“the BBC does have a liberal bias”

DECEMBER 4, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN MEDIA BIAS, UNITED KINGDOM

CONFESSION: FIRST STEP TO REDEMPTION

Is the notoriously left-wing BBC finally getting religion? The Telegraph reports:

The BBC chairman yesterday indicated “the BBC does have a liberal bias” but added “the institution is fighting against it.”

Richard Sharp, in an interview in the Sunday Times, said he and Tim Davie, the director-general, had drawn up a ten-point plan on impartiality, anti-bias training along with reviews of news output in a drive to tackle the issue.

The BBC says it especially needs to upgrade its reporting on business and finance, having been taken by surprise by Brexit and now being confronted with inflation. I suppose being a socialist doesn’t give you a very useful point of view when it comes to business and the economy.

What, after all these years, is driving the BBC’s pledge to reform itself? Money. There is a move afoot to abolish the time-honored “license fee” that generates three-quarters of the BBC’s revenue.

That prospect naturally concentrates the minds of those who run the Beeb, but the fundamental issue is that no democracy should have a state-run news media. BBC News is an anachronism whose time might finally be drawing to an end.

Today’s Lefty Democrats Know NEITHER CIVILITY NOR HONESTY!

Democrats, Stop Patting Yourselves on the Back

Commentary

By Daryl Weber & Ken Weber

December 03, 2022

In the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats did better than everyone thought. History says the party in the White House loses seats in Congress when the first midterm election rolls around. But this time Democrats held the Senate and lost fewer seats in the House than expected. 

So, that’s cause for celebration, no? No. Consider the facts: 

• The election happened less than two years after an astonishing 139 House Republicans (and eight Senate Republicans) voted to overturn the 2020 election. For generations, America set the global standard for free and fair elections. Then one man, Donald Trump, used the word “rigged” incessantly (before and after elections, and without evidence) and suddenly tens of thousands of dedicated election workers became suspect.
• When the January 6 mob attacked the Capitol, spurred on by Trump, our cherished “peaceful transfer of power” process nearly failed. 
• The midterm elections happened four months after Roe v. Wade was overturned, stripping American women of what had been a Constitutional right for a half-century.

For those and other reasons, Republicans should have been trounced at the polls. Instead, they received a limp slap on the wrist, and gained control of the House. 

On the other side of the equation, the midterms took place during a period of robust economic growth, accompanied by historically low unemployment. Yes, there was inflation, but President Biden helped keep our inflation rate below that of most other industrialized nations. Biden and the Democrats passed the historic infrastructure bill, a once-in-a-generation investment to repair our bridges and roads, upgrade our ports and airports, and expand broadband access for everyone. 

Then the Inflation Reduction Act lowered prescription drug costs for seniors, reformed the tax code, including making the ultra-wealthy and large corporations pay the taxes they already owe. Plus, for the millions of activists who are passionate about climate change, both of those bills gave them the largest direct investments ever in clean energy and boosted local clean energy initiatives. 

The point here is that notwithstanding conventional wisdom, Democrats should have done better. 

A few Democrats did quite well. Two, in particular, are interesting. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, running in Washington state, garnered more votes than any of the 435 congressional candidates. (House districts are drawn so that they all have approximately the same number of voters.) Rep. Jayapal chairs the Progressive Caucus. Ironically, and importantly, her former co-chair of the Caucus, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, had the second most votes in the midterms. 

It also happens that Pocan is the only candidate we know of who has read (and enthusiastically endorsed) our book, “Branding Democrats: A Top-to-Bottom Reimagining of Campaign Strategies.”

Coincidence? Perhaps. Or maybe he knows some things other politicians and party leaders should know. For brevity, we’ll just point to one concept that we stress in our book: he’s a proud Democrat. He never shies away from that label. He lets his constituents know that he stands by the long-held values of the Democratic Party. 

Contrast that with what hundreds of other Democratic candidates (or more precisely, their consultants) did. They made the same mistakes they always make – they forced each candidate to battle on his or her own. Every metropolitan area was carpet-bombed in the media by all the Democratic candidates, each telling a similar story, but each unmoored to the larger Democratic Party brand. Why? That strategy not only failed miserably in New York (New York!), it did nothing to help the down-ballot candidates, the city or town council candidates, the judges, and so on. 

The need for Democrats to change is urgent. Today’s high school juniors and seniors will be eligible to vote in 2024. Do they understand that Democrats, much more than Republicans, fight for the issues they care about – avoiding environmental disaster, women’s reproductive freedom, protecting LGBTQ rights, sane gun laws, and so many others? If so, they learned it on their own, with precious little help from the Democratic National Committee. The same can be said for senior citizens; Democrats still fight to protect Social Security and Medicare, while many GOP thought leaders question the worth of those sacrosanct programs. 

Our book lays out a roadmap for effective branding of all Democrats. It argues that all elections should be about more than “our guy is great, your guy is terrible” partisan bickering. There are broad Democratic themes that override any specific candidate or any particular election. That’s what smart branding accomplishes. 

The calendar is our enemy. Democrats desperately need to begin defining and boosting their brand, and we have no time to waste. In the 2024 election Democrats will be defending 23 Senate seats, compared to only 10 on the GOP side. And, of course, the House will be up for grabs. We urge the party to shift to smarter and more efficient messaging, and the change needs to start today.

Daryl Weber is a brand strategist who has worked for some of the biggest brands in the world, including Coca-Cola, Nike, Johnnie Walker, and Google. He is the author of “Brand Seduction: How Neuroscience Can Help Marketers Build Memorable Brands” and co-author of the upcoming book from RealClear Publishing, “Branding Democrats: A Top-to-Bottom Reimagining of Campaign Strategies.”

Ken Weber is president of Weber Asset Management, a registered investment advisor firm based in New York. He is the author of the book “Dear Investor, What the HELL are You Doing?” and co-author of the upcoming book “Branding Democrats: A Top-to-Bottom Reimagining of Campaign Strategies” from RealClear Publishing.

The Thoroughly Corrupt Dems Are Being Exposed…AT LAST!

December 4, 2022

The Media Undertakers Must be Getting Exhausted

By Clarice Feldman at American Thinker:

The media worked hard to bury the FTX scandal. There a young (but well-connected to leftist politicos and media) tech slob Sam Bankman-Fried “lost” eight billion dollars, shelled out at least $40 million to Democrats, is suspected of laundering a lot of taxpayer money through Ukraine, and cloaked his outrageously criminal conduct in the garb of promoting social justice once he realized he could no longer disguise his Ponzi scheme.

The gravediggers hardly had begun to return their shovels to the cemetery shed when there appeared a new story that needed burying. Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi just opened up another crack in the door revealing how outsiders along with the DNC manipulated Twitter in the runup to the election. Not that the shadow banning and actual banning on Twitter of conservative voices wasn’t obvious before, but Musk is inside the belly of the beast and proof of the outrageous behavior at Twitter which preceded his purchase is now being made public, with Musk promising there’s more to come. Twitter staff and executives used barriers designed to combat spam and fraud to manipulate speech that was neither. Even worse, outsiders, including the DNC with connections to these insiders, used these tools to control what people could post and viewers could read, even going so far as to censor items transmitted on the direct message (private person-to-person) feature of the site. In effect, well-connected private parties (almost exclusively Democrat) could and did remove posters. Among the stories Twitter actively blocked was that of the salacious Hunter Biden laptop contents. So shocking was the material on this laptop, so revealing of the perversity of Hunter and the corruption of Joe Biden, that one post-election survey reports that 16% of persons who voted for Biden said they would not have had they known of the contents of this laptop. One major newspaper, the NY Post, did publish a story about it, and several online posters did as well. The most detailed, should you care to see for yourself what was on the laptop, is here.

The laptop reveals not only sexual depravity and illegal drug use, but corruption and influence buying as well. Taibbi reports “Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe’.” The only person it was unsafe for was Joe Biden, the Democrat party’s presidential candidate,

Even then, White House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about it. Several insiders questioned what was going on and received the untrue defense that the material was removed because it violated the company’s “hacked materials” policy. The laptop was never hacked. It was abandoned by Hunter, then was unlocked while in the possession of the NY Post, and it and its contents are authentic. At any other time in history of which I am aware such a scandal would have been front-page news in the weeks preceding an election. In 2020 Twitter and the mainstream media decided that was not to be the case when the scandal clearly would impact the Democrat candidate. The key player in this was the formerly richly compensated, now fired, Twitter head of legal affairs, policy, and trust, Vijaya Gadde. Apparently, CEO Jack Dorsey was never even informed.  No one at Twitter had the guts to reverse Gadde’s deceitful partisan power play. So, as one might expect in a bureaucracy, they just shut up and went along with it, despite even Ro Khanna, Democratic congressman, expressing concern that this autocratic, unwarranted censorship was creating backlash on the Hill. While Gadde was born in India, she was raised and educated here, is a lawyer and should, but evidently does not, have some idea about the scope of the First Amendment. Ro tried in vain to explain to her that even had the laptop been hacked the story should not have been blocked. “A journalist should not be held accountable for the illegal actions of the source unless they actively aided in the hack.” Other Democrat congressman thought this was fine and dandy and said they want even more “moderation,” by which, of course, they mean censorship of facts and views not in their interest. 

Of course, if Twitter had merely determined on its own not to allow certain views, there would be no justiciable claim of a constitutional violation. But here’s the problem — it appears that the censorship was being done on orders from the government to suppress speech.

Now you’d think this was a big story and would garner attention on the front pages of the Washington Post and New York Times. You’d be wrong — the Fourth Estate biggies apparently like suppression of dissent and are happy to keep their readers from knowing what Taibbi reported.

Charles Lipson posted those papers’ front pages — nothing there on this.

The biggest story Friday night is the release of Twitter documents showing how the company’s previous executives killed the Hunter Biden laptop story. Yet here are the webpages from the late Friday night for the NYT and WaPo. Radio silence. They killed the story about killing the story.”

He adds, “CBS News hopes to verify the Twitter release within 2 years.”

It was not only Twitter, certain congressional figures, and the DNC directing the control of information on Twitter. One FBI whistleblower has just testified that ”the FBI held weekly meetings with Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley ahead of the 2020 presidential election to discuss “disinformation” on social media — muscling the tech firms to censor views and facts. It probably took little effort to get compliance, knowing how FBI Director Wray’s agency and Silicon Valley types share the same penchant for shutting up those not on the Left. 

Gender Troubles In Modern, Ignorant Life!?

December 3, 2022

I Have Some Questions about Gender Assignment

By Nick Lopez at American Thinker:

The Fairfax County, Virginia School Board has “educated me” that babies are “assigned gender” at birth, and I have some questions. 

My first question is, what is the department in the hospital that assigns genders to newborns called?  Because if you call a hospital and ask for the “gender assignment department,” they don’t seem to know what you are talking about.  I’ve called eight hospitals so far.  Not one of them seems to have a department that assigns gender to newborns.  

Is the impossible to call or locate gender assignment department at my nearest hospital some kind of secret society, like the Freemasons?  The Cabbagestork Rite?  Wearing bibs and binkies and placing non-binary dolls on a Ouija board in the Denver Airport in order to determine if you are having a boy or a girl?

There are questions beyond the who and how of hiding an entire department in hospitals… never mind who might be behind this insidious assignment bureau.  How exactly is “gender assignment” done?  Does the baby come out looking like a Ken doll, and does the doctor reach into a bag of genitals and select a set to attach to the baby at random?  Since the doctors seem to mess this procedure up by installing the wrong genitals with increasing frequency, do they also put the wrong race genitals on babies?  Or is the “misassignment” a clerical  thing?  Does the doctor check a box “M” or “F,” and then the genitals develop on their own because of suggestion by the medical staff?

And why did the medical community tell us that the gender of a baby could be determined by looking at an ultrasound prior to birth?  If the baby isn’t assigned a gender until birth, how can the baby’s gender show up on an ultrasound before birth (gender assignment) has occurred?  Or does gender assignment happen while the baby is in the womb when an ultrasound is used?

Is it possible to have a Schrödinger’s Gender?  If no one bothers to assign the baby a gender, does it become nonbinary, with they/them pronouns? 

And isn’t the crime of “misgendering” actually the fault of the hospital employee who filled out the birth certificate incorrectly in the first place?  When I look at Bruce Jenner and (“incorrectly”) say, “He’s a male,” that is a hate crime called “misgendering.”  However, I wouldn’t be able to do that had the hospital not assigned Bruce the wrong gender to begin with.  I’m not the only one to have “misgendered” Bruce, either.  The United States Olympic Committee, the International Olympic Committee, General Mills…all misgendered poor Bruce his entire life.  He was put forth as this paragon of masculinity and competitive strength,  but the reality was lacy panties and a Birken Bag.  (Seems Wheaties should get some kind of refund.)  Had the hospital simply put that Bruce was actually a girl, there would have been no question about his gender.  He could have gone through life like my mother, with no one mistaking him for a man, ever…right?

One of my neighbors growing up had eleven daughters.   He had confided to me once that he had so many children only because he wanted a son, and never got one.  I’m sitting here 40 years later wondering why Mr. Smith (not his real name, but this was rural Utah, so you get one guess at what his real name was) didn’t just bribe the country doctor (his first cousin) to assign male gender to his first eight children so he could stop bothering his wife for more kids!

Why didn’t the Chinese Government have doctors assign “boy” to the families who wanted a male during China’s “one child” policy?  It seems a whole lot easier than killing a child so the family can “try again.”

Where do the people who assign baby genders get educated?  And what is the degree in?  A medical doctor is someone who observes, makes a determination of what he is observing, and acts according to established protocols.  However, someone who is assigning gender is not observing; he is determining what is to be observed, which is an entirely different process.  How exactly does one train in order to assign a gender?  Play pin the tail on the donkey?  Throw cabbages at a stork? 

And since medical staff assign attributes to the newborn, why aren’t they assigning other health attributes like “cancer free for life” or “high I.Q.”?  Maybe if the physician sees that the parents are poor, he could assign “trust fund baby” to make life easier? 

Yes, Virginia, there are stupid questions.   And I just asked a bunch of stupid questions.  But the stupid questions have legitimacy because they are based on a stupid statement.  The statement that “gender is assigned” is flat-out next-level dumb.  Any adult who says “gender is assigned” should never be taken seriously on any subject again, ever.  

If your children are in school in Fairfax County, my question to you is, “Why?”

Would you let your children sit in a room with a chemical that drops their I.Q. permanently?  No?  So why are you allowing your children be “educated” by people who are next-level dumb?

Guess what the end result of an “education” that includes “gender assignment” is?  A worthless gender studies degree from UVM on account and a lifetime residency in your basement while trying to strike it rich as an “influencer” on Tic Toc.

When someone makes a stupid statement, the burden of proving the validity of their fallacy lies with the stupid person.  The Fairfax County School Board has made the stupid statement that gender is “assigned.”  Now these people should have to prove it or forfeit the right to educate children or anyone forever.  If Alex Jones is responsible for unprovable statements that he puts forward, then anyone who makes a stupid statement that harms others should also be held responsible.  But obviously, that’s not going to happen in Joe Biden’s Amerika.

Your schools are being burned to the ground.  Perhaps it’s time to take your kids out of the building.

The Magnificent Messiah!