Category Archives: Culture Wars
Another link for Matt Walsh’s film
Filed under Culture Wars, General Interest
A point of view that shouldn’t be banned
I’ve generally avoided writing about the trans movement, because it mainstreams an ideology that I believe is counter to basic biology and reality. I don’t prefer to live in a world of pretend. I hoped it was a fad movement that would fade away, but it’s part of a determined leftist agenda and steamrolling anyone who challenges it.
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, the Women’s Rights movement was gaining steam and everything was about “Girl Power” and knocking down barriers to women and being a strong-willed girl, I bought into modern feminism. When I joined the Army, reality clashed with my feelings that women can do anything men can and that men and women are interchangeable. I saw women in jobs, that they could not physically do and they happily worked in the orderly room doing secretarial work or moved to some other less grueling job. On paper they remained filling a slot for the grueling job they weren’t doing. That left a readiness gap, because on paper that unit looked fully-staffed. This type of thing happened years later when my husband deployed to Desert Storm too, with pregnant soldiers, who were non-deployable.
Women can enter many traditional male-dominated fields and succeed, but when the rubber meets the road, if you put even the most fit men against the most fit women – the men have more upper-body strength and muscle mass, more endurance and will outperform the women. That reality changed my perspective on “women’s rights,” especially when it’s given more importance than having the strongest, most well-trained fighting force to defend America. Having the best-trained and performing military outweighs women’s rights or any other leftist political ideology.
Modern feminism is a leftist political ideology, that has been going through “waves” by their own definition. That feminist movement has now been consumed by the trans movement. We’re watching “trans girls”(biological males), who would not be top athletes competing against other biological males, now joining girls sports teams and outperforming top girl athletes. We’re supposed to pretend we see no physical size differences – taller, larger upper bodies, etc.
I do think most military jobs, even most non-traditional ones, should be open to women, but a few of the heavy-lifting, grueling combat jobs, I believe are best left to the strongest, most fit men. Even most fit men don’t make it into those jobs. Around the Army, the reality of what’s really going on, has been covered up for decades, because it’s career-suicide for commanders to speak the truth about the realities and now on top of the smiley face, they’ve had to put on about any problems that center on women in the military, due to political pressure, the US military is now into promoting the trans movement too. A leftist political movement now surmounts warfighting capability as a focus and that bodes poorly for America’s national defense. However, even in American families, the trans movement also has been working to eliminate parents rights to decide on irreversible medical procedures for their children or drugs that are really chemical castration drugs renamed ” harmless puberty blockers.”
I’ve never watched Matt Walsh, so I asked someone I know if he knows who Matt Walsh is and he said, “He’s a douche!” After watching the Walsh movie, What is a Woman, well, I can say the person I asked despises right-wing media and viewpoints. He reacted like most of the activists Walsh interviewed and talked to in this movie. However, he is against the trans movement targeting children, so perhaps there’s a tiny bit of common ground there. There’s been a liberal effort to get this movie banned on social media and that’s why I wanted to watch it and that’s why I’m sharing it.
I highly recommend this movie, because Walsh delves into the history of the gender ideology movement, which no one on the Left wants to talk about. The trans proponents he talked to offered circular definitions about gender and emotionally-charged reactions about feelings – no truth or science. I’ll state this clearly, I believe and have believed that the trans movement is a destructive leftist ideology that’s being mainstreamed, it’s a social contagion, and it’s targeting children. I don’t hate “trans people,” but I do believe Americans have a right to speak out and say they do not agree with this movement. I don’t know if this link to the movie will be censored or this entire blog post blocked, but here goes.
Filed under Culture Wars, General Interest
More spin garbage to wade through
This blog post is politics and jumps around a bit. It’s a little of this and a little of that, but the spin information war ties it all together. Yesterday, John Durham’s final report on his Trump-Russia investigation was finally released. I haven’t even looked at it and I’m not going to waste my time pouring over it, as I used to do with government reports. All of the Clinton and Dem efforts to invent, ignite and then fan the flames of “Trump-Russia Collusion” was to create and operate a years-long mass media spin information war effort to destroy Donald Trump.
Andrew C. McCarthy wrote a book, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency in 2019, which I listened to the audiobook version on Hoopla a few years ago and that covered much of the corruption I’ve seen reported with the Durham report. And since I’ve yammered on about the Dem’s corrupt spin information war for decades now, there’s really no point in going through the Durham report with a fine-tooth comb and fuming about the mountains of lies and how the Clinton machine, along with the Obama administration spread via their vast army of foot soldiers in news media and on social media platforms. They all worked tirelessly to amplify and keep these Trump-Russia narratives burning.
The Durham report won’t change a thing.
If House Republicans run headlong into ramping up investigations into the Durham report and rehashing 2016 corruption, with the 2024 presidential election right around the corner, they’ll basically be making a contribution in kind to the Biden campaign. The House Republicans can investigate and make criminal referrals to the DOJ, until the cows come home, and there is no way the Biden DOJ is ever going to prosecute top Democrats or former FBI and intelligence officials, who diligently carried water for them, especially not over Trump-Russia Collusion. You also aren’t going to find many Dems or liberal news media folks who will admit they were wrong about Trump-Russia Collusion. As evidence of this Jake Tapper, tried to admit to getting some facts wrong, in light of the Durham report, and he has been lambasted by Dem pundits relentlessly. He’ll likely be back to propping up the Dem spin narratives, even if they relaunch the Trump-Russia Collusion spin effort (which is likely). Add to that as we move toward a presidential election year, what most Americans will care about is more current issues, not rehashing the 2016 election. Many Trump supporters want to see top Democrat villains in this scandal perp walked and in jail, but that’s never going to happen with the Biden DOJ… or even a DOJ in a Republican administration.
The main thing I wish Republicans had learned from this Trump-Russia Collusion political dirty trick is that the Dem’s brand of spin information war is poison to America’s political system and poison to American culture. The entire Trump-Russia spin narrative was intended to be hyped over liberal news media, and other liberal-controlled media, to include social media. Instead of realizing that the spin war is a surefire way to divide and tear America apart, the lesson a lot of Trump-supporters learned was they just wanted a spin-warrior, who could beat the Democrats at their own spin game. They found their spin warrior in Donald Trump, a former Clinton friend, a man who hired a series of grifters and unqualified nincompoops, who invariably quit or were fired and then showed up on liberal news media to trash him 24/7. How Trump managed to pick so many disloyal and duplicitous people still amazes me, but beyond all that Trump entered politics to advance himself and he turned his WH into a daily Trump vs. the liberal media spin show, which his fans loved.
The truth is the spin war, whether it’s the Democrat version or the Trump version is poison and can only deepen divides in America. Here’s the reality check, politics can’t fix what’s broken, because the American people feed on this partisan political spin theater and we pick a dog in these spin battles.
So, with the Durham report being released yesterday, an IRS whistleblower reported to Congress that he and his entire team, who are investigating Hunter Biden corruption, have been removed from the case:
WASHINGTON – A whistleblower at the Internal Revenue Service, which is investigating Hunter Biden for potential tax violations, told lawmakers Monday his entire team was removed from the probe, according to a letter from his lawyers obtained by USA TODAY.
The letter said the IRS criminal supervisory special agent “was informed that he and his entire investigative team are being removed from the ongoing and sensitive investigation of the high-profile, controversial subject about which our client sought to make whistleblower disclosures to Congress.” The Justice Department informed the whistleblower about the change.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/05/16/hunter-biden-investigation-irs-team-removed/70222248007/
That’s how concerned Democrats are about the Durham report. Hillary, top FBI officials, top Obama officials, like John Brennan and James Clapper, who became liberal media “Trump-Russia Collusion” experts, to give credence to all of the Steele dossier bs, aren’t ever going to be prosecuted and in fact, the liberal media will still give them airtime to keep propping up the Steele dossier lies and trash Durham’s report.
With another presidential election cycle about to kick into high-gear, it’s sure to become even crazier. I’ve found the Clinton machine corruption appalling since the 90s, but they, along with a lot of powerful political players in Washington, are above the law. That’s just the plain truth. The reality is conspiracies are very hard to prosecute and that’s why so many organized crime syndicates get away with it. The FBI and DOJ were implicated in this Trump-Russia Collusion scandal, so they aren’t going to hold themselves accountable. Andrew McCabe, the #2 FBI official under Comey, was already on CNN today spewing lies dismissing Durham’s report. CNN will continue to give McCabe airtime. A 2017 DOJ IG investigation found McCabe lacked candor (lied) repeatedly to investigators and he was fired. CNN still hired him and present him as a former top FBI official – someone with credibility…
The Durham report reaction reminded me of all the other swirling partisan spin dramas. The Biden/House Republican stand-off over the debt ceiling is more pressing, with the deadline and dire consequences for all of us, if the US government defaults. There’s also the Dem green agenda is still being rammed through – from killing fossil fuel to pushing insects onto American dinner plates. A couple weeks ago, NY state became the first state to ban gas stoves in new homes, beginning in 2026. In just the past few days, I’ve seen a few opinion pieces in liberal mainstream media advocating for eating insects. So, the “Great Reset” agenda is real and despite all the “don’t be ridiculous” or “that’s just a right-wing conspiracy theory,” the Great Reset is an effort to expedite the UN’s 2030 agenda, which was approved in 2015. As the radical changes escalate, don’t be surprised. When some Biden official first mentioned the ban on gas stoves, Sen. Chuck Schumer, from NY, tweeted numerous times that no one is banning gas stoves. Then lo’ and behold, NY became the first state a couple weeks ago to pass a gas stove ban. When the media starts pushing some new idea, like eating bugs to save the planet, it’s part of their spin war operations – mass media psychological operations with the goal of mainstreaming that idea. They want Americans to drop their aversion to eating bugs by wrapping it up in being a virtuous, environmentally-responsible citizen. The bad people will be the dreaded meat-eaters.
I wish there was some easy way to plan for how to weather these radical changes, especially the economic turmoil, but there’s not. I’ve been trying to simplify my lifestyle and learn more basic skills. I am continuing to stock up on food, water and supplies too. Working on personal preparedness has become a key focus for me. It should be a key focus of everyone, but unfortunately, I suspect, the vast majority of Americans will wait until the government tells them it’s time to prepare or that the government’s going to fix the problems, but by then it will be way too late. The government that has created all of these major problems, certainly isn’t who I’m trusting to fix anything. Here’s the truth – with the national debt, both parties spend like drunken sailors and politicians on both sides get rich and gain power by fueling divides.
It felt liberating to feel no reason to waste hours pouring over the Durham report and writing about all the disturbing findings. I decided to focus on things in my own life. A skill I never learned was how to properly sharpen knives. I used to have an electric knife sharpener that worked okay, but sharpening knives is a basic skill I never learned. One of my sons was visiting on Sunday and he was preparing a Mother’s Day lunch for us. He asked me if I have any sharp knives in my kitchen and I don’t. I did some googling about knife sharpening and I went ahead and ordered a whetstone set – so, instead of wasting time on Trump-Russia Collusion, I’m going to be practicing how to sharpen knives and working on other projects.
I keep paying attention to prices at the grocery store and nothing in the economy looks optimistic, I can tell you that working on my own preparedness is way more important than getting worked up about corruption in Washington, which I can’t change.
It’s still important to take note of the political corruption and be aware of some news, but I’ve changed my priorities. Before you know it, people you know might start buying into the eating bugs and embracing that, all due to the mass media psychological conditioning that’s being crammed down our throats. Everyday, I find more things I want to learn how to do to become more self-reliant and that’s a much better use of my time than getting worked up about the level of Dem corruption and media corruption. It still amazes me how dramatically the feminist movement took a turn to gay rights and then that veered into the trans movement. It’s been amazing to see drivers of the trans movement are literally destroying prominent liberal feminists, who dare challenge the trans agenda and that tells you who has the power in the feminist movement – it’s the biological men in the trans movement. Anyway, I refuse to participate in these leftist movements or buy into of any of this stuff, but then again, I have always identified myself as an independent, free-thinking American citizen, not as a feminist.
Oh, and before I end this post, everywhere we turn, I expect to be bombarded with more hysterical news about “white supremacy” and dangerous “MAGA Republicans.” Over the weekend President Biden gave an incendiary speech announcing his war against “white supremacy.” Then some weird group, Patriot Front, that is ostensibly a far-right wing hate group showed up to march on the US Capitol. The timing was perfect for liberal news media to spin up Biden’s war against “white supremacy.” I googled this group and on Wikipedia, it says this group is part of a group that split from another alt-right group after the Charlottesville protests. This Patriot Front group comes wearing “uniforms” of khaki pants and blue jackets, and masks. To me it looks like a Democrat false flag operation and that Charlottesville tie was a red flag to me. There were reports of busloads of paid protestors showing up in Charlottesville. Even back in 2016, all sorts of paid political actors and operators showed up at political events to create drama and wreak havoc. This went from plants in audiences to start a commotion, which happened at numerous Trump events or to ask embarrassing questions at both Dem and Republican events, but then there were the reports of busloads of paid protestors that showed up. And yes, the issue of paid protestors is a thing: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-crowds-extortion-20181021-story.html.
For years with all these viral video dramas that fuel a lot of the political spin drama. I’ve told my adult kids that it’s best to ask more questions rather than reacting. I want to know what happened before the events in the video, what happened afterwards, who made the media, where was it shot, when was it shot, and was it edited. We are so used to “reacting” and social media has conditioned us to reacting rather than thinking. They’ve got buttons to click to express your emotions and they encourage controversy.
Think more and react less, is my best advice. Oh, and if you’re smart, you’ll start preparing for hard times, with at least the basics – food, water, supplies. Here again, most people I know rely on the news media and await the government experts to tell them they should be prepared for all sorts of emergencies and hard times. If you’ve been watching the lingering shortage problems, inflation climbing, political instability around the world and all the political and economic turmoil here in America and you haven’t thought, “Geesh, I should probably be prepared, in case things get worse,” then nothing I say can make an impact.
As this push for mainstreaming the idea of eating bugs escalates, pay close attention to people you know – friends, family, acquaintances and see how quickly some people start buying into this. I betcha will be surprised at how quickly this mass media psychological conditioning takes hold – experts galore selling it, celebrities jumping on board selling it and mass media giving it loads of hot air for it to rise. I won’t be surprised if some celebrity food personalities go buggy too.
Tipping points can happen suddenly
In my blog post yesterday I pondered how long Democrats and the leftist elites will stick to their accelerated green- energy transformation plan (the “Great Reset”.) While there’s likely no easy turning back course of action after a certain point in their transformation efforts, the thing is once there’s a massive public opinion shift, often major political shifts follow more rapidly than may have seemed possible even months before. I used the examples of growing public backlash against COVID mitigation efforts and the public backlash against the escalation in crime following Dems embracing the BLM “defund the police” policies.
There has been a growing right-wing populist movement in some countries in Europe and the US too, which bodes poorly for America’s future as a pluralistic society.
And yes, America has always been composed of people of diverse ethnic, racial and religious groups, but we’ve always managed to pull our country together by embracing some common values. Presently, it seems the more extreme views on both sides of our political spectrum scream the loudest and dominate the public spaces, where cultural and political battles keep erupting daily. Moderate voices don’t stand a chance in a spin war. Outrage theater dominates public “discourse.”
I also expect public backlash to accelerate against the transgender movement, against the media-run spin information war, and against social media word police antics that promote the leftist political agenda.
In democratic countries, where people are accustomed to and expect to be able to speak and interact freely, it seems highly unlikely that the left’s embrace of using media as a tool to herd people toward leftist ideological beliefs and coral them from other views will succeed for the long term. People accustomed to speaking freely aren’t likely to passively accept being prodded into submission by massive public-shaming/virtue-signaling political messaging efforts for long. Having social media honchos become de facto Democrat/liberal word police is already facing growing backlash, which will likely escalate.
The economic turmoil and green-energy transformation policies already in motion can’t be easily fixed, but a major derailment of this green dream plan seems very likely to me.
Tipping points often seem to happen much more rapidly than people think possible or expect. In the beginning of this year, I suspect, most Democrats believed they could still continue with their COVID hysteria and push more COVID mitigation policies (power grabs.) They were unprepared for the swift and dramatic shift (the tipping point) in public opinion on COVID policy, to the point that you aren’t hearing Dem political candidates running on COVID policy.
79% of people in an October 2022 Pew Research report said the economy is the top issue. I think most of the culture war that generates so much left vs. right drama in America are really boutique political issues, that while they generate a lot of buzz and fad followers, when push comes to shove and economic hard times hit, no one can afford to buy into these issues. Keeping food on the kitchen table, bills paid and gas in the car become the priority. As the economic situation worsens, fewer and fewer people will want to be lectured about transgender issues or hear about green-energy/climate change. That’s why I believe a tipping point is likely long before this green-energy transformation gets very far. It’s being run on hot air, without even having the necessary infrastructure in existence.
Things may get very messy. Famine, wars, some countries collapsing, civil unrest/civil wars and other awful events are possible around the world or even here, but I remain a believer that principled leadership can make the difference between getting people in a crisis to work together and total mayhem breaking loose. There are still people in America, who will put the political/cultural war drama aside and work together in a crisis.
Unfortunately, those kind of people are extremely rare in either political party these days, where spin kings and queens, people like AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who can lob social media attacks and create non-stop political outrage theater drama daily are the type of people who seem to be getting the most media attention. They’re also attracting large followings, who cheer them on. On the left, if you don’t march in lock-step to the latest culture war cause, you’re toast and on the right, if you don’t foam and froth at the Left, you’re labeled a “RINO” and put out to pasture. That’s why I’m so ambivalent about this upcoming election. I don’t believe politics is going to “save our country” or even get us on a better path.
Interestingly, this same phenomenon happens on social media, where the most sensational headlines and flame-throwing personalities generate massive followings.
However, in a crisis, all these flame-throwers and “spin warriors” are completely useless, because a crisis requires real leadership, not just angry words and catchy sound bites. I’ve met loads of outstanding leaders around the military and even in everyday life. So, I don’t despair. History has shown that sometimes when we least expect it, the most unlikely people step up to the plate and lead.
This is especially true in America. There are all sorts of civic-minded people, who see a problem in America and start a fund-raiser or form a group to work on that problem or just set out and work to fix it themselves. America was built on a spirit of volunteerism.
With that I’m going to end with encouraging you to consider donating time, money or food this holiday season, to help feed people in need.
Feeding America is always looking for help to feed Americans in need. If you don’t want to donate to large organizations, just look around your own community and you can surely find churches, civic organizations, schools, local officials, who can point you toward ways to volunteer to help others.
If you’re worried about the state of America, just try to spread a little hope and encouragement or lend a helping hand to someone else.
Even the smallest flicker of light can defeat the darkness.
Filed under American Character, Culture Wars, General Interest
I refuse!
Today is another politics post. I spent a lot of time today on politics Twitter. I have 54 followers on Twitter, so perhaps it’s all just tweeting into the wind. I hope that maybe one tiny bit I tweet might help powerful voices on the right fight back against the Dem spin info war. This blog post is going to be short, because I don’t feel like posting a lot of links to news stories and other stuff tonight.
I’m just going to share what I am concerned about with the Dems effort to destroy Trump, by any means necessary. I expect the Biden DOJ will try to charge Trump with serious crimes and where that leads I do not know. I don’t know if it will lead to civil unrest, but I am positive that whatever happens in regards to Trump, it won’t end with Trump.
The Dems and political left in America will target any other Republican politicians, who appear to be gaining traction, as is obvious with the endless stream of attacks against Florida governor, Ron DeSantis. So, this is about much more than just Trump.
The left’s culture war has met a lot of resistance, with ordinary Americans speaking out against things like the climate-change zealotry & hysteria, the gender politics, and the attacks on even our American symbols, recently. There was a leak of a FBI bulletin listing American Revolution symbols. FBI Director, Christopher Wray was asked about that in a recent appearance and he pretended like he knew nothing about it, because I feel certain he knew he’d be asked about that. Here’s a quote from a Reason article, American Revolution Images Might Reveal You as a ‘Violent Extremist,’:
“When the FBI puts out a bulletin on symbols “used by Anti-Government or Anti-Authority Violent Extremists,” and it looks like a catalog of T-shirts half the country might want to wear, it’s a strong indication that the feds are way off-base. It gets even sillier when part of the bulletin resembles a brochure for a Revolutionary War museum. Then again, George Washington and the Continental Army were, arguably, “Anti-Government or Anti-Authority Violent Extremists,” which is a reminder that governments aren’t necessarily the good guys”
Beyond all the politics, there’s been a War of Words raging for years now, that propels much of the left’s culture war. When even the sitting president goes to great lengths to target “MAGA Republicans” repeatedly, however that is defined (and that’s the thing – the definition will be fluid), as enemies of the state, I feel certain, that wherever this political drama, with the effort to destroy Trump ends up, Democrats and the Left intend to expand well beyond just certain Republican politicians.
Sorry, I refuse to ever go along with the left’s culture war and spin word games. I have spent over 20 years trying to understand the Dems corrupt spin information war and expose the corruption, in any way I can. I am a law-abiding American citizen, who doesn’t even have a speeding ticket on my record, BUT…
I refuse to use or buy into the spin words they’re trying to cram down our throats. Period!
Filed under Culture Wars, General Interest, Information War, Politics, Public Corruption
More Dem word games in the news
This is a politics blog post. I started trying to give readers a heads up in the beginning of my blog posts, so they can decide whether it’s a topic they want to read about or skip it. Even more than politics, this post is going to be about the destructive, partisan spin information war raging across American news and mass media. Sorry, I got very long-winded in this post, but here goes:
Yesterday, some Biden administration flaks began prepping the spin battlefield (the news venues in America and especially politics Twitter, which is the main spin war battlefield). They began redefining the word “recession” in preparation for the release of the second-quarter GDP data expected on Thursday. This ridiculous redefining, like this “recession” change, goes on constantly and the liberal media often will go along with and even push the left’s redefining efforts, but it’s more insidious than that. Merriam-Webster online in recent years has become a player in the left’s redefining efforts too. This leftist redefining words effort has happened with Wikipedia entries, where I watched a bio being altered in real-time, to fit left-wing political aims. I suspect Google plays along too with altering algorithms to filter search engine results. Twitter and facebook have resorted to just banning certain words and content, while liberal-run fact-checker sites carry water for the Dem spin version of events and terms.
These days people frequently make mention of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, about life in a totalitarian superstate, Oceania. Yes, many of the word game tactics employed in the American spin information war eerily seem like Newspeak, a fictional language, in that Orwell novel. It’s important to look beyond the spin word games and not lose sight of what the main objectives are in the spin information war – destroy the American capitalist system and destroy our constitutional republic – “fundamentally transform America.” Here’s the truth, the things the far-left wants to “fundamentally” transform are essential beliefs, values, and components of our constitutional republic and economic system. Yes, the word games being pushed by political hacks and liberal media do have the 1984, Ministry of Truth vibe. And it’s beyond disturbing. I reread Orwell’s novel, 1984, last year and disliked it as much as I did when I read it as a teenager. I abhor totalitarianism.
Here’s the link to a blog post I wrote in 2016 about the spin word games: The Pieces of the Media Messaging Puzzle.
This spin war is not just benign political messaging or partisan PR efforts, as we’ve been lulled into believing for decades. It’s an actual information war aimed at trying to control mass media in America and use that media dominance to manipulate and control American public opinion. When all of the liberal media venues – news, daytime talk shows and even the scripts in TV shows begin pushing a particular current left-wing hot topic in their culture war, that’s how the political left in America try to drown out opposition and more importantly manipulate Americans into believing the views flooding media are the “mainstream” views.
Anyone who disagrees is a fringe hater, bigot, racist or… deplorable person, who should not be allowed into polite society. Add in that public polling has gained an outsized influence in the spin info war and is used as a tool to con Americans into accepting manufactured polling data, that results from massive efforts to flood mass media with the new accepted views, often replete with new terms and words, that almost overnight replace old words and terms. The most obvious current effort has been with the alphabet gender politics and normalization of transgenderism. All sorts of new made-up gender designations began permeating media many years ago. Back in 2014, facebook added over 50 new gender designations pushing this far-left political agenda to normalize gender fluidity. These same tactics were used to normalize gay marriage and once that succeeded, the bar moved further left.
The ultimate goals with the left’s culture war have remained consistent since at least the 1960s – to destroy the America free market system and destroy our constitutional republic, which is euphemistically termed “destroying the patriarchy.”
With the hysteria on the American right about the “Great Reset,” well, obviously a lot of people on the right have latched onto this latest “big idea” among the world’s elites, who fly to Davos via private jets every year, but the reality of what’s been happening for decades among the far-left is explained in a quote by 1960s Marxist activist, Rudi Dutschke, here’s Wikipedia:
“Herbert Marcuse corresponded with Dutschke in 1971 to agree with this strategy, “Let me tell you this: that I regard your notion of the ‘long march through the institutions’ as the only effective way…”[4] In his 1972 book, Counterrevolution and Revolt, Marcuse wrote:[5]“
“To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by ‘boring from within’, rather by ‘doing the job’, learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one’s own consciousness in working with others.
The long march includes the concerted effort to build up counterinstitutions. They have long been an aim of the movement, but the lack of funds was greatly responsible for their weakness and their inferior quality. They must be made competitive. This is especially important for the development of radical, “free” media. The fact that the radical Left has no equal access to the great chains of information and indoctrination is largely responsible for its isolation.”
Much of the hysteria on the American right is akin to the same hysteria back in the 1990s about the UN/one-world government fears and the Clinton push for socialized health care & more federal controls to blunt state powers. Of course, during the Clinton years, there was a rise in right-wing extremism, a rise in federal overreach, a rise in corruption in the Clinton WH, and some military adventures that turned into debacles (Somalia, where a UN-led humanitarian mission creeped into hunting down Somali warlords, and Haiti.) Unfortunately, on the right in America, most people only pay attention to the latest hot buzzwords right-wing pundits start blabbing about, when in reality this is all an ongoing “struggle” by the left. The American right always seems late to the game and wakes up to the left’s actions in the bottom of the ninth.
The World Economic Forum and Davos crowd get mentioned in right-wing media a lot lately, but here’s the thing, their policy ideas take root and grow faster than kudzu vine in the American South at the United Nations. The UN is where countries get pressured to sign onto the Davos crowd brainstorms and the Great Reset is just another gambit to advance the UN’s, Agenda 2030: Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development., which was signed in 2015.
The Great Reset is a plan to use the economic upheaval and repurpose the social mitigation policies deployed in dealing with the pandemic, to propel the climate change agenda, which is in the UN’s 2030 Agenda. Heck, every major company in America has been yammering about “sustainability” for years now, so if all of a sudden you heard about the “Great Reset” recently and got worked up, the reality is the global climate change movement morphed out of the environmental movement, which began in the 1960s. The Great Reset is just the latest big push in the climate change movement and here’s where people really need to pay attention – the climate change agenda is only one tentacle of that much larger leftist culture war (the woke agenda) – that was far-left in the 1960s, but has now taken over the Democratic Party completely, drives mass media content and exerts enormous pressure and influence in corporate America. Moderate Democrats went the way of the dinosaurs. Most disturbingly, the woke agenda flourished on American college campuses, worked its way into American K-12 schools and is now being flooded into the US military via gender politics and a witch hunt looking to label white males as “white nationalists” and “extremists.” Also, the US military has bought into the far-left climate change agenda too. Here’s Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, III, from 2021:
“Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does,” he said, adding that “climate change is making the world more unsafe and we need to act.”
All of these far left-wing political agendas continued through the years and gradually moved to occupy more space in mainstream left-wing politics – the far-left gradually took over the Democratic Party, as college activists grew-up and moved into positions of power, from politics, to tenured professors, to sitting on corporate boards.
Here’s an important point to remember, on the American political right, for decades most of the GOP establishment seemed oblivious to the left’s spin information war and kept trying to make concessions to the left’s culture war movement. They invariably caved and/or apologized for being “insensitive” and often agreed to work harder to be “more inclusive.” Even worse, they automatically adopted whatever new words or terms the liberal media pushed and ceded the left the upper-hand in defining all the terms. The Republican party leadership became further and further alienated from their base, where right-wing American punditry seeded discontent daily and grassroots movements took hold. The Tea Party movement was one of those reactionary movements on the right, where more traditionalist, conservative Americans felt their beliefs and values were under attack (because they were.)
Along came Donald J. Trump, who capitalized on that festering right-wing alienation and feeling unrepresented in Washington. Trump, love him or hate him, learned to use the left’s same corrupt spin information war tactics and he left Democrats and the liberal media panic-stricken. No matter how intensively they flooded liberal media with scorched earth smear campaigns against Trump, he hit back with as low and offensive smear campaigns against Dems and liberal media. It’s a been a race to the bottom.
My personal view all along has been that ending this spin information war is paramount to the survival of our constitutional republic and there will be no winners in the American spin information war – except for the enemies of America, domestic and foreign, who want America destroyed. The spin war can only divide Americans and that path leads only to widespread civil strife and the destruction of our constitutional republic.
For me it’s not about R vs. D or Trump vs. Biden, it’s about finding ways to pull Americans together. The cult of personality politics, trying to get behind one person who’ll save our country, won’t save America. Only when enough Americans decide to work together, start rebuilding community, demand one set of rules again, demand accountability and an end to the wholesale public corruption in Washington, will our politics begin to change. Somehow, I just don’t see politicians, political pundits or mass media in America ever working to that end, because their success depends on fueling controversy and divides for clicks and/or political advantage.
It’s taken America decades to arrive at this point, where political corruption has infested all of our major institutions. The effort to clean house, clean up the mess, and rebuild our institutions can’t be done with catchy political slogans or sound bites – we’re all going to have to roll up our sleeves and get busy. The first thing I think will help is when more and more people quit participating in the orchestrated partisan spin war’s Outrage Theater, that both parties, the media and the pundit class stage every day.
We all probably need to start thinking more about our own true north and working to improve ourselves and bolstering our family, friends and community more than about getting outraged about the latest media-fueled partisan political hot take. Ranting about “The Great Reset” isn’t going to change a thing, but doing things that improve your own life, help your own family, your friends and community will. Only strong resilient American families and communities can withstand the political and cultural turmoil, as this culture war/political war rages on. Being outraged clouds judgment and leaves people immobilized by fear and panic. We should all strive to maintain a bit of calm and conviction in our lives, no matter what spin hysteria media is blabbing about.
Filed under Culture Wars, General Interest, Information War, Politics
Those who live in ivory towers
Sorry, this turned into a long rant, but here it is. I watched this video this morning, after working in my container garden a couple hours. I’ve watched Doug and Stacy videos for quite a while, even though I have no desire to live off-grid and I live in a residential area with a backyard space to garden. I learn a lot from many of the online homesteaders, just like I learn a lot from online gardeners, preppers, frugal-living people, and needleworkers. Doug was trying to avoid the politics in this video and urging people to get up and start doing now, before the economic crisis worsens. He’s absolutely right. Here’s the video and then I’m going to make some comments about the politics:
In regards to the politics, while certainly I believe the Biden administration policies have been disastrous for the American economy and I also have believed since the Obama years, that there’s a multi-faceted culture war raging that encompasses not only hot button issues like race and gender politics, but also the climate change activism and world-wide economic changes. Among the far-left there’s been a belief in “collapsing the system” to force cultural, political, and economic transformation in America since probably as far back as the late 1960s-early 1970s.
None of the things President Obama talked about were new ideas among the radical left, even though American right-wing media became obsessed with generating hysteria, fear and plenty of idiotic Obama conspiracy theories (that birther crap was nuts – Obama’s mother was an American citizen, so that gave her child a right to American citizenship, wherever he was born). Many of these right-wing talkers’ millions of loyal groupies along with the right-wing pundit celebrity culture is as destructive as the Oprah/TV talk show culture was to American culture, where Americans were conditioned to airing all of their most private dirty laundry in public and betraying their closest family members on stage, all under the guise of sharing pain and family problems.
So right now, right-wing media and social media content creators gravitate toward hyping a lot of “news” that is little more than unsubstantiated innuendo and conspiracy theories, while other like-minded people in right-wing media and social media repeat all of this stuff without any independent verification whatsoever. It’s a vicious information cycle, where people add their own bits and takes to it, just like the game of telephone with kids sitting in a circle and whispering something to each other, around the circle. What the last kid hears is nothing like what the first kid whispered.
Absolutely, President Obama had a long history of supporting radical leftist ideologies and within his administration were many people I considered far-left kooks and a few were even hardline communists, but even more of them were mainly corrupt politicians. President Biden has many of the same people in his inner-circle and I don’t expect any changes in policy direction from this White House. They’re committed to the same fundamental transformation as I’ve heard blabbed about since the 1970s, although the latest iteration is the “great reset.” It’s the same radical leftist ideology repackaged with new lingo.
Trump and his administration also contained many corrupt charlatans, corrupt politicians and kooks too. Ditto that for the GOP. That’s why I don’t expect a Republican win this fall or in 2024 to create some miraculous change, unless enough Americans start facing the out-of-control corruption (and spending) in our politics and in our culture. That starts with ourselves – we’ve got to stop blaming other people for everything that’s going wrong and start becoming more committed to changing ourselves and working on improving our own lives.
What I want to talk about is thinking about how much of your energy and time you’re choosing to invest in things you can change and have the power to control in your own life vs. how much time and energy you’re choosing to invest in fear, panic, anger or rage at daily political hot air and online-fueled hysteria?
I see several prepper channels pop up in my YouTube feed, where they cover the political happenings several times a day, claiming they have inside sources, and I keep wondering how much time they have to work at their own preparedness efforts with their almost constant social media presence?
I don’t have time to read as much news, reports and follow the spin war garbage as I did when I spent many hours sitting beside my husband’s hospice bed every day and where my daily chores involved being inside the house almost all of the time, carrying a baby monitor with me, so I could hear him if he needed anything and to make sure he was okay. His 13-month hospice ordeal was horrific for him (it wasn’t a picnic for me either) – he was completely bed-bound. I had to help him sit up on days where he wasn’t strong enough to do that and other days it was turning him and using pillows to rotate his position every couple hours to avoid pressure sores. He was a very independent person and hated every minute being trapped in that bed, but he kept fighting to pull himself up to a sitting position by himself and he kept trying to eat to get stronger. I would have given up the fight within days, but he fought to the last moments.
I write a lot about the truth and here’s a home-truth for myself – I am not in good health and in many serious crisis situations the odds are stacked against me surviving. I have no delusions about being the last person standing in a crisis, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to sit around and do nothing to prepare or to try to better my odds. I have children and grandchildren. I want to make sure they survive.
I’ve been working on losing weight, working on trying to become more physically fit, but as I’ve mentioned before I’m an insulin-dependent diabetic with heart problems, which makes me very dependent on our medical supply chain and even my insulin has to be refrigerated. My doctor has lowered my insulin dosage twice since I started losing some weight and I am hoping I can continue on this path of losing weight, controlling my blood sugar, and lowering my reliance on insulin. Everyone can work a little bit at a time toward becoming more self-sustainable and self-reliant.
There are millions of people in America who have various medical needs and disabilities, which require a heavy dependence on our medical supply chain and modern technology. If you are reliant on medications or medical supplies, it’s prudent to try to increase the amount of medication and supplies you have on hand to create a buffer in case of shortages. Often, doctors, medical insurance and costs can limit how much medication you can have on hand.
There are probably even more Americans who live in delusion-land about the economic crisis that’s already beginning to impact America and who believe there’s not a serious economic “hurricane” headed our way. They’re like the people at the beach the day before a hurricane touches land, where the surf is getting choppy and rough, but hey the sun’s shining, so everything’s fine…
America likely won’t face the same levels of devastation as some countries like Sri Lanka or Turkey, where Sri Lanka has food riots and the Turkish economy is collapsing, but we’re not immune from having our self-indulgent consumer culture upended. America is a land with immense resources, even though we’ve outsourced so much of manufacturing and become reliant on cheap foreign imports. We might be able to avoid some of the horrific devastation many countries will be facing as this global economic crisis and food shortage crisis hit. However, the rainbows and sunshine, head-in-the-clouds folks will probably be in total panic mode when they realize they should have prepared and that the political leaders they trusted, were blowing smoke up their you know what
If you wonder how on earth anyone can still believe everything is going great and that we’re not headed toward a serious economic crisis, well, this came from the White House press secretary a few days ago:
It’s not until more and more Americans take off the partisan political blinders and realize Washington and our political class (across the aisle) are the problem and not the solutions, that any meaningful political change will happen in America. It’s not a matter of “red” America or “blue” America winning, it’s about when the American people start talking to their neighbors, friends and each other and working together to survive the coming crises, that perhaps our country can start moving in another direction.
I hope more people can put aside anger, rage, reacting to media-generated hysteria and move toward trusting in ourselves, each other and in working hard every day to be stronger, better-prepared, more resilient. and most of all I hope we can all work hard on being more grateful for the many blessings living in America has afforded us. I hope we can be more gracious to each other, even the people who hold differing views.
How about each day find a few things in your own life and home that you can do to improve you and your family’s quality of life and to become more self-sustainable. Instead of spending hours enraged about the latest hysterical topic social media is buzzing about or about shortage situations all over America or trying to follow every empty store shelf report, perhaps put that energy toward something positive in your own life.
The reality is the shortage situation is likely to get worse and that means everyone will need to have a personal strategy – whether it’s adequate food storage to buffer the impact, growing more of their own food, or a localized information and food supply chain to deal with that. It doesn’t do me any good to get worked up about empty shelf videos of grocery stores in CA or all around America, when I live in GA. It also is wasted energy. I want to shop less often and make less trips to the store, not run around every day in a panic looking for this item or that item. My first thought when I realize I am out of an item is to think, “Do I have something else in my house that will work?”
My little container garden isn’t going to provide enough produce for me to live on, but this morning I picked more kale to dehydrate (third kale harvest from this kale) and I can probably get one more harvest from that before it bolts. I have more kale growing. I’ve picked enough cherry tomatoes for salads in the past couple weeks and frozen two quart-size bags. I’ve picked green beans twice from five grow bags with green beans – enough for meals, cucumbers, squash, onions and I’ve been dehydrating sweet basil and lemon basil this week. I intend to work on gardening year-round again (zone 8b that is possible) and planting more vegetables in my backyard space. I bought blueberry and blackberry bushes and I’ve got one raspberry. I bought a grape vine and strawberries. It’s a small start at gardening, but I’ll probably have enough cucumbers, bell peppers and cherry tomatoes to give some to neighbors. My squash looked great until the squash vine borers arrived and now it’s a battle. I replanted zucchini. I’ve been planning what I’m going to plant in late-July and August for fall vegetables.
I’d rather be working on things I can change, not spending days on end worrying or fuming about politics and things that I can’t change. More people are waking up to the reality of the economic hurricane heading our way, but assuredly there will be some fools (like liberal pundits on Twitter) still floundering about wondering why there aren’t minimum wage delivery people to cart their groceries to their front door in this crisis, like back in 2020, when their cushy jobs allowed them to work from home. In fact, many of the liberal elites might be waking up to realizing that they no longer have that cushy job at all. The reality of a serious economic and food shortage crisis is inescapable, even for those who live in ivory towers.
Filed under Culture Wars, Emergency Preparedness, General Interest, Politics
Some thoughts on China’s latest lockdown
Many times a lot of Americans take a “who cares what happens in some far off country” attitude. The Chinese full lockdown story is important to everyone, not just the Chinese people and I’m going to give a few reasons why. This post is some current news on that situation and some review of Covid social mitigation policies and news reporting (more like mass media social conditioning efforts) since 2020. I’ll follow this post with some positive posts on things we all have the power to do, not just to survive tumultuous times, but to learn to thrive in not only the best of times, but in the worst of times too.
The Chinese government’s total lockdown of Shanghai has been getting a great deal of attention in the news media and generating some viral videos in the past few days:
Here’s analysis by Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, on the medical side of information coming from Chinese officials one word – “implausible” referring to China reporting only one severe case and no deaths from this outbreak:
Here’s what everyone should know about Shanghai:
Shanghai is the largest city in China, with almost 25 million people, according to Wikipedia..
Shanghai is China’s center of commerce, trade and transportation, but also a global financial hub.
Shanghai is also the world’s busiest container port.
Here’s a report, China Port Congestion Leaves Everything From Grains to Metals Stranded, from Bloomberg today. This report states there are 477 bulk container ships waiting to dock and unload their cargo of everything from metal ore to grain.
The lockdown in Shanghai has created a ripple effect, as some ships have been diverted to other Chinese ports. A few paragraphs into this story it’s clear China’s lockdown isn’t only causing a problem with unloading and loading ships:
“A shortage of port workers at Shanghai is slowing the delivery of documentation needed for ships to unload cargoes, according to ship owners and traders. Meanwhile, vessels carrying metals like copper and iron ore are left stranded offshore as trucks are unable to send goods from the port to processing mills, they said.”
On a cable news report yesterday I heard mention that the lockdown in Shanghai has also created massive panic-buying across China, as people have become fearful of food shortages spreading.
This all brings me back to the weeks before Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and our news media went all-in on Ukraine reporting and completely dropped the coverage of the Trudeau government in Canada imposing vaccine mandates on truckers crossing the US-Canada border, the Trudeau government crackdown on a trucker’s protest, and President Biden also imposing a vaccine mandate on truckers crossing the US-Canada border and the US-Mexico border.
I think all of these extreme Covid mitigation policies world-wide, that hamper free movement of people and goods, have proven both ineffective at “stopping the spread” of Covid and even worse have turbo-charged economic chaos, globally, for the foreseeable future. Once the Ukraine situation attracts less media focus, I suspect we’ll be back to dealing with our own US government creating more of the same Covid policies and programs that inflicted economic hardship on millions of Americans since 2020.
The news media hype seems to play on our emotions and push us to become invested in the emotional aspect of these videos, by dramatizing the “little people vs. the evil, big Chinese government (and yes, it’s an evil regime without question). The human rights abuse aspect does matter. Chinese people yelling from being locked inside their apartment buildings for two weeks looks horrifying, but it’s important to remember that the same Dems and liberal mouthpieces who bought into these draconian Chinese-inspired Covid policies in 2020 were still pushing them just a few months ago in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, and in America. Dr. Fauci hailed the extreme Australian lockdowns. The liberal American news media were still pushing these policies, but now want to sensationalize the horror of Chinese people in Shanghai dealing with a full two-week Covid lockdown, so far.
The situation in these Chinese videos doesn’t look any different than Australia’s lockdowns, which lasted 107 days. That’s the truth. Here’s a BBC report from October 11, 2021, Covid Australia: Sydney celebrates end of 107-day lockdown. The liberal American news media (which is most of the American news media) didn’t all rush to Australia to cover the lockdown protests there and in fact, it seemed they were downplaying the protests and avoiding covering them much. There were videos that emerged on social media and in the news, like this story: EXCLUSIVE: WARNING – DISTRESSING CONTENT: Elderly man collapses to the ground after being arrested for ‘failing to wear a face mask’ while walking in a park – as his desperate partner screams for help, from September 2021. When things happening in the free world of the west look indistinguishable from policies being carried out in China, that’s like a glaring red warning light to me. Two weeks into China’s latest lockdown and the media is hysterically hyperventilating about people starving to death and 107 days of Australia’s lockdown insanity and the American news media barely talked about it at all. The real question remains why on earth liberal democracies in the free world ever bought into the Chinese Covid lockdown policy in the first place???
This reminded me of how the American liberal news media in the beginning of the Covid lockdown social mitigation experiments tried to con us into docilely accepting government Covid lockdowns as an exercise in good citizenship and a show of virtue demonstrating we care about other people. I was very worried about Covid in March of 2020, because I believed my husband had Covid in late January 2020 when he got sick and had acute respiratory failure. I fell in line with social mitigation effort for about a month, but kept wondering what the follow-on plan was. I quickly came to believe all of these social mitigation efforts were political power grabs, not science and that is what I believe to this day. Here’s Italy in March 2020 – remember all the singing:
Funny juxtaposition between their news angle in Italy 2020 and China 2022, but I feel certain the Covid craziness isn’t over anywhere in the world. The economic fall-out from these disastrous social mitigation policies will continue to impact and grow. When you add in the war in Ukraine with the uncertainty with what happens there and the global economic fall-out that will have on agriculture and global commerce, well, the world seems to be pushing full-steam ahead toward some Titanic-level hitting an iceberg events.
If you follow the news and pay attention to what’s happened since Covid social mitigation policies took hold, well, nothing has really returned to the pre-Covid days, even if you took off your mask long ago. The shortage situations never resolved to pre-Covid, the economic fall-out from those policies is still reverberating around the world. Even in many red states remnants of those policies remain – like wearing a mask in some school districts, wearing a mask in the doctor’s office or hospitals, with airlines, etc. Not a single state in America is an all-red or an all-blue state, so there are plenty of people within every state with opposing views, especially on Covid policies. The Covid turmoil is not behind us and many people who opposed masks and/or vaccine mandates and/or vaccines are still fuming about the the social mitigation policies and angry at the liberals who pushed those programs. On the other side, there are liberals, especially in the news media, who are still true-believers in all of the Covid social mitigation policies, would support and promote them again in a heartbeat and who loathe Americans who don’t believe in all of those mitigation policies and rituals like masking between eating bites of a meal on a plane and total lockdowns.
This divide in America won’t be easily bridged and it’s important to remember it goes way deeper than just the Covid mitigation policies. These divides speak to not only differing political beliefs in America, but to an array of cultural issues where Americans break down into two hostile camps. It seems like people in the middle or who aren’t ideologically invested are disliked by both sides, but pulling more people away from the partisan extremes is our only hope to weather the coming storms. We need more people who will work together, not more people ready to fight over everything.
Finding any ways to unite us will be hard, but I remain hopeful it’s not an impossible quest to find some common ground and then build upon that. Unfortunately, it seems like the people with the largest megaphones focus on getting people riled up or spreading a whole lot of fear. America desperately needs some calm, positive leaders. In my next post I’ll talk about that more.
Filed under COVID-19, Culture Wars, General Interest, Politics
Stop the Woke insanity, please
This is too hilarious to pass up sharing. A few weeks ago I was mentioning to my son, that back in the 1970s there was a massive gypsy moth infestation in the forests in NE PA, where I grew up. We were talking about the zebras that escaped from an animal refuge in Maryland and the efforts to try to capture them and that led to talking about invasive species that end up here. My son jokingly told me that we probably can’t call them gypsy moths anymore, knowing how much I detest these looney-tunes woke word games. And just now I saw this Megyn Kelly report:
Filed under Culture Wars, General Interest
Plenty of worries
The 4th of July while usually the day for “Hooray, America!” cheering, this year found me feeling worried about many cultural and political trends. From LGBTQ gender war extremism that seems to be targeting even young children now, to much of corporate America throwing themselves all-in on embracing and enforcing the left’s gender, racial and political edicts, to our partisan political wasteland, where the news media have become more political operatives than objective reporters and our politicians, across the board, seem to be mostly corrupt, self-serving buffoons and brazen liars. Trends don’t look too promising.
Then there’s the constantly shifting PC word games, where words that are perfectly acceptable and benign today, next week might be on an ever-increasing list of words the left’s word police deem racist, sexist, ethnically-insensitive, or denoting some other socially unacceptable connotation. If the left’s PC word games aren’t exhausting enough, the left’s media hysterics scan photos and videos looking for hand signs they deem racist signals and even facial expressions they insist denote some social evil (see the Covington kid’s smirk). To compound the semantical mayhem, many partisans on the right, following former President Trump’s lead, jumped into the spin word games too.
The culture war craziness afflicts the right too, with populist frenzies over hot button issues taking hold often and totally wacko conspiracy theories spreading faster than CA wildfire. The right’s turned mindless “owning the libs’ antics into the highest virtue, while too many elected Republicans float rushed legislation, that is often in reaction to some Twitter “breaking news” uproar than about carefully thought out or researched issues, all to appease and curry favor with the Trump=supporting faction of the Republican party.
Even face masks in the midst of a pandemic became a political symbol, with wearing a mask denoting virtue to many liberals and not wearing a mask a symbol of freedom to many Trump supporters.
It seems the politicians and media pundits, whose life now revolves around being social media influencers, lead the American media outrage theater parade, while the rest of America has not a clue what the heck is really going on, but plenty of Americans sense something is going radically wrong .
There’s a lot to unpack with the policing and enforcement of speech in the American public square, which increasingly is done in online social media venues. An easy early take when Alex Jones, a kooky conspiracy theorist got banned from social media, was that social media companies are privately-owned businesses and can set their own rules for conduct on their site. That issue of social media banning now seems way more complicated than that private company vs. public space argument. The issue took a decided turn when many mainstream (liberal) media companies tried hard to limit their coverage of Trump live speeches and not covering Trump White House press briefings, under the rationale of trying to stop the spread of lies. However, now social media has targeted Brett Weinstein, a liberal evolutionary biologist, who early in the pandemic spoke out on his YouTube channel (Dark Horse) about the possibility that COVID 19 might have originated from a lab leak in Wuhan China. Weinstein also has raised concerns about the safety of COVID vaccines and about use of ivermectin in COVID treatment and as a prophylactic drug. Weinstein has now had his YouTube channel demonetized, and several of his videos were banned from YouTube. In regards to the Weinstein case, Matt Taibbi raises an important question in piece published a couple days ago, If Private Platforms Use Government Guidelines to Police Content, is that State Censorship?. Taibbi states:
“There are several factors that make the DarkHorse incident different from other major Silicon Valley moderation decisions, including the fact that the content in question doesn’t involve electoral politics, foreign intervention, or incitement. The main issue is the possible blurring of lines between public and private censorship.
When I contacted YouTube about Weinstein two weeks ago, I was told, “In general, we rely on guidance from local and global health authorities (FDA, CDC, WHO, NHS, etc) in developing our COVID-19 misinformation policies.”
The question is, how active is that “guidance”? Is YouTube acting in consultation with those bodies in developing those moderation policies? As Weinstein notes, an answer in the affirmative would likely make theirs a true First Amendment problem, with an agency like the CDC not only setting public health policy but also effectively setting guidelines for private discussion about those policies. “If it is in consultation with the government,” he says, “it’s an entirely different issue.”
Asked specifically after Weinstein’s demonetization if the “guidance” included consultation with authorities, YouTube essentially said yes, pointing to previous announcements that they consult other authorities, and adding, “When we develop our policies we consult outside experts and YouTube creators. In the case of our COVID-19 misinformation policies, it would be guidance from local and global health authorities.””
While many Republicans rail about social media targeting Republicans and conservatives on social media for bans and having separate standards and rules on their platforms for liberals and voices on the right, it must be said that the typical Republicans in Congress response seems to be to draft ill-conceived legislation, that they know is never going to pass. It’s all a media effort, not a serious approach to dealing with the “war on words,” that’s escalating. The same Republican ill-conceived approach is sweeping through Republican-run states with legislation banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory (a controversial liberal approach to teaching through a racial lens). Many on the right see CRT as Marxist drivel that’s teaching American kids to hate America and look at everything through the liberal racial politics that’s been raging across America since the death of George Floyd last year. Poorly drafted bans on CRT and overly restrictive rules on what can be taught in public schools seems to me like the cure may be way worse than the disease.
On Saturday, the day before the 4th of July the NYT ran a piece, A Fourth of July Symbol of Unity That May No Longer Unite. Yes, now the American flag is up for demonization by this NYT piece written by Sarah Maslin Nir:
“Supporters of former President Donald J. Trump have embraced the flag so fervently — at his rallies, across conservative media and even during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — that many liberals like Mr. Treiber worry that the left has all but ceded the national emblem to the right.
What was once a unifying symbol — there is a star on it for each state, after all — is now alienating to some, its stripes now fault lines between people who kneel while “The Star-Spangled Banner” plays and those for whom not pledging allegiance is an affront.
And it has made the celebration of the Fourth of July, of patriotic bunting and cakes with blueberries and strawberries arranged into Old Glory, into another cleft in a country that seems no longer quite so indivisible, under a flag threatening to fray.”
Where better to get a gauge for the opposite reaction to this NYT piece than country music, with two new songs released :
Yes, the spin information war, that drives the left’s culture war, still worries me a great deal and what concerns me is what happens when millions of Americans, who refuse to buy into the left’s BLM racial politics, get tired of being told they’re racist and having every aspect of their lives attacked? Or what happens, God-forbid, Dems pass some new gun-control laws or there’s some other high-octane situation like the BLM protests that turned violent last year or some far right-wing violence erupts or Trump or some other right-wing flamethrower ignites something worse than Jan. 6th? Where does America turn for some calm, news reporting or some calm, political leadership, who most of America will even listen to? The Dems spent months last year attacking the police, and now some Trumpers on the right are attacking the FBI and America’s top generals. I worry about the small crowd of blue-checkmark partisan flame-throwers on Twitter driving and controlling the news media coverage in America and their ability to escalate even the most trivial thing into a major outrage spin cycle, that can quickly mobilize tens of thousands of Americans into a raging mob.
I still remain hopeful about America, but this corrupt spin war, that’s now directed from a small crowd of media and political elites on Twitter really worries me.
Before closing this post, I wanted to give an update on my duck saga. Towards evening on the day the second duck showed up in my front yard, the ducks were waddling around my front yard. A pick-up with two older men stopped in front of my house and one of the men jumped out and rushed up to the ducks, happily talking to them. He told me the ducks live in his backyard, but they are wild ducks. He told me when the one duck disappeared the remaining duck kept leaving several times a day wandering around the neighborhood looking for the other duck (which was laying behind the a bush in my flower bed). I told the man that this duck showed up in my front yard and seemed injured. Long story short, this man has a pond in his backyard, lives on a nearby street, and as he talked to the ducks they followed him back to his house. As joyful as that man was to find both ducks, I can assure you, I was even more joyful to not have two Muscovy ducks living in my front yard.
Filed under BLM movement, Culture Wars, General Interest, Politics, Twitter Tales
libertybelle diaries 