What is behind recent pessimistic appraisals of democracy’s future, from Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Brian Williams and other elite intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians on the Left? Some are warning about its possible erosion in 2024. Others predict the democracy downturn as early 2022, with scary scenarios of “autocracy” and Trump “coups.” ... [snip]
They are fearful and angry not because democracy does not work, but because it does despite their own media and political efforts to warp it.
When a party becomes hijacked by radicals and uses almost any means necessary to gain and use power for agendas that few Americans support, then average voters express their disapproval.
That reality apparently terrifies an elite—which then claims any system that allows the people to vote against the Left is not people power at all.
When did you first realize that reality - and the way reality was distorted by the leftist press - were not even close? That funhouse mirrors were more real?
The Travon Martin story?
Hands up don't shoot?
The Covington kids?
The Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax?
The Bubba Wallace "racist" noose?
And the endless examples of racism, sexism, and bigotry that turns out to have been manufactured by the "victims" themselves?
Author Jesse Singal made a statement last night about the moment he first noticed what he calls an “epistemic breach” on the left. In context, he means the moment when it became obvious that people on the left could maintain opinions that were verifiably false by simply opening their eyes. For Singal, the moment he noticed it was the Covington kids
Evergreen line from my story last week: “With his tweet...Trump has signaled that he and his Republican allies would continue to paint tech giants like Facebook and Twitter as villains in a longstanding culture war used to excite the conservative base.” https://t.co/iAKwBt2tddhttps://t.co/1QKeFKNPRJ
CNN's Oliver Darcy was responding to this tweet in his article attacking Trump for painting "tech giants like Facebook and Twitter as villains in a longstanding culture war used to excite the conservative base." Tellingly, his article did not once mention Facebook silencing conservative articles based on the premise they "look like spam," which took place the day before Trump's tweet.
CNN rushed to "debunk" the claims of Google's bias against conservatives, without mentioning the many lawsuits against Google! James Damore, the former senior software engineer who was fired after spreading a document asking questions about the tech gender gap, is suing Google for discrimination against conservatives. Prager University is suing Google and YouTube for discrimination against conservative content. YouTube continues to restrict access to PragerU videos.
Facebook recently "shadow banned" PragerU, preventing at least nine PragerU Facebook posts from reaching any of their 3 million followers. For good measure, Facebook also deleted some of their videos.
A survey early this year found that conservative employees in Silicon Valley tech companies live in fear that their political beliefs would be found out. James Damore said conservatives at Google are "in the closet" and that Google executives are digging through a secret mailing list in order to out them.
Tech companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Twitter have relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left smear factory that brands conservative and Christian organizations "hate groups," listing them along with the Ku Klux Klan. In June, the SPLC had to pay $3.375 million to settle a defamation lawsuit against a Muslim reformer. About 60 organizations are considering separate defamation lawsuits against the group.
Amazon.com has excluded SPLC-designated "hate groups" from its charity program, Amazon Smile. The company exiled D. James Kennedy Ministries and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian legal nonprofit that has won 9 Supreme Court cases in seven years. D. James Kennedy Ministries is suing Amazon and the SPLC over this action.
More recently, the SPLC-designated "hate group" Jihad Watch and its founder Robert Spencer were de-platformed by Patreon, and then the crowdfunding site GoFundMe effectively stole thousands from Spencer.
Oftentimes, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter will temporarily ban conservatives for "hate speech," when the posts in question did not violate their safety standards. Christian scholar Robert Gagnon has been repeatedly suspended on Facebook, and in April the social media platform suspended a German history professor for saying that "Islam is not a part of German history."
Like the SPLC's "hate group" labels, these "hate speech" bans target conservatives, not liberals. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has "fully" admitted that "our bias is more left-leaning." Is it really that much of a conspiracy theory — considering the lawsuits, the partnership with the SPLC, and the many isolated instances of conservatives finding themselves singled out — to suggest that tech companies have systematically targeted conservatives?
All this context and more gives important weight to Trump's claims that Google is biased against conservatives. Rather than address the mainstream conservatives attacked in these isolated incidents, however, mainstream media reporters continue to cite the bans on InfoWars as if they were the main issue.
Cunningly, Darcy ignored the de-platforming of Jihad Watch and the silencing of conservative articles as "spam." He wrote, "It was unclear what precisely the President's Friday tweet was referencing, but it came just weeks after Facebook, YouTube, and Apple removed content from far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his fringe media organization InfoWars from their platforms."
Neither Trump's tweet last week nor his tweets Tuesday morning were about InfoWars. By mentioning InfoWars, however, Darcy associated the "conspiracy theory" of tech anti-conservative bias with a truly conspiratorial website.
PragerU, James Damore, Salena Zito, Jihad Watch, D. James Kennedy Ministries, and Alliance Defending Freedom are not InfoWars. Their experiences are real, and pending litigation against Google cannot be ignored in the discussion of whether or not Trump's tweets support a "conspiracy theory."
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Colton Haab said he was approached by CNN to ask a question at Wednesday night's town hall but decided not to after the network gave him a "scripted question," quashing one he wrote himself. Haab, a member of the Junior ROTC shielded students while the school was under attack from the shooter, said he was going to ask about using veterans as armed security guards.
More than in any other country, Americans on both sides of the political aisle believe the media does does a poor job covering political issues fairly, according to a blockbuster new survey of media consumption in 38 nations.
The U.S. media is working overtime to destroy it's own reputation.
The Russians objective is to destabilize America. They probably believed - like the pollsters and the media - that Hillary would be elected. They saw an opportunity to exacerbate the Left/Right divide without respect to who won the election. The revelations regarding Hillary's corruption were intended to create a the belief that she was not fit to be President when she won.
If Hillary had won, the Right would have grumbled, like they did after Obama's victory. The surprise Trump win completely unhinged the Left and supercharged the Russians attempt at political destabilization.
The press has willingly played into their hands. Lots of people now believe that elections, especially the last election was stolen. Facts don't matter to people's beliefs, especially when so many people share that belief.
I would say that the Russians succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
Congratulations MSM and Leftist. You played your parts perfectly. But then, the Left have always been Russian dupes.
Trump was elected in no small part because of people like Roger Chesley who spills his bile all over the pages of the Virginian Pilot. He calls my emotions "base," calls me a "racist," my very existence is an example of America's "worst selves." He says that Trump is "xenophobic and misogynistic" which means that his supporters are also.
Roger Chesley hates me and my beliefs and makes no attempt to hide it. And, being a polite person I never said anything back to Roger. But Trump's election has done that for me; he's getting the whole "upraised middle finger" from all of us who are sick of this buffoon who actuallybelieved that he represented America because he was handed a media megaphone by the billionaire owners of the Virginian Pilot.
His accusations are not just simple-minded but ridiculously a-historical. Chesley appears to think that the readers of the Virginian Pilot were born yesterday (or are under 8) and actually dares to write:
That a candidate so cozy with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin couldn’t possibly win. (Can you imagine the reaction if Obama or Clinton had made similar overtures? Accusations of treason would surely follow.)
How foolish is this? We only have to recall the famous meeting between Hillary and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the "RESET" button offering a new beginning in US Russian relations. The fact that the translation into Russian was wrong (the word Hillary used in Russian was "overload") was just the beginning of the horrible, bad, really terrible foreign policy disasters begun under Chesley's favorite President and Hillary Clinton. But we can't mention that because, to Chesley, to criticize Obama is racist and to criticize Hillary is sexist.
Symbolic reset. On 6 March 2009 in Geneva, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a red button with the English word "reset" and the Roman alphabet transliteration of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet word перегрузка ("peregruzka".)
Translation: wait a few more weeks and I'll do whatever Putin wants.
But enough of Roger's hate for middle America because the diatribe also reveals what he believes.
He believes that the return of manufacturing jobs to American denies "global reality" which means that he doesn't see a future for Americans who are not Roger Chesley. Roger spends his days behind a computer screen telling Middle America how racists, sexist, bigoted and homophobic they are. Hey, Roger, is the Virginian Pilot hiring? Because there are a lot of out-of-work Ford factory workers who would like a sweet gig like yours. No heavy lifting and not much thought required. Oh, wait, the Pilot is shedding workers like a tree in fall. Could the hate the paper has for it's dwindlingreadership have anything to do with that?
Even when Chesley takes a glance at even handedness, he swings and misses. Here's the fault he finds with Hillary:
I’m not overlooking Hillary Clinton’s many faults. They’ve been examined repeatedly, from her use of emails while at the State Department, to her high ratings of untrustworthiness. Her campaign strategy failed abysmally. Her wooden, yet competent approach couldn’t attract enough support in key battleground states.
That first sentence is untrue. The rest of the paragraph is a whitewash. She's not being criticized for using email while at the State Department, she's being criticized for setting up her own server so that her emails could not be preserved and read except for those she was willing to provide. She used an unsecured communication device, one that was most assuredly hacked by half-a-dozen foreign entities to learn this country's most sensitive secrets. Using her own server meant she could solicit bribes from foreign governments disguised as "contributions" to her "charity" without leaving a government record And it worked like a charm because the Clintons are now filthy rich. I wonder if those foreign rulers and potentates will want their money back.
Chesley implies that she has high rating of "untrustworthiness" but gives no reason. She's untrustworthy because she's a liar. She lied about the reason for using her own server. She lied about not sending classified emails. She lied about turning over all her work-related emails. She lied about the reason for the attack in Benghazi where four Americans were killed on her watch. And that's just part of the reason people don't trust her. Her lies go back decades. She lied about Whitewater. She lied about making $100,000 trading cattle futures. She was even up-front about lying to select audiences and gave quarter-million dollar speeches to global bankers explaining that she had to lie to get elected.
Chesley also faults her for being a lousy campaigner. She made up for her many other faults by casting Trump as the second coming of Hitler and his supporters as "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic." She consigned them to the "basket of deplorables" to the cheers, laughter and applause of her supporters, like Roger Chesley.
Roger Chesley is the Virginian Pilot's political arsonist. The person working overtime at his keyboard dividing the country between races, between sexes, between classes? Get out a mirror Roger and take a good look and see the ugly face of hate which I pray will pass away.
I don’t know Nick Cole. I spoke with him on the internet for the first time this week. I’ve never read any of his books, but apparently lots of people have. From what I understand he was a solid midlister, who was selling well, and growing his backlist. The usual good career track stuff. His last book did well and got great reviews. However, one small bit in the next (under contract) book in the series hopelessly offended a young editor at Harper and it went sideways. But read Nick’s account. It is fascinating stuff.
For years we’ve known there is a liberal bias in the publishing industry. I mean come on, almost all of them work in Manhattan. Duh. Of course the publishing industry vehemently denies that. Left wing fans don’t see it the same way fish don’t notice water is wet. It just is. Right wing fans get sick of being preached at or treated like they’re stupid, and go spend their entertainment dollars elsewhere.
Because this isn’t my first rodeo, I already know exactly how Nick is going to get attacked and dismissed.
