What We Learned — Outlaw Sports
It is two days post-election and America still doesn’t know who the next President will be. This will most likely remain the case until all the votes are counted and all the impending litigation is settled. Don’t be surprised if you, and many others in your circle, feel that if your taxes should be used for something-at the very least, the Government should be able to conduct an accurate and efficient vote count. As it is often said, two things are certain in life: death and taxes. I purpose we add a third item to that statement: If there is a way to screw something up- the Government will find it.
That being said, this post isn’t going to be about how the Government sucks at everything. That would be like writing about how water is wet. Instead, this post is going to be about the complete and abject failure of another, arguably more important institution- the Free Press.
As the Founders saw it, the Free Press was an unofficial check on the other three branches of government. A bulwark against tyranny, should all three branches fail in their mandates. This isn’t to ignore the history of the media being in the pockets of certain political parties because that has certainly happened, but the concept of a Free Press allows for the landscape to be so vast that it should prevent utter dominance, and this principle largely held true until the invention of social media and Big Tech.
When the internet was invented, it was envisioned as a place where free thought and the proliferation of ideas could be exchanged free from corporate dominance. Unfortunately, it morphed into a monopoly of gatekeepers with news outlets jockeying for entrance while excluding others. Exclusion happened when the news outlets petitioned the gatekeepers that their ideological opponents were spreading misinformation and a danger to the general public. Because the gatekeepers are human and have their own ideological preferences, they ruled in favor of their ideological allies. The result: Homogenous ideas and information at the expense of objective truth and accurate information.
Juxtapose this with what the reality is at this moment. Does anyone know what is going on with this election? Reports are that Joe Biden won Arizona. Depending on where you get your information, that may not be the case. Numerous reports have shown an alarming number of irregularities in the voting process in several key States. Things like extreme delays in the vote-counting; late-night ballot dumps that heavily favor one candidate; refusal to allow vote counting observation; and vote totals that exceed the number of registered voters. To be clear, none of this is direct evidence of fraud, but if the reports are true, it raises suspicion about the integrity of the election.
The problem is not that one or both sides may be trying to rig the election. Bad faith government actors trying to cheat is not exactly new and frankly, I’d be shocked if they weren’t trying to cheat. The problem is that our weapon against this type of thing should be a Free Press. However, the Free Press has failed in every possible way imaginable. Rewind four years and remember that we were assured by almost all accounts, that President Trump was a Russian spy who spent his free time peeing on hookers, and that turned out to be completely false.
A short two-minute video for those of you in the media pitifully insisting that no media reckoning is needed and journalists performed beautifully, soberly and responsibly throughout this whole saga: pic.twitter.com/PF5s2kTcYA
- Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 25, 2019
Next, he was impeached for what was at most, an unethical phone call. This was followed swiftly by blaming The President personally for over 200,000 deaths from Covid while simultaneously ignoring that people from every nation around the world are dying from the same thing.
We were told that Covid was extremely dangerous and we should stay inside forever unless of course, you wanted to protest racial injustice-then the virus couldn’t infect you or spread. Those burning buildings you saw, that was just the language of the oppressed who were merely telling us that they were protesting mostly peacefully. If you had a problem with this narrative, it was because you are a racist bigot who needed to check your privilege.
Agree with the President on any issue, again you are a racist bigot. If you are a person of color who disagrees with any of the narratives, that’s because you aren’t actually a person of color-but a white supremacist.
One day after this election is over I am going to write a piece about how Latino is a contrived ethnic category that artificially lumps white Cubans with Black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Guatemalans and helps explains why Latinos support Trump at the second highest rate.
- Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) November 4, 2020
Yes, these are journalists who claim they are reporting the news, and if what objective truth-tellers were telling you just happened to mirror exactly what one of the political parties were saying-well that just further proof of who you should vote for.
That brings us within the temporal proximity of today. We were told by every pointy head statistician that not only was Donald Trump going to lose, but he was going to lose by a large margin. Journalist assured us that Donald Trump was a racist fascist and that a large swath of the American public could see this salient fact. The only people who would show up to vote for him on election day were those backward-snaggle-toothed white devils. Instead, what we have is a very close election both nationally and in the Electoral College.
Should Trump lose, the fact is this: No one trust’s what the Media is selling because Donald Trump has effectively flipped large portions of what was considered impenetrable Democratic strangleholds. Specifically, he showed the entire Media establishment that the thoughts of Blacks and Hispanics are not monolithic. He has shown us that free people still exist in this country and that the idea of American victimhood that can be only be remedied by large-scale Government intervention will be rejected. He showed them that Americans are individuals whose thoughts and ideas cannot be reduced to arbitrary immutable physical characteristics.
So where does that leave us going forward? After all, these legacy Media and Big Tech companies aren’t going anywhere. The answer is simple, but not easy, and it doesn’t involve government intervention because they’re just going to screw it up. The solution lies where it always has in this great country we share: Freedom. Use your freedom. Turn off the legacy Media companies. Find your news in the independent outlets that are trying to actually report facts instead of making the news. Log off of Twitter and Facebook. Find a new social media company, or just don’t use social media. What we learned in the last four years was that we can’t trust the press and Big Tech. Now, we must teach them that freedom, and by extension capitalism, will test the courage of their ideological convictions.
Originally published at https://theoutlawsports.com.
