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How the mainstream media misleads people

In my previous article, I asserted that the mainstream media rarely lies even though it misleads people all the time. Here I will explain how it does this.

A revealing example was their coverage of the shall-issue concealed carry law issue. The movement started in 1987 in Florida by NRA activist Marion P Hammer. While Florida was debating this law, the media went into full-panic mode. Here in Toronto, it was all over our media. An honest American media would have confined the debate over a proposed change in the criminal statutes of Florida to Florida.

In curious contrast, when the shall-issue movement spread to other states, the media response was silence. If the Florida debate was important enough to air across the world, why wouldn’t the same debate being repeated across the country not rate the same coverage? Of course, the answer is tactical. Initially, the journalists wanted to nip this development in the bud. When the movement spread to other states, the journalists wanted to downplay an issue that had become an albatross. What is important to notice is that the MSM’s underhanded tactics did not involve lying at any stage. They simply emphasized certain things and deemphasized others, based on an agenda they never openly acknowledged.

Another common technique is the follow-up story. In 1990, America was transfixed by the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. While they were going on, the MSM pretty much did straight-up reporting. The story was too big and moving too fast for much real-time editing. But after the hearings were over, the media endeavored to redefine the memory of the event via their follow-up stories. For instance, they could have run stories about a black man overcoming the odds in his rise to the top. Or they could have published stories about black conservatives. Instead, every follow-up story was about sexual harassment in the workplace (ignoring the fact that Anita Hill’s accusations had fallen apart). They lost the battle, but we nevertheless ended up with onerous sexual harassment laws. That is how media bias works. Again, no lying.

A further technique involves the dog that doesn’t bark. For a good example, consider the current implosion in Venezuela. When Hugo Chavez was thumbing his nose at the US, the media couldn’t get enough of him. But now that oil prices have collapsed and Chavez’s Bolivarian Republic is in ruins, there still are stories about Venezuela, but they are mostly soberly written fact-filled accounts, with no histrionics or sensationalism, and located on page A7 instead of the front page.

Occasionally they do lie. But when they do, it often blows up in their face, which is why they don’t do it often. Take for instance the University of Virginia rape hoax. A Rolling Stone journalist purposely made up this false story, which is the very definition of lying. But look how well that went for her. The fraud was exposed, she was discredited, and Rolling Stone ended up with egg on its face.

Another example of what happens to media liars was the fate of CBS anchor Dan Rather. In 2004, he pedaled false documents about George W Bush’s service in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. These were immediately exposed on the internet as obvious forgeries and Dan Rather was forced out of his lucrative sinecure. Lying convincingly is hard.

For conservatives who still remain unconvinced that the MSM doesn’t lie that often, here’s an epistemological question for you: If it were really the case that they lie all the time, how would you know it? Wouldn’t you be like Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show, a film is about a fictional reality TV show (called the Truman Show), where Carrey’s character is living in a false reality stage-managed for him by a megalomaniacal TV producer played by Ed Harris?

The reason you, unlike Jim Carrey, are able to be aware of MSM bias in the first place is because of all the truths the MSM tells you. That’s right, all their truths. It is the facts they relay to you that expose their inconsistencies and hidden agendas. Think about it. Among the first people to break through the media bubble were Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge. How could they have done it if all they had were lies to work with? Neither had a research staff. All they did was to change the emphasis. They took the stories on page A9 and placed them on the front page. That’s all. That’s how one guy with a web site and another with a microphone did it.

At this point, you might want to ask, if breaking through the media bias is so easy thanks to the truths the MSM tells, why wouldn’t they just lie all the time? That way, upstarts like Limbaugh and Drudge would be cut off at the root. The answer is that creating a comprehensive false reality is extremely difficult. Totalitarian states like the Soviet Union tried to do that and failed. And they had the kind of all-encompassing, coercive power that the MSM can’t even dream of. In spite of this, every person living in the USSR knew the government was lying to them. They didn’t know the exact truth, but they could guess close enough.

Now there is undoubtedly a small subset of people reading this who might assert that the US today is no different from the Soviet Union of 1968, telling just as many lies. If you are one of these people, you really tick me off. My parents lived through both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. A lot of my relatives couldn’t get to the West and were forced to live out the rest of their lives in the Soviet Union. My grandfather spent 11 years after the war in hiding because he was a pre-war policeman in the Estonian Republic. For that he would have been shot or sent to the Gulag. He didn’t tell my grandmother where he lived for fear that she might fold under questioning. My cousins told me that after her second questioning, she was a changed woman. She never said what they did to her, but it affected her permanently. So, if you can criticize the government to whomever you want, write letters to the editor, or comment on the internet, and you have not yet suffered the fate of my grandmother, then you do not live in anything like the Soviet Union, and how dare you compare your spoiled pampered life to the lives of people who have really suffered.

In my next article, I will discuss techniques for spotting media bias.

Just say NO to Kevin O’Leary

I don’t know how many times we have the relearn the lesson that celebrities make bad politicians. Whether it is Jesse Ventura in Minnesota, Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, and now Donald Trump in Washington, the results are almost never good. They come with no executive experience, no coherent governing philosophy, and no understanding of how political consensus is to be achieved. Being the leader of a country like Canada is not be an entry-level job. Making Kevin O’Leary Canada’s next Prime Minister is a really bad idea.

But what about Ronald Reagan, I hear you say. Wasn’t he a B-list Hollywood celebrity who ended up being a successful President? Yes, but he was also a successful two-time California governor first. That matters. He also read and thought deeply about conservatism. By the time he became Governor, he was well versed in conservative thought.

In contrast, most celebrities lack an intellectual compass. This is because they haven’t thought anything through. Our first clue that Kevin O’Leary has this problem are all his wildly inconsistent pronouncements. Unfortunately, ideological ignorance often works to the advantage of celebrity-politicians – at least initially. Because they boldly say things that no ordinary politician will dare utter, many voters get the impression that they are not afraid to ‘tell it like it is’. People really hate it when politicians speak in scripted, focus-grouped phrases. It comes across as cowardly and disingenuous – as it often is.

What adds fuel to the celebrity-politician’s bombast is that they often do not understand what is politically possible and what is impossible. As a result, they make bold promises that can’t be delivered, but they don’t know it. This faux courage, delivered with a showman’s flair, gives the celebrity-politician a charisma that most career politicians can only wish for. Unfortunately, the source of this boldness is ignorance and inexperience.

Also, their celebrity status confers upon them a false sense of familiarity. With Arnold, a lot of Californians said to themselves, I saw Terminator 2 and Kindergarten Cop, I know what Arnold is like. Er, no you don’t. Arnold is an actor delivering lines written by other people. This phenomenon is worse if they come from reality TV. This is because many people think reality TV is real. It is not. It is scripted. There is the old joke about a good Samaritan telling an accident victim, “Don’t worry, I am not a doctor but I play one on TV.” The same can be said about O’Leary and Trump. They play businessmen on TV. (And before anybody protests, yes, I know they are businessmen in real life. But here’s the thing: their TV shows do not tell you anything about what kind of businessmen they actually are.)

At this point, some of you may be wondering where I am coming from. I have been very supportive of conservative insurgents in the past. I was a big-time supporter of Preston Manning and the Reform Party, and I even supported (and still look back fondly over) Toronto’s crack mayor, Rob Ford. But here’s the thing, while Manning and Ford were outsiders, by the time they took center stage they were not politically inexperienced. In addition, both possessed a consistent set of political principles that gave their actions a unifying theme.

Preston Manning may not have been elected prior to 1993, but he had been in politics since 1967, when he and his father, Ernest Manning, began working on the long-term prospects of Canadian conservatism. They noticed that about every twenty years or so a grass-roots rebellion against Ottawa erupts in Alberta, but each time it fizzles out due to lack of unifying principles and leadership. They reasoned that the next eruption would take place sometime in the late 1980’s but if they were ready for it, a political realignment might be possible for Canada. They were right. If you are interested, read Murray Dobbin’s “Preston Manning and the Reform Party.” This hostile but informative book explains how the Reform Party was able to burst onto the Canadian political scene, seemingly fully-formed. Whatever you can say about Manning, he was not just ‘winging it’. Nor was he ignorant of what he was doing.

At first glance, Rob Ford sounds like just the kind of radical insurgent I am railing against. Not so. What is often forgotten is that Ford was a City Councillor for 10 years prior to becoming mayor. In his time on City Council, Ford focused like a laser beam on his two signature issues, fiscal conservatism and serving constituents. His dedication to constituent concerns were legendary. He dealt with every concern personally, often answering the initial call himself. He gave out his home phone number to every resident who asked, even after he became mayor. Jimmy Kimmel said that when Ford was in the limo with him being driven to the studio, he was busy on his cell phone talking to constituents! While Ford’s mayoralty was ultimately destroyed by his substance abuse issues, his first couple of years were very productive. This was due to the experience and knowledge he acquired from a decade of working in city politics.

Another problem with celebrity-politicians is that the source of their charisma is often the source of their downfall. Because they are ignorant of what can and cannot be done, they drive heedlessly into traps, either failing to deliver on their bold promises (the best case), or creating foreseeable disasters (the worst). As well, the unconventional behaviour that is the source of their initial appeal begins to wear on the voters after a while. This is because the people insist on statesmanlike behaviour just as much as they like boldness and originality. The celebrity-politician rarely appreciates this. They think they have rewritten the rules, when in fact the rules were just temporarily suspended. When their probation period ends, the immutable rules of politics return – often with a vengeance.

This is why I am against Kevin O’Leary. If he were elected party leader and loses to Trudeau, we will have missed a golden opportunity. But if he beats Trudeau (as he brags he can do), the resulting Charlie Foxtrot might bury the Conservative Party of Canada for a generation. This I believe will be the current fate of the Republican Party, who chose a reality TV clown as its standard-bearer. I don’t want Canadian conservatism to suffer the same fate as our American cousins. Speaking as the former two-time riding association president in the Conservative Party, if O’Leary is selected to be our party’s leader, I will personally have much more spare time on my hands during the next federal election campaign. I will probably still vote Conservative (while holding my nose), but only because I think O’Leary is incrementally less of a celebrity airhead than Justin Trudeau.

Mainstream media lies and the closing of the American conservative mind

Remember how American conservatives used to respond to media bias in the mid-nineties? I do. They would research the fishy story and then point out its inconsistencies by citing facts and logic. Flash forward to today. When confronted with an unpleasant news story, today’s conservative is just as likely to retort, “mainstream media lies!” This is intellectual laziness and it is troubling. And no, I don’t trust the mainstream media either. I have been studying mainstream media bias since the late 1980’s and have been actively seeking alternate sources of information ever since.

But here’s the thing: even though media bias is real, it doesn’t license you to dismiss every unwelcome fact out of hand. If you do that, you end up in a positive feedback loop of anger and paranoia. Another way of saying this is that if you can dismiss every unwelcome idea that comes your way, you can prove anything. Which is another way of saying you can prove nothing.

No intellectually healthy political movement countenances this kind of dishonest thinking. Until very recently, conservatism did not. Something similar happened to liberalism in the 1960’s, which began the decade optimistic and progressive. But as the decade wore on, an increasingly angry and paranoid outlook took over. Martin Luther King was replaced by Malcolm X. Patriotic New Dealers were supplanted by Bill Ayers and the Weathermen. Liberalism ended bitter and violent because it had lost control of its intellectual self.

The same thing almost happened to the conservatism in the 1990’s. Along with the sunny Rush Limbaugh and the optimistic Republican freshmen who were elected in the 1994 midterms, a nasty, paranoid, extremist element metastasized alongside it. This took the form of the militia movement, whose members carried AK-47’s and spouted wild anti-government conspiracy theories. But the kooks didn’t hijack conservatism - not this time. Partly this was because conservative leaders took their responsibility seriously and policed the movement.

Take for instance a very illuminating exchange between Rush Limbaugh and a listener I happened to overhear in the mid-90’s. A female caller was alarmed at the prospect that the UN was going to bar code new-born babies in American hospitals if NAFTA passed, so that they could be processed better in FEMA camps. Rush had none of it. Though she refused to listen to sense, the intro to his show for the next week began with the phrase, “EIB, the pro-NAFTA network.” Every time I heard that, I smiled. Of course, what really killed off the militia movement was the Oklahoma City bombing. After that atrocity, nobody wanted to be associated with those guys. They were politically radioactive. This helped Bill Clinton win reelection in 1996 but also inoculated the GOP against further fanaticism.

When the Tea Party movement sprung up in 2009, the crazy element was absent. I put this down to Mark Levin’s best-seller, Liberty and Tyranny. If there ever was a right book at the right time, this was it. While ordinary people can often sense when something is wrong, they are often poor at drawing conclusions. They are not political philosophers and so look to leaders for guidance. Thanks to Mark Levin, the Tea Party movement was animated by the principles of constitutional conservatism.

Unfortunately, conservatism lost its way since then. For this I largely blame Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. The wise thing for the then-de facto leaders of the Republican Party to have done was to embrace the Tea Party cause as their own and use it as a vehicle for legislative victory. Instead, they openly scorned the Tea Party voters who elected them while simultaneously misleading them on issues such as immigration. This created a power vacuum that has since been exploited by unscrupulous demagogues.

What’s worse, this time, the conservative media went along for the ride. There is a revealing anecdote about Rush Limbaugh that bookends the story from the mid-1990’s. When Donald Trump recently proposed a trillion-dollar stimulus bill, Rush gushed his approval. In economic terms, Trump’s proposal is equivalent to Obama’s trillion-dollar stimulus package which Rush had (justifiably) derided. As a conservative leader, Rush should have stood up for limited government principles, but he didn’t.

Even worse has been the behaviour of Fox News, whose recent election coverage has been terrible. First, they went all-in for Jeb Bush. When Bush dropped out, they went all-in for Marco Rubio. After he dropped out, they went all-in for Trump. It appears as if Fox learned all the wrong lessons about mainstream media bias. The problem with MSM bias is the bias. What most people want from a news channel is honest reporting. What they don’t want is more propaganda, only this time from the other side. Fox has become what we all say we hate about the mainstream media, except that they do it in the other direction - but with much less skill than ABC News, who is able to hide their bias far more subtly.

If conservatism is to become a forward-thinking force in American politics again, it must jettison all of the bad intellectual habits it has accumulated. It must recover its intellectual honesty and subject its own arguments and beliefs to the same critical evaluation it applies to left-wing ideas. Conservative thought leaders also need to relearn that standing up for principles is more important than partisan cheerleading and emoting. If they do not, conservatism will keep descending into the fringe ghetto where it is currently heading, and the only conservatives left will be a small number of True Believers.

The rebirth of the Democrat Party and the coming implosion of the GOP

After the 2004 Presidential election, many believed the Democrat Party to be in permanent decline. Jonah Goldberg gleefully contemplated that the GOP will have to divide into its social conservative and libertarian factions just to provide the American people with at least two realistic options on election day. In the real world, the Democrats came roaring back two years later to retake the House with a gain of 31 seats, and to tie up the Senate with 5 additional Senators. In 2008, they took the presidency, with further massive gains in Congress. Oh well, so much for the GOP’s Goldberg era.

The Democratic victory in November 2008 led to another round of triumphalism, and predictions for the demise of one of America’s great political parties – this time the Republican Party. Once again, the hegemony was short lived. The Tea Party came out of nowhere in 2009 to crush the Democrats in the 2010 midterms.

You can see what I am getting at. Given the recent past, it’s hard to believe that the new era of Republican domination will last any longer. In fact, I will go one step further. Normally I don’t make predictions, but I believe that one distinct possibility is that the 2018 midterms will be a replay of the 2010, except with the parties reversed.

Why do I think this is possible? For starters, losing gives the loser a number of advantages and the winner a number of disadvantages. Think of it as a negative feedback loop designed to stabilize the system. Their recent losses have given the Dems two big gifts. First, all the Clinton baggage is now gone. They no longer have to defend the e-mails, Benghazi, the Clinton Global initiative, etc. Second, they now have a clear enemy to focus on.

Contrary to popular belief, people to not come together by talking out their differences. That only leads to more acrimony. In the real world, what inspires people to work together towards a common goal is a common enemy. This election gave them that: Donald Trump. Every Democrat agrees that Trump is the enemy.

One big disadvantage for the winner is that he has to govern. And governing is hard. It’s not about promises any more. It’s about picking the least worst option and justifying to the voters all the negative consequences that flow from the decisions you have made. All the electoral reverses I cited were precipitated by mistakes made by the governing party. For 2006 and 2008, it was the Iraq War, the reappearance of chronic deficits, and the 2008 crash. For 2010, it was Obamacare, the Stimulus Package, and trillion dollar deficits.

In 2016, it was a race war that Obama started in 2011 to mobilize minorities against Mitt Romney. Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, Missouri, and Black Lives Matter were all designed to make blacks fear whites (and by extension, the white party – the GOP). They wood Latinos with wide-open, illegal immigration. As a result, to the white working class, it seemed that the Obama coalition thought of them as a bacillus to be eliminated. Unfortunately for Obama, the white working class reciprocated the hostility. It is instructive that while Donald Trump received fewer votes than Mitt Romney or John McCain, he did get a boost from rural rustbelt whites who flocked to Trump. They were telling Obama that there are now two sides to this race war. The most insightful pundit of this election, John Schindler, in this must-read column, calls it “America’s emerging nationalism crisis.”

So why do I think the GOP might get routed in the near future? First of all, the Republicans are in an very weak position for a winning party. This is mainly because of the extraordinary unfitness of Donald Trump. Speaking as somebody who thought Barack Obama was the most unfit man to ever be President, I think Donald Trump now holds that title. While he has all the inexperience of Obama, Trump has a series of grave weaknesses all his own. While Barack Obama is emotionally stable; Donald Trump is impulsive, vengeful, prone to angry outburts, and driven by petty grievances. Obama is literate; Trump has never read a book in his adult life. Obama is a family man; Trump cannot govern his lusts.

Even worse, in a shocking scandal completely ignored by the media, Donald Trump is in cahoots with a hostile foreign power that regards the United States as its “greatest strategic adversary”. For details, see my previous writings or those of the aforementioned John Schindler. This situation is unprecedented in American history. The closest analog is the 1948 Progressive candidate, Henry Wallace, who was also a witting agent of the Kremlin. I don’t think most Americans realize how dangerous the situation in Eastern Europe is, or how close we are – right now – to a conventional war in Europe.

For too many Americans, the only wars they know are the counterinsurgency campaigns of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, they don’t understand that the butcher’s bill for a conventional war can be far, far higher. Against this background, the US – the country that has ensured peace in Europe for the past 70 years – elects a man personally tied to the region’s aggressor. If war comes to Europe, Trump – and the GOP - will own that catastrophe. All of it. And Americans will learn how expensive isolationism can be.

In addition, this election has laid bare a number of the GOP’s structural weaknesses. The first is the alternative media. If you asked me six months ago, I would have said that talk radio, Fox News, conservative Internet sites are conservatism’s greatest strengths. No more. This wretched election cycle has exposed about 80% of them to be “infotainment hacks”, to use Jay Cost’s memorable phrase. While some in the conservative media are insightful and honest news disseminators, too many are ignorant fools propagating nonsense to goose ratings.

Even worse, the Republican Party’s ideology is now broken. From Abraham Lincoln down to 2016, the Republican Party was the party of Anglo-Saxon conservatism, that is of Edmund Burke, free enterprise, classical liberalism, constitutionalism, the rule of law, and a respect for tradition. Now that Trump is its de facto head, the GOP is being governed by a central European, nationalistic, socialistic ideology. This doesn’t mean that every Republican, or even most Republicans, think this way, but it does mean that the GOP will be pulled in this direction by a leader who thinks like a South American caudillo. Will the GOP revert back to its roots when Trump is gone? Hard to say. I hope so. More to the point, this ideological schism makes it hard for the party to pick itself up after the next electoral loss.

Unfortunately, the GOP has nobody to blame but itself. Coming off of 8 years of Obama misrule, winning in 2016 was almost preordained. The Republican Party didn’t need to take the problematic direction it did. But it did, and it will pay the price.

The most underreported story today: Russia’s systematic meddling in the Presidential election

In Europe, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin supports every fringe party and movement, both far-left and far-right, as long as they destabilize the status quo. For this reason, many anti-EU parties are funded by the Kremlin. For instance, in Greece, both the ruling Coalition of the Extreme Left, and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party are bankrolled by Russia. Until recently, this sort of interference was unknown in North America.

Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin has succeeded on getting his tentacles inside every major political party in the US. First, there is Jill Stein of the Green Party. Last year, she attended the Russia Today 10^th anniversary dinner. Afterwards, she sent this creepy message from Red Square:

“It’s been so wonderful to see people come together from across all borders and from the across the political spectrum, really, come together around basic human values, around human rights, around the need for international law, including the need to reign in U.S. exceptionalism and totally reform and revise our foreign policy so that it is based on international law, human rights, and diplomacy”

This from a country that recently invaded two other countries, that has conducted a scorched earth war in Chechnya, has threatened Denmark with a nuclear attack, that has practiced a nuclear attack on both Sweden and Poland, and whose current leader ascended to power by orchestrating a terror campaign against his own people that killed 293 souls.

Then there is Gary Johnson, the leader of the Libertarian Party. On Russia Today, he defended the Russian takeover of the Crimea, stating that the Ukraine (a sovereign country) is to Russia what Puerto Rico (a territory taken from another country) is to the US. I guess Johnson is unaware of the Budapest Accord, which guaranteed the borders of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine handing over its nuclear weapons to Russia. Both the US and Russia are signatories of this agreement – and therefore guarantors of Ukraine’s borders.

The real problems however are only encountered when you move up to the A-list of Presidential candidates. With Hillary Clinton, the concern is that Russia has the e-mails she had on her private server. The blackmail potential is huge. Against this, it must be noted that Hillary Clinton’s stated foreign policy has not to date favoured Putin.

More worrisome is the hack on the DNC server, which seems to have been done by Russia. Is Vladimir Putin is trying to tilt the election in Donald Trump’s direction by creating turmoil in the DNC? (Debbie Wasserman-Schultz had to resign over the contents revealed.) If Hillary Clinton’s principal opponent were a normal candidate, he would have immediately condemned this inexcusable foreign meddling. Instead, Trump made a stupid joke about it, regaling in his opponent’s misfortune.

Speaking of the Trump campaign, it has so far been the epicenter of Kremlin influence. Mike Morell, the former head of the CIA, said this:

“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.

Mr. Putin is a great leader, Mr. Trump says, ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin. Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests — endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States.

In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation. [Emphasis added]”

An unwitting agent. An assessment like this - by a former CIA head of a presidential candidate - is unprecedented in American history. Trump supporters dismiss Morell, claiming that he is in the tank for Clinton. Of course, they do not consider the possibility that causality may flow in the other direction, that Morell only favours Clinton because he is horrified by Trump. This is what John Schindler says about Morell:

“His depiction of Trump as “an unwitting agent” of Vladimir Putin is shared by many American intelligence personnel, including most of the ones I know. And I know a lot of them from my own time in the Intelligence Community. Among seasoned Russia-watchers and those acquainted with counterintelligence, I don’t know any spies who would substantially disagree with Morell’s comments on the Republican nominee.

In a recent column analyzing Trump’s bizarre comments on Crimea and Ukraine, I explained that his falsehoods uttered on national television meant that the GOP’s candidate “Either is clueless about Crimea and Ukraine, being totally unfamiliar with the basic issues, and decided to pontificate on the subject regardless while on national television. Or he is consciously parroting Kremlin propaganda.”

Morell has chosen my second option for Trump, characterizing him as Putin’s man. The term “unwitting agent” is spy-speak for what Lenin (supposedly) famously termed a Useful Idiot, that is, someone who is duped into spouting propaganda that he may not fully understand. This is a harsh assessment but more charitable than the accusation that Trump’s is a witting agent of the Kremlin.[again emphasis added]”

Who is John Schindler? He is a former NSA man and a former professor of the Naval War College who has written extensively about Hillary’s e-mail scandal, carrying the torch on this issue since the beginning. He believes Clinton has committed numerous felonies. And he wrote the above lines in a newspaper owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law. Roll that in your Trump cigar and smoke it.

There are also worrisome reports about Donald Trump’s finances. According to Edward Lucas – probably the best observer of Eastern European affairs writing today:

“His carefree ways with other people’s money — including numerous near-bankruptcies in past decades — mean that American banks shun him. 

Yet his debts have grown over the past year, from £270 million to £485 million; which suggests he may have borrowed heavily. 

His cash assets, meanwhile, have shrivelled. So where is the money coming from.

The short answer is Russia.

As the leading American newspaper, the Washington Post, reported: ‘Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.’

Trump’s son, Donald Jr, boasted to a property industry conference in 2008: ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.’”

Then there are the numerous Kremlin-connected operatives in Donald Trump’s campaign, with the now-gone Paul Manafort being only the ugliest and most notable member. According to Schindler, Manafort was so closely connected to the Kremlin that he was probably run by a GRU (Russian military intelligence) operative when he was in the Ukraine working for Putin’s puppet there. He may have even helped orchestrate violent protests against US Marines in the Crimea in 2006. There is a word for somebody like that.

Then there is Carter Page, the Trump advisor with direct financial ties to Gazprom, the state-owned gas company that Vladimir Putin uses regularly as a foreign policy tool to enforce his will on other countries and to enrich his friends.

Third, there is Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s foreign policy guru, a retired Lieutenant General, and former head of the Defence Intelligence Agency. According to Schindler:

“It seems that Flynn remains furious at Obama for firing him, and that anger may be the driving force behind his cozy relationship with the Kremlin. General Flynn has frequently appeared on RT (formerly Russia Today), the Russian government’s news channel aimed at the outside world. RT is unadulterated Kremlin propaganda—not a normal news network—as evidenced by its showcasing avowed neo-Nazis and having its own Illuminati correspondent.

Since Flynn is a Cold War veteran and a career spy, he knows exactly what RT is—he has no excuses. Yet this has not deterred him from appearing there regularly. To top it off, last December he attended RT’s 10th anniversary gala in Moscow, including a photo op with President Vladimir Putin.

It’s safe to say Putin would have a word for any top retired Russian intelligence general who regularly appeared on official U.S. television and did a photo op with President Obama. It’s not a nice word, and that general would be well advised to avoid drinking tea.

To make matters worse, neither General Flynn nor RT were willing to comment if he is a paid contributor to the network. If a possible vice president is an actual paid employee of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, that seems like something the American people should know.”

Again, to Trump supporters: this assessment also appeared in a newspaper owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law.

You know, people ask me why I so strongly oppose Donald Trump even though I am a deeply committed conservative. This is why.

Conservatives have made a big deal of Hillary Clinton’s well-documented venality. And if she were facing off against any candidate but Donald Trump I would say the corruption charges against her would be disqualifying. But in the bigger picture, the Democrat Party has been corrupt for 150 years. There was Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall machine. There was the Daly machine in Chicago and there was fightin’ Tommy D’Alesandro of Baltimore. While Hillary Clinton may be high on the corruption scale, what she has done is no different than what Tom Pendergast did in Missouri 100 years ago. Another 4 years of Democrat corruption won’t kill the Republic.

But what would be unprecedented - an event unparalleled in American history - would be a President beholden to a hostile country, one with nuclear weapons aimed at the United States and who regards the US as its “greatest strategic adversary” (Putin’s words not mine). The only other example I can think of is Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate in 1948. But he came a distant fourth in 1948.

The world situation is more unstable today than it has been since the end of the Cold War, largely because the American President for the last eight years has been so weak. If his replacement were somebody actively rooting for the other side, I do not think the center will hold.

This is why I don’t want Donald Trump in the White House. Every other consideration is secondary.

What Paul Ryan’s primary win says about the Trump media

A month ago I read in Breitbart that Paul Ryan’s approval rating had dropped to 43% in his primary fight against challenger Paul Nehlen – whose popularity had improved to 32%, according to the poll cited in the article. I thought, wow! Paul Ryan is about to go the way of Eric Cantor. This was followed up with articles announcing that Ryan is “running scared” ahead of his primary.

To my great surprise, I also came across articles in the non-Trump media (basically everything but Breitbart and Drudge) stating that Paul Ryan is cruising to an easy victory, and that his challenger Paul Nehlen is a nut who nobody takes seriously. They also referenced polls, but these polls had Ryan’s support among likely primary voters pegged at upward of 80%, with Nehlen polling in the single-digits or low teens. I thought, wow! Talk about dueling narratives.

My second thought was that the nice thing about this storyline clash is that we don’t have to guess which is right. We will know soon enough. Since the stories are so divergent, one will have to turn out to be completely false. My third thought was that this is an interesting test of the Trump media’s reliability. Are they telling a story that everybody else is ignoring and lying about, or are they are just pushing agitprop?

On Tuesday, Paul Ryan beat Paul Nehlen 85% to 15%. All the mainstream polls had predicted this result. The only outlier was the poll that Breitbart touted. It was so singularly divergent from all the other polls - as well as the final result - that its methodology and purpose can be legitimately called into question.

With regard to Paul Ryan’s victory, when you win 85% of the vote, your support is as universal as it is ever going to get in a free election. All politicians naturally accumulate enemies, people who hate you for purely personal reasons or because they are under the sway of some eccentric ideology. That Paul Nehlen only received 15% means his level of support was little more than white noise.

You know, Andrew Breitbart is a hero of mine. He was a bully who liked to bully bullies. He loved to fight for the little guy. The last thing he would ever do would be to shackle himself to some politician – even a politician he more or less agreed with. I cry when I think about what a Goldman Sachs alumni has done with his organization.

Trump’s “Second Amendment people” comment proves he doesn’t understand gun owners

I’m a gun guy. I have been for a long time. I am a collector and I have been a provincial level pistol competitor for almost 30 years. Last month I competed in the US National Pistol Championships in Camp Perry.

I have a lot of friends who are gun owners and many who aren’t. One of the annoying things that non-gun owners do around gun owners is to crack jokes about ‘taking somebody out’ or ‘shooting the place up’, etc. The important thing to note is that in making jokes like this they are not being mean. They are trying to be friendly and this is how they genuinely think gun owners talk amongst themselves. They believe this because their main source of information about gun culture comes from Hollywood and the media. When their joke is received with rolling eyes and blank stares, they are perplexed.

In contrast, gun owners never speak to each other this way. Why? Well one reason is that we have the tools and the skills to carry out the implied threat that would be joked about. We are afraid somebody will take us seriously. With great means comes great responsibility. Or as Robert Heinlein put it, “an armed society is a polite society.”

For instance, I would never, ever make an assassination joke because I sometimes travel across the border with handguns to attend shooting competitions (with all the correct ATF paperwork filled out, of course). The last thing I want is for US Customs to pull me over at the border because I have been flagged by the Secret Service as a possible threat. Non-gun owners make the kind of jokes they do because they do not understand this reality.

In making his “Second Amendment people” joke about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump comes across to me like one of those non-gun owners. Clearly, the part of his speech where he delivered that line was an attempt to curry favour with American gun owners. In his ham-fisted attempt at humour, he ticked us off because we know we are not like that. He was playing to a caricature created by liberal disinformation to discredit us – one that we are continuously trying to distance ourselves from.

Andrew Klavan’s theory about Donald Trump is that he is living up to the liberal media’s caricature of a conservative because the liberal caricature of conservatives is all that he knows. He is opportunist who saw an opening in the GOP and he must put on the best act he can.

Trump’s assassination comments, while also distasteful and inappropriate, is a data point that Klavan is onto something.

Trump’s charges of a ‘rigged’ election are subversive

Donald Trump’s latest disqualifying comment concerned the actual voting process on the upcoming Presidential Election. Coming off a horrible week, when the wheels of his campaign were flying off, Donald Trump had this to say about the upcoming election:

“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged.”

That a Presidential candidate from a major political party uttered a statement like this is simply reprehensible. The electoral process, and by extension, the legitimacy of the government itself is based on trust – the trust of the people in the electoral system. A specious charge of a ‘rigged’ election by a major candidate is irresponsible because it needlessly erodes the people’s trust – trust that must exist for the system to be able to operate at all.

Take the Presidential election of 1960, between Richard Nixon and JFK. Until Bush vs. Gore, it was the closest election in American history – and it is likely the only contest where cheating may have affected the result. But when told that the Kennedy wins in Illinois (8,800 vote margin) and Texas (46,000 votes) may have been tainted by the major Dailey’s Chicago machine and LBJ’s Texas machine, Nixon declined to complain. His reason? Throwing the result of a presidential election into turmoil with allegations of fraud would destabilize the country.

But say, you ask, don’t political candidates contest election results all the time? Of course they do. But here’s the difference. They do it after the contest is over. And they almost never make generalized claims devoid by specific allegations. What every competent candidate does is to ensure that his scrutineers and observers are in place at as many polling places as possible. These people are instructed to record the discrepancies they see and to challenge any irregularities they witness. And if an election is close, the campaign takes the compiled list of irregularities to a judge and asks for a recount. The judge then orders a recount, or an investigation, or finds the complaint spurious. That is how it is supposed to work. The system of scurtineers and judicial oversight is one of the checks and balances within the system to help keep things fair.

I will give you an anecdote from a friend with a long history of political involvement. In an alderman race in Toronto - this would be going back 40 years or so – the alderman-candidate he supported lost by one vote. Yes, you heard me – one vote. So, the losing campaign asked a judge for a recount. The judge in turn asked what irregularities they had observed that would justify his granting a recount. They said they had none (they neglected to instruct their scrutineers to record any they may have witnessed) but they felt that a recount was warranted because of the closeness of the result. The judge declined the request, explaining that a mere dissatisfaction with the result is not enough to justify judicial intervention. To justify a recount, at least one specific complaint about wrongdoing in the process was needed. My friend told that story to every batch of new scrutineers he trained. His larger message was that complaints about voting irregularities are irrelevant if they are unsupported by evidence.

This is not the first time Donald Trump has made specious charges about a rigged election. The first time was after he got shellacked in the Wyoming and Colorado primaries where won no delegates. He lost because those states have a complicated caucus process that requires a strong ground game, one that Ted Cruz had and that Trump completely lacked. Instead of acknowledging his error and congratulating the winner like a good sport, he screamed that the system was ‘rigged’, and that it was undemocratic because he received no delegates. Surely, there must have been Trump supporters in those states, he charged (conveniently ignoring the fact that he won every delegate in the Florida primary in spite of the fact that the other candidates collectively won more than 50% of the vote).

That he himself believed these charges to be without merit can be seen from the fact that the Trump campaign did not legally contest the result of either state primary, nor did it make any specific complaint at any time. It was clear that Trump’s only purpose in his empty allegations was to tarnish his opponent’s entirely fair victories.

Though I had supported Ted Cruz until that point, I was not yet turned overtly hostile to Donald Trump. But after that disgraceful incident, the scales fell from my eyes. Donald Trump wasn’t merely less preferable than Ted Cruz. I was beginning to see that he is morally unfit to be President.

A widespread belief among the framers of the US Constitution was that a republic can be maintained only by a moral people. Among the many things this means, it means that the people contesting an elections have a moral duty to not be sore losers. Tracking and reporting specific irregularities and wrongdoings is fine. So is fighting for justice for yourself. In fact, doing so is your patriotic duty. (For this reason I think Nixon was wrong in not challenging the results of Texas and Illinois.)

But to call the fairness of an election into question simply because you don’t like the results – or because you had a bad week on the stump - is the height of bad sportsmanship. It is also fundamentally dishonest, irresponsible, and unpatriotic.