TDS Outbreak at Miss America Pageant

“Miss Texas Tears into Trump in a Blistering 15-Second Takedown on Live TV,” screamed the headline on Yahoo’s lead article, which originally appeared in the liberal Huffington Post this past Monday morning. Here are the article’s first two paragraphs:

Miss Texas Margana Wood may not have triumphed at the Miss America pageant, but she won over millions of new fans by calling out both white supremacists and President Donald Trump on Sunday night.

During the Q&A portion of the event, Wood was asked about Trump’s response to white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia last month, when he said there were “very fine people on both sides.” 

The links one will notice are all to thoroughly one-sided, indeed, extraordinarily propagandistic, articles in the Huffington Post that turn the Charlottesville Operation into the morality play that I discussed in my previous article. I said that the mainstream media’s coverage could be summed up by the headline, “Violent White Supremacist Rally in Charlottesville Turns Deadly.” In fact, it might be better summed up by the question to which the aspirant to the Miss America crown was given 20 seconds to respond:

Last month a demonstration of Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the KKK in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned violent and a counter-protestor was killed. The president said there were very fine people on both sides. Were there?

“You’re asking me that…here?” is what I would be thinking. “Are you out of your mind?”

But the person asking the question was one of the judges, Jess Cagle, the Hollywood-celebrity-obsessed editor of Time, Inc.’s People magazine. He might not be the most appropriate evaluator of feminine allure, but it’s pretty clear from his loaded question that he knows what he likes when it comes to current political opinion, and Miss Texas, who wanted his vote, could hardly have responded in any way but in the direction in which the question led her. Furthermore, an honest and knowledgeable answer, which would have to begin with a correction of the falsehoods in his question, would have required a lot more than 20 seconds. Let’s take a shot at it to show what I mean.

First, the stated purpose of the demonstration was to protest the proposed removal of the statue of the great Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, from its place of honor in Charlottesville. Considering that unstated fact, there is a very good chance that at least some of the demonstrators were “very fine people,” Southern gentlemen of the old school, in fact, of whose number I like to count myself. Perhaps the lovely blonde Margana could have made that point in the allotted time, but anyone depending upon the mainstream press for her information wouldn’t even know it, and if she did such an answer would surely have ruined any chance she had to win.

Second, not even the thoroughly dishonest mainstream press has reported that the KKK was among the demonstrators. That heavily FBI-infiltrated group, which really amounts to nothing as a political organization in this second decade of the 21^st century, had already had its meager little rally in Charlottesville a month before.

Third, the expression “white supremacist” is a pejorative term used by opponents of people who call themselves “white nationalists,” as the leader of the rally, Jason Kessler, and more prominent associate, Richard Spencer, and their intellectual mentor, Jared Taylor, like to do. I made in quite clear in my previous article that I do not regard these likely mountebanks as fine people, but I would not dismiss the possibility that some of their well-meaning but misguided followers might have been swayed by their argument. As both Taylor and Spencer have put it, they are calling for the same sort of group consciousness and pride among the very disparate group of Caucasians generally that sustains the state of Israel. This latter is a sentiment that they and the molders of public opinion in the country seem to admire, and we don’t hear the Jess Cagles of the world bandying around the expression, “Jewish supremacists,” when it would seem to be a good deal more fitting for Zionists than calling self-proclaimed white nationalists “white supremacists.”

Fourth, Cagle leads off with “neo-Nazis” as though it was their rally more than anyone else’s, which is simply a joke. Anyone calling himself a Nazi of any stripe in the United States today and flaunting a flag with a swastika on it might as well have a sign pinned to his backside that says, “KICK ME.” Yes, there were such people polluting the rally, but who can really believe that they were anything but Deep State plants, designed to make defending Robert E. Lee look absolutely as bad as possible?

Fifth, there is the “turned violent” and “counter-protestor” part of the question…or statement. One would never gather from it that the turn to violence occurred when the Democratic governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, with no apparent reason for doing so, declared the rally an unlawful assembly 30 minutes before it was to begin and then the police forcibly flushed the demonstrators out of the park where they had been given permission to gather and into the arms of the violent Antifa and Black Lives Matter “counter-protestors.” After they did that, the police, ignoring their responsibility to maintain order, simply retired from the scene and allowed the two opposing groups to go at one another.

The car incident that we are told caused the death of a young woman named Heather Heyer—although we are never told exactly how—occurred almost two hours after the big fracas had ended. At its worst as an indictment of the rally organizers, it is the act of one deranged individual who had washed out of the Army after having being diagnosed as a schizophrenic, and is therefore completely anomalous. On the other hand, as an indictment of the opinion molders for whom people of the likes of Jess Cagle and the owners of Yahoo are fronting, there is a very good chance that it was simply a staged event. For some of the latest on that from YouTube see Charlottesville Shuffle, parts one and two, Heather Heyer Died of a Heart Attack, Stunning Afterthought: There's No Video Of The Car Crash In Charlottesville!, and Kurt Haskell: NO ONE DIED at Charlottesville and I can prove it.

Propagandist Desperation

Certainly you realize, dear reader, that the stated opinion of a contestant at the Miss America event is not worthy of being treated as national news. But, as it turned out, Yahoo and the Huffington Post were not alone. AOL also headlined the story and gave it the same spin as Yahoo and USA Today did the same. In fact, “Disagreeing with President Trump was a common theme during the Miss America 2018 competition, Sunday,” is how the latter led off its story, noting that the eventual winner, Cara Mund of North Dakota, went for the bait on Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate change accord, but Miss Missouri, Jennifer Davis, gave a pass on an invitation to find Trump guilty of colluding with the Russians to deprive Hillary Clinton of the presidency.

What in the world is going on here? What we are witnessing is desperation by the molders of public opinion at their increasing loss of control of the national narrative. They still hold a considerable amount of sway over people who subscribe to newspapers, watch the network nightly news shows, or, say, listen to National Public Radio. That is to say, they are still able to propagandize that part of the public that likes to think of itself as educated. In Virginia, such people are heavily concentrated in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, and in the University of Virginia home of Charlottesville. Those are the only parts of the state that went for Marco Rubio over Trump in the Republican primary last year and the regions that made the difference for Hillary in her narrow victory over Trump in the state in the general election.

You can almost see the wheels turning at propaganda central: “How can we reach the lowbrows?” “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade” in the Sunday newspaper insert Parade magazine used to be a favorite way as I have chronicled with my Parade of Lies series, but, as noted, only a very few people get newspapers anymore, and Parade has shrunk to virtually nothing. That’s where the Miss America pageant comes in, as well as ubiquitous free sources of news on the Internet. (An Internet search of “Miss Texas Trump” showed that a great many other news organs also treated this ginned up exchange with Miss Texas as news, including Fox.)

Fortunately, there’s a good sign that the propagandists are succeeding mainly in making themselves look bad and exposing themselves for what they are. At the time of my writing this, 11,820 people had weighed in on Yahoo with comments. Almost all of them attacked Miss Texas and the article. One of the most perceptive was from someone using the screen name “Hawki”:

Obviously, she doesn't represent the state of Texas. We like the president and support him. Trump Derangement Syndrome [TDS] needs to be certified as a legitimate disease by the American Psychiatric Association.

Here’s another one that was fairly typical: from “PartyLikeIts1776”:

Fake News: Young impressionable girl, brainwashed by Liberal mainstream media fake news, parrots LIES that have slandered our great President enough, and loud enough, and continuously enough, people will believe it. Good for Democrats, sad for truth seeking Americans... This should open the eyes of many Americans to the Democrats propaganda policy, if you tell a LIE long enough, and loud enough, and continuously enough, people will believe it. Good for Democrats, sad for truth seeking Americans.

They’re not having very much success with their target audience, it would appear, and it’s just wishful thinking that Miss Texas “won over millions of new fans” with her desired response to Jess Cagle’s loaded question.

David Martin

September 14, 2017

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