Tag: mainstream media

The Left Doesn’t Count Votes. It Finds Them.

f you saw a recent NYT report on Brazil’s election between incumbent socialist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and conservative Flávio Bolsonaro, you may have noticed that the Left’s “paper of record” made an astounding, if unintended, admission in the headline: it reveals its conception of elections. In its words, “Flávio Bolsonaro’s first round lead leaves President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva three weeks to find the votes to stop Brazil’s rightward shift” (italics mine). It doesn’t say “prevail in the election by voter turnout,” but it casts the election as an implied political obligation to manufacture ballots to block voter will and engineer an imposed social order against it. This is clearly the Left’s intention in November.

While this may read as routine journalism, or perhaps just wishful thinking on the writers’ part, it may strike some readers as more of a Freudian slip about how the Left’s mental worldview works: leftist parties operate under a duty to manufacture enough ballots to overcome an election deficit. If your candidate falls behind, you intervene on the sidelines to close the gap. This is now their “normalized” concept of an election.

More than that, progressives have inverted the structure of an election from one that sets two opponents in passive receipt of votes to an actively managed, planned event that aids one side during the election. What was traditionally an arm’s-length contest becomes a pre-existing agreement.

Rather than preserving a quiet period after the close of campaigning to measure the public result of candidate marketing through voluntary voter turnout, the election becomes merely part of their total political campaign operation. It turns votes into indicators, and the indicators into corrective ballot measures.

This obviously goes by other names, such as rigging, stealing, cheating, and fraud, but the extraordinary aspect of this language in the NYT is how it reveals a shift in political psychology and a determination to make that abnormal psychology generally accepted behavior. It resembles the Left’s efforts to make people think that transgender athletes are legitimate contestants among biological females: it asks you to accept a fraud as a right, and, more than that, that you are wrong for questioning it. That is how election fraud works: objections violate a higher moral standing claimed by the victor, even though the victor obtained it through deception.

To use an analogy, it is like two horses in a race where the spectators rush the racetrack on the losing horse, inject him with amphetamines, block the other rider, and the racing judge looks the other way, while the crowd is asked to keep quiet out of fairness to the horse.

To use a good legal analogy, it would be like two legal opponents in a trial, along with their lawyers, actually accompanying the jury into the deliberation room and trying to measure which way they’re leaning and “tip” the scales. Jurors privately deliberate after closing arguments because they weigh what they heard and reach a protected verdict based only on the evidence presented in open court.

Elections are the same: voters effectively go into private deliberation after hearing both sides, cast their ballots in private, and the verdict is then announced in the open “public court.” We have certain appeal processes for election irregularity (e.g., Florida in 2000 and Bush v. Gore), or for an election “mistrial,” as in a deadlock (a runoff or recount), including the discretion to count state electors (e.g., Pence, 2021). In all cases, the counting or verdict is subject to a quiet period, and campaigning of any kind must stand down.

The other key factor in Brazil that is reframing the Left’s vision of elections is based on its paranoia that any conservative candidate is a Trump candidate and ally and part of a larger plan to aid and abet President Trump’s mandates (“Brazil Is a Sign of Things to Come,” NYT, 10.5.26). But South America (and Cuba as well) has been dragging behind the West economically for decades because of its leftist political corruption and because it swings in the extreme between Left populists and Right militarists. Rarely has an actual business conservative, or even a moderate leader, emerged.

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BBC pays white staff less than ethnic minorities – report 

White employees at the BBC earn less than their ethnic minority colleagues in six of seven salary grades, according to the British broadcaster’s 2025/26 annual report. The figures have raised new questions about the corporation’s drive to promote ethnic minority staff and its possible impact on pay.

According to the BBC’s 2025/26 pay gap report, highlighted by The Telegraph on Wednesday, black, Asian, mixed-race and other ethnic minority employees earn 13.2% more in median hourly pay than white colleagues in the lowest salary band. Even among the broadcaster’s most senior executives, the gap stands at 5.3%.

White employees came out ahead in just one category, where their median hourly pay was 0.6% higher. Across the BBC as a whole, however, white staff still earned 0.7% more, largely because they held a greater share of the highest-paid jobs.

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NY Times Suggests Babies Are Not Conscious

The New York Times has decided the open question in science this week is whether a baby is conscious. Not a cluster of cells. Not a theoretical model. An actual newborn baby.

Carl Zimmer’s 5 October piece, “Are Babies Conscious?” (yes that’s a real headline) walks readers through a lab test and then informs them that a “squirming, gurgling infant” does not seem conscious, “at least not in the way adults are.”

Zimmer’s setup is the oddball-sound test. A subject hears three low tones and a high one, over and over, then a run of four low tones. Adult brains throw a brief, distinctive blip at the break. People in a coma do not. People who are asleep do not. The Times then puts a newborn in the same frame and asks whether the blip will be there.

Are Babies Conscious? As scientists map the birth of consciousness, they hope to gain a better understanding of how it evolved in humans in the first place. https://t.co/g1D5A4wRtF— Patrick Emerton (@egregiousknave) October 5, 2026

Er what? https://t.co/ZqhoAq4dJk— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) October 6, 2026

The paper calls it an active scientific debate. Dr Topun Austin, a neonatologist at the University of Cambridge, is quoted defining the thing under study: “Consciousness is a process of being receptive to the outside world and mixing that with our own internal world, to create the feeling of who we are and where we are.“

A caption under the piece states that there was a time when our brains were too rudimentary to support consciousness. Zimmer’s own promo line said he had found scientists “on a mission to find out when consciousness begins in babies.”

The reaction online was immediate, and it was not about neuroscience. It was about where the line moves next.

@ModernityNews Ever get the feeling we’re living inside a cautionary tale?

Like we’re all just trapped in a dystopian ’70s sci-fi movie, while Charlton Heston screams about the sanctity of human life? pic.twitter.com/oxA1EaZhXJ— Alpha Of The Betas (@AlphaOfTheBetas) October 6, 2026

“Are Babies Conscious?”

Give this a few more years and they’ll claim consciousness doesn’t begin until the baby is one years old, so abortion should be legal up to that point. pic.twitter.com/hLxMdTzZzC— Arthur in California (@ArthurReturnss) October 5, 2026

@JackPosobiec This is setting to push for post-birth abortion down the line.— Emmanuel Gonzalez (@Emm_Gonzalez38) October 6, 2026

@JackPosobiec They want abortion legality to extend into early childhood— Paul Joseph Tinkle (@PTinkleIndy) October 5, 2026

@JackPosobiec Anyone who has had a child knows that babies are conscious. Only the childless hacks at the NYT are confused.— Andrew McCann (@andymccann) October 5, 2026

All this is going on while we’re debating whether ‘machines can be conscious’, a disturbing irony.

Incredible that we’re debating whether “machines can be conscious” while Democrats still haven’t acknowledged that babies in a mother’s womb have consciousness.— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) October 3, 2026

Of course, there are countless studies that indicate infants, even unborn infants have consciousness as we understand it.

In January, neonatologist Carlo Bellieni of the University of Siena published “A Rudimentary Consciousness Appears in the Late Fetal Period” in EC Gynaecology, reviewing 31 clinical trials from the last decade on fetal anatomy, perception and memory. His conclusion: the early appearance of memory is a sign of rudimental consciousness, and it does not depend on whether the fetus is inside or outside the womb, only on the grade of brain development.

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How Zionists Shape Europe’s Media

One of Europe’s most powerful media moguls has a message for the continent: “We shall all be Zionists.” In May 2026, Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner used those words to close a speech to the World Jewish Congress after declaring, “I am a Zionist.” A month later, his group, which owns Bild, Welt, Politico and Business Insider, completed its acquisition of Telegraph Media Group, expanding its reach further into the British media market.

At Axel Springer, the pro-Israel position has long gone beyond Döpfner’s personal views and is embedded in the media group’s official principles. Elsewhere in Europe’s media landscape, similar narratives are advanced through owners, boards of directors, specialized outlets, journalist outreach and political norms that make the Israeli perspective the default and familiar frame.

Mathias Döpfner’s Media Empire

Mathias Döpfner has been openly pro-Israel for years. In 2021, Axel Springer flew an Israeli flag outside its Berlin headquarters, and when some employees objected, he said anyone troubled by it should “look for a new job,” describing solidarity with Israel as a “German duty.”

In 2021, Döpfner was also pushing into German party politics. Before the Bundestag election, he asked Bild executives whether they could do more for the liberal Free Democratic Party, or FDP, and later urged then-editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt to give the party stronger backing. Bild subsequently denied that its coverage followed instructions from its owner.

In 2023, Die Zeit published internal messages in which Döpfner wrote, “Zionismus über alles. Israel my country,” roughly meaning, “Zionism above all. Israel is my country.” Axel Springer accused the newspaper of taking private messages out of context, but the wording was considerably stronger than conventional support for Israel.

Axel Springer’s corporate rules give that political position an institutional dimension. Its constitution, known as the Springer Essentials, lists Israel’s right to exist among the company’s core principles, while Döpfner has described those values as “non-negotiable” and argued that media companies cannot be neutral and should openly stand for certain principles.

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George Stephanopoulos’s Actress Wife Once Had Some Creepy Parenting Advice

Democrats have spent a lot of time during President Trump’s second term falsely accusing him and Republicans of being “pedophiles” and “pedophile protectors.” That’s all projection, of course, as Democrats have gone to the mattresses time and again for abusers, with Michigan recently removing 20,000 sex offenders from its registry and Tim Walz pardoning an illegal alien who sexually abused a girl to try to protect that monster from deportation.

But every accusation is a confession, and it turns out George Stephanopoulos’s wife, actress Ali Wentworth, was telling parents years ago they should watch pornography with their children, arguing that “you can’t stop them.”

Here’s more:

Ali Wentworth “would” watch porn with her teenage daughters Elliott, 17, and Harper, 15, for a very specific reason.

The “Night Cap” actress shares her two children with her husband, ABC News’ “Good Morning America” co-host, George Stephanopoulos.

“In porn, women have been conditioned to look and act a certain way,” Wentworth, 55, told Debra Messing and Mandana Dayani on the latest “The Dissenters” podcast episode (via Us Weekly).

She added: “They are performing and it’s dangerous to have boys see this as something women want.”

“You can’t stop them, so I would watch it with them,” the “Go Ask Ali” author explained. “I would look at the porn with them that one time, like, ‘They’re performing.’”

Wentworth also said she tries to sneak in lessons with her daughters when they’re scrolling through social media. “I say,  ‘Do you see this girl? There is a hole she is trying to fill,’” the actress recalled.

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Trump’s Big Bluff on Iran

The Trump administration and its supporters – including the Wall Street Journal editorial page – are working overtime these days to spin the news around the Iran war to make it appear that the US is winning and Tehran had better submit to Washington’s demands before it is wrecked, maybe even “annihilated.” Indeed, Trump is preparing the option of bringing the military hammer down on Iran after the midterm elections if Tehran has not surrendered by then.

In effect, Trump and his supporters are waging a “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran in the mainstream media.

This campaign is sure to fail. If anything, it reflects the Trump administration’s desperation. The president started a war the United States was bound to lose, and there is little he can do now to change that basic fact.

Trump’s propaganda campaign has two dimensions – one economic and the other military.

First, the administration argues that Iran is being economically strangled by the US naval blockade coupled with Operation Economic Outcast, the strategy announced by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on 24 August 2026. At the same time, it maintains that oil is once again flowing out of the Gulf at rates not far below those that prevailed on 27 February 2026. The implications are obvious: the economic punishment being inflicted on Iran will force it to capitulate soon, while the US economy – and the international community more generally – is well on its way to recovery.

Second, the US is now building up its military forces for a massive military strike after the mid-term elections, when Trump will be free of electoral constraints. This growing threat of a devastating US attack, coupled with the economic pain being inflicted on Iran, is designed to get Tehran to quit now, before its situation becomes even worse.

There are huge problems with this strategy. It sounds persuasive when the mainstream media dutifully purveys it, but it falls apart when one looks closely at what is actually happening.

Consider the military dimension. The headlines say the US is sending 10,000 additional troops and a third aircraft carrier – the USS Theodore Roosevelt – to the Persian Gulf region, creating the impression that Iran will soon be confronting three American carriers. Moreover, the additional troops – on top of the roughly 50,000 US troops already in the region – are portrayed as evidence that Trump is seriously considering putting boots on the ground.

The aircraft carrier story, however, is quite different from what the headlines suggest. The Roosevelt is reportedly being sent to replace the USS George Washington, while the supposed third carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush, has already left the Middle East and is now in Thailand. Thus, there is presently only one carrier in the region. Indeed, this is the first time during the war that the US has only one carrier in the Middle East, and it is difficult to imagine that there will be more than two – if even that many – after the midterm elections.

The larger problem is that the Iran war is severely straining the US Navy. Its senior leaders warn that the current operational tempo is not sustainable indefinitely. Carriers and other warships are being rotated through extremely long deployments, which cause significant maintenance and readiness problems that will have to be addressed at some point. This problem is compounded by the fact that US ships have lost access to nearby logistics facilities and increasingly depend on a supply chain that reaches back to Diego Garcia, which is about 2,500 miles from the Persian Gulf.

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Joe Biden Shuffles Next to Jay Leno as He Shows Off His Gas-Guzzling 1967 Corvette at Car Show

Joe Biden brought his gas-guzzling 1967 Corvette Stingray to a Newport, Rhode Island, car show with Jay Leno.

This is the same Corvette that Joe Biden almost lost to a house fire, even though the small blaze was contained to the kitchen.

Joe Biden was in Rhode Island for the Audrain Auto Museum’s Concours D’ Elegance at Fort Adams State Park.

Biden enjoys his gas-powered Corvette after he forced American car companies to produce more electric vehicles that nobody wants.

The last time Joe Biden took his Corvette for a spin with Jay Leno, he bragged about shutting down American oil production.

“I made sure there could be no oil drilling off the East Coast, the West Coast, and 150 miles off the Gulf of Mexico,” Biden boasted as he raced down the road in his Corvette with Jay Leno.

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Corporate Media Don’t Understand the Houthis—and Don’t Want You to, Either

It’s that time of year again: The Houthis are making the news—and so is the Western corporate media narrative that surrounds them.

The Houthis—formally Ansar Allah, “Supporters of God”—are from the Zaydi Shia minority in Yemen, and have governed the most populous sections of the country, including the capital Sanaa, since the start of Yemen’s civil war in 2014.

Like many a “civil” war, the conflict has plenty of outside participants—most notably Saudi Arabia, which led a coalition of Arab states (with the backing of the United States) in an effort to bomb and starve Yemen away from Houthi control.

In 2022, a tenuous truce took hold between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, but the Saudi blockade of the country was never lifted.

This July, the Houthis declared their own naval blockade of Saudi Arabia, in response to the Saudi siege and resumed bombing of Yemen. In a rapid September offensive, the group completed its takeover of Yemen’s Red Sea Coast and the strategic Bab al-Mandeb strait, putting Saudi oil shipping operations in a decisive bind. The Houthis have also launched missiles at Saudi Arabia in response to Saudi attacks on the country.

The offensive has prompted a slew of media interventions to ostensibly explain to everyone who the Houthis are. The New York Times (9/23/26), for instance, ran the headline “Who Are the Houthis, and What Do They Want?”; the BBC (9/24/26) ran the very same title, minus the comma.

The Washington Post (9/15/26) asked: “Who Are the Houthis, the Iran-Backed Rebels Threatening a Key Maritime Passage?” Its headline characterization revealed what corporate media see as the primary thing anyone needs to know about the Houthis: that they are simply proxies of Iran, the West’s current favorite enemy.

In a typical example, a recent CNN dispatch (9/21/26) identified the Houthis as “Iran-backed” in both the headline and the first sentence, with a reference to “Tehran’s proxies” appearing further down.

For its part, an Associated Press exclusive (9/23/26) on how “Iranian Advisers Helped Houthis Seize Yemen’s Red Sea Coast in Less Than 48 Hours” sounded the alarm that “Iranian Revolutionary Guard advisers were in the field helping direct the battle,” in a show of “how Iran has built the Houthis into a major regional partner able to open a new front in the wider war with the US.”

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REALLY? MSNOW Guest Suggests the Second Amendment Was About ‘Slave Patrols’

Left wing author Malcolm Gladwell recently appeared on MSNOW’s ‘Morning Joe’ and suggested that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees American citizens the right to bear arms, was really written about slave patrols.

He spends much of the segment complaining about the Supreme Court, which he says has been ‘a significant impediment’ in the left’s pursuit of gun control.

The most amazing thing is that what he is saying here is treated as completely normal by the hosts, who do not interrupt or correct him in any way.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

MIKE BARNICLE, MS NOW CONTRIBUTOR: What do you say about a culture, American culture, that when a disease is identified and it’s threatening and it’s killing people, you can talk about from the inception of polio vaccines through AIDS, we — we react, we find — we find a cure almost immediately. People feel relieved. Guns have been killing Americans on the streets for decades — decades. And there’s nothing we can do.

GLADWELL: Yeah. I mean, here I have two chapters in the book on the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court has been a significant impediment here. They have — the last two major gun rulings — in the Bruen case and the Heller case — are abominations. And I had — I actually have fun with them because in both of those cases, the court plays historian and plays linguist, because in the Heller case, of course, Scalia famously.

And the — and the fellow justices try to make sense of the grammatical convolution that is the Second Amendment, which, if you read, makes — no one would ever write that sentence today. It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s commas everywhere. There’s this weird initial what’s called an initial being clause. Does it modify the main clause? And all of these linguists lined up and told the court, “Okay, here’s how people in the 18th century used an initial being clause — here’s how James Madison used that clause. Here’s what James Madison meant.” What he meant was, we’re talking about militias here, and by militias he meant slave patrols, right? And the court had no interest.

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25 Years After 9/11, NYT Continues to Rationalize Catastrophic Wars

The 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, occasioned retrospectives on both the attacks carried out against the US that day and on the wars that the US prosecuted in their aftermath.Ft In its editorial remembrance, the New York Times (9/11/26)—which played a critical role in dampening skepticism of the “Global War on Terror”—rationalized the cataclysmic violence the US unleashed after 9/11, and assigned greater value to American lives over those of other people.

Under the headline “How a Heroic Response Went Awry,” the editorial board asserted:

The war against the Taliban and the Qaeda forces there was a justified and necessary response to the attacks. Within months, the US military destroyed Al Qaeda’s camps (even if killing Osama bin Laden would take nearly a decade) and drove the Taliban from power.

To say that a policy is “necessary” is to say that there is no alternative. But there was an alternative—namely, reaching an agreement with the Taliban for bin Laden to be extradited from Afghanistan, a possibility that existed before and immediately after 9/11.

The US, however, did not pursue this option as seriously as it could have. As the Washington Post reported on October 29, 2001:

Over three years and on as many continents, US officials met in public and secret at least 20 times with Taliban representatives to discuss ways the regime could bring suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden to justice.

Talks continued until just days before the September 11 attacks, and Taliban representatives repeatedly suggested they would hand over bin Laden if their conditions were met, sources close to the discussions said.

Throughout the years, however, State Department officials refused to soften their demand that bin Laden face trial in the US justice system.

A CIA administrator was quoted in the report: “I have no doubts [the Taliban] wanted to get rid of [bin Laden]. He was a pain in the neck.”

In addition, a former head of Saudi intelligence said that, in 1998, the Taliban agreed to hand over bin Laden to Saudi Arabia, a close US ally; the source said that the Taliban changed course after the US fired cruise missiles at an apparent bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, following attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania attributed to Al Qaeda (LA Times, 11/4/01).

Then, just a week after the US invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban offered to discuss handing over bin Laden if the US stopped bombing Afghanistan and provided evidence that bin Laden was involved in 9/11 (Guardian, 10/14/01).

In other words, far from being “necessary,” the Afghan War was a choice the US made when diplomacy appeared to be a viable option. And we now know that those 20 years of war had disastrous effects on Afghans (Jacobin, 9/11/21; Al Jazeera, 9/11/21), and resulted in the Taliban returning to power.

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