Summary of Election Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election in the
Rights vs. socialism
The American Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to access healthcare, education, jobs, homes, transportation, travel, public speech, their government, and many other rights.
No other country guarantees to its citizens all of the rights that Americans have.
American government is limited, but its citizens’ rights are not. For Americans, rights are unalienable, and within the bounds of law, practicable.
In other countries where rights are limited, government power is correspondingly greater. There’s an inverse relationship between government power and individual rights. They don’t coexist.
Socialists would have us trade away our unlimited rights for a smaller set of rights limited by government regulation, and a much larger basket of government powers. They would have us exchange freedom for government overseers.
Socialists use all sorts of emotional arguments to justify these trades, but in the end, they all lead to degrees of slavery.
Socialists who give up on the market, who give up the right to practice their rights as they personally see fit, make a very poor bargain for themselves, and for all who come after them.
Do you want the option to buy the healthcare you actually need? Or do you want a government bureaucrat to tell you what healthcare you are allowed?
Do you want the option to educate your kids in a curriculum you choose? Or do you want a government bureaucrat to determine what your child may learn at school?
Do you want to practice your own choices about what is best? Or do you want the government making those choices for you based on unproven dubious theories?
Do you want an economy run by consenting makers, sellers and buyers? Or do you want closed markets resistant to invention and creativity regulated by bureaucrats who have no personal skin in the game?
For reasonable people, these types of questions have obvious answers. Why do Leftists appear to lack the common sense necessary to see them?
Amy Wax on Dissent and Disagreement
…and the “familiar litany of sins”
Borking Kavanaugh
Any USSCt nominee who doesn’t pledge allegiance to the flag of RoeVWade, or any of a dozen other PC shibboleths, will get Borked by any means possible. Kavanaugh is the target-du-jour in the Leftodrama. Tomorrow the honor will go to another victim of political correctness. The key concept is that the victimologist posers under political correctness are not the victims at all. They’ve become the perpetrators.
Republican leaders who play games with this tiger only delay the day it turns its appetite for non-compliant flesh on them.
Polis’ Pandering
Publicly accessible digital ledgers using linked cryptographic identification technology, a.k.a. Blockchain, might economically be applied when the technology fits either an existing or a new application. To use the redundant and overused expression, a “use case” must exist.
Such an application would likely require:
- Participants who don’t have a shared private mechanism for trading data.
- Third party involvement in data trading relationships, or supply chains, between participants that is uneconomical.
- A need for public visibility of the substantive data content.
- Linearity: a requirement that each new addition to the chain be calculated with metadata from the previous contribution to the chain.
These are just a few factors that come to mind that might argue in favor of a blockchain application, assuming tools to implement the tech are economically available. Obviously, not every application, and perhaps not most applications for data trading, will fit blockchain technology.
But now comes Jared Polis with his platform declaration of support for blockchain – see: https://polisforcolorado.com/blockchain/
This is analogous to a declaration of support for double entry bookkeeping. Or maybe, “I like computers.”
Technology does not require a political disposition. In fact, the introduction of politics will likely harm, through needless state level encumbrances, a developing accounting technology.
I hope voters take the time to see through Polis’ panderings on this issue. He’s a big government guy who appears challenged about thinking outside of the big government box.
There seems to be an anti-capitalist bias, or distrust, of value-added intermediaries in long-established markets held by proponents in the blockchain movement. And there seems to be a corollary assumption they make that blockchain technology will pave the way for a utopian market scheme of purely economic transactions with minimal or zero profit potential through market verticals, and markets that run through entirely automated mechanisms.
If this sort of thinking were the product of scientific analysis, then fair enough, so be it. But to begin with the assumption, and then proceed to backfill reality to fit the assumption, that’s just wrong.
Utopians. They never learn.
The best response is no response
The best response to Leftist violence is to starve it of attention. Theater only works with an audience present. Don’t attend, only publish the conflicts on social media alongside critical analysis. Don’t give the barbarians meme space. Leave the angry Left alone to demonstrate and yell at itself.
What possible reason exists to confront it in the streets anyway? Few arguments, however reasonably delivered, could be sufficiently compelling to change a zealots mind during a mob event. Confrontation sustains the mob, and that’s exactly what the mob is there to generate.
Philosophical arguments aren’t settled in the streets. They require cool heads to even be heard.
The Left knows this. That’s why they keep their people in a constant state of agitation. Don’t help them.
Dems became Left wing zombies
The Civil War Is Here
The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule.
by: Daniel Greenfield
A civil war has begun.
This civil war is very different than the last one. There are no cannons or cavalry charges. The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority. The left has rejected all forms of authority that it doesn’t control.
The left has rejected the outcome of the last two presidential elections won by Republicans. It has rejected the judicial authority of the Supreme Court when it decisions don’t accord with its agenda. It rejects the legislative authority of Congress when it is not dominated by the left.
It rejected the Constitution so long ago that it hardly bears mentioning.
It was for total unilateral executive authority under Obama. And now it’s for states unilaterally deciding what laws they will follow. (As long as that involves defying immigration laws under Trump, not following them under Obama.) It was for the sacrosanct authority of the Senate when it held the majority. Then it decried the Senate as an outmoded institution when the Republicans took it over.
It was for Obama defying the orders of Federal judges, no matter how well grounded in existing law, and it is for Federal judges overriding any order by Trump on any grounds whatsoever. It was for Obama penalizing whistleblowers, but now undermining the government from within has become “patriotic”.
There is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them. But when government officials refuse the orders of the duly elected government because their allegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with the President and Congress, that’s not activism, protest, politics or civil disobedience; it’s treason.
After losing Congress, the left consolidated its authority in the White House. After losing the White House, the left shifted its center of authority to Federal judges and unelected government officials. Each defeat led the radicalized Democrats to relocate from more democratic to less democratic institutions.
This isn’t just hypocrisy. That’s a common political sin. Hypocrites maneuver within the system. The left has no allegiance to the system. It accepts no laws other than those dictated by its ideology.
Democrats have become radicalized by the left. This doesn’t just mean that they pursue all sorts of bad policies. It means that their first and foremost allegiance is to an ideology, not the Constitution, not our country or our system of government. All of those are only to be used as vehicles for their ideology.
That’s why compromise has become impossible.
Our system of government was designed to allow different groups to negotiate their differences. But those differences were supposed to be based around finding shared interests. The most profound of these shared interests was that of a common country based around certain civilizational values. The left has replaced these Founding ideas with radically different notions and principles. It has rejected the primary importance of the country. As a result it shares little in the way of interests or values.
Instead it has retreated to cultural urban and suburban enclaves where it has centralized tremendous amounts of power while disregarding the interests and values of most of the country. If it considers them at all, it is convinced that they will shortly disappear to be replaced by compliant immigrants and college indoctrinated leftists who will form a permanent demographic majority for its agenda.
But it couldn’t wait that long because it is animated by the conviction that enforcing its ideas is urgent and inevitable. And so it turned what had been a hidden transition into an open break.
In the hidden transition, its authority figures had hijacked the law and every political office they held to pursue their ideological agenda. The left had used its vast cultural power to manufacture a consensus that was slowly transitioning the country from American values to its values and agendas. The right had proven largely impotent in the face of a program which corrupted and subverted from within.
The left was enormously successful in this regard. It was so successful that it lost all sense of proportion and decided to be open about its views and to launch a political power struggle after losing an election.
The Democrats were no longer being slowly injected with leftist ideology. Instead the left openly took over and demanded allegiance to open borders, identity politics and environmental fanaticism. The exodus of voters wiped out the Democrats across much of what the left deemed flyover country.
The left responded to democratic defeats by retreating deeper into undemocratic institutions, whether it was the bureaucracy or the corporate media, while doubling down on its political radicalism. It is now openly defying the outcome of a national election using a coalition of bureaucrats, corporations, unelected officials, celebrities and reporters that are based out of its cultural and political enclaves.
It has responded to a lost election by constructing sanctuary cities and states thereby turning a cultural and ideological secession into a legal secession. But while secessionists want to be left alone authoritarians want everyone to follow their laws. The left is an authoritarian movement that wants total compliance with its dictates with severe punishments for those who disobey.
The left describes its actions as principled. But more accurately they are ideological. Officials at various levels of government have rejected the authority of the President of the United States, of Congress and of the Constitution because those are at odds with their radical ideology. Judges have cloaked this rejection in law. Mayors and governors are not even pretending that their actions are lawful.
The choices of this civil war are painfully clear.
We can have a system of government based around the Constitution with democratically elected representatives. Or we can have one based on the ideological principles of the left in which all laws and processes, including elections and the Constitution, are fig leaves for enforcing social justice.
But we cannot have both.
Some civil wars happen when a political conflict can’t be resolved at the political level. The really bad ones happen when an irresolvable political conflict combines with an irresolvable cultural conflict.
That is what we have now.
The left has made it clear that it will not accept the lawful authority of our system of government. It will not accept the outcome of elections. It will not accept these things because they are at odds with its ideology and because they represent the will of large portions of the country whom they despise.
The question is what comes next.
The last time around growing tensions began to explode in violent confrontations between extremists on both sides. These extremists were lauded by moderates who mainstreamed their views. The first Republican president was elected and rejected. The political tensions led to conflict and then civil war.
The left doesn’t believe in secession. It’s an authoritarian political movement that has lost democratic authority. There is now a political power struggle underway between the democratically elected officials and the undemocratic machinery of government aided by a handful of judges and local elected officials.
What this really means is that there are two competing governments; the legal government and a treasonous anti-government of the left. If this political conflict progresses, agencies and individuals at every level of government will be asked to demonstrate their allegiance to these two competing governments. And that can swiftly and explosively transform into an actual civil war.
There is no sign that the left understands or is troubled by the implications of the conflict it has initiated. And there are few signs that Democrats properly understand the dangerous road that the radical left is drawing them toward. The left assumes that the winners of a democratic election will back down rather than stand on their authority. It is unprepared for the possibility that democracy won’t die in darkness.
Civil wars end when one side is forced to accept the authority of the other. The left expects everyone to accept its ideological authority. Conservatives expect the left to accept Constitutional authority. The conflict is still political and cultural. It’s being fought in the media and within the government. But if neither side backs down, then it will go beyond words as both sides give contradictory orders.
The left is a treasonous movement. The Democrats became a treasonous organization when they fell under the sway of a movement that rejects our system of government, its laws and its elections. Now their treason is coming to a head. They are engaged in a struggle for power against the government. That’s not protest. It’s not activism. The old treason of the sixties has come of age. A civil war has begun.
This is a primal conflict between a totalitarian system and a democratic system. Its outcome will determine whether we will be a free nation or a nation of slaves.
Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266197/civil-war-here-daniel-greenfield
Boldfaced American propaganda
Speech and ideation control targeting young Americans
Reported by: Discoverthenetworks.org
“Indivisible is an organization that seeks to persuade Americans – particularly young people – to believe that big, centralized government can benefit society in a multitude of ways that the private sector cannot. In short, Indivisible’s objective is to “energiz[e] and infor[m] Americans about government’s potential” to ensure “a safe, healthy, just and prosperous future” for all. Asserting that “too much time is taken up debating big government versus small government,” Indivisible contends that “what we need to be discussing is how our government works well,” and why it is indispensable for “accomplishing big things.”
In an effort to “inspire a cultural shift in how Americans think about the role of government in America,” Indivisible is committed to “disrupting and reframing negative media discourse about government,” “creating a network of champions to change the conversation about government in their communities,” and “training the next generation of civic-minded leaders.” Toward these ends, the organization has created an Indivisible Institute that administers a leadership-development program for young people “who share a passion for reclaiming government as our unique tool for addressing tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities.” These “emerging leaders” are taught how “to help … build a new American culture” wherein “the potential and promise of government” is axiomatic.
One of Indivisible’s major projects is its “Pave the Way” video contest, whose name derives from the notion that government is “literally paving our way with road construction and interstates.” This contest offers cash prizes to young people who produce quality videos of interviews wherein small-business owners tell “how government paved the way for their business’ success” by means of things like the GI Bill, the Affordable Care Act, Small Business Administration loan programs, and infrastructure spending.
Another key initiative of Indivisible is its “I Love My” program, which offers information and talking points designed to highlight the many benefits of government. On the premise that “it’s amazing how much government is doing behind the scenes to make our lives better every day,” Indivisible argues that the media should make a special effort to “show [that] our public systems and structures [are] usually so well run that we don’t notice them at all.” One such structure, says Indivisible, is the U.S. Postal Service, which “makes our businesses better,” “helps our communities function,” “makes our democracy work,” and “is the reason our country works at all.”
Similarly, another section of the “I Love My” program teaches people to how to speak about taxes in a way that emphasizes their usefulness in helping government to serve “the common good,” rather than in a way that casts them in a negative light. “Don’t talk about taxes as a ‘burden‘ or something from which we need ‘relief,’” Indivisible advises. “These [terms] are inherently negative and they cue up the dominant thinking that taxes are bad. Instead, talk about taxes as ‘loads’ to be carried or shared.” Moreover, says Indivisible: “Don’t call people ‘taxpayers‘ – it limits the conversation to only one side of the ledger (costs, not benefits). Instead, talk about people as ‘residents’ or ‘citizens’ or ‘member[s] of our community’ – it highlights that we are all people who both contribute to and benefit from public systems and structures.”
Indivisible’s “My Take” program features interviews where “real people” are asked to articulate “their feelings [about] government” and their various interactions with it. For example, the interviewees are asked: (a) “What is your favorite thing that government does?” (b) “Who is your government hero who is not an elected official?” (c) “What thing that government does do you think would surprise most Americans?”
Indivisible’s “Reality Check” program seeks to “expos[e] the reality behind myths and misunderstandings about government,” which ultimately serves as “our tool to help us solve big problems together.”
Reclaiming Government for America’s Future is an Indivisible research project consisting of reports, videos, and webinars that aim to counter the popular notion that government “is too big, intrusive, untrustworthy, and controlled by powerful elites” who have little interest in using it as “a tool for the common good.” Topos Partnership conducted this research on behalf of Indivisible, Public Works, and a number of partner organizations in Oregon, North Carolina, Nebraska, Michigan, Arkansas, and Colorado. The overarching objective of the project is to spell out ways in which progressives can effectively “shift conversations and begin to change the cultural common sense about government.”
Politics of the Swarm
“Indivisible” groups across the U.S. take inspirations from the success of the previously-reviled “astroturf” Tea Party, from the militant ANTIFA Left wing who practice violence to preclude counter revolutionary messages from being heard, from the Occupy campers, and all of it underpinned by a love of Marxism, sympathy for communism, hatred of capitalism, and revulsion over the evil counter-revolutionary Republicans.
But that’s not the message they present to the rest of the world—the Dar al-Harb [House of War]—the U.S. became for them after the recent election.
In the new battle space, forget philosophy, argument, cases, constructs, reasoning, laws, precedent, decorum, and civil behavior. Enter the swarm—used to be called the mob. But where the mob was random and uncontrolled, the swarm is targeted and strategic.
The swarm intends to overwhelm, not through a Cloward-Piven system-saturation strategy, but through crowding out the head space, the message space of the public domain, from the opposition—the illegitimate non-communist counter revolutionaries currently holding public office.
With what content, one might ask, and here’s the new twist. It’s nothing. Or something. It does not matter! The message is irrelevant except as a temporary placeholder to crowd out the opposition message. Counter revolutionaries are so far beneath the Left’s contempt, they’re not even worth an argument.
Instead, they get short, shouted, repetitive, symbolic phrases, fitted to sound bites. No conversation, no debate, because no one wants to be seen talking to a counter revolutionary dhimmi.
The swarm intends to foreclose discussion and provoke suppression. If they get lucky, maybe create a few martyrs for the movement. They intend to exacerbate normal human relations by politicizing everything to foreclose peaceful constructive communications. Peace does not serve their interest in revolution.
Any form of engagement aggravates the swarm. Proximity or adjacency feeds it with targets to focus outrage upon.
So how should civil society, the descendants of our Western intellectual heritage, live alongside these extremely unpleasant, and sometimes outright destructive, swarming communist agents?
It seems prudent to keep a safe distance from them when they’re in outrage mode. Perhaps if enough people stop enabling them and leave them alone to burn through their tantrums among themselves, they’ll eventually burn themselves out and settle down.
There’s plenty of advice on the internet for dealing with tantrums in children, advice that might inform a rational approach to political tantrums by Leftist adults.
Meanwhile, the political adults in the room should carry on with the constructive chores that come with adulthood. To this end they should continue to publish their constructive ideas, present their solutions using reasonable persuasion, and most importantly, stop taking the Left’s tantrums as serious political statements.
To elevate the swarm’s messaging to the level of our core constitutional structures, besides being an absurd equivocation, seriously undervalues the work product from the Founders who built our republic, and we should never forget that hindsight.
The Rule of Law?
“Connected by leadership”
America has been had
President Trump, whatever else you do, you must get the Muslim Brotherhood OUT of our government, military and federal agencies.
http://unconstrainedanalytics.org/resources/
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263921/our-catastrophic-failure-jihad-denial-daniel-greenfield
buyer’s remorse
repudiating the Left
We had an election November 8th which repudiated Democrat policies on immigration, economics, political Islam, encroaching federalism, regulatory repression, health insurance, domestic energy, military execution and preparedness, international trade, taxation, media propaganda, political environmentalism, entitlement growth, and the list goes on…
Our President and his party seem in deep denial about the depth of this repudiation. In fact to hear them tell it, all of their policies, and they themselves, were somehow affirmed on November 8th! So, now they’re busy redefining reality to fit this purported affirmation.
Part of their strategy involves promoting domestic civil unrest because bad news sells more easily than good – to suck up the intellectual energy of the country and redirect it back on to their agenda. Despite the country having repudiated their world view, they’ve doubled down on their world view.
In classic cult behavior, they’re reinforcing their boundary positions to occupy outsiders with skirmishes and prevent the inner sanctum of liberal mythologies from exposure to the purifying sunlight of objective scrutiny about the outcomes that never materialize under Leftism.
Non Leftists must continue to offer cleansing prescriptions of free markets, reduced federalism, elimination of autocratic regulation, individual responsibility, and removing government from our free lives, to name a few.
A Leftist future in no way contributes to the pursuit of happiness in America. The Left depend on strife, division, intervention, autocracy, and suppression. Leftist leadership comfortably promotes these destructive vectors for the greater good.
We’ve just had 8 years of discovery about who’s greater good concerns them most, and we’ve had enough of the self interest of Leftist leaders. It’s time our government re-established conditions for citizens to re-assume responsibility for their own self interests. We know best what we need and must do.
It’s apparent the Left, the progenitors of government against the people, will fight us every step of the way, for the greater good of course.
BLM – another false narrative from the Left
looking out for #1 – and that ain’t you
Clinton thinks that distributing money financed by government debt, and redistributing tax money to entitlement beneficiaries and government spending targets, are preferable to allowing citizens to choose how best to spend their own money, and avoiding government debt altogether.
That’s because in the citizen-self-directed model, Clinton is superfluous.
In the name of doing good, Clinton and the Left are all about creating roles for themselves. To be sure, they probably want to do good as well, but if they weren’t getting rich and powerful in the deal, they’d do something else.
Interestingly, the only roles they seem to know how to create are ones that involve dictating other people’s behavior.
They seem to have no idea about how to create and run a sustainable market enterprise that makes a net addition of value to the economy, provides paying jobs, and succeeds solely from the voluntary cooperation, without coercion, of all parties in the exchange.
But they have no problem telling everyone else in the country how to live.
In the land of the free and the home of the brave, why do so many people fall for the Left’s confidence scheme? None of the Left’s excuses for socialist mechanisms hold up under the slightest scrutiny.
The tip off for me is how quickly the Left get upset and start to freak out when questioned about their methods. It tells me that on some level that they won’t face, they fear how wrong they are.
Denver, Cleveland, here they come….
A protest leader talks about "militant tactics" & "self-defense" to shut down "Nazi recruitment rally" @ABC10 pic.twitter.com/fpIcIKrz1X
— Frances Wang (@ABC10Frances) June 26, 2016
…in the name of compassion, of course.
“Often contradictory in his views on atheism and religion, Rousseau nevertheless was certain of one thing: that the State should be the final arbiter of the human condition, in the name of something he called the General Will. Only the State, he thought, could make postlapsarian man well again. One can practically smell the fascism coming off his pages, all in the name of compassion, of course. No wonder his more perceptive contemporaries, including Voltaire, considered him a monster.
Many others, however, were greatly influenced by him, including most of the great monsters of the twentieth century. Without Rousseau, Marx is unthinkable; without Marx, Lenin is unthinkable; without Lenin, Stalin is unthinkable, without Stalin, Mao is unthinkable; without Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot are unthinkable.”
Michael Walsh, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,” 2015, p. 137-8.
Benghazi After All These Years
Posted by Stilton Jarlsberg at his excellent blog – Hope n’ Change Cartoons
“As much as we’d like this to be a truly definitive commentary about Hillary’s testimony at the Benghazi hearing, at the time of this writing there are still hours to go…so we’ll just have to do the best we can.
In a nutshell, Hillary has been doing a fine job of being imperious, calm, and inhumanly disinterested in the deaths she has accepted “responsibility” (but not blame) for. Much like Jack the Ripper, you have to at least give her credit for being skilled at her craft.
Elijah Cummings, the ranking (emphasis on “rank”) Democrat on the committee has spent the day covering Hillary’s ass like a pair of overstretched panties from Lane Bryant, actually going so far as to pronounce the entire committee a political construct with no other purpose than to hurt Hillary’s chances to become president. It is worth noting that Cummings knows for a fact that this isn’t true, essentially giving him the same culpability (albeit after the fact) as the terrorists who burned our embassy and murdered American citizens.
As for Hillary, she seemed unbothered by the revelations that on the night of the attack she sent an email to Chelsea saying that it was a planned attack from Al Qaeda affiliates, and the next day she had a phone call with the Egyptian prime minister in which she explicitly stated that the attack had nothing to do with any Youtube video.
Days later, of course, she trotted out the Youtube video story while speaking in front of the coffins of our dead…she shared it with the families who had lost their sons…Susan Rice took the lie to the Sunday news shoes…and then Barack Obama took the completely fictitious story to the United Nations, where he disparaged America’s freedom of speech, and declared that “the future must not belong to those who would slander Islam.”
All lies.
And all to cover Hillary’s hiney for her complete ineptitude in office, and to cover Barry’s ass for his ludicrous campaign claim (damn near his ONLY campaign claim) that “GM is alive, Bin Laden is dead, and Al Qaeda is on the run.”
So – is the media exploding over these revelations? They are not. It’s relatively safe to say that the media gives not a single damn, very few care about the truth on the Republican side, and no one cares about the truth on the Democratic side except to the extent that they want to hide it.
So as long as Hillary looks calm and composed while lying (which, we should note, sociopaths find remarkably easy) it seems likely that she’ll sail through this hearing and be that much closer to being nominated to run for president.
And should our nation be unfortunate enough (but perhaps deserving enough) to see her win that high office, we can only pray that her personal security will be no greater than that of Ambassador Chris Stevens.”
GasHoax
Rubio on Obama’s Assault on Israel
the community of astroturfers
Sharyl Attkisson, author of Stonewalled, provided a rich paradigm for deconstructing propaganda on her blog yesterday. It wraps up the Elbert County United Front of Leftists – the Prairie Sunny Truthy Plainsy Birdy bunch – in a succinct unified theory that de-cloaks much of their collective bovine scat.
Top 10 Astroturfers
“What’s most successful when it appears to be something it’s not? Astroturf. As in fake grassroots.
The many ways that corporations, special interests and political interests of all stripes exploit media and the Internet to perpetuate astroturf is ever-expanding. Surreptitious astroturf methods are now more important to these interests than traditional lobbying of Congress. There’s an entire PR industry built around it in Washington.
Below are the top ten astroturfers as viewed by respondents in an informal, non-scientific survey.*
TOP 10 ASTROTURFERS
1. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and Everytown
2. Media Matters for America
3. University of California Hastings Professor Dorit Rubenstein Reiss and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Dr. Paul Offit
4. “Science” Blogs such as: Skeptic.com, Skepchick.org, Scienceblogs.com (Respectful Insolence), Popsci.com and SkepticalRaptors.com
5. Mother Jones
6. Salon.com and Vox.com
7. White House press briefings and press secretary Josh Earnest
8. Daily Kos and The Huffington Post
9. CNN, NBC, New York Times, Politico and Talking Points Memo (TPM)
10. MSNBC, Slate.com, Los Angeles Times and Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC and Jon Stewart.
Astroturfers often disguise themselves and publish blogs, write letters to the editor, produce ads, start non-profits, establish Facebook and Twitter accounts, edit Wikipedia pages or simply post comments online to try to fool you into thinking an independent or grassroots movement is speaking. They use their partners in blogs and in the news media in an attempt to lend an air of legitimacy or impartiality to their efforts.
Astroturf’s biggest accomplishment is when it crosses over into semi-trusted news organizations that unquestioningly cite or copy it.
The whole point of astroturf is to try to convince you there’s widespread support for or against an agenda when there’s not.
The language of astroturfers and propagandists include trademark inflammatory terms such as: anti, nutty, quack, crank, pseudo-science, debunking, conspiracy theory, deniers and junk science. Sometimes astroturfers claim to “debunk myths” that aren’t myths at all. They declare debates over that aren’t over. They claim that “everybody agrees” when everyone doesn’t agree. They aim to make you think you’re an outlier when you’re not.
Astroturfers and propagandists tend to attack and controversialize the news organizations, personalities and people surrounding an issue rather than sticking to the facts. They try to censor and silence topics and speakers rather than engage them. And most of all, they reserve all their expressed skepticism for those who expose wrongdoing rather than the wrongdoers. In other words, instead of questioning authority, they question those who question authority.
Much of this sounds familiar to many Americans. The results of an informal, non-scientific poll identify groups related to Gun Safety Action Fund, Inc. as top Astroturf efforts. These groups include Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, Everytown, Everytown for Gun Safety, Gun Sense, It’s Time for Gun Sense in America, Gun Sense Voter, I’m a Gun Sense Voter, Moms Take the Hill and Stroller Jam.
The groups present themselves as grassroots organizations of “mayors, moms survivors and everyday Americans.” They are spearheaded by former New York Mayor and multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg, and former PR professional and mother Shannon Watts. Last year, they announced a $50 million political campaign to try to counter the efforts of the formidable gun rights lobby.
Second to the gun control groups in being identified as a top disseminator of astroturf and propaganda is the controversial, left wing blog Media Matters for America with the stated goal of waging “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” against FOX News. More broadly, Media Matters acts on behalf of the interests of Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration, sometimes in direct consultation with Obama officials. It was founded by the troubled Democratic political operative David Brock, who formed the super-Political Action Committee (PAC) American Bridge that raised funds to help elect liberal Democrats to Congress. Brock also served on the board of the super-PAC Priorities USA, which announced support for Hillary Clinton’s potential run for president.
A close third is an array of blogs that use words such as “science” and “skeptic” in their titles or propaganda in an attempt to portray an image of neutrality and logic when they are often fighting established science and serving pro-pharmaceutical industry agendas. These include: ScienceBlogs.com (using the pseudonym “Orac”); vaccine inventor Dr. Paul Offit of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who earned an undisclosed fortune from Merck pharmaceuticals; and his apparent replacement in trolling blogs Dorit Rubenstein Reiss. She is a law professor at the University of California Hastings and a frequent contributor to SkepticalRaptors.com.
A final category frequently mentioned is quasi-news organizations that sometimes throw readers off the astroturf trail because they publish some legitimate news-type or pop-culture stories, but mix in propaganda or astroturf. These sources tend to be highly-cited by the unquestioning traditional news media either to advance an agenda, or in the media’s attempt to be hip and edgy or “get clicks.”
Sometimes, astroturf is in the eye of the beholder. But no matter how you see it, there is no short supply.”
pick a little talk a little cheep cheep cheep
“Saying anything to push their agenda”
The glaring misrepresentation that the evidently buzzed hive-mind of Elbert County leftists who will “say anything to push their agenda,” used to justify their latest assault on Elbert County conservative voters, is that BOCC officials represent a “very small minority of Elbert County voters.”
In the left’s Merlinesque reverse reality, the winners of BOCC elections don’t actually represent the majority of voters. Enter the appointed leftist leaders of Elbert County – career bureaucrats who insinuate themselves into citizen advisory committees to represent “grass roots involvement” without harmful [non-leftist] “ideologies.” And the more of these “imminently qualified” self-serving public-servants we have to control the free citizens of Elbert County, the better.
But how come these obviously qualified leftist individuals never win an election? That’s easy. We, the voters, are all stupid – so stupid we don’t even understand basic words like hypocrisy.
Thank goodness local leftists exist to abjectly demonstrate how hypocrisy works – how election losers are really winners, how a minority of leftists really represent a majority of grass roots voters, and how self-anointed government-obsessed totalitarians are really the voice of Elbert County people.
Perhaps leftist “grass” roots hypocrites should lay off the grass before presuming to dictate more truth to Colorado.
(as) If
The hubris shown by the New Plains Democrats who changed their web site domain to Truth Colorado blows my mind.
Truth – an objective concept – can only potentially mean something as an observation by other people. And even then the concept requires substantiation. Truth, subjectively announced about oneself, amounts to the puffing of carnival barkers and snake oil salesmen.
Content from the new truth site is no different than that of the old plains site with its maundering innuendo against anyone not liberal, and long-winded leftist positions on various agenda projects.
The local loopy left have gone far beyond the point of reasonable forbearance. The harm they steadfastly continue to inflict on this community is expensive. Preventing an economy from developing – promoting the impoverishment of a population – holding out regulatory strangulation and job prevention with one hand while promoting social services with the other – these should be chargeable offenses.
And they shamelessly call themselves the truth.
They don’t deserve this place.
If—
(‘Brother Square-Toes’—Rewards and Fairies)
How it’s done
In may 2011, the Obama White House chooses Schultz, to be paid with your tax dollars, to handle press on Fast and Furious.
Our relationship is courteous enough. As far as I’m concerned, it largely consists of Schultz trying to discredit those who could harm the administration, and advancing story lines and ideas to help his boss. He seems to have a pretty well-organized network of support. For example, Schultz might suggest to his media contacts that they do a story dissecting controversies in Issa’s background. It could be an editorial or blog written by party loyalists, an article penned by a like-minded reporter, or a favorable piece in the left-wing propaganda blog Media Matters. Schultz then circulates the resulting “story” to the rest of us in the media, sprinkled with his commentary. The strategy counts on the tendency of many bloggers and reporters to copy and codify each other’s work. If things go according to plan, the story is regurgitated and excerpted by so many outlets that it appears, to the uninitiated, to be prevailing thought. It’s self-fulfilling and self-legitimizing. Pretty soon, the theme bleeds into real news organizations and the cycle is complete. The message being delivered, of course, is that there’s no real story behind Fast and Furious. Just a Republican vendetta.
. . .
It’s a propaganda campaign to divert from the damaging facts: controversialize critics to try to turn the focus on personalities instead of the evidence.
Sharyl Attkisson, Stonewalled, 2014, pp. 107-108.
To write, publish, blog, or facebook ideas contrary to the zeitgeist of Leftist orthodoxy is to routinely endure all manner of insult and ad hominem from the reverse barometers of truth and justice trying to saturate “prevailing thought” with their politics.
If the people taking down society are against you, however, one has to treat such attacks as compliments.
Yellow Journalism
Dems for Dorman
to be or not to be
It would be so easy to just become a progressive – to join the chorus of Leftists all quoting the same bad science, the same dead end economics, the same top heavy political and labor groupthink that follows leadership in lock step without dissent. What a simpler existence! You take all of the messy bits of reality that don’t fit the progressive agenda, and just forget about the lot of it. Who cares if it means ignoring that pesky scientific method with its difficult cause-and-effect that requires evidence to found a conclusion. What a royal pain. Forget all that stuff. They don’t use it anyway.
The planet is not warming up. Peak energy gets freshly refuted every month. Top down dictatorship, whether its religious or political spectacularly fails like clockwork every time it’s tried. Human creativity and invention just ruin the rationing/postcarbon/degrowth agenda. But none of it matters to progressives. All of it just rolls off their backs like water off a mallard.
Inside the climate controlled atmosphere of progressive armor, the weather is fine. The days are pleasant, not too hot or cold. And when dissonant ideas attempt to penetrate the ramparts, a ready made script of rules for radicals, like leukocytes to a wound, closes the breach, and obviates the necessity for further thought.
You almost have to admire the simplicity of a system capable of a-priori refutation of all competing ideas without ever having to actually construct a cogent counter argument. And the substitution of physical force for intellectual reason is a stroke of brilliance. Might is right. Who knew? Who would’ve thought that a group could actually succeed on brute force alone! I mean, most groups in history who gained power through force and suppression at least paid lip service to some novel idea. But not progressives!
Ideas just gum things up and get in the way of their experiencing the quiet contemplation of pure power. Best not to break stride. Just keep marching. Keep chanting. Keep demonstrating. Keep shouting. Keep fighting. Cause harm, and if necessary, kill. The willingness to kill gives them all the edge they need. Barbarity works.
History contains many lessons for winning strategies that don’t require intellectual honesty, provable science, fairness, justice, or moral approval. The progressives learned to get their way by walking through the opposition, not around them. And it doesn’t matter what the opposition is saying. Just shut them up, shut them down, ignore them, ridicule them, stomp them, and march on.
The pleasant weather around the well insulated powerful progressive is worth protecting. It is its own reward – a tautological compact of self-referential and self-reinforcing happiness that will not be disturbed.
And just look at what you have to look forward to if you don’t join them. Those who don’t join the progressive movement are an enemy to be crushed. They get to receive every indignation and insult known to man on a daily basis. They get to have all of their reasonable world view, proven in science, demonstrated in unrevised history to maximize real human progress and wealth, ridiculed as insanity.
So this is why I say maybe it would just be easier to join them. Take the blue pill and get with their program because the real world is full of nasty progressives who don’t want you messing with their matrix.
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