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CNN: Calling U.S. a “Republic” Is “an Attack on Democracy”

By Selwyn Duke

“You’re entitled to your own opinions,” late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) once famously said — “but not your own facts.” This, apparently, would be news to the Cable News Network (CNN).

That is, after interviewing Trump supporters on Sunday, a CNN reporter claimed their observation that the United States is a “republic” is “an attack on democracy.”

This isn’t the first time CNN — an unreliable news source that had to pay a huge settlement some years back to a Catholic school student it defamed with false “racism” claims — has attacked our republican form of government. Last year, for example, the network ran a chyron stating, “SCHOLARS WARN OUTDATED CONSTITUTION HAS PUT DEMOCRACY AT RISK.”

Many U.S. Mainstream Media Join Brazilian Socialists to Try to Destroy Elon Musk’s X

By Selwyn Duke

The “world is not obliged to put up with [Elon] Musk’s extreme right-wing anything goes just because he is rich.” So said Brazilian president and ex-convict Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva recently, referencing his nation’s attack on Musk’s X social media platform.

Only, he didn’t mention that “anything goes” doesn’t mean killing and stealing (which governments do frequently).

Rather, that’s what Lula da Silva calls allowing free speech and open debate: “anything goes.” Moreover, allowing “left-wing anything goes” from rich people and entities is apparently okay. Apropos to this, there’s no such thing as a big media outlet that isn’t “rich.”

In fact, 90 percent of our media is controlled by just six enormous conglomerates.

Kamala Is Ahead — But Are the Polls Designed to Deceive?

By Selwyn Duke

“They not only changed their formula, to put Hillary ahead [over Donald Trump]. They went back and changed the results,” said late Democratic pollster and strategist Pat Caddell in 2016. “They didn’t tweak their procedure — they cooked it.” Caddell wasn’t talking about some obscure news organization, either, when making his comments. He was speaking of Reuters, the world’s second-largest media company.

Caddell would go on to say that he’d never in his life seen a journalistic organization “do something so dishonest.” And considering that Reuters has also been ranked the “second most trusted news brand” raises a question.

What would Caddell say about today’s polls showing Kamala Harris leading Trump in the 2024 presidential race? Should we trust them? Note here that not long ago, Harris was one of American history’s most unpopular vice presidents.

From Woke to Awakened — RFK Jr.’s Running Mate: The Media Lied to Me About MAGA

By Selwyn Duke

Media “bias aids Democratic candidates by about 8 to 10 percentage points in a typical election,” informed Professor Tim Groseclose in his 2011 book Left Turn. As to this bias’ reality, there’s a story currently in the news that illustrates it well. To wit:

Nicole Shanahan, billionaire, entrepreneur, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate, just made a startling confession. “I was completely misinformed about what MAGA is,” she admitted in a recent interview.

And it was the media that misinformed her.

(Now, who, again, is spreading “misinformation”?)

Billionaire Finally Realizes 7-year-old Tale About Trump Is a Lie

By Selwyn Duke

Just as it’s “garbage in, garbage out” with a computer, feeding incorrect data (lies) to the population has serious consequences. After all, how can people make correct judgments about what politicians and policies to support — i.e., civilization-preserving decisions — if they’re being fed misinformation about those politicians and policies?

And, boy, the lies do fly fast and furious, too. A good example is how a prominent billionaire, a Ph.D. physicist, and a Substack investment writer confess that they’ve just discovered the truth about the anti-President Trump “very fine people” hoax.

Heard About the European “Far Right”? How About Unicorns?

By Selwyn Duke

The side that defines the vocabulary of a debate, wins the debate. So goes the theme of an old book I’ve often cited, The Tyranny of Words. Examples would be if the media routinely called pro-gun-control people “anti-freedom” or pro-abortion individuals “pro-death.”

Mainstream journalists don’t do that, of course — but they do use corresponding language to describe conservatives. Just consider headlines about the recent European parliamentary elections:

GOP Media Takedown: A Recipe for Victory

By Selwyn Duke

It’s long been known that a leader can gain power by rallying the people against a boogeyman.

And it helps when that boogeyman is real.

When CNBC’s GOP debate moderators couldn’t help but be sanctimonious, supercilious, and self-important Wednesday night, they did more than provoke a response from their intellectual superiors. They did more than further reveal the Establishment Media as a left-wing monolith, further discredit themselves, and further cement in minds that they’re comic-book versions of journalists.

They quite literally revealed a strategy for GOP electoral gains.

Crock Boy: When the Media Get Owned by a 14-year-old

By Selwyn Duke

Take the money and run. With the huge windfall enjoyed by the Mohamed family — of clock-bomb-arrest fame — in “Islamophobic” America, one might think that little clock-maker extraordinaire Ahmed Mohamed would head to Switzerland for an internship with Rolex. Instead, news is his whole family is moving to Qatar after the boy accepted a scholarship from the Qatar Foundation for Education. Because, you know, if you’re interested in pushing back scientific frontiers, the Islamic world is where you go.

Now, Qatar is an interesting choice. Its official state religion is Wahhabi Islam — this is also the dominant faith in Saudi Arabia. And like Saudi Arabia, the nation’s main source of legislation is Sharia law (I’m sure Ahmed’s sisters will love it {and maybe they will}). It’s quite telling, however, that the Mohamed clan would choose such a place, although not surprising, really. With Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed (talk about wearing out a name), being a Muslim activist who twice ran for the Sudan’s presidency, it wouldn’t be surprising if these people were “true believers.”

But what I really want to discuss are those other destructive true believers, in all things politically correct, who averred Crock Boy was Clock Boy and dubbed him an inventor. This brings us to the main point, something never quite articulated sufficiently.

Ahmed the “Clock Boy” Meets with Obama and War Criminal

By Selwyn Duke

The media has dubbed him “Clock Boy,” but critics have pointed out that he’s really just Crock Boy. This hasn’t prevented Ahmed Mohamed (shown), the 14-year-old Texas student arrested for bringing to school a device that could be taken for a bomb, from making the rounds as a celebrity and meeting world leaders. This included an encounter Barack Obama at the White House’s Astronomy Night last evening, even though the meeting was left in doubt after Mohamed met last Wednesday with an African president wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

The boy’s dubious meeting with Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir — accused of orchestrating genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur — put the White House in an uncomfortable position. Obama had already committed to the now-discredited narrative that Mohamed was a fertile-minded inventor victimized by “Islamophobia,” and revoking his Astronomy Night invitation would have been a blow against that victim narrative. Ultimately, the administration decided to walk a fine line. Press Secretary Josh Earnest played down Mohamed’s visit at a press briefing yesterday, saying he didn’t believe Obama would “have an opportunity to meet one-on-one with Ahmed” as “several hundred people” would participate in the event. And so it transpired: Obama met with the high-school student while mingling with the attendees, but didn’t showcase his visit.

Unfortunately, Mohamed’s tale is an example of how, as Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…” And a tall tale Mohamed’s is.

Read the rest here.

When the Feds Quash Free Speech with Legal Tyranny

By Selwyn Duke

Imagine you run a website and are ordered by the federal government to divulge personal information on article commenters. Now imagine that the feds also issue a gag order preventing you from revealing what they’re up to.

This is precisely what happened with award-winning libertarian website Reason.com

Site editor Nick Gillespie related his travails just today at the Daily Beast, and it’s a story many will find chilling. His problems began after he blogged about the life sentence handed down to Ross Ulbricht, founder of Dark Web website Silk Road, by a judge named Katherine Forrest. Not surprisingly, agitated Ulbricht defenders took to his piece’s comments section and, par for the Internet course, savaged Forrest. As Gillespie writes, they suggested “that, among other things, she should burn in hell, ‘be taken out back and shot,’ and, in a well-worn Internet homage to the Coen Brothers movie Fargo, be fed ‘feet first’ into a woodchipper. The comments betrayed a naive belief in an afterlife [note, my libertarian friend Gillespie, that people without that ‘naïve’ belief in an afterlife generally have a naïve belief in government] and karma, were grammatically and spelling-challenged, hyperbolic, and… completely within the realm of acceptable Internet discourse, especially for an unmoderated comments section.” Gillespie then continued:

But the U.S. attorney for U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York thought differently...

Read the rest here.

Media: “Browning of America” Good, “Bleaching Out” of San Fran Bad

By Selwyn Duke

Pugnacious pundit Ann Coulter is in the news again, talking about her latest book Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole. As some might guess, its theme is that our current immigration regime — 85 percent of our immigrants hail from the Third World and Asia — is creating a historically unprecedented demographic upheaval that is changing the face of America. And Coulter, not one to shy away from controversy, has described this change as the “browning of America.”

As left-wing Daily Beast writer Lloyd Grove opines, this is “language that many doubtless will find hair-raising if not downright offensive.” Yet as he also points out, it’s merely a phrase Coulter “adopted as a negative after seeing it bandied favorably on MSNBC.” And, of course, the leftist media would never use such language unfavorably.

Except, there’s this story: The New York Times recently reported on what it calls the “gentrification” of the Mission District neighborhood in San Francisco (shown in part). Once a mostly Hispanic area, primarily white dotcommers — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg among them — are buying real estate, moving in, and raising property values. Nonetheless, as American Thinker writes, “Nowhere in this article did the Times ever use the word ‘diversity.’ This is puzzling, because in every other article where they talk about adding more Blacks or Hispanics to a white population, they always celebrate that as the merits of diversity.” But then there’s what the Times does do: It describes the Mission’s demographic change as the “bleaching out” of “the Latino culture that drew them [the dotcommers]” to the district.

Read the rest here.