Now they are coming for your kids

 

The federal government just won’t stop.  Here’s an update from Issues and Insights on the move to force a COVID “vaccine” (read: experimental gene therapy) on children:

It goes without saying that parents almost always know what’s best for their kids. But the FDA and woke officials in the White House and Congress don’t agree. They intend to force COVID vaccines on your kids, whether you like it or not. Don’t let them. It’s politics, not science.

In a desperate bid to find more COVID victims to save with experimental vaccines, the Federal Drug Administration just gave the Pfizer anti-COVID vaccine “emergency use” authorization for children aged 5-11. Get ready for a big propaganda push.

. . .

The truth is, COVID isn’t a serious threat to kids up to 18. And no, we’re not against vaccines. They’ve been shown to work well at preventing hospitalizations and deaths for those in the highest-risk groups. If you’re at extreme risk, you’d be wise to get a shot.

But as the Daily Mail reported, “Parents have been split 50-50 over vaccinating children because kids . . . make up less than 0.1% of all COVID deaths in the U.S.” Not to mention that the effects of experimental drugs on kids are still unknown.

As with lockdowns, vaccine mandates are not really about health at all. They’re about control. In this case, government control of your children.

Read the entire report here.

# # #

 

A View From Abroad

 

If you have been distressed at America’s downward spiral and dismayed by a media that will not report honestly, you are not alone. At AmericanGreatness, Conrad Black has the bad news:

After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.” 

As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”

. . .

. . . And there is no precedent for the completely avoidable and shaming debacle of the American defection from its own alliance and helter-skelter flight from Afghanistan, leaving thousands of desperate people of many nationalities who had relied upon the United States, to fend for themselves against the new terrorist regime that seized power there (and $85 billion of U.S. military hardware along with it).

. . .

The thought of the most successful alliance in history being “led” for three more years by an American president whose round-the-clock gaffes are not protected in Europe as Biden is in the United States by a totalitarian social media platform cartel and terminally biased national political media is a subject of profound and general disconcertion. 

Mr. Black’s full article is here.  I don’t agree with everything he says, but he brings a sobering perspective from our erstwhile allies overseas.

# # #

Weaponized Medicine

 

JD Rucker has been publishing Dr Joseph Mercola’s updates on the mandates and “guidelines” on COVID-19, and Dr. Mercola's updates are perpetually at risk of being censored (see here and here).  Here’s the beginning of today’s offering:

Editor’s [JD Rucker’s] Commentary: When this story first crossed my desk, I almost didn’t publish it. Dr. Mercola will often revisit topics that we’ve already discussed, and while his insights are invariably better than mine, I initially thought this particular topic was well saturated.

I was wrong for two reasons, which is why you’re reading this right now. First, there is no such thing as an important topic regarding Covid-19 being “oversaturated” because mainstream media is flooding the zone with propaganda. How could a story like this be overdone compared to all the massive lies that are being told to the masses every minute of every day? I realized the error of my thinking and I blame a temporary lapse in judgment.

The second reason, as I learned when I read it, is that the Project Veritas video may be a bit long in the tooth for the mercurial news cycle, but Dr. Mercola’s perspectives tie it all together with current events. Again, silly of me to think otherwise and almost pass on this fabulous article!

In short, I almost messed up and deprived our audience of this important piece. But just in the nick of time, I grabbed it in the 48-window Dr. Mercola allows for his articles to be published. Here it is…

Medical Mafia is Sinking the Healthcare System

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

• Jodi O’Malley, a registered nurse who works for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Indian Health Services branch in Phoenix, Arizona, is blowing the whistle on COVID jab injuries
• A DHHS emergency room physician admits no one is reporting COVID jab injuries, even though it’s required for emergency use medications
• According to media reports, unvaccinated COVID patients are causing health care systems to be overwhelmed. Health care systems in Idaho, Alaska and Montana have started rationing health care based on probability of survival
• What many media outlets are not addressing is that medical resources are under strain due to the enormous numbers of trained medical staff either resigning or getting fired for refusing the COVID jab
• Public health data are being massively manipulated and then wielded as a weapon to justify egregious power grabs and governmental overreaches. In the process, the medical profession has been pushed to the edge of a moral void where patients are viewed as disposable based on their medical choices

Read Dr. Mercola’s article here. 

# # #

One Option: Do Not Comply

 

Hannah Cox at FEE (Foundation for Economic Education) has an encouraging story on how Americans can resist and choose not to comply with police-state directives:

4 Ways Americans Are Fighting Back Against Anti-Science COVID Restrictions

What’s more American than apple pie? Civil disobedience.

In the US, it would be easy to believe the vast majority of people are in lockstep with the government’s pandemic policies. Networks are aflush with headlines claiming their polls show a majority of Americans support policies like masks and vaccine mandates, and detractors are painted as fringe.

Every good politico knows that, with the right framing, you can get a poll to say anything you want it to. But aside from the unreliable nature of the polls and headlines dominating our airwaves, there is another problem with the media’s reporting: they never seem to elevate stories that tell a counter narrative.

One doesn’t have to look far to find examples of Americans who have simply had enough of the anti-scientific and unconstitutional COVID mandates. We know, and have known for over a year, that the majority of masks in use provide little benefit in warding off the coronavirus. Additionally, studies have shown that mask mandates failed to reduce COVID deaths, hospitalizations, or even cases. And on top of all of that, we consistently see the same leaders who push these unscientific mandates on the rest of us flout the rules whenever it suits their fancy—like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Met Gala or San Francisco Mayor London Breed partying at a local jazz club.

Vaccine mandates present similar problems. Besides being flagrantly unconstitutional and a violation of bodily autonomy, these mandates ignore the natural immunity that millions of people have built up.

The rules only get sillier and more nonsensical from there. . . .

Read the full article here.  

# # #

 

COVID propaganda is killing us

 

Molly McCann cuts through the propaganda fog at TheFederalist. Here’s the opening section:

Pretending COVID Is An Emergency Is Killing America

There is no justification for the continued suspension of the American form of self-government that secures all our individual rights and liberties.

The Western world is living a massive COVID lie. That lie is strangling the life out of liberty, and it will destroy our constitutional order if we do not end this horrifying charade.

A recent article in The Guardian discussing France’s vaccine passport unconsciously provides the perfect example. It describes the Great Plague that struck Marseille in 1720 (the final contortion of the Black Death), noting that it “kill[ed] more than half of the city’s population.”

“[S]truggl[ing] to find a delicate balance between halting the spread of the disease and damaging vital commerce,” the city authorities, The Guardian tells us, ordered travelers “to carry a ‘bill of health’ and ships arriving at the Mediterranean port underwent a 40-day cordon sanitaire or quarantine.”

“Three hundred years on,” The Guardian seriously intones, “President Emmanuel Macron is walking an equally tricky tightrope . . .” Hopefully, you spotted the glaring problem with this comparison. In 1720, the Great Plague in Marseille killed more than half the city’s population.

We have gotten to the point in this “pandemic” where government leaders and a worryingly high percentage of the American people are acting like COVID is a crisis on par with Marseille’s Great Plague. We have been buried in facts, figures, mountains of data, constantly shifting information, misinformation, and more. We are relentlessly briefed by the media about rising infection rates or the current capacity of local ICUs.

But cut through it all and ask — how many Americans are dying? According to Johns Hopkins, the fatality rate of COVID in the United States is 1.7 percent, which means that 98.3 percent survive. That takes into account all deaths, including people who had underlying conditions and the elderly. Excluding those who are obviously high-risk, the survival rate is close to 100 percent.

. . .

Read the rest here.

RELATED:  Dr. Joseph Mercola at BasedUnderground reports ‘Pandemic of the Unvaxxed’ Is a Lie: 60% of Those Older Than 50 Who Die From COVID Are Double Vaxxed.

# # #

 

COVID and censorship

 

The more I learn about the censorship of physicians and scientists who are sounding the alarm about the vaccines and protocols promoted by the government, the more concerned I become.  JD Rucker is the proprietor of NOQ and an editor at Liberty Daily.  He’s been posting articles by medical skeptics that he knows will be viewed by the mainstream as lunatic fringe conspiracy theory stuff, but he puts them up on his blog anyway.  I am not qualified to critique the data or the arguments, although they seem reasonable to a layperson.  What does get my attention is the government's and Big Tech's ongoing attempts to silence those with dissenting views and criticism of the government-promoted mandates, moves towards vaccine passports, and additional booster shots.

[from JD Rucker’s prefatory remarks] The point made in this article is not only has [Anthony] Fauci pushed the wrong potentially disastrous pandemic solution, he has blocked the right one.

Much of what the two virologists [Dr.Luc Montagnier and Dr. Vanden Bossche] say is very technical in nature.  This article simplifies their controversial messages without losing their essential meanings.  The public needs to understand their warnings that refute all the propaganda pushing vaccines from government and public health agencies as well as big media.

Here then are a few extracts from NOQ’s “Two Top Virologists’ Frightening Warnings About Covid Injections Ignored by Government and Big Media” by Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn:

What is the solution?  Bossche has identified the needed alternative to the current massive vaccine effort.  It is this; “This first critical step can only be achieved by calling an immediate halt to the mass vaccination program and replacing it by widespread use of antiviral chemoprophylactics while dedicating massive public health resources to scaling early multidrug treatments of Covid-19 disease.”  This is referring to the early home/outpatient treatment protocols based on cheap, safe and fully approved generics like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine; these also work as preventatives.  Pandemic Blunder provides much data and advice on using this treatment approach.  So, both virologists support use of what [Anthony] Fauci has blocked.

These action recommendations were also made by Bossche “Provide – at no cost – early multidrug treatment to all patients in need.  Roll out campaigns to promote healthy diets and lifestyle.”  In other words, people need to take actions to boost their natural immunity, this should include vitamins and supplements, including this cocktail: vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc and quercetin.

. . .

The full article is here.  I should note that I remain skeptical about both virologists.  Dr. Montagnier is another one who did not come off too well during the 1980’s AIDS crisis, and Dr. Bossche has worked for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  But readers will make up their own minds.

RELATED:  James Gallagher has a piece on BBC.com (“Covid: What’s the best way to top up our immunity?”) that raises yet more questions. 

UPDATE:  Peter Skurkiss has a column at American Thinker, “Do The People Who Rushed To Get The COVID Shot Have Buyer's Remorse?”, that also looks at media and Big Tech censorship from more angles.

# # #

The Biden Regime Has Made Us All Enemies of the State

 

J.B. Shurk at American Thinker (cross-posted at NOQ Report) starts off:

How can you tell we're slipping under the yoke of totalitarianism?  The New York Times has declared that the word "freedom" is merely an "anti-government slogan," and the Biden regime refuses to condemn Cuba's communist police state, even as it "disappears" Cuban dissidents during live video feeds.  I don't know how much clearer the State and its "news" propagandists can be.  If "freedom" is a dirty little word as meaningless as "hope and change," then everything upon which the United States of America has been built is dead, and if the Obama-Biden cabal running the White House find common cause with the same Castro-Guevara mass murderers who have tortured and summarily executed innocent Cubans in the name of "revolution" for sixty years, then the federal government cannot be trusted.  

This isn't a surprise to anyone paying attention.  Two months ago, the U.S. State Department draped embassies around the world with Black Lives Matter flags, and today BLM has pledged its allegiance to the communist Cuban regime while blaming the U.S. for Cuba's island prison of poverty, violence, and repression.  There has never been any doubt that BLM is a Marxist organization intent on destroying American freedoms, yet Democrats, corporate boards, and even Mitt Romney have sung its praises for years.  Hanging those insidious BLM flags on American consulates overseas was tantamount to hanging the hammer and sickle over the stars and stripes.  Their meaning was self-evident: the U.S. is under new Marxist management.  Still, too many corporate sellouts and political backstabbers honored BLM as some sort of paragon for civil rights, even as its members routinely engage in arson, larceny, intimidation, and murder.  

Now that BLM has made its allegiance to America's communist enemies abundantly clear, will any of those corporate or political invertebrates walk back their support for BLM's pro-Castro movement?  Surely not.  They've chosen a side; they're totalitarian appeasers now, giving aid and comfort to those who wish America harm.  Is that too harsh?  Is it unfair to accuse American companies and politicians of casting their lot with the intellectual heirs of Stalin and Mao?  A man should be judged by his deeds, not his words, but as far as I can see, none of these pro-BLM sycophants has done or said anything while the Biden administration embraces Cuba's police state tactics here at home.  Their inaction speaks volumes.  

. . .

Read the full article here.  So we are current with what we are up against . . .

# # #

Wokeness erasing America

 

Most excellent commentary from Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness:

If wokeness should continue and “win,” by now we all know where it will end up. After all, this is not a prairie-fire, peasants-with-pitchforks, spontaneous bottom-up revolution.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.

. . .

Full article is here.

# # #

The Cruelest Hoax Of All: COVID-19

Mark Wauck at MeaningInHistory nominates COVID-19 as:

The Cruelest Hoax Of All

Which hoax? We live in an age of hoaxes, so there's a lot of competition for the honor of being the cruelest hoax of all. My vote still goes to the Covid hoax. I base that on the sheer unprecedented amount of damage done by this hoax: business failures, unemployment, lockdowns, depression and its attendant ills, education stoppages that hurt the poorest students most, mass fear bordering on--and not infrequently exceeding--hysteria, widespread paranoia and the breakdown of social solidarity. And last but not least--perversely mistaken withholding of effective treatments (the HCQ regime and Ivermectin) in favor of dangerous and often fatal "treatments", such as mechanical ventilation, leading to far too many unnecessary deaths. Most of this damage was inflicted in knowing violation of all scientific and medical norms regarding viruses in general and coronaviruses in particular. Now we're witnessing the rush to lift many of the absurd measures that were taken--simply because Trump has been ousted by our ruling oligarchy. Which leads to the very reasonable supposition that this was an essentially political hoax that took advantage of unscientific hysteria that was propagated with a purpose.

. . .

there has been an appalling lack of transparency throughout this whole hoax, which has facilitated its political weaponization.

Read the rest here (includes links to reports and videos).

RELATED:  Steven W. Mosher: The doctor who denied COVID-19 was leaked from a lab had this major bias at the NY Post here.

# # #

 

Media tries to drag Biden over the finish line

We were in a Sportsbar over the weekend, and the TV screen dialed to CNN had a headline on the crawl to the effect that Joe Biden is declared President.  Huh?  Since when does the media declare the winner of a Presidential election?  Later on Saturday evening, Greg Gutfield opened his show by making jokes about what a Biden presidency would do.  So he was framing the question in terms of a probable Biden Presidency – as in a done deal.  Nuts.  To frame the questions that way is to give up on Trump’s re-election, to fall victim to the media propaganda to take the air out of our tires, so to speak.  We changed channels. 

On Sunday, many bloggers and commentators enumerated the procedural steps involved in a contested election.  We all know that the respective Secretaries of State have first to certify the vote counts.  Some of those SOSs may be reluctant to certify tallies they know to be fraudulent.  So that’s one potential check on the process.

Clarice Feldman at American Thinker has more and is, as usual, one of the best:  

Apparently, they are under the impression that [the media] decide election results. They don’t. On December 14, electors chosen by state legislators cast their votes. No one else but the state legislators have that right. (Article II, Sec. 1,§2 of the Constitution). Certainly not the press, nor state boards of elections, secretaries of state, governors, or courts.

If they have reason to believe the elections in their states were unlawfully conducted and the results fraudulent, they can act to override them. (You can see a detailed history of this section of the Constitution in this fine article by Daniel Horowitz.) The Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania  legislatures are majority Republican. At first glance these states -- particularly the precincts in Milwaukee, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia -- are the most suspect.

Is there ample evidence of fraud sufficient to have altered the will of the legal voters in these states? It sure looks that way.

. . .

If the [Pennsylvania Supreme Court] Court had applied the Constitution, then we wouldn’t have this mess, for it’s clear under Article 1 Sec. 4, cl 1--that the Pennsylvania court had no constitutional power to change the “times, methods, and procedures of elections.” 

That provision specifically applies to the election of senators and representatives, both of whom were on the ballots in question.  And what if there is no clear winner by Inauguration Day?  We’ve been reading a lot about how Mm Pelosi would become President, as the Speaker of the House is third in the line of succession,  But Ms. Feldman again explains:

What if There’s no Winner Declared by Inauguration Day?

I’ve seen lots of assertions that in such a case Nancy Pelosi will be the interim president. Nope. Should that eventuality occur, the House votes for an interim president and the Senate for an interim vice president. (The House votes are by state -- one vote each -- and the Republicans hold a majority of 26 states. Our founders were geniuses. Never forget that.)

As Ms. Feldman closes:  “Never give up the good fight. Never hamstring your will to fight on with pessimism.”

Her article is here.

# # #

All you need to do is vote.

Is it going to be Biden landslide?  A Trump landslide?  Who believes any of the polls?  Kurt Schlichter has encouraging words in the final days before Election Day. His article at TownHall about the propaganda psy-ops begins:

The next few days will be a Cat 5 hurricane of mainstream media spin and Democrat bullSchiff designed to make you think that you’ve already lost this election. They want your morale shattered, your spirit broken, and you to put a lid on your participation in saving your country from leftist tyranny.

It’s all a lie.

It’s a psychological operation designed to keep you on the sidelines.

We got this.

All you need to do is vote.

And his full article is here. 

For what it is worth, we cased out the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections today, and the line to vote in person stretched most of the way down East 30 St.  Probably a two-hour wait.  And that was on Thursday afternoon.  There were campaign signs everywhere, extra police and sheriff presences, and I expect it will be much the same on Election Day.

# # #

Lion lyin' media

The media manipulates just about everything we read and see.  Here's a meme from social media:

# # #

Censorship at Fox News

Photo credit: Boingboing.net

Joey Morona at Cleveland.com reports on blatant censorship at Fox News. The headline: 

Fox News cuts ties with Diamond & Silk 

after duo spreads coronavirus misinformation, report says

These two delightful ladies have been axed for telling the truth. Here’s an example of their dastardly crimes:

Their apparent banishment comes as the duo continues to make dubious claims about the coronavirus. On their March 30 live stream, for example, they suggested the number of deaths from COVID-19 was being exaggerated to make Trump look bad.

“What I need to know is: Who has the bodies?” Diamond asked.

A week later, their Twitter account was locked for violating the platform’s rules about spreading coronavirus misinformation, Politico reported.

“The only way we can become immune to the environment; we must be out in the environment. Quarantining people inside of their houses for extended periods will make people sick!” the offending tweet said.

On Monday, Diamond and Silk called the pandemic and resulting economic shutdown a “Deep State experiment that we’ve all been suckered into.”

Read the rest of the report here.  Diamond and Silk are right on the money.

Fox News has been gradually falling in line with the mainstream media propaganda pedlars, and this latest muzzling of two champions of truth and common sense is shameful and scary.  Those who want to hear and read both sides of an issue will have to seek it out on radio or online.  

# # #

COVID-19 and propaganda

"Stay At Home. Save Lives."

At the American Thinker, Dex Bahr reminds us all that the propaganda never stops:

As we go through yet another week of Wuhan virus restriction in the United States, do you find yourself becoming annoyed at the daily sloganeering?  We see these messages on television, hear them on radio and flashed before us while driving.  I, for one, am beginning to tire of this "we're all in this together" claptrap, along with "flattening (or bending) the curve"; social distancing; and "stay safe, stay strong."  However, the one slogan that is most irritating is "stay at home...save lives."

Let's not forget that original reason for sheltering at home was to prevent hospital emergency rooms from becoming overrun by slowing the spread of the virus.  The mandate was never to save lives, but to slow the spread and by default prolong the extent of the virus.  Again, staying at home was for the purpose of lessening the burden on hospitals, not saving lives.

Read the rest here.

# # #

Victor Davis Hanson on impeachment and TDS

Gary Varvel cartoon via indystar.com

Historian Victor Davis Hanson’s article “Is Trump the Only Adult in the Room?” has been linked on multiple web and blogsites. Here’s an extract via Fox News:

Democrats addicted to attacking Trump –

even if impeachment drive hurts them

. . . [N]o president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year effort to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election.

. . .

The common denominator of all this petulance is exasperation over the inability to derail Trump.

Trump’s many enemies fear he will be reelected in 2020, given a booming economy and peace abroad. They know that they cannot remove him from office. And yet they fear that the more they try to stain him with impeachment, the more frustrated and unpopular they will become.

Yet, like end-stage addicts, they simply cannot stop the behavior that is consuming them.

Full article is here.

# # #

“Hate speech” and Facebook

image credit: hubpages.com

Petr Svab at The Epoch Times:

While in the United States, most of what Facebook labels as “hate speech” would be lawful to utter publicly because of First Amendment protections, some European countries have laws against “hate speech,” forcing Facebook to take such content offline. Facebook could theoretically make such content only available to users in locales where it’s lawful, but the company has apparently subscribed to the “hate speech” doctrine, tripling its content policing force to some 30,000.

The document with [Candace] Owens’s name was posted into an internal discussion group set up by former Facebook senior engineer Brian Amerige, who left the company due to disagreements over content policing.

“I’m glad to see the group continues to be used to raise awareness inside the company about Facebook’s slippery slope of a content policy,” he said via the Facebook Messenger app. “In a very sad way, it’s comically predictable to see people listed as ‘extra credit’ to watch and investigate. Evolution into the ‘thought police’ is the inevitable result of their dangerous and ineffective approach to promoting the truth.”

The core issue Amerige hit an impasse on with Facebook executives was their insistence on suppressing “hate speech,” which Amerige deemed misguided.

“Hate speech can’t be defined consistently and it can’t be implemented reliably, so it ends up being a series of one-off ‘pragmatic’ decisions,” he previously said. “I think it’s a serious strategic misstep for a company whose product’s primary value is as a tool for free expression.”

Read the rest of this report here. As Thomas Lifson at American Thinker summarizes:

Facebook is being exposed as a naked propaganda organ that ought to be treated by law as a "publisher" legally responsible for the content it hosts, and not as a "forum" — the status it currently enjoys, exempting it from libel laws and other downsides to the content it spreads out to the world.

# # #

How the media manipulates the report

investigaction.net

Mark Steyn walks us through exactly HOW the media transmutes a news report into outright propaganda – step by step -- in his "Taqiyya for Easter." He starts off:

Let's say a fire breaks out at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris at the start of Holy Week, and just after two of the city's other most prominent houses of worship - St Sulpice and the Basilica of St Denis - have been attacked and vandalized.

Well, I think we can all confidently say as the first flames are beginning to lick the ceiling that it's undoubtedly an accident. Cigarette butt. Or maybe computer glitch. Probably just an overheated smart phone. We don't need to get in there and sift through the debris. We can just announce it.

On the other hand, when there are coordinated attacks on Easter services at several churches in Sri Lanka, it becomes a little more challenging to pass off multiple suicide-bombings killing nearly three hundred people as an electrical malfunction.

So, in contrast to the confident declarations of a week ago, on Sunday morning the media opted for a subtler narrative. Lead sentence from The Economist:

IT HAS BEEN nearly ten years since the guns fell silent in Sri Lanka's civil war. But bloodshed returned with a vengeance...

So it's something to do with the Tamil Tigers? Their guns fell silent, but now they've returned with a vengeance, eh?

Well, er, no, er, not, ah, precisely... But it's useful for "context", lots and lots of context. And, if you pile up enough context, you can bury the actual story. 

Do read the rest of the how-to analysis here.

# # #

Propaganda for fun and profit

art credit: no-gods-no-masters.com

Corruption in the media just keeps getting worse. The anchors and pundits brazenly lie. They hardly ever retract. I had assumed the propaganda was ideologically-driven and power-driven, but I had not really considered how much money could be made by manufacturing blatant propaganda for gullible -- or at least uncritical viewers/readers. Stephen Ryan at American Thinker puts a few things together:

Right now, left-leaning mainstream media is getting flogged, and they deserve it for their dishonest reporting on the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory. Mass firings and a month of apologies by Jeff Zucker and Rachel Maddow would not be sufficient to mend the harm these organizations have done to America’s trust in news reporting.

But the folks who truly deserve to be put in their place and totally humiliated are the viewers of these pretend news shows. At what point do the Wellesley and Williams-educated elites look in the mirror and accept the fact that they have been taken for fools? They have enabled progressive media to manufacture rotten journalism. They never turned the channel.  

Most people got a glimpse of Rachel Maddow’s ringmaster act when she ran the elephants around a circle for forty-five minutes entertaining the masses with the promise that Trump’s tax returns would shortly be shot out of a cannon.  As the fuse burned and Rachel Maddow whipped the crowd into a frenzy, insinuating that she had caught the tax cheat, MSNBC producers were madly counting the gate.

Slate Magazine writes: “There was, of course, the mid-month burst of global attention surrounding the program’s unveiling of President Trump’s 2005 tax return, a scoop that yielded a series-best audience of just over 4 million viewers.”

Then suddenly… Boom!  - “TRUMP PAID HIS TAXES IN FULL!!!” Whoops. Cut to commercial.

For a nanosecond, media critics seemed embarrassed.  Slate called it a “mini-backlash among critics who accused Maddow of overhyping the discovery.”

But the ringmaster understood that nobody listens to the critics. What mattered most was the act: the bearded lady would be on the show the next day and the mob would show up.

The Trump tax return debacle, in certain ways, was a game changer for progressive media.

The fallout from the Trump tax return show was that network news producers tossed their journalistic ethics out of the window. The ghost of Walter Cronkite could finally be ignored -- the news legend’s white privilege delegitimized his legacy.  News organizations found themselves free to manipulate or willfully lie to their audience every single day.

And nobody seems to care. Certainly, Maddow’s audience doesn't care -- they show up every night.  Network news producers understand that now. In today’s world, it’s no longer the New York Times’ laughable and pretentious axiom “All the news that’s fit to print” that matters, it’s Randy Newman’s tune, “It’s money that matters,” that news media organizations dance to. Just ask Rachel.

Will there be any reckoning? The rest of the article is here.

# # #

Propaganda News Networks. Again.

image credit: floppingaces/com

Justin Caruso at Breitbart reports:

Several major television networks are apparently unsure whether or not to air President Trump’s live address to the nation on border security Tuesday due to concern over what he will say.

According to The Hill, CNN and Fox News Channel are planning to air Trump’s address on border security, while the basic cable networks CBS, NBC, and ABC have not committed one way or the other.

MSNBC has not made a public comment one way or the other, and the network has repeatedly opted not to air Trump events before.

The President’s live address begins Tuesday evening at 9pm. Mr. Caruso’s full report, including tweets from the President and from members of the “media,” is here.

# # #

The propaganda mill is working overtime

Image credit here

Time Magazine has announced its Person of the Year, actually several Persons of the Year, including “journalist” Jamal Khashoggi who was murdered in Turkey last October.

Who was Jamal Khashoggi? Well, he was not a journalist. He was not a U.S. citizen. He was not even a Green Card holder. Khashoggi was a Saudi national and a political operative for the Muslim Brotherwood. From Daniel Greenfield at FrontPage:

The Khashoggi case demands context.

Before the media and the politicians who listen to it drag the United States into a conflict with Saudi Arabia over a Muslim Brotherhood activist based on the word of an enemy country still holding Americans hostage, we deserve the context.

And we deserve the truth.

The media wants the Saudis to answer questions about Jamal Khashoggi. But maybe the media should be forced to answer why the Washington Post was working with a Muslim Brotherhood propagandist?

And from LiberalForum:

Since Khashoggi's October 2 murder at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey, media across the United States has claimed he was a U.S. green card holder. As a result, reporters and editors urged the White House to change long standing policies and partnerships with the Kingdom. 

But according to a report in Business Insider, Khashoggi wasn't actually a green card holder and simply visited the U.S. on a visa.

Mohamad Soltan, an Egyptian-American activist who sees Khashoggi regularly in Washington, told Reuters that Khashoggi was in the United States on an O-visa. . . .

The media is bestowing on Khashoggi increased visibility and now, “credibility” as a martyr for journalism, honored by Time magazine in the company of other journalists who risked their lives to report the news. As I see it, Time is cynically using those other journalists to provide cover for Khashoggi as a journalist. So now the media can continue to use him as a cudgel to whack away at President Trump’s Middle East policies as part of their anti-Trump agenda.

Alexander Downer at the Financial Review published an excellent summary of the story that the media won’t report, click here. The mainstream media’s dishonesty and bias is on full display 24/7, but it’s not always this blatant. Or self-serving.

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