Last week, from February 5th to 11th 2017, I got nearly all my news from Breitbart News, a right-wing US news outlet read by President Trump and once led by his top adviser, Steve Bannon. I was hoping for some insight into the Brain of Trump, but it is way too whitewashed for that.
My blood pressure went down not up, if anything. Breibart does not take part in what it calls the liberal “hysteria” over Trump. They have full confidence in him. They pass over his lies and mistakes, along with the ethical issues concerning his top people. His racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia are merest common sense, what most “regular Americans” believe, as proved by his (electoral college) victory and (cherry-picked) poll numbers.
Sure, Breitbart makes Muslims, Mexicans, Blacks and left-wing protesters seem dangerous and out-of-control, but I dismissed that as third-rate fear-mongering. They were upset about Trump’s Muslim ban getting struck down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but I was glad.
All in all it was a relatively peaceful week (pictured above).
But then when I watched “Saturday Night Live” I was not getting the references. For example, I did not know why they had Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway stalking CNN reporter Jake Tapper. I did not know she had been banned from CNN for 48 hours.
Other stuff I did not know:
- Trump said he received no calls opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline – not pointing out that he had turned off the public comment line.
- There were #NoDAPL protests nationwide.
- Trump signed a Blue Lives Matter order.
- Kellyanne Conway did not simply “misspeak” about the Bowling Green Massacre, but was pushing the untrue story to support the Muslim ban.
- Trump’s Muslim ban was struck down for lack of evidence.
- Trump left off Dylann Roof and other White nationalists from his list of terrorist attacks.
- The list was misspelled.
- The many ethical issues with his cabinet picks, like Scott Pruitt’s emails.
These are things I would have known as a matter of course.
Some of the White Liberal criticism of the Trump Administration did bleed through when they bashed liberals. For example, I knew Nancy Pelosi called Steve Bannon a White supremacist because they wrote an article about the Zionist Organization of America defending him.
It is like hearing 60% of a conversation.
Worst of all, even what they did report was sometimes misleading or untrue. For example:
- They claimed that Black Lives Matter called for the killing of White people – but without actually backing it up.
- They went along with Trump’s “alternative facts” about crowd size at the inauguration.
- They made it seem like the US Army Corps of Engineers had completed its environmental review of the Dakota Access Pipeline – when in fact they had cancelled it!
The last two were contradicted by the very newswire stories they carry from AP, UPI and AFP (the best part of the website).
Breitbart News is not a serious attempt at understanding the world – or even of getting the facts right.
– Abagond, 2017.
See also:
- Breitbart News
- breitbart.com – the website itself
- Programming note #31
- Black people according to Breitbart News
- Steve Bannon
- fake news
- alternative facts
- RationalWiki media guide
- #NoDAPL
- Trump’s Muslim ban
- Dylann Roof
- White Liberals
- Islamophobia
- electoral college
- Orwell’s 1984
562
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. – Soren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author
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“It is like hearing 60% of a conversation.”
They have that in common with MSM. Heck, put them together and you’d get 120%.
“Worst of all, even what they did report was sometimes misleading or untrue. For example:
They claimed that Black Lives Matter called for the killing of White people – but without actually backing it up.”
Reporting stuff as true without backing it up. Now where have I seen that before? Russian hacking? Trump dossier? Saddam has WMD? Assad used chemical weapons on his people?
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don’t understand the relationship of the Winston picture to this article. who is big brother in this scenario? breitbart?
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The site seems nothing more than a site by and for the pathologically disconnected and reality fear-based.
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I was wondering what the tone of the paper was. Since you say, “All in all it was a relatively peaceful week”, and that your blood pressure went down, it sounds like the overall tone is not incendiary. This is interesting. I can’t really fathom how a web of lies can be put together in newspaper fashion to sound credible. I guess I will have to look at it myself.
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@ Susan
I got caught up in part by watching Democracy Now. That was way more upsetting than anything in Breitbart – in part because I took it more seriously, in part because they report more of what is going on, feeling no need to whitewash the Trump Administration.
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@ Scribh
Breitbart, from what I saw, is not much worse than Fox News.
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@ nomad
In the analogy Trump is Big Brother. By accepting his lies and distortions of truth we can feel at peace.
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Trump and Bannon are like an infection in the body. Eventually so much pus will build up around them it will erupt and the open wound will be so disgusting we’ll have to treat it. But until that happens Republicans are going to do their damnedest to deny there’s anything wrong with the situation.
You go on that site (Breitbart) and they try to sound really deep and intellectual and talk about nonsense terms like “anarcho-capitalism” and “anarcho-monarchism” and proudly proclaim themselves “neo-reactionary”
How does Trump who likes to have his staff nicely dressed let Bannon hang around in that disheveled state?
Who goes to work anywhere, much less the White House, dressed so unprofessionally?
The White House may require fumigating when Trump, Bannon and their equally disgusting, degenerate minions finally leave
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@abagond
‘In the analogy Trump is Big Brother. By accepting his lies and distortions of truth we can feel at peace.’
no chance of that. unlike with obama and hillary,’ we wont feel at peace we’ will be vigilant against his lies. we wont feel at peace with his lies, like we did with obama’s. and thats good. one more benefit of the trump administration. not feeling at peace with big brother.
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Hmmmm….
The analogy doesn’t seem right. Whereas Trump lies, he does not have the means to force coerce and hypnotize people into believing his lies. And he appears to be at odds with the ‘deep state’. His own party undercuts him and MSM, the propaganda arm of the state, is totally biased against him. So he does not have the mind control capability that Big Brother has. On the contrary, that power belongs to his adversaries in MSM and the intelligence community. Trump is out of the loop. Nothing has been more programmed into us than the belief that Russia hacked the election and Trump is a Putin stooge. This meme is repeated over and over again on the MSM, until it has become a fact and an article of faith. You are considered anti-American if you don’t believe it. That’s the kind of mind control and manipulation that I associate with Big Brother. Trump can only dream of having that kind of power. On the other hand, the president that preceded him did have that kind of power. He along with the Intel community and MSM could make the public believe lies. Big Brother was a brother.
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@ nomad
I did not apply the analogy to the US in 2017 but to a Breitbart-only news diet. If Breitbart News and outlets like it were all we had, then the analogy would apply. Trump could achieve that by shutting down the White Liberal press or discrediting it to such a degree that few take it seriously.
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Obama is O’Brien. Chelsea Manning is Winston.
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@abagond
“I did not apply the analogy to the US but to a Breitbart-only news diet. If Breitbart News and outlets like it were all we had, then the analogy would apply. Trump could achieve that by shutting down the White Liberal press or discrediting it to such a degree that few take it seriously.”
Okay. I see. Now that I understand the frame of reference. Mine of course was slightly different. As I say, I wasn’t quite sure who Big Brother was. It still strikes me as an ironic choice since the most blatant effort to manipulate the mind of the public that I have ever seen is being executed by Trump’s opposition in MSM and likely behind the scenes by the Intel community. Unprecedented Big Brotherish mind programming, coming from the other side.
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My blood pressure goes up while thinking about “alternative fact” sources like Breitbart because I am forced to remember that people actually believe them. I want everyone to adopt progressive values so that we can enjoy a society that is more beneficial for the majority of people. It bothers me that some people seem to enjoy keeping others uninformed and making the government as unhelpful as possible, when education and community-focused laws are two of the most important resources a society should protect.
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Big Brother was a brother.
Can you believe this guy is still hanging around? Please. Go away. Interfered in the election and now interferes with the Trump presidency. Go away. Your legacy aint worth a dam.
http://nypost.com/2017/02/11/how-obama-is-scheming-to-sabotage-trumps-presidency/
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@ nomad
If true, they are hardly at Orwellian levels: they could not even win an election against a rank amateur.
Some parts of the MSM are partisan hacks, like MSNBC, but hardly all of it.
For example, it was the New York Times, one of the main MSM outlets, that broke the Clinton email server scandal, which arguably cost her the election:
The Times is biased journalism, Breitbart is outright propaganda. There is a difference. In the Times facts still matter and the truth is messy (see above). In Breithbart the truth is clean, too clean – because it is whitewashed. I have seen the Times print corrections, but I have yet to see Breitbart do that. On the one I saw on crowd size at inauguration, for example, there is no correction. They let the alternative facts stand.
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“Worst thing on the planet!”
@ SCRIBHNEOIR
Actually, you should know by now (if you weren’t such a hardcore cretin) that one of the worst things on the planet are WHITE racist creeps who tell African/Black women to have sex with dead people!
However, I will defer to YOU as the resident EXPERT on steaming stinking piles of “irish” bilge, seeing how frequently you love to immerse yourself in it.
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@ nomad
There is a clear bias in the MSM, but that is easily accounted for by the fact that nearly all of it comes from blue counties, in particular DC, LA and NYC. No Orwellian conspiracy is required.
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@abagond
oh yeah. its Orwellian if its breitbart, if its msm its not.
what makes it even more Orwellian is people’s obliviousness to it and acceptance of this level of propaganda as normal and the acceptance of what the state manufactures as fact, e.g., ‘Russia hacked the election’.
Made to believe it as surely as Winston was made to believe five is four. How many fingers am I holding up, Abagond?
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‘For example, it was the New York Times, one of the main MSM outlets, that broke the Clinton email server scandal, which arguably cost her the election:’
People don’t seem to care a lot about that. They minimalize its importance. What brought her down was the content of Podesta emails as revealed by WikiLeaks.
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@ nomad
Again, if all we had was Breitbart and its like, it would be Orwellian. Likewise if all we had was MSNBC. And again, there is a difference between propaganda and biased journalism.
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As I said, it’s already Orwellian. The fact that you are unaware of it only underscores the Orwellianess.
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We’ve already had Big Brother for eight years. And he was a brother.
“Like the fascism of the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent media whose description now fits that of the Nuremberg prosecutor: “Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.
Take the catastrophe in Libya. In 2011, Obama said Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew… that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
This was the known lie of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. It became the media story; and Nato – led by Obama and Hillary Clinton – launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten”.
Under Obama, the US has extended secret “special forces” operations to 138 countries, or 70 per cent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa”
Big Brother was a brother, But he wasn’t my brother.
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@ scrib
Understand this.
I’m not your “dear.” I’m not gay. AND, I don’t don’t engage in niceties with utterly pitiful and LOST people posing as humans who dabble in necrophilia and blatant racism.
As long as you remain here posting your thoughts and replies, I’ll be here sharing mine.
I believe it is most relevant/important for those that may not know who and what you are, do know that you are in fact of and from the gutter.
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ad hominem makes the world go round!
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@”The Times is biased journalism, Breitbart is outright propaganda. ”
Yes the NYT is “biased journalism” in that they selectively report like everyone else.
While I don’t have abagond’s expertise on Breitbart, I do know that NYT’s articles bashing Russia are clear examples of propaganda.
Let’s take “A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories”.
Now, if you didn’t read the article, you’d never know that it was primarily about fake news in Sweden.
So if “Swedish officials were never able to pin down the source of the false reports”, then there’s absolutely no need for even a merely biased journalist to go in depth on unsubstantiated allegations about Russia.
Furthermore, a merely biased journalist wouldn’t need to use the title, “A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories”?
Even If you take the opinion that this story was really about Russian propaganda, then there’s no reason to even begin the article by talking about fake news in Sweden.
The article is not just reporting a story, it is deliberately associating Russia with unsubstantiated claims of its dissemination of fake stories.
That is the epitome of propaganda.
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I was wondering why Putin did not lay off his trolls after the election. Now I see why.
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I too was wondering why DNC and their candidate did not lay off their paid propagandist bloggers after the election. Now I see why. They still want war with Russia.
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@”But this is how you formulate such a sentence in English. Just so you know.”
Yeah, abagond once wrote a post entitled “How to derail an argument about racism”, in which he points out: “If their English is bad, jump on that”.
Thanks, lord of mirkwood aka xpraetorius, for exemplifying that.
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Hey scrib
I’d rather formulate 100K bad sentences in a week than construct just ONE despicable sentence advocating the idea of necrophilia coupled with abhorrent racism in several lifetimes.
LOL – You can parse any of my sentences however you like. The people who matter the most to me (hint: they ain’t the French) know exactly what I’m saying, bad grammar or not. The opinion or correction of a morally vapid necrophiliac matters not!
You might think you can simply move on and overlook this sort of continual aggressive and disrespectful behavior against my Black sisters, mothers, wives, aunts, daughters, cousins, friends, nieces, associates and ancestors as normal fare and then go back to your usual business and agenda. I think otherwise! As long as you remain here and as often as I wish, I am going to call you and your racist BS, out.
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Scribh is xpraetorius?
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“Scribh is xpraetorius?”
Don’t know and don’t care if he is or isn’t.
This is what I know for sure about Scrib who purposely changed his name to distance himself from the stupid morbid ____ he did as Mirkwood! (Who then thinks he can remain here – unabated – as if he did nothing wrong and all is well.)
A WHITE NECROPHILIAC RACIST who told a Black female poster on this blog to have sex with a white corpse.
An IMPOSTER pretending to be an ally while displaying greater empathy/sympathy/concern for a lion killed in Africa than for unarmed Black men murdered by police here in Amerika.
An insensitive racist JERK who posts OFFENSIVE photo-shopped images HERE of the president and wife as chimpanzees.
A DESPICABLE COWARD who without provocation blatantly lists certain Black women (plural) on this blog as folks he doesn’t like – as an after thought while engaging another drive-by racist troll pos – while simultaneously blowing sunshine and smoke up the butts of the two females who most enable, encourage and support his presence on this blog.
Etc ……
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@ ASG-M
“From what I have seen in this blog’s archives, xpraetorius is a conservative think tank. I am a Sanders Democrat.”
From what I’ve seen in the archives, xprae was running an experiment here. Maybe he/they came back with an invented construct (LOM) to see how posters here would react to a self-proclaimed anti-racist ally who said tons of racist sh*t.
You could be a construct invented by researchers. Any of us here could. It’s the internet.
Or you could just be a self-deluded jerk.
“I go away for stretches to escape the harassment.”
You mean like how Taotesan has almost disappeared from this site due to your harassment and despicable treatment? Which is a d*mned shame, because she always had such interesting and thought-provoking contributions to this blog.
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DT – now you know what solves it?
What is it,the fact that white people have to live along side blacks,latinos,muslims even thier own females with respect and equality?
DT -“when the economy crashes, then thier will be riots in the streets, for things to to go back,to when we where great”
So just like hitler he and his group are going to rig the government and the economy until it colaspes or exploit said colaspe and disaster for a return to um which stage of history in which america was great , oh yeah a mythical nostagisic past that only exist in thier fantasies.
Interesting how pathologically dominant a significant percentage of the white population continue to need to be.
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@ Scribh
Two comments deleted for moderated language.
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@ Abagond
Do I have a comment in moderation, or did you delete it (on what grounds)?
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I find Scrib’s posts educational. He constantly reaffirms the white supremacist mindset from a supposed ‘liberal/progressive’ perspective. Don’t for a minute think Scrib and his fellow white supremacist ilk, are ignorant are this. Read them and don’t respond unless it is to mock him.
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@Fan @Solitaire
Deleted comments for moderated language.
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Lol the patronizing (patron saint?) dreaded white liberal, all you need is a non-profit, scribh
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@ Abagond
*”@Solitaire
“Deleted comments for moderated language.”
I didn’t realize. May I ask which word(s)?
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@ Solitaire
Shit.
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@ Abagond
You’re right, I do remember saying that now. I’m sorry. I curse like a sailor IRL and I sometimes forget that what seems to me very mild profanity is on your banned list. I will work on that.
Would it be possible to reinstate that comment with the offensive word either asterixed out or replaced with an inoffensive synonym? I don’t have a copy of it anymore myself.
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@ Solitaire
Done.
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@ Abagond
Thanks!
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