How The Liberal Media Destroyed Gary Johnson’s Candidacy And Gave Us Trump
It started with simple ignoring, a national silent treatment that gave very little media coverage of the issues and thus scarcely acknowledged the legitimate presidential campaign of Gary Johnson, who was proposing novel solutions to our most pressing problems and was the only third-party presidential candidate in 20 years to be included in all 50 state ballots, plus D.C. That last fact never dissipated throughout the nation because the major media outlets did not cover it. Some never even mentioned it.
It should be clear to everyone that the media does not act to inform. So what is its actual role?
People on the Left think the media are simply driven by profit and the headlines chosen by what will sell. They say this is why the media focused so much on Donald Trump, to the detriment of the Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton. But how much sense does this make?
How could the media, first of all, know what headlines will be more profitable in an ever changing news cycle, and whose role is it to constantly monitor the money making potential of the news? And if Trump headlines sold more newspapers than Clinton headlines, shouldn’t that have been a clue about the level of popularity of the candidates?
But the real fallacy of the argument that the media are only profit-driven and that is why they are so inept at providing clear unfiltered, unbiased information is that inconvenient truth that the Democrats WANTED to keep Hillary Clinton away from public scrutiny and away from the headlines. The Democrats worked hard to limit media access to Clinton, who did not give press conferences, did not answer questions from reporters and only allowed the media to cover staged and rehearsed performances. The Democrats wanted to limit Hillary Clinton’s exposure, even going as far as scheduling presidential debates on big sporting event nights and frequently disappearing from the campaign trail.
Why? Because Hillary Clinton does not poll well. When people get more exposure to her, her favorability numbers drop. But when people get a break from her actual doings, her actual speeches and incessant nodding, they like her better. And don’t forget that it was part of the Democrat strategy to LEGITIMIZE and PROMOTE through the media what they referred to as Republican “pied piper” candidates:
The Democrats wanted the media to focus on Donald Trump and his error-prone campaign to make Hillary Clinton look good in comparison. They wanted to win by default, by defining Hillary Clinton as the only “normal” running for president. They wanted to force a choice between their preferred candidate and a twisted pile of candidates that they portrayed as subhuman. The media was not acting as a profit making enterprise, they were acting as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.
Now doesn’t that make more sense, particularly in light of the absurd treatment of Gary Johnson who came into national attention — not as a successful re-elected governor who had built profitable businesses that employed thousands and had plans to address income inequality and a destabilized Middle East but — as a caricature of a dope drawn gleefully by none other than MSNBC, a fringe Leftist cable network.
If you learned anything about Gary Johnson at all from the mass media, it was that he, like all Democrat opponents, has some bizarre flaw, coincidentally manufactured and highlighted by the media with the sole intent of leading the public away from the issues that candidate may be addressing. This is how the Left tries to hold on to power. They use the power of the mass media to keep the public ignorant about political platforms by distracting the public with middle school level gossip and taunting of candidates.
An out of context geographical reference (What will you do about Aleppo?) by MSNBC was used to bury Gary Johnson’s anti-war stance under a massive re-branding in order to promote a Neo Con war supporter only because she was the Democratic party nominee. That fact should leave no doubt that the media bias is not ideological, is not about fighting for progressive or liberal causes, it’s about helping the Democratic party machine maintain power. Hillary Clinton is a Neo Con, who received support from all the major Neo Cons and who has voted for all the military interventions that have destabilized the world since Iraq, and the media took a bat to the knees of Gary Johnson, who was running on a non-interventionist platform that recognized the folly of the last twenty years of US military interventions, in order to help her.
Likewise, another strangely worded question, “name a foreign leader you admire” was propagated in the media without that last word, thus making it seem that when Gary Johnson said he couldn’t because he did not admire how any current world leader was running their country that it meant he did not know the names of any world leader.
Gary Johnson is a perfectly reasonable person, a moderate in every sense of the word who proposed that no massive burdens that threaten people’s livelihoods should be undertaken without very clear evidence in the fight against climate change. He acknowledged the reality of climate change and the very high likelihood that humans are responsible for it. And yet he was portrayed by the media as a loon by tying little bits of interviews together to ridicule him for supporting research into colonizing Mars and thus insinuate that he didn’t care about climate change, meanwhile at the same time, that same media praised Elon Musk and President Obama for saying the same thing.
Gary Johnson made his commitment to protecting the environment clear repeatedly. An avid outdoorsman who has climbed all the world’s major peaks and cycled 70 miles during the campaign was portrayed as a Scrooge McDuck who would lay waste to the environment for economic gain, never mind the truth of the life he has lived and his very simple argument in favor of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the need to have government act to protect the environment because individuals would be hopelessly overmatched against polluters.
This savaging of a presidential candidate through misinformation, through deception and promotion of half-truths and distortions should not be the handiwork of the mass media. This should not be in their toolkit. But there was Time magazine and CNN and all the rest joining in the selling to the public of the caricature of Gary Johnson that MSNBC created. But where were they when Hillary Clinton couldn’t identify Mosul?
Where were they when Hillary Clinton had nothing clear and definitive to say about the TPP or the Dakota pipeline or immigration or healthcare? In fact, everything that Hillary Clinton said was couched in meaningless nondescript word salads that could be interpreted any way you’d want with the caveat that she had a public and private position on everything. How anyone could vote for her is the real mystery. What were they voting for exactly? More Obama stagnation, more government excess and corruption, more drone wars that mutilate whole countries? What? Why did people vote for Hillary Clinton? The answer, quite simply: To stop Trump.
Hillary Clinton had nothing to offer, but Gary Johnson did, and yes, so did Donald Trump. The fascinating reality is that Hillary Clinton represents not the meritocracy that fair-minded people wish America to be, but the elitism that the core of the American way of life rejects. She is not the smart woman leader the media tried hard to portray. Almost everything of significance that she has put her energies into has failed miserably, whether it was Hillary Care during her husband’s presidency, or being the country’s top diplomat where she managed to offend American widows.
A true leader doesn’t repeatedly fail when given leadership positions. And that is the other issue, the fact that she was GIVEN these positions, everything from Senator to Secretary of State, because of her standing in the Democratic Party, not because she was actually qualified or prepared to undertake them. And what of her two failed presidential campaigns? Why, for example, couldn’t she have acknowledged the pain of police officers alongside victims of police brutality and invited members of both to the Democratic convention? What kind of leader picks one side of the country and calls the other side deplorable? Simplistic good vs evil descriptions of complicated multilevel problems is not helpful or productive. And where was she when the Democrats had two years to pass immigration reform and didn’t? She didn’t speak out against the mistreatment of immigrants until she needed to win Nevada during the primaries.
Hillary Clinton is not a leader; she has no sense of what that word means. She stood for nothing other than the safest platitudes about “fighting for” women and children.
And there is that elitism again. What kind of leader sees themselves as saviors of helpless blobs? That is not a leader, that is a self-aggrandizing elitist playing god, most clearly exemplified by a meme with a Dali Lama quote and Hillary Clinton’s face that said “the world will be saved by the Western woman.” How can you be educated and not see how racist and insulting that is? How is it that what an exiled leader of a small oppressed country may have said about “Western women” could be taken as anything other than the result of Western imperialism, the same hegemony that has little black girls everywhere believing that white skinned dolls with blonde hair are preferable to brown skinned dolls.
Playing to the white savior stereotype is paternalistic; it is not leadership. A leader is someone who can persuade a group of people they see as equals to solve problems, who can give them a plan and a way to help themselves. Guess who was able to do this in the 2016 election?
Hillary Clinton never even acknowledged that there were economic problems in the country because doing so would mean acknowledging that Democratic policies are sometimes exceedingly bad for large swaths of the population. That is not a leader, that is just a party hack whose priorities are so skewed that only utter annihilation at the voting booth can save the Republic from their jumbled kaleidoscopic understanding of real people problems.
Hillary Clinton never even defended capitalism against the bizarre attacks, literally by a communist sympathizer, that now has the Left spouting off against companies making too many products and giving consumers too many choices that can only be solved by making government bigger, increasing taxes on everyone, and regulating companies to death.
The best way to understand the phoniness of Hillary Clinton’s qualifications is to look at the promotion of elitism via the Ivy League as the standard of success and intelligence. It’s all really an attempt to be able to push the fallacy of argument from authority.
What matters to the Left is the illusion of superiority. What matters is the paper diplomas, never mind that most Harvard students, for example, spend very little time attending classes and elite professor like Steven Pinker excuse it as simply the way of the privileged who need to pursue their “extracurricular” activities, and never mind that these “students” are poorly qualified and utterly unprepared for the positions that, like Hillary Clinton, are GIVEN to them because of the same connections that got them accepted to the Ivy League in the first place. What matters to the Left is the appearance of intelligence and qualification, but artifices built on hot air eventually crumble.
Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama are the intelligent or educated powerhouses that the media portrays, nor are Democratic Party opponents the rubes and idiots they describe and constantly reinforce.
But the one set of talents a successful politician must possess, likability, persuasiveness and authenticity, Hillary Clinton quite bizarrely didn’t. In fact, it’s almost laughable how wooden and yes, shrill, Hillary Clinton was on the campaign trail. Nothing rang true, not the photo ops with kids, not the stump speeches, not the campaign slogans, not the excuses about the basement server or the undiagnosed pneumonia. How then was Hillary Clinton qualified? Was it because she was the beneficiary of millions of dollars given to the Clintons ala Marc Rich in exchange for government favors? This makes her qualified? Or is it the trips to visit her foundation’s donors while she was a government official ostensibly conducting government business? Or was it the draining of taxpayer money into the Clinton foundation coffers?
What business does someone who cannot connect with regular people have running for office in a democracy? Oh, that’s right. Hillary Clinton wasn’t running for president, she was waiting her turn, waiting for the media, the celebrities, the millionaires, the Democratic party hacks to hoist her into power.
The world of the elite liberals isn’t a meritocracy, it is a power sharing enterprise where cronyism rules and corruption is its currency.
Gary Johnson was the president our country needed: an experienced governor who balanced budgets, with another skilled governor as VP, who took the perspective of the individual with the aim of protecting civil rights against government suppression, ending perpetual military interventions and shrinking government to minimize pay-to-play corruption and overtaxation.
So why did the media support Hillary Clinton and Democratic party crookedness over an honest, humble man? Ultimately it was to maintain their elite status, their connections to power, their social importance and cultural relevance.
Donald Trump is the president the elite liberals deserve as comeuppance for their arrogance, for their underhanded dealings and for their betrayal of the American public with their slanted, slanderous “reporting” of the election. If anything could destroy this cabal, it’s the election of the one man besides Gary Johnson who most clearly knows what it’s like to be misrepresented in the press, but who can now speak directly to a world that is ready to listen without the elitist media’s interference.
Never forget that Trump winning the presidency came as a surprise. The Clinton campaign, the Leftist media, all believed that Donald Trump was the weakest of the Republican field. Not one of them seriously believed Trump had a real chance to win. They thought it was preposterous and they bet the country on it, putting it at risk of someone they believed was a madman. That is why they suffocated the other Republican candidates and gave them very little media coverage as well.
The media put the interests of the Democratic Party ahead of the country and gave Trump outsized coverage in order to make him the Republican frontrunner by ignoring the more moderate, more “acceptable,” better prepared presidential candidates who received something like .1% of Trump’s air time. It was the media through their level of coverage alone that guided who became the frontrunner because more coverage equals more importance in the consciousness of the public.
This was no coincidence. This was no unintended consequence. It was deliberate. They promoted Trump to kill the Republican Party and the more appealing candidates that could easily best Clinton. They promoted who they thought was the weakest, but the joke was on them because in their arrogance they could not appreciate that Hillary Clinton was weaker still. She was weaker than a candidate they sold to the public as a carnival barker. She was weaker than a candidate they sold as unhinged.
Hillary Clinton was a worse fate for the country to accept than someone the media portrayed as a clown, and the country chose to tie their fate to him and his big tent rather than Clinton and the Democrat’s funhouse mirrors of distortions and lies.
If the stranglehold that the Leftist have on mass media can be loosened by Donald Trump’s election, then his presidency on that alone will have been the most successful in modern American history, for it will allow our country to rise against tyranny and inherited power once again.
Do yourself and the country a favor next time the media portrays a candidate as an imbecile. Go to that candidate’s official website to find out what they are saying about issues because that is what the media wants you to ignore. When 30 second videos are coming out, don’t just take that as the truth, take it as a cue that you must find out more about that candidate’s proposals.
Be honest about the answer to this question: Did the way Gary Johnson was treated in the media serve the public?
Can anyone really say that the marginalization, the distortion, the attacks on Gary Johnson were for the benefit of the country? For those of us who believe in progressive causes and are socially liberal, wouldn’t Gary Johnson, a man who put himself out there as the only presidential candidate on all 50 state ballots calling for the end of the war on drugs and the end of mass incarceration, be preferable to Donald Trump?
For the Left, wouldn’t anyone actually be better than Trump? So honestly, why did the Leftist media prevent Gary Johnson’s candidacy from being seen as another alternative to Trump?
Again, it is because the media was not acting as a profit maker or an information provider, they were acting solely as the Democratic party’s propaganda arm — not liberal philosophy, not progressive ideology — just sheer power preservation of the Democratic Party. If the Leftist media actually cared about progressive causes, more attention would have been paid to the racial and economic disparity in the criminal justice system that the Democrats had a huge hand in implementing with, what do you know, Bill Clinton’s three strikes you’re out law, and which Gary Johnson vowed to end.
But the Leftist media doesn’t want the public to be well informed and vote according to issues and candidate proposals, they want the Democratic Party to be in power, and so we get bombarded ad nauseam with the message that Democratic party opponents are imbecilic or demonic, or in the case of the caricatures of Trump, both.
Why else would it be so hard for the Leftist media to acknowledge the progressive and honest government overtures Donald Trump has made, from supporting Planned Parenthood, to removing lobbyists from his transition team and cabinet, to refusing a salary, to softening his campaign rhetoric and embracing his critics, all of which he should have been praised for if the ultimate goal were the betterment of the country, but as we’ve seen, the mass media is not interested in ideas, or honest government, or serving the public, it just wants the Democrats to win, no matter who their standard bearer is, even if it is a candidate like Hillary Clinton who was largely distrusted, had a history of bad judgement, and was under FBI investigation.
But remember that it is the Democratic OPPONENTS who are supposed to be imbecilic and/or demonic, while the public was supposed to ignore Hillary Clinton’s real unfitness for the presidency, and listen only to the message that the Democrats are good and right always.
The Left’s control of the means of communication (media, movies, myths) is tyranny and it has to be stopped.
How is it ok that nearly all mainstream newspapers, television networks, movie studios, and social media platforms have a liberal left wing bias that often works in tandem with the Democratic Party’s agenda? When Bush was president the networks would end their newscasts by reading the names of the soldiers that died that day; the Vietnam war protests were generated because the media showed the horrors of American military intervention on television. But thanks to the collusion between the media and Democrats, the American public is kept largely ignorant of the realities of American wars, particularly when they don’t paint the Democrats in a good light.
Is it any wonder that Fox News and the handful of conservative leaning radio and magazines rose up in opposition? And in true authoritarian fashion Liberals rail against this relatively small vocal minority and call for its silencing, so offended are they that they cannot control 100% of the message. So who really are the baddies? Who uses their dominance to attack political opponents and push hysterical, unbalanced stories that are so clearly meant to help the Democrats maintain power?
How could a fair-minded person agree that it is correct and just that most mass media, which incidentally is mostly taught at Left-leaning universities, shares the same slant?
Does this really sound like America or an authoritarian state?
The mistake is in confounding the Democratic Party with Liberal / Progressive ideology. The Democratic Party is primarily a vessel to help party insiders gain power and the privileges that it entails. They use popular, poll tested, social stances literally as cover for policies that actually hurt the poor and vulnerable most. The Democrats are wolves in socially progressive sheep’s clothing and the media assisting them do a disservice to the country.
There are other parties, the Green and Libertarian, that are socially progressive, sometimes more so than the Democratic Party, and there are individual Republican politicians who support progressive causes. So there is no honest reason for the mass media to portray Democrats as knights in shining armor and everyone else as goblins that must be vanquished and not allowed to participate in “decent” society.
Isn’t the only hope for peace in a multicultural country like ours to be able to live alongside people with whom we vehemently disagree? Bulldozing over other people’s beliefs and traditions is never going to be a solution. That is just madness, and one that has been repeatedly tried throughout history with the same catastrophic horrors as the result.
So what game is the Democrat party supporting media playing? Sometimes it seems that they would rather see the country destroyed than let another party attempt to fix problems. Trump should be given a chance to govern and unite instead of being attacked for every move he makes. The media is looking for all the ways that they can negatively spin everything about President-elect Trump like a catty and jealous spurned ex.
No, someone waving a Trump sign or a Confederate flag is not hurting anyone, just like someone wearing a yarmulke or a hijab is not hurting anyone, nor is someone waving a Black Lives Matters banner or burning the American flag hurting anyone. These are all expressions of individuality and belief. This is what protecting the first amendment of the Constitution looks like.
Individuals feeling free and being free to voice their opinions and frustrations without fear of violence or suppression is the pluralistic society that we should strive to achieve, that is the promise of America. Their voices need to be represented and challenged though dialogue in the mass media. That is what peace looks like. Oppression, censorship, silencing, creating “safe spaces” in the public sphere are not conducive to a peaceful pluralistic society.
And make no mistake that it is the Left, the so called Progressive Liberals, who are standing in opposition of what is in practicality the only path to peace. It is the Left that wants to silence — completely silence — opposing view points under the guise that these ideas, these thoughts, these cultures, these religions are harmful or just plain “offensive”. And they are using mass media as a weapon to do so. Yes, there is a right-wing reactionary, sometimes inflammatory, response to this, but aren’t the Leftists the intelligentsia? Shouldn’t they use objective, evidence-based arguments instead of antagonizing via underhanded, mean-spirited and clearly dishonest methods those they politically oppose?
What is so hard about defending your policies through honest debate? What is so hard about living your life without demeaning other people’s heritage? What is so hard about living in the same country without imposing your ideology on others?
No one should have the right NOT to be offended, and everyone should have the duty to protect the rights of others to freely express themselves, even if they are offensive. That freedom of speech, that freedom of expression, is the only path that allows ALL people to Live Free together, and that is what the media should be and would be championing by giving non Democrat party presidential candidates and their platforms fair, balanced and unbiased coverage.
