Category: Fake news

Results trump rage

By Steve Woodward

By now we know beyond a doubt that the corrupt mainstream media, Democrats, feminists, and Never Trumpers among Republicans despise President Donald Trump on numerous levels and gleefully ignore substance (results of policies) to advance the narrative that he is unfit to hold the office.

Even Trump believers/supporters along with practical Americans who want a strong economy, a secure southern border and a mighty military struggle to defend Trump. They wish he would not tweet, that he would not punch back against every critic, or that he would not joke about pursuing a third term (unconstitutional).

A young Conservative media prodigy, Kassy Dillon, set off a Twitter-storm when she dared to be forthcoming about Trump. On September 13, the Pepperdine University graduate student and founder of the Lone Conservative media platform tweeted, “Here’s the thing: I’m voting for Trump but I wouldn’t be friends with Trump. I’m not voting for (Democrat Andy) Yang but I’d definitely be his friend.”

Dillon’s pragmatic approach to political ideology is not new. She focuses on issues, policy and substance. She could care less if she’d rather not have a Diet Coke with the President. In fact, prolific Twitter user Trump even replied to her tweet. “I’m OK with that!”

A recent survey by the Heritage Foundation’s Heritage Action for America arm sheds light on a dire necessity: Republican and independent voters in 2020 must embrace the issues and debate anti-Trumpers on substance. There is a temptation to waste time condemning false “reporting” about Trump’s tax returns, “whistle blower” allegations, Justice Kavanaugh’s past or the White-House-in-crisis narrative. We’ve been doing this since November 2016 to no avail.

By engaging voters in three comprehensive surveys, Heritage Action sought “to find out what issues currently motivate the coalition that elected Donald Trump and Republican congressional majorities in 2016, so that we can keep that coalition together and expand it while simultaneously advancing the conservative ideas we hold dear.

“We found that the GOP isn’t connecting the dots between its own innate conservative principles and voters’ preferences—which, our polling reveals, are more similar than many realize.” Let that sink in.

Some of the most notable revelations include:

  • Voters in five key swing states overwhelmingly reject single-payer healthcare, with 65% of respondents opposing it.
  • Common ground between Democrats, Republicans and independents is found in multiple categories. Increased funding for job training (95% Dems/81% GOP/86% IND). Support for mandatory medical care for infants surviving attempted abortion (71% Dems/85% GOP/76% IND). Across all voter categories, 75% are certain or hopeful that their family’s financial situation will improve going forward (56% Dems/88% GOP/74% IND).
  • Even on the subject of taxes, there is strong evidence that Trump administration economic policy will sway independents and attract begrudging approval from Democrats. 58% of respondents say taxes on middle class Americans are “too high” (63% Dems/53% GOP/60% IND). And, there is strong agreement that taxes paid by small businesses are too high (52% Dems/64% GOP/60% IND).
  • A clear majority, 57%, of general election voters say national Democrats are “becoming increasingly extremist”, while 65% oppose Socialism.

It is not extremism alone that likely will plague the Democrat nominee for President in 2020, as well as other Democrat Congressional candidates nationwide. It is their rampant corruption and disregard for voters, willfully concealed by a compliant media. Democrats recently unveiled their newest “reason” to impeach Trump — his conversation, as reported by an unidentified whistleblower, with Ukraine’s newly elected president.

Former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, who pretends to be challenging Trump for the 2020 Republican nomination, said Trump committed treason if he asked Ukraine’s leader to investigate Joe Biden’s (very shady) interaction with Ukraine when he was vice president under Barack Obama. “The penalty for treason,” Weld said on MSNBC, “is death.”

The death knell is chiming for any pretense of substantive political debate and any evidence that the rule of law applies to both parties. Beneath the din, the will and wishes of American voters slip further away, quaint relics of the past.

 

 

 

 

Hurricane Deception

By Steve Woodward

The tweet was snarky, as is to be expected. It speculated that President Donald Trump cancelled a scheduled trip to Poland, not because of the looming threat of Hurricane Dorian, but because he is lazy and needed an excuse to spend the holiday weekend playing golf, as usual.

Imagine the false outrage had Trump made the trip to Poland? The twitter-sphere would have condemned him for abandoning the homeland amid yet another climate change-generated natural disaster. Dorian is Trump’s Katrina!

Over on Facebook, we’ve encountered a chorus of whiners reacting to Trump’s forthcoming appearance in Fayetteville, NC (Sept. 9), on the eve of a special election for a U.S. congressional seat in NC-9. The outrage centers on a narrative that Trump’s 2020 campaign is saddling municipalities with unprecedented costs, closing in on $1 million, for additional security and other logistical needs when he rolls into to town for his signature rallies.

Naturally, no one mentions how the campaigns of sitting presidents seeking re-election handled these costs in the past. George W. Bush and Barack Obama were called out for similar fiscal “abuses”. Obama used Air Force One to travel with then Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for a 2016 joint campaign appearance, but a Bush era ethics lawyer had no issues with the arrangement.

It’s an unavoidable problem, Richard Painter said in an interview with ABC News, for presidents who are simultaneously commanders-in-chiefs and the leaders of their respective political parties.

“I don’t think this is controversial,” Painter said. “A president that won’t campaign for his own party isn’t the leader of his own party. If someone claimed that President Bush was abusing taxpayer money to campaign, we would have laughed at that.”

But in the era of Trump this type of reasoned analysis is no longer possible. The narratives build one upon the other in the media’s endless quest to diminish him and marginalize his administration and supporters. His campaign doesn’t reimburse? Of course not, as a businessman he was famous, or so it goes, for refusing to pay contractors what they were owed.  Everybody knows that (because it has been repeated for three years running). He’s lazy because he plays rounds of golf despite working more hours than any president since perhaps Abe Lincoln (never mentioned), and granting more media access than any president ever (not even close).

Authors Gary Marcus and Annie Duke explain how unrelenting fake news perpetuates Trump delusion syndrome in a piece they co-authored for The Wall Street Journal, which lays out how the Left and its compliant media hold the truth hostage so effectively. It is a simple matter of exploiting behavior.

In a world of information overload and distraction wrought by technology and daily life as we know it “we tend to assume that whatever we hear is true.” Admittedly, this is an objectionable generalization but it is not aimed at readers of this blog. It is aimed at the growing sector of society identified by Rush Limbaugh as the “low information voter.”

The authors site numerous studies that have demonstrated how vulnerable human beings are to being snookered. A 2017 study by faculty at New York University examined around 500,000 social media messages. Subtle words such as “hate”, “destroy” or “blame” accelerate the spread of these messages by 20% per emotional word.

“Fake news tends to avoid nuance or neutral language and frequently adds layers of emotion and moralizing — all of which makes false items spread much faster than the real thing,” Marcus and Duke wrote. They conclude a war can be waged on fake news by teaching “information literacy” across all age groups.

In WSJ August 31 – September 1 editions, the newspaper profiles prolific novelist Salmon Rushdie. His 14th just-published novel is a contemporary version of a 17th-century classic, “Don Quixote”. His motivation for writing it partially draws on the fake news and reality TV phenomena from which almost no one readily escapes.

“We live in a moment in which truth is stranger than fiction,” Rushdie says, “and so the fiction has to decide how strange it needs to be in order to get close to the truth.”

This week’s fictional thread, which inevitably will work its way back to the Trump White House, is that Hurricane Dorian is another in a series of monster storms delivering “unprecedented” fury.

“The truth is that the storms that are hitting the Caribbean with this intense magnitude are historic, unprecedented, and these storms are manmade storms,” contends Emory University Prof. Tiphanie Yanique in a televised interview with the independent news hour Democracy Now.

The guest and her interviewer, both clearly in lockstep with the climate change narrative, failed to address a well documented chronology of Category 5 hurricanes. The first Cat 5 hurricane in the Atlantic Basin was recorded in 1924, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), followed by 34 more through this year. Only four have hit the United States as a Cat 5 across 95 years.

Now, test your information literacy as you read this concluding sentence: The most intense Cat 5 hurricane to make U.S. landfall hit the Florida Keys on Labor Day 1935. President Roosevelt was blamed, along with climate change.