I recently suggested a new on-going feature, walking back the lies. I have another item for the column.
The Best and Brightest people who sneered at Conservatives as ignorant, hateful racists for suggesting the debunked idea that a lab in Wuhan was the source of the virus and the Chinese were covering it up – are walking back the lie. It seems the virus may indeed have originated in Wuhan and the Chinese may indeed have covered it up.
No apology of course. No admission that Conservatives were right all along. We don’t insist on that, don’t expect it, and would be astonished if it were forthcoming.
But somebody should remember and therefore the purpose of this ongoing feature. We were right. And they knew it.
Joe Doakes
Series? Not a bad idea at all.
It’s verging on a Berg’s Law of “Fact-Checking” – something to the effect of “to the ‘fact-check’ caste, truth is directly correlated to “did a progressive say it”.
I feel so stupid. I completely fell for the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory that the election was stolen. But as this article makes clear, the election actually was SAVED.
All those unsubstantiated Republican claims that an informal alliance of left-wing activists and business titans got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding; fended off voter-suppression lawsuits; recruited armies of poll workers; successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line; helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks; and after Election Day, monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not challenge the result including pressuring state legislators to certify dubious election results – they’re all true. They did all those things and more. But that’s a Good Thing. Because they saved the election from Trump winning.
I wish I’d understood this last Fall. I wasted so much time fretting over laws of statistics and suitcases of ballot and cardboarded-over windows but none of it mattered. Things went exactly as planned.
So I’m embarrassed at my credulity but one good thing came of it – I won’t have stand in line to cast my vote ever again, not when the big-shots have decided what the outcome should be and taken steps to ensure it. So that’s nice.
Joe Doakes
Last week on his podcast, Ben Shapiro noted something I’d picked up when late, long-banned, forever-exiled commenter Dog Gone was trying to act as this blog’s “fact checker” – the difference between “true” and “false” usually boils down to whether a conservative or a progressive said it, regardless of the veracity of the fact itself.
As we noted last week, “Stand your Ground” and ‘Constitutional Carry” bills have been introduced in the Legislature.
And they have a shot, potentially – there are enough red-district DFLers with legitimate fears of being retired in 2022 to maybe soften the DFL’s stance, and Governor Klink might need to weigh his fealty to the Progressives against gun control’s dismal record outside 494 and 694. A veto will be held against him, and every outstate DFLer, in 2022. Smart DFLers (like Bakk and Tomassoni) remember 2002, when every single outstate DFLer who opposed “Shall Issue” was defeated in the ’02 mid-terms.
Remember – it took seven years to get Shall Issue reform passed, culminating in the ’02 pro-gun election sweep.
Gun rights are a long game.
This, against a backdrop of 40% of gun buyers in 2020 being new purchasers, and 40% of them being women and, at least anecdotally, a substantial number of them being formerly ambivalent about firearms.
My suspicion? Big Left realizes they are losing the gun battle, and has to gaslight the minority who still opposes them into becoming more die-hard, to avoid losing more ground outside the Blue coasts and Chicago.
President Biden, we’re told, is a devout Catholic, which is a good thing…
President Biden is perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century. A different, more liberal Christianity grounds his life and his policies. https://t.co/G27AWibfSe
…as opposed to Amy Coney Barrett, for whom it was a bad thing.
Also – “Ascendant liberal Christianity is an eternal hope on Big Left. Sort of like Blue Texas. There’s anways been a “blue” church: mainline Presbyterians, white Methodists and Episcopoals, ELCA Lutherans, and an awful lot of mainstream Catholics, who have made their peace with abortion in exchange for programs just as easily as “Feminists” made theirs with Bill Clinton.
The “blue” church is “ascendant” because one of its own is in power. These also happen to be the denominations that are in demogrpaphic free-fall.
…see to it that you fall in love with someone who swoons over you like Big Media swoons over…
CNN's David Chalian says that the side lights on the National Mall's reflecting pool are like "extensions of Joe Biden's arms embracing America." pic.twitter.com/G88C8UCN3C
Wasn’t there a famous incident a centuray ago, a fire blamed on innocent people which gave a certain politician the excuse to seize power? Are we absolutely certain the troublmakers were ordinary Trump supporters, same as the rest of the crowd outside, and not infiltrators hoping to cause a backlash against President Trump and his supporters protesting the stolen election
Joe Doakes
Whether the riot was launched by provocateurs or not, plenty of Trump supporters did participate with great glee. There’s a dilemma, of course – if there’s one thing we learned during the Tea Party, at gun rights and pro life and tax-protest rallies, it’s that conservatives need to behave impeccably, because the media and the Dems oppo research staff (pardon the redundancy) will pick over every utterance, visual and thought for wrongthink).
(If there’s another thing we learned it’s that the left’s slander machine and control of the administrative state makes perfect behavior irrelevant. Lefty social media today is awash in claims that the Tea Party was racist, violent, and a tool of the Koch Brothers, who (we’re told) bought all of American politics for a few years).
But whoever turned the demonstration into a riot, and whatever the reasons, the left is responding to last week’s events with a technique they’ve mastered; not wasting a crisis. Whoever did what, it will be spun relentlessly to their advantage.
Politics swing from left to right and back and forth again.
Perceptions go from one extreme to the other.
Fashions and social mores skitter back and forth and up and down over time.
So what on this earth can we always count on?
If there’s a totalitarian, somewhere, anywhere, the New York Times will shill for them:
China now resembles what “normal” was like in the pre-pandemic world. The country reported fewer than 100,000 coronavirus infections for all of 2020. https://t.co/GqAIISVIaa
Dennis Prager has a great line – “Relationships can survive a lot, but no relationship can survive contempt”
When parties can’t see one another as human, forget about reaching common ground on differing ideas and ideals, can there be any point to trying to live together? I wouldn’t work for couples – why would it work for a nation?
It dawned on the world too late that when the Nazis actively portrayed the Jews as not very human…
…they meant it.
If there’s one thing more useful than one eliminationist Nazi cartoon, its’ two. Here goes:
Wait.
That wasn’t even in German.
That wasthe Washington Post.
On Christmas Eve.
This is up there with “bitter, gun-clinging Jeebus freaks” and “Deplorables” and the rest of the litany of conceits Blue America holds on Red America.
But most importantly? It’s about contempt.
I’ve been pointing out examples of Blue America’s contempt for the rest of us in this space since the beginning, really. And if the Trump era has done anything, it’s helped parts of the right come out of their shells (yes, some, like our friend Pete Strunk, haven’t been in their shells fir a very long time, but its fair to say Pete’s always been an outlier)
As clubby, self-referential and solipsistic as the modern “elite” (and even not-so-elite) media is, I should have probably predicted we’d see scenes like this whenever Trump was on the brink of leaving office.
Never mind that “the Lightworker” Obama was did a whole lot more actual oppressing of “journos” than Trump.
…covering Trump was up there with going ashore with the first wave on Omaha Beach, or like riding in a B24 with Charles Collingwood.
Which is a little ironic, given that The LIghtworker was, in fact, the most press-hostile President since Woodrow Wilson – and given the deep-state leaks with which the executive branch was riven, it would have been pointless for The Donald to even try to match Obama’s record.
I’m particularly proud of the interview I had last weekend with Peter Wood, author of 1620 – A Criticial Review of the 1629 Project. Wood and his book take a hammer to the historical fraud that the NYTimes sicced on the nation…
…and, worse, the miseducation of an entire generation about the history of our country.
So after leaving the Hunter Biden corruption story sitting out there untouched during the run-up to the election, the media is suddenly “discovering it”.
St Paul City Councilmember Mitra Jalali says that capitalism crushed a local alternative weekly.
I’m scratching my head at this because the print and online versions were free. So, if they couldn’t survive by giving away whatever they had, how did capitalism crush them? One would think something free would “crush” something more expensive. That’s usually what is said of Walmart- they offer things so cheaply that the small businesses can’t compete. In this case, what is the issue? Free publications can’t compete with more expensive subscription news? Or is it actually can’t compete with better sources online that are also free? Is that capitalism? I guess maybe it is because we here in the USA do have lots of choice and are also free to start another weekly in City Pages place. So, if that choice and opportunity bothers Mitra Jalali, just what alternative does she want for us?
I suspect councilwoman Jalali – who was “Mitra Jalali-Nelson” until having a hint of Scandinavian became a negative in Metro DFL politics – knows this.
I suspect she, like all DFL pols, knows her voters don’t think about it all that hard, and that nobody in the media is ever going to make an issue of it.
In this case, South Dakota’s Kristy Noem, widely seen as a solid dark-horse contender (I’ve added emphasis):
It’s unlikely that much, if any, of the money will end up going to Trump, said Paul S. Ryan, the vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, a campaign finance watchdog. Ryan, a campaign finance lawyer, pointed out that the governor can give a maximum of $2,800 to Trump’s campaign under federal law. If she wanted more to flow to Trump, she could have directed donors to the president’s own donation site.
“In all likelihood, she is keeping this money that she is raising,” Ryan said. “If she were actually interested in raising money for Donald Trump’s own legal efforts, she would use a joint-fundraising committee.”
Note the source – Common Cause, a “campaign finance watchdog”…
…that is part of the progressive non-profit industrial complex, outside of media quotations.
1. Evolution! – The pollster’s craft hasn’t caught up with the “new normal”, in a society where people legitimately fear being “canceled”, losing jobs, social standing and being targeted for violence because of their beliefs.
That is simultaneously possible, and not mutually eclusive
2. Incompetence! – The pollsters absorbed the lessons of 2016, where they actually did a little better than they did this year…
…and learned nothing.
3. Never Ascribe to Incompetence What Can Be Chalked Up To Malice – I’m going to present three facts and a conjecture:
Fact 1 – On December 1, 2016, representatives of the New York Times and Washington Post newsrooms went on WNYC radio’s “On the Media“ program (syndicated on NPR) and said, In as many words, that was time to change the rules of journalism. It was time to move past “passing the facts on to people and letting them make up their own minds” to “Denormalizing Donald Trump“.
Fact 3 – for the past 30 years, the Star Tribune “Minnesota Poll” has had a fairly clear pattern; the closer a race ended up being, the more wildly distorted pre-election polling numbers were. For example, they showed Tim Pawlenty, Norm Coleman and Tom Emmer getting blown out just before the election. All three races ended up being famously close. On the other hand, they tend to report blowouts pretty accurately; they had Amy Klobuchar and Kurt Bills pretty much dead on.
Conjecture: It’s not an “accident”, or a learning error, that polling predicting a landslide up until election day was completely wrong.
“The week before the election, Mike Pence is coming to a state that our polling says is supposed to be a blowout for Biden AND HAS BEEN EXPOSED TO COVID!
But if you don’t, I consider it my mission to make sure that date lives on – dare I say, in infamy.
It was the date that reps from the New York Times and Washington Post newsrooms went on the air and told the nation…
…well, the tiny, self-selecting part of the nation that listens to NPR on the weekend – that it was time for the news media to stop playing by the rules that they always told the nation they played by, the whole “telling people the facts and let them draw their own concusions” thing, and started using their power to “de-normalize” President Trump.
And almost four years later, here we are:
Donald Trump “stands without any real rivals as the worst American president in modern history,” writes the editorial board. Today, we are publishing a special section to remind readers why President Trump is unfit to lead the nation. https://t.co/iTIZMVsG8u
Not Martin Van Buren, the most genuinely corrupt president in history.
Not James Buchanan, the inept buffoon who all but sent out engraved invitations to the Civil War.
Not Woodrow Wilson, the Princeton dean who lied about keeping the nation out of war, did more than any other single person to federalize and weaponize Jim Crow and empower the Klan, and launch the bureaucratic state that’s eating the nation alive today.
No. Trump. A coarse populist buffoon who has, nonetheless, pretty much done what he said he’d do (start bringing troops home, revive the economy after the slowest recovery since the Depression, nominate conservative SCOTUS justices), a few nobody expected (roll the ball farther toward peace in the middle east than any president, defeated ISIS), and brought the extreme delusional madness of the left fully out in the open, where (if America is wise) it can be stomped on hard, God willing…
The flotsam and jetsam of the left’s social media legion of the invincibly depraved has legs so tingly this morning at the news the POTUS and FLOTUS have Covid, they had to drag themselves hand over hand to the kitchen to make their avocado toast.
Of course, they were in Duluth before the news broke, so the Twin Cities media has jumped into high gear to investigate, not ballot harvesting (oh, good heavens, no) but just how close Minnesota’s GOP congresspeople and candidates actually were to the President.
Strib columnist Jennifer Brooks:
Should we boil Duluth? I think we might need to boil Duluth.
If the FCOTUS recover without complications – fingers crossed, prayers being prayed – I’m almost tempted to send all these “journalists” sympathy cards.
The NYTimes is trying to disappear some of their own paper’s history in re the “1619 Project”, which claimed that, based on the premise that America was founded primarily to exalt slavery, the nation was really founded when the first slave arrived.
Editors recently removed (without explanation or acknowledgment) the provocative statement that the project “aim[s] to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding” from the article series’ online introduction. Lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones has repeatedly claimed it is a myth that the project proposes 1619 rather than 1776 as the country’s birth year: She blamed bad-faith critics on the right for tricking the media into believing otherwise.
“One thing in which the right has been tremendously successful is getting media to frame stories in their language and through their lens,” wrote Hannah-Jones in a subsequently deleted tweet. “The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 is our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.”
Forget for a moment that Hannah-Jones’ Twitter banner is a picture of 1776 crossed out and replaced with 1619. Forget that multiple progressive media outlets that were sympathetic to the project’s aims used the 1619-as-true-founding summary in order to explain it. Forget that a year ago, after the articles were published, both Hannah-Jones and New York Times magazine editor Jake Silverstein described the project in exactly these terms: “We sort of proposed the idea in a variety of ways that if you consider 1619 as the foundational date of the country, rather than 1776, it just changes your understanding and we call that a reframing of American history.” Just consider one last piece of evidence that Hannah-Jones is being deceptive about who invented the 1619-not-1776 framing.
My guess – she’s not being “deceptive”. She, and the Times, are backfilling and memory-holing because Identity Politics stands to cost the Democrats.
During the Bush years, as many as a third of Democrats had some level of belief that 9/11 was an inside job.
Today, a significant number – on social media, it looks like a supermajority – believe that Trump colluded with Russia, that Kavanaugh raped someone, that “white supremacists” started the riots, that “Anti”-fa is anti-fascist, that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s purported “dying wish” should have some legal merit and that the Electoral College disenfranchises them.
Which is why we’re seeing this sort of “journalism”, doubtlessly placed by a Democrat attack-PR firm, about a movement whose adherence among the GOP is likely in low single digits.
Yep – it’s Berg’s 7th Law, and Urban Progressive Privilege – a gaslighting twofer!
As I read it for the first time ever, I am amazed at how similar his statements are to almost every other elected leader, regardless of party. President Trump tells us here that he recommends social distancing, limit gatherings to 10 people, avoid restaurants, bars. Choose take out. Choose distance learning if possible. And he states, way back in March, that this is going to be going on for a while, maybe past August, he suggests. These are his prepared statements. What I mainly heard reported at the time was his off the cuff responses to the media. He is a wild man with his words when he’s not reigned in. Everyone knows it. The media is now complaining that Trump knew the whole time how dangerous this was and “minimized” it. Yet, here, on March 16, his prepared remarks do not minimize it. In fact, he even asks us Americans to make sacrifices. He reminds the young that they will have milder cases, but can easily spread it. Think about the vulnerable elderly around us. It is all there. But, the media chose to focus on other things, chose to portray this as political- Republicans versus Democrats. Now, the President’s rallies in some counties in Nevada have been cancelled. The media again wants us to believe that Trump is not on the side of protecting citizens by reporting a faux conflict between the President and the Governor of Nevada. Yet, the White House guidelines recommend smaller gatherings due to current virus spread in those areas where the President would rally. As the Press Secretary said, no one is forbidding a spontaneous gatherings. But, the President cannot host a large gathering himself. These distinctions are important. It shouldn’t take research to read between the lines. When can we hold the media responsible for the public reaction to the virus?
I think we are holding them responsible.
Problem is, the people who aren’t inclined to trust the media can’t disdain them more, and the Legion of the Invincibly Ignorant who still do aren’t going to be convinced no matter what.
