Archive for the ‘opinion/news’ Category

Tips for conservatives covering leftist protests

Posted: September 1, 2024 by John Ruberry in blogs, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
Tags: , , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

Last month the Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago at the United Center.

I did some photography work for a right-of-center publication. There’s no need to mention which one.

Left-wing radicals are trained to spot “infiltrators” among within their protests. To get the best coverage, it’s important to blend in. It’s also wise to do so in terms of personal safety.

During the DNC protests–which were mostly centered around Union Park, which is roughly halfway between the UC and downtown Chicago–I witnessed three fights, but no one seemed to get injured in them.

Here are some tips regarding not only in covering protests. but also, how not to get spotted, to use a favorite put-down of the leftists, as a “counterrevolutionary.”

For starters, when you cover protests, whether the organizers have a rally permit or not, these gatherings often turn into marches. Wear comfortable shoes, dress for the weather, and depending on the conditions outdoors, have bottled water and sunscreen available. If you can’t remain on your feet for several hours, or if you don’t feel confident walking a few miles, then covering rallies is not for you.

And because these events can last several hours, bring light snacks.

Blending in:

The DNC protests were largely Hamas pep rallies—the attendees, politically speaking, for the most part, were to the left of Kamala Harris. Obviously, I left my Donald Trump button at home.

At these rallies—most credible sources said that about 3,500 protesters attended the big ones–often there are people handing out buttons and protest signs. Don’t sell yourself out. I picked out a “thought criminal” button and a “give peace a chance sign.” I support peace under the right conditions and as a Republican living in Illinois, that makes me a thought criminal.

And wear a hat with the logo of a local sports team. Once again, you want to blend it.

Don’t go alone. Okay, a couple of days last month, I broke that rule, but having someone watch your back is sound advice on most occasions in Chicago.

Have a cover story. Often, I’m asked at these protests, “Why are you here and who are you working for?” I always reply, truthfully, that I am a free-lance photographer and an amateur historian. Have a pseudonym already picked out, because someone may ask for your name. This is not the time for a Ralph Kramden “hummina-hummina-hummina” moment.

Ask permission to take someone’s photograph or to videotape them. There are several reasons. The first one is simply because it’s the polite thing to do. Secondly, you’ll capture much better images. Finally, it decreases the odds of you being identified as a provocateur.

What to do if spotted? I’ve only been outed once at a leftist protest, after someone noticed me speaking to a well-known conservative videographer. But because at that time the scene was chaotic–hooligans were throwing water bottles at police officers–the radicals quickly lost interest in me. If that attack on the cops hadn’t broken out, I would have left for home.

Live to document another day.

You don’t want to make the same mistake as two other videographers I know, who years ago not only refused to blend in at a protest, but when identified–which didn’t take long–they suffered the indignity of having their $1,000 video camera snatched from them. The leftists decided to play keep-away and catch with their equipment, which of course was quickly dropped on a sidewalk. Then the radicals stomped on the video camera.

Keep calm and remain strong. Imagine yourself as a glacier–sturdy and slow moving–with such a permanence that people forget you are there.

If you have your own tips on not getting noticed at left-wing protests, drop them in the comments section.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Update (DTG) : Instalanche! Thanks Glenn (Actually Sarah Hoyt) John is on a roll! I always found that my doctor who scarf and hat make people assume I’m a leftist so all I had to do is be quiet and listen and I could cover any event without grief. It doesn’t take long for a leftist to pontificate if you just wait.

To beat the Democrats, we must destroy the media first

Posted: August 18, 2024 by John Ruberry in election 2024, elections, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
Tags: , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

I’ve been a conservative blogger for nearly two decades. And it’s just occurred to me that we’ve been advancing our cause the wrong way for many years.

Our side supports smaller government–but a strong and vigorous military and law enforcement apparatus–as well as lower taxes, fewer regulations, and enabling vigorous free speech. The leftists–call them liberals or progressives if you prefer–are on the opposite side of those issues. 

So why aren’t we winning more?

Because the leftists, with a few exceptions such as Fox News and talk radio, has the media on their side.

Attacks on prominent Democrat politicians, such as Hillary Clinton, sometimes succeed. But Clinton, a thoroughly unlikable person with the charm of a rattlesnake, was easy prey. Not even the mainstream media trusted her. 

Let’s move on to Joe Biden. Until cognitive decline became apparent in Biden to open-minded people–that was sometime around 2019–the progressive media juggernaut didn’t care much for the corrupt Delaware fabulist. But word trickled out that what was left of his mind was turning into Play-Doh. And trusted leftists such as Susan Rice and Anita Dunn were at his side to mold that putty into another Bernie Sanders, albeit someone less scary than the Vermont socialist.

And the leftist media, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, went into prevent defense mode, first to assist Biden to outmaneuver Sanders and win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, then to run cover as Biden, using the COVID-19 hysteria as an excuse, as the cognitively declining Biden campaigned for the White House from the basement of his Delaware home.

And the media, Pravda-like, protected Biden after the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan–remember the embarrassingly wrong USA Today fact check?–as well as minimizing the effects of the supply chain crisis, inflation, recession, and of course Biden’s accelerating descent into senility.

As long as Play-Doh Brain Biden played along and didn’t appear too horrible in public, the media shielded him. 

And then for a few weeks this summer, the media remembered they were journalists. With tens of millions of Americans watching–Biden’s cognitive decline was on full display during his disastrous debate in June with Donald Trump. 

Biden was no use to the media mob anymore. So, they all but “granny dumped” him as they told their audience, finally, that Biden’s mind was goo. Then Brutus-like, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Barack Obama finished him off. 

Et tu, Kamala Harris? Probably.

Of course, Harris, the vice president, is now the Democrat nominee. And with rare exceptions, such as Harris’ call for Soviet-style price controls, they’re back to protecting the head of their Democratic Party.

I’m being overly generous in this article but think of whoever is the Democratic president or its presidential nominee as Superman. And look at the media as the Dems’ secret power. Well, it is for low-information voters. They’re the ones who not only don’t know who their state representative is, they don’t even know there is a legislature in their state and the other 49. But these low-information voters reliably fall for the establishment media lies–even if encountering their lies is nothing more than seeing a Facebook headline on their smartphone.

Take away that secret power, the media, and that will be the end of the Democratic Party as a national political force.

I touched on this issue in my post here last week, Journalists should be forced to wear clown suits. Cancel your subscriptions to their publications. If you absolutely need to read an article from, let’s say, the Chicago Tribune or the Washington Post, for laughs perhaps, you can often find those same pieces on MSN or Yahoo for free.

And challenge the leftist media propagandists on social media. Break them while forcing their employers to go broke. They’re not earning an honest living. They’re propagandists–not journalists.

While breaking the media, you may gain friends and admirers.

And you may save our nation.

No more Mr. Nice Guy.

Make them squirm.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Update (DTG) Instalanche thanks Glenn Hi folks, it’s been a bit, You can catch John here every Sunday, our regular Tuesday writer has been ill and our other Jon, Jon writes on Thursday and of course you can find me here daily.

Quick favor a friend of my son is having some issues if you can help, click here.

Journalists should be forced to wear clown suits

Posted: August 11, 2024 by John Ruberry in election 2024, elections, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

In the words of George Romney, father of Mitt, American voters are in the midst of “the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.”

Romney, who was then the governor of Michigan, was a leading contender for the 1968 Republican nomination when he made his “brainwashing” gaffe.

Leaders, let alone presidents, don’t allow themselves to be brainwashed. Well, Joe Biden has, but what’s left of his mind was washed away at Rehoboth Beach.

Getting brainwashed by clowns is even more humiliating. I’ll get to them in a little bit.

Our ongoing mass brainwashing, although now it’s usually called gaslighting, began, as Mollie Hemingway tells us, with the lamestream media covering up Joe Biden’s senility in 2020.

“There is nothing mainstream about the so-called mainstream media,” Hemingway said last week. “They are far-left. They tend to help [Kamala Harris] out with her politics. But it reminds me so much of what we saw in the 2020 race when Joe Biden was allowed, through the complete help of that corporate media, to run his campaign from the basement … The result of that is that we have a country and world in chaos.”

There was a three-week respite from the gaslighting by the media this summer, when the self-appointed puppet masters decided Senile Joe had to go, and they finally reported on his dementia. Biden’s replacement at the top of the Democrats’ presidential ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris, is an empty pantsuit. Her greatest skill, is something that can only be accomplished in the public sector, is failing upwards.

Move ahead in our Wayback Machine from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. This election is almost forgotten now, but Dianne Feinstein, who succeeded George Moscone as mayor of San Franciso, ran for a full-term in 1979. She won in the runoff, but the first round of voting bears noting. In his leftist agitprop campaign, Jello Biafra, the lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, a punk rock band, astonishingly finished in fourth place with 3-percent of the vote.

Oddly enough, Harris’ base is San Franciso, her first election win occurred in the 2003 district attorney race.

But I have the media in mind for this blog post.

Part of Biafra’s mayoral platform, with one change, needs to be put in place, nationally. 

The punk rocker favored forcing business leaders to wear clown suits. Instead, I support requiring journalists to don clown costumes. Because they are clowns–evil ones, that is.

Before that happens, politely and within the law, we need to confront these liars and clowns, whether in person, on social media, or by email, and let them know we are well past believing their gaslighting.

As they did with Biden’s senility, the lamestream media is ignoring or minimizing the reporting on Harris’ far-left record, including her opposition to fracking–a spokesperson recently walked that one back–her support of spending less money on law enforcement, and her backing of a what the leftists call single-payer health care, which means the elimination of our private healthcare system.

And since Harris refuses to do sit-down interviews–the media is squelching that story too–the vice president can’t be confronted with questions about her unpopular political positions.

By the way, what kind of journalists aren’t clamoring for public figures to speak to them?

Clown-type journalists, that’s who. Frauds who put three-card monte dealers to shame.

After Donald Trump’s upset win over Hillary Clinton, there was a collective, and yes, welcome response by the media along the lines of, “We didn’t get it right in the Trump-Clinton election and we refused to take Trump supporters seriously–but we’re going to reach out to them, so we don’t make the same mistake again.”

Well, that attitude lasted about two weeks. Then the corporate media leftists, the clowns, hitched their out-of-date wagon to the Trump-Russia collusion lie.

The time for reproachment with the mainstream media is over. Journalists, most of them, need to find another line of work. Yes, of course, learning to code is an option for them. I’ve been on the wrong side of receiving pink slips, I know too well the pain of losing a job. But I was earning an honest living when I whenever I was let go.

And not only has the time arrived to confront the lamestream media, but the moment is also here to cancel your subscriptions to publications that repeatedly insult the public with disinformation and yes, brainwashing.

An aside: Here in Illinois, there is a bill on the desk of our Democrat governor, J.B. Pritzker, that will offer taxpayer-funded subsidies to state newspapers. It’s a terrible idea, which means of course Pritzker will sign the subsidy bill. Besides, Pritzker’s party benefits the most from our dishonest media. He’ll be helping out his pals and political allies.

But government subsidies will not save newspapers and other mainstream media outlets. The market for honest media has moved on. Besides, when government gets involved with business, it always picks the losers. And the media, especially in hellholes like Illinois, is playing their fellow wokesters, who at best, make up 20 percent of the population. We are a center-right country.

Send away the clowns. I’ll be leading the laughing when that happens.

Replace them with real journalists.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Another bitter harvest of demonization? The My Lai massacre and the Sonya Massey killing

Posted: July 28, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

Did demonization of cops lead to a police-involved murder? Just as demonization of the military may have contributed to the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War?

Earlier this month, Sonya Massey, a black woman from Woodside Township, Illinois, was shot to death, according to police bodycam video footage, by Sangamon County deputy sheriff Sean Grayson. Massey called the police because she believed there was a prowler at her home. The cop, who has since been fired and is now charged with murder and other charges, has a rocky employment history, being employed either part-time or full-time by six different central Illinois police departments in four years, although in one of those jobs, for a small-town police department, he was let go because wouldn’t reside within 10-miles of the village.

Grayson is white, and the racial angle has brought rare national media attention to downstate Illinois. 

He is a military veteran who left the service under a general discharge. According to KSHB-TV in Kansas City, Grayson “was discharged from the U.S. Army for serious misconduct during his year-and-a-half service in Fort Riley.”

According to KSDK-TV in St. Louis, Grayson has two DUI convictions, one in 2015 to which he pleaded guilty to, and another the following year he weas found guilty in a bench trial.

In his last job, according to Capitol News Illinois, prior to being hired full time by the Sangamon County sheriff’s office–another deputy sheriff position with Logan County–Grayson’s performance was poor. In a report, a chief deputy wrote that Grayson need “extensive” training after failing to follow commands. The same officer wrote that Grayson needed “additional traffic stop training, report writing training, high-stress decision making process classes, and needs to read, discuss and understand issued Logan County Sheriff’s Department policies.”

Capitol News Illinois offered additional disturbing details. “Seven months on. How are you still employed by us?” the chief deputy asked Grayson in a meeting about his job performance. “I don’t know,” was his reply.

As for My Lai, the massacre, which occurred in 1968, saw at least 300 civilians killed, including elderly people, children and infants. Some women and children were brutally gang raped. The only soldier convicted for the massacre was 2nd Lieutenant William Calley. Originally given a life sentence of hard labor in a military court martial, President Richard M. Nixon commuted that sentence to three years of house arrest.

At the time, Americans wondered how Calley, a junior college dropout who failed most of his courses, became an officer. While he did score well in a military exam, Linda Greenhouse, writing for the New York Times in 1974, said of Calley that he was someone who “apparently failed at almost everything he had tried to do.” Between quitting junior college and enlisting in the US Army in 1966, Calley’s jobs included working as a bellhop and as a dishwasher.

Normally, such a background wouldn’t be considered the makings of officer material. While the anti-war movement hadn’t reached its peak in 1966, plenty of young college graduates were being told by their parents and peers to dodge the draft, in a stealth fashion, by enlisting in the National Guard instead.

In short, the talent pool for American military officers wasn’t deep during the Vietnam War. Hence, Calley.

As for Grayson, he was hired for his first part-time police job, in the small town of Pawnee, in August 2020. That was six years after the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, Missouri and the Laquan McDonald murder in Chicago. Both were of course police-involved killings–ones that ramped up anti-cop sentiment.

And three months before Grayson started his law enforcement job in Pawnee, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Not only was the anti-police rhetoric sent into hyperdrive by the media and agenda-driven leftist politicians, but it was also the beginning of the Defund the Police movement.

Four years after Floyd’s murder, because of retirements and struggles in hiring replacements, many police departments don’t have enough cops. For instance, three months ago, Chicago’s police superintendant, Larry Snelling, said of the CPD, “We’re down close to 2,000 officers.”

The ACAB–All Cops Are Bastards–sentiment so many Americans believe in, or have been indoctrinated in, may be offering a bitter harvest.

The Massey shooting death could be the beginning of a tragic trend.

UPDATE July 30:

Yesterday the Washington Post reported that Calley, 80, died in hospice care in April. Citing the Social Security Index, the New York Times confirmed his passing. The cause of Calley’s death is not known.

John Ruberry regularly blogs in Illinois at Marathon Pundit.

Older Entries
Newer Entries