Also, my third post is just to post a grid of the actual facts and data.
CNN has not “collapsed”, lol. That is just 100% right wing media hype.
The facts are that CNN viewership is about what it was in 2015. CNN and other news outlets get a boost in ratings during periods of crisis, and the entire Trump administration was one big 5 year crisis that people wanted to be updated on - culminating in his gross incompetence in handling the COVID crisis and his criminal attempt to illegally overturn the election and overthrow the legitimately elected government.
So again, see the graph for the actual facts and numbers rather than the spin of whatever professional entertainers are saying on FOX news.
This article is a great example of propaganda, thanks for bringing it into this thread. It is a hyper partisan op-ed packed with half-truths and false equivalences. Of course it’s from the Washington Times, that is their bread and butter!
My favorite part was when they called CNN “full government propaganda” when it was Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs who were literally invited to White House meetings in the Oval Office. Always accuse your enemy of what you are actively doing.
I also like when they try to make a big deal about Biden nominating a black woman to the Supreme Court, when Trump himself stated he would deliberately nominate a woman for his pick, and when even Saint Reagan announced he would deliberately nominate a Jewish American to the court. Identity politics for me, but not for thee!
Just as interesting a first, for America, is that this was the first stolen election. Might the two firsts be somehow connected? Just sayin’. At the heart of the madness into which the world is now spiraling was the stealing of the election by a Deep Swamp oligarchy fronted by their stumbling, mumbling puppet with dementia, doing their bidding. The world has never seen anything like this.
Jan 6 wasn’t insurrection. It was civil disobedience, and that’s all it was. Now, given that many people are confident, as I am, that the election was stolen, surely that’s exactly the kind of thing that Thoreau had in mind, in his formulation of the concept of civil disobedience. Civil Disobedience espouses the need to prioritize one’s conscience over the dictates of laws. The election was stolen, and good conscience was behind the Jan 6 commotion. Your insinuation, Corey, that Jan 6 was a heinous, unprecedented historical event overlooks the fact that the stealing of the election was itself a heinous, unprecedented historical event. And in accordance with Thoreau’s thesis, it became incumbent on every American who saw it that way, to make their presence felt.
Bogus lawsuits? Republicans have become cowards who run in fear of being called mean names, so maybe the threats of Antifa/BLM riots and national unrest might have had something to do with the way things played out at the level of SCOTUS and their dismissal of cases as being without standing. How does that work? How is it that a voter in Texas should have no interest in whether or not elections are run fairly in other states? Voters who see their votes being stolen in other states must surely have standing, by definition… because their votes for a single national POTUS are being compromised. It’s not rocket-science. Something here stinks to high heaven.
You said earlier that the onus is on me to prove my extraordinary claim that the election was stolen. I return the suggestion that the onus is on you to prove your extraordinary claim that, despite the evidence all around us, our cultures are still viable, requiring our full complicity and obedience. For the reality is that our cultures are unravelling. We can no longer count on our institutions, infrastructures and courts to do what we relied on them to do in the past. We’ve entered a new phase where what worked in the past no longer applies. This is The Great Unravelling. Everybody is a clown now. Bigots masquerading as anti-bigots, sexists masquerading as anti-sexists, authoritarians masquerading as liberals, frauds, cowards and opportunists around every corner. There is no unclowning of Clown Culture.
Civil disobedience has played an integral role in American culture and history. It has played an integral role in the acquisition of power by the Left. And now that they have it, they don’t want to lose it. They no longer care for democratic values, it seems. That’s why the American Left is good with violence by Antifa/BLM but get all high and mighty when even a murmur of discontent comes from the “nazi” conservatives.
Civil disobedience: Celebrated as the voice of the people when the Left do it, insurrection when it’s anyone else.
The once defenders of free speech have become the new censors and authoritarians. Go against the grain, and they’ll shut you down quicker than you can say “Neil Young was just a hippie dream”. How quickly their calls for peace and tolerance evaporate when confronted with beliefs that differ to their own.
Just a reminder that Mr Durham’s probe into the Clinton Campaign, Obama DOJ/FBI activities, and subsequent “Russiagate” activities is still well under way. And most of Obama’s cronies are staffing positions in today’s Administration.
Nice data @raybennett
Definitely shows our cyclical attention to these news outlets.
Zucker is rumored (sources report) to have colluded with Gov Cuomo on messaging to boost ratings and political favorability. Do you think this might be enough for CNN to lose 1st Amendment freedom of press protections and be classified as a political organization?
January 6th can only be seen in the larger context of Trump’s plan to have Mike Pence overthrow the election results. That would have literally been a coup (an autocoup, technically).
Claims of stolen elections may be good for headlines, but as always, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and Giuliani, Powell, Wood, and the My Pillow guy were 100% incapable of providing even a shred of ordinary evidence, let alone extraordinary.
And there was nothing “civil” about what happened at the capitol on January 6th.
Ask yourself, if this was BLM who was raiding the Capitol, disrupting the electoral process, beating police officers, stealing from congressional offices, and literally smearing shit on the walls, would you consider that “civil disobedience”?
If, in 2024, VP Kamala Harris decides to throw out votes she didn’t like from, say, Florida and Texas, and instead tally a set of fake electors generated by Biden, would you consider that to be acceptable? Or would that also be an autocoup?
What do you think about Hannity and Dobbs being phoned into classified meetings at the Oval Office? Why is it only bad when CNN does it? You’re not playing the “rules for thee, not for me” game, are you?
Fair enough. But isn’t that what an “exclusive” story looks like?
You’re still hung up on the “Insurrection”, right? What happens Corey when your “Insurrection” goes the way of “Russian Collusion”?
Was that Hannity wearing the horns? Did Dodd’s coordinate with Pelosi, FBI, and Capital Police to open the doors for the FBI lead herd of morons to “violently storm” the Capital?
No, because that would require an actual story to come out the other side. “Exclusive stories” come from exclusive interviews, not from sitting in on classified meetings so you can use your media power to deliver the message the right way to support the President’s agenda.
Why would you extend such benefit of doubt to Hannity and Dobbs, but not to Zucker and Cuomo? I imagine you would not consciously hold such double standards in your thinking.
If Rachel Maddow was frequently attending classified meetings, I don’t think you guys would like that very much
If the facts that I have laid out get disproven, I will follow the evidence wherever it leads me. As of now, however, we have Trump openly admitting that he wanted an autocoup, Pence openly stating that Trump is wrong and that would be anti-American, a PowerPoint presentation from January 5th, seditious conspiracy charges against the Oathkeepers, video footage of people attacking cops and raiding the capitol, and records of fake electors being signed off by GOP representatives.
Pelosi, FBI, and Capital Police to open the doors for the FBI lead herd of morons to “violently storm” the Capital?
Proof? I’ve heard this claim many times, but it was never substantiated, just taken uncritically as part of the anti-left mythos. I do think there was likely an “insider job” aspect to this — wasn’t Lauren Boebert giving tours of the tunnels to folks who were present on Jan 6 a day or two before this happened?
That is some wild speculation right there! They brought enough materials to construct a fake gallows with Mike Pence’s name on it, I don’t think it takes a lot of imagination to consider the possibility one of them brought a ladder
You mean like the recent Antifa/BLM riots, lootings and burnings that began in 2020? In the above photos there’s someone spraying something, a police officer holding a door open, and I can’t make out in the bottom photos what renders them as worse than the Antifa/BLM thug riots of 2020-21. There was way uglier stuff going on with those Antifa/BLM riots.
Yes, there was violence at many BLM protests (thankfully only a minority of them), and such violence should be strongly called out by reasonable people.
But just because one thing happened, that doesn’t mean the other thing didn’t. Either way, neither of these qualify as “civil disobedience”.
My hope is that we can achieve a post-partisan agreement that “violence is bad”, regardless of whether the right is doing it, or the left. I won’t try to excuse the violence of the left (even while we seek to better understand that violence), and you won’t try to excuse the violence of the right (even while we seek to better understand that violence).
Disrupting the peaceful transfer of power — a deeply sacrosanct American value — is bad, regardless of who does it.
Looting is bad, regardless of who does it.
Beating police officers is bad, regardless of who is doing it.
Conspiring to overthrow the results of a democratic election is bad, regardless of who is doing it.
I hope we can agree there! I imagine we could build some great discussions off of that single point of agreement.
Usually we can start figuring out how to agree about what’s “good” after we agree about what’s “bad”. We’re still primates, after all! Chimps with smartphones.
But in order to do so, we need to leave our political allegiances behind in discussions like these, or else we filter all information through those biases. Again, I have taken many opportunities to criticize the lunacy of the left, and my desire to hold Trump to account for his attempted autocoup is not coming from a partisan place. I would be equally disgusted if, say, Hillary did something like this. Again, it is my hope that folks who engage in this space are as willing to criticize their own “team” as they are their opposing “team”, and without using the sins of the other in order to justify or deflect from the sins of our own preferred group.
My allegiance is to the democratic process itself, and my enactment of our Constitution is not as a merely amber code to be followed uncritically, but rather as an engine of enfoldment that was designed to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable views and values. Unfortunately we are seeing the many ways that engine has broken down — largely because so much of it depended on non-enforceable etiquette and silent agreements, which Trump largely dispelled, and the fact that very few of these procedures were ever codified into law. Even Trump’s attempted autocoup came from an untested fringe legal theory that tried to exploit a loophole in the law (that, technically, the Vice President needs to sign off on the final electoral count, which was never ever imagined as a means to subvert the democratic process itself).
Why would they risk doing something so bold? I think it all comes back to Karl Rove’s comments about the limits of “reality-based” communities, which to me is like a secret decoder ring to make sense of many GOP efforts to install permanent minority rule (and now being emulated by many wokists on the left):
The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.
In other words, lie big, and repeat the big lie as often as you can, because when you are in power you can get away with it. The same goes for the left, with their incessant and often fallacious claims that “this person is racist and should therefore be cancelled”. The left does this in the LL quadrant, which is where their hegemony lies, and the right does it in the LR, where THEIR hegemony lies. It’s a combination of strongman and straw-man tactics — and it works better than ever on these postmodern information platforms we currently live our lives upon.
Yes, it’s been what - 8 years or more and still no actual charges? Yet in just half the time half of Trumps organization has been charged or convicted.
You are either mentally sick or never watched that video. He was definitely not holding the door open.
Nice deflection. Regardless of the price of tea in China, the events of Jan 6th were an attempt to violently overturn an election through intimidation and violence.
Also, I would love to include “rule of law” and “integrity” as basically good things!
As such, what is your opinion of the fact that, despite having power for a roughly equivalent amount of time over the last 50 years, there were roughly 142 people indicted who were part of GOP administrations, and only 2 under the Democrats? Are you willing to hold your own team to account for their failure to respect the “rule of law” and “integrity”?
Or is this another example of an “inside job” by those notorious hippy-loving FBI and DOJ agencies?
