We’ve been watching this war in Ukraine for more than one week, and one of the things that’s become apparent is that there’s a clear divide among conservatives about the war. The divide is more thorough in the media sphere, but it’s real, and neither side should discount it. On the one hand, you have the segment that I’ll call the pro-interventionists, and even there, it’s not a uniform body of opinion. On the other hand, you have the anti-interventionists, and again, they’re not perfectly uniform in their view. The primary cause of all of this division and confused positions arises out of one specific, underlying cause. The first group is generally prone to accept the media reports at face value, while the second group is not. This is the result of years of unreliable, unverified, unproven and false reports in the mainstream media, that has shown itself to be perfectly incapable of reporting straight news in the domestic arena. This is dangerous to our movement, but more importantly to our republic. As we’ve seen quite clearly in the last six years, the shaping of the media narrative in the media is designed to exact a specific outcome that favors the DC UniParty. It’s that simple. The establishment in Washington DC directs the narrative, and the media shamelessly follows along, in order to further their shared interests. Conservatives must learn, for once and for all, that the DC establishment’s narrative and media domination does not end at the water’s edge. Swamp gas has gone global.
When you consider the media conglomerates that dominate media, what you find is that most are associated quite closely in one way or another. This set of relationships extends far beyond American shores, as outfits like Paramount Global(Parent of CBS News, Viacom, and others) and NewsCorp(sister company of Fox Corporation and parent of Sky News and others) will quite nicely demonstrate. NBCUniversal is a similar conglomerate, ultimately the parent of NBCNews, MSNBC, CNBC, and Telemundo among many others. ABC News is part of another conglomerate owned by Disney, and naturally, CNN is owned by ATT. The number of print and and broadcast assets under the umbrellas of the media empires constitutes much of the media you consume. Spend five minutes chasing links from one to another on even and admittedly left-wing reference like Wikipedia, and you will quickly see the ties from one outlet to another. Add to this the endless cross-pollination as so-called ‘journalists’ move back and forth within the span of the larger umbrella, and you begin to see the trouble. Then consider how frequently members come from or move to politics and familial relations to politicians, and you see how corrupt this has all become. By design, they’re all tied-in to the DC UniParty, that spreads it tentacles around the Western world. Europe, the Americas, and Australia are all places in which these conglomerates compete and largely dominate for the news space. This is what the media branch of our ruling mafia looks like.
What this means is that in many ways, if you’re searching for news and information, you’re unlikely to avoid the narratives being propagated throughout the DC UniParty’s sphere and reach. In fact, if you search on any of the search engines on any big story, you’re unlikely to get results in the first three or four pages of results that aren’t shaped by or directly disseminated from beneath this umbrella. You really must go a long way outside of these to find sites and sources that do not rely entirely or almost entirely on the information, misinformation, and disinformation being spewed by these conglomerates. It’s difficult for non-connected outlets to get noticed, particularly with outfits like Google and Bing acting as gatekeepers that will steer you back beneath the safe confines of the umbrella.
No narrative demonstrates this more thoroughly than the current DC UniParty’s narrative on Ukraine. This narrative is almost impossible to escape, and as we’ve seen recently, even conservatives easily become ensnared by the tentacles reaching ever outward from the simmering pit of their swamp. It’s not that they shape the news, so much as that in many cases, they’re fabricating it from whole cloth. On Thursday night, they rushed to the news-desks and printing presses and websites with the narrative that the Ukrainian nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia, which caught on fire early Friday morning, had rising radiation levels. Within hours, this was all shown to be false, inasmuch as the actual fire was in an administrative building, and radiation levels from the plant were never affected. This is the second time during the course of this war that this narrative has been spread, last week seeing a similar story focused on the plant at Chernobyl.
As I’ve been covering during the last several days, the reporting we’re seeing is almost entirely propaganda, but not from the Russians or Ukrainians as would be expected. Instead, most all the propaganda we’re now seeing is emanating from Western media, including particularly the swamp-gassers in DC and New York. The problem for conservatives rests with the segment of conservatives who still trust anything in media at this point. The same media that provided all of the false narratives over the last seven years with respect to Trump, Russia, impeachments, Jan 6th, COVID, and all the other nonsense we’ve been force-fed all emanates from the same fetid, stinking, stagnant pool.
I wish there were a way to show conservatives who are still being misled that the false narratives don’t stop at the water’s edge. There is no clean and pure media anywhere in the West, if it’s tied to this same crowd of spinmeisters. Conservatives who understand this are refusing to go along, as they should. Stories have now come out that Zelenskiy may in fact be as corrupt as the guy he replaced, and he’s got offshore accounts and interests as far away as Belize. This is a fact the swamp-gassers will never tell you, because it doesn’t fit with their narrative. The larger problem, however, is getting these conservatives still slurping-up the media narrative to understand they’re being fooled again, and by the same crowd. Once you see it, there’s no going back, and it’s important for Americans to see it. What I’ve heard so far of Bongino’s radio show on Friday suggests that he’s begun to see it more clearly. Having investigated the SpyGate scandal, and indeed having written books about it, Bongino has caught scent of the swamp in all of this, and it’s important that others do too.
The difficult chore of maintaining credibility in the era of FakeNews
It started in a big way last week. Dan Bongino violated his own self-imposed “72 hour rule” with the story of the Snake Island story from Ukraine. Before the weekend was over, he’d discovered that he’d been misled like so many others, promptly informing his listeners of that fact on Monday. Dan’s “72 hour rule” is that when some new story of bomb-shell proportions comes along, he tends to hold onto them in order to verify the stories multiple ways before repeating them to his audience. Many others have seemingly been duped, repeatedly, and it’s a real problem, because while they may not be the ones originating the story, they’re the ones repeating it to their audiences. From the point of view of their audiences then, for all intents and purposes, they are originating the stories. On Tuesday, as is my habit while driving home, and as soon as I walk in the door, I tuned into Mark Levin’s show. Levin, long my runaway favorite among talk-show hosts, began in on a story in which he described the workings and effects of thermobaric bombs. He explained that Russia was using them. He also explained that Russia was using cluster-bombs against civilian areas, despite the bombs having been banned for use against civilians. Within less than twenty hours, these reports had been smashed when Bongino said on air on Wednesday that these reports hadn’t panned-out. A little digging revealed that this had been a completely unconfirmed report, and initially, there was a video discounted as fake by the gentleman in charge of the political subdivision in which it had allegedly occurred. The claims about cluster bombs are likewise unconfirmed, except that in Eastern Ukraine, there’s some evidence the Ukrainian forces have used them. At this moment, there is still no firm evidence that either side has used them, but even as of this moment, you can surf over to Levin’s site for his Tuesday Recap page and find the unverified claims about their use by Russia, along with the false claim that these weapons are altogether forbidden. He also claimed during his on-air description that the thermobaric bombs constitute a chemical weapon, which they most certainly are not. All of this made it plain to me in a very painful way that my favorite among talk-show hosts, Mark Levin, a guy I have enjoyed more even than Rush over the years, had now joined the legion of outlets I generally consider #FakeNews. It’s both shocking and saddening to me. We have so few media outlets we can take at face value. Whether by negligence or intent or because they’ve simply been fooled by others, it’s clear now that just when we need them most, most all media, even supposed “conservative” media, lie to us in varying degrees. Though I neither feel it should be my place, nor do I feel I have the heart to do the matter full justice, I must now take on “the Great One,” for the sake of my own integrity.
This is and has been the greatest disappointment of the last several years, and it began during the era of Trump, not because of anything Trump did, but because since the rise of Trump, any pretense at objectivity has been ditched in mainstream media, from CNN to MSNBC to Reuters to FoxNews. Media outlets have become so uniformly unreliable in so many ways for people like talk-show hosts, who must rely upon valid and factual news stories to fuel the discussions they will spawn with their audiences. The underlying information is so frequently inaccurate that talk-show hosts are finding it difficult to stay ahead of the fake news injected at light-speed into the conversation. Don’t misunderstand me to have said that I believe Mark Levin or Dan Bongino are liars, but that they now serve as a conduit through which lies are smuggled to their predominantly conservative audiences. I don’t believe this is their intention, but I suspect that applies to many other talkers. It’s that they’ve come to rely on sources that are corrupt or corruptible. It’s happened to me a time or two over the last eleven years here on this blog, usually in very small ways I’ve rushed to correct. The problem is that at the speed with which information now propagates upon its release in modern media, a lie can do real damage to our world, in ways that could be measured in millions of lives.
When the pandemic coverage had begun in 2020, I’d already suspected Fauci of giving us all a load of internally inconsistent nonsense. From a logical point of view, many of his pronouncements didn’t make sense. His answers were either unnecessarily evasive or expressed with unjustifiable certitude. Some of it was simply nonsensical. Mark Levin was among the first people in conservative media who featured Fauci as a guest, on his show on Foxnews. Fauci used Levin’s credibility with his conservative audience to ensnare them with his now largely-debunked and almost completely refuted narratives. I dare Mark Levin to now go back and re-watch the garbage he permitted Fauci to spew under the banner of “Life, Liberty and Levin,” and tell me that somehow, he feels unashamed for having failed his audience. He should feel pain if he now re-watches that episode, particularly considering that people made life-and-death-level decisions based on Fauci’s pronouncements early on. Mark Levin is a trusted source among conservatives like me. You can do the math. The fact that Fauci was saying these things on Levin’s show made them seem more reliable. Silly, gullible me. While I still didn’t trust Fauci, I did trust Mark Levin, and Fauci had now been given Levin’s virtual imprimatur. Fool me once…
Less than one year later, on January 6th, 2021, I listened as Mark Levin came on the radio and raged against the rioters at the Capitol on that day. He railed against the people at the Capitol, as if they were the terrorists my gut said they hadn’t really been, at least most of them. I listened, and I began to get that sickly feeling of disappointment. Was Levin falling for another false story? Since then, Levin has clearly realized, due to in-depth reporting by people like Julie Kelly, that he wasn’t getting the full story then, either. This entire episode had been frustrating to me because I actually know a man who observed some of what went on at the Capitol that day, during the event, from outside the Capitol, where he could see much of what was going on. While he never went into or anywhere near the scrum going on outside, he was in a position to see that there were numerous and obvious provocateurs. He told me that at one point, it became clear to him that at least some of the Capitol Police appeared to be acting in collusion with some of the provocateurs. Many innocent dupes followed the provocateurs into the Capitol, and my friend could see this happening. Some of the dupes were even drawn into a melee with police by the provocateurs, which happens quite easily in a crowd this size. As these events were happening, I was in my office listening to accounts of it, live on the radio, wondering immediately if this was another DC-UniParty setup. Why wasn’t that Levin’s first instinct? He has enough experience to have spotted it. I live half a continent away, but I can smell DC BS from the other side of the planet these days. This event had that stench from the beginning. Despite our shared experience of the last several years, for more than a few radio hosts, it wasn’t so obvious for some reason, but should have been. Instead, we got the usual “we condemn all violence” business, in a fashion no different than Chris Wallace repeatedly demanding that Trump denounce white supremacists on the debate stage, starting from the ridiculous premise that Trump were some sort of racist who now needed to renounce such associations. Conservatives must lose their fear of these smear-jobs, because it cripples them, not only politically but also intellectually, which is the intent of the smear-artists. For all appearances to the world, Levin and many other hosts were pushing the mainstream media, DC UniParty narrative, again.
Levin is a passionate advocate for positions in the information sphere, as am I, which is undoubtedly a large measure of what draws me to his broadcasts daily. I don’t make decisions about issues or candidates on the basis of emotion, but instead take a firm and careful accounting of them. Once I’ve done so, I then apply my passion to the conclusions I’ve drawn in explaining an issue or advocating a particular stance. The problem that arises for people like Mark Levin, Dan Bongino, or anybody else in the broadcast space is that things move incredibly fast. Information blasts in and out, and it is updated and superseded by better, more accurate information, but also sometimes more bogus, inflated, and hyped information. It happens constantly. In this environment, one is going to make judgments about the newsworthiness of a story in an accelerated frame of reference, and it will necessarily lead to a much higher rate of error than it will, for instance, on a lowly blog published in the backwaters of the Internet. Some of the posts here are composed, fact-checked, and pushed out in thirty minutes or less, but those are rare. In the main, the postings on this site will have taken hours to compose, sometimes days, or longer, and I’ve been known to table a story indefinitely if I think my information isn’t solid enough. If you were to have access to what’s here, you would see that I have almost half as many posts in “draft” status as the almost fourteen-hundred posts that have been published over the span of years. Those drafts are posts you cannot see, and many of them you will likely never see, but this is the process. If a story just doesn’t stand up as I think it should, it’s never published. That’s born of the luxury of knowing I’ll almost never be “first” with a story, and that all I can offer is a unique perspective, or new details you hadn’t been presented before, and because the speed at which I present information is far less important to my audience than the idea that I get it right.
Levin sometimes has excellent instincts. In March of 2017, based on a smattering of seemingly unrelated stories across several media outlets including McClatchy and the New York Times, Levin’s good instinct for political chicanery by Democrats led him to piece together the story we’ve all come to know is SpyGate, which actually encompasses a whole universe of sub-scandals, from spying on the Trump campaign and presidency, to the use of that information to concoct two fake impeachment narratives. The chicanery also revealed what should be the biggest scandal of all: The corruption of the FISA system by actors within the Justice Department and the FBI, along with others both directing and participating in these activities in the administration, and on the FISA court. What Levin’s instinct (and experience within the DOJ)provided him was the starting point for unveiling what should be known as the greatest scandal in American history, but for the fact that the corrupt and corruptible media will never willingly report on it. Claims that Levin is incapable of stellar research and investigation are to be ignored. It’s clear he has the experience and clear-eyed thinking to analyze such things. Why does it seem, of late, that he’s not nearly so clear-eyed in his appraisals? We can always forgive errors born of honest intent, but the problem is that media will attack even for those sorts of instances.
Levin bitterly complained after a small error in his most recent book, runaway New York Times best-seller American Marxism, was made out to be a mortal sin by a few among the chattering class in the leftist mainstream media. In general, his books are extremely informative and well-written. They’re amazingly well-researched and thoroughly documented. Few authors go to the lengths to provide the citations that Levin routinely does within the pages of his books. The problem is that when those critics reviewing your books are doing so with a political bias and intent, what you get instead of honest critiques are partisan hit-jobs. Levin made the error of writing “Franklin School” instead of “Frankfurt School,” as if that’s not an easy mistake to make and and a more difficult error to spot in editing. From the point of view of the full-tilt leftist media, this was the worst scandal in literary history, and they used it to libel him mercilessly. There’s a vast difference between an innocent error and the intentional falsehoods leftists publications gin through their presses and websites daily.
One of the problems is that in broadcasting, information moves extremely rapidly, and if you let yourself become emotionally invested in your conclusions about a given story too quickly, you’re going to get burned, quickly losing the trust of your audience, particularly if you don’t forthrightly confront the story’s inaccuracies or plain falsehoods promptly, as Bongino did on Monday and again Wednesday. In the case of Mark Levin, I’ve come to a crossroad due to this trouble. As a matter of loyalty for all his years of hard work, honest advocacy, and excellent programming, I am easily persuaded to give him another chance. And another. And probably several more. The crisis I’m beginning to experience is that this has become something of a trend, but more importantly, he surely became aware between his broadcasts of Tuesday and Wednesday that the use of thermobaric or cluster bombs (by either party) in the war in Ukraine are unconfirmed. I listened intently to the whole of his Wednesday broadcast, as I do most days, waiting for him to step right into the matter and clear it up. He never did.
Another sin of Levin’s is made up of his best intentions to advance conservatism. On many more than one occasion, due to his desire to defeat the left, he’s let alleged conservatives on the air, generally Republicans seeking election/re-election, who come on to use his platform in a political season, often seeking his endorsement or even just the legitimacy among conservatives lent to them by appearing on his airwaves. Lindsey Graham? Kevin McCarthy? There are more. Too many, really. I remember yelling at my radio, riding down the road “Mark, why do you bring these RINOs on your program? They’re going to screw you and betray us as soon as they’re re-elected.” Well? Have they? Yes, sadly they have. Levin himself was gently commenting on this recently. He knows. What he may not realize is how thoroughly it harms his credibility.
Since the beginning of the Russian attack on Ukraine, Levin has begun to bang the pots and pans indicating he’s very much in favor of some kind of intervention, or at least assistance to the beleaguered people of Ukraine. It’s leading him to accept too quickly the dis/misinformation he’s getting from some source(s), perhaps at Foxnews, or perhaps elsewhere. This has begun to seriously impact his credibility. On Wednesday evening, my worst fears in this vein were realized when he began gushing over Never-Trumper FoxNews Pentagon Correspondent, Jennifer Griffin, who’s a known leftist, clearly committed to corrupting news over at FoxNews. She’s one of the demons involved in the fake, ridiculous story about Trump at Normandy back in 2018, in which he allegedly called service-members who died there “suckers.” At the time of the story, Griffin said she was “unable to confirm the more salacious details,” implying she had confirmed the less salacious details, which naturally, she hadn’t. The whole story was later debunked, but as usual, the debunking never received coverage to scale of its the story’s original propagation. If this is one of Levin’s routine sources on national security matters, then nothing he says on the subject is even remotely reliable any longer. I get it: He’s not a reporter, but he still has some obligation to the facts, and he needs to be more discerning in selecting his sources. Neither Griffin nor Baier, both to whom Levin seems to have some unusual attachment, are what I would consider reliable or even particularly passable sources. Before going on an anger-fueled rant about how he’d happily provide his own weapons to the people of Ukraine, perhaps it would be a good idea to verify the reports of cluster-bombs and thermobaric bombs allegedly employed by the Russians. When it turns out, less than one day later, that the stories were either false or at least unverified, what then can he say to pull back on the bombast? It’s too late. Elvis has left the building. The best he can do is to retract the story later, but how does he then retract the bombast? He almost certainly won’t. He’s likely to leave that part stand, despite being at least partially motivated by the false stories. This is the danger of the passion when driven by unchecked or unverified information. As of now, he’s still letting the thermobaric and cluster bomb stories stand. I suppose he hopes we won’t notice, or that the unverified stories will become verified, or even mooted by future verified use.
Bongino was more measured Wednesday, having mostly abandoned the narrative that Putin had become unhinged and “irrational,” instead pulling it back to “unpredictable.” The interesting part about that is that in times past, Bongino had criticized Biden for destroying any “strategic ambiguity,” while praising Trump for having maintained it. “Strategic ambiguity” consists, in part, of unpredictability. On Monday and Tuesday, he had relentlessly pounded on the idea that Putin was perhaps irrational or even insane. It doesn’t help that this has been the mainstream media and UniParty narrative. Here is Hillary Clinton from Tuesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show:
Notice that Clinton questions Putin’s state of mind too. It’s foolish to assume your enemy is a crackpot because he’s become less predictable. In time of War, I would in many respects seek to make myself as unpredictable as possible to adversaries and enemies. It would be my intention to keep them guessing, and I’d want them to worry mightily about my willingness to ratchet-up the intensity or scope of the war. Bongino likes to talk about how President Trump had maintained a cloak of “strategic ambiguity” around his foreign policy intentions. Why would Putin behave differently? In contrast, Clinton famously had her reset button with the Russians while serving as Secretary of State, a job she was woefully ill-equipped to perform. Fortunately for her, it did give her access to bilk much of the globe with her Clinton Foundation. It was strictly a cash-and-carry operation, and there was no “strategic ambiguity” in it. Her mission was to cart away cash, and Russia fully understood it.
The other thing clear in the video is that the DC UniParty establishment is trying to capture the mantle of Ronald Reagan, as they continue their anti-Trump narrative. People like Levin and Bongino need to think very carefully about who’s providing the information they now rely upon to make pronouncements about Ukraine. If I could ask either man a question, I think I might pose it this way:
Consider the following list of names: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Mitt Romney, Adam Schiff, Susan Rice, Eric Swalwell, Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, Fiona Hill, “Colonel” Vindman, Victoria Nuland, Ron Klain, and Jake Sullivan.
Now consider the events in Ukraine since roughly 2004. Then consider the activities of that list of people(and other cohorts) over the intervening period. Then, consider the following facts: In 2014, with funding and assistance from the US State Department, US DOD, and various US intelligence agencies, there was a coup d’etat in Ukraine. Essentially, the US fomented and funded regime-change in Ukraine. Ever since, the narrative in DC by the establishment, particularly the Democrats, has been “Russia, Russia, Russia.” Even Mitt Romney talked about Russia in his debate appearance, but Obama immediately deflected the question by mocking Romney. Had Romney inadvertently let a cat escape the proverbial bag?
Now ask: How many of the people listed above were involved in the RussiaHoax/SpyGate, the First Impeachment of Trump, the Second Impeachment of Trump, and how many had a hand in the January sixth story, events, and subsequent narrative? How many are now pushing the official DC UniParty’s Ukraine narrative, in concert with corrupt and corruptible media?
The media lies endlessly to us, and those lies don’t stop with events beyond the water’s edge. Meanwhile, I have to hear Levin questioning the patriotism of Americans who are questioning the official DC narrative, or suggesting they’re Russophiles or similar garbage. That’s what I expect from Hillary Clinton, so that when I hear it coming from the radio in Mark Levin’s voice, I must ask him: “What in the Hell are you thinking?” Why would Mark Levin now take up the “Russia, Russia, Russia” allegations of Hillary Clinton only to aim them against members of his own audience? On the basis of information from which sources? Jennifer-freaking-Griffin???
These two men have repeatedly demonstrated their capacity for intense investigations and research, but they’ve been steered in the Ukraine story largely by emotion, driven by many false stories, false narratives, and imagery that’s been created but unsubstantiated in far too many cases. In media generally, we’ve been shown a story about Miss Ukraine, bearing arms and ready to fight, but the rifle she’s pictured with is an airsoft rifle, (airsoft being a sport she enjoys.) We’ve been told about the “Ghost of Kiev,” by such low-lifes as Adam Kinzinger, that has turned out to be an utter hoax. The Snake Island story turned out to be propaganda in the larger dimension: It appears that rather than having been killed after telling their Russian attackers to “Go F’ themselves,” they laid down their arms in surrender, and are now all safe, albeit disarmed and removed from the battlefield. We’ve had a member of the Ukrainian Parliament tell the world that she’s fighting “not only for Ukraine, but for the New World Order.” We’ve had every manner of false story propagating, not merely from the combatants, but particularly from the Western media. The number of fabricated, concocted stories coming out of the war zone are far too numerous to list here. Even the imagery is frequently suspect, as reported elsewhere on this site.
That Levin and Bongino walked into some of these stories is no surprise. I too was sucked into one of them early on. The Snake Island story recalled the bravado and courage of the Alamo, until it didn’t. What’s been surprising and disappointing is how thoroughly Levin has been entirely swamped by some of it. Bongino corrected the record, in his defense and to his credit. So far, Levin has not, and he’s not backed-off his bombastic declarations about his willingness to ship arms to a country that has been a playground for the DC UniParty’s money-launderers. The alleged brave acts(it’s not that I doubt the bravery of Ukrainians, but only the veracity of this narrative) are being pushed in media with a reckless disregard for fact-checking and verification, which is the definition of war-time propaganda. The “fog of war” only clears if we work to make that hapen. It’s important for talkers to right their ships when they get a story wrong. Sometimes, it’s understandable and forgivable if the host makes amends by leading with the truth or a correction at the next available opportunity, as Bongino has done this week. We need solid information, and while I still want the passion both men bring to their respective endeavors in media, I have to insist that they improve their information-vetting, by reconsidering the sources they now employ. Clearly, some of those sources are of dubious veracity. I enjoy the presentations of each man, both interesting and entertaining, as well as bracing and motivating, but I need the foundation to be solid. Everybody makes mistakes, me included, but there are innocent errors and errors of incomplete information, but there are also errors born of haste, undue passion, lack of due diligence and malice. I expect the former to happen from time to time, and they are entirely generally to be forgiven upon forthright correction. The other sort, when they become habitual, threaten to turn an outlet or a show into nothing better than another mainstream media outlet: Corrupt or corruptible. This also applies to many others in the conservative space. In a moment of excess passion, it could easily happen to me. We must fight against this kind pollution of facts driven by our own intemperance, but we must also hold outlets and hosts accountable. I need Levin to correct the record, telling his audience that reports of thermobaric bombs or cluster bombsintentionally targeting civilians are unconfirmed, unverified reports at this time. In fact, their use at all remains unverified. These weapons are indeed nasty, but the US has employed cluster-bombs too. Ask the Iraqis. Ask the Afghans. What makes their use illegal, like so many weapons of war, is their use in the intentionaltargeting of civilians. Under various international treaties and conventions, doing so constitutes a war crime. It’s important for Levin to fix this at the next opportunity, and as ever, at least for the moment, I’ll be listening this evening to see if he will.
I watched much of Lindell’s CyberSymposium in South Dakota this week with great interest. (I’ve attached some of the most compelling videos at the end of the article.) There were some problems, and his symposium came under attack, and reportedly, Lindell himself was the object of some sort of attack. (I’ve attached some of the most compelling video at the end of the article.) In the end, I don’t know if anybody is going to attempt to claim the five million dollars he offered as a challenge. I don’t even know if that really matters. Instead, what emerged for me most of all was something deeply troubling. I’m not referring to the Cyber-attacks launched against his event. I’m not talking about the various ridiculous media hit-pieces launched even before the event had really begun. All of that is terrible. I saw an examination of images purported to have been snapshots of drives from Mesa County, Colorado Dominion EMS Servers. If real, this would be damning. It was incredible. The mathematical presentations of Dr. Douglas Frank, and Seth Keshel were sobering. All of this was incredible. With mock elections, his team showed how elections could be hacked and results changed. There was every kind of information, although I’m still not clear on what happened with the P-CAPs. As good or as bad as it may have been, depending on your perspective, what is undeniable is that while he was presenting, other parties, potentially including a Federal District Court judge, colluded or conspired(or just coincidentally by an act of seeming unnatural, implausible synchronicity) did everything they could to defame him and his event from minute one. They announced at the outset that two of the news outlets covering it (Newsmax and OAN) had been sued by Dominion Voting Systems, that morning, apparently for daring to cover the event. Yesterday, a Federal Judge ruled that a case against Lindell by Dominion could go forward. Terrible. All terrible. As much as that may teach us about the people arrayed against Lindell, none of that bothers me nearly so much as the other thing I learned: They really wanted it silenced. FoxNews was crickets. Talk radio was dead silent. The podcasters of note said not a syllable. Not one. Despite taking who knows how many millions of his advertising dollars, on FoxNews, Lindell couldn’t beg a mention of his Symposium, or even buy it. On Levin’s and Bongino’s shows and platforms, I heard not a word. Not one. In fact, they all seemed to be studiously avoiding it. Lindell was abandoned by most of his media “friends” before the event ever began.
I don’t know the truth of it, but I know this: The conservatives in our country have become wholly unreliable, not in terms of the information they provide, but in terms of their willingness to walk out even a little way onto a limb. So terrified are they of having it sawn off behind them that they cannot summon the courage even to mention the event. It’s as if it didn’t exist. They don’t want to touch it, and I understand all the reasons. I really do. For one thing, they can see how Dominion Voting Systems is behaving: They’re using lawsuits as a kind of weapon, and with most of these people, it’s working. It’s working because rather than even come up to the line, tempting a lawsuit, these hosts/outlets pretend not to see the issues at all. For another thing, they don’t wish to risk their reputations on Lindell’s theory of the case. If Lindell doesn’t prove out, they’d have egg on their faces. I understand all of that, and a few things more, but here’s the problem: They didn’t even report the existence of the Symposium. Surely, that can’t be considered defamatory. Surely, it is possible to report on the Symposium without liability for what was said there, and certainly, reporting on it cannot do damage to one’s own reputation if one remains objective. Think of it. Even if, as an example, Bongino thought the Cyber-Attack theory was all wet, there’s nothing that prevents him from reporting on it, and so-saying, is there? Or is there? If Levin thinks the whole exercise is moot at this point, he should say so, rather than remaining silent on Lindell’s efforts while running Lindell’s ads and pushing his American Marxism(of which I’ve purchased three copies.) And then there’s this: If they report on the event, even as skeptics, do they risk alienating the portions of their audiences who find Lindell’s case persuasive? So you see, it’s potentially a lose-lose. What this means is that for all their posturing as brave purveyors of the truth, they were most comfortable saying absolutely, positively nothing about Lindell’s event.
I knew FoxNews had become crap. I knew it years ago. I just hadn’t realized how far the rot had spread. It’s not that I believe Lindell fully “produced the receipts,” as some might say, but that the event happened, and that all the silencing tactics were in full force, and that all the stops were pulled out to shut him up, and this wasn’t done for nothing. If the validity of the disk images holds up, there is definitely something to be investigated in Colorado, but more than that, I think even Dr. Shiva’s presentation served to undress the Big Lie of government laundering its censorship through social media platforms like Twitter. There was much value in this Symposium, whether it produced the full results Lindell had wanted or not. Legislators or their representatives from all fifty states were there. They compared notes on how to proceed with audits and so on. Even if one doesn’t buy a word of Lindell’s theory of a Chinese-sponsored/operated Cyber-attack using Dominion Voting Systems, there are certainly substantial issues to be pursued, whether they involve the Chinese or Dominion or neither.
It’s worth watching. You can find it all on FrankSpeech.com. Where you won’t learn about it is on Bongino or Levin or FoxNews, at least as of the Symposium’s ending on Thursday. Only One America News, Real America’s Voice, and Newsmax gave it coverage. OANN was wall-to-wall, as was RSBN. Mike Lindell is a patriot, and he believes in his cause. Whatever else one might say about him or his symposium, he was all in. It’s just sad that so many other conservatives upon whom we rely daily aren’t equally committed. Meanwhile, some conservatives lecture us about imposing “real material losses” on the left, but apparently aren’t willing to risk any losses of their own. Me? I’m headed over to mypillow.com to purchase another bath sheet. They’re excellent.
Here’s Dr. Frank’s excellent presentation:
Here’s Seth Keshel’s presentation. It’s more proof we must audit all 50 states:
Dr. Shiva’s presentation on censorship laundering by the new fascists:
Lindell’s Day Three Opening Remarks:
Colonel Waldon on attempts to damage the Symposium:
Introductory Film played throughout the Symposium:
Editor’s Note: I do not take any advertising from anybody in particular, as it’s whomever buys ads with the ads service that shows up on these pages. I have no idea if any Lindell product has ever shown up here, or if they ever will. This site is too small a fish to be visible in that pond. I was, however, very serious about the MyPillow bath sheet: Best towel I’ve ever owned, and now, I’m going to buy another.
The evidence coming out of the emails and other information from the Hunter Biden computer and hard-drive contents disclosed by the NYPost and former Mayor Rudy Guliani require immediate action. There is sufficient information present to suggest that Joe Biden is mortally compromised, and cannot be permitted to be President of the United States. This information, which has every appearance of being authentic, the content of which has not yet been denied by the Biden campaign, is pure blackmail material. If Joe Biden is elected President, there is a high probability that the Chinese and other malevolent actors, in possession of this and more information, would use it to undermine the United States government, its defenses, its security, and indeed, the safety of the American people. Joe Biden must not be permitted to be President, and the Democrat Party, slavishly committed to this course, must turn this around immediately. A president so thoroughly compromised is a walking danger to every American, and for the good of the country, this charade by which the media pretends this is all quite fine must be put to an end. For the safety of the nation, Biden must abdicate his candidacy now.
One of the people who has done the best job of expressing the appropriate level of outrage and disbelief at the utter irresponsibility of all the players who are helping Biden to conceal all of this has been former US Secret Service agent, former NYPD cop, and pod-caster extraordinaire, Dan Bongino. Bongino understands the gravity of these disclosures, and he understands that what is at stake here is more than just typical political disputes. This is an issue of the utmost import to our national security, fundamentally holding our nation’s future in the balance. A president is entrusted with the power to command our forces and make war, or to withhold our forces when better judgment might deploy them. A nuclear-armed hostile like China in possession of potential blackmail information over a President of the United States and members of his family is an unconscionable risk we must not take. In the segment below, courtesy of Rumble.com, Bongino explains the threat along with the utterly vapid, irresponsible stance of the mainstream media in covering this up and even making light of it:
Biden must never be put in a position to compromise the United States of America. He should step aside immediately, but failing that, his party must remove him. If they will not act, and if he’s already in so deep that this train has left the station, and there is no other alternative, we must make sure that every friend, neighbor, relative, or stranger on the street is aware that Joe Biden is not merely a shameless profiteer who traded on his office as the Vice President, but that he may well directly sell out our country as a would-be President of the United States. There can be no excuse for any rational person to vote for this man, or any ticket on which he appears, or even a party that would knowingly place him in nomination. There is growing evidence that this conduct has been known around Washington DC for years, and that Biden may not have been the only person similarly situated, so we can expect much of official Washington DC to remain mute on the question. He must never be entrusted with the “nuclear football” or more broadly, the security of the American people. It’s an awesome responsibility his conduct to date demonstrates he is incapable of carrying.
This is more than some mere low-grade DC scandal. This goes to the very security of our nation. If the Big-Tech giants are too deeply invested both in he and in China to let this story through, we must carry it, but we have less than three weeks to do it. People are voting in many states already. Time is of the essence. This must be stopped, and if that means Harris moves to the top of the ticket, so be it. She too should be defeated, but Biden must be taken out of contention for the presidency. His conflicts, in addition to suggesting substantial legal and criminal liability, make him a clear and present danger to our national security. No rational American should be willing to see his candidacy continue, much less his election.
Editor’s Note: In a followup to yesterday’s post, Guliani explained that on the morning of the original story breaking, a Biden attorney called the computer repair shop to ask for the harddrive back. That almost certainly eliminates any questions as to the authenticity of the data. You can see that in this video at the 14:30 mark:
Long-time readers will be aware that I’ve never thought much of former Speaker Paul Ryan(R-WI,) and that I’ve long thought he was just a Washington DC insider getting wealthy on his connections and position. Now comes news that confirms what I thought all along: Paul Ryan actually punished Devin Nunes(R-CA) for tipping-off President Trump about the deep-state spying on the Trump campaign that occurred in the last year of the Obama administration. No wonder then that Paul Ryan retired as Speaker of the House. If the abuses of the FISC and the FISA process is ever fully disclosed, people like Ryan are going to be caught up in it all. Ryan and his ilk are the swamp. It’s no secret that Ryan didn’t want Trump elected, and did everything he could do undermine him. Sure, he made some campaign appearances apparently on Trump’s behalf, but let’s be blunt: It was all about keeping up appearances. The real truth came out when it was disclosed by Cleta Mitchell on Lou Dobbs’ show that Ryan punished(!) Nunes by putting him before the ethics committee, and that action stalled Nunes’ investigation for a year:
Do you understand what this really was? Paul Ryan, using his power as Speaker of the House, tied up Devin Nunes in a phony ethics committee investigation because he went to the President to warn him about the plot against him. While Nunes was out of the picture, the investigation was being stalled and obfuscated. Only once the ethics committee dispensed with the nonsensical ethics review was Nunes restored as chairman, and by then, he was going to be in a race to get things revealed to the public before the midterms of 2018.
This is sick. Paul Ryan helped the DC Uni-Party get away with their crimes, if ultimately, they manage to do so. I like Dan Bongino’s term for insider, DC Republicans: “Swamp Rats.” Paul Ryan is all of that and more. I wonder how many other swamp rats are among the Republicans who “retired” in 2018. They’ve been helping Obama’s people avoid justice because they’re owed justice too. President Trump had better focus some of his energies on cleaning up the DC swamp before it swallows him whole.
At the Ted Cruz rally at The Woodlands on Friday, Governor Palin made mention of a candidate who hasn’t been getting a great deal of national attention, but who deserves the support of conservatives and Tea Party folk everywhere. One of the things her remarks made clear is that too often, we surrender supposed “blue” states on the basis that we should not waste our precious resources campaigning in places that have been written-off as simply too far gone. Governor Palin is right about this, and going back even to 2008, when she wanted to spend some time in Michigan, but the McCain Campaign had decided it was not worth the effort, Governor Palin has never been one to cede anything to the left, leaving them a victory by default. In fact, this is what has made her so precious to many on our side, because it is this unrelenting fighting spirit that we have often lacked. It’s been the habit of the GOP establishment to write-off such places, but she’s right: We must fight for every one. In her speech on Friday, she mentioned a candidate for Senate in the State of Maryland, a deep, deep blue state in which mathematically, no victory should ever be possible for a Republican, never mind a conservative, but maybe that’s our problem. Perhaps we abandon the men and women like Dan Bongino too easily, and maybe that’s why we seem to be perpetually on the defensive.
We fight over our “Red” states, and some “battleground” states, and we walk away from “blue” states because it just seems so impossible, but we must ask at some point: Is it? Is it really impossible to deliver a message of freedom and liberty and the vast potential that is the America we love to all her people? More, aren’t we committing a grave moral error when we abandon the people of those states as veritable Don Quixotes, damned forever to tilt at the windmills of a hopeless political imbalance in their states? Yes, I am fortunate enough to live in a “red” state, but then again, I am actually a transplant from a “blue” state via a “battleground” state and my service in the Army. The reason I decided together with my wife to remain in Texas two decades ago is because I looked at the increasingly hopeless prospects of the states in which I had spent my youth, and decided there could be no way I would willingly damn my young family by dragging us back there.
The problem is what Mark Levin likes to point out, likening the left to a swarm of locusts: Once they strip a place and make of it an economically barren and politically devastated wasteland, they move on to more promising areas, turning them each in their turn to the sort of disaster they had created on their previous stops. I often meet folk who have come to Texas from other places around the country, and some of them ask me how I have adapted to Texas. My response is always the same: “Don’t try to make Texas into the same sort of place you had left behind, but instead make yourself into a Texan.” Many of them are taken aback at the notion, and they ask me what I mean, and I explain to them that so many come here from deep blue or battleground states, arriving here to set about the business of turning Texas into what they fled, never stopping to consider the insanity of the notion. Why would one try to recreate here the very things one has so recently escaped?
Another problem we face is that in leaving these “blue” states to the left, not only are we abandoning some of our most stubborn brethren, who refuse to be run-off from their homes, and who fight tooth and nail for every inch of political ground, but we are also rejecting our own thesis with respect to warfare, whether real or political. You see, one of the things we conservatives have acknowledged vis-à-vis the war on terror is that for the sake of our country’s safety, it is far better to fight the thugs and terrorists and tyrannical despots on their ground, rather than waiting for them to arrive here, on ours, because naturally, given the time, they will attack us at home. By our failure to contest ‘blue’ states, they needn’t spend any time or effort defending their own ground, because we don’t press our attack there any longer, leaving them free to go on the offensive in every red precinct in the country.
As I have explained before, our political strife in this country is a war, in fact, restrained for the moment to the sphere of politics, but the strategies employed are no different. Governor Palin mocked Barack Obama for suggesting that Texas would be a blue state, and for the time being, that’s true, but as her words also warned, the only thing preventing that from coming true over the longer run is us. If we permit the GOP establishment and all the Austin cronies to turn Texas to their purposes, and if we don’t begin to fight the radical left, not only in Texas, but in places like Maryland too, we are going to slowly lose.
It is stunning to think that only a generation ago, California voted for Ronald Reagan, the most conservative president of my lifetime, and perhaps the lifetimes of most Americans still living. Conservatives don’t seem able to win in California any longer, and it is the locust-like nature of the left, combined with our own unwillingness to battle them that explains the problem. We ceded that ground, as we have ceded New York, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, Massachusetts and a number of others. We’ve simply walked away. We’ve effectively said “tough luck, we’re saving our own skins” to our conservative brethren in those states, leaving them to grasp at the last straws of their political and economic freedoms, yet we wonder why we see the left infiltrating those places that had been our great strongholds. There had been a time not so long ago when places like Virginia or North Carolina would never have been in question. Now?
Ladies and gentlemen, as I write this post, I am re-watching at the video of Dan Bongino, linked by Governor Palin on her Facebook page, and I want you to see this too. Here is the video, and at its end, he makes the same point:
Here is a man who is fighting like Hell for the last bit of logic and the last bit of sanity remaining in his state, and when you hear his passion, and when you see the fire in his belly, I want to ask all of you, my conservative brethren, most of us ensconced in deep red territory, how is it that we walk away from fighters like this man, abandoning them to a hopeless battle in which we had surrendered the flanks: Is he not championing precisely the things in which we believe? Like many of my readers, and like Gov. Palin, I’m not much inclined to give anything to the left, and I’m certainly not of a mind to leave such a man standing alone, speaking the truth in a state in which, without our help, he will never be heard over the din of the locusts. It’s time we do something about that, and being conservatives, our country and our culture under attack on all fronts, there is no time like the present. We shouldn’t wait for somebody else to rescue us, because if we don’t do it, none will. If you’re in Maryland, go help get this guy elected, and if you’re not in Maryland, contribute to that effort any way you can. Start here. Then, let’s fight the left everywhere. All we’re doing at present is “holding onto our positions,” but we’re not advancing the war by pressing our assault on their leviathan. It’s time to change the formula. It’s time to make the case. It’s time for us to reinforce our flanks, but surge and break through at the front. This is total war, waged for now in words and votes, but if we fail to engage on all fronts, we will lose the country.
