Leftwing Misinformation Without Media Accountability
Pete Buttigieg wants you to know Donald Trump rolled back federal regulations on trains related to a braking system. In East Palestine, OH, last week, the Secretary of Transportation called on Donald Trump to support reinstituting those regulations, something Buttigieg could do.
Buttigieg’s defensive line has now been picked up by the leftwing echo chamber and reverberated across Democratic officials’ talking points, MSNBC commentary, and lefty online trolls.
I put up this video on Instagram the other day and these are some of the comments from progressives:
“What did trump do to prevent it? Infrastructure? Nope. Train regulations ? Nope”
“But, it’s true! Trump made it possible for the railroad companies to not put electric brakes on the cars that carry hazardous materials.”
“Propaganda stupidity!! Trump bowed to the lobbyists and made pulled the requirement, period!! All the bullshit spin won’t change that”
“So there were no train derailments while Trump was Prez? You know that is a lie. The fact is the train companies spent millions on lobbying Republicans not to pass regulations and to get rid of others.”
Surprise. The National Transportation Safety Board Chair says the braking regulations would have had no impact on this train derailment. The brakes were an unrelated issue.
Buttigieg and the left were able to accomplish a partial blame shift to Trump to distract from Buttigieg’s own incompetence, and it turns out it was all a bit of misinformation. Will there be any media accountability? Of course not.
Likewise, we saw that with the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Much of the press corps rushed out in support of suspending the Post from Twitter for accurate reports on the laptop. Talking heads, who are still regularly on television as people we should rely on, insisted it was all Russian disinformation.
There has been no accountability in the press over these individuals.
That all gets me to the Wall Street Journal story from the weekend reporting the lab leak theory over COVID is now a seriously considered theory in the U.S. government.
Remember how reporters treated Tom Cotton when he suggested it? Oh, I do.
Speaking on Fox News, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, raised the possibility that the virus had originated in a high-security biochemical lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the outbreak.
And let us not forget this gem by resident Washington Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler who, he wants you to know, deals “in facts.”
And there was “expert” Angela Rasmussen, who claimed that even talking about the lab leak was “dangerous.”
Here now is the latest from the Wall Street Journal:
The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.
The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.
The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.
The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.
I suspect the national intelligence panel and four other agencies still not down with the lab leak theory are the ones with the partisan political motivations, not Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and so many of us on the right who suggested the lab leak made the most sense. By the way, the Central Intelligence Agency went on record that it disagrees with the national intelligence panel and is, itself, unsure.
What is most notable from the situation in East Palestine to the Hunter Biden laptop to the lab leak theory is how the mainstream media and progressive partisans were all aligned against the right, used cultural and corporate outlets to shame and censor the right, and then they turned out to be wrong. They advanced their own misinformation, and instead of apologizing or recognizing the problem is multifaced and non-partisan, will double down, undoubtedly, on how big a problem it is on the right.
When you deal with ego-driven people and institutions who have both partisan motivation and a deep disinclination to self-introspection, you get a press and progressive left incapable of dealing honestly and rationally with how often they themselves get things wrong.
It reminds me of the rise of blogs and the New York Times editor who lamented all those bloggers without editors who might get things wrong and how terrible that would be. And yet…
And our research team at the University of Utah’s College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine still can not find one quality study to support masking. We’ve been saying this for more that 3 years and have been entirely ignored. Fact - the corporate media and the Democrats are liars, stupid or both.
Erick, you coined the phrase enslaved "press".
Yet again, here we have another prime example.