“I wonder which would be more fake — a Twin Cities Times fed by Brock’s “progressive news” or the Star Tribune?”

 OCTOBER 8, 2022 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line:

THE REAL FAKE NEWS

Earlier this week Axios reported on the Democrats’ real fake news gambit: “Writers for a D.C.-based media operation run by prominent Democratic operatives are behind a sprawling network of ostensible local media outlets churning out Democrat-aligned news content in midterm battleground states[.]” It’s an interesting and well-researched story written up in the dumbed down Axios form by Lachlan Markay and Thomas Wheatley. They found that David Brock was a key operative and fundraiser for the American Independent, “a Washington-based progressive news outfit” that appears on each of the sites’ mastheads.

Reading it at the time, I wondered. Aren’t those “local media outlets” redundant? Minnesota escapes the net, but how would a Minnesota-based outlet differ from the Star Tribune? The Star Tribune works the beat 24/7 with approximately infinite resources at its disposal. Is this something more than another vehicle for Brock’s self-promotional and fundraising prowess?

And while we’re on the subject, I wonder which would be more fake — a Twin Cities Times fed by Brock’s “progressive news” or the Star Tribune? Which would be more effective at promoting the Democrats’ party line? In the Twin Cities Brock’s real fake news would at the least be superfluous.

Axios headlined its story “Democrats’ swing-state local news ploy.” The Daily Mail has picked up the Axios story and done it up Daily Mail style in “Democrats are operating a series of 51 ‘fake news’ websites pushing left-wing stories in toss-up states in a bid to turn the midterms in their favor, shocking investigation finds.” The Daily Mail links to Gabe Kaminksky’s Daily Caller story “‘Propaganda’: Dem Operatives Are Placing Stories In Network Of Pop-Up Local Media Outlets To Sway The Midterms.”

SUCH CHICKEN ARE CALLED “CHICKEN” WHEN THEY “DUCK”!

Democrats Walz and Simon under fire for ducking debates

A recent poll found 85% of Minnesota voters think it is important for candidates to debate face-to-face before the election. 

Democrats Walz and Simon under fire for ducking debates

According to MPR and TPT Almanac host Cathy Wurzer, Simon was scheduled to participate in a debate Friday with Republican challenger Kim Crockett but canceled at the last minute, citing a scheduling conflict.

“We can’t remember the last time a candidate agreed to a debate then changed their mind. Our long standing tradition on TPT Almanac of having the last gubernatorial debate of the election was upended when Gov. Tim Walz wouldn’t agree to appear with Dr. Scott Jensen. Not a good trend,” she added.

As Wurzer noted, a recent KSTP/SurveyUSA poll found 85% of Minnesota voters think it is important for candidates to debate face-to-face before the election.

An MPR article from earlier this week said the Walz campaign has declined debate offers from TPT, KSTP, and KARE 11.

Jensen and Walz have only debated once so far this cycle — at FarmFest in August. The governor has agreed to two more debates, one on a group of Greater Minnesota TV stations and another on MPR. Neither will be in front of a live audience. According to MPR, this is the first time in 40 years where Twin Cities TV stations won’t have a debate.

“Steve Simon bailed on a debate with his Republican opponent Kim Crockett just days after a Democrat group announced millions of dollars in spending on the race. Steve Simon and the rest of his party are following the lead of Gov. Tim Walz,” said Minnesota GOP Communications Director Nick Majerus. “Walz has refused multiple debate requests and delayed more debate appearances until well after early voting began. The Democrats are ducking debates because they can’t defend their record of failure.”

Attorney General Keith Ellison has not debated his GOP opponent Jim Schultz. State Auditor Julie Blaha participated in one debate at the State Fair with Republican Ryan Wilson.

Garland And His Crooked Weapons, the DOJ and FBI!

The First Thing Republicans Should Do When They Take Back Congress Is Impeach Merrick Garland

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON at the Federalist:

OCTOBER 07, 2022

Garland has weaponized the DOJ and the FBI, using them as blunt instruments to criminalize the Biden administration’s political opposition.

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

Should Republicans take control of the U.S. House and Senate in November, their first order of business — before tax and spending cuts, abortion restrictions, gun legislation, or anything else in their predictably anodyne agenda — should be to impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland. 

Under Garland, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been thoroughly politicized and weaponized, transformed into instruments of terror aimed at ordinary American citizens who have the temerity to oppose the Biden administration’s radical agenda. 

Tax cuts for domestic manufacturers, or whatever out-of-touch, boilerplate thing GOP leaders imagine their priority should be once they regain Congress, can wait. The urgent thing now is to impeach and remove Garland before he causes irreparable harm to the republic.

Everything Garland has done as attorney general has been mendaciously political, from smearing parents who speak out at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists” to targeting peaceful anti-abortion activists while doing nothing about actual pro-abortion vigilantes attacking churches and crisis pregnancy centers. He has to be stopped, and a determined GOP-led Congress is the only thing that can stop him.

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And by the way, once they’ve gotten rid of Garland, congressional Republicans should make their very next order of business dismantling the FBI and DOJ. Both of these agencies have proven themselves to be corrupted beyond repair. They are enemies of the American people and must be scrapped entirely and replaced by something new — something with far less power and far more accountability. 

If that sounds drastic or melodramatic, as it might to some indifferent or merely idiotic Republican lawmakers, consider the shocking news this week that Garland’s DOJ has once again used the FBI to target peaceful anti-abortion activists for exercising their First Amendment rights. On Tuesday night, armed FBI agents swarmed into the home of 73-year-old anti-abortion activist Chet Gallagher on the outrageous pretext that he had violated an obscure federal statute, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or “FACE Act.”

In fact, what Gallagher and 10 other activists had done was pray and sing in the hallway of a medical building that houses an abortion facility in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, last March. The protest was entirely peaceful, as ample video footage — livestreamed on Facebook by the activists themselves — attests. A few of them were arrested without incident by local police on misdemeanor trespass charges and promptly released.

But in Garland’s DOJ, what they did was use “force and physical obstruction to injure, intimidate and interfere with employees of the clinic and a patient who was seeking reproductive health services.” So reads the indictment, a document so disconnected from reality that its mere existence beggars belief. 

And yet it comes on the heels of an equally shocking FBI raid last month on the home of Mark Houck, a Catholic father of seven and anti-abortion activist who was arrested at gunpoint in front of his terrified wife and small children. His crime? He alleged violated — you guessed it — the FACE Act.

But in Houck’s case, the charges are even more spurious than those leveled against the Tennessee activists. The incident in question involved an altercation last October between Houck and a man named Bruce Love, a pro-abortion activist and escort — not an abortion provider or a woman seeking an abortion — near an abortion clinic in Philadelphia. Love allegedly got in the face of Houck’s 12-year-old son and was relentlessly harassing him. An altercation ensued, and Houck reportedly shoved Love, who fell to the ground.

But as my colleague Margot Cleveland recently noted in these pages, by Love’s own account the altercation didn’t amount to a violation of the FACE Act “because Houck was standing at a corner away from the abortion facility, no clients were involved, and the alleged assault had nothing to do with so-called reproductive services.” That is to say, the government’s case here is extremely weak and will likely be dismissed before a trial ever takes place, as a fair number of other alleged violations of the FACE Act have been in the past.

What’s more, Cleveland detailed how Houck’s attorney was in touch with the Justice Department about the matter months before the FBI raided Houck’s home, and offered to have Houck appear voluntarily in response to a summons. That email was sent in June, but the first response Houck’s attorney got from the DOJ was on Sept. 23, after Houck had already been arrested at his home at gunpoint in front of his family.

These cases, though, are just the latest in a long train of egregiously selective enforcement of federal law by the Garland DOJ that’s clearly intended to intimidate otherwise law-abiding American citizens. The same U.S. attorney pursuing the bogus case against Houck, Anita Eve, has also handled some 40 Jan. 6 cases, in which similarly over-the-top arrest tactics were used. Indeed, Garland’s DOJ has thrown the book at hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants whose misdeeds in many cases amount to little more than unintentional trespassing.

Meanwhile, the FBI won’t say whether it has made even a single arrest in the dozens of attacks against churches, crisis pregnancy centers, and other pro-life organizations in the wake of the Dobbs leak in May. The FBI admitted to The Daily Signal this week (in a statement that is almost identical to one it issued the outlet in June) that it is investigating the attacks, and even that it considers some of them potential acts of domestic violent extremism or possible violations of the FACE Act.

Yet for all that, the FBI has failed to announce a single arrest in connection with some 83 attacks on Catholic Churches and 73 crisis pregnancy centers. Strange then that it would have time to track down Houck and the 73-year-old Gallagher (not to mention 87-year-old Eva Edl, a woman named in the Tennessee indictment).

All of this amounts to precisely what it looks like: the weaponization of the Justice Department for partisan political ends. If a new Republican majority in Congress does nothing else next year, it should impeach Garland and dismantle a hopelessly corrupted DOJ and FBI. Whether GOP leaders realize it, the future of the republic might just depend on them gutting up in the next Congress and doing what needs to be done.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere.

Our Today’s Liberals….WHERE TRUTH HAS NO MEANING!

October 8, 2022

How Liberals Respond When You Try to Debate Them

By Gary Radtke at American Thinker:

Over the last several years, my liberal friends have become less and less comfortable with utilizing classical debating styles — you know, where one person proposes a theory, explains it thoroughly with facts and figures and then responds to any questions about the theory in a logical, rational way.  This article develops a theory on why the vast majority of all liberals are currently atrocious debaters. 

My wife and I have been lucky.  We have developed many close friendships with lots of people over our lives.  Some of these relationships are more recent, but many have lasted 20, 30, or even 40 years.  We have over a dozen friends whom we try to stay in close contact with on a regular basis.  About half of them are liberal; about half of them are conservative.  Virtually no one seems to be dead in the middle anymore.

Recently, a new trend started to become obvious.  For my conservative friends, roughly half of all their friends share conservative values, and half are liberal.  But our liberal friends tend to have just one or two conservative friends, and they are no longer able to discuss political issues with their conservative friends, since the liberals tend to get too emotional when talking politics.

It is my belief that this inability to discuss political issues is because my liberal friends look only at online sites that share their worldview; they watch only TV news that reinforces their worldview; they discuss politics only with people who share their worldview; and they often look at social media that make them think the liberal view on a topic is the only rational one to have.  This isolationism creates an echo chamber, where only one type of ideology is allowed in, and this forces liberals to think of conservatives as caricatures of what conservatives really believe.  (Recently, a new acquaintance, a liberal, asked my wife and me if we think all liberals are socialists.  This was before we even sat down to have our first drink together.  Who does that?)

This apparent isolationism leads to my theory of what happens in a real debate, where different views are presented.  It is called the Pavlovian Liberal Didactic, or PLD.  Pavlov first noted that his dogs salivated when his lab assistants came in to feed them.  The dogs probably also wagged their tails and shook a bit in anticipation of eating.  This conditioned response led Pavlov to many of his theories, some of which make sense.  (It is difficult to agree with many of his experiments on humans.)

In debates with liberals, PLD can manifest itself in one of four ways.  If a conservative asks a liberal a tough question or makes a comment that is outside a liberal’s worldview, then one of the following three responses occurs (similar to the drooling, tail-wagging, and shaking exhibited by Pavlov’s dogs):

1) The Hide in the Basement Response: This is where the liberal walks away without responding at all.  This happened at a recent family party, where my forty-year-old nephew was complaining about Reagan’s AIDS policies.  I simply asked him to tell me which policies he specifically disliked.  He became agitated and started typing things on his iPhone, clearly trying to find some answer to the question posed.  (One might think he should have performed this simple due diligence before making his comments, but I digress.)  He was visibly shaking, and it got so bad that his mother (in her 70s) had to usher him out the door.  In his circles, no one ever questions his logic, since all his friends think exactly like him.

2) The Non-Response Response.  This may take one of three forms:

“I am not going to dignify that question with a response.”

The No Answer, Just Sit There Response.  (A liberal Ph.D. academic was asked, “What is the independent clause in the 2nd Amendment?)  He just sat there, as though he had never taken, or never understood, fifth- or sixth-grade English.

The Deflection Response.  “Why was the Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan such a complete disaster?”  “Trump would have handled it worse.”

3) The Flip Response.  This is where the liberal answers a serious question with an absurd response.  In another conversation, a liberal was asked, “What does the 10th Amendment cover?”  His response: “Everything.”  He had no real answer to the question, so he had to make up a ridiculous answer just so I would not press him further.  I did anyway.

4) The Willful Ignorance Response. This is where liberals know every single thing about all of the rumors about Trump, including the one with Putin blackmailing him with videos of a Russian prostitute urinating on him, but they know nothing about Hunter Biden’s businesses and potential influence-peddling because they just don’t have the time to follow it.

If pressed further on the substance of their beliefs after they have given several PLD responses, in about 50% of the cases, liberals will then respond by calling the conservative one of the following: racist, misogynist, xenophobe, transphobe, phobe-phobe, anti-science.  I have not figured out yet why it happens only roughly half of the time.

Now, the interesting part about all of this is that when liberals give a PLD response, they often think they are being clever.  But in reality, they are just providing a conditioned response, and it is not clever at all.  As a matter of fact, many of my conservative friends mock the PLD response.  We know right then and there that we have won the debate, even if the liberal doesn’t.

The PLD is so ingrained that I can actually explain my theory to a liberal friend, tell him I am going to ask a question that will induce a PLD response, and then ask the question and still get a PLD response.  It is difficult for me to keep a straight face when this happens.

It would be great if liberals were not prone to PLD responses.  However, that is not the only time they evade rational discussion.  When not giving a PLD response, liberals often provide responses filled with emotion; opinion; or “context,” which is really a fancy word for opinion. 

We learn more about how others think when good, honest debate occurs over important issues.  It also makes us better at understanding and improving our own positions when people having different ideologies from us seriously challenge our beliefs. 

I am not optimistic that this pattern will change anytime soon.  PLD is too ingrained in liberals’ psyches for it to meaningfully change over the next few years.  However, if you watch how liberals respond to questions, PLD may at least provide you with a chuckle along the way.

Why Has Gender Confusion Swept Across The Land?

 OCTOBER 7, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

WHAT IS A WOMAN?

Gender confusion has swept across the land, with the prescient lyrics of “Lola” now taken by academia as aspirational. Man today, woman tomorrow: you got a problem with that? Well, yes, most of us do. But not many have the courage and skill to fight back effectively. So far, the most powerful pushback has come from Daily Wire, in the film “What Is a Woman?,” starring Matt Walsh and produced and directed by Justin Folk.

Matt Walsh had the brilliant insight that the simple question–what is a woman?–is unanswerable by the trans lobby and exposes the incoherence of the radical gender edifice. Senator Marsha Blackburn put the principle to use in her questioning of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, who professed herself unable to solve the riddle because she is not a biologist.

As “What Is a Woman?” shows, being a biologist wouldn’t help if you are a gender ideologue. The film is brilliant. Walsh goes from place to place, trying to find someone who can tell him what a woman is. You might think that at a “women’s march,” everyone would know the answer to that question. No such luck. You might think that distinguished academics, therapists and surgeons who make lots of money from the trans zeitgeist would be able to tell us. Nope.

Tonight, American Experiment showed “What Is a Woman?” at a large suburban theater in the Twin Cities. Producer and director Justin Folk, a long-time friend of mine and collaborator with American Experiment, came to Minnesota for the event. It was a sensational evening, attended by more than 200 American Experiment members.

The film is amazingly good. A 90-minute movie about transgenderism might seem like castor oil, good for you but hardly a pleasure. But that is not the case. “What Is a Woman” is fast-paced, hugely entertaining, and, while sometimes gripping, is also funny. Our audience paid rapt attention. When the film was over, everyone stayed for a half hour of questions and answers with Justin. Here is the film’s trailer:

Our event tonight was the first time “What Is a Woman” has been shown in a theater, other than a private event in Nashville. For now, to see the film you need to join Daily Wire. That is a good idea in any event: with stars like Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens and Matt Walsh, the content never stops. You can join Daily Wire here.

At some point, “What Is a Woman” likely will be broadly available in theaters. Watch for it: it is one of the most entertaining, if enraging, documentaries ever.