Amazon and eBay Sell Merch Calling for Trump’s Death

By Daniel Greenfield, @ Sultan Knish Blog

After Charlie Kirk’s murder, two Muslim men in Utah were arrested for planting an incendiary device under a FOX affiliate’s news van. The most striking thing about their house, as Front Page Magazine had reported, was that it appeared to be covered in anti-Trump signage.

Including a black flag reading, “Is He Dead Yet?”

“Is He Dead Yet” merchandise also made a recent appearance when a New York City public school teacher posted a photo of himself wearing that t-shirt and celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death.

In a famously sensitive era, where do you go to buy a “Is he dead yet?” t-shirt or flag? Anywhere as it turns out. Especially from those retailers that have relentlessly censored conservatives.

Amazon had censored everything from books against transgenderism and BLM to banning the sale of the Confederate flag (and even at one point pulling episodes of the Dukes of Hazzard) but you can get a “Is He Dead Yet” flag which the Amazon description openly bills as “an anti-Trump flag” making it clear that it’s not a reference to any other memes with that line.

(The actual Amazon seller is in Eastern Europe, so Amazon is helping a foreign national sell materials to Americans calling for the death of the President of the United States. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post which spent a lot of time warning about foreign interference and foreign disinformation, but its owner actually profits nicely from it.)

Amazon also stocks mugs, t-shirts, stickers and bumper stickers with that phrase that specifically refer to Trump. One ‘Is He Dead Yet’ mug features various possible tombstones for President Trump including “Psycho”, “8647”, “Epstein’s Bestie” and “Rapist”. The same seller also sells Newsom memes including ‘Newsom Was Right About Everything’ merchandise.

Another seller features an orange toupee over the “He”. Others are mock MAGA hats. Some of the Chinese sellers pushing merchandise calling for Trump’s death also responded to Charlie Kirk’s murder by pushing merchandise commemorating his killing to conservatives. Nothing else could or should be expected from China, but it’s Amazon that bears the responsibility here.

So much so that Amazon appears to have paid for Google ads for “Is He Dead Yet”.

Amazon allowed all of this to proliferate on its platform even after two assassination attempts against President Trump and has taken no action to remove it and enforce its terms of service.

Etsy, which had relentlessly censored not only conservatives, but anything un-woke including Dr. Seuss merchandise (after he was deemed racist) and the slogan “I Love JK Rowling”, and recently once again rewrote its TOS to prohibit “degrading language” towards illegal aliens, is awash in every possible variety of Trump death merchandise including mock wine labels and a mug reading “Is He Dead Yet” with Trump’s signature as an EKG line from the ‘resistance’.

“RIP Trump postcards” feature a dead Trump with X’s over his eyes in clown makeup. “It won’t solve everything when he exits this mortal stage, but it will feel f*cking great,” the description reads. An ‘Anti-Trump’ wine label features a skull and the motto “open drink, dance on grave.” There are stickers with an orange toupee on a skull, a “we’ll be grateful when he’s dead” sticker of dancing skeletons, and a scented soy wax candle titled “Smells like his funeral”.

Unlike Amazon, which is dominated by Chinese third party seller spam, Etsy’s sellers are usually authentic American leftists and their products a genuine expression of partisan hatred.

Etsy knowingly allowed this climate of hate to proliferate on its platform in violation of its terms of service which ban “violent language” even while it was cracking down on anything that was in the slightest politically incorrect.

It’s not just Amazon and Etsy. “Is He Dead Yet” merchandise is commonplace on other giant online retail platforms like eBay, and across smaller merchandising sites.

While some of the “Is He Dead Yet” merchandise claims to come from America, the vast majority is being produced in Communist China.

The People’s Republic of China does not actually turn a blind eye toward what it mass produces. Merchandise critical of Xi or the PRC being produced in China is unthinkable and writers trying to get books critical of Communism printed in China have run into problems.

China’s mass production of merchandise calling for President Trump’s death or murder is a decision that would have been made at some point within the Communist Party bureaucracy which maintains extensive censorship over any kind of speech in the giant dictatorship.

And Chinese companies not only produce products celebrating Trump’s death for third parties, but Chinese companies are deeply immersed in the business of marketing these products on their largest retail platforms.

Temu, a Chinese Communist company, has a large selection of “Is He Dead Yet” merchandise specifically targeting Trump. Critics have pointed out that Temu “maintains documented connections to the Chinese Communist Party” meaning that the slogan is being promoted to Americans by a company linked to an enemy regime.

So this is not simply a decision by one Chinese retail platform to stock Trump death gear.

Shein, the second largest Chinese retail ‘fast fashion’ platform used by Americans, also lists “Is He Dead Yet” t-shirts explicitly referencing Trump. Alibaba, one of the world’s largest retailers, has “Is He Dead Yet” t-shirts listed on its AliExpress direct sales platform. “Is He Dead Yet” is not a Chinese information op, but China’s Communist system is happy to promote it.

As are Amazon, Etsy, eBay and other major retail giants that censor conservatives, but empower leftists to celebrate and call for the deaths of Trump and other conservatives.

Charlie Kirk’s murder was marinated in internet memes. These memes are promoted and enabled by a Big Tech system that practices two-tier content policing. The “Is He Dead Yet” merchandise is an example of the kinds of popular leftist memes that make the murder of conservatives into a knowingly hip joke that eventually leads to an assassin’s bullet.

The Left has traded debate and democracy for fantasizing about the deaths of its enemies.

And some leftists do more than fantasize. That is how a bullet clipped President Trump’s ear. It’s why Charlie Kirk is dead. Woke corporations pretend that they had nothing to do with it, but the moment you search their platforms, you find that they were actually profiting from the death cult.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

The Unreal Politics of Unreal Men

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

 

 

Congress threatened to block China from controlling TikTok, the company riled up a mob of tweens to threaten Congress. If the Senate gives in, the outcome will be real enough.

TikTok certainly is real life. If you doubt it, look at the rate of teenage girls who have themselves mutilated because of trans trends on the app, even younger girls who killed themselves over material in the app’s algorithm or the spread of verbal or motor ‘tics’ to teens over the platform.

Social media isn’t real in the same way as the wind and the rain, or the laws of physics or economics, it’s an alternate reality spread through the internal realities of our minds.

Before social media, there was just media, the concentration of mass media, radio, film and newspapers that wrecked much of the twentieth century and killed millions of people. It is no coincidence that some of the most destructive social and political movements arose in line with the growth of the media. It’s impossible to imagine Nazism or Communism without the media.

What made people think that the Third Reich or the Communist revolution were viable? The Communists and Nazis were savvy propagandists who took full advantage of newspapers, film and all the elements of modern spectacle to concoct an alternate reality for millions of people. The crowds at Hitler rallies or Communist marches were living in their own version of the real world. And it was not until Hitler shot himself in his bunker or the Berlin Wall fell that they woke up to find that everything they believed had been as delusional.as anything on TikTok.

Social media is more unreal than media because, like Hitler rallies, it’s a mutual fantasy. TikTok denizens take that to the next level through triumphs over reality by claiming, for example, that Helen Keller never existed. Like a magical world, social media is a place where people can create their reality and then use intimidation and peer pressure to enforce it on others.

In this state of affairs, millions will believe that men can become women. And vice versa.

What was a consensual mutual fantasy within a like minded group became a non consensual fantasy once it was being imposed on women in locker rooms and swimming matches. The process by which the fantasy of a small group became a sexual assault on a larger society parallels how the unreal realities of narrow groups, whether it’s Communists fantasizing about the abolition of private property or master race fetishists, becomes a form of violence when a private fantasy is tethered to political power and imposed on the unwilling millions.

The unreal is sustained first by the delusions of those who wish to believe, then by persuadable useful idiots, then by mass propaganda and finally by force, social, political and finally violence as the failure of the unreal makes its devotees desperate to uphold it by any means necessary.

The power of the unreal lies in the magic of its unreality. Whether it entails transforming economics, gender or our understanding of the universe, revolutionary movements promise to reveal what is hidden and to accomplish the impossible if people just believe. But to believe, people must leave the realm of the real and enter into the alternate universe of the unreal.

Unreal politics depend on an unreal life. In times past, mass ignorance of the larger world made it possible for entire peoples to believe that their destinies depended on constellations or conversations with trees. There was no larger reality and so much of life took place in the unreal. But the citizens of modern civilization had to be immersed in the unreal. And only the advent of the mass media made it possible to immerse millions in unreal alternate realities.

The more people inhabit an alternate reality, the more they can be convinced to believe in anything. The phenomenon that began with the dawn of the media is reaching its apotheosis.

People could be skeptical of what they read in one newspaper, but the age of mass media introduced a barrage of newspapers, and then supplemented them with immediate messaging from radio broadcasts and then cinematic newsreels. The sheer concentration of park speakers, newspaper editorials, magazines, and headlines marching across the silver screen proved much harder to resist because it created an enveloping effect seemingly from everywhere.

Beyond politics, mass media made life unreal. People began taking fashion cues, life advice and moral guidance from the media. When celebrities divorced, it became more normalized, when they committed suicide, a rash of suicides followed. Millions of people stopped using their own judgment and took to repeating whatever they heard as if media culture was their society.

Reality fractured. Nations went to war or went bankrupt. The family fell apart. And throughout it all, the population climbed deeper and farther into the alternate reality of the media.

The internet fragmented that alternate reality and it made way for more immersive and less relatable echo chambers. The old media ceased to be able to speak to anyone outside its echo chamber, but the new media was even more unreal and less tethered to external reality. And the old media came to chase the fantasies of the new media no matter what dead ends they led to.

The old media, Hollywood, cable news and the rest of what’s left of the old mass media apparatus struggle to compete with the truly immersive swipe, stream and social media culture that not only surround smartphone users, but climb inside their heads and invite them to enter another world. And waiting in the wings is an augmented reality metaverse populated by AI bots that will make the worst of the current social media seem like the early days of the internet.

A preview of it can be founded on ‘child-friendly’ metaverses like Roblox or Minecraft where eight-year-olds are groomed by sexual predators, ordered to carve names in blood, like the recently exposed ‘764’ international network, and where reality becomes malleable long before children have reached an age where they have any sense of a clear and definite truth.

That is the same reason why the transgender movement is targeting increasingly younger kids.

Mass indoctrination programs always work best with the young. Children are the easiest to introduce to an imaginary world. And they will have the hardest time breaking away from it.

Children have always lived in imaginary worlds, but as mass media turned to colonizing those words, seizing control over them and imposing rules that crippled childhood imaginations, it also groomed each generation to buy its commercial products and then its ideological products.

What began with a for-profit colonization of childhood became a non-profit colonization in the same way that most of the old infrastructure of capitalism became political enterprises. ‘Woke’ and ‘broke’ are true, but also miss the point. The goal of the ESG system is for corporations to produce primarily political outcomes. Rather than achieving profits through competition, ESG secures wealth by consolidating political control over entire nations. That begins with children.

Woke corporations care very little what anyone over forty thinks about them. That is why the vast majority of advertising is aimed at younger audiences. Despite their assurances to their shareholders, they are not thinking about the next quarter, but about the right side of history.

The collective labor to create a utopia with an ideal outcome for everyone is a fantasy that has overtaken entire societies. The only reason anyone believes in it is that life has become unreal.

The degrees of unreality began with the rise of an upper class and then a middle class that had been sheltered from the realities of life and had a poor understanding of basic external realities. Newspapers, novels, theater, radio, film, television, the internet, social media and smartphones each came with a jump in radical politics as life became ever more mediated and unreal.

America’s early settlers struggled, but had a fairly tight grip on common sense, but by the mid-19th century, middle class families, with little understanding of settlement, headed West because they had been enraptured by popular accounts and worthless guide books, with no understanding of what it would take to make the trip, suffered and in some cases died.

They were already living in an alternate reality created by an early form of media.

Today, a population insulated by multiple media layers believes in seven impossible things before breakfast. Politicians, with no idea of how to accomplish anything, make worthless promises based on whatever trends on social media, run up trillions in debt and believe that they are making the world a better place without ever knowing the world as it truly is.

The concentrations of power, whether in D.C. or Silicon Valley, are more unreal than ever, mad courts where the echo chambers of power allow the elites to flirt with insane fantasies.

Anything seemed possible in Woodstock. Anything seems possible when playing with $6 trillion budgets. And anything can seem to be true in a modern university critical studies course.

Unreality has become our religion. Traditional faiths are falling away in favor of this unreality.

Our elites believe that we can all inhabit their unreal utopia if only we believe, make the appropriate sacrifices and stamp out all skepticism. And then the magic will be unleashed.

All of this seems more plausible to the laptop class who already live in a magical world where any food they want arrives in a few swipes, their screens hold endless entertainment and the world seems to exist to service them. In this unreal world, everything seems possible.

Living in it, reality seems like a distant fantasy. Fully automated luxury Communism, gender transformation, a global order and plastic bags summoning the wrath of Mother Earth are real.

The ancient pharaohs had no trouble believing that they were gods, because for a limited time they were. And for a much more limited time, our elites, either ancient and powerful, or young and wielding dot com enabled jobs, appear to be because they are detached from reality.

Living unreal lives, they adopt unreal beliefs until the unreal bubble of their lives bursts.

But where the pharaohs and ancient monarchs lived unreal lives on account of their power, the unreal inhabitants have been wrapped in unreality by media. Their power is an illusion. They are not god-kings, they have little real power, only a power fantasy fed to them by those with actual power. Whether it’s corporate media or radical politics, the true power lies with those who control the tap, not to those who get drunk on the unreal fantasies they provide.

The more the West loses itself in an unreal world, the worse the real world becomes. 

 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Israel/Hamas War Commentary: Propaganda

By Rich Kozlovich

Editor's Note: Here is the link to all I've published about this horror: My Israel/HAMAS War Series.  RK

As this war unfolds it becomes clear the planning that went into this wasn't just about arms, infiltration, targets, etc.  This was planned as a worldwide effort not only as a violent vile action against Israel, but a public relations war also, involving their corrupt talking heads in the media, academia, governments all over the world, and international institutions, especially the UN.  They're all now been exposed for their vileness and corruption.  Now, everyone knows where everyone stands.  I like it. 

Minimizing the number of dead Jews -  October 9, 2023 By Milli Sands - It is fashionable to compare the current war in Israel with the 9/11 attack. “This is no less than Israel's 9/11,” said Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, in reference to the scale of the attack.  Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper explains why he thinks the Hamas attack in Israel compares to the attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, analogizes similarly. He stated on "Fox & Friends Weekend" (10/08) that the 600 dead in the conflict with Hamas equates roughly to 20,000 Americans dead on 9/11, given population differences (the number of dead is almost certain to rise). Erdan’s back-of-the-envelope math is: there are ~330,000,000 Americans and ~10,000,000 Israelis. Hence, there are 33 times more Americans than Israelis. 33 x 600 = 19,800. Roughly, 20,000.  This minimizes the number significantly. ............

CNN's claims about Gaza are loaded with canards -  October 15, 2023 By Michael Berenhaus -What is with CNN and its reporting on Israel's military operation to take out Hamas in Gaza? Its reporting is littered with cliches and canards.Here is an obvious one:

CNN claims Gaza is an "open air prison" with, by implication, Israel the oppressive jailer.

But Gaza is not an "open-air prison" as CNN reporters have said several times on their programming. If it's an open-air prison, how do they explain the thousands of rockets, drones, attack boats, paragliders, automatic rifles, and other sophisticated equipment that the Hamas terrorists were able to bring in?  Does a prison exist where it is possible to sneak in that kind of weaponry? Doesn’t CNN understand that they are aiding and abetting not to mention inflaming pro-terrorist supporters with their terrorist-supportive rhetoric?   Do they ever check the nonsense they repeat over and over? .......

The Daily Chart: The Pathetic Genocide Claim - October 10, 2023 by Steven Hayward in The Daily Chart - The crazed anti-Semitic left likes to say that Israel is engaged in “genocide” against Palestinians, but it is hard to see how anyone can take this seriously if you look at the growth of the Palestinian population...........

 

 Leftist media outlets are ridding themselves of Islamists October 14, 2023 By Andrea Widburg - Sometimes, people ask me how I keep going when the news is so depressing. It’s partly because I’m compulsive, but it’s also because you never know when a Black Swan—a completely unanticipated event—will change things. For Israelis, Hamas’s attack on thousands of civilians was the worst kind of Black Swan. However, horror can be cathartic and clarifying. Here in America, it might even lead to cleaning up the news media. The good news is that Americans have their heads screwed on right by a two-to-one margin. (I wish it were a greater margin, but I’ll take two-to-one.) That’s because, when it comes to what happened, they side with Israel and agree that Hamas needs to be destroyed:.............

 

The urgent need to counter Hamas’s social media propaganda By David Sypher Jr. October 13, 2023 - The world is closely following the ongoing Hamas-Israel conflict, with speculations about the next possible events, including the involvement of groups like Hezbollah, or potential actions by Israel with U.S. support against Iran. Predictions and opinions on these matters flood social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), often coming from individuals rather uninformed on the complexities of the situation. While social media plays a significant role in spreading information, it’s also becoming a breeding ground for more sinister activities that, if left unaddressed, can have devastating consequences.  Hamas is not only engaged in a well-organized terrorist attack but has also launched a social media campaign flooded with viral rumors, misleading images, and outright falsehoods. This campaign aims to sow division and hate. It’s time we stop giving attention to terrorist propaganda...........

 

Hamas-Sympathizing Dem Blames Media for Her Hamas Propaganda Incident About the Gaza Hospital Bombing - Matt Vespa October 19, 2023 - Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) are two of the most vocal and visible terrorist-sympathizing voices on the Hill. Both have a history of anti-Semitic shenanigans, Omar with the more extensive list, including the infamous tweet about Israel having hypnotic powers over the world. Omar, remember, couldn’t denounce radical Islamic terrorists who committed the 9/11 attacks, describing it as an event where “some people did something.” ............

 

 

Why Wokeism?

February 3, 2022 By Seth Grossman

Last Monday, Hollywood celebrity Whoopi Goldberg said on “The View” that Hitler’s mass murder of Jews during World War II was “not about race.”  She repeated this to Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show.” Whoopi was immediately denounced as stupid and anti-Semitic.  Although she made numerous public apologies, she was suspended from “The View” for two weeks.  However, Whoopi’s statements perfectly reflect the narrative of the “woke” black history and Critical Race Theory that saturates our public schools, colleges, media, and Hollywood/TV entertainment.

That narrative goes like this.: until about 600 years ago, most people in the world lived peaceful, comfortable, and environmentally sustainable lives. 

Then, in the 1400s, a bunch of white men in Europe went crazy.  While abusing their women, they built ships and weapons to attack and exploit the rest of the world.  These crazy white men exterminated Native Americans, enslaved black Africans, and impoverished Asians.  They also started wars and polluted the planet to cause the catastrophic “climate crisis” we have today.........

There are many similarities between what Germans believed in the years before Hitler and what “woke” culture is teaching black Americans today.  Black Americans today are systematically taught that:

1. Every problem and failure in their communities is caused by somebody else, namely past or present “racist” whites.
2. Skin color makes every black American a special person who cannot be understood or represented by anyone with a different skin color.
3. Only black Americans suffered from slavery years ago and only whites were slaveowners.  Only black Americans suffer from rude or unfair treatment and insults. Therefore, black Americans can never be guilty of racism or bigotry.
4. Political power, not education, training, planning, or discipline is the only way black Americans can succeed.  Since elections have replaced wars, the Democratic Party is today’s black army.  “Ballot harvesters” are today’s soldiers. 
5. Black Americans are entitled to use political power, violence, or “any means necessary” take what they “need” from those with different skin color who have more.  That can be through looting, higher minimum wages, “redistribution” or “reparations.”

This thinking caused millions of Germans to embrace National Socialism in the 1920s and 1930s.  Once National Socialists had absolute political power in Germany, there was no peaceful way to stop them.  While this was happening in Germany, very similar events were happening in Italy and Japan.  This thinking caused 14 years of world war and the deaths of some 85 million people -- roughly 3% of the world’s population.  Sadly, this will happen again unless most Americans quickly understand and reject the lies and evil of this “woke” culture..............To Read More.... 

• In an America full of craven Parises, be an Agamemnon - February 3, 2022. By Adam Vicari -
  

  Anyone who is even passingly familiar with Homer’s epic poem The Iliad knows that it is an epic tale of betrayal, war, and retribution...............If this sounds familiar today, that might be because we are facing our own Trojan War in this country today. 

  Their war on the rights and liberties of the American people, and their war on sanity, much like the Trojan War, has been raging for at least the past 10 years and, is only increasing in intensity as their impending defeat draws nearer by the day. 

  Our rights and societal sanity, or, you might say, our Helen, are slowly being eroded or stolen from under our noses every day by those who call themselves “social justice warriors,” as wel as school board members, and the president of the United States.  The radical left-wing agitators, violent thugs of BLM and Antifa, and neo-communists who call themselves “progressives,” are our country’s Paris............We must staunchly refuse to deny reality when a biological man asks us to use “preferred pronouns,” indulging his delusions further. We must signal to the neo-fascist occupying the White House that under no circumstances will we put drugs into our body because the government tells us we must. 

  We must purge the school board members and teachers indoctrinating our children to believe in the pseudo-intellectual garbage contained in the Communist Manifesto and the 1619 Project by voting them out of office............We must not allow the truth or liberty to be crushed under the weight of left-wing lies and tyranny.  We must defend all of our other constitutional rights, property, and safety of ourselves, our families, and our neighbors from the left-wing brownshirts that call themselves Antifa and Black Lives Matter. ........This year, we, the normal, patriotic, civilized citizens of America need to reclaim the Constitution, restore sanity, and demonstrate that left-wing authoritarianism will no longer prevail by making the mid-term elections.............

AP Exam Requires Students To Choose Answers Indicating Voting Laws Are Racially Biased

Maria Wheeler  August 16, 2021

The College Board has been accused of indoctrinating students in ‘woke’ politics by requiring them to choose an answer on an AP Government exam indicating voter ID discourages black people from voting.   “Nothing to see here, just an official AP Government practice exam forcing students to falsely say voter ID is racist and urging them to overturn voter ID laws in order to pass the test,” tweeted Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist.........To Read More.....

Our Group's Take:

1.  To state the obvious, this headline is extremely misleading. The AP question does not require any conclusion about whether voting laws are racially biased. It requires identifying what an infographic says, not whether what it says is true.

2.  The article brings up that exact point, and explains it pretty clearly. However, the headline isn't necessarily wrong either. The infographic that is used suggest exactly that and the "correct answer" also suggests it - that is, if the person taking the test assumes that the infographic is providing accurate information. When in fact it's not.

But most people who read things along those lines particularly coming from what is supposed to be a credible source tend to assume that the information is accurate, which would mean that the voting laws are racially biased, when actually they're not. 

 

I think it is particularly true when the reader is a teen or young adult as the vast majority of people who take the AP exam are. It would be a relatively rare kid who would assume or know that the information was incorrect. As a result, the test basically leads the kids rather badly astray. And I don't think that's reasonable for an exam like the SAT or the AP.

So while your point is technically true - and the article points that out - I think ultimately the majority of kids who take the tests are going to assume that the laws are racially biased because of that infographic. Thus the exam is in effect propagandizing the kids.

As a result, I think it is also fair to say that the AP exam is spreading propaganda or is indoctrinating students to believe things that are not the case.

 

3. My Take - I don't know if anyone else is unaware of what the AP stands for, but it stands for Advancement Placement.  Which means they're clearly attempting to indoctrinate the next level of college enrollees. 

Suppression Plans Straight From CCP Play Book

Adam Creighton  – July 21, 2021

Last week US President Joe Biden said Facebook was “killing people” with misinformation, following comments by his Surgeon-General that social media giants weren’t doing enough to censor “serious threats to public health”.

Biden was referring to online critics of Covid-19 vaccines, among whom there are plenty of cranks, to be sure. But heavying digital tech platforms to censor voices the government doesn’t like, even if it’s “for the public good”, is part of a worrying global trend towards more authoritarian government. There’s more at stake than public health.

A few days ago Jacinda Ardern urged New Zealanders to take all non-government information with a “grain of salt”. “Dismiss anything else, we will continue to be your single source of truth,” she said in remarks that would have been considered bizarre in the era Before Covid. “We will provide information frequently and share everything we can.”

Everything, however, didn’t extend to a health ministry report on the country’s elimination strategy that vanished online on June 24, a day after Atlanta-based attorney Michael Senger revealed its complimentary references to China on social media.

The report was embarrassing because it illustrated the pioneer of our novel response to the pandemic: the Chinese Communist Party, for whom controlling information is par for the course.

“The lockdown of 11 million people is unprecedented in public health history, so it is certainly not a recommendation the WHO has made,” the World Health Organisation’s Beijing representative said in January last year, referring to the Wuhan lockdown. The people of Wuhan became trailblazers for the 11 million Australians locked down across Victoria and NSW, and the hundreds of millions of others in between.............To Read More....

 

Party, Propaganda, and Revolutionary Silence

It is time to speak the truth about the reality of what the country is experiencing. 

By Richard Higgins • August 4, 2020

The American people are enduring a withering bombardment of propaganda from a corporate-owned media that is beholden to financial interests, including interests that benefit from legacy trade policies with Communist China.  Propaganda is a weapon of warfare abroad, and propaganda is a weapon of tyranny at home. 
 
Propaganda works. 
 
The tactics used and the target selection determines its overall level of effectiveness. Today, propaganda tactics are ubiquitous in the 24/7 social media-fueled frenzy. Today’s target is the American people. Fear amplification and false expectations are the messages. Divide and conquer is the ethos.  Propaganda tactics and methods have so saturated the national discourse that it is difficult to discern reality from falsehood, truth from fiction, or deceit from honesty. 
The situation is exacerbated by the lack of critical thinking skills among the younger segment of the population. Subjects like logic—and hence logical fallacies—argumentation, metacognition, etc. aren’t required course work at any level of public schooling.........To Read More....

Polls Are Just More Media Propaganda

By Brian C. Joondeph August 28, 2018

Election season is upon us again, two years after one of the wildest roller-coaster political campaigns in recent memory. This time, it's Congress on the ballot, not Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton. Yet President Trump is still on the ballot – his agenda, his policies, his future.

If Democrats win the House, we can expect Trump's economic plans to be put on hold. Aside from the unlikely prospect of impeachment, Democrats will use every congressional committee under their control to investigate the president and his administration. Endless hearings, subpoenas, and media coverage will have the Trump administration spending every waking hour answering to Congress, leaving little time to make America great again...............Read more

Contrary to Media Reports, FBI Hate Crime Statistics Do Not Support Claims of Anti-Muslim Backlash

Jonathan S. Tobin, Gatestone Institute, December 4, 2017

The annual release of the FBI’s hate crime statistics report has attracted little attention by the mainstream media in the past few years. The most recent report, however — revealing a rise in hate crimes targeting Muslims and whites in 2016 — has been greeted with more notice than usual by the daily newspapers; even CNN chimed in to highlight the results of the report.

The reason for the sudden interest in the report was that its data appeared to confirm some of the conventional wisdom about the impact of the U.S. 2016 presidential election on anti-Muslim sentiment in America. According to the report, compared to 2015, there were increases in most categories of hate crimes. The bulk of them were based on race, ethnicity and ancestry — with the total number of such incidents rising by 5%. Still, it is the increase in anti-Muslim crimes, which increased by 20% since 2015, that stands out.

As bad as that sounds, there are those, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who consider it to be merely another piece of evidence that America has become a hostile place for Muslims since the September 11, 2001 attacks – and particularly since Donald Trump began running for president. In fact, the ADL, which has long held that hate crimes are under-reported, due to the lack of uniform procedures for compiling data in different states around country, views the FBI report as simply the tip of the iceberg.

If the ADL is correct, it would be logical to conclude that hate crimes in America in general, and victimization of American Muslims in particular, may constitute a far greater problem than even the worrisome statistics indicate. In fact, they might mean that those who have suggested that the United States is an Islamophobic nation, as a 2010 Time magazine cover story did, could be right. The more one examines the FBI data, however, the less likely he is to reach such a conclusion.

In the first place, the FBI statistics by themselves do not show the context of the rise in hate crimes and anti-Muslim incidents. What most of the stories about the report neglect to mention is that in 2015, the FBI changed its method of classification. Before then, ethnicity- or nationality-spurred hate crimes were designated as Hispanic or non-Hispanic. The FBI subsequently revised that classification, breaking down hate crimes into a variety of possible categories. As a result, the most recent data is misleading, making the incidents in which Arabs or Muslims were targeted appear to be more numerous than in previous years.

Let us look at the actual data. In 2000, the FBI reported 28 instances of anti-Islamic crimes. In 2001 (the year of the 9/11 attacks), the total rose considerably — to 554 — but then went to down to 171 in 2002. It stayed at that level for most of the decade, dipping to 105 in 2008. In 2010, a year in which a controversy raged over ultimately aborted plans to build an Islamic center and mosque in place of one of the buildings that had been damaged by falling debris from the World Trade Center attacks, the number rose to 161. In 2014, it was 154.

The claim that the relatively small number of hate crimes can be attributed to under-reporting is implausible, given the cultural climate and plethora of media outlets eager to find evidence for Islamophobia. The lack of concrete evidence to support claims of Islamophobia is due to the fact that after 9/11 — and every other jihadist terrorist attack in America since then (such as the Boston Marathon bombing and the San Bernardino attack) — the U.S. government has gone out of its way to discourage anti-Muslim rhetoric and to differentiate the actions of a few fanatics from those of the law-abiding majority.

The myth of a post-9/11 “backlash” against Muslims is politically motivated and spread by groups such as the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which presents itself as a civil rights group, but was founded to serve as a front organization for the terrorist group Hamas. The effort to persuade the public that America is Islamophobic stemmed largely from the aim to shift the narrative about terrorism to that of an Islamist war on the West to one according to which Muslims are terrorized by and in the United States............Original Article

 

Only Propaganda Is 'Good Journalism'?

By L. Brent Bozell III September 25, 2013

Why are liberals in so much denial about liberal bias in the news? Why do they think they're bending over backward to be "objective" doing that which Republicans see as partisan activism?  Daniel Froomkin of the Huffington Post — formerly of The Washington Post — suggests an answer. He is exactly the kind of liberal agitator in the newsroom who wants every news story to be a blazing editorial. Every reporter must divide the world clearly between Liberal Sense and Conservative Nonsense. His latest article is titled, "Writing a Neutral Story About Something So Heartless As the Food Stamp Vote Is Not Good Journalism."

On Sept. 19, The New York Times reported, "The Republican-led House yesterday voted to make deep cuts to the food stamps program that has kept millions of American families from going hungry since the recession hit, saying its response to growing need was instead a sign of bloat and abuse."  In short, Democrats keep families from starving. Republicans reject "growing need" as "bloat." - See more at:

Green PR to Influence Presidential Candidates

By Alan Caruba

This first appeared here in 2007.

Have you ever wondered why hardly a day goes by without your reading or hearing about some Green program? It’s not just happenstance. The environmental movement has one of the most varied and impressive public relations programs extant. And it spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on it.

Take, for example, a $250,000 contract that Fraser Communications, a Los Angeles PR and advertising firm, just secured to promote the Presidential Climate Action Project. It is described as “an academic, government and interest group push to make climate change a priority for the next U.S. president.” Think about that, we haven’t even had a primary yet, but this program is already thinking about how to bring pressure on whoever is elected to continue dealing with climate change or, as it used to be known, “global warming.”

About the only person still using the term “global warming” is the gaseous former Vice President, Al Gore. He has, despite his Nobel Prize, evolved into a laughing stock for his near-term predictions of global catastrophe.

The Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP) has an “advisory committee” that includes the Johnson Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and the National Wildlife Federation, among other groups.

One almost instantly wonders why a governmental agency like NOAA that presumably takes its direction from Congress is involved in trying to influence a future president? Isn’t that just a tad inappropriate? Unethical?

As to the others, from the beginning when the environmental movement first took off, it has been leftist foundations that have provided the funding, so there’s no surprise in that. Here again, however, one wonders what the National Wildlife Federation’s interest in climate change is all about? Since the Green mantra is that climate change is manmade, the result of human activities, why is a group devoted to bison, bunny rabbits, and other furry creatures involved?

The whole object of this endeavor and the charge that its PR firm will undertake is to apply “public persuasion” strategies related to policy and the environment. The key goal is to “set the stage for candidates running for public office in 2008 to take positions on specific proposals to address climate, energy, and national security.”

Whoa! The name of the project is “Climate Action”, but it turns out that this Green project is also about energy and national security.

One can understand “energy” because the primary goal of the Greens is to cripple the ability of the U.S. to acquire the energy resources it requires to maintain our economy and our lifestyle. Using the Endangered Species Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, and every other means, the bottom line is to insure that no coal-fired electricity utilities be built anywhere and to continue to slow any progress toward nuclear facilities. As for oil, they hate it. That’s why they have conspired to limit access to the billions of barrels of oil untapped in ANWR, Alaska’s North Slope, and 85% of our nation’s continental shelf.

You want national security? You better be able to fuel our Air Force squadrons, our Army’s tanks, and our Navy’s carrier fleets. You better cut our current 75% imports of oil and become more self-sufficient.

But somehow I suspect that PCAP’s agenda is about influencing presidential candidates to take positions that they genuflect to the myth of global warming. That means a President who will sign off on carbon dioxide limits on every industry and activity that might emit CO2. And that includes backyard barbeques.


Alan’s work has a sense of timelessness about it, so anyone perusing these articles in the future will find them equally insightful as they were when originally written. For Alan's latest thoughts go to his blog, Warning Signs. For his past works go to The National Anxiety Center. I would also recommend reading his last book, Right Answers.

Green PR Suffers Blowback

By Alan Caruba (July 11, 2007)

In mid-June, a respected newsletter for the public relations profession, Jack O’Dwyer’s, reported on a speech given to a Canadian Public Relations Conference by Jim Hoggan, a Vancouver PR practitioner. Reportedly, global warming is the top public issue in Canada, even more than the economy and healthcare.

I have been a public relations counselor since the mid-1970s. Like many in the profession, I came to it after having been a journalist. My advice to clients has always been to tell the truth.

To the extent that people are more concerned about a complete hoax than they are about the real critical issues affecting their real lives tells you how successful the bogus theory of the Earth dramatically and suddenly warming in a year, ten years, or a hundred years, has been.

Is the Earth warming? Yes, it has been warming since the last mini-Ice Age ended in the 1800s. Since then the Earth has warmed a fraction of a degree Fahrenheit or Centigrade. Big deal.

Mr. Hoggan, however, was worried. In a speech called, "You can spin MotherNature", he told attendees that a survey he undertook revealed that, "More than eighty percent of people believe environmental PR pros mislead the public for a living." Most of the 1,097 respondents said, "they thought PR people were helping clients misrepresent their performance."

He said, "There are climate quibblers in the energy industry. And the auto industry is confused—actively campaigning against climate change regulation even while spending billions on advertising concentrated on its largest, most profitable and most environmentally damaging models."

No, Mr. Hoggan, neither the energy industry, the auto manufacturers, nor their consumers and the general public are "confused" about climate change, nor are they stupid.

About the same time he was giving his speech, the Associated Press reported that, "More people than ever are driving alone to work as the nation’s commuters balk at carpools and mass transit. Regardless of fuel prices, housing and work patterns make it hard for suburban commuters to change their gas-guzzling ways." Oh, boo-hoo. Typical of such articles, the consumer is to blame along with the awful energy and auto companies.

This is why the environmental groups and their PR representatives continue to spend millions to influence legislators to regulate, regulate, and regulate every single aspect of our lives. Based on bogus environmental claims, the intent is to deny people the right to make market-based decisions.

The result is policies that drive up the cost of basic commodities that include food, energy, and housing. Policies based on "global warming" or "climate change" have no real basis in science. They are based on the hatred of free enterprise and, indeed, the hatred of humanity that is endemic to environmentalism.

Who are some of the "climate quibblers" that are casting doubt on green claims? After a slow start when any legitimate climatologist or meteorologist who disputed the claims was attacked, they have been joined by an impressive and growing list of world leaders.

Recently Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic, wrote, "We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 degrees Centigrade for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and do it right now."

In April Yuri Izrael, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was interviewed by the Ria Novosti news agency. The Vice Chairman of the International Panel on Climate Change broke with its much-vaunted "consensus" over global warming. "I think the panic over global warming is totally unjustified. There is no serious threat to the climate." He is the head of the Institute of Global Climate and Ecology in Russia.

Science is not about "consensus." It is about provable facts. Everything else is a hypothesis.

Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who early and often debunked and rebuked the theory of global warming, has been at a disadvantage with the general public because, not surprisingly, he cites some rather complex scientific data. As early as 1988 he began to speak out and that should give you an idea of how long this hoax has been perpetrated. "The current evidence does not warrant any drastic actions that cannot be justified independently of climate concerns," says Dr. Lindzen.

As is often noted, the same environmental groups, during the 1970s, were aggressively pushing the notion of a new Ice Age. Ironically, they were closer to the truth. The Earth is currently at the end of an 11,500 year interglacial cycle and many of the climate anomalies such as a June snowfall in Denver may well signal the advent of another Ice Age.

What we can do is insure that American politicians like Sen. Harry Reid, Senator Barbara Boxer, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, John McCain, and others do not force some truly horrible legislation through Congress based on the global warming or climate change lie. There is no climate change crisis and, if there was, like all climate phenomenon, there is absolutely nothing Americans, Canadians, and the rest of humanity could do.

What we do not need to do is turn essential food crops like corn into ethanol. We do not need to insist that auto manufacturers squeeze a fraction of additional energy out of a finite gallon of gasoline. In an economy based on the need for electricity, we must resist efforts to thwart the building of more coal-fired and nuclear facilities to facilitate growth. We should not deter the exploration and extraction of vitally needed, known energy resources off the shores of the North American continent.

Mr. Hoggan ended his speech by tossing out the standard calumnies about those who cite real science. "The mainstream media are presenting a controversy that doesn’t appear in science—usually without mentioning when skeptical experts were unqualified or were associated with energy industry lobbying firms or Exxon-funded think tanks."

What Big Oil is really trying to do is to insure you will have gasoline when you drive up to the pump or a choice of oil or natural gas to heat your home this winter. If Mr. Hoggan’s survey is correct—and I think it is—the public is skeptical of PR professionals who tell them the Earth is dramatically warming or just about to.

So, whom do you trust? Jim Hoggan? Speaker Pelosi? Governor Schwartzenegger? Al Gore? Do you really believe that "Live Earth" concerts have anything to do with science? I recommend you trust your own common sense.

© 2007 Alan Caruba.

All rights reserved.

I would like to thank Alan for allowing me to republish his work.  Alan’s work has a sense of timelessness about it, so anyone perusing these articles in the future will find them equally insightful as they were when originally written. For Alan's latest thoughts go to his blog, Warning Signs. For his past works go to The National Anxiety Center. I would also recommend reading his last book, Right Answers.

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Observations From the Back Row, 3-30-11

By Rich Kozlovich

Earth Hour may be losing steam as novelty wears off
More Canadian municipalities are pledging to power down Saturday for Earth Hour, but an expert says interest in the event may already be fizzling. Earth Hour has "done a great job of capturing the imagination of an awful lot of people around the world" to raise awareness of climate change issues, said Mark . But "just more of the same gets old fast," he said Friday, noting most marketing campaigns will fade after a few years without something new to draw the public's attention…..The challenge now, he said, "is going to be how to sustain, deepen and broaden the momentum of support for climate change-related policies, practices and behaviours."

My Take - Is it possible that people finally realize that this whole thing is a load of horsepucky? True, it captured everyone’s imagination and tickled the fancy of the general public….but did it really do anything worthwhile. Yes, it did! It made people who really are interested, in this and other issues, look to see what the facts really are and they weren’t impressed. That is why it is waning. Once all that warm and fuzzy stuff wears off, the part of society that is fickle, easily led, misinformed and uninformed simply stops paying attention. As for his statement that; The challenge now, he said, "is going to be how to sustain, deepen and broaden the momentum of support for climate change-related policies, practices and behaviours’. The real challenge for these people is to keep some of the people who promoted this stuff (at taxpayer expense) from going to jail. Oh, I’m sure they will find another gimmick to cloud the public’s minds, but as time goes by it may not be as easy as it was a few years ago.

Clean energy’s junk economics
The oxymoron-ish nature of a “left-wing think tank” is on display in the Center for American Progress’ latest pitch for a so-called “clean energy standard”….. What we do know — and this is undisputed — is that electricity from wind and solar sources is so expensive that without government subsidies, it would not exist, let alone compete with fossil fuels. At a Senate hearing last week, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) asked a “clean energy” venture capitalist: “If it wasn’t for the credits you’re receiving, would you be in business?” The answer was no, according to Climatewire. CAP admits as much in its report, citing the success of several “clean energy” welfare programs.

Society has been lied to for so long on this issue that they haven’t been able to connect the dots until now….thanks to the internet. If some economic plan was worth exploring it wouldn’t need government grants to become reality. Businessmen would already be doing it, competing with it, making themselves a bunch money and hiring employees who would in turn get their share of the pie that is commonly known as wages and benefits. And if they wished to invest in the companies they could then become owners. And that is the system they wish to overturn?

Global Warming’s Hockey Schtick! There He Goes Again: Mann Claims His Hockey Stick was Affirmed by the NAS
Spinmeister Michael Mann has fired off a reply to the editor of a newspaper which published an article critical of his work, again claiming his hockey stick graph, one of the most thoroughly discredited papers of the modern age, was affirmed by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS): "...the National Academy of Sciences, affirmed my research findings in an exhaustive independent review published in June 2006 .."

The NAS report did nothing of the sort, and in fact validated all of the significant criticisms of McIntyre & McKitrick (M&M) and the Wegman Report:……..Mann uses the 5 rules of propaganda in his defense, including the rule of orchestration: endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.

Here are five basic rules of propaganda, courtesy of Norman Davies in his extraordinary book "Europe: A History":

• The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between 'Good and Bad', 'Friend and Foe'.
• The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
• The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one's own ends.
• The rule of unanimity: presenting one's viewpoint as if it were the unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: draining the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure, and by 'psychological contagion'.
• The rule of orchestration: endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.

My Take - In a previous post dealing with Mann’s lawsuit against a scientist who criticized his work (interesting action for a guy who says his work shouldn’t be dragged into the courts by the Attorney General of Virginia) I asked if he really believed in his discredited work. Apparently this is the answer. This kind of reminds me of Clinton who said that it depended on how you defined the word “it” if he lied under oath. This really is the day of Orwellian “newspeak”.

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