Who Are the Real Insurrectionists?

The Epoch Times; Victor Davis Hanson, January 5, 2022 Updated: January 11, 2022

Commentary

Recently, Democrats have been despondent over President Joe Biden’s sinking poll numbers. His policies on the economy, energy, foreign policy, the border, and COVID-19 all have lost majority support.

As a result, the left now variously alleges that either in 2022, when they expect to lose the Congress, or in 2024, when they fear losing the presidency, Republicans will “destroy democracy” or stage a coup.

A cynic might suggest that they praise democracy when they get elected, only to claim it is broken when they lose. Or they hope to avoid their defeat by trying to terrify the electorate. Or they mask their own revolutionary propensities by projecting them onto their opponents.

After all, who is trying to federalize election laws in national elections contrary to the spirit of the Constitution? Who wishes to repeal or circumvent the Electoral College? Who wishes to destroy the more than 180-year-old Senate filibuster, the more than 150-year-old nine-justice Supreme Court, and the more than 60-year-old, 50-state union?

Who is attacking the founding constitutional idea of two senators per state?

The Constitution also clearly states that “when the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside.” Who slammed through the impeachment of then-President Donald Trump without a presiding chief justice?

Never had a president been either impeached twice or tried in the Senate as a private citizen. Who did both?

The left further broke prior precedent by impeaching Trump without a special counsel’s report, formal hearings, witnesses, and cross-examinations.

Who exactly is violating federal civil rights legislation?

New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in December 2021 decided to ration potentially lifesaving new COVID-19 medicines, partially on the basis of race, in the name of “equity.”

The agency also allegedly used racial preferences to determine who would be first tested for COVID-19. Yet such racial discrimination seems in direct violation of various title clauses of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

That law makes it clear that no public agency can use race to deny “equal utilization of any public facility which is owned, operated, or managed by or on behalf of any State or subdivision thereof.” Who is behind the new racial discrimination?

In summer 2020, many local and state-mandated quarantines and bans on public assemblies were simply ignored with impunity—if demonstrators were associated with Black Lives Matter or protesting the police.

Currently, the Biden administration is also flagrantly embracing the neo-Confederate idea of nullifying federal law.

The Biden administration has allowed nearly 2 million foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally across the southern border—in the hope that they will soon be loyal constituents.

The administration hasn’t asked illegal entrants to be tested for or vaccinated against COVID-19. Yet all U.S. citizens in the military and employed by the federal government are threatened with dismissal if they fail to become vaccinated.

Such selective exemption of lawbreaking non-U.S. citizens, but not millions of U.S. citizens, seems in conflict with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

After entering the United States illegally, millions of immigrants are protected by some 550 “sanctuary city” jurisdictions. These revolutionary areas all brazenly nullify immigration law by refusing to allow federal immigration authorities to deport illegal immigrant lawbreakers.

At various times in our nation’s history—1832, 1861 to 1865, and 1961 to 1963—America has been either racked by internal violence or fought a civil war over similar state nullification of federal laws.

In the past five years, we have indeed seen many internal threats to democracy.

Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to concoct a dossier of dirt against her presidential opponent. She disguised her own role by projecting her efforts to use Russian sources onto Trump. She used her contacts in government and media to seed the dossier and create a national hysteria about “Russian collusion.” Clinton urged Biden not to accept the 2020 result if he lost, and she herself claimed Trump wasn’t a legitimately elected president.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has violated laws governing the chain of command. Some retired officers violated Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice by slandering their commander-in-chief. Others publicly were on record calling for the military to intervene to remove an elected president.

Some of the nation’s top officials in the FBI and intelligence committee have misled or lied under oath either to federal investigators or the U.S. Congress, again, mostly with impunity.

All these sustained revolutionary activities were justified as necessary to achieve the supposedly noble ends of removing Trump.

The result is Third-World-like jurisprudence in the United States aimed to reward friends and punish enemies, masked by service to social justice.

We are in a dangerous revolutionary cycle. But the threat isn’t so much from loud, buffoonish one-day rioters on Jan. 6. Such clownish characters didn’t for 120 days loot, burn, attack courthouses and police precincts, cause more than 30 deaths, injure 2,000 policemen, and destroy at least $2 billion in property—all under the banner of revolutionary justice.

Even more ominously, stone-cold sober elites are systematically waging an insidious revolution in the shadows that seeks to dismantle America’s institutions and the rule of law as we have known them.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Notes

  • trying to federalize election laws in national elections
  • wishes to repeal or circumvent the Electoral College
  • wishes to destroy the more than 180-year-old Senate filibuster
  • wishes to change, for the bad, the more than 150-year-old nine-justice Supreme Court
  • trying to play with the more than 60-year-old, 50-state union
  • attacking the founding constitutional idea of two senators per state
  • slammed through the impeachment of then-President Donald Trump without a presiding chief justice
  • violating federal civil rights legislation by impeaching Trump without a special counsel’s report, formal hearings, witnesses, and cross-examinations.
  • direct violation of various title clauses of the 1964 Civil Rights Act when New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene decided to ration potentially lifesaving new COVID-19 medicines, partially on the basis of race, in the name of “equity.” The agency also allegedly used racial preferences to determine who would be first tested for COVID-19.
  • impunity—if demonstrators were associated with Black Lives Matter or protesting the police.

Ocupa el Zocalo

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“Los mexicanos hemos sido privados de nuestra libertad”

Media Suppresses the Money Behind BLM; The Fallacy of White Privilege; Schools Must Open in the Fall

Bill O’Reilly; July 13, 2020

Bill O’Reilly here, welcome to the No Spin News for Monday, July 13th, 2020. Stand Up for Your Country. Tonight, we’ll continue our investigation into the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation. We have a good guest. You’ll learn things you don’t know.   But first, the lead story is how COVID is hiding the radical agenda. Now, stay with me here because it’s a little complicated, but important. Now, first of all, the president of the United States has been put off balance. So you may have noticed it, Donald Trump has lost a little of his swagger. He’s always been a guy that struck back against things he didn’t think were fair, but now he’s doing more of that. And on the COVID thing, he’s frustrated, and that’s the truth. I know it personally. So, Donald Trump is used to, if you read my book, the United States of Trump, controlling everything in his world, and he did that for the first three years of his presidency, he was in charge, he controlled. The pandemic comes in, he can’t control it and the American people are scared, many of them. And when people are frightened, they look to the government or their dad or their business, whatever it may be, to protect them. But nobody can protect us from COVID. It’s unique in that. So you can’t send in the army or the police. Can’t. There’s nothing you can do. And of course, the anti Trump press blames President Trump for the pandemic, for the contagion.   Now, that’s not fair. It’s not true. Maybe he could have done things better, but think about this, the president has kept the economy and the markets, particularly the stock market, fairly stable. I think that’s a pretty good accomplishment in the middle of a pandemic. Now, I’m not trying to promote Donald Trump. I’m trying to inject a bit of fairness here. So if you want to think that President Trump has booted it on COVID, that’s your opinion. You’re entitled to it. But the fact is that Donald Trump has been worn down. Put yourself in his shoes, just six months ago he thought he had reelection like that. He had a booming economy running against a weak opponent. OK. Trump thought he was just going to skate right on in there. And then, wham, this happens. He’s frustrated. We’ll get into that in a little while.   Now, I’ve said if the schools don’t open in the fall, Trump loses, and I’m sticking to that, which is why there is so much urgency on the part of the federal government to get these schools open. We’ll get into specifics on the schools in a little while. The next thing is that there is a radical left movement. You all know it. I mean, we’ve been going over it and over it and over it. But that is being obscured by COVID because instead of reporting honestly on the radical left movement, the networks and a lot of the cables just do COVID all day and they ignore the danger, and I mean that literally, from Marxist groups and anarchists. I mean, they ignore it and are not going to report it. We do. But we look for pickup. Got a little bit of the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, we got a little, we got it out there, but it wasn’t easy.   And finally, many of you voters in America are absolutely clueless. A, they’re panicked over COVID. B, they don’t pay attention. C, it’s all about them, not about the country. And so you’ve got a big, big cordray voters who well, on Thursday, they’re going to vote for Biden, but maybe not on Saturday, Trump. They’re back and forth, they swing, which is why you see the polls, which don’t mean anything now. And finally, the backlash against the radical left and against the anti police movement has been delayed because of COVID. If there was no COVID, these people could never get away with what they’re trying to pull. I mean, we are seeing hundreds of people shot in major cities across the country and the networks ignore it, mostly ignore it. If there wasn’t any COVID, they couldn’t do that.   Now, you’ve heard me talk about white privilege and this is going to lead into our segment on the Marxists Black Lives Matter Lobal Foundation. So white privilege, I have never bought into. All right. I have always told you for years, it’s not true. What is true is economic privilege and there’s no doubt about that. If you have money or your family has money or you inherit money, you have privilege attached to that asset. It’s all about money, not skin color. I’ve always said that it is harder for an African-American to pursue happiness in this country than a white American. That is true because there are bigots that play the skin color game. It doesn’t matter there on all sides, because whites are the majority. So here on Long Island, where I live, for many, many years, if you were a upper black family, there were certain neighborhoods you couldn’t buy into. All right, that was wrong. And the reason was, as again I write in the United States of Trump, because his father, Trump’s father, was involved with this, economic. That they thought of black families moved into certain neighborhoods, property values would go down. OK. So there is economic privilege and it’s a corrupter. How many rich people do you know? I know a lot and some them I’d like to slap upside the head because they’re so arrogant. Why are you arrogant? Because you have money? You know it. It exists. OK, but white skin color privilege is a myth.   Enter 19 year old Rav Arora. This kid’s a genius. He lives in Vancouver, Canada, and he’s a writer. He sells his articles to a number of publications. So he researched white privilege. Ready? And again, it’s always good to watch this broadcast with a pen and paper. He found out four things that just blow the white privilege theory out of the water. Number one, according to statistics from the US Census Bureau, several minority groups in America out earn white people. They earn more money than white people. These are the groups, ready? Pakistani Americans, Lebanese American, South African Americans, Filipino Americans, Sri Lankan Americans and Iranian Americans. And the number one group in the United States for earnings, India, Indians. They earn more money than anyone else. None of those groups except for South Africa, are white based. None of them. Second, black immigrant groups have a median household income above the American average. Who are black immigrant groups? Nigerian’s, Barbadians, Ghanians, Trinidadians, all have higher incomes than the average American. And because whites are more than blacks and Hispanics, that’s the factor.   Third, Nigerian Americans are one of the most educated groups in America, according to a study by Rice University. They only make up one percent of African-Americans, Nigerians, one percent. Yet they are represented at the Harvard Business School at a rate of 25 percent of black students. So no wonder they are out earning whites, Nigerian Americans. I didn’t know any of this and I know you didn’t know any of it. And thanks to Rav Arora, we now know it. And finally, 16 million white Americans, almost twice as many as black Americans live in poverty. Now, that’s a little skewed because black Americans are 13 percent of the population and whites are 50 something, close to 60 percent. It’s a little skewed. But it goes against if you’re white, you have privilege. OK. That’s what it goes against. So, the white privilege argument, this is why I’m even bothering with it. Kids hear this, black kids, and it builds in to their thinking process, they’re immature,  but so are most adults, that they’re victims. Because whites have privilege, they the black kids don’t have privilege and they can’t succeed. They’re victims of a biased system and that creates grievance. Oh, I flunk because I’m black. Oh, you didn’t hire me because I’m black. Oh, you were rude to me because I’m black and you have white privilege.   Nobody has done this to me because they’re afraid of me, but if anybody ever said to me, Hey O’Reilly, check your privilege, the mature O’Reilly would say, hey, why don’t you take your stupid theory and whatever. I probably wouldn’t use a euphemism, but I would state my objection. I grew up in Levittown, New York, as many of you know. It was a you couldn’t get more humble beginnings than that. I guess you could, but it would be hard. OK. I didn’t have any money and nobody in the neighborhood had any money, that’s why they were living in Levittown. My father bought the house for eight thousand dollars in 1951. So this white privilege nonsense is corrosive to the country because it creates another generation of victims. The blacks grow up, not all of them, certainly not Nigerians, and they say I can’t make it. Why should I even try?   Now, part of the dissemination of black propaganda, or propaganda directed toward blacks is the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation. So in Milwaukee, the head of the crew there, Patrick Benjamin, recently wrote an article June 21st, it said dear white people, if you have ever said any of these things then you are part of the problem, and he lists the most absurd stuff like everyone struggles, being white has never been one of those struggles. Being poor is a struggle. It’s just garbage. The article is just garbage. But the basic premise is that white people are oppressive and that’s what the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation sells. Skin color. Caucasian oppressive. One final note. Skin color should not be in any debate, and it is in the Washington Redskins and we’ll get to that in a little while. Should not be in any debate. Skin color does not matter. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best. It’s the content of your character. OK. This right here, it doesn’t matter. And if you inject skin color in any way, shape or form into the debate, you’re going to be marked, number one, ostracized and you’ll lose the debate. You’ve got to really cut through this and get into education. Get into the system in America that requires competition and how to compete.   All right. Let’s bring in Scott Walter. He is the president of the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C., and his group, the Capital Research Center, has been investigating the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, which is different from the slogan. So the slogan Black Lives Matter doesn’t have anything to do with what Mr. Walter and me, what we are investigating. It is the organization. So last week, the CRC uncovered Susan Rosenberg’s ties to a group called Thousand Currents. I’m not going to go over all the investigations that we’ve done, but just suffice to say that the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation runs money through Thousand Currents, based in Oakland, California. And this Susan Rosenberg is a co chairwoman of that group and she is a convicted terrorist, a violent woman who served hard time in a federal penitentiary. I didn’t know that, but Mr. Walter and his crew found that out. He joins us now from Washington. When you ran that article, and I saw it on Real Clear Politics, what kind of reaction did you and your organization get, Mr. Walter?   “Well, we got a very nice reaction from conservatives who were shocked and appalled to hear about Ms. Rosenberg’s background. We got deafening silence from The Washington Post, The New York Times, all the television networks, etc., although, I should say, Tucker has mentioned it, though. That would be the one exception.”   Were you invited on any programs?   “No, not to discuss, Miss Rosenberg.”   Were you invited on any programs to discuss the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation?   “Nope.”.   Outside of us, did you see any other original reporting on the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation?   “Maybe an occasional detail added here and there, again, only by conservative outlets, though, online.”   OK, so do you believe that the corporate media, Disney, AT&T, Comcast, these people, they don’t want Americans to know what BLM Global Foundation is? Do you believe that?   “I do believe that, especially in the case of Disney, who is going to have a big Colin Kaepernick show, right?   Well, they’ve offered him a first look, but I don’t even think Colin Kaepernick knows what the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation is. I don’t think all these people running around under this banner know anything about the three Marxist women who founded it, but I could be wrong. Maybe they do and they don’t care.   “I’m sure there’s more ignorance than knowledge. But you’re right, they wouldn’t care that much. It seems to be very hard to embarrass the left, especially when they get to keep so many things silent.”   All right. Now, the big news organizations, they’re going to black out, and I think I can use that word blackout, but CNN may have it on their list, they’re going to not tell the American public, this is a Marxist organization that seeks to overthrow the federal government and impose communism. And the three women admit it. Do they not, the three founders?   “They are, in their own words, trained Marxists. And certainly, Miss Rosenberg, the cochairman of that pass through that you mentioned, Thousand Currents, where the money flows through, the only repentance she had for all of her violent terrorism in the 70s, 80s, her one regret was she did not shoot back against the cops.”   She wanted more violence against the police. Do you believe that if this were a front page story on The Washington Post and that ABC News and CBS and NBC picked it up and led with it on their nightly newscasts and said, you know, you really should know that this Black Lives Matter global foundation, which drives the Black Lives Matter protests, because it does, they’re Marxists and they want to overthrow the government. Do you think that Americans would care?   “Sure, the average American, of course, is appalled by that kind of radicalism and especially, you know, extremism is really extremist when it’s violent.”   When you reported the link between this violent convicted terrorist, Rosenberg and Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, you would think that that would be a story that gets picked up. Did you send it to the AP? Did you send your stuff out?   “Oh, yes. No, we’ve sent it out, and in fact, our influence watch .org website, which is sort of Wikipedia of the left, for many of these groups, we’re on the first page of Google results. They don’t even know, they can ignore us, they can just go to Google and find the same info from us.”   So it is on social media, but it isn’t in the corporate media. Final question, calls for an opinion on your part. Why would Disney and Comcast and AT&T, which runs CNN, why would they want to promote communism, to promote people who would seize their assets, who would destroy their corporations? Why would they want to promote them?   “Well, I think it’s a combination of guilt, because to the extent they think about this, they feel guilt ridden and paralyzed. And then also it’s the fruit of all these decades of horrible education that we’ve given people. I mean, if you’re a 30 something powerful executive somewhere, you’re brainwashed almost certainly from the education you got.”   You don’t see that as a threat, the Marxists?   “You think that that’s just the, you think it’s reality. Oh, well, of course, this is the way the world works. We all know that and I kind of feel bad because, gosh, I have an awfully nice place in Greenwich, Connecticut, where I commute down to Manhattan, to my offices.”   All right. I don’t know. You know, there’s something corrupt, obviously, in the press, it’s at the most corrupt point in our history, in my opinion. But, Mr. Walter, we hope you keep investigating and we really appreciate the good work you have done so far. Thanks for appearing tonight.   “Thanks so much, Bill.”.   OK. All right. So I said at the top program that President Trump is demoralized by COVID. I think that’s true. He’s lost a little bit of swagger. He may get it back. Just today, the federal government fast tracked two companies who are working on vaccines. If the vaccine hits, then the whole election process turns around. If COVID is diminished, that helps Trump dramatically. But to back up my statement about him being a little bit demoralized, we found this piece of tape. Go.   “To rescue the U.S. economy from a horrible event that was formed, took place in China and came here and they could have stopped it. They could have stopped it. Nobody likes to write that, but they could have stopped it. They know it and I know it.”   He is really, really angry about that. Now, his opponent, Joe Biden, is a very interesting study. All right. So both Trump and Biden have something in common, they both are fixated on the corporate media. They just zero in on whatever the corporate media is doing. So the corporate media is telling Biden, you’re winning. Joe, you’re winning big. That’s what you’re telling him with all these ridiculous polls. Trump is a little bit worried about the election. No doubt about it. Biden is now feeling really strong, so strong that he is now adopted many of the things that socialist Bernie Sanders was demanding. He’s adopted them in his platform, which would have been inconceivable six months ago. One of the really disturbing things that Mr. Biden has adopted is an anti police posture. Roll tape.   “Surplus military equipment for law enforcement, they don’t need that. The last thing you need is an up armored Humvee coming into a neighborhood just like the military’s invading. They don’t know anybody. They become the enemy. They’re supposed to protecting these people.”   All right. So, what does that mean? That because some police agencies have military type equipment, they’re the enemy of the people? I can’t remember the last time the military type equipment, the Humvee, was actually used. I’m sure that there were times, but I can’t remember one off the top of my head. And if they were used, there would be some kind of insurrection, that would be the only way that they would be called out, like the riots after George Floyd. Yeah, the military needed equipment to protect the people and the property, didn’t they, Joe?   Now, here’s what’s really interesting about this, that Biden back in 1994 was the co-sponsor of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. What did that do? It provided a hundred thousand new police officers in America. Ten billion dollars more for prison funding. Six billion for prevention programs, crime prevention. And it created 60 new death penalty offenses. 60. Joe Biden was the tough on crime guy. Now he’s the, well police are enemies if they use force, military force in the protection of their communities. They’re the enemy. It’s not like they’re riding through the Southside of Chicago, Joe, in the Humvees. They’re not doing that. They should do it, but they’re not. So Biden has staked out now a territory that is far, far left. And again, it’s not reported in the media. Most folks don’t even know it.   OK. Let me give me a few examples. Climate change, 1.7 trillion dollar investment on the part of the federal government in climate change and stuff that they want to buy, like windmills and solar panels. $1.7 trillion. So we got a 28 trillion dollar debt now. If you add up all the stuff that Biden / Bernie want, we owe 35 to 40 trillion. OK, now to keep the dollar from collapsing, because it will, that means all your savings, all your IRAs, all of that, halved because the dollar is not worth as much. That’s what’s going to happen. They’d have to seize, they the Biden administration, private property. Wealth tax. Tax on your car. You already have a tax on your car, you have more of a tax. Tax on everything in order to pay this insane stuff. They want free college, free pre-K, they’d run small business out of existence with the home leave. I mean, it’s everything Bernie Sanders was screaming about, the reason he didn’t win, Biden says, yeah, it’s OK with me. And the final thing, remember when Biden raised his hands and yeah, I’ll pay for the health expenses of illegal aliens, people who violate our immigration laws? I want to pay for all of their health care expenses. Remember that? That was the real Joe Biden. Now, do you think the American voter getting called up on a poll knows any of this? They don’t know it. Do they care? I don’t even know if they care.   Back to school. OK, so if the schools are shut down across the United States, Biden will be president. It’s not going to happen. The Bush administration, the Bush, the Trump administration, is going to try to encourage as many districts as possible to open, and they will succeed. OK. But the biggest union and the teachers, the National Education Association, NEA, far, far left. Three million teachers, administrators and other education professionals members. They said we’re not going open, too dangerous. Now, why are they doing that? It’s not dangerous in North Dakota. Not dangerous in Montana. Not dangerous in Alaska. And here in New York, we had for the first time, no deaths over the weekend from COVID. So let’s pray it holds here. Sun Belt, bad, bad. But the NCAA says, hey, there’s no way we’re opening schools, not happening, because they want Trump to lose. Not because of any protection. The way it should be handled is that each district, in conjunction with the state capital, decides. So if the crazy left Washington State doesn’t open, okay, okay with me. Let those people there who elected these loons, let them deal with that. But here in New York, with the COVID thing is tamped down at this point, got to open. You’ve got to have masks and you’ve got to have distance. You’ve got to have everything you can have. But one kid gets it, front-page hysteria.   Look, in Europe they opened the schools months ago. They haven’t had any problem in Austria and Norway and Belgium and Finland and Denmark. So right now, President Trump is a cipher on the COVID. He used to have the daily briefings, which were, I don’t know, in the beginning, they were all right then they got ridiculous. President Trump, why don’t you invite all the ministers of education from the European nations that have opened their schools to Washington for a two day conference on how you did it? What did you do? If COVID didn’t explode in Western Europe, talking Italy, places that were really impacted, if it didn’t explode, what did they do? Let’s have it. Let’s have the conference and let President Trump take the leadership of that. It shows he’s doing something. Why do I have to think this up? Why? That should be one of his advisers, Betsy DeVos, the education secretary. Mr. President, let’s get all these guys over here and gals and find out what they did and we can do it. So summing up on the school, each district decides. You’ve got a real problem in a certain district, you can’t do it. But I’d say 80, 85 percent of American school districts could open with a minimal risk, responsibly. So let’s go, because you can’t be punishing the children, which is what you do if you don’t let them go back to school in September.   OK. Now, the press does not want the schools to open. This is another corruption of the press. They don’t want it, and again, one kid gets it, bang, oh, it’s awful. So if you’re in Florida, and that’s a bad place right now for COVID, and you open, which the governor says he’s going to do, and one kid gets it or one teacher gets it, they’re going to ram that down your throat because they don’t want, the press doesn’t want the schools open. Because the same thing with the NEA, they know that Trump will get hurt, but the schools don’t open because the psychology is we’re not defeating the virus. We’re not making progress. This is a psychological thing as well as a physical thing.   OK, Roger Stone. I don’t care about Roger Stone, I don’t know Roger Stone. He lied, but he lied in a bogus case, the Russian situation. Do I care that his sentence was commuted? I don’t care. Pardoned Stone’s record, should he go to jail, he’s an old guy? I don’t care. When Trump pardoned him, he’s Trump’s friend, I said, alright, there’s a little loyalty there, I don’t care. President Obama commuted thousands of people’s sentences, thousands. Trump is at, I think, less than 100. One of them was Chelsea Manning, the former army private who leaked secrets about the military, putting our military in danger. Obama didn’t pardon him, commuted the sentence, her. OK. Any outcry? Nope. On a couple of anti-Obama people didn’t like it, but nothing in the press.   So Mitt Romney says that Stone’s commutation is a historic corruption. Governor, look, I’ve known you for a long time, you’re embarrassing yourself now. You’re embarrassing yourself. I know you hate Donald Trump. You want Biden and the Democrats to gain power? Is what you want, Governor? I’m calling you governor because you’re the governor of Massachusetts, now you’re the senator of Utah. I guess I should call you senator. Is that what you want? Really? Do you really want that? Awful. Awful. John Kasich, former governor of Ohio, hates Trump. I know John real well. Roll his tape.   “Yeah, he’s losing momentum and you know, the thing about Tulsa that was interesting here, and I just saw a few of the clips. You saw people like looking at their watches and people were yawning and reaching across. And, you know, I’d say four years ago, people were kind of transfixed by this show, but the show’s kind of winding down.”   You want Biden there, John? Is that what you want, the Democrats in there? The Democrats who destroyed your state, state of Ohio? You put it back together. You want Democrats again? I don’t get it. Washington Redskins are going to change their name because FedEx, which sponsors the stadium to the tune of 200 million dollars, told Dan Snyder, the owner of the team, you’ve got to change the name. So Dan says, $200 million, I think will change day. Here’s my name for the new Washington team, the Washington Spinners. I hope the R&B group doesn’t sue, but the Washington Spinners. That’s what I would name them.   This day in history. June 13th, 2013. Seven years ago. The Black Lives Matter movement began and it was because George Zimmerman was acquitted of second degree murder and manslaughter for taking the life of Trayvon Martin. Seven years ago, Black Lives Matter began. Quick break and back with mail and a Final Thought. The Final Thought is about taking urchins to dinner last night. Wait till you hear this, right back.   Many of us have worried that our 401Ks and retirement savings, everything we worked for over a lifetime could evaporate. With all the fake news, it’s important to have an independent expert in our corner to preserve and grow our savings. It’s simple. So please meet Silicon Valley Angel investor and 5G expert Jeff Brown of Brownstone Research, whose only obligation is to us, to you. His newsletter, The Near Future Report, shares his analysis on where the stock market is going and when, which stocks are poised to rise and fall, and new ways to profit from the exploding tech market. His track record is amazing, so please go to Bill5G.com. It’s easy. Bill5G.com. You will thank me.   If you are over the age of 50. I have an important message for you. There is a true alternative to AARP, the liberal retirement group that lobbies in favor of progressive policies. For less than twenty dollars a year, an AMAC Membership gives you members only pricing on car insurance, roadside assistance, discounts on hotels and travel, cell phone plans, discount dental plans, and on and on and on and on. So please join more than one million fellow Americans right now at AMAC.us. And yes, I am a member. Visit AMAC.us. AMAC.us.   Let’s get some mail. Renee Sethness. San Antonio, Texas. Stay safe down there, Renee. “Love the podcast. You are the first one I’ve heard give a theological explanation on socialism. This is a very honest, sound and religiously documented argument to use when people try to portray Jesus as a socialist.” Look, the Catholic Church for about 150 years has said no. Marxism, communism, no. You cannot seize private property.   Steven Bryn. Old Greenwich, Connecticut. “You keep mentioning the upcoming election will not be about Trump vs. Biden, but Trump versus Trump. Can you please explain?” Stephen, I’ve done that, but I’ll just give you a brief recap. Nobody’s jumping up and down to say I want Joe Biden to be president. Not even the Democrats. Nobody’s jumping going we’ve got we got to have Joe. This is a vote for President Trump or against him.   Doreen Doyle. Lake Worth, Florida. “Bill, is it true if Biden wins and is declared incompetent and then his V.P. is impeached, Pelosi would be president?” Doreen, you got a good imagination, none of that’s gonna happen, but Pelosi is third in line. Speaker of the House, third in line to be president. Fred. And Gerald Ford, he got promoted to vice president and became president after Nixon left.   “The debates will make a huge difference in the opinions of voters. Just as JFK versus Nixon did in the past. There will be an overwhelming victory for Trump in November. I would bet on this.” Well, if you read my column and I hope you do, entitled ‘Backlash,’ you may be right. But I wouldn’t, you know, Biden may rise to the debate occasion. A little shaky, but, you know.   David Schott. East Amherst, New York. “Please explain the fear of lawsuits as a reason for closing and more lockdowns. How could any lawyer prove it was a source of a client’s contagion?” Doesn’t have to prove it. They’ll sue Disney, they’ll sue anybody. Disney is making you sign a waiver and hope for a settlement and run up the costs. Well, if you’re a small business owner, you can’t afford to defend yourself. So they want money, money, money, money. That’s what it’s all about.   Kathleen. Concierge Member. Thank you, Kathleen. “I hope President Trump weighs in on the Durham report.” Can’t. The president’s got to stay away from the Justice Department or the whole thing becomes tainted.   Doug. Concierge Member. “The problem is that two million people are leaving New York because it’s a mess, will move to other states and vote the same way they did in New York, electing idiots. It’s called California, Californiafication. True. Some people elected these idiots will go down to North Carolina, Florida, Texas, and they’ll vote for idiots there.   Linda. “If New York goes bankrupt, do the rest of us have to bail them out?” No. Up to the federal government. Don’t have to bail out.   Susan. “When are you moving out of New York?” Susan, I hope I don’t have to. I got family and friends. I got stuff I have to do here. I don’t want have to move out, but, you know, there’s only so much I can take.   Josie. “Lucky enough to catch you on the Hannity radio program. You two have a lot of fun. Enjoy the back and forth banter.” We have it posted. All right. Some I’m on there every Wednesday with Hannity.   D.C. Seward. Arlington, Massachusetts. “I’ve been a fan a long time, I want to thank you for your recommendation on the show Bluebloods. We have even started holding Sunday dinners because of it.” You know, it’s really a good show. Good acting, good everything.   Mike Oberhaus. Fulton, Missouri. “I ordered my stickers last week, can’t wait to pass them out. One thing I observed in my community is a lot more people are flying flags.” This is the backlash. It’s Is coming. Stickers. I’ll tell you about him right now. OK. Throw them on up there. Stand Up for Your Country. You buy packs of 5, 10, you give them out. You put them on your backpack, wherever you want to put them. Statement, statements, statement, we don’t kneel. BillOReilly.com has them. Word of the day, no codswallop when writing to us. Quick break. Back with me taking the urchins out for dinner last night.   Hey, I want to tell you about gold and silver. This is a silver bar. If you do this every day with this, you get big biceps. So I use the American Hartford Gold Group and they’ve been with us for years. It’s a good crew. So gold and silver is a good investment, I think, as a hedge against everything, because it maintains value. And the folks at American Hartford Gold Group, they make it easy to buy, and I like easy. $1,500 of free silver is available to you, free silver on your first order. Yeah, there’s a minimum for that, but check it out. I want you to go give them a call. Again, that’s 877-444-GOLD gold. Or text gold to 65532.   All right. Here’s the Final Thought of the Day. So, last night I took a few urchins out for dinner and we sat outside. OK, so they’re on the phones, and I go oh, we sit down, no phones. Conversation. We’re talking. Talk about anything you want, even it’s probably dopey, I’ll participate. OK. Oh, they were oh phones. You could see their hands like, I don’t know. So all the phones are lined up on a table and there’s this big beetle that goes across. I take one of the phones and I crush the beetle with the phone. I mean, I thought this kid was going to have a massive heart attack and he had a little cover on the phone. I took the napkin, I wiped it off. I said, hey, your phone’s a lethal weapon. That beetle would be alive today if not for your phone. But they were all throughout the meal, it was like…and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed torturing them because you don’t use the phone and mealtime ever. They were shocked. They were looking at Spencer with pity in their eyes, and he’s my son and they were going, oh, how could you live under this cruel regime where we can’t have our phones at dinner. Anyway to get revenge, they over ordered, they ran up a big tab. So they got me in the end. We’ll see you tomorrow.  
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caroline r.-54745029 July 13, 2020 at 10:05 PM George Soros is raising his ugly head in Texas!!!! You keep saying “money, money, money”. Well, that’s how Soros is trying to win elections for Dems in Texas. “There oughta be a law” ! Robert F.-97863538 July 13, 2020 at 9:36 PM I have no supporting evidence, but I would suspect that the majority of whites NEVER bought into the “white privilege” myth. They may be afraid to publicly acknowledge it, fearing physical, economic or social reprisals at a time when our society is beginning to resemble the former Soviet Russia. Economic privilege is a fact of life. It is only common sense that the greater your economic resources, the greater your ability to indulge in the benefits of that economy. I fail to see the necessity of pointing that out constantly unless one perceives it as undesirable or even evil. There are many neighborhoods that I “can’t buy into”, because they are too expensive. I don’t resent it. I don’t cry for wealth redistribution. I look at economic privilege as the prime motivator in a capitalist society, to educate oneself, work hard and achieve success. It isn’t something of which to be suspicious or to denigrate. It’s a positive thing. But PLEASE, STOP the MLK quotes about not judging people by skin color, but by character content, when our own government has for decades, sanctioned and encouraged affirmative action programs that have favored minorities in the realm of jobs and education, based precisely on skin color. It just adds insult to injury. One last point: a feasible name entry for the Washington Redskins team would be the Washington MERCENARIES. Mercenaries are tough, brave, determined, possessing all the right qualities for a team. They also do EVERYTHING based on PROFIT. Brett R. July 13, 2020 at 9:33 PM Where is the Durham report, both you and Brett Tolman said this Summer. Is that no longer accurate? Visit the BillOReilly.com Message Boards
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Oxford Club

The Doctrine of Media Untruth

By Victor Davis Hanson . May 24, 2020

When knowledge, wisdom, independent thought, even basic competence were no longer requisites for success, then the media naturally slid into mediocrity, and mastered networking and obsequiousness instead of valuing independence.

As a general rule, when the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Service, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and CNN begin to parrot a narrative, the truth often is found in simply believing just the opposite.

Put another way, the media’s “truth” is a good guide to what is abjectly false. Perhaps we can call the lesson of this valuable service, the media’s inadvertent ability to convey truth by disguising it with transparent bias and falsehood, the “Doctrine of Media Untruth.”

Take the strange case of the respective records of liberal New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Florida counterpart Ron DeSantis. Both states have roughly equal populations, with Florida slightly larger by about 2 million. Both have populations that travel daily back and forth between their respective major cities. Both are major international tourist and travel hubs. Both have widely diverse populations.

Both have large numbers of retirees and long-term-care homes. Yet, New York has suffered 14 times the number of coronavirus deaths as has Florida. Florida is now increasingly open, and on May 19 saw 54 deaths attributed to the virus. That same day, New York was completely locked down and yet saw nearly twice that number at 105 deaths.

One would never know from the media of the contrasting fates of the two states during the epidemic.DeSantis is often rendered little more than a reckless leader who exposed Floridians to needless danger. Cuomo, in contrast, increasingly is deified by the media as likely presidential timber who finesses press conferences in the lively fashion of his legendary beloved father, and iconic liberal, Mario Cuomo.

Yet on the principle of media’s commitment to untruth, the public legitimately could deduce from the hagiographic news coverage that the frenetic Cuomo has proven the most incompetent governor in the nation in dealing with the virus. He sent the infected into vulnerable long-term care homes. He neither applied social distancing to, nor cleaned, mass transit. And Cuomo exaggerated his need for some medical supplies, while neglecting shortages in others.

In contrast, the media furor at DeSantis is a good guide to his successes in both mitigating viral fatalities while charting Florida’s path back to economic normality.

Hagiography of the Unfit and Unprofessional

The media assures us that failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is a statuesque heroic figure who is an experienced state politician, a successful polymath, and would be a valuable asset as Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick, but even better—wink-and-nod—a likely next president.

That new media consensus narrative is best typified by a recent and obsequious promo piece in the Washington Post. So given the media deification and the Doctrine of Media Untruth, we might assume that Abrams never has held statewide office, in incoherent fashion could not concede her legitimate defeat in the last Georgia gubernatorial race, and until recently still had not paid off an enormous credit card, student, and tax debt well over $200,000.

In other words, read the media narrative on Abrams and without knowing much else, one could conclude that she is not a photogenic candidate; she is not gracious in defeat; and she is without much experience of victory. Her baggage and lack of even a statewide constituency would mostly hurt a Biden ticket, which explains why his opponents hope that she is the vice-presidential nominee.

The Doctrine of Media Untruth was a valuable guide during the serial psychodramas to abort Donald Trump’s presidency. When Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee was canonized for tele-diagnosing Donald Trump as unhinged and in need of forced removal under the 25th Amendment, we knew the media glorification signaled she was unprofessional in making such a diagnosis of a patient she never met, and would never dare offer such a long-distance mental assessment of presidential candidate Joe Biden, based on his obvious cognitive impairment, memory lapses, and frequent cul-de-sac patterns of thought.

Trump’s antics simply lured the snails out of their shells and showed the public they were glorified slugs all along.

The more that CNN and MSNBC put ambulance-chasing lawyer Michael Avenatti on the air, and gushed about his tailored suits, his possible presidential gambit, his cocky take-downs of Trump, and his advocacy of supposed female victims of the predatory Brett Kavanaugh, the more we knew he was a fraud, a criminal, and likely a legal predator of his own clients. That he was sent to prison was predictable the more one heard the media gush.

Do we remember that for a while “Bob” Mueller was Washington’s hallowed prosecutor, investigator, or inquisitor par excellence? No wonder he had assembled a “dream team” of “all stars” who, as “hunter-killer” squads of legal eagles, would tear apart Trump’s supposedly doddering third-stringers and send Trump either to jail or into ignominious exile. So, the more that legal eagle narrative saturated the liberal media landscape, the more we knew the opposite was true.

Mueller himself had a spotty history. He was both physically and cognitively unable to run an effective two-year high-intensity investigation. He was the un-Durham—as leaky and hodge-podge as the latter’s probe is quiet and professional. Mueller likely outsourced his tasks to an incestuous group of partisan and progressive lawyers, many of them incompetent, with conflicts of interest and blinded by partisanship.

In the end, Team Mueller’s chief legacy was burning through more than $32 million in federal funds, hiding evidence, rigging a now-withdrawn indictment of Michael Flynn, initially hiding the amorous unprofessionalism of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok—and Mueller himself testifying before Congress that he knew little of anything about the Steele dossier and Fusion GPS, the fonts of his own investigation.

Mythology of the Weak and Pathetic

The country once knew little of Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). But once the media sanctified his role after the 2018 election as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, we knew what lay ahead. No sooner had the Renaissance Schiff assumed the chairmanship of the committee than we were lectured ad nauseam how he was a Harvard Law graduate, with a sly sense of humor, who had he not blessed the country with his stellar political career otherwise might well have been a successful Hollywood screenwriter. He ran his committee with flair and competence lacking under the former chairman, the supposedly plodding dairy farmer Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). In other words, we quickly discovered the truth through the Doctrine of Media Untruth.

Each time Schiff assured the media of “bombshells,” that the “walls were closing in,” or that there were all sorts of new top-secret, classified, rarified information known only to him, which would shortly “prove” Trump “collusion,” we understood that he was a con man and prevaricator who had no proof at all or any such evidence. Whatever report he issued (cf. the “Schiff memo”), would certainly be dishonest and not factual. And, of course, it was.

Empowering of the Deceptive Expertocracy

Nowhere has the Doctrine of Media Untruth been more helpful than in following Trump during the coronavirus epidemic. The media fixated on hydroxychloroquine because Trump said it might be a game-changer and he took it himself as a prophylactic. That ensured that the ubiquitous, long-tested, mostly safe, and cheap anti-malarial, anti-lupus household drug would suddenly be declared useless and deadly.

Would the media ever repent and empirically report that in some cases hydroxychloroquine is considered to be efficacious in treating the early symptoms of the disease by front-line doctors, in line with a series of pre-COVID-19 studies that it could be helpful against SARs-like viruses?

If tomorrow Barack Obama gave a press conference, and should confess that when he travels he takes the drug, given its general safety and scattered reports it might have prophylactic value against COVID-19, we would soon read headlines of a “miracle drug” that is cheap, accessible, and vital to the world’s poor and at-risk.

When readers are told that Trump is an idiot for suggesting that the virus might end up like a bad flu year, that his advocacy for opening up the country is a death sentence, that his travel ban was too late and too porous, and that the economy has been wrecked permanently by his incompetence, then we should assume that the death tolls by autumn might approximate or slightly exceed the flu’s lethality in years like 1957-8 or 1967-8, that states that open up do not have much greater spikes in virus morbidity than do states that do not, that the travel ban saved thousands of lives and would likely not have been issued by most traditional presidents so early, and that the economy likely will begin its ascendance by autumn.

Finally, early on in the COVID-19 crisis, the media consecrated Dr. Anthony Fauci as the godlike man of science, in antithesis to the buffoonish, pre-Enlightenment fool Trump. If Fauci uttered a truism, it reverberated across the media world as gospel—but also as a sly putdown of the oblivious, oafish president. So, under the Doctrine of Media Untruth, the more the Fauci hallowing grew, the more we knew he had feet of clay.

The more Fauci was brilliant, prescient and sibyllic, the more we knew that he came late to the danger, had once declared the virus to be not much of a threat, suggested that hook-ups and cruise trips need not be too much derailed by the virus, declared that opening up locked-down states would be a terrible idea, fueled wild modeling estimates of several hundreds of thousands soon to die from the virus, doubted the efficacy of masks, and warned we should not expect an effective vaccination for years.

In other words, under the Doctrine of Media Untruth, the more Fauci was turned into a god and an anti-Trump avenging angel, the more he was human and not especially any more prescient medically than Trump was politically.

Today, the public knows that if Fauci issues a periodic warning from on high, listeners should contextualize it as a valuable data bit, collate his warning with underappreciated economic realities, consider that it might be seen as a subtle putdown of Trump, and move on—all the more so as the media blares out that Trump ignores the latest brilliant forecast from the Einsteinian viral master.

Trump Draws Them Out

The hatred of Donald Trump explains some, but not all, media bias. During the Obama years, a media cohort came of age assuming that the hip, young, educated, urban classes like itself were in permanent ascendance. It did not need to worry about listening to others, venturing beyond coastal corridors, or questioning whether it was really educated or merely branded with mostly mediocre degrees.

Being in the media was analogous to being issued a union card or belonging to the late Soviet party: one was part of an unthinking herd, mouthing platitudes, and hoping to get by and ahead that way.

When knowledge, wisdom, independent thought, even basic competence were no longer requisites for success, then the media naturally slid into mediocrity, valued youth and looks, rank partisanship, obeisance to conventions and stereotypes, and mastered networking and obsequiousness instead of valuing independence.blob:https://rodolfoscafe.wordpress.com/bc4a7576-32e0-4540-88d3-c58b7d80bd53

Trump’s antics simply lured the snails out of their shells and showed the public they were glorified slugs all along.

Should you hate the media?

Bill O Reilley | Jan. 19, .2020

Should You Hate the Media?

1975 was an exciting time to be at Boston University’s School of Public Communication. There we were, about 30 students seeking a Master’s Degree in Broadcast Journalism. All of us thought our quest was noble, that we would become purveyors of truth, skilled fact-finders and truth-tellers in the Watergate tradition. The lessons presented were well worth the tens of thousands of dollars I had to pay for them. Forty-five years later, having reached the top of my profession, I generally despise my own industry, something I never could have predicted. Here’s why. The national TV press is presently controlled by six major corporations that use their vast power to profiteer while attempting to destroy ideological enemies. The coverage of Donald Trump’s presidency has proved that statement beyond any reasonable doubt. The stage was set early when a New York Times columnist wrote that because Mr. Trump was so loathsome (to him and his liberal colleagues), the basic tenets of fair journalism no longer applied. Get Trump was the new rule. The mandate of an honest journalist is to seek the truth, even if the facts of a story go against your personal belief system. It is wrong to simply publish accusation and allegations, you must scrutinize all charges. If you cannot find solid facts to prove a story, you then must balance it – giving both sides equal weight. Did that happen in the Russian-collusion situation? Of course not. The New York Times and Washington Post printed story after story damning the Trump operation. The network news and CNN took their cues from those liberal papers, constantly deriding the President and those who supported him. Then Special Counsel Robert Mueller blew it all up. Federal investigators could find no evidence of collusion. But no apology for unbalanced and fallacious coverage was heard from the corrupt national media. Instead, it segued into the shameful impeachment hysteria. Please understand this: the primary reason the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat members knew the national press would give them cover and blatant support. The media portrayed Adam Schiff and other anti-Trump zealots as heroes. This despite strong evidence the Ukraine whistle-blower secretly coordinated with Schiff, a blatantly political and deceptive act. From the very beginning, there was no balanced coverage of the impeachment story, no attempt to put forth both sides or to provide perspective. Mr. Trump was portrayed as guilty of “high crimes” in the Times and Post, as well as on television, in Hollywood, and in the publishing industry. Any high profile person who had the temerity to disagree was mocked or worse. The cold truth is that the men who preside over The New York Times and The Washington Post, and they are all men, believe THEY should be running the United States, not Donald Trump, who is a vulgarian in their eyes. These men well know the Democratic Party will blindly follow their editorial lead as will TV news executives at CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS. Thus, the so called “free press” in America has become an industry that now seeks power over Americans. The far left vision these operations usually champion cannot be realized at the ballot box, the bosses know that. So it must be imposed by destroying progressive opposition, which the media does with enthusiasm. Just ask Brett Kavanaugh. The key question is: how many of us realize what is actually happening with the dishonest, power mad media? Impossible to say. But for those who do understand the corruption, the danger to American freedom is obvious. And that is why I have come to despise my own industry. Posted by Bill O’Reilly