Tag: trump derangement syndrome

Atlantic Op-ed: Democrats Will Riot If They Lose, Therefore Republicans Should Let Joe Biden Win

The Atlantic has published an op-ed that argues that “law-and-order” Republicans should vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden because Democrats will riot if he loses, refusing to accept the results if President Donald Trump wins re-election.

In an essay titled, “The Democrats May Not Be Able to Concede,” Shadi Hamid writes:

A loss by Joe Biden under these circumstances is the worst case not because Trump will destroy America (he can’t), but because it is the outcome most likely to undermine faith in democracy, resulting in more of the social unrest and street battles that cities including Portland, Oregon, and Seattle have seen in recent months. For this reason, strictly law-and-order Republicans who have responded in dismay to scenes of rioting and looting have an interest in Biden winning—even if they could never bring themselves to vote for him.

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Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using “Confirmed” to Mean its Opposite

IT SEEMS THE SAME MISLEADING TACTIC is now driving the supremely dumb but all-consuming news cycle centered on whether President Trump, as first reported by the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, made disparaging comments about The Troops. Goldberg claims that “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day” — whom the magazine refuses to name because they fear “angry tweets” — told him that Trump made these comments. Trump, as well as former aides who were present that day (including Sarah Huckabee Sanders and John Bolton), deny that the report is accurate.

So we have anonymous sources making claims on one side, and Trump and former aides (including Bolton, now a harsh Trump critic) insisting that the story is inaccurate. Beyond deciding whether or not to believe Goldberg’s story based on what best advances one’s political interests, how can one resolve the factual dispute? If other media outlets could confirm the original claims from Goldberg, that would obviously be a significant advancement of the story.

Other media outlets — including Associated Press and Fox News — now claim that they did exactly that: “confirmed” the Atlantic story. But if one looks at what they actually did, at what this “confirmation” consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense. AP, for instance, merely claims that “a senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” while Fox merely said “a former senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.”

In other words, all that likely happened is that the same sources who claimed to Jeffrey Goldberg, with no evidence, that Trump said this went to other outlets and repeated the same claims — the same tactic that enabled MSNBC and CBS to claim they had “confirmed” the fundamentally false CNN story about Trump Jr. receiving advanced access to the WikiLeaks archive. Or perhaps it was different sources aligned with those original sources and sharing their agenda who repeated these claims. Given that none of the sources making these claims have the courage to identify themselves, due to their fear of mean tweets, it is impossible to know.

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20,000 Member Strong Facebook Group Supports Cannon Hinnant’s Alleged Killer

A Facebook group with 20,000 members who support the alleged killer of 5-year-old Cannon Hinnant is going viral both due to its size and the controversial opinions held by group members.

Darius Sessoms, 25, is alleged to have murdered Cannon Hinnant, 5, after shooting him in the head at point blank range when Hinnant rode his bike on Sessoms’ front yard. The incident became an international story as alternative media led the charge, while some mainstream media outlets completely sidestepped a brutal alleged murder that fails to fit their narrative.

The “Justice for Darius Sessoms” Facebook Group still prevails after accumulating a quick five-figure membership number.

The group’s opening statement read: “Darius Sessoms has been accused of a heinous act that he didn’t commit. This is all propaganda from the far-right Trump propaganda machine to make black people look bad.

“We cannot sit idly by while our president plays fast and loose with the laws. That’s why we need to back Darius against these outrageous allegations.”

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Voters condemn Trump for racist comments — then learn Biden actually made those comments

Voters who spoke recently to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Matt Miller were adamant: President Donald Trump’s alleged racism is reason enough why he should not win re-election in November.

But they refused to apply that same standard to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden when confronted with the former vice president’s history of racist comments.

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Evening News 150 Times More Negative Of Trump Than Biden

As every press conference indicates, the mainstream media and President Trump have a rancorous relationship, but how deep does the press’ antipathy go? A recent study says lopsided coverage of the two presidential candidates is pervasive among all major media outlets.

According to the conservative Media Research Center, which tracks media bias, evening newscasts, which are some of the highest-rated programs on television today, have given President Trump 150 times more negative coverage than Joe Biden throughout this presidential campaign so far.

“From June 1 through July 31, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts focused 512 minutes of airtime on the President, or nine times more than the 58 minutes allotted to Biden,” reported Newsbusters. “This is an even wider gap than the spring when Trump received seven times more coverage than Biden (523 minutes vs. 75 minutes).”

“During these two months, our analysts documented 668 evaluative statements about the President, 95% of which (634) were negative, vs. a mere five% (34) that were positive,” the report continued. “Using the same methodology (fully described at the end of this article), we found very few evaluative statements about Joe Biden — just a dozen, two-thirds of which (67%) were positive.”

In those same two months, virtually every negative story about Biden — from Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations to his sharp leftward shift, to his apparent racial gaffes — was all swept under the rug or dramatically under-reported, even as the newscasts continued to negatively cover President Trump. The former vice president’s own policy platform, which includes massive expansions of government health care, education, and environmental programs, received just “a meager 5 minutes, 22 seconds of airtime, not one second of which included any critical analysis from any journalist.”

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CNN Claims, Without Evidence, Trump ‘Promoted’ Kamala Harris Birther Theory

CNN claimed on Sunday that President Donald Trump had “promote[d]” the “birther lie” that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) might be ineligible for the vice presidency because her parents may not have been citizens when she was born in Oakland, California, in 1964….

The president said he knew “nothing about it,” and went even further, saying that it was something he would not be “pursuing.” CNN spun that by reporting that the president “did not dismiss the conspiracy theories as false.”

Thus far, it would appear to be the media, and not Trump, promoting the Kamala Harris “birther” theory. The theory first appeared in an op-ed by professor John Eastman in Newsweek, for which the publication issued an apology on Saturday.

Other media outlets have made similar false claims about Trump promoting or “encourag[ing]” the idea that Harris is ineligible — and they have contrasted that supposed claim to Joe Biden’s supposedly more responsible leadership…

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