I guess it's up to me to initiate this.
Post your memes, cartoons, images, jokes, songs, notes, or anything else -
Halloween related or not.
Memers are always trying to find the right time to release a meme and are always worried its the wrong time......So I say if the cookies are done you fucking eat them!
— Sol🎬🎃 (@Solmemes1) October 31, 2020
Words of wisdom from the Democrat leader of America.....
w/@drefanzor pic.twitter.com/YpRdrPGyMO
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. special forces rescued an American citizen who had been kidnapped by armed men in an operation on Saturday in northern Nigeria that is believed to have killed several of his captors, U.S. officials said.
Forces including Navy SEALs rescued 27-year-old Philip Walton, who had been abducted on Tuesday from his home in neighboring southern Niger, two U.S. officials said on condition of anonymity, adding that no U.S. troops were hurt.
A diplomat source in Niger said Walton is now at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Niamey.
“Big win for our very elite U.S. Special Forces today,” U.S. President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Fox News that the Trump administration had over the years rescued 55 hostages in 24 countries.
The Pentagon confirmed the operation but did not provide the identity of the hostage.
Walton, who kept camels, sheep and poultry and grew mangoes near the border with Nigeria, was kidnapped by six men armed with AK-47 assault rifles who arrived on motorcycles at his home in southern Niger’s Massalata village early on Tuesday.
His wife, young daughter and brother were left behind.
Reuters has reported that the perpetrators appeared to be from the Fulani ethnic group, and that they spoke Hausa and some English. They demanded money and searched the family’s home before leaving with Walton.
Niger, like much of West Africa’s Sahel region, faces a deepening security crisis as groups with links to al Qaeda and Islamic State carry out attacks on the army and civilians, despite help from French and U.S. forces.
Four U.S. soldiers were killed in an ambush in Niger in 2017, sparking debate about the United States’ role in the sparsely populated West African desert that is home to some of the world’s poorest countries.
At least six foreign hostages are being held by Islamist insurgents in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Islamists have collected millions of dollars in ransom payments in recent years. The U.S. government has frequently criticized other countries for paying.
https://www.oann.com/u-s-special-forces-rescue-american-held-in-nigeria-officials/
President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden are campaigning hard to win both states, where Trump scored narrow victories in 2016.
Both Trump and Biden have appeared multiple times in both states, and both are campaigning in Wisconsin on Friday.
Mrs. Trump made her first solo appearance of the 2020 campaign earlier this week in Pennsylvania.
She also warmed up the crowd at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida, on Thursday.
No true American should accept a nation-wide hegemony that silences dissent, whether it’s a Christo-fascist theocracy or some secular New Left inversion. The former had a shot in the 1980s, but in the current year, the latter is a far more imminent threat.
Freedom of speech is our most basic right, because if you can’t name the problem, you can’t fix it. A diversity of perspectives—advancing from argumentation to tentative resolutions, and left open to dispute—is an essential feature of democratic government and the scientific pursuit of truth. It’s the basis of reason itself. In a pluralistic society, free inquiry has to make room for the goad and the gadfly. Otherwise, bad actors run wild.
Such arrangements are fragile, however, as we’ve seen with recent media cover-ups (what laptop?), social media lock-outs (misinformation!), and academic purges (kill the messenger). A flavorless monoculture, under the cover of “progress,” looms on the horizon.
Invoking the heterodox fringes of political thought, dissident writer Michael Anton issues an urgent call to arms in “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.” He exhorts Americans to confront and dismantle this lefty monolith before it’s too late.
Repeat after me: lockdowns save lives, riots are peaceful, racial preferences are justice, Chinese influence is progress, calling it out is Russian propaganda, borders are oppression, safe spaces are sacred, gender is fluid, pronouns are innate, children can choose but parents cannot, speech is violence, violence is speech, robots are superior, and God is dead—unless He flies the rainbow flag. By the way, where’s your mask?
Imagine having to affirm such inanities for the rest of your life, with your children chanting along. It’s not that far-fetched.
Drawing on insider experience as a White House national security official, Anton argues persuasively that Democrats’ endgame is to establish a permanent nationwide uni-party. This ironclad state would be ruled by the super-wealthy, loyal only to themselves and their global counterparts, and “legitimized” by an interchangeable electorate. If these left-signaling oligarchs achieve their goal, our ideal of an open society—a value that liberals once championed—will be destroyed.
More than any time in my life, it appears that our hard-won liberties could disappear in the blink of an eye. Americans cannot allow this to happen.
Anton’s work swayed me—a free-thinker who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 and Gary Johnson in 2016—to vote Donald Trump in 2020. The fact that stating this publicly might damage my career should be sufficient grounds to go MAGA, if only out of spite. But Anton presents more civic-minded reasons.
Over the years, I’ve tried to balance the left’s truths against the right’s—for instance, reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” alongside Paul Johnson’s “A History of the American People,” or regularly injecting Democracy Now! with some “Tucker Carlson Tonight” like a political speedball. My assumption is that different dispositions motivate diverse people to explore various facets of reality. The aim is to wander these fringes to the edge of crimethink, and arrive at some semblance of the Truth in between.
In “The Stakes,” Anton warns that, if present trends continue, the right side of that equation will be wiped off the chalkboard. It’s not that my mind was changed by Anton’s blistering critiques of perverse wealth inequality, oligarchic control, tech monopolies, wall-to-wall surveillance, media dishonesty, neocon warmongering, and mass immigration. I was already there. Rather, he convinced me that what I’ve learned from intelligent conservatives over the years is not only coherent and largely correct, their ideas and values are in imminent danger of federal suppression.
It’s an uneasy alliance, because the biggest issues for guys like me are labor empowerment, environmental protection, and avoiding unnecessary war. After Barack Obama’s presidency, it’s pretty clear that Democrats have other plans.
Anton paints a compelling portrait of the current power structure and its enduring social consequences. His central argument is that during the “Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama imperium” the wealthy assembled “a high-low coalition against the middle in service of big tech, high finance, and woke capital.” The “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests incited and celebrated by the academic-mass media complex are a recent strategic maneuver.
According to Anton’s view, insular oligarchs—concentrated in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and various corporate boardrooms—are manipulating moralistic intellectuals and impoverished discontents, channeling the proles’ fury away from themselves and toward America’s productive middle class. That’s why you see Google, Goldman Sachs, and Walmart celebrating Pride Month and supporting BLM, while Ivy League professors and CNN pundits decry Karen’s entitlement and Joe the Plumber’s unearned privilege.
This theory jives with my experience in Portland, Ore., where our labor union got woke on “microaggressions” while bending over backwards to serve Nike and other corporate masters. The same holds for my studies at Boston University, where hyper-privileged colleagues shielded themselves with a ring of (mostly privileged) diversity and lobbed accusations of “-ism!” and “-phobia!” at the local maintenance-man class.
In defiance of pop convention, Anton’s thesis combines lefty class analysis with wry, right-wing cynicism: “[T]he ruling class wants to stay in power, maintain its status, preserve its wealth, and increase its share of all three. … Their solution is, first and fundamentally, to transform the United States into a deracinated economic-administrative zone with one-size-fits-all ‘rules,’ whose surface impartiality masks an unbending bias toward capital over wages, management over labor, words over actions, ideas over things, the new over the old, cosmopolitanism over the familiar, [and] foreigners over the native-born. Second, it is to persuade or bully as much of the developed world as possible into going along; and third, over time to amalgamate all such economic-administrative zones into one big zone.”
Skeptics wonder why The Power would ever sponsor a corporate slogan like “FIGHT THE POWER!” So far as I can tell, it’s the same reason predatory televangelists urge their viewers to resist Satan.
An overriding theme in Anton’s book is the taboo that propelled Trump into office: the downsides of mass immigration. Anton presents a few simple statistics that Americans so rarely see, you’d think we weren’t supposed to know: “Since the United States ‘reformed’ its immigration laws in 1965, at least fifty-nine million newcomers—legal and illegal—have moved to the country.”
If you factor in their children, plus high-end estimates of illegal immigration, that number could be as large as 90 million. To get a sense of proportion, when the floodgates opened in 1965, America’s population was about 193 million.
If it’s ever mentioned, the resulting multicultural cyclone is typically portrayed as some blind force of Nature, rather than the result of impeachable human decisions. This ongoing process is facilitated by a compliant mass media, who extol the virtues of future Democrats pouring across the border. That is, if they acknowledge the impact at all.
California and Virginia are two obvious blue canaries in the coalmine, and a purple Texas is gasping for air. Yet if legacy Americans complain about this clever subversion of their citizenship, Anton notes, they’re gaslighted as conspiracy theorists and permanently tagged with career-ending epithets. The ultimate hypocrisy—which he hilariously dubs “the Celebration Parallax”—is that once this demographic shift is accomplished, and a new voter base is secured, the left openly celebrate their success as proof that diversity is our strength.
Opposition to this cynical inundation has traditionally come from the blue-collar left. The Americal Federation of Labor first president, Samuel Gompers, fought hard to keep immigration at bay, as did the agricultural labor leader Cesar Chavez. Until he was forced to go woke, Bernie Sanders argued that flooding the labor market with low-wage immigrants undercuts citizens’ ability to negotiate for higher wages.
Contrary to tropes that a “vibrant economy” requires mass immigration, Harvard University economist George Borjas details the costs to native workers: “[I]mmigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. … The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year.”
In fact, the first strong arguments for open borders were published in the Wall Street Journal back in 2000. The Koch brothers have been fierce advocates for mass immigration, as have Silicon Valley oligarchs—a full three-quarters of their tech workforce are H-1B workers. Back in the ‘60s, Democrats shifted from exploiting white racial animus in the segregationist South to stoking black racial animus nationwide. More recently, the supposed “working class party” has betrayed its constituency to serve the interests of woke capital, with all the financial perks that entails.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Biden is the oligarchs’ favorite pet. Forbes reports that he’s wrangled donations from 151 billionaires (as opposed to Trump’s 99). According to Wired, Biden received 95 percent of employee contributions from Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle, which explains the recent social media blackouts. With this cash flow, he’s managed to spend more on TV campaign ads than any presidential candidate in history.
Anyone who mentions this hypocrisy is subject to excommunication, ostracism, and unemployment as a deplorable “-ist!” or “-phobic!” monster. In a world where frank speech gets you labeled as a jerk, only a jerk can be trusted to speak his mind. Even worse, that jerk’s fans will call him a “truth-teller” for evoking the verboten—even if he lies about everything else.
At this point, I’ll take a hyperbolic barker who’ll tell a couple of big truths over a blank-faced dotard backed by sophisticated propaganda. At least the orange guy’s actions will be held up to scrutiny.
Trump may be a used car salesman trying to sell my own lemon back to me, but you know what? I’d like to have America back. And I’m willing to pay for it.
There is a reason that nearly every powerful special interest in the United States is doing everything in its power to defeat Donald Trump, and it has nothing to do with the media’s fraudulent portrayal of him as a racist. Nor does it have anything to do with his allegedly abrasive personality.
If the president were willing to put the United States citizens under a total lockdown, allow millions of economic refugees to swarm across the borders, ship more jobs to Asia, and then impoverish whatever was left of middle America under the pretext of fighting “climate change,” he would be cruising to reelection.
Put another way, if Trump were a globalist, instead of a nationalist, there would not be well-funded militants destroying our cities while benefiting from a news blackout. There would not be NPC drones like ABC’s David Muir spewing anti-Trump pablum night after night, and money from Big Tech and Wall Street billionaires would be pouring into his campaign, instead of supporting his opponent.
In January 2018, in a speech of striking clarity, Trump described his vision of American nationalism. Addressing the assembled heads of state and business elite at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Switzerland, Trump’s speech amounted to a declaration of war on the globalists. For example, he said:
The United States will no longer turn a blind eye to unfair economic practices, including massive intellectual property theft, industrial subsidies, and pervasive state-led economic planning. These and other predatory behaviors are distorting the global markets and harming businesses and workers, not just in the U.S., but around the globe. Just like we expect the leaders of other countries to protect their interests, as president of the United States, I will always protect the interests of our country, our companies, and our workers.
These words constituted a threat to globalist ideology not because Trump’s version of nationalism is particularly toxic, but because he exposed the globalist vision itself as flawed and dangerous. What globalists want will not deliver peace or prosperity to the world, much less America. What globalist billionaires and globalist corporations want, however, will make them wealthier and more powerful than ever.
In 2016 the World Economic Forum released a brief video called “8 predictions for the world in 2030” which remains an accurate summary of the globalist vision for the future. Here are the key points:
1) You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. Everything you’ll want, you’ll rent, and it will be delivered by drone.
2) The United States won’t be the world’s leading superpower. Instead, a handful of countries will dominate.
3) You won’t die waiting for an organ donor. We won’t transplant organs. We’ll print new ones instead.
4) You’ll eat much less meat. An occasional treat, not a staple. For the good of the environment and our health.
5) A billion people will be displaced by climate change. We’ll have to do a better job at welcoming and integrating refugees.
6) Polluters will have to pay to emit carbon dioxide. There will be a global price on carbon. This will help make fossil fuels history.
7) You could be preparing to go to Mars. Scientists will have worked out how to keep you healthy in space.
8) Western values will have been tested to the breaking point. Checks and balances that underpin our democracies must not be forgotten.
The essence of this list, or agenda, can be distilled into the following: Private property will be abolished, the United States will lose its sovereignty, food will be rationed, state-supported refugees will arrive by the millions and be dispersed into every American city and town, energy will be rationed, and America’s traditional values and institutions will be obliterated.
This is a deeply flawed vision of the future. It fails on every practical level, but is marketed relentlessly by all the same institutions that attack President Trump. And on the surface, it has a powerful moral appeal. Consider these lyrics from John Lennon’s globalist anthem: “Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too.” This sounds great, until you face the reality of other powerful nations who aren’t about to cede their sovereignty to Western corporations, or deliberately undermine their cultures or their economies.
This means that “climate refugees” will not be pouring into China, or Japan, or Russia, or any other powerful and independent nations. It means those nations will continue to consume cheap and abundant fossil fuel, allowing them to allocate a higher percentage of their GDPs to more productive investments including research, industrial development, infrastructure upgrades, and military spending.
Deliberately hobbling the American economy, unilaterally, in the name of fighting “climate change” will elevate the price of everything imaginable—energy, water, food, housing, transportation, and every product and service that requires those basics for its own production. At the same time, adding tens of millions of “climate refugees” to America’s population without any regard to whether or not they come with productive skills will place additional burdens on an already handicapped economy.
Even worse, this agenda embraces a new dominant ideology, already well established, that attacks the core values that made America great. It justifies American submission to rationing and mass immigration through the underlying claim that American imperialist capitalism is responsible both for the “climate crisis” and the economic misery in other nations. It goes on to reject the most fundamental premise of capitalism, which is individual ownership of property. “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.”
But just as abandoning the fate of the world to rising nations such as China—an implacable police state bent on enslaving the world—is obviously flawed, abandoning capitalist values to a society where “you’ll own nothing” is also a recipe for misery. Taking away the ability for individuals to own property takes away the incentive for people to work hard and strive to improve conditions for themselves and their families. Behind the obvious historical fact that communism and socialism have never worked and have led to nothing but murderous tyranny and economic devastation in every place they have ever been tried, is one simple truth of human nature: people need to have an incentive to achieve, or they won’t bother.
Thus far, America’s influential elites, from Big Tech and Big Media to at least some significant percentage of academia and the corporate community, have been unable to embrace the alternative vision President Trump represents. This is a failure of imagination as much as evidence of corruption. Because there is an alternative future that doesn’t involve American decline.
In this alternative to the agenda of the Davos set, instead of despoiling the landscape with millions of wind turbines, we would have clean fossil fuel, hydroelectric power, and nuclear power that is deregulated and allowed to create cheap abundant energy in America and around the world. This would cause a rapid rise in the standard of living and quality of life in developing nations, which would lead to rising literacy and lower birth rates. In Africa, India, and elsewhere, economic development also fosters voluntary population migration into revitalized and inviting urban centers, taking pressure off ecosystems and wildlife.
This scenario, where sovereign nations are encouraged to develop conventional energy and make big infrastructure investments, has been completely derailed by the Western obsession with fighting climate change. The result is environmental destruction caused by burgeoning populations pouring into protected wildernesses in search of firewood and game meat. And that is a cold, devastating fact. Anthropogenic climate change as an existential threat to humanity, on the other hand, is a theory; a mighty convenient one at that.
President Trump’s policies have encouraged industrial development, especially in the United States, but also around the world. The globalists’ agenda calls for tightly controlled development, massive migration, and socialist redistribution, all under the supposedly benevolent management of multinational corporations and international banks. But even if their intentions were entirely innocent, their plans, should they ever come to fruition, would spell catastrophe.
The irony of globalist ideology is that its ostensible goal, peace and prosperity for all mankind, is better served by Trump’s version of nationalism. What Trump envisions—peaceful competition between nations, all looking out for their own national interests—offers humanity a path into the future that can be realized without trauma, especially if America remains united and prosperous, and able to exercise leadership. What globalists offer is tyranny, masquerading as enlightenment.
Just now I received an anguished e-mail from Łukasz Kozuchowski, a young Catholic friend I made in Warsaw last fall. He served as my interpreter for the Live Not By Lies interviews in the Polish capital. At the moment, he is doing graduate work in Belgium. Łukasz was one of a number of Catholics in their twenties who told me that the idea of Poland as a fortress of the Catholic faith is badly outdated. He was not the Pole who told me that within a decade, maybe two, Poland was going to go the same way as Ireland — that is, to the collapse of Christianity and the passionate embrace of secularism — but he was one of many who sadly agreed that that was Poland’s future.
Today Łukasz writes about the situation back home:
The Law and Justice party has been ruling in Poland single-handedly since 2015. Since the party claims to represent the Catholic point of view, numerous pro-life NGOs have been lobbying for making Polish abortion laws stricter.
Poland already had one of the most antiabortion law systems in Europe: enabling abortion in only three cases (health or life of mother in danger, pregnancy caused by rape and — the most widely used — defects of the child in the womb, not only lethal, but also non-fatal, e.g. Down syndrome). This law is known in Poland as “the Abortion Compromise”, developed after long talks in 1993 and regarded by most of society, both religious and not, as untouchable.
In 2016, the first attempt was made to outlaw the last of the abortion cases mentioned. However, significant protests appeared. There were big manifestations in Poland’s big cities. As a result, the proabortion movement “Czarny Protest” (“The Black Protest”) was founded, demanding not only not restricting the law, but even making abortion more available. The protests attracted many people, not only the hard-line abortionists, but also people who “merely” opted for the Compromise. Among the latter were also numerous of my young Catholic friends (which shows that “Catholicity” of Poland is merely theoretical in many cases).
Another attempt was made in spring this year, with similar results. But last week, the Law and Justice party used the Constitutional Court of Poland, regarded by many as a puppet institution of the current government, to declare that the case of child’s defect cannot be legally regarded as an excuse to perform abortion. The backlash has been much bigger than in the previous instance.
First of all, the “Black Protests” erupted with force not seen in Poland before. Not only in big (“liberal”) cities, but also in smaller towns, hundreds of thousands of people protest. Every single day streets are full with people day and night. They shout: “wyperdalać” (fuck off!) and “to jest wojna!” (this is war!).
Almost all of my friends (even Catholic) are taking part in these protests. Not only the left-wing, but even those who seemed to be moderately conservative, vocally oppose the Constitutional Court’s decision. Many of them are very vehement. Numerous institutions and brands, including almost all the universities in Poland, published statements openly supporting the protests and encouraging students to take part in them (even though we are dealing with Covid!). Since the Church hierarchy openly lobbied for the change in law, many of the protesters vandalised churches and expressed vulgar, aggressive remarks about the Church. Masses were interrupted, curses and proabortion slogans painted on churches’ walls. Today, a tabernacle with the Body of Christ has gone missing (probably stolen) from one of the churches in Łódź, the city known for its reluctance towards religion.
The reaction of the bishops actually helped the rioters. The bishops expressed their gratitude for changes in law. It is nothing extraordinary, but was done in a way a bit reminiscent of the Byzantine system, where the state de facto paternalises the Church. Responding to this, Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of Law and Justice, made a speech on TV declaring very paternalistically that the state will protect the Church.
The atmosphere is extremely tense. The lay people are organizing spontaneously to protect their places of worship, because there are so many protesters that the police cannot manage the situation. Right in the middle of Warsaw, on the Three Crosses Square, brutal fights took place, including people being stabbed. Both sides are losing their temper and many people — both pro- and anti- protests — are resorting to violence.
I do not know in which direction this all will go. Some people are simply afraid, and stay at home.
As a Catholic, I am of course pro-life. This has led to many of my friends turning their backs on me. Some of the people I previously knew as kind and intelligent wrote to me very vulgar and offensive messages. The polarisation of the society is becoming extreme, with the pro-life side on the margin. To be honest, I feel lost and helpless. I do not know what to do (especially that I am far away from my home country now) and whether the change in law, since causing such disruptions, was the right thing to do here and now.
If the government looses power after next elections, without a doubt a severe legal pro-abortion backlash will follow, causing thousands of children to die — the protesters say that there is no way back to the Compromise. For me, it is not certain that the lives of innocent children will indeed be saved by the Constitutional Court’s ruling. And strong anti-Catholic tendencies in the society are growing rapidly and profoundly.
I pray that the situation will de-escalate — this is the most important thing now, as the state does not seem to control the situation fully.
Today the President of Poland proposed a kind of “a new compromise”: aborting a child with lethal defects will remain legal, but children with non-lethal diseases, such as Down Syndrome, will be illegal. We are also seeing divisions among the protesters appear — the most hardcore ones, who are organizing the protests and who run the “Black Protests” movement, are now starting to condemn the “not-pro-abortion-enough” protesters, including moderate politicians, causing visible confusion among many. Will it calm down society? We will see…
Łukasz gave me permission to post this, and requests that I ask you readers to pray for Poland. He sends this image of the crowd in the heart of Warsaw right now:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/de-catholicization-of-poland-abortion-law/
Even if Donald Trump had lost the 2016 election, instead of won it in a surprise, the media’s coverage of his campaign and supporters would have been a horrific failure. They presented that race as unwinnable for Trump and as if his support was inexplicable.
Their response to their 2016 failures has been not to improve their journalism in any way, shape, or form, but to decide that they didn’t do enough to bias that election in their preferred direction. Their nearly four-year temper tantrum has resulted in far worse 2020 campaign coverage than even the depths of their 2016 coverage. It’s as if they looked to the Candy Crowley debate in 2012, when she went out of her way to back Barack Obama when he said something false, and viewed it as a model, not an embarrassment.
Once again, regardless of the outcome next week, Big Media is actively at war with half of the American people and are desperately working to rig an election against them. Here are just five ways they’re doing that.
On October 14, the New York Post published a story about how Hunter Biden had introduced his father to a top Ukrainian businessman. This contradicted Joe Biden’s oft-repeated claim to have had no knowledge whatsoever about his son’s overseas business affairs.
Hunter Biden was paid handsomely by Burisma, a Ukrainian energy concern, while his father was vice president. Hunter had no business acumen or relevant experience in the energy sector, but was paid millions of dollars by Burisma at the time his father was in charge of U.S. policy toward Ukraine.
The story was sourced to a laptop computer allegedly left by Hunter at a Wilmington computer repair store. Big Tech moved immediately to squash the blockbuster story on both Twitter and Facebook. Twitter has banned the New York Post from tweeting and Facebook publicly announced they were suppressing the story, pending journalistic fact checks.
It’s been more than two weeks since Facebook announced it was suppressing the story pending fact checks. It has not shared who it tasked with the fact checks, and the only journalistic checks on the information have confirmed the story. One of the recipients of an email found on the laptop confirmed it was real, on the record. Government officials said it was not Russian disinformation. No information has come to light to suggest it was Russian disinformation. And last night, the key email in question was verified as legitimate by a cyber expert who was given access to the metadata for the email.
Other media outlets participated in the coordinated effort to squash the story, either by ignoring it completely or by claiming it wasn’t a big deal. Few to no media outlets defended the New York Post.
Partly as a result of the New York Post’s story and partly as a result of a Senate report showcasing Hunter Biden’s questionable overseas financial dealings, a former business associate of Hunter Biden’s named Tony Bobulinski came forward with more details about the Biden family’s problematic overseas relationships.
Armed with reams of documents, texts, emails, messages, and voicemails, Bobulinski said that Joe Biden had lied when he claimed he had no knowledge of Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings. Bobulinski recounted two in-person meetings with Joe Biden. Bobulinski, a retired Navy veteran, would go on to describe how Biden family members and associates plotted to keep Joe’s involvement off the books, and provide paperwork, texts, emails, documents, and audio files to substantiate his claims.
Last night, Sinclair’s James Rosen reported that the FBI had opened an investigation into Hunter Biden and his associates last year to investigate allegations of money laundering. The investigation is ongoing, Rosen reported. Bobulinski was interviewed as a “material witness” to the investigation in recent days.
The media blackout of any story that might harm their preferred candidate has extended even to this explosive news. Keep in mind, President Trump was impeached for expressing concern about Hunter Biden’s possible corruption in Ukraine at the same time the FBI was investigating Hunter Biden for money laundering.
There is no question that this story is journalistically significant, and dramatically more substantiated than the Trump-Russia collusion hoax that the media promulgated for years. In that story, the media ran wild with ridiculous and preposterous allegations with no evidence. Here, a family firm CEO with documentation to support his claims has been viewed by a corrupt media as not worthy of spending time on. GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel summarized how bad the propaganda situation is with major media:
Another way corporate media have been rigging the election has been through their polling narratives. For months, the media have been relentlessly pushing a narrative that Trump can not win the 2020 election. They almost seem to be in a contest to see who can make the most outrageous claim about a given state.
In 2016, the Real Clear Politics average of polls of Wisconsin showed that Hillary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump by 6.5 points. In fact, she lost that state to Trump, narrowly. You would think that this result, and the result in general, might produce some humility on the part of media pollsters.
In its final 2016 poll, Marquette reported that Clinton would win by six points. This week, that same pollster reported Biden would win by five points. By comparison, the Washington Post and ABC News dropped a poll claiming that Biden was going to win by 17 points. Even their previous poll gave Biden “only” a six-point lead. Marquette’s previous poll advantage was the same as their more recent advantage.
Guess which poll got massive media coverage.
One shouldn’t always assume polls are wrong, but if anyone learned anything from 2016 and 2018, it’s that polls are not always right. In 2018, for example, Fox News’ closing poll in the Indiana Senate race placed Democrat Joe Donnelly safely ahead by a 7-point margin. He lost to Republican Mike Braun by 6 points, 13 points off from what the final poll indicated. That poll result, which turned out to be very false, contributed to a narrative that the night would be a bloodbath for Republicans. While Republicans lost the House, they actually gained Senate seats, such as in Indiana.
Pundits talk as if polls are always right, but if they were, pundits wouldn’t have jobs. Everyone can read a poll and see what it says. The entire point of punditry should be to look at the entire universe of information, of which polls are a part, and try to see what world looks like with mosaic of information. Too many beltway folks go out of their way to ignore everything that’s not a poll.
That is a particular problem because some polls have at times seemed to become a vehicle to express deep-seated media bias in favor of particular candidates — in the hopes that the polls might move public opinion rather than reflect it.
Maybe ABC and the Post are correct and Trump is going to lose Wisconsin by 17 points and Biden will lead the most epic landslide in history. It’s certainly a possibility. But while the media are obsessing over horse-race polls, they are downplaying both Trump’s record of accomplishment and the enthusiasm he has from voters.
Trump’s biggest success in his first term has been his foreign policy agenda. While the elites predicted literal nuclear annihilation if he were elected, his presidency has been one of peace agreements and avoiding war when other presidents would have invaded.
He has worked against powerful military-industrial interests to end the Afghanistan War. He successfully eroded ISIS’s territorial gains. He rewrote trade deals. Peace agreements have sprung up in the Middle East between Israel and various Arab nations.
Trump has tried to get countries to be more invested in their own defense, rather than relying mostly on U.S. power. That has led to these peace agreements and arms deals in the Middle East but also an increase in defense spending from North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries. Trump has also massively reoriented the country’s posture toward China as part of an effort to deal with a growing threat there.
The media responded to these successes by hiding them, constantly. In the two debates between Trump and Biden, virtually no foreign policy questions were asked.
Much of Trump’s presidency was marked by significant growth of the economy. Even after the global pandemic, which has wreaked havoc throughout the world, yesterday’s explosive gross domestic product (GDP) numbers came in greater than expected. The media responded by burying the story as much as possible, worried it would help Trump.
Third-quarter GDP was up 33.1 percent, nearly double the previous growth record set in the first quarter of 1950. The Washington Post treated it like this almost unbelievable record was bad news, and didn’t use the annualized rate of 33.1 percent but the seemingly less impressive smaller number for the quarter. “U.S. economy grew by a record 7.4 percent from July to September, but the data is complicated,” was their headline. When second-quarter GDP fell by an annualized rate of 31.7 percent, the headline said that, instead of the lower 9 percent figure for the quarter. CNN and MSNBC simply blocked the historic news from airing on their prime time shows.
Republican voters are unified like they have been rarely before. Is that evidenced in any way in the media coverage? Or does nearly every media outlet constantly trot out a member of the tired and sad cabal of NeverTrumpist Republicans to suggest the opposite?
Trump’s rallies are brimming with enthusiasm, even during a pandemic, while Biden struggles to get even small crowds in attendance. When Trump held a wild and vibrant rally in Omaha this week, nearly all media coverage focused on how the logistics team had been unable to transport all the attendees in a timely fashion.
The Republican National Convention was a huge hit in part because it served as a fact check of the media narrative in recent years. Simply by highlighting a track record of domestic and foreign policy successes, viewers were reminded of how false the narrative about the first term of the Trump administration has been.
This week saw the news that the supposedly high-ranking “Anonymous” government official that published a 2018 New York Times op-ed about secretly undermining a president he personally disagreed with was in fact a 30-year-old mid-level bureaucrat nobody had ever heard of. The fake narrative that the New York Times knowingly promulgated roiled the administration for months, if not years, as high-level cabinet officials took turns denying that they were secretly and unconstitutionally undermining the elected president of the United States.
Miles Taylor was the Homeland Security Department policy analyst who turned out to have written the op-ed and a best-selling book about how he and other Resistance members put their personal political preferences over the ones chosen by the voting populace when they elected Trump president.
That little op-ed was nothing compared to the preposterously false Russia collusion hoax that the media promulgated for years thanks to dubious and selective leaks from politically motivated sources. For years, major media pushed the idea that Trump had won the 2016 election not because he won the Electoral College but because he had conspired with Russia — yes, Russia — to steal the 2016 election.
A coordinated leak campaign to hamstring the transition and, then, the administration was orchestrated and spun into a special counsel probe that brought the administration to a near standstill. In the end, none of the media’s promised collusion was found by the special counsel. The media pretended that they’d never been as credulous of their Russia collusion hoax as they had been and have never apologized or admitted error for what they did.
In fact, they just moved on to other hoaxes. One they cling to was formed by people using The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg to filter it into a damaging story. Goldberg was also used by similar officials to push false and discredited claims about the need to invade Iraq and cleanse it of weapons of mass destruction — that they turned out not to have.
Goldberg granted anonymity to four sources so they could claim that the public persona of Trump as a military-loving enthusiast was false. In fact, they said, he had personally chosen not to visit a World War I cemetery in France one day because he thought the people buried there were losers.
Now, as it turns out, there is contemporaneous evidence that it was John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff and the man Goldberg and his allies intimated was behind the story, who put a stop to the trip because of weather concerns. Further, more than a dozen eyewitnesses to the meetings where the cancellation was discussed went on the record to dispute the anonymous allegations.
There was never even a scintilla of evidence put out in support of Goldberg’s charge. Yet the story entered the public consciousness, became a major theme of Democratic ads, and continues to be mentioned by Biden on the few occasions he speaks publicly.
When Jack Dorsey and his Twitter employees suspended the account of the New York Post, other media outlets could have sounded the alarm about the violations of this country’s spirit of a free press. Instead, they stayed more or less silent. CNN’s Jake Tapper, who has no problem opining daily about his seething hatred of Trump officials, mentioned the Post’s suspensions but refused to take sides about it. Others didn’t even go that far.
Twitter and Facebook have been openly meddling in the 2020 election by censoring political opponents, suppressing their supporters, limiting the distribution of articles and arguments in their favor, and other draconian efforts. The media have more or less cheered them on.
NeverTrumpers, and their more traditional Democratic media colleagues, seem to think that so long as they are protected by social media companies — and there is no reason to think they won’t be — that censorship of non-leftist media is not anything they will fight. Some openly support bans on anyone they politically disagree with. Failure to defend journalists who are actually under attack — as opposed to those who are merely criticized — is a hallmark of many in the media.
David Daleiden, an undercover journalist who showed that Planned Parenthood was engaged in trafficking of unborn baby body parts, had his entire life upended by Kamala Harris prosecuting him for his journalism. Journalists didn’t think it worthy of coverage, even though many think she could be president within a matter of months.
The media are doing everything in their power to make sure that their preferred candidate wins — and that their arch enemy Trump loses. They’re coddling Biden, refusing to ask him any hard questions about his policies, his plans, or his family being investigated for money laundering. As a friend told my husband, “It’s like watching someone make sure a three-year-old wins CandyLand.”
They’ve gone overtime to influence public opinion with their emphasis on polls, despite the problems with those polls. They’ve hidden Trump accomplishments and enthusiasm. They’ve pushed outlandish conspiracy theories that many Americans believe to this day. And they’ve encouraged social media companies to suppress conservative arguments.
Will that be enough for them to win the day? People will find out next week. But the half of the country that the media are rigging the game against can’t be happy about what they’ve seen this year. And nobody who cares about a free and functioning country should tolerate what they’ve done.
