Socrates: Do you mean the so-called ruler or the ruler in the most precise sense [of the word]?
Thrasymachus: I mean the ruler in the very precise sense of the word.
Plato, Republic(341b)

In Book 1 of the Republic Plato portrays an argument between Socrates, sometimes cited as the creator of “moral philosophy,” and the sophist Thrasymachus, about the nature of justice. Sophists are people who, as they were described in Plato’s time, seek “to make the worse appear the better cause,” that is, use deceptive techniques to make the bad and the false appear good and true (or vice versa).

In Book 1 of the Republic, Socrates puts forward a view about the nature of justice that Thrasymachus regards as the typical drivel of philosophers with “their head in the clouds.” Plato describes Thrasymachus as “gathering himself up like a wild beast” and “hurling himself upon [Socrates and his companions] as if he would tear [them] to pieces.” In brief, Thrasymachus is a bully. Socrates even admits to being “frightened” and put into a “flutter” by Thrasymachus’ savage attack, but after regaining possession of himself Socrates gets Thrasymachus to make a seemingly innocuous admission that changes the whole course of the argument, namely, to admit that if one is to have any faith in the conclusion of arguments one must couch the arguments in precise speech. For if one is not scrupulously precise in one’s language then any conclusion reached in the argument cannot be trusted.

By the end of Book 1, Socrates, employing precise speech, has shown that the views Thrasymachus states with so much arrogance and venom are the very opposite of the truth and he is reduced to sulking in the corner. Socrates has, so to speak, employed precise speech as an instrument of genuine reason to tame the “wild [sophistical] beast” and make him gentle and harmless. Since sophists have only proliferated since Plato’s day, and now control most of our government, our “educational” establishment, our “entertainment” industry, the “news” media and even, regrettably, most of our “woke” corporations, Plato’s insights are as relevant today as they were in the 4th century B.C.

One of the areas in which Socrates’ and Plato’s critique of sophistry is relevant to the contemporary political scene is the treatment of Donald Trump by the “news” media, the “educational” establishment and other contemporary “experts.” Trump has been viciously attacked from the moment he came down the escalator in 2016 to announce his candidacy for the presidency. It is difficult to imagine any heinous sin of which he has not been accused. One of the most basic of the accusations against Donald Trump is that he is “a divider.” The other charges are just special cases of this. He “divides” us by virtue of being a racist, a sexist, a bully, a homophobe, a dictator, a traitor, and so on. The “evidence” that he is all of these heinous divisive things is there for all to see in what he says, sometimes in what he “tweets.”

Trump, we have been told by our moral betters, has said that all Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers. He has bragged about grabbing women by the p—y. He has said that immigration is bad. He has even said that immigrants from Mexico are “animals.” He has demeaned Haitians and Africans by saying they come from “shithole” countries. He has said that the coronavirus is a hoax. He has endangered a plethora of lives by suggesting that people inject themselves with bleach to cure themselves of the virus. He has said that there were good people among the white supremacists at the Charlottesville rally. He lied that there was election fraud in the 2020 election. In early January before the two crucial Georgia senatorial elections had taken place, the Washington Post reported that in a phone call with a Georgia state official he told the Georgia official that they “would be a national hero” if they fabricated votes for him in the 2020 Georgia presidential election. Many national “news” media outlets, including the New York Times and CNN claimed they had independently verified this story.

One could add many more charges made daily against Trump by the “Democrats” and their media collaborators but these should suffice for the present. Admittedly, anyone who said such things would deserve to be criticized. In fact, however, should facts still be relevant, Trump has said none of these things. In some cases, he said the precise opposite of what has been attributed to him. In this essay, following Socrates’ method, should this still be permissible, I analyze Trump’s precise words in these and several other accusations and show that each of these is a fabrication, specifically, that the “Democrats” and their media colluders regularly embellish what Trump said with a bit of creative writing, so to speak, in order to pin an irresponsible “divisive” view on him.

Although it should not be necessary to do so, the inability in our age, given what has been done to our “educational” system over the last several decades, to make simple distinctions requires me to emphasize that the argument of this essay does not imply agreement with Trump’s actual statements or the way he said them. I myself would not have said the things Trump has said and certainly would not have said them in the way he said them. The present article is not about Trump. It is not an attempt to defend what he actually said. That would be a separate very different kind of article. This article is about the “news” media and their “Democrat” collaborators. It is concerned only with the specific question whether Trump actually said the things the “news” media and the “Democrats” regularly attribute to him.

I. Trump’s Alleged Unacceptable Claims

1. All Mexicans Are Rapists And Drug Traffickers

Consider one of the first of the Trump statements that set the Democrat Party and the “news” media into a frenzy, his statement, upon first coming down the escalator in 2016 to announce his candidacy for the presidency, that all Mexicans are rapists and drug traffickers. This accusation has been repeated over and over and over again by “Democrats” and members of the “news” media for over 4 years. Consider a small sample!

On April 6, 2018 Byron Wolf of CNN said that “Trump basically called Mexicans ‘rapists’ again” and adds that “Trump continues to generalize such allegations against a large group of people.” On Aug. 31, 2016 Tessa Stuart of Rolling Stone published an article titled “Donald ‘Mexicans are Rapists’ Trump Goes to Mexico.” On June17, 2017, Amber Phillips of the Washington Post published an article titled “They’re Rapists: President Trump’s Campaign Speech Two Years Later, Annotated,” in which the accusation is repeated.

On April 6, 2018, Michelle Mark of Business Insider published an article titled “Trump just referred to one of his most infamous campaign comments: calling Mexican’s rapists.” On June 25, 2015, Greg Allen, in an article titled “Univision Cuts Ties with Trump After Comments about Immigrants,” quotes a rather confused Sean Spicer as saying that that Trump’s “broad brush” on Mexican Americans is “not helpful to the cause.”

In fact, Trump did not “basically call Mexicans ‘rapists’ again,” he did not “generalize such allegations” about all Mexicans, he did not “disparage Mexican immigrants,” he did not paint “Mexican-Americans with a broad brush,” and so on. However, in order to see this one must not allow one’s personal prejudices, emotions or political affiliations from distorting one’s understanding of some relatively simple sentences. Rather, one must take Socrates’ advice when dealing with the sophists of his day and examine Trump’s precise words:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.

Trump explicitly says that not all Mexicans are rapists and drug traffickers, for he concludes by saying that some of them are “good people.” In fact, some of his critics, after a lot of hard thought with which they are evidently not accustomed, eventually admitted this. Even so, one might accuse Trump here of tokenism, that is, of only admitting that a few Mexicans here and there are good people. However, that is not the main reason why Trump did not accuse all Mexicans of being criminals. For, Trump makes no claim whatsoever about “all” Mexicans (This is the point where “Democrats” and the “news” media may need to look up what the word “all” means). Trump’s statement only refers to that subset of people that Mexico is “sending.”

Further, since Trump explicitly contrasts this subset of Mexicans that Mexico is “sending,” with Mexico’s “best,” the one’s Mexico is not sending, one must infer that Trump does not ascribe these vile qualities to Mexico’s “best.” That is, put directly, Trump’s remark implies that not all Mexicans are rapists and drug traffickers. The “Democrats” and the “news” media have in this case ascribed to Trump the exact opposite of what he actually said.

It is worth noting that even Politifact, a left-leaning “fact-checker” with Democrat party connections, has, on August 8, 2016, pointed that Trump never said what Hillary’s vice-presidential choice, Tim Kaine and many others, have accused him of saying:

Kaine has embellished the controversy by saying Trump has said “all Mexicans are rapists.” The Democrat doesn’t come close to proving his claim; all of the Trump quotes Kaine’s campaign sent us pertain to unauthorized [emphasis added] immigrants crossing the Mexican border into the U.S.

Despite the fact that even Politifact admits that Trump never made that stronger statement about “all” Mexicans, the charge is repeated ad nauseam by Democrats and media personalities and it often even goes unchallenged on Fox “News.” Further, although more accurate than some outlets, Politifact still did not get it completely right. Trump did not say that it is only the “unauthorized immigrants” that are rapists and drug traffickers. He said that the immigrants that Mexico is sending are rapists and drug traffickers. Trump made no statement whatsoever about some ordinary person who crosses the border illegally on their own. Trump’s statement clearly refers only to organized efforts to “send” people illegally into the United States from Mexico. Does the word “coyote,” that is, a human trafficker, ring a bell for the “news” media?

It is, finally, worth referencing a conversation between CNN “star reporter” Jake Tapper with Trump reported by Theodor Schleifer in a June 5, 2016 article titled “Trump defends criticism of judge with Mexican heritage.” Schleifer reports how Tapper’s accuses Trump of racism. The precise wording of the conversation is reported by Schleifer as follows:

Trump: “He’s proud of his heritage. I respect him for that,” Trump said, dismissing charges that his allegation was racist. “He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico.”
Tapper: “If you are saying he cannot do his job because of his race, is that not the definition of racism?”

It is, apparently, necessary to go very slow here for CNN’s “star reporter” and the rest of the “news” media that has an unhealthy obsession to find racism in everything Trump. In the case at hand, Jake, a little too eager to do his bit for the cause, has apparently forgotten that “Mexican” is not a racial classification. The point is not difficult. The people from Mexico are Mexicans regardless of their race, and there are people of many different “races” in Mexico. There are “white” Mexicans, “black” Mexicans, “brown” Mexicans and so on.

The current Wikipedia article titled “Demographics of Mexico,” providing multiple references for documentation, lists the demographics of Mexico as follows: 47% of Mexicans are called “Castizo” or “mostly European or white European descendants. 27% are “Mestizo” with a mixture of European and indigenous populations. 21% are indigenous native Americans. The article also lists 18% of the natural hair color in Mexico as blonde and 2% as red.

One well known example is Canelo Álvarez, perhaps Mexico’s most famous boxer at the present time, who has reddish hair and looks like he hails from Dublin. The current Wikipedia article on Canelo explains that many people in Mexico associate their red-haired citizens with the Irish soldiers who fought in the St. Patrick’s Battalion in the Mexican-American War. This is all apparently news to Tapper, who, as I understand it, studied history “modified by visual studies” as an undergraduate (perhaps, from the look of it, a bit more of visual studies than history).

2. Trump Called Mexicans “Animals”

On May 17th 2018 Miriam Valverde, in an article titled “In context: Donald Trump’s comments about immigrants, ‘animals’” quoted Diane Feinstein’s (D-California) condemnation of Trump for calling Mexicans “animals.”

Immigrants are not ‘animals.’ The president’s statement was deeply offensive and racist. Immigrants are our family and friends, and they make significant contributions to our country,” tweeted Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California.

Of course, this accusation was repeated over and over again in the “news” media. The only problem is that Donald Trump did not make a racist remark about immigrants. Fortunately, Miriam provides Trump’s exact words again, not the words conjured by Diane Feinstein and adopted uncritically by a friendly “journalist.”

Margaret Mims, Fresno County Sheriff, after thanking Donald Trump for his support, has the following exchange with Trump:

Mims: Thank you. There could be an MS-13 gang member I know about — if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it.
Trump: You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.

Trump is here explicitly referring to the immediately preceding statement made by Sheriff Mims about MS-13 gang members. He was not talking about all immigrants. He was talking about the gang that is regularly accused of torture, beheadings, child prostitution and terrorism, that is, as AG Bill Barr, in a July 15, 2020 press conference said, a gang in which “being the most savage, bloodthirsty person you can be and building up a reputation as a killer” is admired. Needless to say, comrade Feinstein and many other demagogues who momentarily forgot their occasional opposition to torture (when this is politically useful) saw this as an excellent opportunity to embellish Trump’s remarks to suit the Democrat Party-media narrative that Trump a racist.

3. Trump Is “Anti-Immigrant”

It has also become an article of faith among Trump’s critics on the left that Trump is “anti-immigrant.” In fact, Trump has never stated a general “anti-immigrant” position. His main focus has always been to stop illegal immigration. The following is typical of Trump’s statements on the matter:

This sustained influx of illegal aliens has profound consequences on every aspect of our national life — overwhelming our schools, overcrowding our hospitals, draining our welfare system, and causing untold amounts of crime. It must end NOW!

Usually, children acquire the ability to distinguish between snakes and poisonous snakes by the third or fourth grade, which is fortunate because this is an essential survival skill. However, for some reason, the “Democrat” Party and much of the “news” media seem unable to distinguish between immigrants and illegal immigrants. Trump has always opposed the latter, not the former. It is true that at points during his presidency Trump has attempted to reduce legal immigration as well, but the key word there is “reduce.” Trump has never called to end legal immigration.

Even when Trump moved to reduce legal immigration, he never moved to stop it altogether and claimed only to want to attract more talented immigrants (e.g., on May 16, 2019 the Wall Street Journal reported on Trump’s proposal for “a ‘common sense’ plan that ‘builds upon our nation’s rich history of immigration.”). In fact, it would be possible to have a reasonable discussion of Trump’s immigration policies if one could find serious people in the “Democrat”-media complex willing to do so.

Unfortunately, they have done what they usually do, namely, call Trump names and accuse him of being anti-immigrant by conveniently losing the ability to make the sort of mundane distinctions that should be mastered by a competent 3rd or 4th grader.

4. Trump “Derided Immigrants From Haiti And Africa”

In Jan. 12, 2018, the Democrat party and the media were sent into a frenzy when someone leaked a private conversation in which Trump allegedly referred to various countries populated largely by blacks and Latinos as “shithole” countries. One cannot recall ever seeing the Democrat Party and the “news” media so excited. Call this Trump’s Alleged Shithole Statement or TASS. One must say “allegedly” because Trump and others have denied that this is a correct description of what took place in that meeting and there is no direct evidence of what precisely he said, e.g., no tape recording. This did not of course prevent the Democrat-media complex from attributing the unqualified statement to Trump.

However, for the sake of argument let us assume that Trump did assert TASS and examine whether the interpretations put on it by Trump’s detractors are justified. Most of his accusers do not provide any precise interpretation of TASS but simply assume it is a racist statement, that being the easiest option since it requires no thought or mastery of the English language. The Atlantic claims that in TASS Trump “placed whites over Asians, and both over Latinos and blacks from “shithole” countries.”

In a report on Jan. 12, 2018 CNN announcers Eli Watkins and Abby Phillip state that in the remark Trump is “deriding immigrants from Haiti and Africa.” On January 12, 2018, Anderson Cooper, after, as usual, reminding viewers how great he is, how very much he cares, slammed Trump, sometimes choking back tears, for what he “has said… about Haitians.” Similar remarks were repeated endlessly by “Democrats” and in their agents in the “news” media. In fact, however, TASS is not even about Asian, black and Latino people. It is about certain of the countries in which they, along with “white” people, live. The specific type of inference used by Cooper and others to generate their talking points can be found in critical reasoning and logic texts in the chapter titled fallacies, or, more precisely, in the sub-section in that chapter that deals with “the fallacy of division” (e.g., in Copi and Cohen’s Introduction to Logic, 12th edition, Chapter 5, section 5.6, A5).

The fallacy of division is the fallacy in which one fallaciously infers that what is true of the whole is also true of the parts of that whole. For example, it would obviously be a fallacy of division to infer from the claim that an F-22 fighter is expensive that one of its parts, such as a rivet, is expensive – and this is precisely the kind of fallacy that proved so useful to so many in the Democrat party and the “news” media to convict Trump of racism (again). And, although this might come as “news” to the “news” media, one says very different kinds of things about countries and the people who live in them. A country C has a “gross national product” but John who lives in C does not have a “gross national product.” A country C has a certain population but Maria who lives in C does not have a certain population.

Trump’s TASS is about certain countries as wholes, not their citizen parts. It is, therefore, fallacious to infer from the claim that country C is a “shithole” country that the individual people who live in C are “shithole” people. TASS does not even imply that there is anything wrong with the people in C. A freshman critical reasoning text should be sufficient to settle the matter if the “news” media can find one.

Further, the claim that country C is a “shithole” country is not a racial statement. It is most naturally taken as a statement about that country’s standard of living, its gross national product, the quality of its educational system and medical system and so on. Thus, the claim that a country is a “shithole” country might actually be used in an argument that the people in C, being lovely people, deserve better. This more charitable interpretation did not, however, fit the Democrat-“news” media narrative and, accordingly, never made its way to their conscious minds.

Since Cooper’s award-worthy performance is representative of the rest, it is instructive to discuss it in some detail. I again leave aside the claim that the claim that Trump asserted TASS is alleged, not proven – something Cooper conveniently forgot to mention. The point here is that it appears that Cooper, with all his wealth (listed at Celebrity Net Worth as 200 million dollars), is unable, on the required occasions, to distinguish between a collective and its parts – that is, unable to recognize that from the claim that a whole state is a “shithole” one cannot legitimately infer that the parts of that state, its people, are “shithole” people. Presumably even Cooper, if he can choke back his virtue-signalling tears, is capable of realizing that if one calls the Soviet Union a “shithole” country, one is not calling its people “shithole” people or disparaging them in any way. Comrade Cooper can distinguish between a government and its people, right?

Something does not cease to be a fallacy just because Cooper and the “news” media needsto use it in order to run their mandated narrative du jour. For Cooper himself criticized the country of Haiti, not its people, when he referred to what the people of Haiti have “suffered” from their government and added: “For days and weeks without help from their government or police, the people of Haiti dug through the rubble with their bare and bloodied to save complete strangers.” That is, Cooper, his reasoning faculties apparently blinded by his lucrative emotional theatre, does not realize that he agrees with Trump’s alleged TASS. The country of Haiti, the collective whole, failed its people. That is what Trump’s TASS is saying. Cooper and Trump are in agreement, although Cooper’s need to virtue signal prevents him from seeing this.

The Atlantic article goes on to speculate what meaning TASS has to Trump supporters. Let me repeat this in order to make sure the point is clear. The Atlantic did not go out and ask Trump supporters what TASS means to them. That would require leaving their air-conditioned rooms and their pumpkin spiced latte – which is not in the cards. The Atlantic simply speculates what TASS means to Trump supporters,

Perhaps… the leaked conversation would resonate with [Trump’s] base. … Perhaps racist Americans see the browning of America as the shitholing of America. Perhaps, as former Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Cedric L. Richmond responded, they hear “Make America Great Again” as “Make America White Again.”

The keyword, of course, is “Perhaps.” Such words also have a name in critical reasoning and logic texts. It is called a “weasel word.” When Bob’s used car dealer tells him that this car gets “up to” 36 miles per gallon, he is weaseling Bob because the statement does not mean that the car gets 36 miles per gallon. It is consistent with the car dealer’s statement that in ordinary driving it only gets 18 miles to the gallon. Weasel words are popular with used car dealers, politicians and “journalists” because almost anything can be said to be “perhaps” true. Perhaps America’s enemies are laughing at the damage the “news” media is doing to the United States right now. Perhaps “journalists” use “perhaps” so much because they don’t actually know anything. Perhaps unscrupulous people engage in racial demagoguery involving “weasel words” to advance their own career while they hurt innocent people and damage the nation.

In summary, the Democrat-media frenzy about Trump’s “shithole” remark is a complete fabrication that employs textbook reasoning fallacies to stir emotions for a political agenda. This is not serious journalism. It is a freshman critical reasoning homework assignment – one that the Democrat-media complex failed – but there is nothing new in that.

5. Trump Admitted To Grabbing Women By Their Private Parts

Another charge leveled against Trump prior to the 2016 election and repeated endlessly by the “Democrats” and the “news” media ever since is that Trump admitted to Billy Bush in the infamous Access Hollywood tape that he “grabs them [women] by the p—y” and gets away with it. In fact, Trump said no such thing. Once again, one must examine Trump’s precise words, should this be permissible. But before we do that, it is necessary to recall the context of Trump’s remark. First, Access Hollywood is, putting it mildly, not 60 Minutes, and Billy Bush is, putting it mildly, not Mike Wallace.

Setting the bar even lower, he is not even Chris Wallace. Second, in that conversation Billy Bush could be heard egging Trump on, trying to get him to make outlandish statements about his relations with women. Bush succeeded, but the whole tone of the conversation is unserious. Trump’s defense that this is locker room talk” is, therefore, in this context, somewhat plausible. However, to turn to the most important matter, Trump, even being egged on by Bush, did not say that he “grabs [women] by the p—y.” On the outside chance that today’s sophists cannot prevent us from following Socrates’ ancient call for precision, here are Trump’s precise words in that discussion:

I just start kissing [beautiful women]. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab them by the p—y. You can do anything.

Trump does here admit that he just starts kissing beautiful women without permission. That sort of behavior is not acceptable. However, that is not the present issue. The present question is: did Trump admit to grabbing women by the p—y in this conversation? The answer is that he did not. Trump goes on to say that “stars” can grab women by the p—y, indeed, that “stars” can “do anything” to women, but he does not say that he personally does these things. The reply will be that everyone knows what Trump means. But, in fact, it could be argued that Trump draws a line here between what he admits to doing, automatically kissing beautiful women when he sees them, and grabbing them by the p—y. He explicitly admits to the former, not the latter.

It is worth noting, as an aside, that Bill Maher, apparently suffering from another temporary self-congratulatory bout of moral outrage, (mistakenly) criticized Trump for admitting to grabbing women by the p—y, but Jill Jameson, the former porn star, has, as reported in the Jan. 24, 2017 article titled “Ex-porn star Jameson claims Bill Maher a ‘p—y grabber’,” stated that she has seen Maher at the Playboy Mansion do precisely what Maher has wrongly said that Trump admitted to doing. Jameson’s accusation has not been proven, but it reminds one that one actually needs evidence to support such a serious charge, not just the usual media and Maher word-play.

6. Trump Called The Coronavirus A Hoax

On Feb. 28, 2020 Thomas Franck of CNBC published an article titled “Trump says the coronavirus is the Democrats’ ‘new hoax’.” This claim was repeated over and over again by many “Democrats” and people in the “news” media. Trump must certainly be ghoulish to call the coronavirus a hoax at a time when many thousands were already dead in the United States and several hundred thousand more were certain to die from it in the coming years.

In fact, what Trump actually said in a campaign rally in North Charleston, South Carolina is that “The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. This is their new hoax.” That is, Trump was not calling the coronavirus itself a hoax. He was calling the Democrat’s politicization of it a hoax. This is a neat trick. The Democrats politicize the coronavirus. Trump calls the politicization as a hoax. Then the Democrats and the “news” media, in a continuation of the original hoax, do a dishonest switch and claim that Trump called the virus itself a hoax. Fortunately, Hope Yen, in a Sept. 18, 2020 Associated Press “fact check” concluded that Biden distorted Trump’s words on the virus hoax.

7. Trump Told People To Inject “Bleach” To Kill The Coronavirus

On July 9, 2020, in a speech, Joe Biden, who used this claim to help him become the “president” of the United States, states that Donald Trump said that “maybe if you drank bleach” you can cure the coronavirus. Others have said that Trump also suggested introducing dangerous ultraviolet light inside the body to kill the virus. “Journalists” and “Democrats” with no appreciable scientific background were horrified. These claims were picked up, embellished to make them sound even more stupid and repeated by “Democrats” and the “news” media ad nauseum. Matt Perez, eager to do his bit for the cause, published an article in Forbes on April 23, 2020, titled “Trump suggests Injecting Coronavirus Patients with Light or Disinfectants, Alarming Experts.”

In the article, Perez quotes Dr. Vin Gupta, an NBC “news” commentator, also eager to do his bit for the cause, who said that “This notion of injecting or ingesting any type of cleansing product into the body is irresponsible and its dangerous” and cautioned that this is what people do “when they want to kill themselves.” Trump is, apparently, so stupid that he is going to kill us all before it is all over. On April 24, 2020, Kate Kell and Raphael Satter published an article in Reuters titled “Trump’s COVID-19 disinfectant ideas horrify health experts.” In this article Patrice Harris, President of the American Medical Association, also eager to do her part for the cause, is quoted as saying: “It is unfortunate that I have to comment on this, but people should under no circumstances ingest or inject bleach or disinfectant.”

On the same day, Kirsten Brown and Justin Sink published an article titled “Trump’s Idea to Disinfect Lungs Leaves Medical Experts Aghast.” On April 25, 2020, in an article titled, “Trump recklessly suggests injecting disinfectant to kill coronavirus. Why he’s wrong,” Jackson Ryan, a “science editor” at CNET (short for “Computer Network”), also eager to do his bit for the cause and show how much he cares, states authoritatively that “Disinfectants, like bleach and isopropyl alcohol, are toxic and should not be consumed, ingested or injected to fight COVID-19.” Overseas media, equally appalled, and wishing to do their bit for the cause as well, chimed in to show how much they care. On April 24, 2020, Poppy Noor of The Guardian published an article titled “Please don’t inject bleach; Trump’s wild coronavirus claims prompt disbelief.”

In fact, Poppy is right about one thing. The flurry of “news” articles about Trump’s alleged statement should “prompt disbelief” but not about Trump. It should prompt disbelief in the ability of the “news” media to read in the English language at the 7th grade level. For, in fact, should this still be relevant, Trump never said that people should drink or inject bleach or disinfectants into the body to cure the coronavirus. On July 11, 2020, even Politifact published an article titled “No, Trump didn’t tell Americans infected with the coronavirus to drink bleach.” Further, Politifact provides Trump’s precise words, which will make Socrates, but not Biden, Dr. Gupta, Patrice Harris (President of the American Medical Association), Poppy Noor, and Thrysamachus happy. Here are Trump’s exact words, spoken while talking to a group of doctors about possible treatments for the coronavirus:

And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? …[It would] be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.

With a modicum of effort, our “news” media, Dr. Gupta, the president of the American Medical Association and Poppy Noor can verify that the sentence in which Trump mentions injecting a disinfectant has a question mark at the end. Even American “journalists” should be competent to recognize that this means that Trump was asking a question, not instructing anybody to do anything. That is, Trump’s real sin was to ask a question to a gathering of doctors which, one would have thought, is precisely what a president should do when speaking to a group of doctors about a pandemic. This is why Politifact rates Joe Biden’s claim, and by implication the rest of these unhinged claims, as “mostly false.”

This story does have an addition dimension that actually presupposes a certain amount of scientific literacy. For, despite the Democrat and “news” media glee at how stupid Trump is to suggest injecting disinfectant or shining ultraviolet light into people’s bodies to cure diseases, there is a long scientific tradition of investigating precisely these possibilities. It is not possible to do justice to this topic here so only the most basic points can be made.

Hypochlorous acid, commonly known as Eusol, is used as a disinfectant to clean surfaces. For example, Eusol, that is, sodium hypochlorite equivalent to 0.05% – 0.1% is listed at pharmacy.nhg.com.sg as a disinfectant to treat floors furniture and mops but also, undiluted, on wounds. Despite the fact that one would not be advised to put sodium hypochlorite on one’s salad when one runs out of oil and vinegar, The Journal of Hygiene published a paper in 1943 by D. G. ff. Edward and O. M. Lidwell titled “Studies on Air-Born Virus Infections: III: The Killing of Aerial Suspensions of Influenza Virus by Hypochlorous Acid.”

The paper gives a result of a study that found that the influenza virus in the nasal passages is susceptible to mists of Eusol. Similar studies have continued to the present day. In 2011 Myeong Sang Yu, Hyung Wook Park, Hyun Ja Kwon, and Yong Ju Jang published a paper in the American Journal of Rhinol Allergy titled “The effect of a low concentration of hypochlorous acid on rhinovirus infection of nasal epithelial cells” that argues that introduction of hypochlorous acid (Eusol) into the nasal cavities does have some effectiveness in neutralizing rhinovirus present there.

The “news” media also expressed considerable glee at Trump’s stupidity in suggesting that ultraviolet light might be used to kill the coronavirus inside the human body. However, in an April 23, 2019 news conference, Chaunie Brusia announced that a research team led by Mark Pimentel, MD at the Cedars-Sinai Hospital is performing research on a UV light therapy, called “Healight,” that delivers intermittent ultraviolet (UV) light through an endotracheal catheter to treat coronavirus and other respiratory infections. Dr. Pimentel stated that “Our team has shown that administering a specific spectrum of UV-A light can eradicate viruses in infected human cells (including coronavirus) and bacteria in the area while preserving healthy cells.”

In addition to Eusol, methylene blue is a substance sometimes used as a disinfectant outside the body but also in photodynamic therapy (PDT) inside the body. The general idea is that there are certain substances that are normally dangerous to the body but which one can introduce into the body in such low concentrations that they are not dangerous because they can be rendered effective by light at the point in the body where the desired effect is needed, e.g., the site of a cancer or infection.

In fact, there are a plethora of articles on these subjects to those willing and able to search for them, which does not, apparently, include the “Democrat Party” or the American “news” media. Further, since Thailand was not working for the Biden “campaign” at the time, Thailand Medical News published an article on April 16, 2020, over 6 months before the US “election,” titled “Breaking News! President Trump Could Be Right After All. Photodynamic Theory and the Disinfectant Hypochlorous Acid Are Interesting Research Prospects to Treat Covid-19.” That is, it is not just that disinfectants and light are being introduced into the body in PDT o treat some diseases or other, but even coronavirus specifically is mentioned as an area of promising research.

On the assumption that scientific research is still permitted in the United States by a “news” media that is no longer in election mode, some American “journalists” might profit from tracking down some of the scientific papers listed on the Thailand site. There is a plethora of additional scientific papers on this topic, some of which specifically involving the use of the disinfectant methylene blue in PDT, are, given below.

The disinfectant Methylene blue is also used in PDT. See the IARC Monograph on the evaluation of the Carcinogenic Risks to Humans No. 108 titled “Some Drugs and Herbal Products” at The International Agency for Research on Cancer at Lyon France in 2016. A 2005 paper by João Paulo Tardivo, Auro Del Giglio, Carla Santos de Oliveira, Dino Santesso Gabrielli, Helena Couto Jungqueira, Dayane Batista Tada, Divinomar Severino, Rozane de Fátima Turchuello and Mauricio Baptista titled “Methylene Blue in photodynamic therapy: From basic mechanisms to clinical applications” discusses the in vitro (in the test tube) and in vivo (in the living body) applications related to PDT.

The authors conclude that methylene blue has the potential in PDT to treat a variety of cancerous and non-cancerous conditions, including basal cell carcinoma, Karposi’s sarcoma, melanoma and virus and fungal infections with low toxicity and no side effects. What this means, in layperson’s terms, is that although methylene blue is toxic, it can be safely introduced into the human body in low concentrations to cure some serious diseases because the medical efficacy of those low concentrations is increased by UV light introduced at that site within the body.

Similarly, in a 2019 paper in Scientific Reports titled “Photodynamic effect of Zirconium phosphate biocompatible nano-bilayers containing methylene blue on cancer and normal cells” Reza Hosseinzadeh and Khatereh Khorsandi describe the effective use of methylene blue in PDT of human breast cancer cells. The argument of this paper is more complicated than the one discussed in the previous paragraph because it begins with the recognition that the use of methylene blue, especially in PDT, has been limited due to its rapid enzymatic reduction within biological systems (that is, enzymes within the body break it down too fast to be useful).

As a consequence, the paper argues that nano-platelet zirconium was used as a “drug delivery vehicle” for methylene blue to enhance its photodynamic therapy efficiency in human breast cancer cells. The results suggested that not only does Zirconium Phosphate-methylene blue nanoparticles decrease the “dark” toxicity (i.e., in the absence of light) of methylene blue but that zirconium phosphate-methylene blue nano-hybrids significantly enhance the photodynamic efficiency against human breast cancer cells.

This study is cited here because it provides a concrete instance of the way in which scientists are always trying to find ways safely to introduce otherwise toxic substances (e.g., disinfectants) into the human body, sometimes in common with light or ultraviolet light to enhance their potency at the required area in the body, in order to render them effective to treat diseases.

The introduction of the “disinfectant” into the human body need not merely be to put it in a syringe and squirted into the bloodstream – as the Democrat-media alliance imagined Trump to be suggesting in their joint campaign slogans. More sophisticated applications are possible in which the “disinfectant” is synthesized into a “hybrid” molecule that decreases its toxicity and makes it possible to introduce it safely into the human body to treat diseases.

8. Trump Has Never Condemned “White Supremacists”

During his “campaign” for the presidency, Joe Biden, who currently finds himself in the White House, referring to Trump’s remarks at Charlottesville that there were “very fine people on both sides” at the protests against removing various historical statues from public places, stated that Donald Trump has “yet once to condemn white supremacy, the neo-Nazis.” Indeed, Biden has claimed that it was Trump’s remarks at Charlottesville that convinced him that he had to run for the presidency. Similar claims were repeated endlessly by the “news” media.

However, in a Feb. 11, 2020 article titled “Trump Has Condemned White Supremacists,” Robert Farley points out that “contrary to Biden’s claim, the president twice specifically condemned white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and he has repeated that condemnation since.” Farley provides a complete transcript with a timeline of Trump’s precise words on these issues. On the day of the Charlottesville incident Trump said, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides.” Farley also reports that Trump stated that he and Democrat Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe had met earlier that day and we “agreed that the hate and the division must stop, and must stop right now. We have to come together as Americans with love for our nation and true affection — really — and I say this so strongly — true affection for each other.” That is, the aim of Trump’s message that day, worked out jointly with Democrat Governor McAuliffe, was to provide a unifying statement. Trump explicitly condemned “hatred, bigotry and violence … on many sides.” Trump’s unacceptable statement, for which he absolutely cannot be forgiven, was that he alluded to the fact that “hatred, bigotry and violence” come from both sides und das ist streng verboten by the “Democrats”-“news” media complex because it is one of their ground rules for any discussion that their side of the aisle must be protected from any criticism whatsoever.

Farley further reports that two days later, on Aug. 14, 2017, Trump issued a statement that “referred to KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.” Farley quotes Trump’s exact words:

[A]s I have said many times before: No matter the color of our skin, we all live under the same laws, we all salute the same great flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God. We must love each other, show affection for each other, and unite together in condemnation of hatred, bigotry, and violence. We must rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that bring us together as Americans. Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.

That is, Trump’s real sin on Aug. 14th is not that he did not explicitly condemn the KKK and White Supremacy. He explicitly did just that. In an attempt to be unifying, he called on us to love each other no matter what the color of our skin, followed by an explicit condemnation a day later of the KKK and white supremacy. His egregious sin was that he did not do this fast enough to meet the joint Democrat and “news” media’s political timetable. Accordingly, Farely concludes that “Joe Biden’s claim that President Donald Trump has ‘yet once to condemn white supremacy, the neo-Nazis,’” is just wrong.

Finally, since Joe Biden claim that it was Trump’s divisive remarks about white supremacy that led him to run for the presidency, and since Trump explicitly did condemn white supremacy and attempted to be unifying, it follows that Joe Biden’s rationale for running for the presidency, the office he now holds, is based on a fraud.

9. Trump Pressured Georgia Officials To Create Votes For Him In The 2020 Election

On Jan 3, 2021 the Washington Post published an article titled “‘I just want to find 11,780 votes.’ In an extraordinary hour-long call Trump pressures Georgia election official to recalculate the vote in his favor.” The article claims that Trump told the election official to “find the votes.” On Jan 9 2021 the Washington Post published another article titled “Trump Pressured Georgia Election Investigator in Separate call legal experts say could amount to obstruction.”

This case is especially important because these media reports were cited in the second impeachment of Donald Trump to support the claim that he illegally attempted to pressure Georgia election officials to overturn the Georgia vote. Note as an aside that, difficult as it is to believe, media reports were used as evidence in an attempt to impeach the president.. As of March 18, 2021, Wikipedia, which generally attempts to promote the impression that it is an encyclopedia (as opposed to a political tool for the Left), reports the event this way: “The [second] article of impeachment addressed Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results (including his false claims of election fraud and his efforts to pressure election officials in Georgia).” This was also important because reports of Trump’s alleged Georgia election interference might have influenced the voters in Georgia in the election of the two Georgia senators that took place several weeks later. As it turned out, the two Democrats that had not been expected to win their elections did, so to speak, “win” them.

The problem is that the Washington Post articles were completely false. In mid-March 2021, the Georgia election official released the actual audio recording of the conversation. In their retraction the Washington Post wrote the following:

Trump did not tell the investigator to ‘find the fraud’ or say she would be ‘a national hero’ if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find ‘dishonesty’ there. He also told her that she had ‘the most important job in the country right now’… The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.

Imagine that! Trump is opposed to dishonesty! Clearly that is an impeachable offence. The Washington Post did not make a simple mistake here. They did not say that Trump called someone a fool when he really called them a jerk. They did not misread a number or a word. The Washington Post, during an election season crucial to the country, apparently unable to find a competent 7th grader to properly transcribe the simple wording in Trump’s actual conversation with the Georgia Secretary of State, made up the accusations, later used in the second Trump impeachment trial, out of whole cloth. What Trump actually said was nothing like what the Post reported. The “journalists” at Pravda could do no better.

10. Trump Lied That There Was Election Fraud In 2020

Immediately after Trump claimed that there had been fraud in the 2020 election, he was accused of lying, spreading false information, and even sedition. Although none of the “news” media ever told this to Stacy Abrams, who still thinks that she is the legitimate governor of Georgia, it is now, apparently, seditious, or, to be more precise, seditious for members of one party only, to question the results of an election. It is fine when members of the other party do so. In the following days, weeks and months after the 2020 presidential election, one “news” story after another informed the public that there was no election fraud whatsoever and repeated the claim that Trump is lying and spreading false information.

On Jan 15, 2021, Rex Huppke of the Chicago Tribune instructed Trump that he “must apologize for his lie that the election was stolen.” On Jan 20, 2021 Libby Cathey of ABC News, in an article titled “Trump’s Legacy of Lies: How Trump weaponized mistruths during his presidency” called Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen “the big lie” that “ended in the capital siege.” Unfortunately, Libby did not supply any evidence for her causal assertion about the capital siege. Needing an “expert,” Libby enthusiastically quotes Dr. Bandy Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at Yale, author of Profile of Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul (which claims, basically, that Trump’s mental illness gives insight into America’s spiritual illness), who claims that Trump’s “pattern of lying seems to consist of beginning with a conscious lie intended to deceive others – or to cover up who he really is – but as more people believe him and the adulations of the crowds gratify him in irresistible ways, he comes to believe it himself.… His grandiose sense of himself, on the other hand, does not allow for any possibility that he is wrong.”

For good measure, Bandy, possessed, apparently, by a novel theory of psychiatric disease and a grandiose vision of causation not found in any scientific textbooks, adds that Trump’s “psychosis” had spread to his followers like Allen Dershowitz. Dershowitz contacted the American Psychiatric Association to ask if Bandy’s behavior contradicts their rules that a psychiatrist should not diagnose someone that they had not personally examined. For the record, comrade Bandy was informed by Yale that if her behavior did not change, she would be terminated and she was in fact terminated on May 17, 2020. One could go on, but that should be enough documentation for present purposes.

Despite the grandiose confidence of Trump’s critics, possessed, apparently, with such vivid visions that they cannot conceive any possibility that they may be wrong, it is noteworthy that Trump just won a major legal victory in Michigan where an elected 1st District Court of Appeals Judge Christopher Murray declared that the Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, broke the state election laws by changing the rules that had been set by the state legislature, for legal ballots, ballot signatures and the like. Judge Murray put it this way:

Nowhere in this States election law has the legislature indicated that signatures are to be presumed valid, nor did the Legislature require that signatures are to be accepted so long as there are any redeeming qualities in the application or return envelope as compared with the signature on file. Policy determinations like the one at issue – which places the thumb on the scale in favor of a signature’s validity – should be made pursuant to properly promulgated rules under the APA or by the legislature.

The effect of Secretary of State Benson’s illegal changes was to relax the conditions of legal ballots, set by the legislature, in order to make many more ballots acceptable than would have been acceptable under the existing laws. As a result of these illegal changes to the rules, about 3.1 million additional ballots that would have been illegal under the existing laws were accepted in the 2020 Michigan presidential elections.

Since Trump only “lost” the state by about 150,000 votes it is easily possible that he would have won Michigan, thereby placing him within striking distance of the needed 270 electoral votes. If similar shenanigans were discovered in another major state like Pennsylvania, and if this could have been corrected before the election, Trump would be the president now. As Matt Margolis, in his March 21, 2021, in his article titled “Trump Vindicated as Judge Rules Michigan Secretary of State Violated Election Laws,” puts it:

Michigan was not the only state where Democrat state officials unilaterally changed election laws, so this ruling certainly raises legitimate doubts whether Biden truly won the election without invalid votes.

Naturally, the “news” media, eager to do its part for the cause, not the cause of “journalism” but the cause of the Harris-Biden campaign, led the charge to declare the 2020 vote to be certified quickly before precisely this sort of fraud could be discovered and corrected. As the Michigan judicial decision shows, however, once again, Trump was right and the hasty “news” media was wrong. Trump did not “lie” or spread false information about election fraud in the 2020 election. Rather, Trump was censored by partisans from exercising his first amendment rights to tell the truth, as he saw it, about the election, a right that used to be guaranteed in the United States that we all grew up in – but no more.

In fact, although this verdict by the Michigan judge is important, one does not actually need it in order to know that the “news” media was behaving in an inappropriate partisan way in this case. The enormous haste in the “news” media’s insistence that Trump had lied about election fraud gives them away. For, in fact, there is no possible way that the “news” media could know at that early date, days and weeks after the 2020 election, that there had been no election fraud.

The “news” media has apparently never heard of these things called “investigations.” Nor had they managed to remember that, unlike reading Democrat party talking points, which only takes a few minutes on the nightly news, investigations take time, sometimes months or years. One actually needs to check the facts, difficult as that is to believe. The “news” media, instead of just reporting the “news,” collaborated with the Democrat Party and the Harris-Biden campaign to solidify a certain fraudulent election result (illustrated by the result in Michigan). That is, the “news” media played an important role in subverting the Democratic process in the 2020 election but, because of the censorship operation by much of the “news” media, “Big Tech” and “social media,” one is not allowed to talk about the fraud. Das darf man nicht sagen!

II. Trump’s Alleged Support For The 2003 Iraq War

Many supporters of the “Democrat” party and the “news” media have repeatedly claimed that Trump asserted another falsehood when he claimed that he never supported the 2003 Iraq war. This case is slightly different from those discussed in the preceding section because Trump never said any of those things but there is actually a tenuous thread of support for their claims in this case. Most “Democrats” and members of the “news” media admit that Trump began to speak against the war after it started, but many of them refuse to give up the claim that he expressed support for the war in his 2002 interview with Howard Stern. However, this case is, at best, not clear cut. It is useful discuss this case because it displays another strand of the “Democrat” and “news” media strategies of misrepresentation.

In a 2/18/2016 Eliza Collins published an article in Politico titled “Trump supported invading Iraq in 2002: The GOP candidate says he opposed the 2003 invasion, but a year prior he told Howard Stern he supported going in.” The first sentence of the article is “Donald Trump often touts that he was against the war in Iraq, but in 2002 he expressed support for an invasion.”

In fact, Eliza is wrong that Trump “supported going in” in his talk with Howard Stern. First, it is important to remember the context. This is not a conversation with Morley Safer on 60 minutes. It is a conversation with “shock jock” Howard Stern on the radio Howard Stern Show, the most common subject matter of which, give Stern’s own obsessions, is women’s underwear. Second, this was a phone conversation between Trump and Stern. It was not a face to face sit down in which one can gage the intentions of the questioner (e.g., how serious is Stern in asking this question?). Third, the question was sprung on Trump, which does not permit a considered response. In this context, the best Trump could possibly do was to give a hasty response. Finally, and this is the most important point, Trump did not say that he “supports going in.” Fortunately, Eliza, who, apparently, does not understand the sentences in her own article, provides the precise wording of the exchange:

“Are you for invading Iraq?” Stern asked.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Trump responded. “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

Saying “I guess so,” in this context is not a statement of support. It is, most obviously, a guess, and one of the most common dictionary meanings of “guess” is speculation. If John asks Jill if she loves him and Jill says “I guess so,” that is not the answer Jack wants. It does not mean that Jill, so to speak, supports “going in.” Jill’s response in that case is not an affirmative answer.

It is an attempt to stake a position in the safe indecisive middle. It is, perhaps, an attempt to postpone the final verdict on the issue until later. If one wished to give a fair appraisal of the cognitive meaning of Trump’s response it would be something like this: “I suppose, given what I know about it now, that it might be the right thing to do, but we’ll see.” Unfortunately, the media has never been interested in giving a fair appraisal of the meaning of Trump’s statement in the context of a phone-in discussion on the patently unserious Howard Stern Show.

By contrast, Joe Biden did unambiguously support going to war with Iraq in 2003. He voted to authorize the war it in the US Senate. Despite that, he several times denied having ever supported the Iraq war. In a Sept. 10, 2019 article titled “Biden’s Record on Iraq War,” Robert Farley states: “Twice in the last five weeks, Joe Biden has claimed that despite voting to authorize military force against Iraq in 2002, he opposed the Iraq war from “the moment” it began. That’s not accurate, and Biden now says he misspoke.”

The contrast between Biden’s explicit support for the authorization to go to war and Trump’s momentary “guess” what he would do is stark. Biden voted for the authorization to go to war in Iraq in 2003 on the floor of the United States Senate and later denied that he had ever supported the war. Biden’s support for the war in a vote in the Senate is as unambiguous as one can get.

By contrast, Trump’s “guess” what he would do in response to an unexpected question in a phone conversation on an unserious radio show is not unambiguous support for invading Iraq. Once again, the Democrats and “news” media seem totally incapable of fairly evaluating context and nuance when it comes to Trump. Instead, the method is to get a word or a sentence that can be taken out of context and embellished so that it can be repeated endlessly by partisans as a weapon against the despised conservative. That is not fair and it is not journalism. More important, it is a disservice to the American people.

III. The “News” Media’s Admitted Abandonment Of Objectivity And Fairness

The fact that the “news” media consistently misrepresents Donald Trump should not be a surprise. This is not an opinion. Many in the media have admitted it themselves. They have explained why they are doing this and many of them have even bragged that they are not going to be objective or fair.

On June 26, 2017 Mitchell Stephens, a professor of “journalism” at NYU, published an article on Politico titled “Goodbye Nonpartisan Journalism and Good Riddance: Disinterested Journalism is Overrated.” Stephens begins the article by claiming that Donald Trump’s “candidacy and presidency are already remaking American journalism … including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the network evening newscasts and CNN,” although what Stephens really means is that American journalism is remaking itself to join the Democrats in their war on Trump. That is, the decline of “objective journalism” is not something Trump did to American “journalism” but something American “journalism” did to itself, namely, break its traditional ethical commitment to neutrality. Stephens’ representation of the media as a passive victim here is what criminals typically do to escape responsibility for their crimes. “I didn’t mean to stab her 36 times. The Zoloft made me do it.” In this case, Stephens’ representation of the media as a passive victim here is an attempt to blame the media’s abandonment of objectivity on Trump. “Trump made us do it!” Stephens needs, like an adult, to learn to accept responsibility for his behaviour.

In the course of giving a self-serving history lesson to the effect that American “journalism” has always been partisan, Stephens explains that it has simply become time for American “journalism” to return to its partisan roots:

Is this the end of all that is good and decent in American journalism? Nah. I say good for them. An abandonment of the pretense to “objectivity”—in many ways a return to American journalism’s roots—is long overdue. Journalism in the United States was born partisan and remained, for much of its history, loud, boisterous and combative.

Stephens is, of course, wrong that American journalism has always been loud, boisterous and combative. The way “journalists” behave depends on who is in power. For example, it was not loud, boisterous and combative when White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny “became a mini-celebrity (or rather a national laughing stock)” when he asked Obama in the first days of his presidency what “enchanted” him most about being the president. Of course, even the Times, embarrassed by this unprecedented embarrassing level of groveling, which is saying something, buried Zeleny’s remark.

By contrast, on the first day of his presidency Zeke Miller of Time Magazine incorrectly reported that Trump had removed a bust of Martin Luther King from the Oval office and had to issue a retraction soon thereafter. The message, of course, a crucial part of the narrative being constructed by the “Democrat” party and their colluders in the “news” media, is that Trump is a racist. Time later stated that this was a “good faith error” because “the bust had been obscured from view.” Apparently, it is too much to ask a “journalist” covering the first days of a new presidency to walk a few steps and crank his or her neck 45 degrees to check whether the bust is still there. It’s a tough job, especially for shills.

Stephens celebrates the fact that our “most respected mainstream journalism organizations,” by which he means the one’s that dependably skew to his leftist side of the aisle, have abandoned the former practice of not calling politicians “liars:”

Our most respected mainstream journalism organizations are beginning to recognize the failings of nonpartisanship—its tepidness, its blind spots, its omissions, its evasions. It was news when the patriarch of American journalism, the New York Times, finally used the word “lie,” in a headline on atop its front page on September 17, 2016, to describe a Trump assertion (albeit one he claimed no longer to hold: “birtherism”). Other legacy journalism organizations began more regularly calling out Trump’s “falsehoods,” if not actually accusing him of lying. About a week later, the Los Angeles Times declared, also on page one: “Never in modern presidential politics has a major candidate made false statements as routinely as Trump has.”

After “the patriarch of American journalism” (an odd sexist description of a “newspaper” whose nickname is “the Old Grey Lady”) abandoned tradition and began accusing Trump of lying, many other “journalists,” feeling that they had been given permission to do the same, followed suit. This is, of course, the same “patriarch of American “journalism” that had to delete a tweet claiming that Brett Kavanaugh thrust his penis in a girl’s face in a drinking party more than 30 years ago at Yale after being reminded, perhaps by a 3rd grader, that one actually needs evidence if one is going to publish this sort of smear about people.

On Aug. 8, 2016 Jim Rutenberg, eager to do his bit for the cause, in an article for the same “patriarch of American journalism,” titled “Trump is testing the norms of American journalism,” asked the trenchant question that, apparently, “everyone is grappling with,” namely, “Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?” Many other “journalists” were soon to follow suit and abandon their traditional standards in order to do their bit for the cause.

With normal standards in the rear-view mirror, “journalists” began discovering Trump “lies” everywhere. It was remarkable, almost like a miracle, how many “lies” they found. Don Lemon, Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, Rachel Maddow, etc., regularly found Trump “lies” to entertain their remaining “news” base (the one that pays their inflated salaries). It was not long, with objectivity banished, before the “news” media “discovered,” so to speak, that Trump had “lied” much more than any other American president.

The Huffington Post, with a straight face, claimed in January 2021 that by Nov. 5, 2020 Trump had made 29,508 false or misleading statements of which 16,421 were lies. In order to understand this, however, one must remember that “lied” does not mean what it meant in the bad old days when a lie was defined in terms of objective truth. One must now understand that “lied” means “whatever admittedly non-objective left leaning ‘journalists’ say is a lie,” which, in many cases, turns out to be the truth (like Trump’s true claims about the illegality in the Michigan election). That is, most of Trump’s alleged “lies” were cooked up in America’s “news” rooms by the newly created species of non-objective “journalists.”

Further, it was not true that “everyone” was grappling with comrade Rutenberg’s question. Tucker Carlson was not “grappling” with it. Sean Hannity was not “grappling” with it. Glen Greenwald was not “grappling” with it. Lara Logan was not “grappling” with it. That is, in keeping with our Orwellian age, by “everyone” Prof. Stephens does not mean “everyone.” He means “everyone” is his “woke” bubble, the members of his tribe. Of course, the whole premise of Stephens’ argument is false, for there is nothing that says that a fair journalism must be tepid, have blind spots, or evade or omit things.

More recently, Lest Holt, of NBC “News,” while accepting the Edward R. Murrow Award for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism, stated that it has “become clearer that fairness is overrated” and added that “The idea that we [in the “news” media] should always give two sides equal weight and merit does not reflect the world we find ourselves in.” Lester, one recalls, is the “journalist” who, while “moderating” a presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, intervened to contradict Trump and back Hillary’s claim that the “Stop and Frisk” policy in New York was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of New York. It is also worthy of note that the Washington Post, which cannot, apparently, read in the English language anymore, gave “kudos” to Lester for his “fact checking” to help their preferred candidate, Hillary, in the debate. But even the left-leaning Politifact admits that Trump was right:

The judge made it very clear that she was not finding stop-and-frisk as a general practice unconstitutional,” said David Rudovsky, a leading civil rights attorney and senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Holt’s claim [that] “stop-and-frisk was ruled unconstitutional in New York” … makes it seem as if the judge decided that all stops and frisks were unconstitutional in New York, when really her ruling said New York had to “stop and frisk” differently. New York cops still stop and frisk today.

In fact, Holt was simply following the Candy Crowley “school” of presidential debate “moderation” pioneered at CNN in the presidential debate between Obama and Romney in 2012. Crowly, like Holt, eager to do her part for the cause, intervened in the debate to state that Obama was right and Romney wrong about the language Obama had used to describe the terrorist attack on the Benghazi compound. A few days later Crowley had to admit that “Romney was right in the main.” Of course, millions of people saw her support for Obama in the presidential elections broadcast to the entire nation, but only a few thousand saw the “correction” a few days later, which means that the strategy to help Obama, despite the later correction, was successful. For the record, Comrade Crowly permanently left the field of journalism two years later.

Further, the fact that Crowley’s taking sides in the debate was clearly against the town hall rules did not stop some “journalists” from arguing that she was right to do so. Yes of course! The cause comes first! One only needs to wait until some debate moderator breaks the rules to intervene in a 2024 presidential debate to help Donald Trump or Ron De Santis against the Democrat to see how much these “journalists” believe any of what they are saying, if they really believe anything at all anymore. For, in fact, authenticity, that pesky old phenomenon the existentialists tried to remind us about in world that had become totally false, is no longer a part of the equation.

The fact that Lester Holt of all people, who intervened in a presidential debate with false information to hurt the conservative du jour, is shamelessly praised by the former “news” paper, the Washington Post, for doing so, and later, comically, received a major journalistic excellence award, illustrates that in today’s Orwellian world promoting untruths to hurt conservatives can be a major career booster.

Despite the lucrative new career-enhancing enthusiasm in the “journalistic” profession for discovering Trump “lies,” there were, in fact, a few journalists left who managed to retain some of that old-fashioned but now much despised “fairness” and “objectivity” – and keep their integrity to boot. Sharyl Attkisson, in a talk at Hillsdale College on Feb. 25, 2021, titled “Slanted Journalism and the 2020 Election” (currently on youtbe.com under the same title) explains the common-sense reason why real journalists have traditionally been reluctant to accuse someone of lying, namely, that lying is not simply saying something that is false. It is intentionally asserting something false and intentions, being subjective, are intrinsically very hard to verify. Thus, it is easy to decide if someone has said something that is false but much harder to determine if they intentionally did so, that is, if they have lied.

Of course, the inability to verify subjective matters is no problem once one abandons objectivity and fairness, as the “news” media did during the 4 years of the Trump presidency in order to protect the American people, the “basket of deplorables,” from being able to decide for themselves who they wished to vote for in the 2020 election.

Attkisson goes on the list a number of additional “mistakes” by our self-admitted non-objective admittedly non-fair thought police. It would take far too long to list all of Sharyl’s examples here, but one particularly amusing case is the report by Newsweek’s Jessica Kwong on 11/28, 2019 titled “How is Donald Trump spending Thanksgiving? Tweeting, Golfing and More.” As Sharyl puts it, the story implies that “Trump is once again goofing off unlike his heroic predecessor Barak Obama who used to only do selfless things.”

Predictably, however, for the non-objective “news” media, Kwong’s story was false. Trump had actually left the United States the night before to fly to Afghanistan where he served dinner to US troops. When Trump turned up in Afghanistan, and it became impossible, even for Newsweek, to maintain the false storyline any longer, Kwong claimed she had made an “honest mistake.” Kwong reported on Twitter that she was deleting her previous tweet because “It was written before knowing about the President’s surprise trip to Afghanistan” – yes of course, just like the article claiming that Trump removed the bust of Martin Luther King from the Oval office was written before the “journalist” found out he had not removed the bust.

It had not, apparently, occurred to Kwong before writing her original story to wonder whether the president might be making a surprise trip to visit the troops because, as Attkisson notes, “all recent presidents have done this at one time or another.” Who would have thunk it! The answer is: Anybody with common sense and basic decency but not, apparently, Jessica or her editor at Newsweek. Attkisson adds that in the Trump era “reporters,” like Kwong, commonly report stories unattributed to a source as if they had personally confirmed the story when they had not! In other words, Kwong reported the original story as if she had an internal White House source to lend it credibility when she did not.

However, Newsweek did not, Attkisson notes, correct the report. On 11/28, 2019 Jessica Kwong republished the story, which Newsweek described as an “update,” with the new title: “How did Trump spend Thanksgiving? Tweeting, golfing – and surprising US Troops in Afghanistan.” Kwong forgot to mention that Trump had also surprised Newsweek. Unfortunately, the new story is not an “update.” The fact that the original story was false, Attkisson notes, merited a correction and an apology but none was given. Attkisson adds that as of the date of her Hillsdale speech, Newsweek still had the false information that Trump golfed on Thanksgiving on the Newsweek page. It may be worth mentioning that in 2010 Newsweek, which had once been a fine news magazine, known for its objectivity, sold for one dollar.

The “news” media, Attkisson remarks, never seems to learn its lessons. Remarkably, NBC “news” had made virtually the identical mistake one year earlier! 8 hours before the end of Christmas day in 2018, NBC published a headline “blaring” that “Trump becomes first president since 2002 not to visit troops at Christmas time.” The article took multiple jabs at Trump to prove that he could not live up to the standards of his predecessors – that being a crucial part of the script the newly non-objective non-fair “news” media, eager to do its bit for the cause, was putting together.

In fact, however, Trump had left the White House late on Dec. 25th 2018 to visit the troops in Iraq. When the mistake was revealed, Attkisson notes that NBC, “like Newsweek, was unable to admit its mistake.” Instead of issuing a simple apology and stating that it had published a story “without bothering to verify it,” NBC published a lengthy editor’s note “parsing the definition of what constitutes a Christmas visit” and claimed that “the original article was technically correct.

As Attkisson puts it, “[It] depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” She goes on to give many more embarrassing instances of media’s inability to tell the truth or to admit that it has made a mistake even when it has been caught red-handed. This is, of course, the same media that has made a major effort to promote the impression that it is deeply concerned about Trump’s alleged “lies,” most of which it concocted itself.

None of this should be any surprise. This endless list of “honest mistakes” that always seem to skew in one direction (against conservatives), followed by various comical excuses by “journalists” whose bias and/or incompetence have been exposed, is what one gets when the “news” media announces that they are no longer going to be “objective” or “fair” because they, or, perhaps to be more precise, their paymasters, have decided that someone like Trump is too dangerous (to their establishment power) to cover objectively or fairly.

IV. The “News” Media’s Censorship Operation Against Trump

The program to censor Trump and his supporters by Facebook, Twitter, Youtube.com and other parts of the “news” media is an essential part of the “news” media’s current Orwellian operation. Twitter’s admission, after the election, that it was a “mistake” to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election, is pathetic. It was as obvious before the election as it is now that the American people have the right to make up their own minds about such issues despite the grandiose self-conceptions of social media’s child billonaires. Since the constant “news” media misrepresentation of the facts is so easy to expose as soon as one applies Socrates’ insistence on precise speech, its dishonest operation can only be maintained if the people who attempt to expose the fraud are prevented from doing so (that is, if they are censored).

The “news” media’s censorship operation only makes sense if one believes, with these craven elites, that the American people are too stupid to think for themselves. Freedom of thought cannot be permitted by a “news” media that considers itself so superior to the “basket of deplorables” (half of the American people) that they need, for their own good, to be manipulated by their intellectual and moral betters on the coasts and in Silicon Valley.

This kind of censorship operation is practiced by all dictatorships. The dictator pumps out false or misleading information to maintain their own power and then censors anyone who points out that it is false or misleading on the grounds that their critics are giving false or misleading information. The attempted “justification” of the anti-American censoring behaviour by Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other media is literally comical. For it is easy enough to determine who is lying (or spreading false information) and who is not. One need only determine who needs to censor and who does not, that is, who is afraid of a free discussion and who is not. If one does not have the truth, one has nothing and, as usual, the censors, by their fear of a freedom of speech admit thereby that they know they cannot win a free and fair debate.

It should be noted that the present article only focuses on the media misrepresentations of Trump’s tweets and statements. It does not even begin to cover the whole other category in which various members of the “news” media fabricated stories, not based on anything Trump himself said, designed to destroy the Trump presidency and his chances for re-election in 2020. For example, the present article does not cover the media fabrication, in June of 2020, before the election, reported as fact at the time, that Russia was paying Taliban militants bounties to kill US troops. The “news” media and the “Democrats” had not been this happy since they were running their “shithole” hoax. Biden even used this story in his election “campaign” to keep alive the main idea of the first Russia hoax that Trump is somehow under Russia’s thumb. The new version is: Trump cannot even stand up to Putin to protect our troops! In April of 2021, however, after the election, Biden had to admit that the intelligence agencies did not have much confidence in those reports about bounties on US troops. That is precisely what Trump said at the time and he was pilloried by the “news” media and the “Democrats” for it. It would require another whole article to analyze this entirely different category of “news” media malfeasance against Trump.

The crime is not only against Donald Trump and conservatives. The crime is against the American people, the much despised “basket of deplorables” in “flyover country” for whom the coastal elites and the “news” media have nothing but contempt. The “journalists” at Pravda would be jealous that it was so easy to pull this off in America.

V. The “News” Media As The True Dividers Of The Nation

Michael Smerconish of CNN, referring to the massive polarization in the country, in a Jan. 13, 2021 Twitter remark, asks “How the hell did we get here?” Of course, many in the “news” media blame a large part of this polarization on Donald Trump. One of the media’s main criticism of Trump is that not just that he is lying but that he is the “dividing the country” by doing so. His various outrageous statements about Mexicans, women, “shithole countries,” injecting bleach to cure the virus, etc., polarize the nation.

It is entirely fair to criticize Trump. He is coarse. He, apparently, has no filter. If he thinks something, he says it. However, a precise examination of Trump’s statements reveals that once again the media has got things exactly backwards. If, as demonstrated in the previous 3 sections, Trump did not make these divisive statements but, rather, they were fabricated by the media and put into his mouth and broadcast to the nation and around the world, then it is the media that has divided the nation! It is the media that has turned Americans against one another. It is the media that has created ill will in Haiti and Africa against the United States by promoting the worst possible interpretation of Trump’s TASS. It is the “news” media and their comrades in the “Democrat” Party that has poisoned the nation internally and damaged the reputation of the nation abroad. Further, despite the discredited Democrat-media accusations for years that Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, it was the “news” media itself, including the censors in “social media,” with their constant, demonstrably false hit pieces about Trump that have interfered in US elections far more than Russia ever did.

The American people have noticed. Smerconish might want to take note of the fact that according to a Jan. 18, 2020, Hill-Harris X poll, an overwhelming majority of voters say the news media is making the United States more politically divided. The survey of 1,001 registered voters found that 75 percent believe that the way news media reports the news increases the political divide, compared to only 7 percent who believe it diminishes the divide. The ratio there is almost 11 to 1 against the media.

Further, both Democrats and Republicans, by strong majorities, believe that the media is dividing the country. 84 % of Republican voters, 74 % of Democratic voters and 69 % of independents believe the news media has contributed an increase in political polarization throughout the nation. The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer reports that “journalists” are “purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know to be false.” The public also see which way the media bias trends. A December Edelman Trust Barometer U.S. Election Poll found that 57 percent of Biden voters trust the “news” media while only 18 percent of the Trump voters trust the media to tell the truth. This is not a close call. It is not as if 59 % of Biden voters that trust the “new” media while only 53% of Trump voters do. The real ratio is almost 3 to 1. Biden voters trust the media much more because it helps Biden.

One does not, apparently, need a Master’s degree in Mathematical Logic to notice that the US “news” media is unwilling or incapable of doing its job properly. This should not be a surprise. See James O’Keefe’s surreptitious tape at CNN exposing Jeff Zucker’s instructions to his “journalists” about what stories to cover and how to cover them, for example, his instructions to his “journalists” not to cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal before the 2020 election. In another surreptitious undercover video Charlie Chester, a technical director at CNN, admitted that CNN was “creating stories” to get Trump out of office. Chester also stated that “I am a hundred percent going to say this and I a hundred percent believe it that if it wasn’t for CNN, I don’t know that Trump would have gotten voted out.” In one video Chester admitted that CNN targeted anti-Trump voters by focusing on climate change because “fear sells”. This is not “news”. It is theatre, choreographed tears and hysteria and all, not “news”, or, to be more precise, democrat party propaganda in the form of theatre. Naturally, Twitter, given their high standards for censoring conservatives, permanently suspended James O’Keefe’s Twitter account for exposing their comrades at CNN.

Apparently, the American people do not deserve to know the facts that the elites do not deem suitable for them. See also O’Keefe’s discussion with Ben Shapiro, currently on youtube.com titled “James O’Keefe’s Takeaways from Listening to CNN’s Editorial Meetings for 2 Months.” Finally, see James O’Keefe’s undercover video titled “BUSTED: James O’Keefe Confronts CNN Director About His Claims That the Network Used ‘Propaganda.’”

In this last video, Charlie Chester, CNN Technical Director, brags, among other things, that CNN uses “propaganda” and even “created a story [about Trump’s mental capacity] that we knew nothing about” to get Trump out of office. If Smerconish really wants to know how America became so divided, he can begin by watching James O’Keefe’s undercover videos of his own network’s dishonest divisive behaviour followed by viewing some of Sharyl Attkisson’s videos about the behaviour of the “news” media. If the “news” media and “social media” censors really care about suppressing lies and misinformation they would need to start censoring themselves.

A glance at the series of comical theatrical performances on CNN “news” programs, including Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources, on any given day enables any fair-minded person easily to make up their own mind about how quickly CNN’s “journalists” kneeled to Zucker’s instructions how to cover or not cover stories. While the “news” media regularly fabricate unacceptable statements to attribute to those with whom they disagree, or, perhaps, to be more precise, with whom they are told by their paymasters to disagree, the country is the loser.

VI. “The Enemy Of The American People”

The “Democrat Party and the “news” media were horrified when in 2017 Trump called the “news” media “the opposition party” and the “enemy of the American people:”

The president has referred to the media as the “opposition party” to his administration, and he has blamed news organizations for stymieing his agenda. But the language that Mr. Trump deployed on Friday is more typically used by leaders to refer to hostile foreign governments or subversive organizations. It also echoed the language of autocrats who seek to minimize dissent.
“Oh boy,” Carl Bernstein, the journalist who helped to uncover the Watergate scandal, said on Friday, after a reporter read him Mr. Trump’s tweet.
“Donald Trump is demonstrating an authoritarian attitude and inclination that shows no understanding of the role of the free press,” he [Bernstein] added.

That is, when Trump fights back against a “news” media that, as documented in the previous sections of this article, consistently misrepresents what he says, unable even to get simple sentences right, and sides with the party that opposes him, he is called an “authoritarian” and compared with “hostile foreign government” and “subversive organizations.” Of course, in our Orwellian world, to understand this one must understand that “authoritarian” no longer means authoritarian. “Authoritarian” now means fights back against Democrat-media tyranny. Indeed, in a lecture at Lehigh University, comrade Bernstein claimed that Trump’s criticism of “fake news” “drips with Stalinist imagery.”

Bernstein should know all about Stalinist imagery because, speaking of subversives and hostile foreign governments, comrade Bernstein grew up in a home with communist parents who supported both Stalin and the Democrat party. In fact, Carl was 9 years old in 1953 when his parents’ friends, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed for transmitting nuclear weapon secrets to the Soviet Union. As comrade Bernstein knows well, the first thing dictators and subversives do is to call the people who oppose them “dictators” and “subversives.” Bernstein can be grateful that the Washington Post now helps him do this.

Leaving comrade Bernstein behind, and returning to the real world, the actual problem with Trump is that if he is “subverting” anything it is the establishment “news” media’s own demonstrated record of incompetence and malfeasance. Although the American “news” media can carelessly and malevolently “dish it out,” that is ruin everyone from the humble decent man, in fact, a hero, Richard Jewell, who was just trying to do his policing job and save lives, which he did, to the Covington children, they cannot take it when anyone fights back. What terrified them about them about Trump was that he was not the least bit afraid of them and could not be controlled. Unlike most of the “Republican” establishment, who generally drop to their knees faster than Fang Fang, Trump was unmoved by their attempts to bully and intimidate him.

In fact, Donald Trump was not the first person in recent times to accuse the US “news” media of being an enemy of the American people. That honour belongs to Jimmy Carter Democrat Pat Caddell in response to the “media’s” flagrantly biased coverage of the 2012 race between Mitt Romney and the media’s darling Barak Obama. As Caddell, defending the old- fashioned view that the “news” media should neutrally report the news, as opposed to picking a side and supporting one of the two major parties, puts it:

[W]e face a fundamental danger here. It is this: I talked about the defense of the First Amendment. The press’s job is to stand in the ramparts and protect the liberty and freedom of all of us from a government and from organized governmental power. When they desert those ramparts and go to serve—to decide that they will now become an active participants—when they decide that their job is not simply to tell you who you may vote for, and who you may not, but, worse—and this is the danger of the last two weeks—what truth that you may know, as an American, and what truth you are not allowed to know, they have, then, made themselves a fundamental threat to the democracy, and, in my opinion, made themselves the enemy of the American people. And it is a threat to the very future of this country if that—we allow this stuff to go on, and we cross—we’ve crossed a whole new and frightening slide on the slippery slope these last two weeks.

The media bias certainly did not begin with Donald Trump. It has been going on for some time, indeed decades. It just got much worse under Trump, probably because they knew they could not control him. The fight against such sophistry must be carried out, at the intellectual level, in the same way it was carried out by Socrates 2500 years ago, by employing precise speech to expose their techniques of deception.

A “news” media that cannot seem to get anything right, a “news” media that cannot even tell the truth about the Martin Luther King bust in the Oval Office even when they were in the room; a “news” media that sometimes cannot even transcribe a simple sentence about grabbing a woman’s p…y without distorting it with their political bias; a “news” media that cannot even make the sophomore year distinction between the Supreme Court saying that a certain policy is unconstitutional and their saying that it is constitutional but that one must not apply it in unfair ways; a “news” media that cannot even recognize that Trump only asked a question of doctors and did not tell anyone to inject anything, let alone “bleach,” to cure the coronavirus, is unworthy of trust.

The fact that Trump never even used the word “bleach” seems to be beyond them, as are all the scientific articles on photodynamic therapy. A “news” media that censors people who disagree with them politically, especially conservatives, a “news” media that, offering up laughable excuses for its constant errors in one direction, refuses even to cover stories, like the Hunter Biden scandal before the 2020 election, that might hurt their chosen political candidates, a “news” media that, days after the 2020 “election,” when they cannot possibly know the truth, announces, comically, there is no evidence whatsoever of Democrat cheating in the election, a “news media that even admits that it is no longer “objective” or “fair,” a “news” media that displays contempt for half of the country, and so on, is a “news” media that no longer deserves the trust of the American people, trust which it has in large measure already lost. It is a “news” media that comrade Bernstein’s communist parents would love to have. It is a “news” media that comrade Bernstein himself does have.

It is no wonder, therefore, that Federal Judge Laurence Silberman found himself compelled to point out that the overwhelming level of bias in the “news” media has reached the levels that it is a threat to democracy:

The New York Times and The Washington Post are “virtually Democratic Party broadsheets,” while the news section of the Wall Street Journal “leans in the same direction,” U.S. Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman said. He said the major television outlets and Silicon Valley giants were similarly biased.
“One-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy,” Silberman wrote. He exempted from his criticism of “Democratic ideological control” Fox News, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page [but not the Wall Street Journal “news” division]. Silberman ended his treatise with a warning that democracy could be thwarted by liberal control of the media. “The first step taken by any potential authoritarian or dictatorial regime is to gain control of communications, particularly the delivery of news.”

John McCain stated that “suppressing free speech is how dictators get started.” The irony is that in contemporary America there was no need for the dictators to “seize” the news media. A compliant American “news” media, corrupted by money and celebrity, eager to further increase their inflated salaries and get their virtue-signaling faces on camera, were already all in. The crime is not only against Donald Trump and conservatives. The crime is against the American people, the despised “basket of deplorables” in “flyover country,” the actual moral core of the country, genuine heroes in the real world like Richard Jewell and Nick Sandman – as opposed to the spoiled bubble dwelling virtue-signaling Lilliputian coastal elites and their equally unimpressive lightly educated “news” media collaborators who are all “heroes only of words.”

Richard McDonough is the author of two books, numerous articles, encyclopedia and dictionary entries, and book reviews. He has taught previously at Bates College, the National University of Singapore, the University of Tulsa, the University Putra Malaysia, the Overseas Family College, the PSB Academy, the University of Maryland, the Arium Academy, and James Cook University. In addition to philosophy, he has taught psychology, physics, humanities and writing courses.

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The featured image shows, “The fin de siècle newspaper proprietor,” by Frederick Burr Opper; political cartoon published March 7, 1894.