Thank You, Baker
by Forrest C. Kerr
November 9th 2016 took me by surprise. I’d stayed up watching the results of the election the night before, and I had a strong feeling it wasn’t going in the direction I expected, but the news that Wednesday morning still came as a shock. Every news source I trusted had told me Hillary had this in the bag. And now Donald Trump was president.
How could this have happened? A reality TV star was going to be handed the key to the nation’s nukes. “Good Lord” I thought to myself, “I sure as hell didn’t want Hillary, but now there’s a chance I’m going to get drafted to die in Northeast Asia because the ‘YOU’RE FIRED’ guy pissed off the North Koreans.” I was genuinely worried, it seemed like anything could happen in the next four years. But the one thing 2016 me could never have foreseen, is that I’d be happily voting for Donald J. Trump in 2020. How’d that happen?
I began 2016 a passionate fan of Bernie Sanders. In a sea of corruption here was a man who had been pushing the same points for years, which seemed indicative of a certain type of political backbone. I cared about health insurance reform, I cared about student debt, I cared about getting out of stupid wars, and I cared about American jobs.
I remember Bernie’s 2015 Huffington post op-ed against the Tran Pacific Partnership (TPP) reading like a breath of fresh air. A strong stance against trade deals that only benefited multinational corporations at the expense of the American worker — that’s worth supporting. I’d seen good, working-class people suffering in my hometown. Here was a man who cared about MY neighbors!
Like many millennials, I was naive. That naivete took a hit after I watched the DNC spend months undermining my candidate and came to a head in July of ’16 when WikiLeaks revealed the less than impartial attitude of the DNC officials towards the Sanders campaign behind the scenes.
By the time the Democrats began to fall into line behind Hillary, I was getting angry. Then Bernie endorsed his former opponent and I felt outright betrayed. When family and friends asked me about it I started to say I wasn’t going to vote for anyone. The system was rigged, and I wanted out.
Back to the day after the 2016 election. In my mind I had this moral high ground by not throwing my vote behind either candidate, but I’d had no doubt that the election was Hillary’s. Trump’s win shook me to the core. I started going over what I knew about our new president. This boiled down to: “Reality TV man is crass and crazy, oh God he’s got access to the nukes what in the world is going to happen next.”
https://www.revolver.news/2020/10/bernie-bro-to-deplorable-a-journey-of-the-heart/
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part 2
But when I analyzed these “facts” I realized they only revealed how little I actually knew about Trump. I also had to wonder why this electoral result came as such a surprise. Every single news source I trusted had left me knowing next to nothing of substance about our new president, and they’d all told me Hillary had the election in the bag to boot. How had I ended up so wrong and confused? I had to face up to a bitter truth: something was up with the media.
Beyond my concerns about a reality TV star having access to our nation’s nukes, all I really knew about Trump was that he received a million dollar loan from his dad, and he said something particularly crass about women that one time. Okay, lets look at these “facts.” The Access Hollywood tape was over a decade old, and I’d had contractor friends receive loans for over a million dollars in their mid-20s. Why did these “facts” matter so much to me?
I’d always been aware that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal had their respective biases, but it was beyond doubt that they were giving me pretty useless and inflammatory info on President Trump. It wasn’t like the presidential office was some sort unsullied place of purity before this election. From Bill Clinton to JFK, presidents have enjoyed the sexual rewards that accompany positions of power. I came to realize that expecting moral purity from the executive in chief was naive, and a standard that had hardly been lived up to in the past. I found myself gradually becoming agnostic on the Trump question. Sure he was a loose cannon spouting off on whatever he felt like, but he clearly wasn’t being treated fairly by the media.
Then Trump withdrew the US signature from TPP in January 2017. This was a watershed moment for me. When Bernie lost the DNC nomination in 2016 I assumed something like the TPP was guaranteed to pass, and the American people could enjoy a further streamlining of the one way “Send our jobs to Asia” pipeline. Seeing Trump stand up for American jobs shocked me.
To a college educated millennial, it seemed impossible that a REPUBLICAN would go to bat for blue collar workers. That’s the Democrats’ job … right? But as I looked back at the past decade, I realized that sometime after Occupy Wallstreet the DNC had abandoned their focus on unions and the average worker for talk about privilege and racial resentment, leaving the position of “politics for the people” as unclaimed real estate. Bernie spoke about American jobs and manufacturing, and look at what the DNC did to him. The American worker had no representative … except for Trump. And here he was, doing what I’d hoped Bernie could do: set a match to the 5,600 pages of bureaucratic nightmare that was the TPP, once and for all.
Trump’s trade policies were winning me over, but seeing the effect of his presidency on the people I grew up with was what shifted me from neutrality to support. For the first time in my life I saw childhood friends experience real economic improvements because of a president. One of my best friends founded and runs his own carpentry contracting company, and he told me that since 2016 he couldn’t find an idle hand to hire in the carpenter’s union hall. 625,000 new construction jobs have been created since President Trump took office.
https://www.revolver.news/2020/10/bernie-bro-to-deplorable-a-journey-of-the-heart/
Glenn Greenwald appeared on Tucker Carlson's FOX News show Monday night to criticize the media for its lack of response to the Hunter Biden laptop story. Greenwald also criticized intel community activity in domestic elections and posed the question that even if Russians are behind the story it just requires journalistic investigation in case Biden is compromised.
"Adam Schiff is seriously the most pathological liar in all of American politics that I've seen in all of my time covering politics and journalism," Greenwald said on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.' "He just fabricates accusations at the drop of the hat at the other people change underwear. He's simply lying when he just asserts over and over that the Russians or the Kremlin are behind the story. He has no idea whether or not that is true. There is no evidence to support it."
"And what makes it so much worse is that the reason that the Bidens aren't answering basic questions about the story," Greenwald said. "Basic questions like did Hunter Biden drop that laptop off of the repair shop? Are the emails authentic? Do you know denied that they are. Do you claim that any have been altered or are any of them fabricated? Did you in fact meet with Barisma executives? The reason they don't answer the questions is because the media has signaled that they don't have to. That journalists will be attacked and vilified simply for asking."
"The whole point of the Intelligence Community since the end of World War II was that whatever propaganda the CIA produces, whatever disinformation campaigns they engaged were never supposed to be directed domestically," he said. "That was the point of the NSA, the CIA, and all those intelligence communities."
"What we have seen since 2016 going back to the 2016 campaign is incessant involvement in U.S. domestic politics. Working with journalists to disseminate purely for partisan ends. If you want to talk about things like violating norms, and dangers to democracy, what's more dangerous than allowing the CIA constantly to be manipulating our politics by making cover for the Biden campaign by claiming anonymously that the Russians are behind the story and therefore you disregard it. Even if the Russians why does that alleviate the responsibility of journalists to evaluate the emails and to examine whether or not Joe Biden actually engaged in misconduct?" Greenwald asked.
"The much bigger point is the way that the information is being disseminated," he said. "It is a union of journalists who have decided that their only goal is to defend Joe Biden and election him president of the United States working with the FBI, CIA, NSA not to manipulate our adversaries or foreign governments, but to manipulate the American people for their own ends. It's been going on for four straight years now and there's no sign of it stopping anytime soon."
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/10/19/glenn_greenwald_media_and_intel_community_working_together_to_manipulate_american_people_for_their_own_ends.html
President Donald Trump’s White House is promoting the President’s strong efforts to defeat human trafficking in the United States of America.
Recent operations by the U.S. Marshals saved exploited children. Now, the spotlight is on the Trump administration’s broad success in fighting the scourge of modern-day human slavery. Attorney General William Barr even acknowledged a case in which his DOJ prosecuted traffickers preying on children in the child welfare system. President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a new review process to help parents whose kids have been taken away by Child Protective Services (CPS), amid widespread reports of CPS-related sex trafficking.
“We renew our resolve to redouble our efforts to deliver justice to all who contribute to the cruelty of human trafficking, and will tenaciously pursue the promise of freedom for all victims of this terrible crime,” stated President Donald Trump in a press release issued Tuesday by the White House.
READ THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS RELEASE HERE:
“COMBATING HUMAN TRAFFICKING: President Donald J. Trump has prioritized fighting for the voiceless and ending the scourge of human trafficking across the Nation.
In January 2020, President Trump recognized the 20th Anniversary of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and signed an Executive Order on Combating Human Trafficking and Online Child Exploitation in the United States.
Through this order, President Trump created the first-ever White House position focused solely on combating human trafficking.
Since taking office, the President has signed nine pieces of bipartisan legislation to combat human trafficking, both domestically and internationally.
Today, President Trump released his National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking to direct the Federal Government’s efforts to end human trafficking within the United States.
LEVERAGING FEDERAL GOVERNMENT RESOURCES: The Administration is committed to eradicating human trafficking by leveraging every resource of the Federal Government.
The President approved the largest Department of Justice (DOJ) grant package in history to combat human trafficking, including the first-ever grants for safe housing for survivors.
President Trump doubled the amount of DOJ funding to combat human trafficking that existed during the previous administration and prioritized funds to enhance prosecutions and frontline efforts in the states.
In Fiscal Year 2019, Federal law enforcement agencies initiated more than 1,600 new investigations into human traffickers, and DOJ-funded human trafficking task forces at the State and local level reported opening more than 2,500 new cases.
The Trump Administration signed bilateral agreements with El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to help curtail labor exploitation.
https://nationalfile.com/president-donald-trump-is-fighting-human-trafficking-in-historic-ways/
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part 2
A COMPREHENSIVE PLAN OF ACTION: The Administration is focused on implementing a whole-of-government approach to fighting human trafficking.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently created the Center for Countering Human Trafficking (CCHT), establishing a centralized location for subject matter experts to coordinate and expand its efforts in the fight against human trafficking and forced labor.
Agencies are focused on preventing human trafficking through increased awareness and education, curtailing demand, and decreasing imports of products resulting from forced labor.
The Department of Health and Human Services, DHS, and DOJ have worked to train more than 95,000 professionals to enhance their capacity to respond appropriately to suspected instances of human trafficking.
These professionals include civil society, law enforcement, and government officials.
Through the President’s Task Force on Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives, his Administration is working in coordination with tribal communities to better understand the impact of human trafficking in Indian Country.”
https://nationalfile.com/president-donald-trump-is-fighting-human-trafficking-in-historic-ways/