Tag: media

CNN Drops a Bombshell: The Shutdown Is Backfiring on the Democrats Big Time

The Schumer Shutdown has taken a surprising turn that should have Democrats in a panic. CNN has analyzed the polling data, and situation looks really bad for the Democrats. It turns out the Republican Party is actually gaining ground with voters during the shutdown, creating a nightmare scenario for Chuck Schumer and his caucus. The numbers tell a remarkable story of political miscalculation by Democrats, who seem to have badly misread the public mood.

When CNN’s John Berman asked data analyst Harry Enten about how the shutdown has affected Republican political standing, he didn’t sugarcoat it for the left. “You might think, given that the Republicans are in charge of both the House and the Senate, that a government shutdown might actually hurt the Republican brand. But, in fact, it hasn’t. If anything, it’s been helped a little bit,” Enten explained. He pointed to the hard data showing the Republican Party’s overall brand up two points. Meanwhile, the net approval ratings for Republicans in Congress have jumped five points since before the shutdown began.

Democrats were really counting on the “Republicans control the House, Senate, and White House” talking point to work… but it clearly hasn’t. And the implications are staggering for Senate Democrats, who have now blocked Republican attempts to reopen the government 13 times. Rather than inflicting political damage on the GOP, Schumer’s obstruction strategy appears to be backfiring spectacularly. Enten drove home the point, noting what Republican leaders John Thune and Mike Johnson must be thinking: “Why should we give, electorally speaking, when our brand has actually improved a little bit?”

Even more problematic for Democrats is where Republicans are gaining support. The shutdown isn’t just rallying the GOP base, as one might expect during partisan battles. “Change in the Republican Congress’ net approval rating versus pre-shutdown. It’s rallying the base for sure. Look at this, the net approval rating up 12 points versus pre-shutdown,” Enten observed. But then came the real kicker: “But it’s not just with the base. It’s also with the middle of the electorate. Look at this. Among independents, it’s up eight points as well.”

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Washington Post: Some Democrats Now ‘Growing Anxious’ About What a Zohran Mamdani Victory Will Mean for Their Party

A new report from the Washington Post claims that some Democrats are getting nervous about what a win for Zohran Mamdani in New York City would mean for their party in the long term. They are not alone.

Even Bill Maher expressed concerns about this on his show last Friday night.

The Democratic Socialist (communist) candidate has very little experience and has promised the moon and more to his loyal supporters. Rank and file Democrats, who have fought the ‘socialist’ label for years, now realize that there will be no escape from that in the future if Mamdani wins and becomes the face of the party.

The Washington Post piece is behind a paywall, but FOX News has some details:

‘Democrats are nervous’ about potential Zohran Mamdani victory, new report warns

A report from The Washington Post Tuesday warned that “Democrats are nervous” about New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, as the 34-year-old democratic socialist’s momentum continues ahead of the election.

“In New York, Zohran Mamdani is on the verge of taking democratic socialism to new heights if he wins election as mayor of the nation’s most populous city,” wrote The Post’s Sabrina Rodriguez. “Outside New York, some Democrats are growing anxious.”

The headline read, “A democratic socialist is poised to become New York mayor. Democrats are nervous.”

The report contains quotes from numerous Democrats expressing their concerns over what Mamdani’s potential win could mean for the Democratic Party’s image and how it could reinforce Republicans’ claims that Democrats aim to usher in socialism.

“It’s one thing for Republicans to use absurd attacks calling Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi socialists to scare voters,” Fernand Amandi, a longtime Democratic strategist, told The Post. “It’s another thing to use an actual socialist to scare voters about the Democrats being the party of socialists, and that’s the concern about Mamdani.”

Mamdani was recently caught in a lie about a family member who was supposedly afraid to ride the NYC subway after 9/11 because of Islamophobia.

He has also worked very hard to erase his own anti-police record, but keeps getting tripped up on that as well.

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Seattle’s socialist mayoral candidate wants leftist media outlets to be state-funded

Seattle’s socialist mayoral candidate Katie Wilson, who has been nicknamed the “Mini Mamdani,” has raised concerns among critics about conflicts of interest and government overreach, this time over her plan to tax residents to subsidize media outlets that support her campaign and employ her.

In a recent interview on the Mostly Economics podcast, Wilson promoted a proposal she calls “News Notes”: a taxpayer-funded voucher program that would give every Seattle resident $100 to donate to local media outlets, to save failing outlets from the free market. To pay for it, she floated new property taxes, a capital gains tax, or a digital ad tax.

But the outlets she specifically named as beneficiaries, The Urbanist, Publicola, and South Seattle Emerald, are the same ones that routinely promote her political agenda. Many of them have endorsed her. Some have even paid her.

Wilson lists income from The Stranger, The Urbanist, and Publicola in her PDC filings, each below $30,000 annually, while all three also endorse her for mayor. These aren’t neutral newspapers. They’re progressive advocacy media that cheerlead for every new tax, anti-police measure, and socialist policy put forward in Seattle.

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Trump-Appointee Paul Ingrassia SLAPS Politico with $150 Million Defamation Lawsuit After ‘Fake News’ Smear Campaign – Attorney Calls Case One of the Most Substantial Threats to Western Civilization – the Far Left’s Weaponization of Journalism

Paul J. Ingrassia, President Trump’s former liaison for the Department of Homeland Security and a Gateway Pundit contributor, has launched a massive $150 million defamation lawsuit against Politico and its reporter Daniel Lippman.

This comes just days after Ingrassia was forced to withdraw his nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel due to a vicious witch hunt orchestrated by far-left outlets desperate to derail President Trump’s agenda to drain the swamp.

Ingrassia announced the lawsuit Monday night on X:

“ANNOUNCEMENT: I have just filed a $150,000,000 defamation lawsuit against Politico and Daniel Lippman. Very proud of all the hard work done by my absolutely incredible legal team – the Truth will finally come out, and Justice will be served!”

The suit, filed in Virginia and confirmed by his counsel Edward Andrew Paltzik of Taylor Dykema PLLC, targets Politico’s October 9 article by Lippman titled “Key Trump nominee accused of sexual harassment.”

According to the statement from Paltzik, the allegations are “categorically false,” stressing that “Paul has never sexually harassed anyone—full stop.”

Paltzik called the legal action “a landmark, powerful, and necessary” step, adding that the past two weeks had been “extraordinarily difficult for Paul and his family,” yet he has maintained “incredible composure under fire.”

Attorney Paltzik told The Gateway Pundit,

“Paul Ingrassia’s case is about one of the most substantial threats to the future of Western Civilization and to our one-of-a-kind Republic in particular: the Far Left’s weaponization of journalism. We can no longer afford to sit back and just hope against hope that the situation will improve. Only by fighting back in the courts against this weaponization, which is exactly what Mr. Ingrassia is courageously doing, will prevail against this scourge.”

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GASLIGHTING: MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace Claims No Democrats Have Compared Trump to Hitler

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace looked into a camera today, and with a straight face, claimed that no Democrats have compared President Trump to Hitler.

Not only have they compared Trump to Hitler repeatedly, they’ve done it on Wallace’s own show.

This is the type of obvious gaslighting and outright lying that has caused millions of Americans to lose trust in the media. Everyone knows this is a lie, yet she just tells viewers not to believe their own eyes and ears.

The Wrap reports:

JB Pritzker insisted that he has never compared Donald Trump to Hitler – one week after he compared the United States’ use of ICE and border patrol agents to Nazi Germany.

“I haven’t suggested that Donald Trump is Hitler,” the Illinois Governor said while talking with Nicolle Wallace on “The Best People” podcast.

Wallace chimed in: “I don’t think any Democrat has. I think it’s a smear that they project back onto critics. JD Vance called Donald Trump cultural heroin, he called him America’s Hitler. The attacks on Donald Trump as a fascist came from three-star generals who worked for him.”

Just last week, while speaking at The Economic Club of Chicago, Pritzker drew parallels between Trump’s leveraging of ICE and the border patrol against illegal immigrants to the Nazi’s attacks on Jews.

“This is how authoritarian regimes do it,” Pritzker said. “They create these kind of fake ideas that there’s an enemy out there and it could be sitting next to you at one of these tables. So just somebody sitting at your table that you don’t like might be one of those enemies. So let’s round them up, let’s make sure they are the subjects of the laws that we’re passing, because we don’t like who they are. That is what authoritarian regimes do.”

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Election Interference Litigation: Trump’s Case Against the Des Moines Register and Pollster Moves Forward

Back in 2018, I launched a podcast very loosely tied to what I’ve done for a living for many years, and so I called it “Shaping Opinion.” The very first topic I sought to cover was how political polls are used to shape public opinion and influence the vote. 

Needless to say, I didn’t get any takers who were willing to put themselves out there on this issue, and not just in that first year. This has always been one of those topics I’ve been ready to seize on if any new studies or indisputable proof would come up that would give me a chance to dig in. But no matter who I approached, people got awful shy on this one, especially after the presidential race of 2020. 

Of course, this is one of those topics where you can trust your own eyes and ears, and your powers of observation over time. In every presidential election cycle, Democrats are over-sampled and Republicans are not. Pollsters say there are reasons for this, but they never tell the full truth. 

You can count on public polls telling you early and often that the Democrat candidate is dominating. At some point around the conventions, polls will say each candidate saw a “post-convention bounce,” but the Republican candidate’s bump is always temporary and fleeting. The Democrat candidate’s bounce is always framed as the start of the home-stretch run where he or she is a likely winner. 

This is to condition the voters into assuming the Democrat will win. Social psychologists often say that most people like a winner, so for many, once they have a sense from the polls who the likely winner will be, that’s who they decide to vote for. 

Anyone with common sense who has seen this pattern over at least three election cycles can detect for themselves that polls are commonly used to shape opinion, not reflect it. 

So last year, when a well-respected pollster from Iowa named J. Ann Selzer published her final numbers for “The Iowa Poll” three days before election day, many of us were extremely curious. She released what was the final Des Moines Register presidential election poll, which had Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by three points. 

Fox News called this a “shock poll” that “showed a seven-point shift from Trump to Harris from September, when he had a four-point lead over the vice president in the same poll.” 

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WSJ: Trump Offered to Build White House Ballroom for Obama in 2010

President Donald Trump offered to build a White House ballroom for President Barack Obama in 2010 — but the Obama administration never took up his offer, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The Journal reported:

For at least 15 years, Trump had tried and failed to build a grand ballroom at the White House that could host extravagant dinners for world leaders, lawmakers and celebrities. In early 2010, President Barack Obama’s top strategist David Axelrod got a call from Trump, then a real-estate developer and reality television star. They were connected via MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, who had closer ties with Trump at the time.

“He said, ‘You have these state dinners in sh—y little tents,” Axelrod recalled in an interview. “He said, ‘I build ballrooms. I build the most beautiful ballrooms in the world. You can come to Florida and see for yourself.’ ”

Trump offered to build a modular ballroom at the White House that could be deconstructed. “I was thinking, we’re in the middle of a recession, I’m not sure about this,” Axelrod said. Axelrod suggested that Trump get in touch with Obama’s social secretary about the ballroom. They didn’t connect.

The Journal noted that Trump had approached the ballroom the way he had approached other building projects in the past — discovering how to control the regulatory process, or finding loopholes, to allow construction.

The ballroom is being built with funding from private donors, with costs reaching an estimated $350 million.

The Washington Post editorial page defended Trump’s ballroom project, noting that even Obama and Biden administration alimni had admitted the need for an indoor space — as opposed to the current arrangement, which forces esteemed guests to walk across the grass and to use portable toilets outdoors at large gatherings.

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‘Science Is on Our Side’: Critics Fire Back at AP Report on ‘Wave of Anti-Science Bills’

The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement and allied organizations are supporting “a wave of anti-science bills” in state legislatures across the U.S. — and some of the organizations may be profiting from their MAHA advocacy, The Associated Press reported.

During the current legislative session, lawmakers have introduced more than 420 bills that “strip away public health protections,” including measures that target vaccines, milk safety and fluoride, according to the AP’s four reports, published Monday.

The bills, which the AP said stem from “conspiracy-driven ideas,” are supported by Trump administration officials, including U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom the AP accused of “elevating anti-science ideas nationally.”

Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), told The Defender that the AP’s characterization of these bills as “anti-science” is irresponsible. She said:

“AP irresponsibly characterizes anything that does not track the ‘scientific consensus’ as ‘anti-science.’ Science only develops by challenging consensus and dogma and marshalling empirical evidence to support the claims.

“AP parrots corporate science as if it were true, without checking or comparing the evidence of new claims against those of the so-called consensus. AP has devolved into pure propaganda.”

The AP said several organizations “connected to Kennedy,” including CHD, support these state-level legislative efforts. State legislatures have enacted or adopted about 30 of the bills in 12 states.

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Trump Fights Back — Seeks to Proceed with $10 BILLION Lawsuit Against Wall Street Journal Over Epstein ‘Birthday Book’ Hit Piece

President Donald J. Trump is fighting to move forward with his massive $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, and News Corp, accusing them of launching a “deliberate smear campaign” intended to destroy his reputation.

According to ABC News, Trump’s legal team filed a motion late Monday night urging a Florida federal judge to deny the Journal’s request for dismissal, arguing that the outlet’s July article, which tied Trump to a bawdy letter allegedly penned in Jeffrey Epstein’s so-called “birthday book,” was “malicious, defamatory, and politically motivated.”

In their latest filing, Trump’s attorneys blasted the Journal:

“Defendants did not publish the article on the front page of The Wall Street Journal based on a mere harmless joke between friends. Indeed, such an assertion strains credulity beyond repair. The article, and the surrounding media around it, were all a deliberate smear campaign designed to damage President Trump’s reputation.”

Trump’s lawyers are now pushing for oral arguments to expose a coordinated media effort to smear the president.

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‘Gapazoid’ The Suicidal Pedo Who Rushed Wikipedia Conference Stage With Gun Was Ex-Editor

A gunman who rushed the stage at the Wikipedia WikiConference in New York City last week was a suicidal pedophile who was going to kill himself in protest of the propaganda website’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy when it comes to adults who fantasize about sex with children. 

Connor Weston, 27, allegedly rushed the stage, pointed a loaded revolver at his head, and declared “I’m a non-contact pedophile. I want to kill myself.” 

Of note, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said in leaked e-mails that there would be a secret prohibition on self-identifying pedophiles that he made official policy in 2010. Under these rules, editors identifying as pedos are banned indefinitely. Weston posted under the name ‘Gapazoid,’ according to a statement. 

The gunman stepped on stage next to Maryanna Iskander, the Chief Executive Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation that owns Wikipedia, during her keynote address and announced that he was an “anti-contact no-offending” pedophile who was planning to kill himself in protest of the site’s child protection policy.

He described the child protection policy as a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, a term used by site co-founder Jimmy Wales in leaked e-mails to describe a secret prohibition on self-identifying pedophiles that Wales officially made public policy in 2010. Under current policy, editors identifying as pedophiles are banned indefinitely. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” references a policy previously in place in the U.S. military regarding homosexuality prior to allowing homosexual individuals to serve openly. –Breitbart

Weston was eventually subdued by two volunteer security members at the conference (wut?) – Richard Knipel and Andrew Lih, site admins who edit as “Pharos” and “Fuzheado” respectively. One day later, Arbitration Committee member “ScottishFinnishRadish” (SFR) published revealed that Weston was behind the Gapazoid account, and that they had implemented a global ban after SFR banned his account on the English Wikipedia site in February. 

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