Russia “Hacks” Election by Giving Voters the Truth About Hillary

— by Polydamas

Beginning two months ago, on November 9, 2016, the day after Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States, the American people have been subjected to a relentless barrage by the mainstream media of various reasons and excuses for his upset victory. Echoing the false narratives of Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton and her coterie of advisors and operatives, the lapdog mainstream media was all too happy to deflect the blame for her defeat away from her eminence and away from themselves and to shift it to any other available scapegoats. We at The Cassandra Times are libertarians without a real horse in this race, but we will show our loyal readers that all of the leftist excuses are false and based upon elitism, secrecy, deceit, and propaganda.

Since time immemorial, every unit of human organization, from the smallest tribe to the largest nation, has been ruled either by the physical might of the strongest chieftains or by the rhetorical might of the so-called wise men. Ayn Rand’s very insightful 1961 essay collection For the New Intellectual characterized the two camps by their archetypes: “Atilla” the brute who dominates weaker men with his physical prowess and his monstrous mallet versus the “Witch Doctor” who deceives them with his verbal prowess and rhetorical sophistry.

At least as far back as Plato’s Republic, written more than two millennia ago, leftist liberalism has been the domain of the Witch Doctors, whom Plato called the Philosopher-Kings, and their jealously-guarded arcane knowledge of governance. These same Witch Doctors have always believed that they alone possess exclusive access to superior knowledge, wisdom, and experience to rule the hoi polloi, the hopelessly ignorant people whom they consider to be beasts of burden and whose brute labor is needed to pull forward the wagon of the state. Their intimate knowledge of the levers of government and society are the carrots and the sticks with which they prod the masses to produce, all while cynically concealing from all, under a mask of selfless altruism and piety, their devious methods of operation as well as their abiding contempt.

An integral part of Witch Doctor lore is that the masses must be constantly lied to “for their own good” and must never learn that the elites view them as dumb oxen lest they rebel and refuse their yokes. For example, in an unguarded 2014 moment of candor in the presence of other elites, one of the Affordable Care Act’s own architects, MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber, revealed that the commonly-known Obamacare Act was deliberately written “in a tortured way” to obscure from the masses Obamacare’s hidden truth that it is based upon “healthy people pay in and sick people get money”. The Witch Doctor elites’ obfuscation was needed, in his words, due to “the stupidity of the American voter” and that its “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” in selling it to the American people. Professor Gruber may have apologized for his insensitive words, but his real sin in the eyes of the elites lies in letting the cat out of the bag in the presence of the unwashed masses. Keeping their gullible people behind a veil of ignorance is a fundamental tenet of Witch Doctor lore, which explains Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s resort in 2010 to the Jedi mind trick that “we have to pass the [Obamacare] bill so that you [the public] can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy”. And the gullible sheeple predictably responded back then “these aren’t the ‘droids we’re looking for, let’s move along.”

One of the mainstream media’s false leftist narratives that attempts to explain why their Witch Doctor candidate Hillary Clinton did not win the election is that the ignorant Americans who live in “Flyover Country” outside the enlightened coastal cities were just too stupid to appreciate her sublime virtues. They were too dumb to understand her Witch Doctor’s slick facility with slippery language that won her debates partisan applause and high grades by the pundits, her wonkish mastery of infinitesimal policy details, and her astoundingly wise yet unfortunately exorbitant government solutions to all that ailed America. These people were simpletons and hate-filled deplorables on the wrong side of history whose limited intelligence did not allow them to appreciate the knowing sarcasm of the elect or the self-evident wisdom of The New Yorker. Their irredeemable racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia prevented them from helping her break the patriarchy’s glass ceiling and anointing her as the first woman President of the United States. This narrative allows the leftist elitists, possessors of Ivy League degrees who only associate with selfsame elitists in the coastal cities and in the Washington, D.C. Beltway and in the ivory towers of academia, to snobbishly look down their noses at the benighted masses who elected Donald Trump and to berate them for being the dumb oxen that they supposedly are.

A second but related false narrative of the elitists is slightly more charitable to the masses. They believe that the masses may not all be congenitally and irretrievably stupid, but that they are often misled by the right-wing propaganda of the alternative media. Up until the late 1980s, during the golden age of the mainstream media, the American people were entirely beholden to and dependent upon the fluff news and information spoon-fed to them by liberal pundits in newspapers, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, magazines such as Time and Newsweek, and the sensible-sounding anchors of television networks ABC, CBS, and NBC and similar purveyors. The rise of conservative talk radio and Rush Limbaugh in the late 1980s broke the monopoly of the mainstream media. This stranglehold was further loosened considerably in the past two decades by the advent of the Internet in the mid 1990s, the Fox News Channel, and alternative conservative and libertarian sources of information like The Drudge Report, Breitbart, InfoWars, and the like.

The elitists and their mainstream media allies now seek to capitalize on the liberal sense of electoral loss, outraged grievances, and histrionic gnashing of teeth to regain their exclusive monopoly on information and to herd the mass of sheeple back into the leftist information pen. To this end, they now accuse every source of information other than themselves as the purveyors of “fake news” and demand to appoint themselves as the protectors of the masses, the valiant arbiters and gatekeepers of “Truth in Information”. They want to police and cleanse Facebook and Yahoo! and every other information gateway not controlled by themselves of any “false” and “hateful” speech that does not fully comport with the diktats of Northern California’s and San Francisco Bay Area’s political correctness.

Closely related yet is a third false narrative that Hillary Clinton’s defeat was caused by the hacking efforts and the meddling of evil foreign powers like Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This false narrative hopes to tap into cold war and anti-Russian sentiments and erect against Donald Trump a bipartisan coalition of establishment Republicans and Never-Trumper neoconservatives who want some media adulation. In reality, there is absolutely no proof whatsoever that Russian hackers managed to hack into the election machines or the vote-tabulating computers and actually caused the votes to be altered or miscounted. On the contrary, several recounts in the mid-western and northern states that were narrowly carried by Donald Trump, initiated by third-party candidate Jill Stein, confirmed the fundamental integrity of the votes cast there.

The hypocritical outrage directed at Russia and its supposed interference with the election is nothing short of laughable. Since the late 1940s and throughout the cold war, the United States broadcast anti-communist news, information, and pro-freedom propaganda into the Soviet Union via its Radio Liberty station. Likewise, Radio Free Europe provided similar news, information, and propaganda to Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain. Similarly, beginning in the mid 1980s and continuing until today, Radio Martí has been trying to win the hearts and minds of Cubans under the dictatorial regime of Fidel Castro with freedom-loving propaganda. The United States’ broadcasts were intended to and very clearly did interfere with the internal politics and affairs of the Soviet Union and its communist allies by criticizing these communist regimes. Turnabout is fair play and the elites and their mainstream media allies have no basis for grievances against Russia for doing the same to America and transmitting via the Internet pro-liberty propaganda that criticized the anti-freedom administration of Barack Obama and his chosen successor Hillary Clinton.

Now, concerning motivation, even if the NSA, CIA, and FBI do manage to produce incontrovertible evidence that Vladimir Putin and his administration wanted Donald Trump as President, what of it? Suppose Vladimir Putin toasted Donald Trump’s victory with a round of Russian Vodka. Why not? As Secretary of State in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton created some conflicts and escalated others with Russia. Without judging the specific merits of the Obama administration’s policies toward Russia, Vladimir Putin and Russia subjectively preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton, especially in light of Clinton’s world interventionist sentiments and her anti-Russian rhetoric. So did the democratic State of Israel, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his center-right coalition, who also had a preference for a more conservative American President like Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton and her continuation of President Obama’s disastrous Middle East policies. Other countries in the Middle East like Egypt also preferred Trump to Clinton, especially since she, as Secretary of State in the Obama administration, had attempted regime change in Egypt during the “Arab Spring” and participated in the ouster of long-time president Hosni Mubarak in favor of a president from the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, who was, in turn, deposed by a military coup. A strong preference for Donald Trump as the American President is not evidence of guilt. This is not even sufficient circumstantial evidence that would hold up in small claims court.

Let us even assume for the sake of the argument that Vladimir Putin actually went well beyond propaganda and cheer leading for Donald Trump in Russian media like Russia Today. Let us further suppose for a moment that the NSA possesses indisputable evidence — and none exists — that he actually ordered Russian hackers to infiltrate the Democratic National Committee’s computers and to hack into Clinton confidante John Podesta’s e-mail and to leak the damaging information to WikiLeaks in order to torpedo Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. If the Internet had existed during the cold war and America had the opportunity to do the same hacking to Communist Russia in order to undermine Russian Premiers like Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, or Mikhail Gorbachev and to support the more pro-freedom candidate, there is no doubt that America would have gladly done so. Why not Russia?

The American people had to be educated and reminded of the truth. As recounted in previous opinion pieces in The Cassandra Times, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s quarter of a century in Washington, D.C. have brought the United States to the brink of political and economic irrelevancy. They have failed the country in the post-cold war era and proved their cowardice in the face of Islamic terror by not confronting Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda when they were weak in the mid 1990s and, later, in their acquiescence to the creation of the Islamic State. They have sold America’s manufacturing base and entire economy down the river to China and Mexico. They have coddled Communist China and assisted it in its hundred-year marathon to overtake the west and transform itself from a fifth-rate economy to a belligerent world leader. Had Hillary Clinton been elected President of the United States, our country would have been permanently relegated to a third-world kleptocracy with the rampant corruption of Brazil wedded to the downward economic death spiral of Venezuela.

Even if the accusations are true that Russia interfered with the election to prevent the ascent of Hillary Clinton, the American people would owe Putin, the Russian hackers, and WikiLeaks a huge debt of gratitude, not enmity. Whoever revealed to WikiLeaks the elitism and corruption of Witch Doctor Hillary Clinton, whether a conscientious whistleblower like Edward Snowden inside the American government or Russian hackers at the command of Vladimir Putin, a great service was done to the American people. The lapdog mainstream media had almost succeeded in hypnotizing America that Hillary Clinton was the inevitable 45th President. WikiLeaks exposed to the American people the truthful internal communications of the elite Witch Doctors, their utter contempt for the benighted masses and even for their own constituents. The WikiLeaks e-mails proved the shocking corruption at the heart of the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation and its shameless trading of access and government deals in return for hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign contributions to the Foundation’s coffers. The American people then understood exactly why Hillary Clinton exempted herself from using the official and secured government e-mail system to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests and public scrutiny. Her decision to set up a private e-mail server in her basement was correctly understood by the people not to be the innocent mistake of a technologically-illiterate grandmother, but a racketeering scheme of a member of the rich and powerful Witch Doctor elite to sell influence with impunity. Her wiping of her e-mail server with BleachBit and not “with a cloth or something” was properly interpreted by them as a purposeful destruction of evidence of the conspiracy.

If America only had a properly-functioning Fourth Estate and a mainstream media, that exposed to sunlight and public scrutiny the scandals, shady dealings, abuses of powers, and inner secrets of leftist elites like Hillary Clinton who seek to maintain their hegemonic hold on America, WikiLeaks and possible Russian propaganda would not have been necessary to educate the American public. These alternative sources are needed precisely because the mainstream media has failed the people by becoming servants and lapdogs of the elites.

The Ron Paul Liberty Report  has well served Americans by compiling a list of mainstream journalists who were revealed by WikiLeaks to have only pretended to be impartial, but who secretly coordinated with and took their marching orders from Hillary Clinton’s campaign:

Cecilia Vega, David Muir, Diane Sawyer, George Stephanopolous, Jon Karl – ABC

John Heillman, Mark Halperin – Bloomberg

Norah O’Donnell, Vicki Gordon – CBS

John Harwood – CNBC

Brianna Keilar, David Chalian, Gloria Borger, Jeff Zeleny, John Berman, Kate Bouldan, Mark Preston, Sam Feist, Wolf Blitzer – CNN

Jackie Kucinich – Daily Beast

Whitney Snyder – Huffington Post

Betsy Fisher Martin – MORE

Alex Wagner, Beth Fouhy, Chuck Todd, Phil Griffin, Rachel Maddow, Rachel Racusen – MSNBC

Savannah Guthrie – NBC

Jamil Smith – New Republic

Amy Chozik, Gail Collins, Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman, Mark Leibovich, Pat Healey – New York Times

Ryan Lizza – New Yorker

Sandra Sobieraj Westfall – People

Glenn Thrush, Kenneth Vogel, Mike Allen – Politico

Jessica Valenti, Monisha Rajesh, Sady Doyle – The Guardian

Brent Budowsky – The Hill

Alyssa Mastramonoco – Vice

Jon Allen – Vox

Karen Tumulty – Washington Post

(http://bit.ly/2fg8ZvZ)

At worst, like The New York Times‘ Moscow reporter and Stalinist-era apologist Walter Duranty, these and other members of the mainstream media have become politicized and true-believer acolytes of leftist administrations and are the willing disseminators of its falsities. They are accomplices and accessories after the fact to their illegalities.

At best, they are in the words of Vladimir Lenin, “useful idiots” who unknowingly and stupidly push the elites’ agenda and are played by elites like musical instruments. This alternate theory may receive some small support from Ben Rhodes, the Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications for President Obama, who sold the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran and who admitted the elites’ secret in a moment of unguarded candor to the New York Times Magazine:

Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

In this environment, Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them — ”

“I can name them,” I said, ticking off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House messaging.

Price laughed. “I’ll say, ‘Hey, look, some people are spinning this narrative that this is a sign of American weakness,’ ” he continued, “but — ”

“In fact it’s a sign of strength!” I said, chuckling.

“And I’ll give them some color,” Price continued, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”

(http://nyti.ms/1QU31sd)

This article makes clear that, in stark contrast to previous generations of journalists “where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power, it was much harder to sustain a ‘narrative’ over any serious period of time”, Ben Rhodes proudly revealed that “We created an echo chamber. They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say”.

Unsurprisingly, the same ventriloquist’s dummies who masquerade as journalists have happily parroted two self-contradictory narratives to shield Hillary Clinton from suffering the inevitable consequences of her congenital deceit. From one side of their wooden mouths, they constantly assured the public that Hillary Clinton had no ill intent and did not cause any damage to national security despite setting up her unsecured home-brew e-mail server, removing classified materials from government servers, and communicating them through her unsecured e-mail to members of her inner circle — including to her house maid with instructions to print them out, when the latter had no security clearance. Somehow, Hillary Clinton’s decision caused “no harm, no foul” and did not compromise national security because there supposedly was no proof that any dastardly hackers had broken into her server and purloined the classified information. On the other side of their wooden mouths, they now shriek that “the sky is falling” and an existential danger exists to democracy as we know it because the dastardly Russian hackers stole the election from their heroine by penetrating the e-mails of John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee and compromising their closely-guarded secrets. So the Russians are somehow dastardly and capable enough to sway national elections, but not dastardly and capable enough to break into Hillary Clinton’s unsecured server, read her e-mails, and swipe the top secrets contained in them.

Conveniently lost in the talking heads’ apologias for Hillary Clinton’s self-induced poor decisions and scandals are the undeniable truths revealed by WikiLeaks. Essentially, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was a de facto wing of the Clinton Foundation, which was trading access, political favors, government exemptions, and government contracts to the highest bidders in return for hundreds of millions in graft. The Clinton Foundation executed a professional scheme of bribery, influence-peddling, and corruption that literally dwarfs the 1980 ABSCAM scandal. Thirty-five years ago, in the more honest years of the early 1980s, a sitting Democratic Senator Harrison A. Williams (D-NJ) and six Congress Representatives, Frank Thompson (D-NJ), John M. Murphy (D-NY), Raymond Lederer (D-Pa), Michael Meyers (D-Pa), John Jenrette (D-SC), and Richard Kelly (R-Fla), were each indicted, convicted, and served time in jail for bribery and conspiracy. In return for political favors, these ABSCAM politicians were videotaped in a sting operation accepting $50,000 to $100,000 in bribes from undercover FBI operatives who masqueraded as fake Arab sheiks. In contrast, the Clinton Foundation actually did receive many millions of dollars in bribes from real Arab sheiks from Saudi Arabia, the king of Morocco, Qatar, and others. The Clinton Foundation is the real deal ABSCAM corruption on a previously unimaginable scale.

Stella Morabito’s excellent November 21, 2016 article in The Federalist titled “How Journalism Turns Into Propaganda” (http://bit.ly/2fys5KK), which is respectfully reproduced below, is highly recommended and capably explains the symbiotic relationship that develops between journalists and the elected officials and elites that they cover. Eventually, the elites groom journalists as their favored lapdogs and ply them with morsels and delicacies. These journalists willingly abandon their faculties of objectivity and critical thinking to the allure of prestige and material comforts.

In summary, there can be no dispute that talk radio, the alternative media, WikiLeaks, and even Russian newspapers and television provided the American people with much better and more truthful coverage than the collaborationist mainstream media about matters of great public importance. These sources put the spotlight on the elites, revealed their hidden secrets, exposed the Democratic Party’s fixed nomination of Hillary Clinton over her opponent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, her massive pay-for-play corruption, and her endless lies and shameless obfuscations on matters big and small. They did the job that the mainstream media was supposed to do, to inform the American people which of the two candidates for President of the United States was more suitable to lead them for the next four years and who was a felonious grifter from Arkansas. They threw open the mainstream media’s curtains that concealed the hard truths about the mighty and powerful Hillary Clinton, the Witch Doctor of Oz. Now, with unmitigated gall, the lying, collaborationist mainstream media wants to appoint itself the institutional “fox in the hen house”, keeper of American Ministry of Truth, the arbiter and gatekeeper of “real news”, and to legally drive out of town truthful competitors of alternative media. The American people must say “no way!” at least out of gratitude for helping them dodge the Hillary Clinton bullet.

How Journalism Turns Into Propaganda

Stella Morabito

The Federalist

November 21, 2016

Real journalism is dangerous for elites, which is why we have so little of it.

“They’ve decided you’re to go into journalism. It’s a great honor. We have to strengthen the press. It’s full of bourgeoise elements and reactionaries. We don’t send just anyone there.”

—In the screenplay “Angi Vera,” newspaper editor and Communist Party hack Anna Trajan speaks to her young protégé, groomed to destroy anyone standing in the way of the party’s narrative.

The quote above, from an old foreign film, gives us a glimpse into how power elites seek to control the media and subvert objective journalism. I’ll elaborate on that below. But the high level of collusion we see today between Democrat power elites and the media goes back a long time. The collusion continues post-election, as the media gives lopsided coverage to angry anti-Trump protests organized by Moveon.org, which are stirring up calls for violence.

So it’s high time we analyze more closely the relationship between the media and power elites. To do that, we need to look at how and why elites conscript journalists, and why journalists can’t resist the bait. The enticements come as access, privilege, prestige, fame, influence, and very high salaries for those in the limelight.

Not all mainstream journalists are fallen, but those who resist bias tend not to be household names. For example, I highly recommend this superb post-mortem on the election by Will Rahn of CBS News. It is more introspective and insightful than anything else I’ve seen. In the end, we should remember that journalists’ weaknesses are simply human weaknesses. There are several reasons their level of prejudice has risen so high. But prime among them is how much our society has come to de-value the old ideals of virtue and honor.

Power Elites Will Always Recruit Messengers

An interesting study in corruption—and of journalism in particular—is the 1978 Hungarian film “Angi Vera,” which I quoted above. The setting is Stalinist Hungary in 1948, just after Soviet forces imposed a communist system there. The entire human infrastructure of the nation, including journalists, teachers, medical personnel, and factory foremen, is being replaced by people trained in education camps to comply with the Communist Party line. Politically incorrect administrators, officials, and thinkers are discredited and purged wherever they are found.

The movie superbly displays the predatory nature of one-party states. Its title character, an angelic-looking young nurse named Vera, is an orphan from a working-class family. She has a superb instinct for pushing all the right buttons and kissing up to all the right people in a system based on psychological manipulation. In the end, Vera earns herself a comfortable life as a well-connected elite journalist in a rigged system.

Vera’s brown-nosing and betrayals did cost her others’ trust. That upset her. For a while. But she kept her eyes on the prize, and in the end it’s clear she’ll get used to a life of material and social privileges in a society built on planned scarcity.

The film (which only recently came out on DVD, with English subtitles) is a little-known masterpiece. It may not be a direct study of the corruption of journalism. But it definitely serves as a window to the personal qualities—corruptibility, malleability, and conformity—that power elites look for when recruiting journalists, and rewarding them.

How Does Journalism Become Propaganda

Objective journalism is actually a very new idea. A fourth estate that serves as a back-up check against abuses of power doesn’t sit well with power-mongers. As the quote above attests, those in power always hope to prevent any perceived critic from having a voice. Those who believe in a fourth estate expect to have critics. But totalitarians find it compulsory to turn journalists into their propagandists.

Of course we often behave as though objective journalism is a given. I mean, what other kind is there, right? But, alas, the human species has a thing about power. No doubt, evolutionary psychology can explain a lot. Whatever the reason, that quest for power seems to be the default setting of Homo sapiens.

Central to this: all people would have access to objective information. That could only happen by prohibiting laws that abridge freedom of religion, speech, the press, and, perhaps most critically, freedom of association.

The whole idea was based on de-centralizing power: preventing too much power in the hands of too few people. In such a system, people could actually live in peace. They could trade freely, raise their families in peace, and build self-governing communities without meddling from the central state, the Leviathan.

In fact, all could prosper in a system that protects the natural right of every human being to express his beliefs, exchange his ideas, and have real conversations with others without being gagged. For centuries we considered the First Amendment a no-brainer. Yet today free speech is blatantly under attack on multiple fronts, in all of our institutions, especially in the very place where it was supposed to be most enshrined: the universities, where even the idea of having a conversation about having conversations is being shut down. What happened?

Back to the Default Setting

Somehow, large parts of our civil society have succumbed to that base but instinctive drive in people to lord it over others. That drive, as always, motivates those who tend to seek the reins of power. History is filled with unsavory characters determined to reset the universe so it revolves around them.

They have always—always—had major quibbles with the free flow of information. They view objective journalism as a bad joke, or in the words of Vera’s mentor above, a “bourgeois and reactionary” thing.

The point is that freedom of expression, when legally protected and practiced universally, stands in the way of their accumulation of power. So the first order of business for a power-monger is to break down free expression, to control the language. That’s a tall order when the public is well-informed. To combat a high-information public, community “organizers” have been hard at work pushing policies that cultivate ignorance, vulnerability, and scarcity.

As they march through the institutions of a society, these conditions produce a culture of confusion, dependence, fear, and resentment. Once power-mongers control all the outlets of communication—particularly the media, Hollywood, and academia—their propaganda can do its work. The work of propaganda is to condition people through political correctness to get with their program. This, in a word, means to promote the elites’ accumulation of power in perpetuity.

Journalism in the United States of America

Obviously, those whose job it is to report the news are never going to please everyone. That’s always been the case, and complaints of biased journalists have always been with us. But today’s journalism has an especially blatant disregard for objectivity, not to mention the old concept of honor. Precious few media outlets permit deviation from politically correct agitprop.

Pre-election there were copious examples wherein journalists colluded with the Democrat Party machine. WikiLeaks emails from Clinton operative John Podesta confirmed that the media lavished all kinds of special favors on the Clinton campaign. Democrat strategist and CNN commentator Donna Brazile fed interview questions in advance to Clinton’s campaign.

Undercover Project Veritas interviews exposed how Clinton operative Robert Creamer bragged about inciting violence at Trump rallies, operations that had the apparent consent of the Clinton campaign. None of this was investigated by the media. The mainstream media’s coverage imputed this violence to Trump supporters, while ignoring incidents of fire-bombing against Trump headquarters in North Carolina.

On other fronts as well, particularly in defense of Planned Parenthood, the media colluded with the powers that be. Media compliance with Clinton’s campaign turned the recent re-opening of the FBI investigation of her email server into a media investigation of FBI Director James Comey. (It worked, as Comey did a 180 with a second “exoneration” of Clinton.) Then there was the utter lack of media interest in looking at the Clinton Foundation’s highly questionable operations, including its money-laundering and pay-to-play schemes.

Of course, the list could go on and on and on. Today’s media is hopeless at independent reporting or thinking. Most people can see this. A recent USA Today poll revealed that people believe—by a 10 to 1 margin—that the media wanted Clinton to win the election. In a Suffolk University Boston poll asking 1,000 people what they thought was the primary threat to election integrity, 45.5 percent named the media, followed by 27 percent claiming it was the political establishment.

How Does a Journalist Get This Way?

Corruption on such a mass scale is most likely in a culture that rejects the idea that humans are by nature highly corruptible. This false assumption allows people to operate under the illusion that they are not susceptible to manipulation. That illusion provides optimal conditions for manipulation.

Again, as Communist Party operative Anna Trajan stated to her protégé Vera in “Angi Vera:” “You’re to go into journalism. It’s a great honor.” Indeed, journalists see great privilege in having access to purveyors of influence, and then enjoy their approval and continued access when affirming their narrative. This is especially true in a rigged system like communism, in which privilege is the only currency of value in a stagnant economy. The shameless pandering of our current cast of journalists proves our system is also not immune to this perverse symbiosis.

Political correctness is the job description of most journalists today. It aims to saturate the masses in the elite’s preferred narrative while suppressing any competing narrative. The idea is to make sure that only those willing to play this intimidation game get a piece of the power pie. In that way, the cronyism worms deeper into the system. There is no logical end point, as it can only keep feeding on itself and get more extreme and polarizing unless something from the outside manages to stop it in its tracks.

It’s plain old-fashioned hubris, dangerous and commonplace. So journalists get this way the same way anybody gets this way: through pride, through greed, and all of the other oh-so-quaint “seven deadly sins” that our elites would tell us do not exist. Left unchecked, these tendencies metastasize. If we allow ourselves to be unaware of the dangers of unchecked pride and greed—or for that matter envy, anger, sloth, lust, and gluttony in all their forms—we fall. That’s a law of human nature, just as gravity is a law of physics.

No One Checks the Checkers

Why do people even go into journalism? Is it because they really want to report the news? Is it because they have natural curiosity and—like cub reporters of old—want to sniff out a story and really report what happened no matter whose goose may get cooked in the telling?

Not so much anymore. I would guess most now do so for the prestige, and if they have a sense of purpose it is to change the world, to be heroes as so many “social justice warriors” like to see themselves. They are already pre-disposed to a narrative that matches up with the “social justice” power agenda of elites who run the show.

Anyone who tries to report objectively won’t make it through the meat grinder of political correctness and the filters they must penetrate. This drives any hint of independent thought out of journalists who may have been inclined towards independent reporting.

Now combine a lapdog mentality in the media with elites who have a problem with freedom of information because it levels the playing field. Freedom of information results in the most equal distribution of power possible. Well, that can’t be good for power elites intent to keep and exercise power, right? So wherever power elites regulate the flow of information, you’re only going to get propaganda instead of hard news.

The News as 24/7 Thought Reform for the Masses

What do you see when you tune into any of the networks today? Or social media, which is shamelessly in the pocket of the Democrat Party? For the most part, it is cherry-picked “news” that gets re-hashed and re-cycled ad nauseam based on the agendas of the political elites who have enlisted journalists as their messengers.