6: Engaging the system

Getting off the couch to advocate for truth

If you've read my posts up until now, I'm at a point in my journey where it was clear to many of us that the media was being weaponized by the Democratic Party. The blade has two sides: First, news stories are concocted and coordinated with the needs of the party, whether or not there was any truth. Second, censor anyone who dares offer a point of view that is different from the agreed-upon narrative.

Here's a point that my liberal friends and family don't understand. We all are exposed to the corporate media. We know what we are being told to think. For most people who are still of the belief that what the media says is true, they stop there. 100% or so of their opinions are shaped by the messaging of the media. But. When it is obvious that the media is lying, misleading, and censoring on a topic, those of us who see right through it look to independent media.

There are fantastic investigative journalists, news media, and NGO's who do the job the corporate media used to do. They would show up at hospitals to show that there was NOT a full ER of covid patients. They would seek out alternative voices, such as experienced doctors, reputable medical professionals who would tell the truth about different treatments. Some organizations fight the government with FOIA requests (Freedom of Information Act). It is not hard to find this information once one decides they need to look for it, but it's certainly not found in corporate media.

The end result of this phenomenon is that conservatives who go through this effort end up knowing both sides of any story, have seen documented evidence of what is true, and thus end up well educated. One learns to distrust not just corporate media, but any source that doesn't have "source" material, like an actual document, text message, whatever, to back up what they say. So it's comical (although tragically so) when my liberal friends and family, having done zero actual research on any topic of discussion, begin to tell me that I'm a conspiracy theorist, or that I'm crazy for not believing the media. This is the mass formation psychosis thrust upon the American populace. It has become impossible to have a reasonable discussion about data or truth with many liberals.

Trump so completely destroyed and threatened the monopoly position of elected R's and D's that they needed to fight back with impeachment. A secret room in the basement of the congressional office building? No live witness testimony? Adam Schiff blatantly making up his version of a phone call that Trump supposedly made? Who thinks Trump talks like that? I'll tell you who - people who have literally lost the ability to think for themselves. Our country unfortunately has many people who exist in this fog. And Washington knows it, which is why they get away with stealing so much of our wealth and playing their geopolitical games.

Up until this point, I had never contributed a dime to a candidate (nothing significant that I can recall, anyway). I had not attended a political rally, nor been to a Trump speech. I decided to engage in the 2020 campaign, although still in my introverted, private style of course. I was in Springfield, IL, protesting the lockdowns in spring 2020.

As a personal side note, the lockdowns were announced mid-March. This is spring break time. Well, in addition to my primary residence, I have a Gulf Beach vacation condo at a resort in Florida. It is rented out to vacationers throughout the year (except when I go there), and the resort handles all bookings. The resort had to cancel all vacation bookings. As an owner, I can still of course go to my condo. So, my wife, my daughter and I went to Florida and had an almost empty resort to enjoy! Every few days we would see some shops close up, and restaurants were restricting hours. After about 11 days or so, it was getting a little grim, so we decided to come back home. It ended up being a most memorable experience for us.

Later that summer, I attended two events for the "Walk Away" movement to show support. This is a movement started by former Democrat Brandon Straka to support people on the left who were growing more uncomfortable with the media's messaging and the Democratic party. He had videos and rallies throughout 2020. I went to Baltimore for one, and Chicago for another. It was clear that movement was growing. Brandon himself would be arrested for being in the area of the Capitol on Jan 6.

I also attended local Republican Party meetings to meet candidates and learn about local leadership. I contributed to state campaign coffers, as well as to the Trump campaign. I sent a rather large (for me) contribution to the campaign to attend a speech in Wisconsin and meet candidates in a special area. It turns out I could not go, so I had willing substitutes take my place.

The polls were horrifically wrong in 2016. It didn't seem like there was any serious reckoning amongst the polling community. In fact, during 2020, there was a deliberate effort to sway the turnout through polls. See, the assumptions behind the poll are important. As a statistician, I understand the importance of aligning actual responders to a distribution of the population, like age, income, geography, prior political affiliation, etc. The respondents are given a weight (like 1.6346, or 0.341). As Tom Petty might say, "The weighting is the hardest part." In presidential polls, there is weighting based on party affiliation. Here's the thing: how do you know what weight to use? You can make a sample that is D+5 based on some historical artifact, but the truth is it is highly subjective, and in many cases the polls have been shown to force a high D weighting in their methodology. This, of course, sways the results. Pre-determined weights based on something highly correlated with what you are measuring is a recipe for deception. The entire industry should be "re-imagined".

We all saw the changes to voting laws. At the time, I wondered why emergency powers could be used for the purpose of usurping the state legislative responsibilities to choose the "manner of elections". In many cases, legislatures were bypassed altogether, and the Attorney General would allow mail-in voting (where everyone gets a ballot mailed to them, whether requested or not). What was more egregious were changes to the deadlines for receipt of mail-in ballots. Suppose that I agree that sending out ballots to every registered person made sense (I do not), I disagree that voters are unable to get their ballots to an elections office in time. it insults their intelligence to suggest that a voter is unable, with 30 days notice prior to the election, to send a ballot back so that it arrives in time. I know our postal service prioritizes election and ballot mail, and it's easy enough to set a mail-in deadline of five days (or something) prior.

While I could state dozens of examples of media complicity with the Biden campaign and censorship, the cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop is the most important item at the close of the election. The New York Post reported that the FBI was investigating Hunter Biden's laptop as part of a money-laundering probe. They had direct evidence of subpoenas. There was "sufficient evidence to believe that there was criminal conduct". This is an unbelievably big deal. There were links to Ukraine, energy companies as well as Chinese officials, where it appeared that Hunter would make introductions to then-Vice-President Biden. If any of this is true, it would represent a clear national security issue, opening up a presidential candidate to blackmail and compromise.

The NY Post was blocked from Twitter, and no other news organization would report on this. Some days later, in fact, 50 intelligence officials (current or past) claimed that none of the claims are true, and that it was "Russian disinformation." The fascination of blaming Russia for everything is, well, interesting. I looked through the information, went to see what others were saying, and by all appearances, it looked true. The media is covering up a major national security issue that includes potentially criminal activity from the highest levels of our government. We The People were not given the opportunity to weigh the importance of this. People I talked to didn't know the first thing about the laptop. Our media is acting as an enemy of the people.