Tag: media

MSNBC’s Wallace: GOPers ‘Must Assert the Truth’ Before They Can ‘Share Any other Views’

During an interview with former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes on MSNBC’s Inauguration coverage on Wednesday, host Nicolle Wallace discussed the dangers of “echo chambers” and said that it would be her policy “that a Republican must assert the truth before they’re allowed to share any other views.” And that if we can guard against counterfeit currency, “we should be able to protect against fake news that we now know has the potential to kill people, as it did two weeks ago.”

Wallace asked Rhodes about “the extraordinary damage that this culture of disinformation and echo chambers that repeat the lies have done and how this new team is poised to take that on.”

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Media Cheers DC Under Military Occupation

Question: does anyone with a media job find this situation to be worthy of some further inquiry? Or in other words, worthy of questioning the premise of why such an extravagantly intensive military presence is allegedly necessary? Is it proportionate to the scale of the purported threat? Has the nature of the threat itself — whatever that might be, exactly — been adequately probed to determine whether it is grounded in reality? Already a bunch of purported threats initially trumpeted across the media with the usual five-alarm-five hysteria have dissipated in short order, so there is perhaps some reason for doubt in that regard.

Instead of applying a modicum of skepticism to this gigantic show of military force, much of which appears to be “security theater” in its purest form, our vaunted media is doing little other than cheering it on. And of course, inflating the threats being cited as justification for it. They can repeat over and over again that what occurred on January 6 at the Capitol was an “attempted coup,” and therefore everything and anything is justified to retaliate, but everyone with a brain by now should be able to recognize that the government was never at a greater than 0% risk of being overthrown that day. Fear-inducing terms like “insurrection,” “domestic terrorism,” “seditious conspiracy,” “armed rebellion,” and others have been marshaled intentionally to inure the public to extreme actions such as the swiftly-executed corporate censorship purge and now, the transformation of the country’s capital into a military fortress.

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Just The Daily Beast casually floating the idea of forming a secret police agency to monitor, “infiltrate and neutralize” American citizens.

And this terrifying suggestion was submitted by the The Daily Beast.

Democrats in Congress are teeing up another round of investigations and commissions to get to the bottom of the January 6 insurrection, which will almost certainly revisit the thorny question of whether the U.S. needs an independent counter-subversion agency to infiltrate and neutralize armed domestic extremists, who are now threatening more attacks on or around the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

“Thorny question.”

He’s talking about the creation of an independent agency to spy on and neutralize(!?) U.S. citizens. Yeah, THORNY.

That’s one heck of a suggestion, guy.

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A message to anyone who feels like ‘Winston’ in Orwell’s 1984

“The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering . . . all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting– three hundred million people all with the same face.”

That was a quote from George Orwell’s seminal work 1984— a masterpiece that describes life in a totalitarian state that demands blind obedience.

The ‘Party’ controlled everything– the economy, daily life, and even the truth. In Orwell’s 1984, “the heresy of heresies was common sense.”

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.”

“And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

If you were ever caught committing a thoughtcrime— dissenting from the Party for even an instant– then “your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten.”

Now, our world obviously hasn’t become quite as extreme as Orwell’s dystopian vision. But Big Tech, Big Media, and Big Government certainly seem to be giving it their best effort.

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Media Mistakes in the Trump Era: The Definitive List

We the media have “fact-checked” President Trump like we have fact-checked no other human being on the planet, and he’s certainly given us plenty to write about. That’s probably why it’s so easy to find lists enumerating and examining his mistakes, missteps and “lies.” But as self-appointed arbiters of truth, we’ve largely excused our own unprecedented string of fact-challenged reporting. The truth is, formerly well-respected, top news organizations are making repeat, unforced errors in numbers that were unheard of just a couple of years ago. Our repeat mistakes involve declaring that Trump’s claims are “lies” when they are matters of opinion, or when the truth between conflicting sources is unknowable; taking Trump’s statements and events out of context; reporting secondhand accounts against Trump without attribution as if they’re established fact; relying on untruthful, conflicted sources; and presenting reporter opinions in news stories,without labeling them as opinions.

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Let’s Look at a Worst Case Scenario – ‘Black Pill’ Edition

I want to fight. I want to be positive. But every once in a while I swallow the dreaded “Black Pill” (the belief that all is lost and there’s really no sense in moving on). What I’m about to write may sound as if I have swallowed the whole bottle, but I need to present a commentary on what I’ve been seeing for the past 10 months, and especially the last eight days.

The terms “insurrection,” “sedition,” and “treason” are being shouted by politicians and the corporate press (CP) like a 4-year-old the first time they discover the “F-word.” And their main target has been Donald Trump. If those terms were being associated with just the president, it would have most likely elicited a response from me. However, that’s not the point of this missive. Although the House voted to impeach Trump, the CP, and certain politicians, are not stopping at punishing only him, they are attempting to connect Trump’s most ardent supporters with voting for, and supporting, one they claim is guilty of treason. The way I interpret this is, the CP is saying voters and Trump factions have given “support” to an enemy of the State in order to punish them as well. The CP is asking regular people to identify anyone they can who was at, in or near the Capitol on 1/6/2021 and the arrests have started. Why would this concern me?

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