Willbacker
Ravens Ring of Honor
There's a difference between going after a leak and using incendiary rhetoric at rallies. It's a conversation in which I tend to side with the whistleblower (even when they're from the Obama administration!) but it's a different conversation.
I'm going with conspiracy until it's proven otherwise. In my line of work I come across a lot of comments about the financial markets (one of my work's clients is the biggest financial newspaper in the southern hemisphere) and a couple of years ago I came across a comment from one of Australia's best-performing fund managers who said something that'll always stick with me. It was about picking stocks but there are a lot of moments during the political news cycles that remind me of what he said. Anyway, he was asked about the internet and whether that makes things easier for people to get more informed (and make better stock picks etc) and he made the comment that there's a huge amount of information out there but nearly all of it is of such low quality that it's absolute garbage tier. And if I'm being blunt it's really the same thing with the way people get political news in particular - a lot of these sources are the equivalent of some bloke in a parking lot telling you he has this great property investment opportunity.
I know people really don't trust the media (and I've been harping on about why the main cable channels in particular are godawful, but that it's not for the reasons people think) and I don't expect I'm changing any minds, but if I could impart one new habit on people it's to verify what you're reading. If you hear something, try to find another site that's saying the same thing (a completely unrelated site obviously) and with as much transparency on its sources as possible. I know a lot of outlets do "a source told [XYZ]" to protect their sources' jobs but it's the difference between "sources told WalterFootball" or "sources told ***" and "sources told Adam Schefter".
And for the love of all that is good, if you still touch won't any mainstream organisation, I can't recommend enough trying to see if a wire outlet like Reuters or AP has reported something on it. They're wire outlets so you see their stories pop up on other news outlets' websites (they have a huge presence around the world so they cover stories for everyone across the spectrum where it would otherwise be too expensive for other outlets to send someone). They don't embellish their stories or add editorial spin either.
As for the "dirty shit behind the scenes", a lot of those people don't help their own cause but in my experience things are a lot simpler than they appear. My partner's a civil servant (so our pillow talk tends to be about politics and geopolitics) and I'll say that it takes a certain type of person to be attracted to running for office in the same way that a lot of pro athletes tend to have similar personalities and there's a lot of toxicity. But the "deep state" is just people doing their job of making the wheels of government turn every day. Hillary wasn't running a pedophile ring in some pizza place; political staff just work long hours and pizza's a workplace staple when you're burning the midnight oil. And there was no DNC conspiracy to railroad Bernie - just a crappy outdated primary system and he didn't do well in the south. More recently it turned out that the MAGAbomber wasn't a skilled DNC operative but a deranged bloke who didn't know where to draw the line. And you look at how the caravan has a lot of women taking their kids with them and I'd ask whether it's more likely that they're on the George Soros payroll or it's the more simpler alternative that there are lots of push factors in their crappy pre-migration lives that they want to make less crappy (that was Anthony Scaramucci who made that point recently btw), especially considering it's not the first such caravan and they've happened under the watch of several presidents.
Anyway, that's my $0.02. Be sceptical of everything you read or hear (even stuff you may trust from a place like Gab or Qanon or whatever - I've got my own thoughts on sources like that and I don't see myself changing anyone's mind but that two-stage source verification process is important) and try to find other sources saying the same thing. Don't sleep on the wire agencies if you want to see if something's verifiable. And there's a lot of stuff that goes on in the champagne rooms of the political "elites" (as much as I hate that word...) irrespective of where they sit on the spectrum but the truth is almost always way more boring than you think.
You ever see Trump do that to go after a leak. When you see news organazations constantly just put up only negative material personally I believe Trump has every right to say what he says. I mean when you're constantly called a Nazi and want to kill women and babies...……….
The pizza pedophile was just so absolutely ridiculous and I don't even know where that came from but it had to be from a real obscure newssource. There was conspiracy to railroad Bernie. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/damaging-emails-dnc-wikileaks-dump/story?id=40852448. Wikileaks bro. Remember them. Can you trust ABC? Its interesting how he's called the MAGAbomber. If newssources were fair how come housewhip Steve Scalise's shooter was not called the BERNIEshooter and then blame Bernie's rhetoric. Now my favorite the caravan you don't believe that the women with the children were put to the forefront by the agenda driven media? Really lmao. The major bulk of this caravan is working fighting aged men and by a longshot. Heck its even a strong possibility that these are unaccompanied minors that are being smuggled. I mean have you not noticed food trucks, medicine and gasp clean clothes being provided and you don't believe there is money behind all this.