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Big Media have been making up so many accusations about President Donald Trump and his administration that Americans have now equated them with fake news.
On Wednesday, May 24, 2017, The Hill reported the fake news element of the Harvard survey that shows most coverage of Trump was negative in the extreme. I wrote about the survey’s findings with regard to the negativity the other day.
The Hill reported (emphases mine):
According to data from the latest Harvard-Harris poll, which was provided exclusively to The Hill, 65 percent of voters believe there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media.
That number includes 80 percent of Republicans, 60 percent of independents and 53 percent of Democrats. Eighty-four percent of voters said it is hard to know what news to believe online.
Even 53% of Democrats think Big Media report fake news.
Once again, President Trump is proven correct.
Unfortunately, the survey noted that the consistent onslaught of fake news from Big Media have prevented him from rising in popularity polls. This is exactly what media outlets want.
Hmm. Most Americans think Big Media are peddling fake news, yet they still believe it. They still trust media more than Trump. An interesting situation.
More Americans are walking away from Big Media, whether its mainstream news or printed periodicals.
Those Americans are going online and reading or viewing alternative media, which, at least, seem to be doing a good job of investigation.
This is one small example of why traditional media outlets are losing their grip:
Now a Harvard study of media outlets covering President Donald Trump has proven Americans are correct in their perceptions of bias.
The study, ‘News Coverage of Donald Trump’s First 100 Days’, shows the extent of anti-Trump coverage.
American coverage
This chart gives us a summary of the findings from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy:
It is also worth remembering the 2016 campaign and the many journalists who were in the tank for Hillary Clinton. The Democrats held a few get-togethers for them, which the Podesta WikiLeaks revealed:
European media
Three European media sources were also included: Britain’s Financial Times (FT) and the BBC as well as Germany’s ARD.
Of the European sources, ARD was the worst offender, giving Trump astoundingly negative coverage 98% of the time.
The FT came next with 84% negative coverage. The BBC’s output was negative 74% of the time.
Basic findings
A summary of and excerpts from the study follow. Emphases mine below.
Trump was the star of the news during his first 100 days.
In the United States:
Trump was the topic of 41 percent of all news stories—three times the usual amount.[15] It was also the case that Trump did most of the talking (see Figure 1). He was the featured speaker in nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of his coverage. Members of the administration, including his press secretary, accounted for 11 percent of the sound bites. Other Republicans, including Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, accounted for 4 percent. Altogether, Republicans, inside and outside the administration, accounted for 80 percent of what newsmakers said about the Trump presidency.
Trump supporters were unhappy about the lack of coverage given to violent leftist protests against the president. The Left accused them of being cry babies. However, was Trump’s base right or wrong? They were right. With regard to news coverage:
Participants in anti-Trump protests and demonstrations accounted for … 3 percent.
On the other hand, television coverage did not give the Russian hacking scandal as much time as many of us might have thought:
Immigration was the most heavily covered topic, accounting for 17 percent of Trump’s coverage.[19] Health care ranked second (12 percent), followed by the terrorism threat (9 percent), and Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election (6 percent). Presidential appointments, global trade, Trump’s family and personal life, and the economy were the other topics that received 4 percent or more of the coverage.
Even though they loathe the president, cable news channels know he’s good for their ratings:
News ratings were slumping until Trump entered the arena. Said one network executive, “[Trump] may not be good for America, but [he’s] damn good for [us].”[18]
In Europe, media coverage focussed on international issues but not on Russia:
Although, like their American counterparts, immigration was at the top of the agenda, they gave relatively more space to international trade, military, and foreign policy issues, a reflection of the extent to which Europe is affected by U.S. policies in these areas. On the other hand, Russia’s interference in the U.S. election received considerably less attention in the European media than in the U.S. media.[1]
The three European outlets also discussed Trump’s fitness for office much more than their American counterparts did:
Only 3 percent of Trump’s U.S. coverage explicitly explored the issue of Trump’s fitness for office. European journalists were less restrained with the exception of BBC journalists, who are governed by impartiality rules that prohibit such reporting.[21] Journalists at ARD, Germany’s main public broadcasting outlet, are not governed by the same rules, and Trump’s suitability for the presidency was ARD’s leading topic in January, accounting for a full fifth (20 percent) of its Trump coverage. ARD stayed on the issue in its February coverage, when it consumed 18 percent of its Trump coverage. In March and April, Trump’s fitness for office got less attention from ARD, but it nonetheless accounted for about 10 percent of ARD’s coverage. Even that reduced amount exceeded the level of any of our seven U.S. outlets in any month. And ARD’s journalists were unequivocal in their judgment—98 percent of their evaluations of Trump’s fitness for office were negative, only 2 percent were positive.
Historical perspective
The Harvard study provides history about news coverage of American presidents.
Until the early 1960s, television news gave equal time to stories about Congress and the president.
In 1963, television news expanded to half-hour broadcasts on each of the three networks (CBS, ABC and NBC). This new type of news programme facilitated the hiring of the correspondents and camera crews needed to produce picture-driven news.
This resulted in an increased coverage of the president:
who, in any case, was easier than Congress to capture on camera. Newspapers followed suit and, ever since, the president has received more coverage in the national press than all 535 members of Congress combined.[12] The White House’s dominance has been such that, on national television, the president typically accounts for roughly one-eighth of all news coverage.[13]
The study points out that the president is not only the focus of media but also their target:
Although journalists are accused of having a liberal bias, their real bias is a preference for the negative.[22] News reporting turned sour during the Vietnam and Watergate era and has stayed that way.[23] Journalists’ incentives, everything from getting their stories on the air to acquiring a reputation as a hard-hitting reporter, encourage journalists to focus on what’s wrong with politicians rather than what’s right.[24]
Furthermore, the traditional honeymoon period no longer exists:
That era is now decades in the past. Today’s presidents can expect rough treatment at the hands of the press, and Donald Trump is no exception (see Figure 4). Of the past four presidents, only Barack Obama received favorable coverage during his first 100 days, after which the press reverted to form. During his second 100 days, Obama’s coverage was 57 percent negative to 43 percent positive.[26]
Even so, television news coverage of Trump hit a new low in negativity:
Of news reports with a clear tone, negative reports outpaced positive ones by 80 percent to 20 percent. Trump’s coverage was unsparing. In no week did the coverage drop below 70 percent negative and it reached 90 percent negative at its peak … The best period for Trump was week 12 of his presidency, when he ordered a cruise missile strike on a Syrian airbase in retaliation for the Assad regime’s use of nerve gas on civilians. That week, his coverage divided 70 percent negative to 30 percent positive. Trump’s worst periods were weeks 3 and 4 (a combined 87 percent negative) when federal judges struck down his first executive order banning Muslim immigrants, and weeks 9 and 10 (a combined 88 percent negative) when the House of Representatives was struggling without success to muster the votes to pass a “repeal and replace” health care bill.
No wonder Trump is unhappy with the media
When Trump rails against the media, he has fact on his side:
Trump’s coverage during his first 100 days was not merely negative in overall terms. It was unfavorable on every dimension. There was not a single major topic where Trump’s coverage was more positive than negative …
Trump haters have been spending too much time watching and reading Big Media. Wake up, folks! The Harvard study has news for you:
Research has found that familiarity with a claim increases the likelihood people will believe it, whether it’s true or not. The more they hear of something, the more likely they are to believe it.[34]
Here is the Harvard breakdown of print and television media negativity:
Trump’s attacks on the press have been aimed at what he calls the “mainstream media.” Six of the seven U.S. outlets in our study—CBS, CNN, NBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post—are among those he’s attacked by name. All six portrayed Trump’s first 100 days in highly unfavorable terms … CNN and NBC’s coverage was the most unrelenting—negative stories about Trump outpaced positive ones by 13-to-1 on the two networks. Trump’s coverage on CBS also exceeded the 90 percent mark. Trump’s coverage exceeded the 80 percent level in The New York Times (87 percent negative) and The Washington Post (83 percent negative). The Wall Street Journal came in below that level (70 percent negative), a difference largely attributable to the Journal’s more frequent and more favorable economic coverage.
There was no relief.
Looking at this another way:
Studies of earlier presidents found nothing comparable to the level of unfavorable coverage afforded Trump. Should it continue, it would exceed even that received by Bill Clinton. There was not a single quarter during any year of Clinton’s presidency where his positive coverage exceeded his negative coverage, a dubious record no president before or since has matched.[29] Trump can’t top that string of bad news but he could take it to a new level. During his first 100 days, Clinton’s coverage was 3-to-2 negative over positive.[30] Trump’s first 100 days were 4-to-1 negative over positive.
Interestingly:
Media failing the American people
Although this was not its only conclusion, the study said that the media need to step up and report more about Americans:
Journalists would also do well to spend less time in Washington and more time in places where policy intersects with people’s lives. If they had done so during the presidential campaign, they would not have missed the story that keyed Trump’s victory—the fading of the American Dream for millions of ordinary people. Nor do all such narratives have to be a tale of woe. America at the moment is a divided society in some respects, but it’s not a broken society and the divisions in Washington are deeper than those beyond the Beltway.
True. This is what a Michigan supporter had to say on Friday, May 19. He doesn’t mention the media, but he has a positive message for the president and his fellow supporters:
The man interviewed said that he supported Donald Trump from the beginning. He canvassed door-to-door for him. He got verbally attacked by … family and friends. People on whose doors he knocked sometimes physically assaulted him.
Big Media bear much of the blame for that gentleman’s abuse.
They don’t care about that man. They don’t care about Americans. They do not care one iota about you.
This is what lies ahead, less than a month from now:
The media will fuel the flames then not report on it, just as they ignored the riots earlier this year.
Tune out. Cancel the newspaper subscription. You can read the obituaries online.
If you want to know what’s really happening at the White House, follow the Twitter feed.
The other day, I posted on the Democratic Party origins of the fake Russian narrative used against President Donald Trump.
This post will explain further why the Democrats are opportunistic hypocrites, especially when it comes to Russia.
Last year, I summarised the Clintons’ and Podestas’ close links to Russia: the uranium deal and banking connection, respectively. The latter popped up in the Panama Papers. If you are unfamiliar with either of those topics, please read my post. You can’t get much closer to a warm, comfy relationship with the Russians than the Clintons and the Podesta brothers.
Two prominent Democrats currently braying the most about Trump’s supposed Russian connections — again, a fabrication — are Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (CA).
In March 2017, Schumer was intent on finding out the ‘truth’ about Trump’s notional Russian connections. Trump’s director of social media replied with pictorial evidence from 2003 of one of Schumer’s own meetings with none other than the man himself, Vladimir Putin:
Trump had tweeted the same picture that day with this comment:
We should start an immediate investigation into @SenSchumer and his ties to Russia and Putin. A total hypocrite!
Heavy reported on the tweets and Schumer’s love-in with Russia (emphases mine):
The photo originates from September 2003, when Putin visited New York to celebrate the first Lukoil gas station opening in the U.S. after it bought Getty Petroleum in 2000 and began re-branding Getty stations. According to press reports at the time, Putin did not make any public remarks and was only at the gas station convenient store for 10 minutes. That was long enough for Schumer to give Putin a Krispy Kreme doughnut. Lukoil President Vagit Alekperov was also at the meeting.
“When I showed the president of Russia a Krispy Kreme doughnut and he ate it and said it was good, that was one of the more surreal moments I’ve had in politics,” Schumer said at the time.
After Putin left the scene, Schumer told reporters that it was good for the U.S. to have a gas station owned by a company based in a non-OPEC country. “The more competition there is in oil, particularly against OPEC, the better New York will do and the better America will do,” Schumer said.
Schumer also wrote a 2008 Wall Street Journal op-ed, in which he said Russia needed to take a big role in talks with Iran during the George W. Bush administration.
The back-and-forth between the president and Schumer came just a day after Attorney General Jeff Sessions agreed to recuse himself from any potential investigation into Russian ties with the Trump campaign and the election, if one was to happen.
Sessions’s recused himself because:
he met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice in 2016, before the election.
That wasn’t enough for Schumer, though. On March 2, he took the hypocritical high moral ground:
Schumer said Sessions should resign from his post as attorney general. He called on the Trump administration to agree on the creation of an independent counsel to investigate.
On May 17, the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed the independent counsel, former FBI director Robert Mueller.
As for Pelosi:
Politico reported:
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Friday that she’s never met with the current Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak …
But a file photo from Pelosi’s 2010 meeting with Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev shows Kislyak at the table across from Pelosi — then House speaker — and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.). Medvedev had been in the country for a meeting with President Barack Obama a day earlier and stopped in on Capitol Hill to meet with congressional leaders as well.
Note the semantics that Pelosi’s spokesman used:
Asked to square Pelosi’s comments with the photo of the meeting, a spokesman said Pelosi simply meant she never had a solo meeting with Kislyak.
“Of course, that’s what she meant,” said the spokesman, Drew Hammill. “She has never had a private one-on-one with him.”
It’s not wrong for either party to meet with Russian officials as part of their work.
The issue is that Democrats are denying their own meetings with them then piling on Attorney General Jeff Sessions for meeting with Ambassador Kislyak when Sessions was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee at that time in 2016.
Another reason Sessions felt duty bound to recuse himself — perhaps more pertinent — is that he was also involved with Trump’s presidential campaign at the time. Is it probable that there was overlap in those conversations with Kislyak? We don’t know, but given Sessions’s integrity, it’s doubtful. In any event, he probably did not want to put up with a lot of bloviating, hypocritical Democrats.
Politico also found out that another Democrat, Senator Claire McCaskill (MO), similarly denied meeting with Russians:
Yet, she communicated directly with them in 2013 and 2015.
She was in the same room with them in 2013:
In 2015, McCaskill discussed the situation in Iran with the ambassador:
McCaskill’s denial was an attack on Sessions:
Her claim was designed to underscore what many Democrats view as the impropriety of Sessions’ one-on-one meeting with Kislyak last year, which the Trump administration claims was a routine part of his service on the armed services panel.
Republicans returned fire:
Republican operatives quickly blasted McCaskill as misrepresenting her record, citing the Democrat’s tweets about a 2013 group meeting with Kislyak and a 2015 call with the ambassador to discuss the nuclear pact with Iran.
“Just like Hillary Clinton, Senator McCaskill has a major problem with the truth,” Scott Sloofman, spokesman for the conservative America Rising PAC, said in a statement. “In her rush to stand with Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren to score political points, McCaskill exposed herself as both a liar and a hypocrite.”
The Democrats and the media must put this absurd Russian narrative to bed.
Of course, they will not because it serves their purposes in assassinating the character and integrity of the president and members of his administration.
Low information critics of Trump will know only what they read in the papers and see on television news.
What paupers.
Get online: read and watch what Big Media refuse to report.
My intention last year was to write about the WikiLeaks emails from the Democrats.
Because of all the hubbub surrounding the 2016 presidential campaign, I never got around to it. I still have all the bookmarks of the emails themselves and related analyses from The_Donald. They are a revelation.
I hope that some people will be wondering how and where the Russian narrative used against President Donald Trump started.
Look no further than Hillary Clinton’s campaign supremo John Podesta and a journalist, Brent Budowsky, who writes for The Hill.
Much of the Podesta WikiLeaks email no. 25651, dated December 21, 2015, concerns Hillary Clinton’s stance on ISIS and Syria. There is also a mention of campaign advertising and getting out the vote.
However, the key to this is the Democrats’ strategy against Trump, primarily this one from Brent Budowsky (emphases mine below):
Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin …
Budowsky was also interested in finding and releasing incriminating tapes of Trump to help Hillary, whom they knew even then was not doing well in the polls:
I suspect her negative trust ratings are locked in through election day. If there is a Trump ISIS video the campaign release it. If not, her untrustworthy numbers will remain further locked at high levels. These trust problems are self-induced and keep occurring.
Budowsky became more insistent:
Re the Trump ISIS video, if we don’t have the proof campaign should assign 100 people to look for it ASAP, there is probably something on tape somewhere.
With regard to campaign adverts, Budowsky already noted that Trump was not running them:
It is no coincidence that this year Trump runs no ads, while Jeb and Hillary run the most ads with little effect. Voter registration by contrast creates real voters and changes—and improves—the playing field itself. There is no ad on earth that will increase her trust ratings or the enthusiasm of her voters the way a mega-registration project will increase her support on election day.
They knew then that Hillary was scuppered. Based on the context, they also seemed to discern that Trump was going to be Hillary’s opponent in 2016.
In June 2016 — one month before the Republican National Convention declared Trump the GOP presidential candidate — Trump Derangement Syndrome was flying high in the Democrat camp. Obama’s campaign manager from 2008, later a senior adviser, tweeted:
On November 9, 2016 — the day after the election — Hillary’s campaign heads decided to run hard with the Russian narrative:
The quote in blue comes from an investigative book about the Clinton campaign, Shattered, which came out earlier this year.
On April 21, Breitbart included the quote in their report, which began:
The blistering behind-the-scenes book, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, illustrates how Hillary Clinton furiously blamed her defeat on the FBI investigation into her private emails, Russian interference, and Trump’s supposed support from “white nationalists” …
Also:
The Clinton camp settled on a two-pronged plan — pushing the press to cover how “Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign, overshadowed by the contents of stolen e-mails and Hillary’s own private-server imbroglio,” while “hammering the media for focusing so intently on the investigation into her e-mail, which had created a cloud over her candidacy,” the authors wrote.
And so the Russian narrative survives, alive and well, to this day.
The Democrats and the media have been displaying abject contempt for the people of the United States ever since.
Anyone who still thinks either camp cares about them is sorely mistaken.
Summer’s nearly here and it will be a long, hot one where Big Media and the White House are concerned.
The Russian narrative still shows no signs of abating.
On Tuesday, May 16, Dr Stephen F Cohen, a longtime academic and expert on Russia, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show:
Cohen is left-wing politically, and writes for The Nation. Therefore, he is no fan of President Donald Trump. However, he has an objective outlook. I’ve seen him on Tucker Carlson before and he speaks sense.
On May 16, he warned that the media assault is not only unwarranted, it is dangerous to the fabric of the United States. The clip below is a minute long:
The day before, Big Media stories circulated accusing Trump of giving away security secrets to the Russians. A salient comment at The_Donald explains why this is not only fake, but also dangerous news. Highlights in bold are from the original. Those in purple are mine:
Trump didn’t help ISIS or endanger lives – the media helped ISIS and endangered lives.
Day 1: Trump has a meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador. Nobody knows what is being discussed other than the people in the room.
Unknown to the outside world, Trump is supposed to have told them (disputed) that an intelligence source in a specific ISIS city has found that they are having a new focus on laptop bombs. Laptop bombs are very old news, we already have to send laptops through X-ray separately, but not everyone might do this at small airports, particularly in Russia. It’s useful information for Russia to prevent terrorists blowing up planes. In 2015 a Russian plane was blown up in the air killing 224 people.
Day 2: “Anonymous sources” tell the media that Trump endangered a source by doing this. The source could be killed, Trump is risking lives. The usefulness for preventing more Russian civilian aircraft being blown up is completely absent from reporting.
In reality, the danger to the source is very small. Why? Because only the top Russian leadership have been told. It would not get published in newspapers. Nobody knows outside of the people in the room. The “danger to the source” the media is crying about would require a complete leak. Not just about laptop bombs, because that’s old news and could have been found through digital interception. But the entire conversation from the White House between Trump and the Russian Foreign minister and ambassador would have to get leaked to ISIS.
To point out again: How would ISIS find out and kill the spy? They don’t know what was discussed in the meeting. Their only knowledge would be when in a few months airports start paying some extra attention to scanning laptops, maybe some Russian airports get X-ray machines installed. The danger to the source is extremely small.
Day 3: The media tells the entire world the full details of the conversation, from their “anonymous sources” – that Trump talked about a new ongoing programme, revealed by a spy, in a specific city. Most likely this is the only city this development is happening in – it’s quite technical, and needs an expert to disguise batteries as bombs to pass X-ray scans.
ISIS can immediately round up everyone around this programme. Because now ISIS knows both the city and the programme the spy has access to.
They didn’t before, but the media just told them everything they need to know.
Basically, the media are complete sociopaths, holy extreme boundless warriors with terrorist mindsets, out to destroy the Trump administration. They don’t give a [—-] about getting a spy killed. Thanks to Washington Post, the probability of that spy being killed increased from the 1% range to the 50%+ range.
Trump had this to say about the aforementioned article in the Washington Post:
The Gateway Pundit pointed out that Trump did not even know what city was concerned, but someone at the White House did and released the information to the Washington Post (emphasis in the original):
The real scandal is that WaPo claimed in their article that President Trump disclosed the city of where the intelligence was gathered to the Russians but the President was never even briefed on this information.
There is also the organised brigading by David Brock’s left-wing Shareblue media initiative which emerged from the Correct The Record PAC which plastered propaganda all over the web for Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign.
Two of my previous posts mentioned Brock in passing. In March 2017, I wrote that Brock’s organisation pays people to comment on pro-Trump social media. In April, I wrote about the accusations that Brock’s organisation, Media Matters, made against Fox News’s Judge Andrew Napolitano:
Napolitano has great insight into the inner workings of Washington, DC, particularly with regard to recent claims of surveillance of President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign …
On March 17, Media Matters, founded by the highly powerful Democrat operative David Brock, currently recovering from a heart attack, accused the judge of obtaining his ‘conspiracy theory’ from ‘Russian media’.
In January, Brock’s team issued a blueprint about bombarding social media with more anti-Trump, pro-Left propaganda, including leaks:
On May 16, the Seth Rich story entered the mainstream. Rich was murdered in mysterious circumstances in Washington, DC on July 10, 2016. He worked for the DNC (Democratic National Committee) at the time. It is thought that he might have been involved in leaking more than 44,000 incriminating DNC emails to WikiLeaks. However, at this time, no one really knows for certain.
In any event, the contents of those emails clearly showed that the DNC were determined to take down Bernie Sanders’s candidacy. The DNC convention took place at the end of July 2016. Before then, because of the strength of the leaked emails, the then-chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz had to resign.
For those unfamiliar with Seth Rich, WikiLeaks tweeted that the best and most concise source of information so far is a Fox 25 (Washington DC Fox affiliate) article. On May 16, Fox News ran with the story. (Also see this Fox 25 article from May 17.)
The bigger print media outlets immediately came up with the aforementioned Trump-Russia story about the president giving Russia state secrets. Those articles took Rich’s story off the front pages.
There is a reason for that.
The Rich story could be a huge link to goings-on in the US capital. The DC police are not commenting on his murder.
Furthermore:
Fox 5 is standing by the story, but several federal and local law enforcement sources told the Washington Post they were unaware of Rich sending any DNC information to WikiLeaks. Nothing in their examination of Rich’s computer and email activity connected him to WikiLeaks.
“There is nothing that we can find that any of this is accurate,” police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck told the [Washington] Post.
Those who have been following the Seth Rich murder for the past ten months think there is a cover-up, because, to quote a contributor to The_Donald:
Seth Rich is a domino. Once this is exposed the rest will fall one by one.
The Fox 25 article states:
If true, Rich being WikiLeaks’ source would undercut the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia hacked email accounts linked to Clinton to hurt her campaign. It would also refute Democrats’ allegations that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to release and promote this information.
Once the Russian narrative dies — it’s sure to continue throughout the summer — then Trump’s Department of Justice will become front and centre news.
James Comey, a big source of protection for politicians and media, is gone. It is almost certain that many of these people are panicking. They, along with the possible collusion of law enforcement agencies, know about big, undercover crimes going on. Some of them could well be put on trial, with a number of them facing prison sentences.
Why else have there been constant calls this month for Trump’s impeachment? Why else have there been accusations that if Trump isn’t insane, he at least has Alzheimer’s and is, therefore, unfit for office?
This comment from 4chan.org/pol/ — posted at The_Donald — says it all:
It seems very likely that an incorruptible FBI director and the Department of Justice can make tremendous inroads in draining the Swamp, just as Trump pledged.
Bruce Bawer — an American who has lived in Europe for nearly two decades — wrote an excellent essay for PJ Media, ‘What Happened in France?’
It offers a post-mortem of Emmanuel Macron’s victory on Sunday, May 7, 2017 and explains how it happened.
With an upcoming parliamentary election taking place in Britain on Thursday, June 8, it seems apposite to look at voting patterns in the two countries.
Before I excerpt Bawer’s editorial, I, too, have noticed a certain voting behaviour in France and the UK, two countries I know well. I live in the UK and see that voters are reluctant not so much to go to the polls as they are to actually vote in a way that reverses globalism. People in other parts of Europe, e.g. France, are similarly skittish.
The hive mind is a powerful thing in Europe. The globalists created it through politically correct thinking and make jolly good use of it via the media and pollsters.
Two recent British shockers were David Cameron’s victory in May 2015 and the referendum vote for Brexit in 2016. Both results surprised everyone. This is because we were under constant onslaught by print and broadcast media to vote against the Conservatives and Brexit.
Even now that Theresa May is the occupant of No. 10, politics remains a touchy subject. As I’ve said many times before, it’s not something I discuss much with people I know, even with fellow Conservatives, some of whom are quite wet — squishy, for my American readers — about Brexit. They think voters should have gone for Remain last June.
However — and this is something Bruce Bawer did not mention in his piece — Europeans do not have a well developed online alternative media universe comprising independent journalists, citizen journalists and political fora. This, to me, is the principal difference between the UK and Europe.
Bawer’s article is well worth reading and passing along to friends. I’ll try to excerpt as little as possible, because it probably took him a long time to write.
Americans are probably still scratching their heads over 2017 election results, not only in France but in the Netherlands. Both resulted in preserving a self-destructive status quo, one that increases terror and diminishes national identity.
Bawer says that Europeans feel a collective guilt about their former colonies and political movements. Therefore, they feel the need for perpetual atonement (emphases mine below):
One way of trying to answer it is to look at countries one by one. For example, the Brits and French feel guilty about their imperial histories, and hence find it difficult to rein in the descendants of subject peoples. The Germans feel guilty about their Nazi past – and the Swedes feel guilty about cozying up to Nazis – and thus feel compelled to lay out the welcome mat for, well, just about anybody. The Dutch, similarly, are intensely aware that during the Nazi occupation they helped ship off a larger percentage of their Jews to the death camps than any other Western European country, and feel a deep need to atone.
Then there’s postmodernism:
According to postmodern thinking, no culture is better than any other – and it’s racist to say otherwise. No, scratch that – other cultures are, in fact, better than Western culture. Whites, by definition, are oppressors, imperialists, and colonialists, while “people of color” are victims.
We are in denial about terrorist attacks:
The plainer the truth got, in fact, the more fiercely they resisted it. And as skilled propagandists began to represent Muslims as the mother of all victim groups, many Westerners were quick to buy into it all …
But – and this is a fact that some of us are thoroughly incapable of identifying with, and thus almost thoroughly incapable of grasping – some people don’t want to know the truth. And if they do know the truth, they want to un-know it.
These are not intellectuals or socio-political elites, but ordinary people of various income groups and educational levels:
I’m talking about people who, in everyday life, come across as thoroughly good and decent – but who, when push comes to shove, just don’t want to rock the boat. That’s a lot of people. Maybe most. People who are nice so long as it’s easy to be nice …
There are kind people who, the minute there’s any hint of trouble – which means, way before the death-camp round-up begins – prefer to lie low. Their highest value isn’t truth or virtue or beauty or even long-term security for them and their families but the ability to buy another day without major trouble.
You’d think they’d be able to look forward at least some distance into the future and dwell on that grim prospect. Able to see their children, their grandchildren, and so forth, living under sharia law. If, indeed, lucky to be living at all.
But I think it needs to be recognized that for some people, seeing that far into the future is just beyond their intellectual grasp. Or beyond what they dare to envision …
Bawer posits that a lot of these people can see what is actually happening to Europe but they are ‘terrified’ to do anything about it, even at the ballot box.
This is why a Conservative victory in 2015 and Brexit victory in 2016 were so significant for Britain. I had hoped our continental neighbours would follow suit this year, but, alas, it was not meant to be. The Germans are likely to see Angela Merkel continue her chancellorship later this year.
Bawer says that Europeans are now so cowed into submission, even a private vote can’t help:
You might think that, once in the voting booth, these people would be able – and not just able but eager, desperate even – to stand up against the powers above them that have turned their countries upside down and assert their power as citizens. But everything around them has conspired all their lives to render them incapable of feeling that power – or, perhaps, has rendered them incapable of feeling that they have the moral right to exercise that power in the way that their gut is begging them to.
That still, quiet voice in their heads, which I would describe as a voice of plain reason and common sense, is up against the resounding voices of all the higher-ups shouting in unison – the leading voices of politics, business, the academia, the media, and so on – that they’ve been bred from infancy to respect and take seriously. To, indeed, obey …
So it is that even in a secret ballot, it takes European voters a remarkable amount of nerve to resist the thunderous chorus of voices from above urging them to vote against their own interests; it feels like nothing less than an act of treason to heed the meek little voices in their own heads begging them to do the opposite – to do what’s actually best for themselves and their loved ones.
Bawer nails it perfectly in his next sentence:
They’ve been psychologically manipulated to the point where they truly believe, on some level, at least in some Orwellian doublethink kind of way, that acting in clear defense of their own existence, their own culture, their own values, and their own posterity, is an act of ugly prejudice.
Yes — that’s it in a nutshell.
I see it here in the elderly — people old enough to know better — and I see it in the middle-aged and the young.
Europeans must wake up and vote for what is right and good.
I sincerely hope that Britain will do so again on June 8.
On Sunday, May 7, 2017 the French will be electing a new president whose term will run for five years.
It is almost certain that Emmanuel Macron (En Marche!) will win.
Marine Le Pen (Front National) is likely to pick up more votes than her father Jean-Marie has in past elections, but there is too much historical baggage attached to the FN to make her a winning proposition nationwide.
May 3 – debate
On Wednesday, May 3, TF1 hosted a televised debate of the two candidates, which was also shown on several other channels.
One of my favourite socio-political commentators, journalist, author and essayist Natacha Polony, appeared on RMC (talk radio) the next morning to say that the debate revealed one candidate who doesn’t understand the issues and one who is a perfect Énarque (graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration, where the top politicians come from). Macron is also a graduate of Sciences-Po, also very important to political life.
Polony says that the debates told the French public very little about how they would resolve current problems in their nation. A few ‘hollow’ soundbites and ‘vulgarity’, she says, do not constitute a policy position.
France24 reported similarly. The debate was:
loud, fast, personal, riven with inaccuracies and thin on substance …
The media and viewers thought that Macron won the debate hands down.
SkyNews has a good recap of the highlights:
In angry exchanges, Ms Le Pen played up Mr Macron’s background as a former banker and economy minister in the outgoing Socialist government.
Portraying him as Francois Hollande’s lapdog, she said he was the “candidate of globalisation gone wild”.
He tore into her flagship policy of abandoning the euro and accused her of failing to offer solutions to France’s economic problems such as high unemployment.
The attacks were often personal with Mr Macron calling Ms Le Pen a “parasite” and a liar.
Also:
Ms Le Pen accused Mr Macron of having no plan on security but being indulgent with Islamic extremism.
He told her that radicals would love her to become president because she would stoke conflict.
Alternative media’s Paul Joseph Watson, a frequent traveller to France, reacted from London:
For the FN, the debate was of historical importance:
The TV appearance was the first time a National Front candidate has appeared in a run-off debate – an indication of how far Le Pen has brought her party by softening its image and trying to separate it from past xenophobic associations.
Macron win baked in from the start
Emmanuel Macron was meant to win from late 2016.
The media are doing their job in carrying water for him. This week’s French magazine stand is incredible:
Macron, who served as François Hollande’s economics minister for two years, was his pet in many ways. His campaign was designed to beat that of the conservative François Fillon (LR) and the socialist former education minister Benoît Hamon (PS).
Manuel Valls
Those who know that former prime minister Manuel Valls was tipped to be the next PS candidate years ago might wonder what happened. This, too, was part of the plan.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A PS party leader warned Valls not to run and do something ‘irreversible’.
Shortly afterwards, Hollande told Valls in a one-on-one meeting in December that eventually his time would come.
Hollande, incidentally, kept Valls in the dark as to whether he would run for a second term. He didn’t.
Valls did not understand the message from his party. It was not Valls’s turn for a reason. The PS supported Macron, even though Macron created his own political movement.
Valls went ahead and ran for the PS primary earlier this year. He was a long-time favourite. Yet, the weak Benoît Hamon beat him. Behind the scenes, the PS machine made sure Valls did not win. Nothing personal, just politics.
Valls put his support behind Macron rather than Hamon before the first round of voting on Sunday, April 23. That was understandable as Hamon was polling only in the single digits and received only slightly over 6% of the vote that day.
François Fillon
François Fillon of Les Républicains, or LR, was my candidate. He served as prime minister under Nicolas Sarkozy between 2007 and 2012.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Fillon has always been measured, reserved and statesman-like.
There was never a hint of scandal about him.
He won the LR primary decisively on November 27, 2016 with two-thirds of the vote. The turnout — non-LR members could pay €3 for a ballot — was immense. Many polling stations had long queues all day. Some ran out of ballots. Officials were surprised, to say the least.
The result took everyone aback. No one had written much about Fillon in the run-up to the primary. In fact, one newsweekly, Marianne, called him ‘Mr Nobody’.
In December, with a sound political manifesto, he was seen as the man to beat.
In the third week of January, two of Marianne‘s readers wrote letters to the editor, expressing fear about Fillon. In the magazine’s 20 – 26 January 2017, edition, one reader wrote about the disaster 2017 would turn out to be with ‘the arrival of Fillon at the Elysée’ (p. 50). The other reader’s letter bore the title ‘SOS Fillon’. It said what an ‘inhuman’ cruelty from an environmental perspective it would be for him to be ‘at the Elysée’ (p. 52).
The polls showed Fillon as the top candidate at that time.
On January 25, everything changed.
Mysterious charges came out of the blue, with an address book and a dossier given to Le Canard enchaîné. Allegations purported that Fillon’s Welsh wife Penelope had engaged in fictitious employment and had been paid hundreds of thousands of euros for work she had never done both for a literary magazine and as Fillon’s parliamentary assistant. This was strange, because the allegations stretched back to things that supposedly took place in the late 1990s, yet, they had never seen the light of day until now. Recall that Fillon — ‘Mr Nobody’ — was prime minister between 2007 and 2012.
A preliminary hearing began immediately, something that is unheard of in similar situations in France. It normally takes weeks, if not months, for the authorities to investigate.
Nearly every day for two months, either Le Canard enchaîné was receiving new information about other Fillon scandals or the authorities were questioning the couple and searching their properties.
As Eric Ciotti, the LR president of the council of Alpes-Maritimes, told RMC the other week, the last day Fillon had a proper campaign was on January 24.
Fillon had to be cleared out of the way for Macron. Believe me, Macron never would have stood a chance under normal circumstances.
Despite all of this, on April 23, Fillon received a respectable 20.0% of the votes in the first round. He came third, behind Le Pen. Le Pen garnered 21.3% and Macron 24.0%. Jean-Luc Mélenchon came fourth with 19.5%. Benoît Hamon, the PS candidate, got just over 6%.
Now that Fillon is out of the way, so is the drip-drip-drip of scandal.
You can read more about Valls and Fillon in an article I wrote recently for Orphans of Liberty, ‘Pauvre Fillon’. (Pauvre means ‘poor’, ‘pitiable’).
The Big Media narrative
Big Media have been busy for months saying that Macron is a centrist, anti-establishment and antisystème candidate.
If he espoused the latter two characteristics, Big Media would never have endorsed him. Big Media are part of the establishment and le système.
Marianne noted that all of these media outlets have made a big deal about everything Macron except his political platform (13 – 19 January 2017 issue, p. 11).
They have given Macron the celebrity treatment in the same way that the world media gave Obama in 2008. Marianne pointed out that l’Obs (Le Nouvel Observateur) put Macron on their cover six times in 2016 (p. 17).
At that stage, Marianne only had Macron on their cover twice: that particular January issue and in November 2015. Interestingly, the 2015 issue has ‘Moi, Président‘ next to his photo.
This week, Marianne fell in line with every other magazine and put him on the cover. Sad. The magazine that prides itself on independent (albeit left-wing) thinking howled about media intox — hype — then fell into the same trap.
Establishment help
Macron has benefited from Socialist help at home and abroad.
In France, Marianne says that Hollande’s ex-partner and mother of his children, Ségolène Royal — former minister of the environment — has been discreetly advising him behind the scenes since December (13 – 19 January 2017 issue, p. 12). Royal has long admired Macron. She appeared with him on the hustings this week.
In the United States, Obama — also a socialist — gave Macron a fulsome endorsement to the French electorate. Can you imagine the outcry if Trump had done something similar?
My guess is that he was in Tahiti for this very reason. If he had rung Macron from the US, the American intelligence community could have tracked his phone calls. Ironically, Obama put such an arrangement in place himself, whereby Americans corresponding with or talking to people overseas may become of interest to US intelligence.
Like Obama, Macron is another Manchurian Candidate. The two must have much in common.
This tweet bridges the discussion from Obama to the next two men mentioned below:
Besides socialists, there are the globalist economics experts and policy wonks around Macron, including Alain Minc and Jacques Attali.
I saw Alain Minc several years ago on a late-night French talk show, On n’est pas couché (‘We Haven’t Gone to Bed’). The subject was the disconnect between a candidate’s promises and the reality that follows an election. Minc told Natasha Polony, who was a regular panellist at the time, that even she had no place in voicing an opinion about policy-making. Minc said:
You get your say at the polls. At that point, your role ends. Afterwards, we take over.
Her jaw dropped.
In other words, leave it to the experts. The great unwashed have no voice. This guy is advising Macron. He also attended the same grandes écoles as the future French president.
Their already heated debate continued a little longer. Then, Minc dismissed her as being silly and told her to be quiet. If I remember rightly, the talk show host stepped in and changed the subject.
Jacques Attali, who is richer than Croesus, said in a print interview a couple of years ago that, even though he is in his 70s, he still works every day. He said he could not help but look down on retired people who wanted to relax and enjoy life. As a graduate of the same schools as Macron and Minc, Attali has never had to toil day after day in a manufacturing plant or drive a lorry or work in a slaughterhouse. If he had busied himself at any of those occupations for decades, he, too, would want to put his feet up.
Policy positions
Macron’s team have been busy this week tweeting, sometimes posting several every few minutes: a lot of empty words — or bla bla, as the French say — style over substance.
He doesn’t want people to know what he’s actually going to do.
Keebler AC reposted the following tweet on a thread at The Conservative Treehouse:
What follows are a few illustrated highlights from the debate that give you an idea of what Macron is about:
I’ll translate the dialogue below:
Juncker (?, on the left): The barbarians are at the gates. How can we guarantee a French victory?
Macron (lower right): Open wide the gates. There is no such thing as French culture.
Hollande (upper right): I told you so! The little one’s a genius!
All of this causes confusion. On March 31, an RMC panellist, a barrister, asked how Macron could be Hollande’s successor:
It’s inconceivable. He’s surrounded by people from the Right.
However, others do understand. Someone replied to that comment with this helpful illustration:
The influential imam from the Grande Mosque de Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, called on all French Muslims to vote for Macron in the second round.
And Les Républicains (LR), in order to continue to distance themselves from the FN, also urged their members and supporters to vote for Macron. Career politician Jean-François Copé rightly criticised Macron for his heavily publicised victory party after the first round, while Marine Le Pen left her supporters to party and made a quick exit after the results were announced.
Here’s Macron’s party at La Rotonde brasserie in Paris’s Montparnasse district. Copé said he was stunned:
Note that Copé also commented above that, as far as ensuring French security is concerned, Macron is ‘very weak’. As far as economic policies go, Macron is in ‘permanent flux’.
That said, Copé announced on the show:
With death in my soul, I said I will vote Macron.
Globalists v Nationalists
Ultimately, the battle for the Elysée is about globalists (Macron) versus nationalists (Le Pen).
This revolves around changes in those who embrace Marxism.
S. Armaticus, who authors the Catholic site, The Deus Ex Machina Blog, wrote an excellent analysis in the comments on The Conservative Treehouse‘s pre-election post:
The “Globalists” -read cultural Marxists in the US are endorsing the “globalists” – read cultural Marxists in France. Now the cultural Marxist’s enemy is the former economic Marxists- read post-Soviet countries. The reason that the cultural Marxists hate the former economic Marxists is that the later dumped their Marxism. The reason they dumped their Marxism is because it didn’t work. It left their countries ruined. So these former Marxists are trying to implement something that works to get them out of the mess that Marxism left. While the cultural Marxists never experienced Marxism first hand. So they are trying to implement Marxism.
And that is why us normal people like you, me and The POTUS, are caught up in this fratricidal war between the neo-Marxists (Obama/Macron/Trudeau) and the ex-Marxists (Putin).
We should know the results on Sunday night. Unfortunately, because the French don’t really have enough of an online presence to fight globalism.
As Marine Le Pen said, a woman will be leading France: either her or Angela Merkel.
No guesses as to who will be in charge come Monday morning.
Next week I will discuss Macron’s private life.
