When Democracy Died In America -Journalism Soviet Style

 THE BACKHOE CHRONICLES

When Democracy died in America-------- 


Joe Biden took questions from reporters today for the first time since Tucker Carlson’s interview with Tony Bobulinski, a former business associate of Hunter Biden who accused the Biden family of using their political influence to rake in millions from foreign governments.


But the media members on hand didn’t bother to ask about it. 


Biden briefly faced reporters after voting in Wilmington, Del. less than 24 hours after Bobulinski, a retired lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, raised concerns that in 2017 the former vice president's brother, Jim Biden, and Joe Biden had ties to a possible joint venture with a Chinese energy firm owned by the Chinese government. 


Reporters ignored the bombshell allegations, instead, asking the Democrat presidential nominee about ongoing looting and unrest in Philadelphia and the Affordable Care Act, before he hurried off into a waiting black SUV.


“What we saw there was another failure by the news media to ask Joe Biden about Hunter Biden and whether or not he will admit that he lied to the American people about his son’s foreign business dealings,” Trump 2020 campaign spokesperson Erin Perrine said on "Outnumbered Overtime."


“This is a story the media refuses to cover, even when they have the candidate there, taking questions, which he so rarely does.


Chronicle fans, this is Soviet-style journalism. Don't report on anything that might be negative about the party you support, yet run with ANY unsubstantiated allegations that might be negative about the opposition party.


OMG. 


Democracy died today.


Please, please, please....vote Trump.


Peter Feaman

The False Narrative of Systemic Racism

 The false narrative of America  being essentially a hierarchy of privilege based on race comes out of writings by the Urban Institute.  A left leaning think tank funded largely by government grants and more recently corporate foundations, the  Institute is a leftover from the Johnson Administration. At the time of its founding  in the mid -1960s, the country was emerging from an era  when segregation and other injustices existed and the legal framework that provides African Americans the power to more fully participate in the advantages of a free society was created.  Today although remnants of past racial injustice remain, the social, economic and legal constructs have long been in place to insure that all Americans have the ability to fix any unfairness on the basis of race.  

 

But the institute among many other organizations and individuals who benefit from the racial injustice industry continue to invent convoluted narratives to support their existence.  Worse yet other groups have emerged to create over exaggerated and dangerous responses to episodes of injustice that could have been handled fairly by existing law.  


According to Urban Institute centuries  of bondage, Jim Crow, and their enduring legacies constitute a period of 400 years during which policy, practice, and violence blocked and stripped Black people of wealth accumulation.  They claim whites were able to accumulate wealth through inheritance and blacks until 1965 were prevented from doing so.   That is to say that white children today are more privileged because their parents and grandparents accumulated wealth and passed it on to them.  This is a distorted narrative designed to justify a socialistic agenda of wealth redistribution. 


In truth a large percentage of white people, asians and blacks who are economically comfortable today and whose children have prospered inherited nothing from their parents other than a value system that taught them that hard work and a decent, if not great education, would  lead to a better life.  One only has to look at Cubans whose children have prospered here who came here with nothing to escape a failing socialist state. 


Slavery and segregation were wrong and should be acknowledged as such.  As were the wrongs against native Americans and many groups of new immigrants.  But the cult of bitterness towards America should not be encouraged.  It is wrong to instead of encouraging  a love and respect for a country that has provided freedom and the ability to achieve the fullness of potential, to condemn its very foundation and the symbols of the freedom we all enjoy.  What is true is that most American children today did not inherit wealth, they inherited the freedom to pursue their dreams and advance as far as their hard work and determination could take them.  


Sadly the theory of racial injustice perpetuates any inequalities that may exist by discouraging blacks from trying to achieve by implanting the idea of hopelessness. Their narrative is that blacks can’t succeed because “systemic racism” works against them no matter how hard they work - an untruth that destroys possibilities. Instead of inspiring with the uplifting  message of freedom and hope and what that offers, the self-serving racial industry continues to discourage black Americans as victims who are in a hopeless situation. 


 Tmurtha

Charlotte County Republican Registration Has Spiraled -- Now We Just Need to Get Out the Vote

Back in the early days of Charlotte County, practically everyone registered to vote was a Democrat.  In the first recorded numbers we have in 1930, there were 1589 Democrats to 79 Republicans.  The Democratic Party, of course, was a different party back then.  The Southern Democrats of the 1930s would not recognize their party today.  Through to the 1960s the Democratic Party continued to dominate the County, two Democrats to every one Republican.  In 1967, there were 8292 Democrats to 4315 Republicans, for example.  But times they were a changing.  By 1980 Republicans slightly outnumbered Democrats and the trend continued through today, as the gap between the parties increased in  Republican favor. (Also increasing though were the number of  Independents and others with a dramatic rise in the 1990s that has continued - another story).   

Today, compared to 2016, the increase in the number of Republicans  over the increase in Democrats is almost 10,000 voters.  Republicans increased in number of registrations in that period by nearly 25% with 70,216 registered voters while Democrats only increased by about 11% now with 40,080 voters.

It's not surprising that we see more Biden signs dotting our community, there are a lot of Democrats despite the overwhelmingly more Republicans.  And of more concern is voter turnout.  Due to a very aggressive Vote-by-Mail campaign, the Democrats who we outnumber almost 3 to 1 are outvoting us.  To date - 11,569 Democratic voters have returned their ballots, while only 10,258 have returned theirs.  Granted the percentage of Democrats getting vote by mail ballots has been much larger, but in real numbers Republicans still requested 2000 more ballots.

We need to get our ballots in and vote.  If you have a ballot, mail it or bring it to the Supervisor of Elections office in Punta Gorda now, or return it to one of the polling places during early voting.  And if you don't choose to use vote by mail, please early vote.  Don't wait.  Anything can happen.  Your vote is needed to win this important election.  And if you can volunteer to help with the Get Out the Vote program at charlottegop.com


Kamala Harris and the 1619 Project

 The woman who could very well become the President of the United States has expressed support for the “1619 project.” What is the 1619 Project and why should you be concerned? 


The “ 1619 Project,” published by the New York Times as a special 100-page edition of its Sunday magazine in August of 2019, presented a distorted version of American history entirely through the prism of race and full of hatred towards the country that has been dedicated for most of its history to furthering human liberty and equality.  It ignores most of the factual history of worldwide slavery laying the blame for slavery on white America.  Among other omissions it ignores  the hundreds of thousands of white people who died not only for the basic freedom of all Americans but to free enslaved blacks.  The Project asserts that every aspect of American life has only one lens to view through that of slavery and what it reeped. “America Wasn’t a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One,” proclaims the introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones; “American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation,” says another by Matthew Desmond. In some cases, history is reduced to nonsense : “How Segregation Caused Your Traffic Jam.”


With claims that this country’s true founding was 1619, and that that all of American history is rooted in race hatred—specifically, the uncontrollable hatred of “black people” by “white people.” Hannah-Jones, the instigator and promoter of the project writes in the series’ introduction that “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”  Despite the pretense of establishing the United States’ “true” foundation, the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history. Its aim is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritizing of personal identity i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race.


While many leading scholars of American history have spoken out against this false and disturbing view of our American founding and development, the Times with support of Pulitzer Center printed hundreds of thousands of extra copies of the magazine issue containing this fallacious propaganda for free distribution at schools, libraries and museums across the country. 



Kamala Harris has praised the 1619 Project, this distorted racially divisive and threatening to the very core of our democracy view as “a powerful and necessary reckoning of our history”   stating that “We cannot understand and address the problems of today without speaking truth of how we got here.”. This compilation of falsehood and propaganda is not truth,  it is garbage.  


It is frightening to think that a person who very well could become President of the United States supports a view that America was founded in 1619 not 1776, Lincoln was a racist who held back blacks, and that the American Revolution and the Civil War were conspiracies to perpetuate white racism. 


Wake away America. This devisive-spirited woman cannot ever be close to being the President of our union. 
<t. murtha>

We are Being Gaslighted

 WHAT IS GASLIGHTING?


The term originates in the systematic psychological manipulation of a victim by her husband in Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 stage play Gas Light, and the film adaptations released in 1940 and 1944. In the story, the husband attempts to convince his wife and others that she is insane by manipulating small elements of their environment and insisting that she is mistaken, remembering things incorrectly, or delusional when she points out these changes. The play's title alludes to how the abusive husband slowly dims the gas lights in their home, while pretending nothing has changed, in an effort to make his wife doubt her own perceptions. The wife repeatedly asks her husband to confirm her perceptions about the dimming lights, but in defiance of reality, he keeps insisting that the lights are the same and instead it is she who is going insane.


We are living in a perpetual state of gaslighting. The reality that we are being told by the media is at complete odds with what we are seeing with our own two eyes. And when we question the false reality that we are being presented, or we claim that what we see is that actual reality, we are vilified as racist or bigots or just plain crazy. 


You’re not racist. You’re not crazy. You’re being gaslighted.


New York State has twice as many deaths from Covid-19 than any other state, and New York has accounted for one fifth of all Covid-19 deaths, but we are told that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has handled the pandemic better than any other governor. But if we support policies of Governors whose states had only a fraction of the infections and deaths as New York, we’re called anti-science and want people to die. 


So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy? No, you’re being gaslighted.


We see mobs of people looting stores, smashing windows, setting cars on fire and burning down buildings, but we are told that these demonstrations are peaceful protests. And when we call this destruction of our cities, riots, we are called racists. 


So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy? No, you’re being gaslighted.


We see the major problem destroying many inner-cities is crime; murder, gang violence, drug dealing, drive-by shootings, armed robbery, but we are told that it is not crime, but the police that are the problem in the inner-cities. We are told we must defund the police and remove law enforcement from crime-riddled cities to make them safer. But if we advocate for more policing in cities overrun by crime, we are accused of being white supremacists and racists. 


So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy? No, you’re being gaslighted.


The United States of America accepts more immigrants than any other country in the world. The vast majority of the immigrants are “people of color”, and these immigrants are enjoying freedom and economic opportunity not available to them in their country of origin, but we are told that the United States is the most racist and oppressive country on the planet, and if we disagree, we are called racist and xenophobic. 


So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy? No, you’re being gaslighted.


Capitalist countries are the most prosperous countries in the world. The standard of living is the highest in capitalist countries. We see more poor people move up the economic ladder to the middle and even the wealthy class through their effort and ability in capitalist countries than any other economic system in the world, but we are told capitalism is an oppressive system designed to keep people down. 


So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy? No, you’re being gaslighted.


Communist countries killed over 100 million people in the 20th century. Communist countries strip their citizens of basic human rights, dictate every aspect of their lives, treat their citizens like slaves, and drive their economies into the ground, but we are told that Communism is the fairest, most equitable, freest and most prosperous economic system in the world. 


So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy? No, you’re being gaslighted.


The most egregious example of gaslighting is the concept of “white fragility”. You spend your life trying to be a good person, trying to treat people fairly and with respect. You disavow racism and bigotry in all its forms. You judge people solely on the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. You don’t discriminate based on race or ethnicity. But you are told you are a racist, not because of something you did or said, but solely because of the color of your skin. You know instinctively that charging someone with racism because of their skin color is itself racist. You know that you are not racist, so you defend yourself and your character, but you are told that your defense of yourself is proof of your racism. 


So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy? No, you’re being gaslighted.


Gaslighting has become one of the most pervasive and destructive tactics in American politics. It is the exact opposite of what our political system was meant to be. It deals in lies and psychological coercion, and not the truth and intellectual discourse. If you ever ask yourself if you’re crazy, you are not. Crazy people aren’t sane enough to ask themselves if they’re crazy. So, trust yourself, believe what’s in your heart. Trust your eyes over what you are told. Never listen to the people who tell you that you are crazy, because you are not, you’re being gaslighted.


Sophocles said: "What people believe prevails over the truth."


And that's what the media are trying to exploit.


~~

Why Do We Let Them Call Themselves Liberal? or Progressive?

Liberal is too kind and actually inaccurate a word to describe those at the top of the a Democratic  Party today.  What is liberal about them?  Liberalism in the classic sense is a political doctrine that says that protecting and enhancing the freedoms of the individual is the central problem of politics. Liberals have typically believed that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but have also recognized that government itself can pose a threat to liberty.   Can we seriously and accurately ascribe this term to today’s Democrats?  


Oh they are liberal alright if we use the word in the sense of how free they are to spend other people’s  money like using any crisis to invent or pull from their agenda archive  massive government programs that go way beyond addressing the immediate crisis to try to increase their bureaucratic domain over the lives of individuals and actually repress freedoms further. 


Originating at the turn of the twentieth century, Progressivism was a political movement  believing that the problems society faced such as  class warfare, poverty, racism and violence could best be addressed by providing good education, a safe environment and an efficient workplace. The modern so-called progressives have used this political cause to gain power, for instance, in cities throughout the country, with disastrous results.  You only have to look at the poverty, failing public school systems, rising crime in major cities controlled by these people to recognize that this is the work of a subversive, inept, elitist ruling class who not only can’t fix these problems but has no real interest in doing so.  They are truly not progressive they are inept exploiters of minorities and the poor whose objective is totalitarian power.  


Conservatives and Republicans have been too polite.  We need to start calling out these Democratic socialists for what they truly are and stop using euphemisms  like liberal and progressive for these mean-spirited, self-serving, elitist leftists.    <t. murtha>

Vote by Mail is Safe and Secure - Here are Options

 Voting by mail in Charlotte County is safe and recommended.

 

A vote by mail ballot request is only valid for only 2 election cycles.

 

Voting by mail gives you options.

1: Vote and return the ballot by mail, no postage required.

2: Vote and return the ballot to one of the drop off locationssuper early voting.

3: Vote and return the ballot to an early voting venue.

4: Vote and take the ballot to your polling place on November 3rd.

5: if you change your mind you can go to early or normal voting and ask for a

   replacement ballot.

 

To check on your request for a mail ballot or to request a mail ballot: 

 

Go to https://www.charlottevotes.com/ and answer the questions on the home page.


After you mail in your ballot  you can also check the status of your ballot at this site.


(J Druyer)