Once in a while we pull back the curtain and take a peek at the sausage-making in the world of journalism. We think this is important, since the founders believed that the only thing that can save a democracy is a free press. That is true, assuming that the press is free, which it is not. In an interesting twist of fate, I have a master’s degree in journalism from one of the best schools in the States. This is relevant, since the media as it stands doesn’t think I am smart enough to be a critic, and it thinks the same of you. Have you abandoned your print newspaper for cause? “No problem,” the media says. “You are an idiot and we are going to digital, where nobody can count our responses.” 

So let’s take a peek at one current controversy the press has decided to rule as “decided.” Here is a quote from last week’s release from the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR)– one of the most-influential publications for the media by the media. In  this case, climate change. 

What we’ve learned from our week of climate coverage 
by Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope 
 
Today marks the beginning of a global climate strike and Monday will bring the UN Climate Action Summit, so we’re dedicating this installment of our newsletter to media coverage of climate, and whether it’s getting any better. 
 
This spring, CJR and The Nation co-founded Covering Climate Now, an unprecedented journalistic collaboration aimed at strengthening news coverage of the defining story of our time. The project was embraced immediately by The Guardian, which became our lead media partner, and has since grown enormously: more than 300 news outlets from around the world—with a combined audience of more than 1 billion people—are now part of Covering Climate Now. More are joining by the day.  Each of these outlets—big and small, TV and radio, print and digital—committed to running a week of strong coverage in the lead-up to the UN climate summit, and they have delivered. 
 
A highlight was an exclusive on-camera interview with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres—conducted by Mark Hertsgaard of The Nation, Mark Phillips of CBS News, and Amanda Mars of El Pais and shared with all 300+ Covering Climate Now outlets—that reported for the first time the pre-conditions that countries had to meet for their leaders to address the summit on Monday. In the spirit of collaboration central to the Covering Climate Now project, Hertsgaard wrote a news story in English, Mars wrote one in Spanish, and CBS shared video and audio of the interview with all participating outlets. 

If that does not make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, it should. Irrespective of your personal stand on climate change, this is proof-positive that there is a massive, collective effort to skew the news. To create propaganda and overwhelm any remaining vestiges of independence in the media. 

In this brief quote, you are looking at the heartbeat of a movement that has similar programs and similarly well-defined positions on virtually every so-called controversy you see in the media. Are you interested in what you MUST believe in terms of gun control, gay marriage, marijuana legalization, abortion or euthanasia? I can tell you without looking. It’s all in the media, to include movies, television, newspapers and magazines, and is coming under control on Fakebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Google. In this new age, you are actually not welcome to your own opinion, or, if you are, you are welcome to keep it to yourself or get shamed, criticized, outed, shadow-banned or fired from your job.  

You may have seen the kerfuffle last week when Canada’s Prime Minister got discovered in an old photo wearing blackface and brownface at multiple parties in his past. I have no use for Justin Trudeau. He is an arrogant, selfie-enamored, petulant child of privilege, and he is the necessary result of letting people under 35 vote.  

So much for Justin. However, he is not a “racist.” Let’s establish that I have never personally participated in any event where I or any other person made up in blackface or brownface. When I have heard of it, I regarded it as tacky. Low-class. The product of an unimaginative mind.  

I still believe all those things, but if Trudeau is a racist, it will take more than an anachronistic pogrom of the ignorant self-righteous to convince me. By “an anachronistic pogrom of the ignorant self-righteous,” I mean the organized, partisan and hostile media. 

So back to climate change. They say human-influenced climate change is settled science. The thing is, if it’s settled science, why is the funding, reporters, ink and collaboration to force a point of view on the media’s audiences? I am not about to say there is no climate change or that whatever there is has not been caused by humans. However, wouldn’t the science be supported better if a bunch of ninnies were not promoting it? I mean, nobody is up in arms about whether water boils at 212F. Or why did the “scientists” at the University of East Anglia – the repository of climate data for the world – get caught falsifying their data? You can read about it on Wikidiot, here, and they have an explanation. But it doesn’t answer the question of why?  

“Why?” is a very important question, which my colleagues in the media should have discovered in JN101. People subscribe to newspapers because they want reliable information, not because they want to be a target for every new shoe salesman on the internet. 

Why, for example, is an essay like this important for the wood industry in the United States? There are a hundred reasons, but for starters, look at what’s happened since 2007. We lost Modern Woodworking, Wood Digest, Wood and Wood Products and spin-off publications associated with those titles, as well as other primary print publications. If that trend continues, all that will be left will be commercially directed digital efforts from the wealthiest or most aggressive suppliers. And they will say, as do the current mainstream media, “trust me.” 

There is an army marching against you, both in your consumer hat and in your industry. Worse, you have very few troops left of your own. We keep tweaking the self-proclaimed “voices of the people,” hoping that we can draw them into a debate. 

So far, that has not gone particularly well. For example, I scolded a few on a media site about using made-up, foolish pronouns to try and show their self-emasculation. They got mad and said that the fake pronouns are the new reality. I remarked that in j-school they should have learned that the media should be the preserver of Standard Edited English (SEE), and that we can let the popular culture ebb and flow as it will, yet provide a sensible, understandable communications medium. Journalists are supposed to be the conservators of culture, not the destroyers of it.  

Crickets. 

I would love to learn who says I need to use their pronouns or not wear blackface if I choose. So far, all I see is monkeys in a circle, all fingers pointing left. 

Would you like to do something? For one thing, contact your industry suppliers and tell them you read this column and would like them to support independent voices that stand up for the industry. For another, send a copy to your local newspaper and your favorite remaining magazines, along with your federal and state representatives. We are relatively certain it will have no effect, but if you rattle their cages enough, they eventually have to listen. 

If you don’t, then we have to be content to hear from CJR next month that marijuana edibles make you intellectual. 

Last month we had the misfortune of seeing a gang of thugs beat up a little queer in Portland, Ore. The victim, Andy Ngo, is a journalist labeled as a conservative, a label he denies; the thugs, Antifa are ostensibly anti-fascist.  

But they aren’t anti-fascist, after all, are they? If they were, they would say so. Instead, they are Auntie Fuh.  

They are also cowards. There is something about a coward that has, throughout all history and all cultures, caused nausea in moral people. The Auntie Fuh-ers wear masks to hide their identities, use weapons against unarmed targets, prefer conflict on a 12-to-one ratio and refuse to account for their actions. There is no question that Ngo is 10 times the man that any one or combination of them is.  

 
In order to know a real anti-fascist, one would need to know what a real fascist is. That is not difficult. Throughout the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, the strong arm of the party was the Brown Shirts. These were people who either felt the world was unfair or said they did, and their stock-in-trade was to break up any show of free expression or peaceable assembly by any political party other than their own. They were known for wearing masks, using weapons against unarmed targets, preferring conflict on a 12-to-one ratio and refusing to account for their actions. (I understand I am conflating Nazism with Fascism, and they aren’t the same. But at the time the distinctions were lost one their mutual victims.) 

For what it’s worth, they recruited heavily from the labour unions. This is significant because their prospective enemies were the old, established, monied classes, including the professional military – the bourgeois. The Brown Shirts were the self-professed progressives of the day, and the older classes were the conservatives.  

The conservatives of the time were sometimes fearful of, sometimes bemused by the Brown Shirts, most of them thinking they would simply go away. But they did not. Not to oversimplify, but in a point of history very little taught in school, the Brown Shirts and Hitler in one fell swoop turned Germany from a democracy to a dictatorship overnight.  

Actually, three nights. The Night of the Long Knives, as it came to be known, or Operation Kolibri (Hummingbird), saw Hitler’s forces set out and massacre many hundreds of his highest profile detractors, including long-time ally Ernst Rohm. The numbers are not known, but estimates run into the thousands. Men were shot at dinner, at the theatre and at their desks. It was no secret, and anybody left alive after the purge knew one thing for certain: you can disagree with Hitler if you like, but the cost will be terminal and without process or appeal. Progressives expect to be taken seriously.  

My personal favourite anti-fascist was a little Lutheran preacher named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was the son of Germany’s most preeminent psychiatrist at the time, and was truly born to the purple. He positively reeked of entitlement. He was also nauseated by Hitler and his supporters, and thought deeply on the ramifications of a devout Christian taking up arms against evil. Bonhoeffer answered his question for himself, and became a co-conspirator in several plans to assassinate Hitler, even though he came under Gestapo suspicion early in the war, was imprisoned and spent all of WWII incarcerated.   

In the end, Hitler came to believe that Bonhoeffer’s group was responsible for the downfall of the Third Reich and on Hitler’s orders, Bonhoeffer was garroted, naked and alone on a train platform at dawn, April 9, 1945, only three weeks before one of the world’s most nauseating cowards, Adolf Hitler, cried himself to death. Bonhoeffer was one man, no weapons, no allies and standing fully and unapologetically for his own actions.  

Is a picture starting to emerge?  

I would hate to imply that Auntie Fuh-ers are liars and fascists in addition to their cowardice, but it’s sort of inescapable, is it not? It’s not like they are similar to fascists or resemble fascists; they ARE fascists in the WWII sense, and their stock-in-trade is labeling innocent people as fascists. As long as those people are alone and can’t fight back. 

 
Yet we let them blather on. What Bonhoeffer saw was the deterioration of the legal system of Germany, the seeding of discontent based on false claims of inequality and unfairness and the justification of using force against identifiable target groups. It started with conservatives, but, as Bonhoeffer’s friend, mentor and fellow German Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemöller, said, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”   
 
There is much to be learned about the rise of Nazism from pre-war insiders in Germany, and I highly recommend the Bonhoeffer biography Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas.   
 
Auntie Fuh and all its familiars are on a tear across all of western civilization. I think it’s clear they have no intention of slowing down, and we will either react decisively or pay the price.   
 
Somebody has to say this. Our fantasy of diversity and multiculturalism is failed. It cannot work. We need one culture with one set of laws for one people. That one culture needs have NOTHING to do with skin colour, sexual orientation, religion or even politics. It must have EVERYTHING to do with one Law, one economy, one educational system, all directed toward discipline, accuracy, truth and accountability. If a law is a law, it has to be enforceable, and it has to have consequences. There is no law that equates beating up gay Asian photographers to free expression or peaceable assembly. Consequences are a form of economy, and if the costs of hurting people get high enough, it will stop.   
 
It seems we have lost track of reality. Take justice, for example. Justice does not exist for the perpetrator, and justice does not exist for the victim. Justice is for society. Irrespective of how little some of us want to see others bear the full consequences of their actions, there is something noble about just desserts. There is nothing noble about bed-wetting, mask-wearing, weapon-wielding gangs of criminals. There is even less noble about letting them get away with it.  

According to a USA Today poll, health care, immigration, the economy, climate change, education and taxes lead the list Democrats want to hear about at this week’s debates. Not a word about Trump. In other polls, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are ahead of Trump in Florida and a Gallup poll has Trump’s approval at 40 percent. Over 85 percent of respondents to other polls say gays should be serving in the military, half of young Americans don’t use deodorant and about two-thirds of Americans say asteroid tracking is very or extremely important in case the world is ending.

By now, we all know polls either are or are not accurate, depending on the pollster, any introduced bias, the quality of the questions and the phase of the moon.

I got polled once for a national foreign policy question. It was after Gulf War I, and the question was whether I approved of George H.W. Bush’s conduct of the war. They asked whether I approved. I said I did not approve, since my view at the time was that he should not have stopped but should have gone straight into Baghdad. That answer ended the poll. I thought I would have a chance to explain that I approved of the war, but not the quitting, but no such chance was offered, so my answer was logged and reported as disapproving of the conflict, not the conduct, placing me with a bunch of people that would not typically like me.

If you go back to the election of 2016, I predicted in print on election day morning that Trump would win. I was among the only people that predicted that, and I normally would not have done so, but the polls were all screaming he didn’t have a chance and I could see they were not only wrong, but wrong because of introduced bias. In my view, the reporting was being used to affect the outcome.

You need to think deeply about polls. They affect your life. Anytime anybody wants to sell you something, pass a regulation, confiscate property or ban meat in schools, they are likely to justify it with a poll. We all know this, and this is the introduced bias I mentioned above.

But even more importantly, look at the media. The media have a huge interest in misreporting polls. The reason is simple: if the polls show a race to be a done deal, then people don’t tune in to see what’s happening. As with asteroids, above, if there is no threat, or no known threat, people go about their business without caring about asteroids. However, if you introduce the idea that an asteroid could end life on earth, THEN you have a story that will grab eyeballs. (Don’t you just love that phrase, “grab eyeballs?” An eighth grader’s journalistic dream.)

So it is with politics. You can take a nothing-burger candidate or a nothing-burger issue and make it top-of-mind (another grade-eight expression) by simply providing coverage of it as a controversy — a controversy being the assumption of two sides, each of which has critical mass — even if no such controversy exists. Three nutbars against 300 million is not a controversy; it is a social aberration.

The media receive hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spending leading up to and during political campaigns, and it is in their financial interests to jack up the electorate to keep attention focused on impending doom, irrespective of the side of any issue on which you land. Take gays in the military. I believe gays have always been in the military. Likely, they will always be in the military. So the question of whether they “should be” is sort of moot. Yet there’s the poll.

The fact is, no medium or media company should EVER present news for the purpose of grabbing eyeballs. Neither should one EVER base its news judgement on polls. Editorial judgement should rest solely on the mission of the medium. In our case, we promote the secondary wood industry, so we are opposed to gratuitous regulations, predatory labor movements, restrictions on development and political repression. I don’t need a poll. If I did, you would need a new editor. Conversely, if I were editing some kind of animal-radical, anti-research, anti-pet, anti-outdoors journal, I would not need a poll for that, either (and WOW, would they need a new editor.)

Further, polls today are having the function, intended or unintended, of giving people the impression we live in a mob and that the loudest mouth in the mob is the ruler. This has repeatedly led us into situations where the entire country is focused through the media on the interests of less than two percent of the population.

In my opinion, we need to focus back on the benefit of the majority and the way we got here. For one thing, we are not a mob. We are a republic — a representative democracy. That means that we elect our rulers, not that we don’t have them. We have a right to vote, and we need to educate ourselves before the election so we can vote responsibly. After the election, we live with the result.

I see in this week’s news that the issue of Ilhan Omar marrying her brother has resurfaced. I have a problem with that, but not what you may think. I think if Omar married her brother to scam the system, that should have excluded her from the running as far as the Minneapolis electorate was concerned. But it didn’t. So guess what? She is elected, and now is the time we can all keep our mouths shut about what she did beforehand. (Except I still think Minneapolis owes us an apology.)

The exception to that, of course, is any action taken before an election that is a) material to the job in question, and b) hidden from the sight of the electorate. In those cases, it’s news.

I hope I’m making my point clear. The media should be reporting on news that affects the day. Once upon a time, publications were proud to be known as the “publication of record.” We reported history as it happened, so people years later could look back and get an understanding of the world as it was. Now they report fantasies that will turn the best advertiser approval and garner the biggest buck. Polls are not news; polls are, at best, a rigged spectator sport with all the credibility of World Wrestling Entertainment.

Of course, this hurts the valid polls. Polls could tell us much about what you think of associations, trade shows and daily spam attacks.

But that’s for another day. For now, please be aware that we have no credible way of knowing whether one Democrat candidate or another has the best ideas for Democrats, but we do know that polls will decide whether they get a spot on a debate stage, and that the media’s fortunes will rise or fall based on the audience reaction in the polls. So the polls decide who goes, and the polls decide who stays, while the only poll that matters — the election — is nearly 200 days out and being manipulated feverishly by forces that really don’t give a rip about manufacturing in America.

My mother always told me not to call people stupid, and I tried. However, the word exists for a reason, and we would lose our freedom without it. Stupid is stupid. Now, it seems, the politics of stupid is upon us in earnest. I am speaking, of course, of socialism. Socialism requires stupidity in order to flourish. By stupidity, I mean that socialism is spread by ignorance, but then willful ignorance graduates to stupid. Without stupidity, socialism cannot exist. And somebody has to say so, especially for the health of our industry. The problem with stupidity is that it costs.

First, let’s get the language right. Socialists will tell you that socialism has nothing bad about it. They say it blends the best points of communism and democracy, and everybody benefits. They also point out that its unbroken chain of failures is the fault of its implementation. They say it would work, but it has not been done right, yet, leaving the clear inference that they are the ones that can do it this time. A socialist is simply a communist that does not control the military, yet.

For the sake of a historical reference point, the 16^th Century political writer Niccolò Machiavelli said there are only two types of governance: a principality (under a principal leader, such as a monarchy, dictatorship, etc.) and a republic. As an aside, he also noted that once people live under a republic, they are almost impossible to control under a principality.

Socialism is a principality. The government controls the means of production and distributes the goods and services. You will hear socialism equated with capitalism as both being economic systems, but capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are held in the hands of the producers, hence compatible with democracy or republic. In socialism, the reins are in the hands of the government. Socialism is a tyranny, even if you can point to a benevolent one, and the U.S. is a republic, even if the president irks you badly. In fact, I am convinced that the main reason Nancy Pelosi hates Trump so badly is that he has never been drunk or stoned in his life, so to her he looks demented.

Socialism does not work in an educated, disciplined environment, so any socialist movement is recognizable by its focus on cutting down education and discipline. That is why it is so important in socialist systems to subvert education and replace it with indoctrination. They try to confuse language, as in capitalism/socialism above, and they distort discipline. You can see evidence of socialistic principles in the elevation of slang to the status of a language of commerce, for example, and you see our mass media advancing the confusion of language under the guise of political correctness, contemporary wisdom or just plain made-up words and constructs. Cool.

Taken to a sharper focus, look at what socialist movements historically have done to the educated classes once they have achieved power. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge killed almost everybody that had an education above high school. Mao did the same under his Cultural Revolution. Stalin is infamous for his killing of his top educators and generals, as well as vast millions of his less-established citizens. And Hitler – one of the left’s least-lauded socialists – killed off most of the professional military leadership of pre-war Germany and oppressed the country’s cultural elite. You can get a flavor of those antics by searching Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As with Hitler, all socialists attack religious institutions, which are clear, historical enclaves of education, history and discipline.

One clear hallmark of socialist tyrannies is their focus on and idolization of youth. No other cult on earth so often evokes youth as a virtue and tradition as an evil. The possible exception is radical Islam, but that’s a lecture for another day.

The point is, youth, for all its freshness and energy, is not known for wisdom and there is no culture in history that thrived by looking to its children for direction. Socialism preys on the young, the naïve, the uneducated, the underprivileged and the bitter.

Our media are notable for their youth, naïvete, poor university performance, lack of options and bitterness. I often remarked in grad school how oddly underachieving the bulk of the students were. Most seemed as if they did not have the wit, the family connections, the social resources or the cash to become lawyers or doctors, so they, as Mark Twain remarked, “fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.”

I don’t want to get personal, but there actually is a need for specific examples, so let’s mention Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Did you see last week that AOC has identified cauliflower as a vegetable given to “colonialism” and to be rejected? This kind of thing should never get past the eighth-grade playground. It is not worthy of discussion. It is, frankly, stupid.

Coincidentally, on May 27, after this column had been set, the Daily Wire, headlined: “NBC Polling Data Shows Sanders Voters Are ‘Low Information’ And Sanders Voters AREN’T Happy.”

According to the story, a Sunday NBC poll on Meet the Press was not flattering toward Sanders’ voters. “’The less you are paying attention, the more likely you are a Bernie Sanders supporter,’ (Host Chuck) Todd says, pointing to a Monmouth poll taken recently …. The implication, of course, is that Sanders voters are ‘low information.’”

I suppose it’s rude to note, but if NBC can see it ….

We have somehow allowed the media to flood us with insane, drug-infested fantasies about words under the blanket of blank-slate newspeak to the point that we are actually equating people in the bottom 1.8 percent of behavior with people in the top 1.8 percent of ability as being equivalent criteria for leadership.

The problem is, words have meaning, and by now we have allowed the ignorant-to-stupid use of words drive us into a social milieu that requires us to swing society as a whole to address the imagined grievances of the most pitiable fools.

Do you think Ilhan Omar is a proper representative of the values and goals of America? Don’t bother worrying about it. It’s rhetorical. But I was raised in the upper Midwest, and I can say with assurance that the people of Minneapolis owe Minnesota and the rest of the country an apology. A big one. Why they stuck us with that ideologue marionette is a question for the ages. I assume they thought they were being “correct” by being diverse, which is stupid. A republic attends to the needs of the majority.

Of course, I have no evidence other than party affiliation that Omar is a socialist. She could be something entirely different, but not. An agent of tyranny, for example.

The evidence is mounting that there was a bureaucratic attempt to take over our elected president. That remains to be seen. But to the extent that such a thing may have occurred, and to the extent that PC, “conventional wisdom,” naivete, coolness and anarchy have been exhausting our resources, we need to look closely at how those movements are articulated, how they are presented and how they are distributed, and we need to quit being stupid. None of the agents of dissention noted above could have risen above the 30^th percentile had the media not been on an agenda-driven pogrom against the very people that gave it life.

Socialism is not equality. Socialism is death.

Overstatement? I don’t think so. Not at all. In fact, I am ready to discuss any challenges right here, in print, from anybody that cares to respond. Deadline for submissions is June 11.