Saturday, February 6, 2021

Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been, a Dangerous White Supremacist?

Recent antics at USA Today, The New York Times, and other legacy-media outlets illustrate just how unhinged the mainstream press has become. But if you’ve been paying attention over the past several years, you know that this is nothing new, and that the woke insanity these outlets peddle is merely a symptom of a larger cultural shift that’s now coming into full bloom with the left’s capture of the White House.

Did you know, for example, that Bernie Sanders’ mittens are an example of “white privilege”? Or that clapping for a recently deceased 100-year-old World War II veteran is an example of “white British nationalism”? That using merit as a school admissions standard is “racist” and that schools in general are committing “spirit murder” against black kids? Even acronyms are racist. Everything is racist!

Welcome to woke American culture. And we’re just two weeks into the Biden administration.

Let’s circle back to how things are going in the media, which, with allies in the highest levels of government, no longer has any reason to hold back on how truly deranged it is.

Consider, for example, Tom Brady. On the eve of his 10th Super Bowl appearance, USA Today is concerned that the star quarterback won’t publicly renounce his friendship with Donald Trump, and that his choosing to decline to talk politics instead of sports is some kind of “white privilege.” Columnist Nancy Armour, invoking the “systemic racism” dog whistle, informs us that athletes with different pigmentations can’t be as dismissive of politics as Brady can, because they’d supposedly find themselves in hot water for expressing support of a political figure. A laughable claim, of course, considering how every major North American sports league has practically demanded support for Black Lives Matter. (Likewise, USA Today, like most major media outlets, now capitalizes “Black” while keeping “white” lowercase, but yes, favoritism toward whites is just so plainly obvious everywhere you go.)

The answer to this alleged imbalance, of course, is not to promote tolerance for diverse points of view but to demand that Brady “walk back his comments” after offering his generally supportive thoughts on candidate Trump five years ago, when a MAGA cap was spotted in his locker. But because Nancy Armour has decided that a scuffle at the Capitol was “a deadly insurrection” by people “who attempted a violent overthrow of our government,” and that those folks were “incited by Trump,” then you must renounce your support of Trump or face the wrath of the Woke. To not do so is “moral cowardice.”

Do you now support, or have you ever supported, Donald J. Trump?

This nonsense follows yet another instance of “fact-checking” from USA Today that again reveals that the point of these “fact-checks” is not to tamp down “misinformation” but to control the narrative. It seems USA Today recently flagged an article from Not the Bee, an offshoot of parody website The Babylon Bee. The piece stated that Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco was considering changing its name — something that actually is under consideration — because Old Abe “did not show that black lives ever mattered to him.” USA Today fact-checked the article not because it wasn’t true but because the decision to rename the school hasn’t been finalized, which obviously was not the point of the article. Nothing stated in the article was untrue.

Facebook did the same thing to me on numerous occasions. I shared the CDC’s own numbers suggesting that the COVID survival rate for healthy people under 70 ranged from 99.5% to 99.997% and that around 85% of those who caught the virus were mask-wearers. Again, this is data extrapolated from the CDC’s own numbers. Facebook flagged them as “false or misleading.” It outright refused to let me post a link to an article to a Danish mask study showing no statistical difference in infection rates between those who masked and those who didn’t. The same thing happens if you post data showing that lockdowns have no net benefit, in that they have no real effect on viral spread and in fact tend to make economic and social situations worse.

Again, none of this is about battling “misinformation” but rather manipulating the public into accepting one narrative and rejecting another.

The “fact-checks” have on occasion reached comedic levels. After Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, USA Today actually ran an in-depth article, complete with numerous citations, to “fact-check” The Babylon Bee’s satirical piece (because satire is what the Bee does) stating that a circuit court overturned her death. I kid you not. Over 800 words, with 16 citations.


This from the same paper that on this very day is cheering on draconian fines for not wearing a mask on public transportation, even though masks do nothing against a virus that most people survive, and running a scare piece on how “white supremacists” use the internet for fundraising — a thinly disguised advocacy piece for the continued deplatforming of people who oppose the new presidential administration and the narrative that its media lackeys promote on its behalf.

Amid all this propaganda and censorship comes a call from The New York Times itself for the Biden administration to create a “reality czar,” so that we can have someone in government officially declaring what is “factual” and what is “dangerous misinformation.” Yes, The New York Times, not some fringe newspaper with a tiny circulation, is openly calling for the creation of a real-life Ministry of Truth.

The Biden administration is already taking steps in that direction, by working on a system of awarding press passes based on whether the reporter or the organization the reporter works for “operate[s] in good faith and tell[s] their audience the truth.” As deputy White House press secretary T.J. Ducklo informs us, “Organizations or individuals who traffic in conspiracy theories, propaganda, and lies to spread disinformation will not be tolerated” — presumably with the administration deciding what constitutes “conspiracy theories, propaganda, and lies.” That privilege won’t be abused at all to silence critics.

It certainly wouldn’t be invoked to, say, spike a politically embarrassing story about the president’s son leading up to the election. No, no. Nobody would dream of coordinating across social media and the mainstream press to smear an article as Russian disinformation without a shred of evidence that it actually was. That would never happen.

If this all sounds terrifyingly dystopian to you, it should. Now that the Woke Left has control of every major institution of power in the nation, the assault on our freedoms is in full force. If you’re a leftist political star, for example, and you get caught lying about where you were during the Capitol protest, just put out the call to your supporters to snitch on your critics and report them to have them silenced. (Yes, it’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the same person who accused Ted Cruz of trying to get her “murdered” in the Capitol. If she’s so terrified of everything, and so willing to lie to gain sympathy, she’s really not fit to be a leader.)

The New York Times, NBC, and other major media outlets even have reporters who are essentially dedicated to being full-time hall monitors — actively infiltrating private online conversations and alt-tech sites so they can find somebody who said something un-woke, write a concern-trolling article about how this just proves we have to shut down any dialogue the mainstream press doesn’t control, and destroy ordinary people in the process. This trend actually predates Biden; revolver.news reported last October on how NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny wasn’t really a journalist in any sense of the word, but rather an “ideologically motivated hitman” who publicly expresses glee at doxxing Trump supporters and ruining conservative lives and livelihoods.

Just think about that. This is what passes now for journalism. While Julian Assange will probably die in jail for the crime of being a whistleblowing journalist exposing crimes at the highest levels of government, these puritan scolds with the mental capacity of a third-grader running to tattle to the teacher have free rein, at our largest and most powerful media outlets, to get people canceled for saying a bad word.

And they don’t stop at trying to ruin ordinary people with unapproved opinions. Remember that CNN’s Brian Stelter — whose job exists because of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press — wants privately owned cable companies to remove Fox News and other conservative news outlets. (But I thought private companies could do whatever they wanted, Brian.)

Not to be outdone, MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace wonders on live TV why the administration doesn’t consider using drone strikes on unrepentant Trump supporters, and even those who question the COVID narrative. I’m not kidding.


Meanwhile, an L.A. Times columnist compares her Trump-supporter neighbors who just plowed her driveway for free to Middle Eastern terrorists.

Seems the anti-Trump hysteria is even worse now that the man is out of office. These were the people calling Trump a dangerous dictator, and look how they act. Look at their words. Look at what they’re openly calling for.

Not even the military is safe from the purges. The soldiers posted in D.C. for the inauguration were subjected to political purity tests, with the obvious assumption that anyone who served their country but supported Trump might turn on the Biden administration — which is the exact same paranoid mindset that put innocent Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II. We’re not sure where your loyalties really lie, so here’s a nice cage for you and your family. It’s for everyone’s safety.

But now it gets even worse, as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is calling for a military “stand-down” in the next 60 days to weed out “racism and extremism” in the armed forces. When the entire political establishment is calling conservatives and Trump supporters en masse racists, white nationalists, extremists, and domestic terrorists, you can see exactly where this is heading. It’s not about actually getting rid of “extremists,” but about purging the military of anyone who doesn’t openly support the current administration and/or who shows any signs of supporting Trump or conservative politics.

This is how Stalin’s political purges took shape. And it’s something only undertaken by dictatorial governments that don’t trust their own people — usually for good reason. If a new administration has to take office from behind razor wire and a wall of 25,000 armed soldiers, you can be assured that that administration does not like you, does not trust you, and will undertake actions to restrict your liberties — including persecuting you for the thoughtcrime of having an opposing opinion.

And why wouldn’t they trust you? Well, I’m sure it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with lingering questions about the integrity of the very elections that put the administration in place. No, no, of course not.

To that end, I encourage everyone to read Patrick Byrne’s multi-part blog about how Trump lost the election. The former Overstock CEO for a brief while had the ear of the president, along with attorney Sidney Powell and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and tried to convince Trump to follow up on the work the three of them had independently undertaken to find election irregularities that they thought could easily be investigated.

But they needed the administration’s cooperation to make that happen, and to hear Byrne’s telling of it, Trump was more interested in his loyalty to Rudy Giuliani, whom Byrne characterizes as a heavy drinker, out of his element, past his prime, and essentially unable to organize the forces needed to make the case for election fraud.

In short, Trump blew them off in favor of showing loyalty to a doddering old friend who couldn’t get the job done, and when Trump did have a chance to make his case to the people, he engaged in self-aggrandizing pep rallies instead, because narcissists can never get out of their own way.

Byrne does suggest that Trump wanted to get to the bottom of the voting irregularities, but on the other hand Trump seemed just as happy to go back home, play golf, and wash his hands of the whole mess. Byrne’s account of the story suggests that even those surrounding Trump in his administration’s inner circle were discouraging him from looking into the election. Between that and the constant pummeling from the press, it seems to me as if Trump simply folded. He was done even before the media jumped on the Capitol protest as a way to project their worst fears and paranoias on to Trump and his supporters.

What’s the point of mentioning all this? Well, that brings us to the cherry on top of all the latest media insanity. Time magazine is running a story detailing how a widespread network of left-activists and corporate allies working together to change laws and spread propaganda essentially colluded to ensure the election outcome they wanted in November. Without a shred of self-awareness, Time spins this process, involving “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” as a victory for democracy.

Included in this effort were incessant media reports to convince people that mail-in voting was not susceptible to fraud (ask Amazon what it thinks about that now that the election is over), coordinated clampdowns on dissent of any kind, and the organizing of numerous leftist groups to prepare to take to the streets if somehow their plan didn’t work and Trump still won. And you can be assured that those protests would have been both violent and characterized as “mostly peaceful,” all geared toward pressuring Trump to step down, even if he had legitimately won.

So Time is admitting what happened with the elections, right out in the open. And these are the people who want a literal Ministry of Truth in our government, to tell us all what’s true and false, and what we can say and what will be censored. It boggles the mind.

Let’s just say it like it is: The demands for loyalty, the purges, the collusion with media and corporate allies to push propaganda and suppress dissent — this is how totalitarian dictatorships behave. More to the point, this is how an administration would act if it knew that it wasn’t really democratically elected. The next step is to employ the Deep State and a military cleansed of Trump supporters to threaten, arrest, and ultimately disappear the opposition.

Predictably, the very censorship that the left has been calling for is already coming back to bite it, as Big Tech is now going after leftist pages and personalities that don’t toe the establishment line. But it won’t even register with most on the left that the very things they advocate for will eventually be turned around on them, even though that’s always what happens. If you weaponize the Deep State to criminalize other Americans for their political views, you shouldn’t act surprised when some future administration does the same thing to you.

It’s utterly bizarre how the American left has essentially become what the right wing was around the time of 9/11 — pro-censorship, pro-military, pro-police, pro-corporation, pro-surveillance. These are the people who have us barreling full speed into an authoritarian dystopia that’s equal part McCarthyist witch hunt, Maoist struggle session, and Spanish Inquisition. Possess the wrong opinions, and expect to be humiliated, canceled, and re-educated. You will also bend the knee, publicly recant, and kiss the ring in submission and fealty, if you know what’s good for you.

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