I don’t know if Senator Cornyn will leave this post on Twitter/X up, but “Over 18,000 ‘gotaways’ slipped into the US in 16 days,” is only part of our border crisis that has concerned me and millions of Americans for a long time. Yet, until the October 7th Hamas attack, penetrating the Israeli border, brutally massacring over 1,400 civilians and taking hundreds hostage, our liberal media and Democrats, paid lip service to the Democrats open borders policies. President Biden named Vice President, Kamala Harris to head up policy efforts to stem migration in March of 2021 and she downplayed the problem.
This post isn’t going to be just bashing the liberal media and Democrats or promoting Trump over Biden, because frankly I wish both of them would retire from politics. Where many people, myself included, are struggling is deciding what media sources are reliable or is blanketly trusting or not trusting everything certain media or journalists report a better approach? Or should we look at a variety of sources from various parts of the political spectrum, since the term “mainstream media” no longer seems to mean moderate or centrist? It’s really hard to decide what media to trust, because even the traditional standards most news media relied on with editing have disappeared in the internet age, where “stealth-editing” happens constantly and brings to mind the oft-repeated Orwell quote:
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984
The liberal media played along with the Dem effort to criticize the Trump border policies and efforts to secure our border, but also worked to discredit FOX News reporting on our border crisis. This politicized media reporting actively downplays a real threat to the safety of all of us.
I am certainly not a Trump fan, but for all the liberal media and Dem hysteria about Trump, his foreign policies were better for America and the bigger issue is all of us are at risk of increasing crime from the waves of Mexican drug cartel activities our porous border facilitates and there’s a very real risk of terrorists entering our country unnoticed.
Here’s another example of the liberal media carrying water to prop up a failed Biden administration foreign policy effort – Biden reversing the Trump ban on aid to Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas (a group the US has designated a terrorist group since 1997). Well, that reversal actually helped fund Hamas, who then launched a horrific terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th.
There’s a lot of face-saving efforts (and revisionist history) going on in America by what I’ll loosely call the liberal elite. This crowd floods liberal media with commentary (and edicts), but most of all labels and disparages people who don’t’ agree or dare question the accepted wisdom that comes from on high from the “expert class” on anything from COVID, to the BLM movement, to the open border, to just about any policy pushed by the political Left in America.
I do believe in listening to subject matter experts, but I also believe in being able to question them. And when some subject matter experts, who challenge the prevailing view, are silenced, like what happened during COVID, where those dissenting experts in the field had their social media accounts removed and any posts online where their views were advanced censored, well, it’s natural to wonder why no one can ask questions.
The above post on Twitter/X a few days ago shows Foreign Affairs magazine doing stealth editing on their online version to allow Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, in the Biden administration, to edit his essay in their November/December issue, which went to print before Oct. 7th. The National Security Advisor is the senior advisor to the President of the United States on national security issues. In his essay, Sullivan was doing victory laps about the Biden administration ditching the Trump policies in the Middle East and bragging about how the Biden approach had deescalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy. Then Hamas invaded Israel and massacred over 1,400 civilians. The Trump administration had cut off aid, because aid is routinely funneled to supporting terrorism. Biden pledged $290 million in aid to the Palestinians.
That the very programs Sullivan helped craft actually aided Hamas’ Oct. 7th attack is bad enough, but then for Foreign Affairs magazine to stealth edit to allow Sullivan to save face in their online version, after the Biden policy spectacularly failed, speaks not only to how closely the cabal of the liberal elite in media and politics work together to prop each other up, but also speaks to the moral rot.
JK, a frequent commenter on my blog, a few days ago recommended a Foreign Affairs essay, The Dysfunctional Superpower, by Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense and former CIA director, which is in the current Foreign Affairs magazine too. This Gates article is highlighted in this RealClearPolitics article, Bolstering U.S. Foreign Policy by Repairing U.S. Dysfunction, by Peter Berkowitz.
I didn’t subscribe to Foreign Affairs magazine and I have done away with almost all subscriptions over the years, because I’d rather put more money toward other things, especially working on my emergency preparedness efforts. With everything going on in the world, I debated whether I wanted to subscribe to Foreign Affairs just to read Gates essay and the answer was no, but then as I was looking at the subscription information, it also includes access to Foreign Affairs archives and that made me rethink the issue. I did subscribe and their archives go back to their first volume in September 1922. I’ve done a tiny bit of browsing in their archives and plan to do more. The Gates essay is definitely worth reading too.
We’re all going to be dealing with this how to decide what information to trust issue for a long time due to the corruption of the the vast liberal media and the right-wing media, the corruption within the pundit class and most of all the corruption of our political class . Often I find some worthwhile information in a news article, where most of the rest of the article is useless drivel or information I don’t think is reliable. The truth is we’re going to have to become crows, as JK, explained in a comment years ago:
“There’s a somewhat useful methodology label analysts occasionally admit to using. The Crow Method. Don’t know you ever spent much time in barnyards/feedlots. … Next time you find yourself where bovines and crows are gathered, pick one crow and keep eyes on that one crow. If you’ve chosen a smart crow, the crow’ll be following a big bull and everytime the bull drops a load, the crow’ll swoop down and swirl around the bovine waste looking for the few nuggets of undigested golden corn kernels. The crow will take the corn leaving the remainder of the bullshit for the worms.”
“Better to be a Crow. Dirty work but not so dirty as being a worm. Worms’ll swallow anything.”
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