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media and media people national politics & policies subsidy

Propaganda Shoved Where?

The continued existence of “public radio” and “public television” is out of place in these United States. Not because it’s partisan — all news vendors tend to toe some partisan line — but because it’s partisan and taxpayer subsidized.

Though NPR aficionados tend to downplay the subsidies to NPR and PBS, what public media boosters have more consistently done is deny the partisanship

They have no standing any longer — if the evidence of our senses weren’t enough. 

In “The Bell Finally Tolls for National Public Radio,” Matt Taibbi explains how the media behemoth’s CEO Katherine Maher admitted NPR’s and PBS’s partisanship in her defense of it.

That won’t help her case in Congress, though, notes Mr. Taibbi. 

While the New York Times insists that tax-​funded “public” media “improves the lives of millions of Americans” and “strengthens American interests” (presumably by being relentlessly progressive), it has no defense to Taibbi’s indictment: the branches of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have taken “the country’s signature public news shows into an endless partisan therapy session, a Nine Perfect Strangers retreat for high-​income audiences micro-​dosing on Marx and Kendi.”

Taibbi makes clear just how annoying the dish served by CPB/​NPR/​PBS is, the entities seeing no “problem with taking funds from a huge plurality or even a majority of citizens and pursuing a nakedly politicized, ear-​splitting propaganda project in opposition to the views of those people. NPR is the vegetables we refuse to eat, administered up a different entrance for our own good.”

I was thinking about the blight upon our eyes and ears and reason, but point taken.

De-​fund National Public Propaganda immediately.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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media and media people national politics & policies

SuperPressPAC Problem?

Who wouldn’t want the media behind them — air-​brushing the public images of their candidates; telling stories to dramatize the political agenda items they’re running on? 

Back in November 2015, I agreed with then-​Senator and presidential candidate (now Secretary of State) Marco Rubio’s characterization of the national news media as a “SuperPAC” for national Democrats. 

How to even place a monetary value on the relentlessly one-​sidedly progressive news coverage on network TV and in print outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post?

But is there a downside? Could this Super-​est of all SuperPACs possibly be, on balance, less than helpful?

Let me posit that (a) the Washington press corps is ideologically to the left of the Democratic Party and, accordingly, (b) the national news media lures liberal Dems to far-​out leftist positions that they’d otherwise never dare entertain — all because there exists this massive supportive left-​wing echo chamber.

Then, on Election Day, national Democrats discover quite abruptly that, unlike DC’s editors and reporters, regular folks don’t like high gas prices or men winning women’s sporting events or releasing violent illegal migrants to commit more crimes. And, doggone it, they cast a lot more votes than the Beltway’s fifth column, er, Fourth Estate. 

Take, for example, the current controversy regarding former President Biden’s cognitive abilities; consider, also, the decisions made by Mr. Biden and auto-​pen possessing handlers. 

Would a Republican president and his White House advisors ever think for a second that they could get away with keeping the press away from the commander-​in-​chief of the Free World, holding only heavily staged public events? For months? Forever

I don’t think so. The mainstream media would — rightly! — question, berate, harangue and bloviate until the cognitive functionality of the POTUS had been popularly established. 

But the Washington media did not hold a Democrat president to that (any?) standard.

Thus enabled, Biden kept going. 

Costing Democrats!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 


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government transparency

De-​Classification or Re-Regurgitation?

What do the JFK assassination files and an obscure booklet called “The Adam and Eve Story” have in common?

Both are examples of how the CIA and other Deep State actors keep us guessing and in the dark: by over-classification. 

A “sanitized” copy of Chan Thomas’s immortal classic of seeming ultra-​nuttery, the aforementioned “Adam and Eve Story,” was de-​classified in 2013. Now on the CIA’s website, it floats a wild theory about human history and life on this planet, complete with repeated global, world-​turned-​on-​end catastrophes. 

Most people had never heard of the work until de-​classified and placed on the website. The Wikipedia entry mentions the de-​classification of the document but not why it was classified as secret in the first place.

Here’s a theory: to confuse us

The only reason most people ever give the booklet a second glance is because the CIA made it secret.

Now turn to the present, with something circulating today as “evidence” from the recent release of backlogged JFK assassination documents: a summary of passages in the New Left journal Ramparts, June 1967. It reproduces a rumor about one Gary Underhill and his alleged blurting out that “a small clique within the CIA was responsible” for the shooting in Dealey Plaza. 

All the rage online, but this document was merely the re-​regurgitation of public information — which is what an awful lot of classified material is.

We take note of this Underhill story not because it proves anything, but because the report was made secret in the first place. 

It’s almost as if they want some people to believe something, and others to scoff at it all. 

But maybe what they are doing is burying us in useless “information.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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ideological culture Voting

Don’t Kill Yourself

As Donald Trump appeared to be winning last night, the number of Twitterers who proclaimed a hankering or a design to kill themselves rose dramatically. Michael Malice and others found humor in it, but it’s a super-​saddening development, if you ask me.

These Kamala Harris voters are not really going to kill themselves. It is just something to say on Twitter.

I really hope I’m not wrong about this.

I’ll leave to others the counsel of life. That is the job of friends and family and emergency hotline dispatchers. My counsel is different: talking about suicide because your candidate lost is undemocratic. If the authoritarian pronouncements of both major candidates alarmed you about the danger of anti-​democratic trend, this fad should raise the alarm several decibels.

The whole point of democracy is to allow a transition of power sans bloodshed. And that requires both contenders and supporters not to shed each other’s blood … or their own. When they fail.

It’s a requirement. Not to over-react.

The losers have to accept the loss, and the winners have to refrain from using the state to punish the losers further. 

It’s sort of that simple.

Resignation is key, as scientist Lawrence M. Krauss (@LKrauss1) indicated: “Going to bed, reasonably resigned to Trump win at this point as it seemed to me from a distance for some time. He may be a nut, a liar, and a crook, but the bright side is a likely boost free speech and due process at unis and bump in tech sector, if we survive the rest.”

We will survive. If Trump wins the Electoral Vote (I’m going to bed, too, before a final determination), or if Harris does.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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media and media people social media

TikTok Astroturf

According to sociologist Jacques Ellul, propaganda is not rhetoric; it’s not you and me expressing our opinions and trying to persuade others; it’s not our letters to editors of newspapers or the “memes” we share online. Propaganda is the coordination of many forms of social influence, of many media. States are usually involved, or political parties (wannabe states) or huge interest groups (which can be bigger than many states).

If, however, you secretly get paid to push a message in a specific way, you may be a propagandist.

Take TikTok.

This is the video-​sharing social media site so popular with young people. It’s been controversial; I’ve discussed it before. But I’m no expert. Still, I was not surprised to learn that Democrats have been paying “social influencers” on that platform to serve up the Democratic Party line.

A TikToker named Madeline Pendleton made a video about how the Democrats offered “nearly $15,000” to talk about “how awesome the Democratic Party is.” She found the idea ridiculous, characterizing the offer as a way to distract attention from the party’s “genocide.” But she recognizes that it can be effective. Many of her “mutuals” on TikTok are indeed spouting the same lines that she was “pitched” by Democrats, and they did so within 48 hours of her receiving the offer.

She went on to say that she received two offers: one to make ongoing videos up to the election, and the other to scarify Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which she is no fan of, but thinks is not that big a deal.

“You guys should be aware that that when you see videos like that, the Democrats are actively paying people to talk about how awesome the Democrats are.”

Awesome propagandists, anyway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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incumbents insider corruption

Involuntary Campaign Contributions

Incumbent lawmakers should not be looting taxpayer dollars to fund their election campaigns.

Investigative reporter Lee Fang has learned that incumbents of both major parties are ignoring ethics rules in order “to use government money for ads clearly designed to influence voters.” 

Back in the 1990s, I was shocked to discover that the average incumbent congressperson spent more using the franking privilege, government funding of “official” newsletters to constituents, than the average challenger spent in his or her entire campaign. In this video age, they’ve upgraded their bragging to living color.

Here is a bipartisan couple from the many examples Fang discovered:

Democrat: A taxpayer-​funded ad aired by the campaign of New York Representative Tom Suozzi, talks about how “Tom worked across party lines to convince the president” to do something about the border.

Republican: A taxpayer-​funded ad aired by the campaign of Virginia Representative Jen Kiggans, in which she boasts about her track record on issues pertaining to veterans and the military.

Fang has identified at least nine other culprits and put together a YouTube video compiling some of these taxpayer-​funded ads. Everyone sees these as campaign spots — or “campaign-​style ads,” as Fang also puts it.

The ads even say (for example, in Wesley Hunt’s video) that they were “paid for with official funds” from the office of the congressman or with “official funds authorized by the House of Representatives.”

These “official funds” are not voluntary campaign contributions.

Congressmen, you’ve been caught. 

So stop.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies partisanship

Measures of Desperation

Desperate times call for desperate measures, the saying goes, but since the Hillary Clinton/​Donald Trump contest of 2015 – 2016, the desperate measures that Democrats and media newsfolk lurched towards have been extraordinary.

Yesterday, as one of our Weekend Updates, we considered the current pickle in which the corporate news media finds itself. 

Fearing that they had contributed to the defeat of Hillary Clinton by covering the news of her emails and other scandals, corporate newsrooms cooked up a new ethical rule: Do not report on stories based on data — no matter if confirmed — that may have been leaked by foreign malefactors, such as “the Russians.”

With that rule they suppressed, online, news about the Hunter Biden laptop and its contents, calling it “Russian disinformation.” Twitter banned the news source long enough to get Biden elected, and then the “Russian” story unraveled.

Now that same rule would, if consistently applied, work against reporting on Trump’s current email leakage.

But it’s not just media malfeasance that is desperate, as Stephen Cox explains at Liberty. Referring to the ousting of Joe Biden from the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket, Mr. Cox writes that while this variety of machination is new to America, it is very old, historically: this is “the kind of thing the Roman imperial families used to do. This is the kind of thing the Bolsheviks used to do. The difference, of course, is that the Democratic Party oligarchs have lots and lots of money to enforce their will.”

Enforce it they do. Consider how many in the news media played along with Biden’s senescence, right up until they all proclaimed it obvious and disqualifying. They “turn on a dime.”

“Fragile regimes have a way of bringing the house down with them,” notes Cox. But why is it Trump who sends Democrats into paroxysms of terror?

Twenty years ago, Trump might have been dismissed out of hand. He isn’t now, and neither is Kamala Harris — a woman with all the charm of Hillary and all the competence of Sleepy Joe.

Desperate times, indeed. And Americans know it. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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ideological culture partisanship

Biden’s Belief in a MAGA Republican Bloodbath

Over the weekend, I was surprised to find Joseph R. Biden — our semi-​retired, caretaker president of these United States — on CBS Sunday Morning, for his first sit-​down TV interview since leaving the presidential contest.

Mr. Biden warned that former President Trump constitutes the greatest evil in the solar system, calling this “threat to democracy” an “ally” of the Ku Klux Klan.

“The most important thing … we must defeat Trump,” explained Biden. That’s why he let Nancy Pelosi and former President Obama (and insistent Democratic Party mega-​donors) push him out of the race. 

To save the Republic … by not losing to Donald Trump. 

Asked if he was confident of a peaceful transfer of power should Trump be defeated, Joe said, “No, I’m not confident.”*

“He means what he says,” our nominal president offered about Mr. Trump. “All this stuff about if we lose, there’ll be a bloodbath, we have these stolen elections.”

Of course, “all the stuff about” Trump threatening a “bloodbath” has been conjured up in the noggin of our cognitively impaired commander-in-chief. 

Trump made the “bloodbath” comment at a rally in Michigan. Speaking about the U.S. auto industry, he told the crowd that we had lost “34 percent of the automobile manufacturing business” to Mexico and promised to slap a 100 percent tariff on cars built by China in Mexico — to enthusiastic audience applause. 

“If I get elected,” conditioned Trump. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it — it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. But they’re not going to sell those cars.”

It’s all on tape.We can decide for ourselves whether it was a threat of post-​election violence or straight talk about the car business.

And, too, what it says that such dishonesty is welcome at the highest levels of government. And media.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* All this talk about the transfer of power ignores a critical element: It will be Biden leaving office and either handing the keys to Kamala Harris, should she defeat Trump, or handing them to Trump, should he win. In this latter instance, I don’t see any quarrel coming from Trump. In the former, even the evilest version of Trump would still need an army to intervene.

Note: We can’t be too surprised, however, as four years ago Biden made a similar purposely “malevolent misinterpretation” of Trump’s comments about neo-​Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia (Biden’s Big Lie).

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general freedom media and media people meme

Eclipse

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education and schooling ideological culture

Kids Paid to Propagandize

“You get paid good.” 

So said one student when asked “Why should students join CFJ?”

How well-​paid? $1,400, for learning to fight for “racial justice” and “social justice.” 

Parrot left-​wing propaganda, that is.

The activist group Californians for Justice has paid at least 78 public high school students a total of around $100,000 to take CFJ’s ideological training. Another $20,200 has gone to parents for participating.

The training apparently does not include lessons in independent thinking or assessing alternative viewpoints, such as the view that “social justice” is typically a euphemism for collectivist injustice.

One teacher, who preferred to remain anonymous lest she lose her job, told The Free Press that it’s helpful to know what students think “would help them learn better, but” the students were “obviously reading scripts that have words that they don’t know how to say.” One trainee advised this teacher that students would “come to class on time if we built relationships with them.”

Another teacher in the district, agreed that “CFJ is not helping students find their own voices.… They’re teaching them parroting … the exact opposite of how you empower children.” 

The focus on “racial justice” is manifested in CFJ’s own recruiting: its website reports that CFJ has “trained hundreds of youth of color in Long Beach to be community leaders and organizers.” Why only “of color”?

The training is not funded by strictly voluntary donations, of course. Long Beach Unified School District has been subsidizing it, using taxpayer dollars. The district has already given CFJ nearly $2 million.

The whole operation stinks to high heaven. But they’re “paid good.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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