin gummies to 2-year-olds in their care before naptime.
The story sounds mostly funny to me as melatonin is a natural antioxidant your body makes when its dark as a signal to the brain to start shutting down into sleep mode. It’s not a sleeping pill chemical or anything you can overdose on or hurt yourself with – it’s a natural calming aid that aids rest. It’s not a drug, not a prescription, not something that causes psychoactive hallucinations or liver damage or any kind of organ failure or distress. Of course, whether its harmless or not, I wouldn’t be okay with a childcare provider giving a supplement to my kid without asking, so that part is a problem – but something to be arrested over?… Why? What crime could this possibly fall under? The charges reported so far just say “two counts of battery and two counts of endangering the life of a child”, and this dramatacism is where I got to a “wtf?” enough level to where I had to find a way where this made sense.
This photo of the daycare taken from Google Maps’ Street View appears in a lot of the reports covering this story, along with the mug shots of the 3 women (which I’ve chosen not to include in my own reportage here because it seems unfair that they are being vilified as child abusers when they’re really only guilty of being poor-judgement chuckleheads), which are both stylistically things you include in serious crimes – not a story that amounts to “daycare helps kids take naps”.
The scene of the crime
The only side effects of melatonin I could find were the effects it is meant to have on the body (drowsiness, dizziness, tiredness) and perhaps a head or stomach ache. It’s allegedly possible to be allergic to melatonin and develop swelling or skin rashes, so that part makes more sense, but with no instances of any such damage (which I think would be extremely rare given the nature of the supplement), idk what the freakout over is exactly. And yes, there was a freaking of outs. In addition to the arresting of the workers (aged 32, 19, and 25), the story of the arrest was on dozens of national outlets all reporting the case as if it were an actual case of battery and child-life endangerment when it clearly isn’t.
That makes the story worth logging as its the ignorance of the supplement fueling the sensationalism of an alleged danger, when at best it was just an inappropriate move that was worth somewhere between a strongly worded reprimand and a firing. A criminal record, not so much.
Activist journalist James O’Keefe’s organization Project Veritas got one of their undercover personalities found out by the Washington Post and for some reason this is supposed to be a big deal. It isn’t, of course. O’Keefe’s projects are fishing expeditions that use undercover individuals to infiltrate organizations and report impropriety, illegal activity, or revelation of bias and internal conspiracy that contradicts and individual or organizations public presentation. Just like with actual-fishing, not every one of your lures gets a bite and that’s basically what happened here – as has happened dozens of times before with Veritas – but this time the spin is that the target (this time, The Washington Post) smelled the rat and exposed that they were targeted. Point for WashPo but that’s more of a side note than it is an actual story. Except it’s being treated as an actual-story in a transparent motivation to discredit and hopefully destroy O’Keefe – which is embarrassing because there’s just nothing there to make a big story out of. If these O’Keefe critics were smarter they would use this as a dismissive “lol – look at this cheap trick this guy tried. FAIL” type of short form “follies from Amateur Hour” commentary instead of the path his haters just can’t help themselves from taking by screaming “HA! SEE? BOOM! YOU SUCK!”. Oy vey you guys – chill…
If you think I’m exaggerating the goofy glee over a story that amounts to “a political journalist tried a sting and got stung” (I just made that up and am now disappointed in all the outlets who failed to use that turn of phrase themselves), take this piece on Mediate with the headline “Everyone Points and Laughs at James O’Keefe’s Incredibly Embarrassing Journalism Blunder”. It’s true that there is a great deal of pointing and laughing at O’Keefe over this, but there’s just no “blunder” here which is why there are no signs O’Keefe is embarrassed. Why would he be? In fact, he smartly leveraged the failure as a fundraising point and didn’t do so in a weasely “defeat means victory!” BS kind of way – he just straight up said that one of his operatives had their cover blown and the other reports that were successful in the same operation now need to be rushed to print to beat the Post from stealing the narrative.
That’s a frank and candid admission that doesn’t dodge anything and bluntly states the terms of the game he’s playing. So how is the media responding to that? With headlines like this:
But… it didn’t “blow up in his face” and he’s just claiming that he’s a Winner after Losing… he admitted a fail and put it in context of other items that are fair game for scrutiny just like any other reportage – so why this insistence on smearing him (complete with the unflattering stock photo trick of him mid-sentence so he’s making a derp face) with misleading innuendo?
Commentary Magazine gets the set-up right and the conclusion all wrong with a piece titled “Conservative Media Give Up“.
Over the course of two farcical hours, O’Keefe inadvertently established that the Washington Post’s reporters were pros, that the Post’s reporting on Moore was water-tight, and that his own organization—and Moore’s supporters, by extension—had little regard for the victims of sexual assault. After all, they had hired an activist to portray one toward a petty and political end, thus cheapening the experience of legitimate survivors.
All this is rather loathsome, and O’Keefe’s organization is due all the opprobrium it is receiving and more. But it also illustrates a condition that is rendering conservative activist media impotent: They have stopped caring about their audience.
Huh?… The first paragraph is legit but what is described right afterward is the exact opposite of what it says.
The thesis was that The Washington Post was so politically biased against Republicans that they were eager, in a politically activist (as opposed to traditional-journalistic) sense, to dive onto tabloid dirt about a Senate candidate in order to torpedo their election. O’Keefe tested this thesis. That’s his only “crime” he’s being pilloried for and that’s not a crime at all – it’s the accepted standard practice of thesis testing…
The same article even links to video O’Keefe released showing the Post’s national security reporter stating that his papers editorial board is being too hard on President Trump – mockingly adding “some bombshell”, as a way of bolstering the articles thesis that O’Keefe has “given up” on journalism and is “actively courting ignorance” in their audience. This makes no sense. O’Keefe had a thesis that the Post was unjustifiably harsh on Republicans and tested the thesis with undercover actors. He provided evidence for the thesis, got busted on one of his lures, and probably had a dozen others that just didn’t lead anywhere. So what? I too would call it a sarcastic “bombshell” (ie: not a bombshell) that the Washington Post has an anti-Republican bias, but you can’t take that position in the same article you praise what Pro’s at reporting that outlet is.
What this all amounts to is, ironically, that anti-Conservative-Media criticism has given up (even though to many degrees it never really tried). To do a take down of a figure, situation, or ideology, you have to actually take-it-down… Unfortunately however, ever since the G-Dubya years, Leftist criticism has sadly amounted to just mocking a misstep on on the other side in degrees far outside the parameters of what it merits as a mock-worthy or discrediting event. Whether it’s Bush getting a shoe thrown at him, or trying to open a locked door, or Trump tweeting something incendiary or goofy or an org like Project Veritas having a reporters cover blown amidst other successful finds – the focus is all wrong and it fails at what its attempting to do, which is tear down the individual involved.
For all of Donald Trumps character issues, including his loose grasp of literal and specific accuracy – holy crap, did we dodge a bullet by not electing Hillary Clinton as president.
In a CBS interview talking about her 2016 election autopsy book “What Happened” (to which the joke responses all varying degrees of “YOU happened”), Hillary Clinton reminded voters not only of the levels of her delusions but the level of whopping Pants-on-fire lies she’s willing to tell herself and others to fit her worldviews.
These are dangerous lies. As I’ve explained in detail before: Trumps “lies” are 99% braggadocios machismo New York bullsh*ting. Hillary Clintons lies are oppressive divisive slanders.
“THE PRESIDENT OF ALL AMERICANS” vs “THE WHITE NATIONALIST GUT” In the interview, Clinton talks about the inauguration day of President Trumps swearing in. Typically, defeated candidates don’t necessarily attend this event, but former presidents and First Ladies do, and she is the latter, so she attended. Good for her for showing up. But that doesn’t mean you had to lie about it…
Ruining the sympathetic upswing she was describing (about showing unity with the nation and putting behind her the heartbreak of not being the one up on that podium taking the oath) she calls President-Elect Trumps inauguration speech “A cry from the white nationalist gut”, which is an insane lie.
Clinton said the speech was an opportunity for Trump to have said “okay. I’m proud of my supporters, but I’m the president of all Americans. That’s not what we heard at all”.
In fact, that’s almost literally 100% verbatim precisely to a “T” what we heard exactly… The speech literally contains the line “The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans.”
Which is more likely?: that Hillary Clinton is that woefully ignorant of White Nationalism that she thinks it includes resources and service to “all Americans”? Or that she knows that’s not the case and is just a lying because she thinks she can get away with it? The sad part is that she basically has, as I could find no pundits or fact-checkers who took up this egregious ugly bold faced jewel of dishonesty.
THIS AMERICAN CARNAGE STOPS NOW… Imagine if CBS cut to that part of the speech after showing Clinton falsely claim that in her opinion it would have been a good time to say exactly what Trump said, followed by “that’s not what we heard at all”. That wouldn’t happen of course, not only because of CBS’s potential bias politically, but because the What Happened book is published by a CBS publisher – but that’s fine. No obligation for CBS to call her out on this if they don’t want to – but this audaciously opposite-of-reality statement did put their video editors in an awkward position since they had to directly avoid showing the part of the speech that proves she’s lying and try to find something that illustrates what she’s talking about. Typically in a piece like this you’ll hear a person say something like “her speech was very divisive” and then the next shot will be a clip of some divisive line that the person in questions stated. In this case, Hillary’s claim doesn’t exist, so instead they had to find the most incendiary quote of Trumps from the inaugural speech in where they clip out the context and show video of him saying “This American carnage stops right here, right now”. Accepting that Clinton completely fabricated the “white nationalist gut” smear – this line about American carnage at *least* must have *some* innuendo hinting to the scourge of ethnic minority crime rates or some other impropriety by American ethnicities that are in poverty or other disenfranchised groups? Nope. The exact opposite… The “American Carnage” that Trump firmly vowed an end to is a list of traditionally minority-affected disenfranchisements including inner city poverty, lower and middle class blue collar jobs, failing schools, and crime fueled by drugs and gangs. Look at the context of when this line was delivered in Trumps speech compared to that line being chopped from that context and followed after Clinton falsely claiming that his speech embodied the very heart of “White Nationalism”, and then try to not scrunch your face like you just bit into a dirty lemon:
But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.
This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
We are one nation – and their pain is our pain. Their dreams are our dreams; and their success will be our success. We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.
The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans.
THE NONSENSE THAT ARE CALLED “LIES” VS “LIES THAT MATTER Trumps critics in the media jumped all over the supposed “lie” that his inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama’s when photos of the crowds appear to clearly show that not being the case. This suggests that Trumps off the cuff exaggerated bragging is a calculated or careless effort to deceive the American people – over something that couldn’t matter less. Compare that then with the non-reaction to this whopper by the person who was almost the one delivering that speech and the fact that it absolutely IS a calculated or careless (although even the most charitable excuse-making for Hillary leave’s little excuse for such a falsehood to be an act of unintentional carelessness) and the fact that it is of major consequence to the people who hear that lie. Trump says “I got a historically big crowd at my speech” and whether that’s true or not means nothing to anyone, but Clinton says “our president gave a speech that said he was not the President of all Americans but rather only concerned with Whites” and sh*t poisons the minds of millions, feeding them a lie from a source they find credible that makes them feel powerless, disconnected, and adversarial to a Presidential Administration literally going out of its way to include, connect, and unite. Just disgusting.
And that’s what grinds my gears about this: the severity of it. The depths of this Clinton lie is what freaks me out however because of the willingness to revise history we all experienced and with a straight face claim the opposite of what was either seen or is easy to see for yourself and see that the claim she’s making has no basis whatsoever and is instead just a categorical slander.
CLINTONS CHARACTERIZATION WAS AS “OPPOSITE FROM THE TRUTH” AS IT GETS Sorry/Not Sorry for doing a double-pass on the same point, but the details of exactly how from-the-pages-of-1984 this Clinton Lie was are excruciatingly important.
Trumps speech included gracious thank-you’s to the Obama’s, emphasized solidarity as Americans across the things that divide us, and stated that prejudice will not be tolerated.
A few lines from the speech Hillary Clinton claims was not “at all” a statement of being the President of ALL Americans and instead a “cry from the white nationalist gut” (emphasis, mine):
‘We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and to restore its promise for all of our people.”
“Together, we will determine the course of America and the world for years to come.”
We are one nation — and their pain is our pain. Their dreams are our dreams; and their success will be our success. We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.
Hillary Clinton literally said that not only did Donald Trump not say anything like “I’m the president of all Americans” in a speech where he said exactly that almost word for word, and she said his speech was from the gut of white nationalism when it actually stated that nationalism can’t possibly have anything to do with race and that patriotism and prejudice cannot coexist.
HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?
This is where, even knowing Clintons history with truth telling, I am strained to find an explanation for how this could have happened. How could Clinton utter such a blatant lie on something so easily verifiable and so recent? It was reported beforehand that uniting all Americans would be the highlight of the speech, and as the NY Times reported, that’s exactly what he did. Donald Trump refers to that paper as “the failing New York Times” because it is an openly Leftist/Democrat slanted publication that is highly critical of him and his presidency and his political party, yet that didn’t stop the paper from reporting the truth that the speech’s theme was Unity – so what is so unique about Clinton that she can’t do the same?
You didn’t need to have read the NY Times to know this about Trumps speech – I also know this to be true because I watched the speech (and you can too. does Hillary Clinton know they record these things??). Hillary Clinton not only claims she watched the speech but there is video evidence that she did… and yet there she is a few months later, claiming the opposite of reality is what she observed. That is so nuts – so dangerous in a person with power – so terrifying that neither Jane Pauley interviewing her nor anyone else in the media afterward corrected this crazy falsehood – that this moment alone is enough to fall to ones knees in gratitude that Clinton lost the election.
BUT WAIT… THERE’S MORE… While that smear was the worst in the interview, Clintons divisiveness continued onto other but similar points that were extensions of her “basket of Deplorables” remark that was designed to explain away her failures as a Politician by impugning morals and motives of the supporters of her opponent.
She blames anti-woman sentiment of course. The truth is that “We really don’t want a woman commander in chief” was not a popular opinion anywhere.
She compounds the racism charge in such a ham-fisted way, sating that Trump supporters were angry about “Gains that were made by others” to where Jane Pauly had to help her out and just say what she was dancing around: “millions of white people”. Which again, is false that a prominent sentiment of Trump support was “non-whites have made gains in this country and we need to undo that”. That is yet another ugly smear that has such a non-resemblance to anything in reality that the derangement going on in Clintons mind becomes more and more alarming.
On the fact that she was proved to be completely “careless” in the words of FBI Director James Comey, Clinton baselessly accuses the non-partisan and arguably more-anti-Trump-than-Anti-Hillary Comey to have made those findings for an “audience” of whom she doesn’t know but suggests maybe “right wing commentators, right wing members of congress, whatever”. This echoes her much-mocked claim in the 1990’s of a “vast right wing conspiracy” to take down her husband, referring to the multiple sexual misconduct accusations non-political and Democrat women were making against him.
WATCH FOR YOURSELF… Here is the un-edited interview with all the garbage laid out above.
A correction and apology and Reason 9Billion why our (meaning America’s) news media sucks: I just found out now that this guys manifesto that was cited as him being Christian says so in the context of him differentiating himself from other non-Christian nations and that instead of any preaching, fundamentalism endorsement or anything somewhat somehow partially approaching a belief that God wants him to kill people – he says he has “no relationship” with God or Jesus Christ. So in other words: he is a “Christian terrorist” on less of a level that he is a “weird studded chin hair whisker terrorist”.
There’s no way around this one, guys. I get that people are eager to have a Christian, or at least non-Muslim terrorist movement example to point to in the decade wake of September 11th and it’s related jihadist bombings around the world, but distortion is never a way to argue a point. This Norway loser said that “Christian fundamentalist theocracy” is “everything we DO NOT want” and a “secular European society” is “what we DO want.” There’s no Christian-terrorism here…
I apologize for my previous comments that took anti-Christian biased reports as fact without checking for myself.
His use of the term is not based on faith but out of collective identification with a notion of “Christian Europe.”
“Regarding my personal relationship with God, I guess I’m not an excessively religious man,” he says in his 1,500-page manifesto. “I am first and foremost a man of logic. However, I am a supporter of a monocultural Christian Europe.”
Breivik’s video, in which he blames “cultural Marxists” for supporting a multicultural Europe, is replete with imagery of various sword-wielding and carnage-provoking crusaders and defenders, many of whom sport crosses.
Ironically, anyone who has recently checked the state of deep and abiding faith, or “piety,” in Europe, will find the place is decidedly, and more than ever, secular. In this sense at least Breivik is honest about his brand of Christianity. God-talk hasn’t occupied much of northern Europe for years, and not because bearded jihadists have blocked the entrance to the church.
UPDATE: More info and humorously delivered facts about the killerthat is spot on, but… you’re not gonna like that it’s from Ann Coulter, who titles her piece New York Times Reader Kills Dozens in Norway (a reference to the fact that Breivik cited the NY Times over a dozen times but the bible 0 times):
Breivik says he is “not an excessively religious man,” brags that he is “first and foremost a man of logic,” calls himself “economically liberal” and reveres Darwinism.
But Times reporters had their “Eureka!” moment as soon as they heard Breivik used the word “Christian” someplace to identify himself. No one at the Times bothered to read Breivik’s manifesto to see that he doesn’t use the term the way the rest of us do. That might have interfered with the paper’s obsessive Christian-bashing.
Other famous killers dubbed conservative Christians by the Times include Timothy McVeigh and Jared Loughner.
McVeigh was a pot-smoking atheist who said, “Science is my religion.”
Similarly, Breivik says in his manifesto that “it is essential that science take an undisputed precedence over biblical teachings” –- a statement that would be incomprehensible to all the real scientists, such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Newton, Mendel, Pasteur, Planck, Einstein and Pauli, all of whom believed the whole purpose of science was to understand God.
The Tucson shooter, Jared Loughner, was lyingly described by the Times as a pro-life fanatic. Not only did more honest news outlets, such as ABC News, report exactly the opposite — for example, how Loughner alarmed his classmates by laughing about an aborted baby in class — but Loughner’s friends described him as “left wing,” “a political radical,” “quite liberal” and “a pothead.” Another said Loughner’s mother was Jewish.
The only reason Timothy McVeigh has gone down in history as a right-wing Christian and Jared Loughner has not — despite herculean efforts by much of the mainstream media to convince us otherwise — is that by January 2011 when Loughner went on his murder spree, conservatives had enough media outlets to reveal the truth.
As explained in the smash best-seller “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America,” the liberal rule is: Any criminal act committed by a white man with a gun is a right-wing, Christian conspiracy, whereas any criminal act committed by a nonwhite is the government violating someone’s civil liberties.
Dick Cheney on “Hannity” promo says “its a hard hitting Hannity exclusive”. a little misleading, considering “hard hitting” in context of an interview usually applies to the interviewer, not the guest. The promo should have just come out and said “Sean Hannity gives the former Vic President an unchallenged platform to bash the shit out of the opposition”.
Just admit it: “what do you read?” is a stupid question and Palins answer didn’t mean shit. Why would you answer that question? You know it’s just going to be picked apart and unfairly scrutinized, and all the sources you DONT name will be mentioned. So wtf? “I read the same shit you do” (paraphrase) is a perfectly legit answer.
