Archive for the ‘dablog’ Category

The Case for Trump Allowing Independent Journalists in the White House Briefing Room in Two Videos:

Posted: November 26, 2024 by datechguy in dablog, elections, media, politics
Tags: , , ,

One of the reasons why this blog is going to end as a business at the end of this year has been the various reverses and collapses that took place after things started to get big around here, plus I’m now kinda old to be chasing around the country in the hope that someone will fund it and maybe slip a few extra buck to keep the lights on at home.

But I had my share of big moments, reporting from the middle of an Antifa riots in Denver, My 2010 road trip with Stacy McCain. Multiple CPACS including my final one with my sons when I first reported on Trump making gains with the black community, Scott Brown’s victory party of course, credentialed press at the Romney “victory” party but likely the biggest one in terms of relevance was covering Donald Trump’s first NH rally and it’s the one that makes the point concerning letting alternative media into the press room at the White House.

https://twitter.com/PU28453638/status/1861242898429235617

Let me tell you my story.

When I got to that event in Derry I noticed right away that these weren’t the normal activists turning up or being bussed in that I had seen over and over when covering events in NH. These were regular people. I did a bunch of interviews talking to anyone willing to talk to me to find out why they came and was quickly convinced those regular people showing up WAS the story (Stacy McCain will tell you about my call to him on that matter). As you may or may not know I carried three cameras with me at the time because I didn’t have a ton of extra batteries. I was on my 2nd camera when Trump had his press conference where I was standing in the back. Here is my recording of same.

You might notice two things when watching.

  1. I repeatedly attempted to get my question in and failed
  2. The media questions were all basicially
    • Why does the GOP suck?
    • Why do you, your campaign & your ideas suck?
    • What are you going to do about the fact that you, your campaign, your ideas and the GOP suck?

My recording stopped 18 min in because at that point camera 2’s battery gave out and I have to resort to camera #3 which due to a problem did not allow me to zoom in so I had a wide shot when finally I got to ask Donald Trump my question:

Two things you might notice about my question:

  1. Notice the surprise from Trump getting an actual relevant question.
  2. Notice the media looking back to find out: “Hey, whose not with the program?”

It wasn’t a question of trying to give Trump an easy question. I had decided that those regular folks WERE the story and the question I asked was consistent with what I thought the most important thing was.

Any one of those media people there could have done those interview or asked that question but nobody bothered because they weren’t there to cover a story in the hopes of making a buck, they were there to advance an agenda because that’s how they made their bucks. And that simple act of asking that question in Derry is why he recognized me and called on me in Worcester months later again on what I considered the real story, the lack of protestors when people had been calling for them in the 2nd biggest city in New England which has 10 Colleges in it.

Although in fairness wearing a 12 ft long Dr. Who scarf and a fedora likely helped a bit for him remember me.

I suspect that if you open things up to bloggers like myself or influencers or the alternative media you will get a better set of questions and actually inform the public.

And why would you want to reward a press corps that hates you anyways?

So Donald Trump JR. I strongly suggest you go ahead and let guys like me in, even though by the time you do so I won’t be doing it anymore.

Closing thought: However I would love to get a 20 min on camera interview with the president election before the end of the year and post that as the final act of DaBlog as a business. Might as well go out in style.

If you’re willing let me know.

Update: I mentioned my call to Stacy McCain in this post completely unaware that he mentioned the same in a post today:

 After going all-in on the 2012 campaign (“Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption”), I’d decided to avoid the 2016 campaign and was more or less neutral about the GOP primary. But then in September 2015, I got a call from Pete Da Tech Guy, who was covering a Trump rally in New Hampshire. “Stacy, this Trump thing is for real,” Pete told me. “You wouldn’t believe the size of this crowd.”

There was a real grassroots surge of support for Trump, and so the attitude of the Professional Conservative Pundit crowd turned from ridicule to hatred. Whereas they had originally treated Trump as a joke, now he was seen as threat.

Three Pieces from 2023 You Hated but We Think are worth a 2nd Look

Posted: January 4, 2024 by datechguy in Blame Biden Administration, catholic, culture, dablog
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Earlier this week we had our annual five top posts for 2023. Now it’s time to look at the bottom of the barrel. The posts that drew the fewest views of the year that we think deserve a little more attention then they got:

To be sure over the course of the year we’ll serve up a few lemons but these are posts that we’d like you to take a 2nd look at:

Let’s start with my favorite of the lot.

The Feast of The Passion of John the Baptist Playing Out Daily in America Against an Army of Woke Herodians

This piece is all about the war on truth. John told the truth which is why Herodias wanted him dead

There are still some who either because they still retain some backbone or fear the masses of the people more than the army of woke Herodians (who are actually much smaller then they appear) decide to reject them and side with the people and each time they it strikes fear in the hearts of the woke Herodians because they know their power is dependent on the fear of their Herods and the indifference of the masses.

There are John the Baptists out there. Tucker Carlson who faced the wrath of the woke Herodians but thrived despite it, Riley Gaines who refuses to bend the knee to Transgender Inc. Joe Rogan who talked openly about ivermectin to be used in Covid cases, Ron DeSantis who didn’t give in to either the COVID hysteria or the Disney/woke crowd on sexualizing children and yes Donald Trump as well who refused to bend the knee even as he is treated like an enemy of the state for being an enemy of dishonest elections.

I’m really at a loss why this one didn’t play better as the problem is the single most relevant thing going on.

Rules Rules Rules

It can be very dry to hear about federal bureau​crat​ic rules but our man Jon Fournier understands that they are important and has tackled them. His pieces on Internet rules, Drinking from the feds and on norms on Transgenderism, Guns and life deserved a bigger audience then they got, but the one I’m going to quote is this piece about the resending of a Trump era rule:

The Biden Regime is once again trampling on the First Amendment

The federal government forcing anyone to violate their religious beliefs is a direct violation of the Free Exercise of Religion Clause of the First Amendment.  The original 1973 law, which is now back in effect thanks to Biden’s executive order, did not go far enough because there is no “undue hardship” exception to the First Amendment.

As you can see from this next quote, President Trump understood the First Amendment far better than progressives because his rule was instep with the original understanding of the Free Exercise od Religion Clause.

This piece was from one year ago Jan 5th. The rest of the year didn’t go much better.

Reality Sucks

As I mentioned in the first post I referenced a lot of what is going on is a war on truth and this piece from July 11th illustrated it well:

Ring Doorbells, Paper Ballots and Palestinians

You see the ring camera doesn’t care what your race or religion or the desired narrative of the day is, what it does is show the image of what is actually happening, objective reality.

And while it might be considered a good thing for a homeowner protecting their property or a neighborhood wanting to keep criminals from using it as a stomping ground or even for the mother of boys discourage them from getting into the type of trouble that boys do when they’re young and stupid if you’re trying to sell a narrative based on unreality, well it can be a killer.

Wired magazine didn’t like ring doorbells suggesting it would lead to vigilantism what they really don’t like is reality stomping on the narrative.

After all why do you think so many of the J6 videos were suppressed?

Yesterday was an excellent day for our Days of Christmas fundraiser as we went from 4% of our goal to just over 21% of our goal. We’re still $2365 away from our goal and if you’d like to help us toward it please hit DaTipJar to the left or below:

Days of Christmas Fundraiser Goal $3000 and 10 $10 Subscribers

Posted: December 27, 2023 by datechguy in dablog

Update: $2345 & 10 subscribers to go

I’ve hinted at this a few times since our 15th anniversary but today I am officially launching a fundraiser for the site.

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15 Thoughts on 15 Years of Blogging Under the Fedora. Thoughts 11 to 15 Back to Blogging… The Truth, WQPH, Trump and my boys, The Fall and One More Year

Posted: December 3, 2023 by datechguy in blogs, catholic, catholic devotions, dablog, under the fedora
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I talked about Stacy McCain being most influential on me and he mentioned something in a post yesterday that really hit the lesson he taught me:

 I was talking to a nice Republican lady who, remarking on what I’d said about liberal bias in the media, asked, “What makes you different?” That is to say, why am I not part of the liberal hivemind? On the spot, the best answer I could come up with was, “Well, I was a reporter before I got into politics.” I didn’t get into journalism because I wanted to change the world. I got into journalism because I needed a job. I started out on the bottom rung of the newspaper business, as a staff writer for a local weekly, and worked my way up, spending five years as a sports editor before landing a gig as an assistant special projects editor at the daily Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune. It wasn’t until I’d been in the business about seven years that I became interested in politics, during the first term of the Clinton presidency, when I had my own road-to-Damascus epiphany and abandoned the Democratic Party, of which I had hitherto been a staunch supporter.

The point of that digression is that I cut my teeth as a reporter covering local stories that had nothing to do with politics, and thereby developed the belief that the three most important things in journalism are accuracy, accuracy and accuracy

Having a Computer Science degree back from 1985 the idea of the importance of facts was already imbedded. The biggest lesson I learned from being credentialed press and sharing rooms with them as they wrote and talked is that this is not the norm for journalists. It was all about producing spin and a particular result. That (along with a natural degree of sloth) is why you never see my videos edited. Like the images from the Ghost of Christmas Past they are what they are.

That reputation for accuracy and the reputation as “The hardest working blogger at CPAC” are still a source of pride to me.

The biggest thing to come from the blog and the Radio show that came from it has been my association with WQPH 89.3 FM Catholic Radio which began around 2012 when I was approached by Mary Ann Harold the head of the station. I had at first thought it would be a full time job but instead it’s was more of a Special project for the blog that continues to this day.

In 2017 My Catholic Radio Show “Your Prayer Intentions” now in its 6th year, premiered on WQPH every Saturday at noon. 2017 also saw the publication of my book “Hail Mary the perfect Protestant (and Catholic) Prayer adapted from a blog post which you can still buy at Amazon or from me directly if you want it autographed. The most significant thing from WQPH came in 2014 a few months after the Harvard Satanic Mass scandal & the MIT procession on a trip to Alabama, but if that story is ever posted it will be after I’m gone.

What I thought would be the biggest moment of my blogging career was when I was called on twice during the 2016 presidential campaign by Donald Trump during press conferences. The first in Derry NH which I had to cover after the contract job

The second when I covered his rally in Worcester before going to work at what was then a temp warehouse job on the 10:30 to 7 am shift. He recognized me and gave me the complement that remains on the top of the blog to this day.

Covering Trump fairly didn’t endear me to the GOP in MA and neither did my endorsement of Trump when he won the primaries or my famous post defending Trump after the Billy Bush bit came out which called out the left for trying to use our own morality against us while repeating these words which turned out to be a prophetic after the 2020 steal:

…I know that there will be times that Donald Trump will disappointment me just as I expected Mitt Romney to disappoint me on social issues and John McCain to disappoint me on immigration and George W Bush who disappointed me on spending and the bank bailouts.

But while Trump will occasionally disappoint me (when he does I’ll call him on it) I am convinced he will neither persecute me nor strip me of my rights for holding my Conservative Catholic beliefs and acting on them.

I am very sorry to say I can not make that same statement about Hillary Clinton, and I’m even sorrier to see the day when I would say this about a presidential candidate.

but this led to the real high point of blogging for me was CPAC 2018 where my two sons came with me as credentialed press. It made for a better CPAC:

In other words, he make sure that I was OUTSIDE the activist/msm/news/blogger bubble for at least a few hours. This not only decreased my tension level immensely but it provided me the chance to speak to actual Marylanders and Virginians who were not there specifically to serve me as a CPAC convention goer and thus more free to be themselves and give their own opinions in conversation.

No blogging moment will beat that EVAH!

Despite the two highs of 2016 & 2018 the blog’s decline in traffic seemed to start in 2014 after my Jeffrey Epstein post to the point where contract work was necessary.

In 2016 the decline in traffic and rank (this blog was once in the top 100,000 in the world) meant I took a 3rd shift temp job. The job became permanent in 2017 and any lingering dreams of the blog becoming more than a part time job at best were gone and my ability to go to cover any event had to be sub servant to the steady income to pay bills that came from attendance at work.

Problems at GoDaddy led me to finally leave them by 2019. After election 2020 like many others I found myself suspected from Twitter multiple times while the election was in dispute over false charges that led to a pattern of suspension, appeal, apology and reinstatement then suspension again until the courts ruled against Trump. This was shortly followed by my banning by Youtube erasing more than a decade of work. Meanwhile the new owner of my hosting company became invisible I was not only forced back to my old wordpress blog, but had lost my domain, more than 75% of my daily traffic, all of my ad and guest post revenue and a decline in DaTipJar revenue and subscribers to the point where the blog has become an expense rather than an asset.

The fall was slow, then gradual then like the fall of communism all at once. Right now after paying my writers I barely bring in enough to pay the annual fees to wordpress let alone the costs of covering Pintastic NE or any other event that I can manage on days off or using vacation time.

So here we are 15 years later like Sam Rothstein in Casino back where we started at our original site.

I’m drawing about a 1/3 of the traffic that I did back in the Scott Brown days but not worrying about trying to regain lost glory. Still giving our opinion and occasionally covering something from the Catholic Men’s Conference to Pintastic NE and writing about the news of the day and my online baseball leagues.

Barring a sudden change in fortune allowing the blog covering its costs as it once did I figure I can afford to hang around one more year for the election before the blog becomes too much of an expense to carry.

So you can expect me and my magnificent seven writers to be here for the election and to at least finish year 16. After that, who know but for all those who have stopped by over the last 15 years and especially to those who have contributed over the years and those few remaining stalwarts who still do, let me say this.

Thanks so much, it’s been an incredible 15 year ride. We’ve done and learned a lot together. I’ve seen a lot of the country and those who run it. I’ve seen many incredible things and I’ve met many incredible people along the way including quite a few of you dear readers. None of it would have been remotely possible without you. Me and mine are better for having been on this ride. I hope that you feel the same.

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