Category Archives: Media

Stop calling the media “the corporate press”

It is not an exaggeration to say Americans were terrorized by their federal, state, and municipal governments during the Covid pandemic. Never before had society been locked down so brutally and for so long as during 2020-21. Not during the Spanish flu, where business closures in my hometown lasted three weeks. Not during the 1968 flu pandemic, which killed a significantly larger percentage of the population of the time.

Every step of the way, from “two weeks to flatten the curve” to “you better hold off on Christmas” to “maybe a small gathering on July 4 (2021), if you’re vaccinated,” the media stood in lockstep with the totalitarian state, uncritically repeating its lies and endorsing its edicts.

The media lied about every aspect of the Covid pandemic, including the virus itself, the government’s mitigation measures, and the vaccines. They continue to lie every day for as long as each lie can maintain the faintest plausibility, after which it is quietly surrendered, waiting for resurrection after the amnesiac public forgets.

Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear has seen the transition from “Covid emergency” to “climate emergency” coming from a mile and two years away. And unlike Covid, the climate emergency won’t end.

This carries far graver implications than merely which septuagenarian Boomer occupies the White House. These lies are being used to manufacture acquiescence to an attack on civilization itself. Anyone who participates in such a scheme to subjugate the people en masse can only be described with one word: “enemy.” Touché, Donald Trump. You were right about that.

Thus, it is understandable to want to alert people to the fact the media is not their friend. Many, even “good libertarians,” have taken to calling the media “the corporate press.” This isn’t just unhelpful to the public. It’s counterproductive to freedom.

First, let’s consider what information is conveyed to the public when the word “corporate” is added to “press.” Regardless of intention, the overwhelming majority of people hear: “privately owned and operating for profit.” The problem with the media is they are for profit enterprises that are not owned or at least more heavily regulated by the government.

This is an anti-capitalist message the public is unfortunately too ready to embrace. But it’s neither true nor particularly helpful to encourage their belief that seeking profits is fundamentally at odds with the good of society. It’s just one more confirmation to those already so inclined that seeking profits in any undertaking is fundamentally problematic.

Libertarians may say that is not their intention, but what exactly is their intention? Do they really know? When asked, many will reply that “corporations are creatures of the state.” True enough. But they’re not referring to the guy who fixes their sink as “the corporate plumber” or the place they buy their groceries the “corporate grocer.” Yet both are almost certainly incorporated in the states wherein they operate.

Businesses aren’t incorporated for the same reasons they were hundreds of years ago. At one time, corporate status and its privileges – often a government-enforced monopoly – was granted because of a supposed “public benefit” derived from allowing the company to incorporate.

Today, companies incorporate mainly to limit liability and protect the owners from runaway juries in government-run courts. Creditors of today’s corporations enter relationships with the firms in full knowledge the shareholders’ personal assets are protected from liability. And while it is true third parties who never agreed to such release can be harmed and may have a natural right to seek compensation from the shareholders, they would never get the awards from corporations they get in government courts in any conceivable private court system.

Regardless, the media’s corporate status is no more relevant to their malfeasance over the past several years than malfeasance in any other business.

Another common excuse for the “corporate press” moniker is to point to the business relationships between the media and other corporations and call them “bought off” or words to that effect. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, spends billions on national TV advertising. Critics point to this and say it affected the way media reported on the Covid vaccines. “That’s why I call them the corporate press,” they say.

This is just another argument for why the free market doesn’t work. Certainly, in an anarcho-capitalist society, there would be no restrictions at all on this type of relationship and there wouldn’t be much more, if any, in a laissez faire minarchist society. This has nothing to do with the media being “corporate” and the antidote is not them being something else. The antidote is competition.

If the problem is a lack of competition, that also has nothing to do with the press being “corporate” and everything to do with the New Deal regulatory state, which decides which media is allowed to broadcast and which isn’t. Calling the media “the corporate press” distracts the public’s attention away from the government and misdirects the blame towards the private sector.

But honestly, there is plenty of competition, all the establishment’s attempts at “deplatforming” notwithstanding. The public holds the ultimate power here in simply refusing to consume – or fund – the establishment media. Everyone who objects to the content offered on cable television is free to cancel their cable subscription. Likewise their newspaper or other media subscriptions. Imposing this market discipline in lieu of complaining will do far more to change behavior.

In case you haven’t noticed, the one, common characteristic of the enviro-nazi, medical totalitarianism, and anti-western culture movements is their anti-capitalism. By some strange “coincidence,” the only solution to the supposed problems each of these seeks to solve is less capitalism. And regardless of any pedantic arguments to justify the expression, when people hear “corporate press” they hear “capitalist press,” period.

Referring to the media as “the corporate press” encourages all the bad instincts in the public that inspire them to go along with every incursion into our freedom. Let’s come up with a better pejorative.

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Will Americans ever stop believing Washington’s lies?

Leave a reply

Anyone inclined to question their federal and state governments, the national media, and corporate America – aka, “the establishment” – wonders how much longer the American public can possibly go on believing what they’re told. The long-suspected “liberal bias” of the media has morphed into outright falsehoods told the public about Covid-19, Ukraine, “climate change,” and a host of other issues.

One after another, previous narratives enforced by de-platforming dissenters has crumbled, although the establishment seeks to cling to as much of the previous narrative as minimally plausible.

For example, natural immunity to Covid was at first ignored as if it didn’t exist at all. Then, it was reported as waning faster than vaccine immunity. Once it was undeniable that natural immunity was broader, more robust, and more durable than vaccine immunity, the focus was shifted to the superiority of vaccine immunity and natural immunity together over merely natural immunity.

Why at that point were people with only natural immunity excluded from participating in large swaths of civil society while those with only the inferior vaccine immunity not excluded? A few people screamed about it; most did not. The dissenters were censored or simply drowned out by establishment information.

A particularly egregious lie perpetrated throughout 2020 and 2021 was that immunity to previous infection no longer existed after antibodies were no longer detected in the blood. Forty years after my last biology course, I knew this had to be wrong. Doesn’t the body remember previous infection even after antibodies disappear from the blood?

Of course it does. It’s called T-cell and B-cell immunity. B-cells produce new antibodies upon new exposure to the same virus and T-cells kill infected cells directly. This is not new or controversial information. But even now, people seem to operate on the assumption that immunity from previous infection ends once antibodies are no longer detected in the blood. The establishment does everything it can to encourage this false belief.

Then, there are the “safe and effective” vaccines themselves. Americans were told by no less than the president himself, in addition to presumably more reliable sources, that the vaccines would keep them from getting infected with and spreading Covid. When that untruth was no longer defensible, the establishment tried to tell us they had never said any such thing, that the vaccines would only prevent serious illness from infection.

This begged the question of why, if they did not prevent infection and transmission, the vaccines would be mandated for employment and/or admission into publicly accessible spaces. If the risk to others is the same with or without the vaccines, what is the justification for the mandates?

Again, a few people asked; most did not.

Now, evidence is mounting that the vaccine is not only ineffective, but not as safe as previously advertised. Certainly, it is important to question all claims about the vaccines, positive and negative. The theory that Covid vaccines are a plot to depopulate the earth don’t seem to jibe with reality. But neither does the claim they are completely safe.

Alex Berenson was recently reinstated on Twitter following settlement of his lawsuit for de-platforming based on his reporting on all the lies of the Covid Regime, including the exaggerated danger of the disease itself, the ineffectiveness of the nonpharmaceutical interventions (lockdowns, mask mandates, etc.), and the ineffectiveness and danger of the Covid vaccines. Had the company been able to definitively disprove any of his reporting, no settlement would have been made.

“Promoter of misinformation” Steve Kirsch is willing to pay any “doctor, professor of medicine, epidemiologist, or public health official anywhere in the world” $50,000 to demonstrate on camera where his information on vaccine deaths is incorrect. There have been no takers.

Kirsch recently presented evidence from multiple sources of massive spikes in daily deaths five months after significant vaccine rollouts.

Read the rest at Tom’s Patreon…

Read the rest at Tom’s Substack…

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Forget recession, what is the definition of “dystopia?”

Leave a reply

NBC, ABC, and CBS today all feature stories about the FBI returning Donald Trump’s passports, seized in its August 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago. This just four days after the Washington Post reported that federal agents were looking for “nuclear documents” among the boxes of materials taken from the White House during the raid.

Wait. Both those statements can’t be true, can they? Is it really plausible the Justice Department genuinely believes or ever believed there are nuclear secrets among the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago but was willing to return Trump’s passports just a few days later?

It has now been eight days since the raid. Were there “nuclear documents” among the materials seized or not? Certainly, the Justice Department knows the answer to that question. Why has no reporter asked?

If there were a genuine national security threat to the United States among those papers, the government would have known it within hours of taking possession of them. It would have assigned as many agents as necessary to review the documents and confirm or deny the threat immediately. Had a genuine threat of that magnitude been confirmed, a flurry of other national security activity would have been reported in the days since the raid.

It isn’t just that the government and its media apparatus got it wrong or provided information that turned out to be inaccurate later. They lied. They said things they knew at the time they said them weren’t true and continue to do so.

On Friday, Newsweek reported that the former president was “digging his legal hole “deeper and deeper” by calling the reporting on nuclear documents “a hoax,” according to legal expert Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor,

Kirschner was lying, too. First, being a former prosecutor, Kirschner is well aware that statements Trump makes to the media when not under oath cannot damage him legally. More important, Kirschner knew that if there were anything of consequence among the seized documents, Trump wouldn’t be at liberty to post his statement on Truth Social.

He wouldn’t be at liberty at all.

The “digging his legal hole deeper and deeper” statement smacks of the avalanche of headlines 2017-19 indicating that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was “closing in” on Trump for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election. Week after week, month after month, “anonymous sources” confirmed the latest strand in the rope that would hang Trump had been woven into place.

Mueller was never “closing in on Trump.” The media that reported he was knew it. The “anonymous sources” claiming to leak inside information of the investigation knew it. And deep down, a large portion of the public who wanted to believe Trump was a Russian agent, knew it, too.

Yet, they all kept saying it in unison.

Like “recession,” there may not be one, official definition of “dystopia.” But a society in which every public institution, along with a good percentage of the population, not only regularly repeats assertions they know to be false but persecutes anyone who dissents is at least in the ballpark. When the lies form the bases for coercive government policies, then, like two quarters of negative GDP indicating a recession, you have a “good rule of thumb.”

It certainly doesn’t matter what “dystopia experts” say.

Read the rest on Tom’s Patreon…

Read the rest on Tom’s Substack…

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Defend Twitter’s, Google’s, and Facebook’s property rights now or don’t complain when you’re called a racist

Leave a reply

Twitter took the unprecedented step on Friday of banning the president of the United States from its platform. Their justification lay in the dubious assertion Trump incited the vastly overblown incident inside the Capitol on January 6, as lawmakers attempted to count the electoral votes for president sent by the states.

Never mind that banning Trump can only incite more violence. There is the larger question of whether this constitutes an assault on free speech and what should be done about it. For libertarians, if not conservatives (no, they’re not remotely the same thing), the answer should be clear as far as government action goes: nothing.

The left’s timeworn tactic of calling anyone who opposes outright socialism a racist has worn so thin as to become cartoonish. There is a significant segment of the population who are sick of it. That was one of the major reasons Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Trump got 12 million more votes in 2020 than he did then.

Until Covid-19 and the monstrous, unscientific government response to it, it seemed the left had learned little from their previous defeat. No longer content to simply call non-socialists “racists,” they now upped the ante to “white supremacist” or “white nationalist.” Why? Let’s forget the meaning of the actual terms. For most Americans, “white supremacist” merely means “somebody who’s way worse than even a racist.”

I don’t believe Donald Trump is a racist and he has certainly never advanced a single policy that can accurately be described as “white supremacist.” Neither do I believe any significant portion of the 74 million people who voted for him did so because they are racists or white supremacists. But just as hundreds of his supporters may have been baited by FBI infiltrators, Antifa activists, or both into committing a self-destructive act on Wednesday, Trump’s and his supporters’ call for government action against Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is going to blow up in their faces.

Let’s not forget the libertarian and conservative position on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In a nutshell, both groups generally agree with the Act’s prohibitions on any government-enforced racism. But purists in both camps disagree with its prohibitions on private businesses, specifically in Titles II and VII. I was clear in my own piece on the subject that these sections of the law should be repealed. Why? Because people have a right to make whatever rules they want on their own property, no matter how vile we may find them.

I stand by that position to this day, regardless of my personal feelings on the Jim Crow south (and north, in some cases). Yes, I fully understand Jim Crow was state and local governments prohibiting integration in restaurants and hotels and that those laws were only necessary because some people would presumably integrate their businesses without them. But let’s not pretend Jim Crow laws had no support among the people. They had overwhelming support. And they were really, really bad.

Quincy Jones recounted how black musicians had to sleep in a mortuary, with several dead bodies, while on tour in the South, because “separate but equal” failed to provide any hotels. People would travel hundreds of miles looking for a “separate but equal” place to eat lunch or even use a restroom. Next to what these people went through, suspension of our supposedly God-given right to bloviate on Twitter rather pales in comparison.

If we’re going to defend the property rights of segregationists, and I do, then we’re going to have to answer for why we don’t defend the property rights of woke tech giants. I defend them for precisely the same reason I defend the property rights of the 1960s lunch counter owner from refusing to serve black people. It’s his lunch counter. If you believe in limited government, it’s the government’s job to enforce his property rights, not other people’s preferences.

As long as I’ve been a libertarian, the answer to the question, “What would stop people from doing reprehensible things without government?” has been, “private enforcement of property rights.” Ostracism has frequently been cited as a tool individuals could use to fight against distasteful behavior and speech without government.

Well, here we are. Tech giants and the woke crowd have been doing precisely what we libertarians have always said was the non-government way to avoid associating with people we don’t want to associate with. And what is our reaction? “Regulate them!”

How could anyone credibly argue there isn’t hypocrisy here? What defense would any libertarian or conservative who objects to Titles II and VII on principle offer to those who charge them with racism, when they abandon those principles now?

Yes, it’s true the call for regulation by Trump and his supporters is to remove an exemption in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 to protect internet content providers from being sued for content by their users. This, argues the regulate crowd, gives them an unfair advantage over traditional media. Somehow, also goes the argument, this allows them to achieve “monopoly power” over the internet.

Are they kidding?

Yes, this is a protection afforded internet providers over traditional media, but it doesn’t give Google any particular advantage over other search engines nor Facebook or Twitter over MeWe or Parler. But the real question is, “Do libertarians and conservatives have total amnesia?” Does no one remember how the internet was celebrated just a few years ago as a way around the gatekeeper traditional media? Now, we’re supposed to defend CNN against Twitter and somehow that will help our cause?

Besides being tactically moronic, it’s unprincipled. If you’re a libertarian and won’t go full Monty anarcho-capitalist, then you should be looking to extend the protection to traditional media, not take it away from the tech platforms. That’s the free speech position, to protect speech from government-enforced mobbism in the courtrooms.

Let’s face it. We like to criticize the left for being dumb, especially on economics. But they’re not. They’re smart and they’re winning. The tech billionaires became billionaires largely because they think strategically. They’ve maneuvered the entire non-socialist movement into betraying their own most fiercely held principles and opening themselves up to the tired charge of racism and making it stick. I’m not sure even I could effectively defend against a charge of racism someone who thinks Titles II and VII should be abolished but Twitter should be regulated. On what grounds?

If we want to fight for property rights, free markets, and individual liberty, the special pleading must stop. Arguments like, “this isn’t really a free market” are astoundingly obtuse. Are we saying that unless and until there is 100% laissez faire, all property rights are off the table? Good luck with that. You might as well vote for AOC in 2024.

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

The Brilliance of the Original Frankenstein Films

Leave a reply

bride-of-frankenstein-729-91 Ever since I was a kid in the pre-internet, pre-cable 1970s, I’ve loved the classic horror films of the 1930s and 40s. Black and white alone seemed to lend a mysterious, nightmare quality missing from later technicolor slash-ups flowing with redder-than-life blood. But it was more than just black and white. The old classics were works of art, often weaving literary themes and social commentary into stories borrowed from the great masters.

James Whale’s Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein are perfect examples and my personal all-time favorites. They really should be viewed back to back, as one continuous film, even though that was not Whale’s original intention. He was reluctant to make a sequel to his 1931 original, and Boris Karloff didn’t like the idea of having the monster talk (although it did in the Mary Shelley novel). Thank goodness neither got his wish.

Frankenstein

If you’ve never seen these films, you’re in for a different kind of treat. I don’t know that they were ever really scary for me, even when I was very young, but I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Every scene in the first film is a classic, from the opening in the graveyard to Colin Clive’s famous, “It’s Alive!” scene to the memorable climax in the windmill, where the camera alternates between Frankenstein’s and his creature’s faces as they stare at each other through a turbine.

You needn’t have a film degree to appreciate Whale’s cinematic mastery. After viewing any of his films, watch it again with the sound turned all the way down. Even his 1936 musical Show Boat still works as a silent. This guy was good.

But there is more than cinematic mastery at work. Whale’s two-film masterpiece has the kind of depth usually found only in great works of literature. On the surface, it is a morality play about Man not infringing on God’s prerogatives through scientific discovery. Indeed, that is how the Mary Shelley character in Bride describes the first film’s story. The theme is solidified during the iconic “It’s Alive!” scene when Colin Clive as Frankenstein, in hysterical joy over the success of his experiment, exclaims, “Now I know what it feels like to be God!”

Read the rest at Foundation for Economic Education…

13 Reasons Why is an indictment of schools, not legitimization of suicide.

Leave a reply

13-reasons-why-netflix-01-1200x800 CBS News reports that two fathers are coping with the worst pain anyone can endure in this life: the death of a child. Both fathers believe the Netflix series, 13 Reasons Why, contributed to their daughters’ decisions to take their own lives. They have publicly asked Netflix to cease airing the show and one of the two men has requested a meeting with Netflix.

And before anyone raises concerns about free speech, there is nothing in the report suggesting the men are calling on the government to censor or otherwise interfere with Netflix’s rights, at least at this point. They are simply private citizens seeking to deal directly and peacefully with a private enterprise to discuss a dispute.

The story has already exploded in cyberspace. But it seems that most people (including perhaps the producers of the show and the author of the book it was based upon) miss its real lesson. The story is a pretty accurate representation of the “socialization” homeschoolers supposedly deprive their children of by keeping them out of school.

As 1990 New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto put it during his acceptance speech for the award,

“It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety, indeed it cuts you off from your own part and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does.”

While there is never-ending debate about what children are taught in schools, whether religion should be completely banned from public school or not, whether sex education should be taught, etc., nobody questions the school paradigm itself.

It’s time to consider the possibility that the entire model is wrong. The culture it creates is just one reason. In the absence of adult culture that is at least for the most part based on the rules of civil society, the children, in their ignorance, create their own culture, which is irrational, merciless and often violent. This is nothing new. We’re just confronted with it more now in the age of phone cameras and social media.

It has been the goal of communists and other varieties of statist since Plato’s time to separate children from their parents and have them raised by the state. They’ve largely succeeded.

How do you like the results?

In Defense of Henry Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life

2 Replies

December is upon us and that means plentiful opportunities to watch the enduring classic, It’s a Wonderful Life.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of viewers completely misinterpret Frank Capra’s dystopian nightmare as a heartwarming Christmas tale.

The emotional appeal of angels getting their wings is undeniable. Crying out for correction, however, are the vicious slanders regarding the film’s real hero, Henry Potter.

We first hear of Potter from George Bailey’s father, Peter Bailey, who badmouths Potter with the usual falsehoods about businessmen. But during Bailey’s envious rant, we learn something important: Henry Potter is a board member of the building and loan. We later learn Potter is, in fact, a stockholder.

That puts a somewhat different light on his subsequent motion to liquidate the business upon Peter Bailey’s death. Yes, we hear George Bailey repeating the familiar socialist tropes his father did: that Potter only wants to close the building and loan because he “can’t get his hands on it” and considers the little people cattle, etc. But Potter responds with some rather inconvenient facts: the building and loan has been making bad business decisions, providing what we’d now call subprime loans to people who can’t pay them back.

We don’t know how Potter became a stockholder, but the Bailey Building and Loan does not appear to be a publicly traded company. The most likely explanation is Peter Bailey asked Potter for capital, just as George Bailey does later in the film, in between rounds of disparaging Potter as a greedy capitalist. That would be perfectly consistent with today’s “progressives,” who rail against capitalists out of one side of their faces while sucking up to them for money out of the other.

But regardless of how Potter became a stockholder, Peter Bailey has a fiduciary duty to him to run the business for maximum profit, providing Potter and the other stockholders a return on their investments, something George Bailey confirms they never intended to do. Instead, the Baileys squander their investors’ money on a do-gooder, subprime loan scheme to make everyone a homeowner. It worked out in fictional Bedford Falls about as well as it did in early 2000s America.

Meanwhile, the Baileys constantly slander Potter’s rental houses as “overpriced slums.” These are the same Baileys whose housing opportunities are more expensive than Potter’s.

Their accusations constantly beg the question: If Potter’s houses are so bad, why do so many people choose to live in them? It’s constantly implied Potter’s customers have no other choice, but what exactly does that mean? Why has no one else, including any of the businessmen on the board of the Bailey Building and Loan, developed rental properties that are higher in quality, lower in price, or both?

The inescapable truth is Potter is wealthy because he provides a product that most satisfies his customers’ preferences for quality and price. If there were an opportunity to provide a higher quality product at a lower price than Potter was charging, a competitor would do so and take market share away from Potter, until Potter either raised his quality, lowered his price, or both.

The Baileys burn with resentment that so many residents of Bedford Falls prudently choose to live in Potter’s less expensive housing than buy a house they can’t afford, financed by the Baileys’ Ponzi scheme. Thus, even after shirking their fiduciary duty to run the business properly, the Baileys spend decades assaulting Potter’s character in a transparent attempt to lure away his customers.

When the Depression hits and the Bailey Building and Loan is exposed for the fractional reserve fraud it is, Potter offers to come to the rescue with a generous offer to buy out its customers. It is noteworthy there is a run on the Bailey Building and Loan and the local bank, but Potter is financially secure enough to save them both, proving once again he is the only honorable businessman in the film.

But we must give the devil his due. George Bailey, the ultimate huckster, saves the building and loan without Potter’s help, convincing the yokel mob making a run on his business to keep their money tied up in his fundamentally insolvent confidence game.

That brings us to the one regrettable act Potter is guilty of, which is concealing the $8,000.00 the incompetent Billy Bailey inadvertently handed him while attempting to make a deposit. It’s true this was an underhanded act, although not unprovoked.

We don’t know how much Potter had invested in the Building and Loan to become a stockholder, but suspect it was a lot more than $8,000. One could make the case he was merely getting back some of the money the Baileys had previously defrauded him of, but there are courts for such matters and Potter should have sought their help if he had a case.

Nevertheless, two generations of Baileys had led a decades-long assault on Potter’s good name, resulting in most townspeople disliking him, even though he has quite literally saved their lives on numerous occasions. Without him, a large portion of Bedford Falls would be unemployed, have nowhere to live, or both. It is not an exaggeration to say that without Henry Potter, Bedford Falls would cease to exist. Yet, thanks to the Baileys, he is the most hated man in town.

Compare Potter’s vindictive reaction when George Bailey crawls to him for help after the $8,000.00 is lost to Potter’s reaction at the board meeting at the beginning of the movie. At the board meeting, Potter dismisses George’s unhinged attack upon him and redirects the discussion to the subject of the meeting: what is best for Bedford Falls. By the latter confrontation, Potter tries to have George arrested for embezzling.

Potter’s dastardly act is totally out of character with the Potter of the earlier scene or any other event we know of in Potter’s life. As far as we know, he has always been a hard-nosed, unsentimental businessman, but has never committed a crime or held a grudge, as he does now. Everything we know about Potter up to this point tells us his vindictive attempt to have George Bailey prosecuted is precisely the kind of emotional decision-making Potter has avoided for most of his life. That is why he is so wealthy at the beginning of the film.

Everyone has a breaking point. Potter had evidently reached his. Had he been prosecuted for keeping the $8,000.00, which may have been tricky from a legal standpoint, given that Billy Bailey had handed the money to him, he could easily have plead temporary insanity caused by years of psychological warfare waged against him by the Baileys.

We’ll never know, because before Potter has any opportunity to allow his passion to cool and clear up the misunderstanding, George Bailey sets off on his suicide melodrama, followed by a long, self-aggrandizing hallucination about angels and how Bedford Falls would be worse without him. By the time he concludes his childish escape from reality, the same yokels he previously conned during the Depression are now bailing him out once again, foreshadowing so many future bailouts of dishonest financiers whose assets should have been turned over to better management in bankruptcy court.

In one of the darkest moments of the film, George Bailey’s Christmas tree is jostled and one of the bells adorning it rings. George Bailey, now confident he and his fraudulent real estate scheme are safe, suggests the bell signifies an angel has earned his wings, as if his dishonest business dealings and ruthless defamation of legitimate competitors had divine sanction.

Nothing more is heard of Henry Potter, the man without whom Bedford Falls would not exist. He is left friendless and without the one thing he could cling to before George Bailey, the Devil incarnate, wrested it from his grasp: his honor. As the credits roll, evil has triumphed. The economic fallacies inherent in Baileyism become accepted truth, resulting in disaster after disaster, including the most recent in 2008.

Did the media really “cover” the Trump sexual assault allegations?

Leave a reply

The cast of MSNBC’s Morning Joe conducted a self-examination of sorts on Tuesday on whether media coverage of the election has been biased against Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. The segment was refreshingly sincere and former advisor to Sen. Rand Paul Elise Jordan made a point that’s been lost throughout much of the coverage thus far: the so-called “little people” are as angry at the national media as they are at the government.

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post admitted with a smile that he is, indeed, a “coastal elite,” having attended a prep school prior to Georgetown and now residing “inside the beltway.” But he disagreed the coverage has been biased against Trump, saying, “How do we not cover when nine women come forward against one of the two people who’s the nominee?”

Joe Scarborough gave the obvious, answer: the media should cover that story. But did they? Let’s look at just one of the allegations and try to determine that.

The New York Times broke Jessica Leeds’ story on October 12, providing an edited video interview of Leeds accompanying their print story. Leeds gave the by now well-known account of Trump raising the arm rest between their first class seats and proceeding to kiss and grope her on a flight to New York. Having watched the video and read the accompanying print story, it doesn’t require extraordinary curiosity to wonder:

She says she had been traveling in the “middle West” and was now on a flight to New York. From what city/airport?

What airline was she traveling on?

In what year did this happen? Does the airline have any record of the crews working flights from City X to New York that year? Can they be reached for comment? Do any of them remember Trump on their flights?

Is it possible to obtain a passenger list and can any of the passengers be contacted (privacy concerns makes this one unlikely)?

Leeds says that if Trump had confined his contact to the upper body, she “may not have gotten that upset.” Why did she make that startling statement? Was the contact consensual up to that point? Isn’t that an unusual statement for an alleged victim of sexual assault to make?

Let’s be clear. None of the answers to the questions above may have helped Donald Trump. The problem is there is no evidence from the reporting the questions were even asked. Had the report contained statements like, “Leeds was unable to tell this reporter what airline she was flying or what city the flight originated from,” at least readers would know Leeds was asked and couldn’t remember. And they’d likely consider that information, for whatever its worth, in deciding whether to believe Leeds or Trump.

So, did the New York Times really “cover” that story or did they simply take Leeds’ account at face value, with no attempt to verify its facts? They did perform the bare minimum due diligence in obtaining a response from Trump, who denies the incident ever happened. Besides that, they seem to have just taken Leeds completely at her word and published her account without a hint of skepticism.

Hey, it’s not like vivid accounts of sexual assault ever turn out to be false, right?

One might argue it is unreasonable to try to track down flight crews or other details about a flight from three decades ago. But isn’t it incumbent upon a news organization publishing such serious charges to make every effort to do so and report those efforts along with the information they do have?

And where in any of the reporting is the acknowledgment that Leeds’ and most of the other allegations are based upon their completely unverifiable accounts? Why is it immediately assumed Trump is lying, in the absence of any corroborating evidence? Granted, the media is not a courtroom, but is the presumption of innocence completely foreign to it?

When the New York Post reported an equally unverifiable claim by Anthony Gilberthorpe saying he was on the flight in question and the allegations aren’t true, there was an immediate investigation into his past. A search on his name returns pages of stories attacking his credibility, many published the same day as the New York Post story. Apparently, Gilberthorpe has a history of making extraordinary claims to the press and there is at least some reason to question his credibility.

But what about Jessica Leeds’ credibility? Did the Times reporters investigate it? Does she have any political connections, especially to the Clinton campaign or the Democratic Party? Has she ever had any disputes with Trump or any of his businesses? With the Republican Party?

Again, the answers to the questions above may not be helpful to Trump. But there is no evidence in the New York Times story they were even asked of Leeds or investigated secondarily before the story was published.

It’s not unreasonable to say the other accusers have similarly been taken completely at their words. There is a well-intentioned tendency to believe women who allege sexual assault because many in the past have been reluctant to seek justice because they feared the consequences of making their accusations. But we should recognize the danger in that tendency for completely annihilating the rights of the accused. Our legal traditions compel us to not believe the accuser until the defendant has been proven guilty.

At the very least, professional reporters who were aware the Leeds story would have a monumental impact on a presidential election should have taken more pains to verify their facts and presented their story in a way that made their due diligence apparent to the reader. Since they did not, it’s hard to blame Trump supporters for believing the media is biased against their candidate.

Tom Mullen on WBFO 88.7 FM Buffalo, NY – Libertarian Party, Johnson/Weld

Leave a reply

I sat down with Jay Moran of WBFO 88.7 FM here in Buffalo, NY to discuss the Libertarian Party and the Johnson/Weld ticket. The short version that aired is at the top of the page; the full conversation can be found at the bottom. Listen here.