Tag: mainstream media

As America Braces For The Rittenhouse-Verdict Unrest, Profits Soar

The Mayhem Watch is on. Closing arguments in the trial of “Kenosha Shooter” Kyle Rittenhouse are expected Monday, and after weeks of hype, the country is primed to explode again. Wisconsin governor Tony Evers announced 500 National Guard troops will be on hand for potential post-verdict “unrest,” which seems almost guaranteed, no matter the result.

As with all major news stories lately, the Rittenhouse case saw idiosyncrasies wash away as coverage accumulated, with pundits pounding the trial into yet another generalized referendum on American culture war. Prestige media made Rittenhouse a stand-in for the Proud Boys, January 6th, school board protests, anti-mask protests, QAnon, Blue Lives Matter, Trump, “Domestic Terrorism,” fascism, school shooters, and every other naughty thing, with everyone from then-candidate Joe Biden to The Intercept blithely declaring him a white supremacist. The efforts to cast Rittenhouse as a symbol of racism and white rage have been awesome in quantity and transparently, intentionally provoking, with even leading papers like the New York Times standardizing a practice of underscoring Rittenhouse’s race (“white teenager”) while leaving the identities of those shot out of coverage. Glenn Greenwald pointed out that his old outlet, The Intercept, noted Rittenhouse’s race 20 times in one piece while keeping schtum about the color of those shot. This has gone on for so long, we’ve seen a foreign newspaper misreport that the two people killed in the case were black. In the public consciousness, they might as well have been.

Because Rittenhouse from the day of the shooting was made a symbol of Fox-watching, Trump-loving conservatives, he was also quickly adopted in red media as a hero, which “he surely wasn’t,” as Andrew Sullivan put it. This turbo-charged the freakout even more, as Rittenhouse’s defenders turned his case into a referendum on everything from media coverage of last summer’s protests of Black Lives Matter to the performance (or non-performance, as it were) of police during the George Floyd/Jacob Blake demonstrations, to a dozen other things that made public passions rise in the last year.

Rittenhouse in other words became a symbol of so many things to so many people that the specifics of his legal case have ceased to be relevant. There seems to be no such thing as an editorialist who has negative feelings about, say, Rittenhouse posing with Proud Boys, yet also believes that incident can’t be evidence since it happened after the shooting. Everyone picks a side and stays there. Pundits are telling us that any opinion on how the jury should rule can only be understood as a reflection of racial attitudes. “If you’re defending Kyle Rittenhouse, you might be a white supremacist. Just sayin,” is how Tweeter-with-beard and sometimes-journalist David Leavitt puts it.

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Joe Biden’s ‘Negro’ Quote Earns Hilarious Label From Twitter as ‘Fact Checkers’ Spin Like Tops

We previously reported on how some in the media rushed into damage control mode Thursday in the latest round of “Protect Joe” after President Biden called the late Major League Baseball legend/icon Satchel Paige a “negro.”

For those who missed it, Biden was giving a speech on Veterans Day at Arlington National Cemetary when he made the comments, which I’m providing below just so I don’t get accused of taking the current White House occupant out of context:

I want to welcome all the Cabinet members and honored guests joining us today, including the father of our Secretary of State, who served in the Army Air Corps during World War Two, Ambassador Donald Blinken, whose birthday is today. Happy Birthday. (Applause.) Thank you for your service to our country.

And I just want to tell you, I know you’re a little younger than I am, but, you know, I’ve adopted the attitude of the great Negro — at the time, pitcher in the Negro Leagues — went on to become a great pitcher in the pros — in the Major League Baseball after Jackie Robinson. His name was Satchel Paige.

Naturally, when members of the media hit the Code Red button to alert each other that it’s once again time to Protect the Precious, their colleagues on the “fact-checking” side often also jump in to “confirm” the media’s spin, which Snopes, Politifact, and Reuters have already done in a matter of 24 hours by laughably suggesting discussion/reporting on the comments “lacked context,” while Politifact also brought up the fact that Biden sometimes has a stuttering problem to try and explain what happened.

Compounding the hilarity of the collective Defend Biden effort, Twitter also jumped into the debate in their “events” section to amplify the claims from “fact-checkers” as though a single person in this country should trust anything fact-checkers say at a time when their liberal bias could not be more obvious.

“Edited clips of Joe Biden’s remarks about Black baseball player Satchel Paige lack some context, fact-checkers say,” the promo on the right-side Twitter column read.

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Don’t Let Leftists Gaslight You on Critical Race Theory

Chauncey Devega, a race essentialist and staff writer for Salon, insists that Critical Race Theory is a fairytale.  In his recent article, “‘Critical race theory’ is a fairytale — but America’s monsters are real,” Devega insists that CRT is a lie, a damn lie, and suggests everyday white folks are “doing the work of racism and white supremacy” by “[s]upporting Republican fascists who tell evil fairytales about ‘Critical Race Theory.'”

Devega makes his case by bloviating for ten full paragraphs about an old Southern boogieman called the “Goat Man,” a legendary monster that terrorized black communities in North Carolina by gobbling up black American men and boys.  He’d heard this tale as a child from his grandmother, which turned out to be a metaphor for Jim Crow and white supremacy.

Devega wants the reader to know that the Goat Man is not real, but that “real evil takes the form of flesh-and-blood human beings, not ghosts or demons or spectral fiends.”  Trump and his supporters are the real monsters, Devega insists, along with “Republican fascists who tell evil fairytales about ‘critical race theory.'”

He writes: 

Their goal is to reclaim uncontested white power and white privilege over every significant aspect of American society. Their evil fairytales about “critical race theory” or “parental control” are but a means to that end. 

At no point does Devega dare to take a real look at the issues at the heart of the pushback against CRT — at what is happening in school board meetings across the United States.  He couldn’t care less about the growing concerns of parents, teachers, and administrators in K–12 schools or the rest of American society at large.  CRT is a “fairytale” because arrogant race essentialists like Devega say it is.  (For the record, Vox is parroting this same nonsense, as are NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR.)

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Pfizer-Sponsored NBC News Caught Lying About COVID and Kids

On a recent episode of “The Jimmy Dore Show,” comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore accused Dr. John Torres, medical correspondent for NBC News, for overplaying COVID’s risk to children and reporting incorrect statistics.

“This is a story about how money influences corporate news,” Dore said, before playing a compilation video of Pfizer sponsoring newscasts on CNN, NBC, CBS, Good Morning America, ABC News, MSNBC and 60 Minutes.

“So what’s the result of all that Pfizer money going to newsrooms?” Dore asked. “Here’s how they’re going to report on the Pfizer vaccine being authorized for children who are at almost zero risk, according to the science.”

Dore played a clip of Torres on NBC’s Today show explaining why parents should vaccinate their children with Pfizer’s vaccine.

Torres recited statistics — including the statement that “there have been 146,000 COVID deaths [among children]” — that aren’t corroborated by any government health agency.

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After Cheerleading Censorship for Years, WaPo Now On Receiving End of It, And They’re Pissed

In 2017, the Washington Post made an announcement that they are making their newspaper’s slogan to “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” This slogan, while true, was incredibly ironic and hypocritical as the newspaper has long championed the censorship of their political rivals. If only one side of an argument is allowed to be heard, this is hardly democracy, yet it is the policy of those at the WaPo.

Not to long after proclaiming that democracy dies in the darkness, the WaPo waged a massive campaign of censorship symbolically blowing out candles to ensure their political rivals “die in darkness.” It started with Alex Jones and a hit piece calling for his removal from social media titled “Facebook Wants To Cut Down On Misinformation. So Why Isn’t It Doing Anything About InfoWars”

But even before they changed their motto, WaPo had long championed censorship and they had no problem using lies to achieve these means. In 2016, the Free Thought Project was brought up in the WaPo, who claimed — with zero evidence — that we were part of a Russian propaganda effort to “spread fake news” during the election.

Citing the now-heavily discredited “think tank” known as Prop or Not, the post claimed TFTP and dozens of other news media websites “got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy.”

Clearly no one cared to look at our articles at the time which criticized both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. What’s more, despite being completely disproven and despite the entire ‘Russian meddling’ narrative crashing into ashes earlier this month, the article remains up on their website. 

WaPo’s calls for censoring their political rivals are as numerous as they are scandalous and continue this very day. Just this week, WaPo published a piece demanding that Big Tech immediately censor anyone who challenges the establishment’s narrative on climate change.

The WaPo has even gone so far as to push for modifying the actual First Amendment’s provision for free speech. Yes, they advocated for changing the very constitution of the United States to remove speech they didn’t like. Of course this was done in the vein of “preventing hate speech” but they completely ignored the inevitable effects of such lunacy.

“Yes, the First Amendment protects the “thought that we hate,” but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another,” the article read.

But there are already laws on the books against inciting violence toward others. Not to mention, the WaPo has long pushed “hateful speech” that incites violence against groups with which they disagree. In fact, just last year, the paper took a page straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook which was used to demonize Jews and used it to dehumanize Trump supporters — as rats who should be exterminated.

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