Ashli Babbit was shot and killed in the United States Capitol during a demonstration to protest the election. Early reports indicate Ashli was married and a veteran,she was unarmed, and she was shot by a police officer.
Other early reports and photos suggest Antifa infiltrators caused the major damage to provoke a backlash against President Trump supporters and that the violence was successful in convincing Senators to lay aside concerns about the stolen election in order to rush through certification of Joe Biden as President.
Early reports are always confused; I urge application of Berg’s Eighteenth Law of Media Latency.
And remember that even if a few dozen agitators spoiled the party, hundreds of thousands showed up to engage in lawful political protest and millions more wish they could have. Congress, RINOs, the media and the Deep State can huff and puff about decorum and attempt to shame us with double standards but in the end, it boils down to Never-Trumpers sneering, “Let them eat cake.”
We’ll remember that.
Joe Doakes
First things first – as a practical suggestion, Republican / conservative / Trump groups need to make a point of having saturation level surveillance of their events, especially demonstrations. This is something we learned during the Tea Party – when someone shows up in a racist T-shirt, it’s good to be able to crowd-source them and prove that they were actually a Democrat operative (which happened during the Tea Party A lot).
More on this, likely, tomorrow on the show and next week in the blog.
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.
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…
…to punch up. To treat people with respect. To treat people the way I’d like to be treated. To always take the high road.
But Maureen Dowd?
When Trump walked through the doors, Walter Reed had a stellar reputation. As he walks out 72 hours later, its reputation is in tatters. There's nothing Trump can't ruin.
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.
Democrats want me to believe 160,000 Americans died on Trump’s watch because he could have prevented the virus and didn’t; therefore. we should elect Biden to replace him
Really?
Perhaps someone could lay out the step-by-step plan by which President Trump could have prevented a virus from killing old sick people this Spring or the step-by-step-plan by which President Biden will prevent it from killing them next Winter.
A timetable and citations to statutory authority would be helpful.
The Paper of Walter Duranty, the one that published the deeply ahistorical, revisionistic and nothing-but-inflammatory “1629 Project”, the one that published Paul Krugman’s innumerate claims that “blue” America bankrolls “red” America, which has been openly advocating “progressive” ideals in its editorial pages since I was in high school, which has been one of the primary PR agents for the left in America’s cultural cold civil war, the one that has not only been a “progressive” flak for generations but whose young, “woke” red guard faction has moved beyond shaping the informational battlefield to actively purity-testing the left-leaning editorial staff to drive it further to the cultural and political left…
The only thing that I could find that was remotely “divisive” was exhortation about three minutes in stating that Mount Rushmore would never be desecrated – which, I imagine, some post-modern academics find profoundly hostile.
Or maybe the bit around 5:10 here he said the rights of man will never be taken away. That has got to make Tim Walz nervous.
Perhaps the part around 6:10, where he points out that Americans aren’t “weak and submissive” in facing the war on American culture, but will in fact prevail. That’s a pretty clear and direct threat to…someone.
Conservatives, especially conservatives who are “out” critics of the mainstream media, get routinely accused of “hating” journalism. The late Nick Coleman was particularly, er, “acerbic” in his criticism of those who had the gall to criticize the news/industrial complex, claiming in one bout of hysteria that bloggers “wanted to kill the Strib”.
While we correctly savaged the Strib, and especially Coleman, on issue after issue, it was still baked wind. Self-government, small-“D” democracy, needs a functional, and above all trustworthy, media (among many other institutions) to survive.
And by “”trustworthy”, we mean “can be trusted to report the news, truthfully, regardless of its own institutional and individual political opinions.
In Europe, the media are pretty honest about their political points of view, on an editorial level; the Times of London and the Frankfurter Allgemeine are center-right; Guardian and Die Zeit and Le Monde are all various degrees of left. You know the slant before you pick up the paper. You can account for it.
American media has built a myth of objectivity, or at least of being a so-called “neutral voice”, around itself; Minnesota Public Radio news even made “No Rant, No Slant” their motto for a while, and it’s not much different than the mythology American media built for itself over the past hundred years or so. In my freshman year journalism class,
And it’s never really been true. Some journos do in fact do their best to separate their personal views, of course – I’ve got nothing but respect for the best of them.
Many journalists also do their best, but inevitably reflect the fact that their entire frame of reference is left-of-center. Their education, their workplace, their social circle, are an ecosystem where some variety of The Left is the old, current and future Normal. When they confront a different point of view, they can seem a little like Jane Goodall venturing out among the gorillas.
And when things are chugging along like normal, who cares, right?
The New Abnormal . But then something pops up that threatens the order, and not in a good way. What then?
The media has been rightly seen as slanted to the left for close to fifty years. With the rise of talk radio and alternative news 30 years ago, you could sense that the “elite” media were starting to give up on the pretense of balance and detachment. The notion of the “neutral voice” has been
But with the election of President Trump, the floodgates got dynamited.
The “neutral voice”, isn’t.
“Oh, Mitch – you and your hyperbole”.
No. Not at all.
The Gatekeepers Speak: “On the Media” is a production of WNYC Radio in New York. It’s a public station, one of the flagship station in the National Public Radio chain. Like a lot of NPR productions, sometimes it’s excellent. Sometimes the smug rolls off it like fog off a loch.
And sometimes, it accomplishes its mission – which in the case of “On the Media”, is to serve as the exposed id of the “elite” media in this country.
With that in mind: this show was broadcast on December 1, 2016 – probably as fast as could be put together on NPR timelines. It had four segments:
The first gazed navel-ly about “how the media should cover President Trump“. Because conveying the facts and letting the audience make up their own mind was presumably not good enough anymore.
How talking about Trump “Normalizes” him – unless the media changes the rules when discussing him. This featured reprentatives, not from The Nation and Slate.com or Buzzfeed or Samantha Bee. No, they were from the NYTimes and Washington Post. That led to another segment…
And the media’s behavior in the three and a half years since has mapped to that template, as the media has grasped at every possible straw to try to “take down” the President.
We didn’t even need to get this leaked to us, like ‘Journo-list’ – although I suspect I may have been the only conservative listening to that groaningly pompous program, and I suspect that’s WNYC’s assumption as well.
TL:dr – At least some of the people at the apex of the “layers and layers of gatekeepers” have abolished the old rules of journalism, publicly but yet internally, as re Donald Trump.
The “elite” media’s entire coverage of Trump over the past four years, on every issue, has followed the template that’s suggested, sub rosa, in the four On the Media pieces above.
Will the rules change back when Trump leaves office? Of course not – the media had the same general attitude toward Republicans, conservatives and the issues of the right for a generation before 2016.
But the institutional imperative to use the media’s power toward political and social ends? That’s not going to end.
Distrust, but verify. And then, almost inevitably, if some smidgeon of partisan politics is involved, distrust some more.
America’s left, sotted as it is with Urban Progressive Privilege, has little doubt that it is the the smart crowd.
Of course, you don’t have to be a conservative in Saint Paul, or on social media, to know that that’s just not so. This has been bouncing around for a while, but it’s worth a read.
Pullquote:
In the 2018 GSS, respondents were asked for whom they voted in 2016 (PRES16) or for whom they would have voted if they had voted (IF16WHO): Clinton, Trump, someone else, or no one.
On the verbal ability test (WORDSUM), not surprisingly the median number of vocabulary questions correct was the same for both Clinton and Trump supporters: 6 out of 10 words correct. The mean verbal ability score for Trump supporters was 6.15 words correct, while the mean verbal ability score for Clinton supporters was 5.69 correct, a difference of nearly a half a question on a 10-question test. This moderate difference is statistically significant at p<.0005.
Further, Trump supporters score significantly higher on verbal ability (6.15 correct) than the rest of the public combined (5.70 correct), whereas Clinton supporters score significantly lower on verbal ability (5.69 correct) than the rest of the public combined (5.98 correct).
I know, I know – another self-service social science survey that makes one side feel good and jabs at the other. Notify the media.
Wait. I am the media.
Big Left’s smug superior self-image is…irrationally exuberant.
Colleges are telling students not to return from Spring Break. Schools are closing. Employers are letting people work from home. Everybody is taking the virus seriously.
Except local government. The courts are open. They’re going to stay open, all of them, until the State Court Administrator tells them to shut down.
Look, for people who get arrested and need an arraignment to get out on bail, fine, I get it. You need a judge on duty. Same for Orders for Protection, emergency guardianship, etc. But the hearing doesn’t have to take place in person in the courthouse, it could be Skype.
For nearly everybody else – conciliation court, family court, probate, real estate, contract disputes – the hearing is postponed indefinitely.
Why not get out ahead of it now? Why wait?
I blame Trump. I suspect Democrats are afraid that if they close down the court system, Trump will pounce on it as an excuse to impose martial law and there will never be another election again. No, seriously, I really do think they’re that paranoid. After all, that’s what they would do, if the shoe were on the other foot.
The success of the Babylon Bee has apparently caused the mainstream media to try to horn in on the “Real-sounding fake news” thing, without quite getting what “satire” is.
CNN “reporter” Joe Lockhart on Twitter yesterday (via Hugh Hewitt, who’s noted the “Retweets” the “Reporter” got.
Moments later:
You just know that TV stations, local NPR affiliates and newspapers around the country are going to run the former and ignore the latter.
Ms. McGowan – I suggest going to Teheran to work this out personally.
Wearing the outfit in your Twitter profile photo.
Get back to us. If you can.
The assassination of Soleimani does present some gnarly questions: he was a fair target under current international agreements about terrorism – but one could raise questions about whether it was a great idea. Also whether it was an act of war.
On the other hand, we’re treated to the spectacle of watching politicians, deep-staters, media drones and celebs who batted not an eyelash over Obama’s constant, intense campaign of drone, air and special ops “hits”, complaining about Orange LIterally Hitler Man doing it to a target that actually matters, but up to whom The LIghtworker sucked…
…and having to choose, in public, during an election year, with whom to side in public.
… except that if the couple he was retweeting ever read this, then they would find the racism in the US.
Berg’s Eighth Law – “American progressivism’s reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from sociopathic disorder.”
CBC erases Donald Trump’s cameo from the movie Home Alone 2.
Mark Steyn: I think they’re actually terrified that people will remember that before Trump was the new Hitler, he was a beloved mainstream cultural figure pic.twitter.com/XhmlsdUUS5
Steyn’s comment is the part I love throwing out there. Trump is a former Democrat, and spent a couple of decades as a blue state cultural icon before going apostate.
Or, as I put it on the air, “I disliked Trump back when “Celebrity Apprentice” was appointment TV for many of his critics today”.
Mollie Hemingway from Federalist points out the elephant in the room:
Impeachment was ALWAYS a media effort that they bullied Democrats into doing even when Mueller failed to deliver goods. It BEGAN with editorial board support, it didn’t build to it. https://t.co/cL3ZaL63ty
You could hear it, in plain sight (as it were), in November of 2016, when reps from the NYTimes and WaPo newsrooms.
No. Seriously. Listen to it. Be disgusted. I’m not a huge Trump fan – seriously, not. But listening to that? Let’s say Big Leftymedia doesn’t want to start a civil war.
If they did, what would they be doing differently?
Before Christmas, Democrats in Congress expect to vote on articles of impeachment to remove President Trump from office. Before Christmas, funding for the federal government runs out, unless President Trump agrees to continue the funding. This creates an opportunity for President Trump. I can’t wait to see how he uses it. Joe Doakes
Me too. Unlike the Boehner-era Republicans, Trump and McConnell might just do the right thing with an opportunity like this.
In a sense, they have a point: I’ve been gleefully urging Democrats to push impeachment without rest almost since Trump was elected, seeing it as at best a goldmine for Trump, and at worst a gateway to a candidate I’d have actually supported on my own in 2016, Mike Pence, to the Oval Office.
But it’s almost like they want citizens to think that impeachment was part of some GOP/NRA/Heritage-Foundation/Military Industrial Complex plan to make the Democrats look like idiots.
And the worst thing is, Democrat voters will probably believe it.
Jessica Kwong, progressive stenographer at former magazine “Newsweek”, on Donald Trump’s thanksgiving:
Trump headed to Afghanistan to surprise U.S. troops on Thanksgiving https://t.co/f7Xeqz1ZGQ Deleting this tweet because it was written before knowing about the president’s surprise visit to Afghanistan-an honest mistake. Story has already been updated, as shown in the screenshot. pic.twitter.com/g9CfPaV2kQ
“it was written before knowing about the president’s surprise visit to Afghanistan-an honest mistake”
In other words, pre-written.
The Big Media aren’t “the enemy of the people”. They’re worse; after assuming the mantle of “guardian of democracy” (which, we are told, without their ministrations would “die in darkness”), they are doing something very, very different. They’re worse than an enemy; they are betraying a trust – however misbegotten.
They are swindling the people.
UPDATE: And apparently the once-mighty Newsweek can be shamed into decency; Kwong has been fired.
