Ron DeSantis spoke at the 2017 Restoration Weekend of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. That’s the event that a Washington Post hit piece described as a gathering of “right-wing provocateurs.”
Also speaking at the 2017 Weekend was Medal of Honor winner Clinton Romesha.
Romesha received the Medal of Honor after leading a defense against 300 Taliban fighters despite taking wounds from a rocket-propelled grenade. CNN called him, “An American Hero”. Barack Obama placed the Medal of Honor over his head. Does the Washington Post believe he’s a “provocateur”?
The Washington Post’s Beth Reinhard and Emma Brown are not the first to use the Restoration Weekend, an eclectic gathering of thinkers, activists and leaders of different races and religions from around the world, to smear attendees. And other fake news media outlets picked up these lies.
Esquire accused the Restoration Weekend of being an event for white supremacists.
At the 2013 Restoration Weekend, Ron DeSantis spoke. As did Sonnie Johnson: an African-American conservative activist who combines hip-hop quotes with tributes to Reaganomics.
Some white supremacist.
If DeSantis is a racist for speaking at Freedom Center events, so are Larry Elder, Sheriff Clarke, Allen West, K. Carl Smith, Sonnie Johnson, and many other African-American conservatives.
Newsweek labeled David Horowitz, the Jewish leader of the Freedom Center, a “race war theorist”. It quoted the Southern Poverty Law Center’s smear of Horowitz as an "anti-black extremist.” That’s the lefty group which had to pay out $3.3 million to a Muslim for calling him an “anti-Muslim extremist”.
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The SPLC is as reliable as Newsweek.
David Horowitz has spent a lifetime fighting for civil rights alongside African-American activists on the left and on the right. Freedom Center events bring together conservatives of all colors and creeds. Horowitz and his team have worked to expose the exploitation and abuse of the black community by the Democrats as documented in, The New Shame of the Cities, bringing to light facts ignored by the media.
Horowitz has made school choice for African-American children a priority for the Trump administration while the Washington Post and the media prefer to trap them in failing schools. Those schools don’t exist to educate children, but to subsidize teachers’ unions, which fund and organize for the Democrats.
That’s not just racism. It’s a plantation politics whose bureaucratic slavery exploits African-American children as chattel, using their bodies to create wealth and votes for white lefties.
Like Horowitz, DeSantis supports school choice for African-American children. That’s why he voted in favor of the SOAR Act that provided school vouchers to Washington D.C.’s overwhelmingly African-American population.
The Washington Post spread its smear of DeSantis and the Freedom Center all over the internet, but after all those smears, where’s the actual racism?
The Post never delivers on its premise. After launching a thousand libels, it acknowledges that there’s no substance behind them. “In three of the four speeches reviewed by The Washington Post, Mr DeSantis delivered sharp-edged conservative criticism of Democratic policies without explicitly touching on race.”
The media opposition researchers that turned “monkey this up” into a coded racist slur couldn’t find anything racist. So they settled for implying all the slanders that they could never actually prove.
Beth Reinhard and Emma Brown didn’t produce an original story. They watched a few videos, browsed Twitter and then launched a whispering campaign based on innuendo and out of context quotes into a media echo chamber. Their smear will hold until the next racist hit piece comes along.
This isn’t journalism. But it is the new media normal.
The Washington Post is at the top of a media ecosystem generating smears that scavengers in the ecosystem will turn into outright libels. The Post implies that there’s something vaguely racist about the Restoration Weekend. Newsweek and Esquire scream that the participants and speakers are Nazis. ThinkProgress declares that David Horowitz is “an avowed anti-black activist” and Splinter shrieks that the Restoration Weekend is an “annual gathering of racists”. This isn’t an accident. It’s how it works.
This isn’t really about the Freedom Center. It’s about the corruption of the media.
The media picks candidates and acts as an arm of their campaigns. It initiates opposition research, creates and sustains narratives, distributes talking points, and manufactures scandals.
The Washington Post has nursed a grudge against the Freedom Center due to its frequent criticisms of the formerly respected paper’s lies, misrepresentations and abuses. But the Center is just another vector for sustaining the media’s talking point that DeSantis is a racist. The Post smear completely fails to prove its accusation, but keeping the talking point alive is more important than proving it.
Old media hit pieces actually proved their accusations. New media hit pieces tie together an infinite loop of allegations, innuendos and implications that are never proven, but are accepted because the media keeps circulating new variations on them. Old media lit a fire. New media just blows smoke.
The Washington Post smear is smoke. The other media outlets that picked it up fanned the smoke to make it seem bigger. Beth Reinhard and Emma Brown admitted halfway through that there’s no fire.
And then they blew more smoke.
Before Election Day, a thousand more smoke signals will rise from the sooty stacks of the media. They will smear DeSantis as a racist by implication. None of them will amount to anything, but they will maintain the media’s choking atmosphere of innuendo. The facts will die and the talking points will live.
The Freedom Center smear, the absurdly racist robocalls whose only purpose appears to be damaging the DeSantis campaign, and the misrepresentation of “monkey this up” all perpetuate a narrative.
The media is colluding with the Gillum campaign. Its hit pieces are strategically calculated opposition narratives that smear DeSantis as a racist because his opponent is African-American. If his opponent were female, DeSantis would be a sexist. If his opponent were gay, he would be homophobic. In the left’s political Rorschach test, your opponent’s identity defines how you will be smeared.
The Washington Post’s smear of the Freedom Center is one of a thousand points of darkness in which a paper owned by one of the most powerful men in the world is trying to drown American democracy.
"You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war," William Randolph Hearst had allegedly once said.
Like Heast’s toadies, the employees of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos are furnishing the racism. Even if they have to invent it, manufacture it or whip it up out of thin air, to win a political election.
Even if they have to smear African-American conservatives and a Medal of Honor winner as racists.
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