Race war or bust? MSM smothers racial unity over police killing of Minneapolis man by reminding blacks & whites to hate each other
By Helen Buyniski | RT | May 27, 2020
The brutal police murder of an unarmed black man in Minneapolis united all races and political stripes in shocked outrage. So why is MSM invoking every racially-divisive incident they can to set society at each other’s throats?
Liberals and conservatives alike were horrified on Monday by a widely-circulated Facebook video showing a white police officer choking an unarmed, handcuffed black man to death by kneeling on his neck for upwards of seven minutes, ignoring his increasingly feeble cries for help until he went limp. Regardless of their race, viewers demanded the officer – Minneapolis Police Department’s Derek Chauvin – be charged with murder and cheered at the news he and three colleagues present during the Memorial Day incident had been suspended from the force.
Given the country’s oft-lamented polarization, it’s rare to see such broad agreement on something as controversial as a police killing. But the sight of George Floyd struggling to wheeze out “I can’t breathe” while Chauvin mocked the anguished cries of onlookers convinced many to put aside their ideological feuds and get outraged. Seeing the life slowly choked out of the 46-year-old for nothing more than allegedly “resisting arrest” over supposedly forging a check at a supermarket was beyond the pale.
Mainstream media’s narrative managers were determined to shatter that unity, however.
Thousands of protesters marched on Minneapolis’ third police precinct headquarters on Tuesday, carrying banners demanding justice for Floyd and his family. While a small group broke windows and sprayed graffiti en route, the riot-gear-clad cops met the entire racially-heterogeneous group as if it were an invading army, hurling stun grenades and firing rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd. At least one woman was shot in the head.
Journalists and politicians on social media reacted to this appalling show of excessive force not by unilaterally condemning police violence – that would risk cementing the dreaded “unity” – but by contrasting the crackdown with last month’s docile police response to a “Liberate Minnesota” protest against the state’s Covid-19 lockdown. Hundreds of mostly-white protesters, many strapped with guns, had surrounded the Governor’s Residence of Democrat Tim Walz, demanding an end to the pandemic-inspired stay-at-home order.
The anti-lockdown protesters were largely left alone by the cops, liberals complained, implying police refusal to meet the flag-waving “extremists” with a hail of rubber (or real!) bullets was due to racism rather than the firepower the anti-lockdown protesters were packing.
That the divisive narrative was fundamentally flawed – the Minneapolis crowd protesting Floyd’s murder was as white as it was black – didn’t matter. Nor was it deemed necessary to point out that the unarmed Minneapolis protesters were not a threat to the riot-gear-clad cops, who’d have had to be suicidal to fire rubber bullets into a crowd of AR-15-packing wannabe-militiamen the previous month. It was too late – the spell of unity had been broken, and the conversation had degenerated into bickering over the morality of property damage and whether molotov cocktails were justified in the face of murder.
American police’s legendary itchy trigger fingers may seem incompatible with the American people’s love of firearms. However, the cops’ choice of prey is instructive: police-involved shootings are much more common in cities with strict gun-control laws: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. The majority of US police departments – including members of the Minneapolis force – train in Israel, learning to shoot first and ask questions later while testing out their new skills on real live occupied Palestinians. This training follows them home, where too often poor black populations become the favored target. But the core psychology is that of a bully, unwilling to pick on someone their own size, armed with their own weapons.
The MSM narrative-managers poured it on thick in their effort to muddy the waters, dragging in months’ worth of racial controversies. Anything was fair game, as long as it could be used to guide conservatives and liberals, blacks and whites back to their proper positions at each other’s throats.
From the “Central Park Karen” who called the cops on a black man for asking her to put her dog on a leash, to Ahmaud Arbery, the young black man shot by a father-and-son team while jogging in Georgia, supposedly because they suspected him of a burglary, nothing was too off-topic.
The last thing the media establishment needs is for Americans to realize their country doesn’t have a race problem, so much as a class problem – and the media is on one side of the divide, encouraging those on the other side to fight among themselves for its amusement.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
Cuomo blames nursing homes for following his Covid-19 order that KILLED PATIENTS – after removing it from website
RT | May 27, 2020
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has stealthily attempted to rewrite history, deleting his controversial order requiring nursing homes to admit Covid-19 patients from the state health website and blaming facilities for obeying it.
After being lambasted in the press for the March 25 executive order that forced New York elder care facilities to accept patients infected with the highly contagious virus, Cuomo attempted to blame the nursing homes for not disobeying his orders during a Wednesday press conference.
“The obligation is on the nursing home to say, ‘I can’t take a Covid-positive person,’” the governor insisted. “If they said ‘I can’t take the person,’ they can’t take the person! So that’s how it works.”
The coronavirus has cut a devastating swath through New York’s nursing homes, killing more than 5,800 people in long-term care facilities since the pandemic began – nearly a fifth of the state’s Covid-19 deaths so far, according to AP statistics compiled on Thursday. The policy ultimately sent over 4,500 recovering coronavirus patients to nursing homes, which Cuomo himself called “the optimum feeding ground for this virus.”
But the executive order itself leaves little room for disobedience, reading (in underlined text, no less), “No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [Nursing Home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.” Elsewhere in the document, facilities are advised they “must comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals” so long as they’ve been deemed medically stable – no excuses allowed. Facilities aren’t even permitted to test incoming patients.
But that same order, titled “Advisory: Hospital Discharges and Admissions to Nursing Homes,” was apparently removed from the New York healthcare website early this month, according to Fox News, which discovered its absence on Tuesday. Unfortunately for Cuomo’s revisionism, it’s still available in the Wayback Machine. The governor issued a revised directive on May 10, barring hospitals from sending patients back to nursing homes unless they tested negative for the virus. However, his communications director denied the more recent order represented a “reversal” of the old one so much as “build[ing] on” it.
By Saturday, however, Cuomo was blaming the Trump administration for the ill-advised Covid-19 mandate, declaring New York was merely “following the president’s agencies’ guidance” and “follow[ing] what the Republican Administration said to do.” While the governor’s office claimed he was referring to a March directive from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, that order merely required nursing homes to “admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including… from hospitals where a case of Covid-19 was present” and even advised setting aside a unit to quarantine patients returning from hospitals – a safety measure notably missing from Cuomo’s executive order.
The New York governor’s handling of the nursing home situation has gotten decidedly mixed reviews, with a recent poll showing just 44 percent of state voters approve of the job he’s done managing the virus in state elder care facilities – while 48 percent give him a thumbs-down. Published Wednesday, the Siena College poll reveals a predictable partisan split, with 54 percent of Democrats approving of how he’s managed the nursing home problem as opposed to 55 percent of Republicans disapproving. Independents were the most vehement in their disdain, with 61 percent viewing his response negatively.
Cuomo’s overall approval ratings have also slipped since the early days of the pandemic, when he won over Democrats by taking an oppositional stance to President Donald Trump. Approval for his handling of the outbreak in general sits at 76 percent for May, down from 84 percent last month, while his overall job approval rating has slid to 63 percent from 71 percent in April.
Twitter & media know this isn’t about mail-in ballots or fraud, but about who gets to define truth; Trump does too
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | May 27, 2020
Twitter opened a new battlefront in the 2020 US election by ‘fact-checking’ posts by President Donald Trump to say he was wrong about voter fraud. That would normally be the end of the story – except nothing about this is normal.
On Tuesday, Twitter took the unprecedented step of posting a link under the two tweets – made by the president on his personal account – listing a bunch of mainstream media articles to assert that “fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud,” and therefore Trump’s opinion about the matter is factually wrong.
The move followed a campaign by mainstream media and Democrats to censor Trump over other tweets, insinuating that the intern for former congressman and current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough may not have died accidentally, which culminated in a demand for Twitter to “cleanse the Trump stain” in a New York Times op-ed earlier on Tuesday.
Try as they might, Twitter couldn’t find any violation of their ever-shifting rules to pin on Trump, so they did the next best thing and “fact-checked” him. No doubt, whoever came up with this figured it was a really clever way to appease the outrage mob. Sure, the Trump 2020 campaign would protest the bias – and reveal in the process that they pulled advertisements from Twitter months ago – but they can be brushed off, unlike the chorus of his critics.
Then the White House Press Secretary fired off a thread filled with recent stories about mail-in ballot problems – forms being mailed to the dead or people who’d long since moved away, a Philadelphia judge just convicted for stuffing the ballot box, etc. – clearly showing the Twitter “fact checkers” had some explaining to do.
That should not come as a surprise to anyone. After all, these are the same outlets that have peddled the Russiagate conspiracy theory with impunity for the past four years, and even racked up prestigious awards for the blatantly fraudulent coverage. Mainstream media archives are littered with “bombshells” designed to first prevent Trump’s election, then inauguration, then get him impeached or otherwise removed from office. Every single one turned out to be a dud.
“But Trump lies! Constantly!” scream in unison the people used to being not just gatekeepers of “respectable discourse” but the tone police of Washington, the arbiters of the acceptable, the people who believe their pen shapes the very fabric of reality. People who headline their stories with “what you should know” and “how you should think.”
When challenged, they form ranks and scream they are being unjustly attacked and “delegitimized” – but only if it’s one of their mainstream colleagues called out for their excesses. Anyone else, from Julian Assange to alternative outlets, can rot because the precious First Amendment doesn’t apply to them, supposedly.
CNN had to settle a lawsuit after defaming a teenager from Covington, Kentucky. To avoid a similar fate, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow argued that when she says “literally” that’s not news but humorous hyperbole, essentially dismissing her entire show as fake news.
It’s telling that this very phrase – fake news – has become synonymous with Trump’s criticism of the media, even though it was originally used by Hillary Clinton as an excuse for losing the 2016 election. You know, the election the mainstream media gave her 98 percent chances of winning almost to the very end, and openly endorsed her at the same rate?
If you thought Clinton took that loss hard, though, you clearly haven’t been paying attention to the media. Trump’s victory was an existential crisis for them, the moment their power to dictate the shape of reality itself was exposed as a mirage.
This is why they’ve spent the past four years lobbing Russiagate and other ‘bombshells’ at him. This is why they have led the outrage mobs, not just against Trump or the millions of “deplorables” that voted for him, but also against the social media platforms he used to bypass them in 2016, so he wouldn’t be able to do that again this November. Don’t think for a second any of this is about mail-in ballots, which – much like immigration and other issues – Democrats themselves once used to be against.
When they wrote freedom of speech into the Constitution, America’s founders may not have imagined that a president would be an unlikely champion of it, while the “free press” would be clamoring for censorship to preserve its power. Yet here we are.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Real reason Michael Moore’s film axed from YouTube is climate wrongthink, not copyright
By Helen Buyniski | RT | May 27, 2020
Michael Moore’s popular yet controversial exposé of the “green” movement’s corruption has finally been knocked off YouTube by a tactic that’s as cowardly as it is underhanded. Nothing upsets a cult like a successful apostate.
“Planet of the Humans,” posted to YouTube for free viewing on Earth Day, to the horror of the climate-change industrial complex, was removed from the platform on Monday, after a British environmental photographer filed a copyright claim. The deplatforming represents a triumph for the deep-pocketed “green” superstars who’ve been tearing their hair out over the film for the past month, livid over the unflattering portrayal of their crusade by the once-beloved liberal filmmaker, but unable to shut him up.
Photographer Toby Smith claimed the film – which had been viewed more than 8.3 million times before its removal – used “several seconds” of footage he’d shot of rare earth elements being mined without his permission. Unlike previous attempts to get the film taken down – which targeted its distributor with claims the film was packed with falsehoods and “fossil fuel industry talking points” – this angle of attack was successful, concealing the iron fist of censorship within the velvet glove of copyright law.
Smith could have gone directly to the filmmakers and complained, rather than running directly to YouTube. But the photographer made no secret of his true intentions. “I wasn’t interested in negotiation,” he told the Guardian on Tuesday, sniffing that he didn’t “agree with its message” and condemning “the misleading use of facts in its narrative.”
Heaven forbid facts be used to support a narrative one disagrees with! That’s “disinformation,” in the Orwellian Newspeak parlance of centrist-liberal orthodoxy. Indeed, Smith and the rest of the film’s critics have tried every disingenuous trick in the book to get Moore’s film taken down, from guilt by association (it’s “endorsed by climate skeptics and right-wing think tanks!”) to shaming celebrity pile-ons. Documentary-maker Josh Fox even briefly convinced the film’s distributor to pull it by claiming it was “dangerous, misleading and destructive to decades of progress in environmental policy, science and engineering” – only to see it reinstated so as not to trigger the Streisand Effect (in which the backlash to censorship sees the offending work skyrocket in popularity as people flock to see what the controversy is about).
However, a copyright claim lets the haters memory-hole the film while maintaining plausible deniability around the censorship issue, allowing YouTube to dodge the thorny issue of deplatforming an Oscar-winning documentarian.
Never mind that Smith, like his climate-bigwig fellow critics Bill McKibben and Michael Mann, has an ideological motivation for silencing Moore. The film eviscerates the hypocrisy of the green movement, depicting the self-styled saviors of the planet as money-grubbing opportunists in bed with the same Big Oil interests they claim to oppose. The “renewable energy” that’s supposed to solve the climate crisis is revealed to be as environmentally devastating as the fossil fuels we’ve been taught to revile. Copyright lets YouTube claim they’re “just following orders.”
Jeff Gibbs, director of “Planet of the Humans,” recognized the spurious copyright takedown as an “act of censorship by political critics,” calling it a “misuse of copyright law to shut down a film that has opened a serious conversation” about “green capitalism” and Wall Street profiteering within the environmental movement. “This is just another attempt by the film’s opponents to subvert the right to free speech,” he told the Guardian, adding that he was working with YouTube to get the film back up.
But Big Climate doesn’t want a serious conversation. They’re accustomed to knocking heretics off social media – or at least marginalizing them – with minimal effort. Well-funded online activism group Avaaz has been engaged in a full-frontal assault on “climate misinformation” on YouTube for months, implicitly threatening both the video platform and the brands whose ads appear on climate-skeptical videos with the wrath of millions of armchair inactivists if they don’t suppress the offending content. Just last week, Facebook’s fact-checkers squelched a PragerU video debunking the “climate change is killing the polar bears” meme, even though it was backed by expert science.
But convincing platforms to take down a one-time liberal darling – especially one with an Academy Award under his belt – is a tall order. Now that the “wrongthink” voices of climate skeptics have been silenced and “climate-change denialism” equated to Holocaust denial in the popular imagination, thanks to a full-bore media demonization campaign of all who question climate orthodoxy, the environmental movement has turned to seeking infidels in its midst.
Given his one-time status in the movement, Moore can’t be dismissed as just another Koch brothers shill, no matter how loud his detractors shout that “right-wingers” have embraced his latest film. But they won’t hesitate to resort to underhanded tactics to take him down. Whether this film escapes censorship under false pretenses remains to be seen, but other liberal celebrities should watch out – they might be next.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
Watch the full documentary on Bitchute.