Days of Reckoning

I am by no means a Phil Collins fan, but I find myself more and more frequently these days relating to the song In The Air Tonight. If I had to bet on it, I would wager that a majority of Americans can feel it coming too. Just today, a poll found that now a full 50 percent of the country distrust the Mueller probe. That same poll also found 52 percent distrust President Donald J. Trump’s denials of collusion; that number actually represents a new low for the president. More and more Americans are coming around to his side of things. So, yes, I can feel it; a reckoning is coming.

This has always been a battle of public perception. If you are a follower of my blog for any length of time, you know my position on the media and its now years-long gas-lighting campaign. But because we all collectively live within the media narratives that are constantly pumped out by our devices, televisions and radios we never really take the time to step back and analyze the bigger picture. Day to day the citizenry is driven mad with hysterical news coverage of every perceived shortcoming this president has while, at the same time, being inundated with conspiracy theories out of a Tom Clancy novel involving KGB control over all of D.C. political power. It would be entertaining if it was the plot of a film, but since it is our real lives it has the people of this nation on constant edge waiting for the shoe to drop.

I have a humble number of readers who have been with me from the beginnings of my writings here (mostly friends and family). This blog, despite my infrequent postings, is actually a space I am rather proud of. I have documented my own perspectives on a wide array of things like the Mueller appointment to PizzaGate. I was able to capture my transition from idealist democrat and Bernie or Bust supporter to my position now as a ‘Trump Republican’ and proud patriot. While, there are certainly statements and predictions chronicled on this space that didn’t pan out or were flat out wrong, I really think a lot of what I have written here in the past has proven to be correct in a broad sense. It is truly my hope that you, dear reader, take a moment to consider my intentions as a fellow American and fellow human being as you continue to read this posting. Perhaps, take the time to read some of my other content to understand that I am not making the following assertions out of partisan devotion, but rather I am telling you how I see the world. I am an informed citizen and I hope you understand we have more that unites than divides us.

The media is currently in its third year of Russian hysteria. Some readers may be old enough to remember the original McCarthy scare and how detrimental it was to the credibility of so many. Apparently, the power structures in Corporate American News Organizations have a short memory because they threw all caution to the wind ages ago and dove head first into the ‘Trump is a Russian asset hoax’ from day one. The initial response to those of you indoctrinated to believe the sitting president is owned by Vladimir Putin will be to say ‘Sal, we should wait for Mueller to finish his investigation. You don’t know what he may have found.’ That is not an unreasonable take, except remember what I said about being unable to separate ourselves from the constant barrage of news narratives to ask the broader questions?

Try to think back to the lead up to the 2016 election and the months immediately following. The beginning of the Trump Administration was rife with leaks. Former Obama era bureaucrats were running to every D.C. reporter with everything and anything they could to impugn Trump and his incoming administration, but what never leaked? Evidence supporting the theory of Trump winning the election with the help of Russia. Today the names Stzrok, Page and McCabe are all over every outlet, but before the Washington Post ever printed their names in their publications, people like me were talking about them in places like this because we knew their deeds were highly questionable. How could small-time internet sleuths out-report the biggest political journalists in the country on a story like this? It defies reason.

We also now know the FBI was leaking to the press thanks to their own testimony and that that strategy of leaking was by design. The FBI was sharing information with the press contained in Christopher Steele’s dossier in order to supplement that dossier when taking it to the FISA court. In other words, the highest levels of the Obama administration was actively spying on Carter Paige and by extension the entirety of Trump’s presidential campaign and yet YEARS LATER we have no evidence of any wrongdoing. All of this is outrageous. In spite of massive FBI and DOJ layoffs and available sworn (contradictory) testimony the majority of the press refuses to report on these aspects of the story. Perhaps it is out of incredible malice or bias or both. How many hours have networks like MSNBC, CNN , and CBS dedicated to the Steele dossier and the information it contains? Late night comedians joking nonstop about HOW OBVIOUS it is Trump is owned by a dictator of our nuclear rival. None of it is based on fact. Only suspicions of wrongdoing by tangentially related events and a network of fringe people. Don’t forget Carter Page is still a free man, I guess they shouldn’t have been spying on him after all.

Mueller’s indictments of Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and others are all hardly worth mentioning. None of the charges relate in any way to the core charges of collusion. The indictments of 13 Russian nationals who operated a ‘bot farm’ is, frankly, comical when you consider they spent less than $200k total in ads to ‘influence the election’ and no one has ever tried to suggest Trump had any knowledge or participated in any way. Meanwhile, Hillary spent a BILLION dollars to get elected and she got that money from places like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, oh and Russia. Is this how it is presented to you by our mainstream press? Of course not. So why should you listen to a nobody like me over the unending, megaphone blast of the near unison choir of corporate news? Well, for one, I have no reason to lie to you.

Consider the implications of a Mueller report that largely exonerates Trump. Ninety percent of coverage he has received since taking office (even before, actually) has been negative and all of it has been in the shadow of Russian Collusion. While I would safely assume most of that coverage is coming from honest journalists that truly believe the nonsense being peddled to them by their ‘well-connected sources,’ consider how many times over the last handful of years the media has been caught with egg on their face in their rush to paint Trump as a second-rate Bond villain. Even if you detest the man, a reasonable person would be willing to admit Trump’s America is not reflected adequately in daily news coverage. There seems to be a desire among Trump detractors to justify the constant and unrelenting negative news cycles by saying things like ‘Well, he deserves it’ or ‘I know it's true because he is Trump.’ Trump has become some sort of boogeyman amalgamation in the heads of his most ardent opponents and many of those people work in news. There is a reason journalists try an keep their biases out of their work. Confirmation bias is what happens when you believe things because they FEEL true. Reporters have been operating under that pretense all throughout the Trump era of American politics and it has lead to a more divided and strained America than ever before. This is an actual crisis.

At the highest levels, however, these outlets know what they are doing. From the very beginnings this has been a very real war. It has been a war for the minds of America and it does seem like now, Trump is gaining the upper hand. This was inevitable, of course, if you took the position of skepticism in the Trump, Russia narrative. All of the eggs of the political, news media and Hollywood elites rest in the basket of Robert Mueller’s investigation. How much credibility will they lose when the majority of the nation realizes the scope and scale of the lie? Who could survive a years-long campaign to undermine an entire presidential administration daily in every form of media? This was a brainwashing effort on a grand scale and it seems to have nearly succeeded. The goal was impeachment, but it will fall short. There will always be holdouts who will now forever associate the president with treason and Putin, but the real sedition came from the previous administration and its lackeys in the press. For our purposes of this post I am focused on the media’s role in this war on Donald Trump, but it was the actions of the previous DOJ and FBI that undermined our election and tried to thwart the will of the electorate. The implications of all this should be staggering to most Americans and as the tale continues to unravel, I believe it will be.

Lastly, I find it funny when the press talks about people who follow QAnon and disparages them and writes them off as conspiracy theorists. The mainstream press has just spent nearly three years perpetuating the largest conspiracy theory in American history and fails to recognize ample evidence that the QAnon posts and Donald Trump’s Twitter account are expressly linked. This is a war for public perception and traditional media have been thoroughly and resoundingly beaten by Donald Trump and an anonymous message board poster by the name of Qanon. Continue to trust the media or don’t. In the end it won’t matter. A reckoning is coming. We can all feel it. Now, it is a matter of when, not if. Until Trump is carted off by Mueller and his goons, I stand by every word I have just typed above proudly. What do you stand for?

God bless you and God bless our beautiful country. Follow me on Twitter.