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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Now that people who only get their news from MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times have learned that Joe Biden is suffering from severe cognitive decline, there is an understandable panic among Democrats, as well as calls to replace him on the fall ballot.
Had Biden chosen a running mate in 2020 based on the ability to serve as president, instead of identitarianism, the answer would be easy regarding a replacement at the top of the ticket, the sitting vice president. But Kamala Harris is the veep. This dopey DEI hire, until last week perhaps, polled even worse than Biden. She’s the poster child of a symptom of public sector incompetence: failing upwards.
Harris checked three boxes–Black, Asian, and female. Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s governor, who was said to be a finalist to be Biden’s running mate, checked only one.
Harris may still end up on top of the ticket if Biden bails, partly because the money raised so far by the Biden-Harris campaign can only be transferred to one other candidate–the president’s running mate. Also, the Dems may want to avoid a rancorous battle to replace Biden–and stick with Sleepy Joe–then hope for the best in 2028, because Donald J. Trump can only serve one term.
Whitmer is part of the whispering campaign to replace Biden, as are three other governors, California’s Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, and Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker.
Since I live in the Prairie State, I’m going to discuss Pritzker. Two years ago, when he was running for reelection, I covered Pritzker’s shortcomings in this DTG post, Reasons to oppose Pritzker for governor and president. That blog entry is in need of an update. Of course, the problems I listed in 2022 haven’t gone away.
Crime and the SAFE-T Act: Lawlessness was a problem in Illinois two years ago, particularly in Chicago and its inner suburbs. I live in one of those suburbs.
While the murder rate has gone a little bit in Chicago, assaults and thefts, particularly automobile thefts, have gone up. I haven’t been able to locate state statistics on crime, I’m confident they’re also bad.
Over three years ago, Pritzker signed into law the pro-criminal SAFE-T Act, making Illinois the first state to abolish cash bail. Criminality in Illinois was already encouraged by the catch-and-release prosecution policy of Cook County’s George Soros-funded state’s attorney, Kim Foxx.
Pritzker and the Democrats must have had qualms about the SAFE-T Act, because it was set to take effect nearly two years after the governor signed it into law. A court challenge delayed that until last fall–just as violent crime makes it annual seasonal decline.
We are now a month into the first summer of the SAFE-T Act. In June, there were two egregious murders where the accused were free on pre-trial release. Jai’mani Amir Rivera, who was seven years-old, was shot to death on Chicago’s West Side was shot to death by a teen on electronic monitoring. Also on the West Side, a retired Chicago police officer, Larry Neuman, was fatally gunned down by two teens, both of them were on pre-trial release–one of the pair was on electronic monitoring.
To be fair, even without the SAFE-T Act, with Foxx as the so-called prosecutor, these thugs may have walked free. But Chicago’s failures are being replicated statewide.
Pritzker is active on X, he discusses a wide range of topics.
I can’t remember the last time he mentioned the SAFE-T Act.
Obviously, he knows it’s a problem for him. It’s a more deadly problem for Illinois’ 12 million residents.
Health: I’m going to hurt some readers feelings with this segment.
Shortly after his inauguration, Jimmy Carter released his federal tax returns to the public. And since then, Donald Trump being a notable exception, most presidential candidates have followed suit.
Health records are probably next.
Now that the president’s cognitive decline is an established fact for everyone except for the Biden bitter-clingers, look for future presidential candidates to release specific details on their health, perhaps even making their personal physicians available to the media for unrestricted questioning.
Pritzker is morbidly obese. According to the Mayo Clinic, that condition is “associated with many diseases responsible for a high prevalence of morbidity and mortality, such as insulin-resistant diabetes mellitus, hypertension, coronary artery disease, hyperlipidemia [high cholesterol], and sleep apnea.”
Standards and expectations are understandably much higher for president than for a governor. Pritzker’s health will be an issue if he makes a White House run.
How heavy is Pritzker? I don’t know. But he’s weighty enough to likely cause a femur stress fracture by just standing. J.B. doesn’t even know how that bone broke. I had a stress fracture once–it was one of my fibulas. I know how I got mine–it was from running 32 marathons in 20 years.
Not reaching across the aisle: Harris is a predictable result of a bad candidate winning office in a state dominated by one party. Her goofiness–both in demeanor and in political views–is not enough of an impediment for her to lose to a Republican in California. Gavin Newsom is much more seasoned and serious, but he’s another example. In 2004, when he was governor of San Francisco, he announced a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness. There are more homeless people in San Francisco now than there has ever been twenty years later.
Harris, who was a US senator and the attorney general from California, didn’t have to, metaphorically speaking, reach across the aisle to win statewide. There are not enough Republicans in the Golden State to stop a Harris–or a Newsom.
Pritzker, while enormously popular in the Chicago area and university towns, is generally hated downstate. The Democrats enjoy supermajorities in the General Assembly. Which means Pritzker doesn’t need Republicans to rule.
In the 2022 race, in many downstate counties, Pritzker’s Republican opponent, Darren Bailey, won more than 80 percent of the vote. In rural Edwards County, in southeastern Illinois, Bailey romped with 88 percent of the ballots, while in heavily Democratic Cook County, where Chicago lies, Pritzker collected a more modest 73 percent. About 1.4 million votes were cast in Cook so you can see how Pritzker comfortably won reelection, since the statewide vote total was four million in 2022.
Illinois’ listless media, dominated by leftists, rarely challenges Pritzker.
The governor’s speaking style is condescending. As I’ve remarked before, when he talks, he reminds me of a closer at a timeshare presentation. Yuck.
To win the presidency, no candidate can rely on one party’s votes. To govern effectively, a president needs to work with both parties.
Gerrymandering: With so many Republicans outside of Chicago, why do the Democrats have supermajorities in the General Assembly? It’s because of gerrymandering. As a candidate during his first run for governor, Pritzker vowed to veto gerrymandered legislative maps. He lied. Nationally, the Dems blame gerrymandering for not having a majority in the House of Representatives. While presidents have no power over state remaps, Pritzker’s gerrymandering flip flop certainly betrays a lack of character.
Depopulation: Like California, Illinois is losing residents. High taxes, a high crime rate, and high regulations are the catalyst. And as I mentioned earlier, with little or no political opposition, Illinois government is an echo chamber of liberal failure.
Pritzker has been governor for over five years. If Illinois is so great, why has state’s population gone down every year for the last decade?
Gaza: For the most part, I’ve supported Pritzker’s pro-Israel stance in its war with the Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Although the governor has not condemned the loud anti-Semitic voices within the Democratic Party, such as Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman. His silence on the Jew-haters in his party is disturbing.
Pritzker is Jewish. But since the Democrats are increasingly the anti-Semitic party–anti-Israel Dems like Bernie Sanders are given a pass from the pro-Hamas activists–his faith could be a problem for him. Sad, but true, in my opinion. Pennsylvania’s Shapiro, who is also Jewish, is pro-Israel too.
But the voters most likely to agree, generally that is, with Pritzker and Shapiro on Gaza are Republicans.
Pensions: Illinois’ public pensions are among the worst funded among the 50 states. The pension crisis–created by both parties–has not been adequately addressed by Pritzker. Great leaders solve difficult problems. Despite new taxes, Pritzker’s latest budget shorts Illinois’ pension plans. Such malfeasance is how Illinois ended up in this mess.
Education: Pritzker did nothing to stop Illinois legislators from letting Illinois’ school choice program expire. Thirty states have some sort of school choice program, Illinois is the first to end one. Just 27 percent of Illinois students perform at grade level in math, and only 35 percent of students read at grade level.
Obviously, Democrats, including Pritzker, are more interested in kowtowing to the teacher unions than educating Illinois’ kids. Who would Pritzker nominate to be Education secretary? A radical along the lines of Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates?
I covered additional negatives in my first post about a potential Pritzker presidential run. Those demerits include his tax scam to lower property taxes on his Chicago mansion by removing toilets from the mansion adjacent to his–which he also owned, as well as his ties, not deep, but ties they are, with Boss Michael Madigan, who faces trial later this year for corruption, as well as a connection with one of Illinois’ ex-con governors, Rod Blagojevich.
Pritzker is in the second tier of possible Biden replacements. His negatives are apparent, but the billionaire governor has contributed millions of his own funds to finance his gubernatorial campaigns, and he’s been a generous donor to other Democrats’ campaigns, so he can call in a lot of favors, which is what he did to bring the Democratic National Convention to Chicago this summer.
Because of his fat wallet, Pritzker can hit the ground running–not literally, of course–if he needs to start a presidential campaign tomorrow. But for now, like Newsom and Whitmer, Pritzker is firmly in Biden’s corner.
Conservatives, we need to keep a wary eye on Pritzker. If not in 2024, then in 2028. We laughed off Biden five years ago.
It took four years for Jimmy Carter, America’s 39th president, to amass a reputation for abject failure. Joe Biden only needed nine months, the time it takes for a baby to go from conception to birth.
Here’s a list–and I am sure that I’m leaving out a few–of his failures.
Gasoline prices. Liberals hate relatively cheap gas prices. On his first day in office Biden cancelled construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. In doing so, to borrow the words used in the Biden-Harris sign pictured here, he killed thousands of “good union jobs.” Gas prices immediately jumped. Also that day Biden signed an executive order blocking oil and natural gas drilling at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The next day Biden imposed a suspension of new natural gas and oil drilling leases on federal lands–which fortunately was overruled by a judge in June.
It’s all part of the plan is what I believe. Leftists–excluding themselves of course–want as many people as possible to ditch their cars and trucks and take buses and trains everywhere. In 2012 Steven Chu, the Obama-Biden administration’s secretary of Energy, was asked by a Republican member of Congress if it was the goal of the White House to have lower gasoline prices. He replied to the contrary, adding “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Gasoline prices in 2012 were about $4-a-gallon–in Europe at that time they were $8 to $9-per gallon. Yeah I know, Chu, under pressure no doubt, walked back those comments the next day, as Barack Obama and Joe Biden were up for reelection that year.
Gas prices are at a seven-year high. Donald Trump was not president seven years ago.
As I’ve observed many times before, leftists particularly love trains–because they only travel where there are tracks.
On the other hand if you are a liberal you may consider higher gasoline prices as a Joe Biden success. But more expensive fuel hurts the poor the most. And liberal politicians always say it is they, not the evil Republicans, who are protecting poor people.
Afghanistan. I’ll be brief on this one. Yes, Donald Trump made a pledge to pull our troops out by May 1. But Biden extended that deadline to September 11 then he moved it back to August 31. Biden blamed Trump for setting a withdrawal date–after the Afghan government collapsed in the middle of August. Biden promised an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan–and said it would not be like our dramatic and tragic departure from South Vietnam. But that government stayed in power two years after American combat troops were flown home.
Biden either lied–or forgot–about being advised to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan to at least slow the government’s collapse. During the hasty evacuation from Kabul thirteen members of our military were killed by a terrorist bombing. And despite another Biden promise, Americans were left behind enemy lines in the Taliban-ruled nation. At least 200 remain.
The southern border. While Biden all but said his hands were tied by Trump’s agreement to take our troops out of Afghanistan, he felt no such need to continue the stay-in-Mexico policy for refugees that Trump successfully negotiated with the Mexican president. The result is the ongoing crisis at the southern border. Illegal crossings at that border have soared since January. A record number–1.7 million–have illegally entered the nation at that border so far in 2021. They are unmasked and not checked to see if they are infected by the COVID-19 virus.
COVID-19. Biden promised to get the virus under control. Meanwhile, despite a vaccine developed under the push initiated by Trump, COVID, by way of the Delta Variant, has roared back. Biden is pushing mask mandates–but what about people crossing the southern border? What’s that about “health care” on that sign?
Critical race theory: A little more than a year ago President Trump issued an executive order banning divisive CRT training in federal agencies. Biden reversed that order. Biden’s attorney general, faux moderate Merrick Garland, announced that the FBI would investigate parents who protest the teaching of CRT at school board meetings, citing unnamed threats.
Supply chain crisis. About the time Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg went on paternity leave–without publicly disclosing it–the supply chain crisis began. Container ships are backed up in the Pacific off of Long Beach harbor. There is also a shortage of truck drivers. As Santa said in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, “We’ll have to cancel Christmas.” Okay, not really, but there will likely be fewer gifts under Christmas trees this year.
Jobs: Job growth has been anemic since Biden was sworn in.
Inflation. Higher gasoline prices are always a driver of inflation. And I already mentioned the shortage of truck drivers. Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan pumped cash into the economy. While that seems like a good thing at the base level inflation is caused when there is too much money chasing too few goods. And there is a shortage of semiconductor chips, new automobiles, used cars, plastics, palm oil, magnesium, and more. Oh, besides truck drivers there are not enough workers overall. Biden and the Democrats want to double down on stupid with a so-called infrastructure bill, Build Back Better, priced at over $3 trillion. That bill is drenched with social-engineering and Green New Deal nonsense. Inflation is not going away.
Kamala Harris: Biden’s vice president, the Queen of Cackles, was put in charge of the southern border. How is that working out? Biden turns 79 next month and Harris is a heartbeat away from succeeding him. He could have of course done worse with a running mate choice, but Biden also could have done so much better.
Cognitive decline. The spin has been off of Joe Biden’s fastball–and that pitch was never a commanding one–for a few years now. On a mental level things will only get worse for him. Is Biden running the White House? If not then who is?
Allies losing faith in us. People are attracted to strong leaders and repelled by weak ones. Unless, in regards to the latter, bad people want to take something that doesn’t belong to them. Like for instance, Taiwan. I already mentioned the Afghanistan debacle. But Biden screwed over the French by stealing a nuclear submarine deal they had with Australia. Or maybe I’m being too harsh. John Kerry said the Biden didn’t even know about the France deal.
Can America be trusted? Can America be relied upon? Our allies are surely asking those questions. And our enemies, China, Russia, and North Korea, certainly sense opportunity.
And of course we are just nine months into this Rosemary’s Baby of an administration.
And if you really like what you read please consider kicking into DaTipJar so I can afford to keep paying John and the rest of my Magnificent Seven writers every month.
Which brings us to Joe Biden. He comes into office with one advantage that Trump had namely the lowest expectations of any incoming president for years.
He has one disadvantage that Trump never had but Obama did, a press that will by so fawning (till Jan 21st 2023) that he will never be challenged (till Jan 21st 2023) which will make his mistakes more glaring and likely more destructive as they’ll not be challenged.
The media is still spinning these failures as success at least as much as they can.
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