Trump Gets Trumped, Licht Got Licked

As Trump gets indicted for alleged illegal handling of classified documents, his arch rival CNN burns up for trying to be less anti-Trump.

[I apologize for the many typos in the emailed version of this editorial. (Some are made worse because an overactive spellchecker automatically replaces a word that had one wrong or missed letter with an entirely wrong word.) Because of the length of the editorial, I was running way past my self-imposed 9:00 PDT deadline, so I did not proofread and was typing rapidly. I won’t put the deadline ahead of the proofreading again, and I’ll try to be more succinct in the editorials so as not to miss the AM deadline either.]

The big news of the day, of course is that Trump has just been indicted for illegal handling of classified documents, but I am interested in how this news is juxtaposed with CNN getting what many Trump supporters would find its just deserts for its years of adversarial opinion journalism (as I will call news that is mostly opinion — that does not separate out clearly the editorial from the headlines as I try to do here). While the crashing of the nemesis Trump branded as “fake news CNN” is the lesser news of the two, I’m going to focus on that in my editorial because it relates directly to what this novel news publication, The Daily Doom, is all about and why it also has a high likelihood of failing because of its core mission, which is impartial news that digs for truth among the many fallacious headlines.

CNN, you see, is not crashing because conservatives are fleeing it, as they just did Fox, taking Fox down into its own pit of ash over the firing of Tucker Carlson. CNN is going down because liberals now loathe it for deciding to be less liberal. The comparison between the two networks is perfect. Fox is failing with conservatives because it went less pro-Trump. CNN is now failing with liberals because it went less anti-Trump. There is no room anymore for something in the middle.

The bottom line is this: Very few people actually want, according to one editorial in the headlines below with which I strongly agree, factual, balanced news. What they want is news that says exactly what they want to hear. If it does not cater to their beliefs entirely, then it is biased, unbalanced, unhinged, unfair and incorrect! People want bias confirmation … and conformation.

So, liberals are shredding CNN to bits, as are CNN’s old-guard liberal staff. Of course, the old guard is really the new guard that took over after Ted Turner. They are the people who strongly steered the liberal-leaning CNN flagship of Turner Broadcasting System toward an all-out liberal advocacy agency under new ownership that used the news to promote liberal agenda. Fox did exactly the same for conservatives for years. It used the news and manipulated it to say what its conservative listeners wanted to hear, screening out everything its audience wouldn’t like unless the hosts could rip it to shreds.

This became evident in writing when none other than the outed (and ousted) Carlson wrote privately that Trump was demonic and destructive and his election-fraud attorneys were clearly a package of wing nuts, but that Fox would quickly self-destruct if it presented their views as anything other than fact or if it did anything that dented Trump’s reputation or claims. That got proven true when Fox did self-destruct when it fired Carlson.

For CNN, the liberal lunatics started bashing the network because CNN’s up-and-coming host, Kaitlan Collins, did not, in their opinions, bash Trump hard enough with her questions and fact checking. It particularly got bashed and trashed because it gave a voice to Trump at all, whom the libs thought should be gagged by CNN. So, both sides have acknowledged that you CANNOT run a successful news network in today’s highly fractured society by playing it down the middle.

You can count on the fact that conservatives will not start moving back to CNN now that it tries to aim for the middle because many will see anything that represents Trump negatively as fake news as well as anything that looks good for Biden. You can count on the fact that liberals will not start moving to Fox because it tries to aim a little more centrist either. They will see anything that is positive about Trump as propaganda or fake news and anything negative about Biden as fake news. There may be a middle crowd for an audience, and I hope to find it, but it is a pretty thin middle to aim for — a definite niche. And, when you have to look for your stories among media biased strongly one way or the other, it’s hard to find balanced stories, too

And that is why I think I stand a good chance of failing with The Daily Doom. Most people today want to hear what they want to hear and tune out anything they disagree with. I don’t. For example, I am running a headline today by James Rickards that contradicts the deep-dive article I just wrote for paid subscribers about the BRICS nations not being even close to supplanting the dollar with the yuan. He says the BRICS have a big surprise in store for August. Well, maybe they do; and he, at least, acknowledges the dollar will survive, and he makes some strong points. I think he is wrong about the BRICS, but I guess we’ll find out in August because he is not revealing exactly what the surprise is.

I lose readers when I write that the dollar is not going to be destroyed by the yuan. Many of my readers love gold and hate fiat currencies. I’m fine with that, but I make no friends when I write what I believe. (After all, my own beliefs about what I think will happen, often have little correspondence with what I wish would happen or think should happen because my abilities to run the world are decidedly quite limited … to nothing.) However, I haven’t been wrong in that opinion about the dollar for the entire decade-plus that I have held out against the death-to-the-dollar crowd.

I didn’t believe crypto would replace the dollar either, and we’ve seen in the crypto crash how precarious crypto can be and that the stablecoin variety pegged to the dollar that promised you could get your dollars back failed the worst; and today, in the news, we see all US banks pulling the plug on Binance so that crypto users cannot trade back and forth with dollars because, as has been my point, the dollar always fights back. There are no straight lines in economics, and crypto is not without its scoundrels. Nothing ever is.

I lose readers when I publish too many articles against Trump, but that is hard to avoid these days when Trump is being indicted left and right. You cannot just let that go as if it is not serious news. It’s very serious news. Even if you think it is wrong, it is serious. For example, I think the case being brought against Trump for election-finance violation and illegal reporting of funds is about as exaggerated as you get.

The case looks like desperate overreach to me because it doesn’t just charge each time Trump wrote a separate check on his payouts to Stormy Daniels as a separate count; it makes each time he logged the check on a ledger a separate count, and each receipt he kept with the check a separate count and each check, itself, a separate count. That is three counts for each check that he treated as a business exense. I don’t even think it is fair to count all twelve payments separately just because he chose to amortize the perfectly legal payout on a legal non-disclosure agreement into twelve payments, instead of one lump sum. If it was illegal to call that payoff a business expense, then that is just one expense that got amortized. So, I call those trumped-up charges as a way of stacking up a huge potential sentence over, at worst, a minor accounting/election-rule offense. That is why the case helped his campaign fundraising! It added legitimacy to his “witch-hunt” claims.

However, it is still important news, and some of the other stuff against Trump looks pretty serious. I just call it as I see it, whether that is for Trump or against him because I DON’T CARE if it hurts him or helps him. I’m not here to write his propaganda or his epitaph. I care if it is true. That does not always mean the charges are true. Sometimes, it just means (and is enough) that it is true he is being charged. I deal with the rest in the editorial, not by screening it from the headlines.

Some readers may think I favor mainstream media because many of my stories come from there, but most of my own writing is published in the alternative press. Fact is, I fact-checked CNN and the NYTimes clear back at the start of Trump presidency when they claimed with photos that his inauguration was poorly attended. (Then I applied for a job CNN posted for a “fake-news editor” to fact-check news stories in the press, letting them know they probably wouldn’t want me because half the stories I’d be editorializing against would be their own. Needless to say, I didn’t get a callback.)

The biggest outlets in mainstream media followed each other’s lead by comparing Trump’s inauguration unfairly to the nation’s most historic inauguration — the inauguration of its first Black president in a city mostly populated with Black people, many of whom could simply walk to the event. Of course that event would be more highly attended! What I pointed out, besides saying a fair comparison would have been to Bill Clinton’s inauguration or George Bush’s, was that the photos featured were unfair.

These “news” outlets created the appearance of being fair by using photos taken by impartial mall cameras that were taken at exactly the same time of day. All that really proved, when I dug deeper in my own article by looking at other photos buried in the same mainstream accounts, was that Trump’s audience arrived about half an hour later than Obama’s. To be fair, they should have compared Trump’s inauguration to Obama’s second inauguration because that one was no more historic than any other inauguration, and Obama’s crowd was the same size or even smaller at that event. So was Clinton’s smaller; so was Bush’s (both times for each president). I found you have to go all the way back to Ronald Reagan to find a bigger crowd in the photos than Trump’s (outside of Obama’s first). Of course, none of those mainstream outlets were interested in my photo comparison.

And why was Trump’s audience later in arriving? Because they were less enthusiastic? No. Because, as I had written in earlier stories, over one-hundred non-profit organizations had committed themselves to blocking the streets of Washington, DC, to make sure Trump’s outdoor inauguration failed entirely. No organizations had committed themselves to that during Obama’s inauguration. Yet, committed as those organizations were, they failed. All they managed to do was slow down vehicle and pedestrian traffic enough to make Trump’s crowd half an hour late. Compare Obama’s inauguration when Obama was actually speaking to photos taken when Trump was actually speaking, and the two groups are pretty closely matched.

I have many times taken CNN and the New York Times and others to task for their fake news, but I often prefer mainstream sources when I think they are simply presenting facts, even if it is not the facts people want to hear. I do my best to avoid conspiracy theories, and I find a lot of alternative press sites saturated with those. I am only interested in news; but this is problematic because sometimes the conspiracy theories are true and eventually months later become the mainstream news, as we saw with the origins of the Covid virus and with those claiming the Russia-Trump conspiracy theory was a hoax. So, I also use a lot of alternative sources. I published those Covid “conspiracy theory” articles and my own commentary in favor of them because I believed they were true, but it is not always easy to decipher the truth from the fantasies, and doing so can take a lot more time than I have in the morning. So, I go with my gut instinct about the quality of the facts when quickly gathering headlines in the morning, which has usually been pretty accurate.

For example, just yesterday I published the following headline under “Off-the-Beat or Just Plain Offbeat News”: “Lawmakers Call For Transparency After Whistleblower Alleges US Has Recovered Alien Craft.” Only two days before that, I had published the original whistleblower story: “Intelligence officials say US has retrieved craft of non-human origin.” These are the kinds of stories that are usually relegated to the conspiracy realm, but they cleared my smell check because they had actual sources that seemed credible.

Today, I am publishing an article where the federal government, itself, says it finds that story credible. The article points out the shortcomings (lack of actual documentary evidence), which I think is fair and right to do, but it also impartially acknowledges that lack of documentary evidence is almost certain in a case that is all about classified material. This story has proven to have legs and has already gone mainstream. (Just a note, as well, that, when I put something under “Off-the-Beat or Just Plain Offbeat News,” it doesn’t mean I necessarily consider it offbeat. It may be offbeat (like flying-saucer stories tend to be, so it may go there because it’s weird but fascinating and possibly true), or it may just be off-topic, as in not fitting under all the other categories, hence off the regular news beat.

Bottom line: I try to publish what I believe is true, and, if you don’t like to hear your favorite politician get bad press, this is definitely not the site for you, whether you are a Conservative Republican or Liberal Democrat, as I am an equal opportunity critic. I am as likely to write my own editorials against Biden as Trump and to publish stories against either. You won’t always agree with me, but, if you did, you would have to know I must be just pandering to an audience of one since none of us always agrees with anyone, not even our spouses whom we love.

So, I hope you’ll hang around even when you disagree because my intended mission is truth; but, as with those flying-saucer stories and now known fake news pushed by CNN and the the NYT about Trump’s golden showers and Russian collusion, it is not always easy to decipher the facts from the fiction as I fly through the morning. On those two topics, I got it right, but sometimes I won’t. And sometimes I’ll list stories that run opposite ways because both sides should be considered, and I don’t know which is true. Likewise, with the latest “flying-saucer story,” as I like to call it: it seems to have legs because many, including Republican congress members and Biden administration officials, are now acknowledging the source is normally highly credible.

See ya in the funny papers, as we used to say, which would be any newspaper these days.