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Tuesday, September 17, 2024

SELLERS: Surprise! The Fake News Is Still Fake

'You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in...'

Posted by Ben Sellers

(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) One of the greatest cat memes in meme history to this date would have to be “Surprised Kitty,” the adorable little newborn kitten that would respond to its owner’s hand retracting from a tickle with something bordering on bewilderment or surrender.

It worked on many meme-able levels because its simplicity made it the perfect pictorial expression of an emotion for which words could not do justice, while its cuteness made it a must-share cultural touchstone.

Whatever became of “Surprised Kitty” (now a fully grown cat of about 12 years old), I sure hope it did not make its way to Springfield, Ohio.

The midwestern Everytown, overrun by some 20,000 Haitian refugees during the Biden–Harris administration as part of its cynical Great Replacement strategy, is no place for cats, nor for peace-loving American citizens.

It was first put on the national map last year after Hermanio Joseph, a 35-year-old Haitian illegal, veered into the wrong lane of traffic, causing a school bus to flip over while ferrying children to their first day of the new school year.

Aiden Clark, 11, was ejected and died.

Sadly, Aiden’s father threw him figuratively under the bus, for lack of a better term, at a recent town meeting, where he lamented the fact that it wasn’t a white man who killed his son so that GOP nominee Donald Trump could not invoke him as a political talking point.

Yet, it is the Biden–Harris administration that sees Aiden as little more than collateral damage—a calculated risk to be written off in its vision of making Ohio a blue state, as it has done in small towns—and big cities alike—throughout the nation.

FELINE FRENZY

Ironically, it took a series of cat memes to force the issue back into the public eye.

Following reports from Springfield residents that the Haitian refugees had been killing and eating domestic pets (and quasi-domesticated ducks from municipal parks), the story took on a life of its own, with a viral trend of artificial intelligence-generated images that depicted Trump rescuing cats and ducks.

Although the only evidence of the atrocities may be the eyewitness accounts of the residents themselves—which are disputed by city officials—and a few photos and videos posted online that lack the necessary context, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s running mate, observed that the memes served a greater purpose in raising awareness of the broader impact that Biden–Harris open-border policies were having on communities.

By contrast, far-left, China-compromised Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., all but declared the memes to be a national-security threat on Tuesday after House Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio (whose district lies just north of Springfield), re-posted one of the AI-generated pictures on the committee Republicans’ X account.

During Tuesday night’s debate between former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the current Democratic nominee, the pet-eating allegations again resurfaced.

After Harris falsely suggested that people were leaving Trump rallies en masse out of boredom, Trump sought to hammer the current administration’s catastrophic border policies and the outrage that working-class Americans were feeling as a result.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said.

“The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” he continued. “And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”

ALTERNATIVE FACTS

It was one of several points Trump made over the course of the night that received a snidely intoned fact check from ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis.

“I just want to clarify here: You bring up Springfield, Ohio,” Muir said. “ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

In addition to a barrage of blatantly loaded questions designed to provoke or entrap Trump, while teeing up Harris for her rehearsed talking points, the litany lopsided fact-checks clearly was intended to send a subtle signal that Trump was pushing disinformation and Harris was presenting wholly accurate statements.

That was far from the reality. Indeed, Trump himself called out several of Harris’s more bald-faced lies, and The Federalist helpfully compiled a list of 25 of them.

For analysts on both the Right and Left, the moderators’ bias has since become the biggest takeaway of the night.

“The debate will instead be remembered as a three-on-one pile-on, given the unprofessional and biased team of ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis,” wrote Hoover Institution scholar Victor Davis Hanson. “Rather than refuting pre-debate fears that their past anti-Trump biases would warp the debate, they only confirmed them.”

POLITICAL AMNESIA

Nonetheless, Hanson’s post touches on an important detail, which is that the moderators’ brazen bias came as no surprise to anyone.

In fact, many were shocked with how neutral CNN’s moderators were during the initial June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, given the unbelievably favorable terms Trump had agreed to.

With those same conditions in place at the ABC News debate—a network with which Trump is currently pressing an active lawsuit for defamation—he should have been fully loaded for bear.

And considering the outcome of the first debate—in which the left-leaning moderators played it straight and the candidate ultimately dropped out of the race as a result—no partisan radicals in the news media would dare risk taking the high road again, reputation be damned.

Fortunately for ABC News, the reputational risk may be minimal due to the chronic amnesia that news consumers at large—and Republicans especially—seem to have when it comes to contextualizing mainstream-media narratives.

Few, for example, seem to recall that prior to becoming the clueless, do-nothing border czar, Kamala Harris was, in fact, one of the most vicious interrogators in Senate Judiciary hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, then-Attorney General William Barr and others.

She traded in her resting-bitch-face scowl and became the cackling joymonger we now know following a 2019 reboot of her foundering primary campaign. Nonetheless, she exited the race just three months later—the first major candidate to do so, despite having entered as one of the most buzzed-about.

“This is my third presidential campaign, and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly,” said Harris’s Iowa operations director, Kelly Mehlenbacher, slamming the rampant disorganization, according to the far-left Talking Points Memo.

Harris’s brutal, race-baiting attack on then-candidate Joe Biden in the Democrat primaries, and her collection of “Pinocchio” awards, signaling her willingness to lie shamelessly, should likewise have been common knowledge during debate prep.

SNAKES IN THE GRASS

As for the media’s tendency to rig the debates, there are ample examples, including a notorious 2012 debate between GOP candidate Mitt Romney and then-President Barack Obama, during which CNN’s Candy Crowley inserted a false fact check to favor Obama.

In 2016, Democrat operative Donna Brazile—who, for some reason, was entrusted with the debate questions before another CNN-hosted event, between Trump and Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton—was busted for having leaked the questions to Clinton surrogate John Podesta after the later had his hacked emails published on Wikileaks.

Brazile—who went on to become the interim head of the Democratic National Committee, although she lost her job as a CNN analyst—expressed no remorse.

“My conscience—as an activist, a strategist—is very clear,” she told SiriusXM host Joe Madison, according to the Washington Post. “… [I]f I had to do it all over again, I would know a hell of a lot more about cybersecurity.”

Finally, in the 2020 debates, the failure to challenge Biden in any way on his outright lie—which his own campaign surrogate, and future secretary of State, Tony Blinken, had helped to orchestrate—that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation will go down as a moment of ignominy from which the mainstream media should never be allowed to recover.

The body of evidence all points to one conclusion: There is absolutely no reason to entrust the fake news to act in good faith in its coverage and refereeing of election politics, nor to be indignant about its refusal to be evenhanded—which it has come to regard as a moral imperative, supplanting the ethical obligations that left-wing activist–journalists long ago shrugged off.

In his recitations of “The Snake,” Trump himself has pointed out many times, “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”

Still, for whatever reason, with each new election cycle there seems to come a narrative reset, as if Sergey Lavrov were sitting in the Kremlin and pushing his magic button to wipe away the memories of U.S. voters.

And with that, once again, Republicans find themselves tilting at windmills and going after the elusive football, hoping for a different outcome.

Alas, like an endless loop of “Surprised Kitty,” they perpetually find themselves in a constant state of surrender.

Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.

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