Steering the Story

When I was a eleven or twelve, my brother and I spent a summer at our grandparents' house in Iowa.  Grandma was a skilled card player and we played many card games while there.  Grandma also had a magic trick.  You would select a card and place it in the deck and she would then ask you to select suits until you had only your suit left.  Then she would ask you to select card ranges until it finally narrowed down to YOUR CARD!  However, after a couple of times through, it became clear that she was really the one selecting.

Grandma: "Pick two suits."

Me: "Spades and diamonds."

Grandma: "That leaves you with Hearts and Clubs.  Pick one of those."

Me: "Clubs."

Grandma: "Among the clubs, pick face cards or numbers."

Me: "Face cards."

Grandma: "That leaves you with numbers.  Pick high or low numbers."

As you can see, Grandma either eliminated my selection or stuck with it, depending on what my card was.  She always steered me to my card.  The mainstream media does something similar.

BLM firebombs a police station in Minneapolis.

Media: Mostly peaceful protest

Tea Party protests tax and spend policies

Media: Intolerant racists hate black president

BLM blocks off part of Seattle and declares it the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ)

Media: Mostly peaceful protest.  Look! Someone has started farming!

Truckers protest mask & vaccine mandates in Canada by driving to Ottawa and honking horns

Media: Nazis!  Fascists!  Danger to democracy!

Antifa tosses firebombs in both Berkley and Portland, deface buildings, break windows

Media: Antifa are activists and protesters who oppose Trump's fascist agenda

Parents attending school board meetings demand removal of Critical Race Theory curriculum

Media: Domestic terrorists threaten teachers

After a while, it becomes clear that the media describes violent rioters who lean left as mostly peaceful and generally justified in their actions, though perhaps a bit overenthusiastic.  However, non-violent protesters who lean right are domestic terrorists and insurrectionists.  These wrongheaded radicals need to feel the full force of the law and be denounced at every opportunity.  The media selects the adjectives and positive or negative coverage based more on the politics of the 'protesters' rather than the actions.

Mount Rushmore Speech

Headlines declare that President Trump gave a dark and divisive speech that amounted to a culture war bonfire.  Whoa!  Well, I'm going to have to see this speech!

In the speech, Trump honored the presidents represented on Mount Rushmore.  He offered a brief biography of each and why he is honored.  He also proposed a new monument, a Garden of American Heroes that would host many statues of great Americans.  Gee, that sounds cool.  On the other hand, he denounced those who were tearing down or defacing statues across the country.  He announced the arrest of a ringleader who tried to pull down Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square.  He proposed that this was a cultural revolution and that the vandals want to overthrow America.  He also observed that the vandalism was taking place in localities governed by Democrats.  Ah, there's the divisive line.

Trump also hits on the ongoing defamation of America in the school system, something I have brought up in numerous blogs.  The good is minimized and the bad is highlighted.  Kids are taught to loath their country rather than love it.  The only way to view the speech as divisive is to view the vandals and their supporters as equal to those opposed to vandalism.  There is no reason to respect vandals who clearly hate the country and are unwilling to use the democratic processes available to them to change it.  The vandals have been clever.  By starting with Confederates who defended slavery, a considerable portion of the country was unwilling to speak against it.  Then they moved on to those who were slave owners.  It has progressed to where an abolitionist has been defaced and a statue of an elk was destroyed.  Whatever this movement claimed to be, it has gone off the rails.

"In the vicious culture war that is dividing our nation, President Trump has taken the side of the United States."

Scott Johnson, PowerLine

It's Not About Black Lives Anymore

In the wake of George Floyd's death, protests erupted against the mistreatment of blacks at the hands of police.  This protest quickly went nation-wide and transformed into riots and looting.  Then there was the push to tear down statues.  These pro-slavery statues had to go if we were to really demonstrate that black lives mattered.  Yes, they have a point.  But then Thomas Jefferson had to come down because he was a slave owner.  That becomes a bit murkier.  Then it was George Washington's turn because he too was a slave owner.  When Ulysses Grant, the man who forced General Lee to surrender and end the Civil War, gets torn down, it's not about black lives anymore.  It has since moved on to the removal of Theodore Roosevelt, the toppling of Father Junipero Serra, and even calls to remove an Abraham Lincoln statue that was funded by freed slaves.  There has even been a call to tear down Jesus because he is depicted as European.  The Black Lives Matter movement has been usurped by Antifa and twisted it into an anti-American movement.

Who else tries to erase the past by demolishing monuments and statues?  ISIS did that.  The Taliban used explosives to get rid of a 2,500 year old statue of Buddha.  Russia demolished thousands of churches to make way for the new religion of communism.  Government-run schools in the United States have already stopped teaching American history as anything other than a crime against humanity.  It is time to get rid of monuments to American history.  A clean slate will make it much easier to setup a new way of doing things.  Something more to the tastes of Antifa.

A hundred years ago, virtually every living person was racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist and it gets worse the further back you go.  It has been a very different world through the ages.  We've come a long way.  If every person who ever lived must meet today's moral standards, there will be no historical figures to celebrate.  How many of us living today will meet the standards of 2120?