Brazen Lying Is Media’s Latest Escalation In Campaign Against Trump (2025)

As if orders went out from a central director, nearly every major media outlet flat-out lied about President Trump's speech.

By Mollie Hemingway, JULY 10, 2020

When Sen. Bob Dole accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1996, his speech hit on the themes of “honor, decency and straight talk.” He proudly mentioned the great Republican Abraham Lincoln and explicitly denounced racism.

“The Republican Party is broad and inclusive. It represents many streams of opinion and many points of view. But if there’s anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion, then let me remind you — tonight this hall belongs to the party of Lincoln. And the exits, which are clearly marked, are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise,” Dole said.

The speech was held up in 2016 as an example of how wonderful Republican candidates for president used to be before Donald Trump. So it’s interesting to also look back at how this speech was received by its critics. For example, then-Senior White House Adviser George Stephanopoulos called it “partisan, negative and divisive.”

Fast-forward 24 years to the present. Once again a prominent Republican gives a speech with themes of honor and decency and straight talk. Once again the prominent Republican explicitly and repeatedly denounces racism. The Republican praises Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, the Wright Brothers, the Tuskegee Airmen, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Jesse Owens, George Patton, Louie Armstrong, Alan Shepard, Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Irving Berlin, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Hope.

And once again critics claim that the speech is “dark and divisive.”

But this time the commentary and narrative-shaping pushback that used to be left to Democratic activists such as George Stephanopoulos are now handled by corporate media activists like, well, George Stephanopoulos. OK, maybe it’s not such a significant difference after all. But it’s still noteworthy that the corporate media activists are doing what used to be left to official party activists.

The “dark and divisive” line above came from The New York Times, in what was falsely presented as a “news” report on the speech. The Washington Post’s Robert Costa and Philip Rucker claimed in a screed bizarrely not labeled as opinion, “Trump’s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him.”

Stephanopoulos hosts “This Week,” a Sunday show on ABC. He was out on Independence Day weekend, so his co-host Martha Raddatz filled in. She opined that Trump had delivered “anything but a message of unity” and a “very grim message for America.” Raddatz further shared her anti-Trump campaign narrative: “This speech was not the only time in the past few weeks the president has seemed eager to turn the attention back to the issues of race in this country, how does he expected to get re-elected with a message like that?”

It may seem quaint to do so in this day and age of fact-free opinion, but let’s look at the actual words of the Trump speech that Raddatz claimed was grim and racist:

We believe in equal opportunity, equal justice, and equal treatment for citizens of every race, background, religion, and creed. Every child, of every color — born and unborn — is made in the holy image of God. (Applause.)

We want free and open debate, not speech codes and cancel culture.

We embrace tolerance, not prejudice.

In order for Raddatz to run her political campaign against Trump, she had to repeatedly lie about the content of his speech.

People who actually paid attention to the content of the speech said it was evocative of Lincoln’s First inaugural, a “kindred invitation to unity in the midst of conflict.”

As if orders went out from a central director, nearly every major media outlet flat-out lied about Trump’s speech. Whether they were engaged in reflexive “political advisor” mode like the Stephanopoulos of old, whether they had pre-drafted their reports based on dubious theories about what would be in the speech, or whether they simply decided that the best way to counter an effective political message was to simply lie about it, lie about it they did.

Robert Costa and Philip Rucker opined in a piece falsely labeled as “news” that Trump gave “a dystopian speech in which he excoriated racial justice protesters,” and that this was a continuation of Trump’s “race baiting and, at times, outright racism.”

Washington Examiner reporter Byron York noted “To the Post, apparently, tearing down statues, or threatening to tear down statues, of George Washington, not to mention Jefferson, Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and others, is ‘racial justice protest.'”

As Ben Domenech wrote, “Keep in mind, this is a ‘news’ piece. But even as a statement of opinion, it is false from the first sentence. No Confederates were mentioned once in Trump’s speech, and his defense was an educational dive into the nobility and honor of the men on the mountain behind him – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt – as well as an Americana-drenched defense of the nation and the great heroes and heroines it has produced of all races throughout her history.”

He noted that the lies told by Costa and Rucker, and published in the Washington Post, were indistinguishable from the lies told by Democrat Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who claimed that Trump’s discussion of American heroes and Founding Fathers was time spent “talking about dead traitors.”

The New York Times, ABC News, the Washington Post, and many other outlets made a decision to lie about their political opponent Donald Trump in service of partisan gain.

This is an escalation by the media in their war against Trump, and one that does not bode well for the republic. You might say that they have always lied about their political opponents, and there is significant truth to that.

But even with their despicable anti-Brett Kavanaugh and Russia collusion hoax campaigns, they endeavored to tie their partisan activism to some fig leaf of news. Their behavior may have been despicable in how they handled unsubstantiated claims from Christine Blasey Ford or anonymous and politically motivated leakers, but those claims and leaks at least occurred. In this case, the media invented facts to defame conservatives and the president.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/10/bra...-against-trump/

The day will come when these dissimulators will find out to their dismay the American people are not as dumb as they think we are.

"You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desires...When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies."

The future of our Republic depends on you being right Cincinnatus! We are currently into scary and very dangerous territory! The media is actively acting as the agent of the State and it's trying to control what we think but also what we will allow ourselves to see!!! Check out this article from June 2019.

Seventy Years Later, It’s Still ‘1984’
By Matthew Feeney

In October 1947, Eric Blair—known today by his pen name George Orwell—wrote a letter to the co‐​owner of the Secker & Warburg publishing house. In that letter, Orwell noted that he was in the “last lap” of the rough draft of a novel, describing it as “a most dreadful mess.”

Orwell had sequestered himself on the Scottish island of Jura in order to finish the novel. He completed it the following year, having transformed his “most dreadful mess” into “1984,” one of the 20th century’s most important novels.

Published in 1949, the novel turns 70 this year. The anniversary provides an opportunity to reflect on its significance and its most valuable, but sometimes overlooked, lesson.

The main lesson of “1984” is not “persistent surveillance is bad,” or “authoritarian governments are dangerous.” These are true statements, but not the most important message.

“1984” is at its core a novel about language; how it can be used by governments to subjugate and obfuscate, and by citizens to resist oppression.

Orwell was a master of the English language and his legacy lives on through some of the words he created. Even those who haven’t read “1984” know some of its “newspeak.”

“1984” provides English speakers with a vocabulary to discuss surveillance, police states and authoritarianism, which includes terms such as “Big Brother,” “thought police,” “unperson” and “doublethink,” to name a few.

The authoritarian government of Orwell’s Oceania doesn’t merely punish dissent severely—it seeks to make even thinking about dissent impossible.

When Inner Party member O’Brien tortures “1984’s” protagonist, Winston Smith, he holds up his hand with four fingers extended and asks Smith how many fingers he sees. When Smith replies, “Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!” O’Brien inflicts excruciating pain on him.

After Smith finally claims to see five fingers, O’Brien emphasizes that saying “five” is not enough. “ No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four.”

Orwell’s own name inspired an adjective, “Orwellian,” which is widely used in modern political rhetoric, albeit often inappropriately. It’s usually our enemies who are acting Orwellian, and it’s a testament to Orwell’s talents that everyone seems to think “1984” is about their political opponents.

The political left sees plenty of Orwellian tendencies in the White House and the criminal justice system. The political right bemoans “thought police” on college campuses and social media companies turning users into “unpersons.”

But politicians can lie without being Orwellian, and a private company closing a social media account is nothing like a state murdering someone and eliminating them from history. Likewise, perceived academic conformity might be potentially stifling, but it’s hardly comparable to a conformity enforced by a police state that eliminates entire words from society.

Yet when U.S. government officials use terms such as “enhanced interrogation,” “alternative facts,” “collateral damage,” or “extremists,” they understand that what they’re describing is actually torture, lies, innocent civilian deaths, and political dissidents. They prefer it if others, especially the press, used and believed in Orwellian language that dehumanizes enemies of the government and makes their horrific violence sound tolerable or even justified.

We see far more nefarious and barbaric distortions of language abroad. According to reports by activists and researchers, the Chinese state has put about 1 million people, including many Uyghurs (a majority‐​Muslim ethnic group) in “re‐​education” camps. Reports reveal that the camps are hardly schools. They’re brutal indoctrination sites, with inmates forced to recite Communist Party propaganda and renounce Islam.

North Korea, the country that comes closest to embodying “1984,” has hampered its citizens’ abilities to think for themselves with a disheartening measure of success.

In her memoir, North Korean defector Yeonmi Park describes discovering the richness of South Korea’s vocabulary, noting: “When you have more words to describe the world, you increase your ability to think complex thoughts.”

It’s hardly surprising that when Park read Orwell’s classic allegorical novel “Animal Farm,” she felt as if Orwell knew where she was from.

Orwell was not a prophet, but he identified a necessary feature of any successful authoritarian government. To control you effectively, it can’t merely threaten death, imprisonment or torture. It’s not enough for it to ban books and religions.

As long as the state doesn’t dominate your consciousness, it’s under constant risk of overthrow.

We shouldn’t fear the U.S. turning into Orwell’s dystopian nightmare just yet.

But at a time when political dishonesty is rampant, we should remember “1984’s” most important lesson: The state can occupy your mind.

https://www.cato.org/publications/commen...vcaAlsmEALw_wcB

" . . . in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion and [the] opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower [are] spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process, which we call either ‘ideological subversion,’ or ‘active measures’—‘[?]’ in the language of the KGB—or ‘psychological warfare.’ What it basically means is, to change the perception of reality, of every American, to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the
interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country . . ."

" . . . They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible . . ."
Yuri Bezmenov 1984