Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Politics General)

@Derpy Whooves
I feel like his “child exploitation” argument is a reference to Pizzagate. Which is hilarious. Because obviously false conspiracy theory and all.

those who were arrested for being accused of being disloyal had to engage in the most literal form of flag worship: being forced to kneel and kiss the edge of it

The New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for approval from “national security officials” before publication.

This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said: The American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing reporting that top officials don’t want made public.

On June 15, the Times reported that the US government is escalating its cyber attacks on Russia’s power grid. According to the article, “the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively,” as part of a larger “digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.”

In response to the report, Donald Trump attacked the Times on Twitter, calling the article “a virtual act of Treason.”

The New York Times PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the US government before being printed.

“Accusing the press of treason is dangerous,” the Times communications team said. “We described the article to the government before publication.”

“As our story notes, President Trump’s own national security officials said there were no concerns,” the Times added.

Surveys of the midterm congressional elections in 2018 showed that the majority of Asian votes still went to the Democrats. The new conservative Asian voters are still some way from dominating the Asian vote. But if Chinese Trump supporters are an indicator, conservatism is still rising.

David Wang, the founder of CAFT, said the number of members in the network dropped to 5,000 or so after the presidential election when people shifted their focus to other matters. But now it has risen close to 8,000, and his goal is to have 20,000 people in the network for the 2020 election. The group has growing chapters in cities such as Atlanta and Phoenix and continues to expand.

In the spring, I was invited to a Chinese Trump supporters’ party. It was organized by a woman named Lucy Tan, a mother with two master’s degrees and three school-aged children, at a karaoke bar in the heavily ChinA few dozen Chinese people showed up. Some had participated in pro-Trump activities in 2016, but quite a few were newcomers who said that their conservative stance made them lonely in a progressive city, until they found this group on WeChat.

“I had never loved any politicians. But this old man, I love him to death,” exclaimed Jason Gu, who said he worked in the real estate industry. Gu then lamented about his perception of America’s deterioration since he came to this country in 1991 when he was 37 — his sense that there is a swelling welfare system that encourages laziness and punishes hard-working people.

He picked up a peanut from a plate. “Think about this, when we were kids in China, we could only afford to serve peanuts during the Lunar New Year. Why were we so poor?” asked Gu rhetorically. “I came to the U.S. because I saw the flaws of socialism. But now America is going on the old road of China.”

The very thought of socialism created its own toxic atmosphere. Almost everyone came up with a horror story about how it ruined lives in their home country, and they pledged never to let the U.S. become another Venezuela.

@Violet Rose in The Rain
 
Sounds like you’ve reached the New Zealand levels of the media-government dick-sucking complex. Wonder how long it’ll be before you reach the Australian level of arresting journalists and raiding their premises to ‘protect’ “national security.”
 
I really do wonder what happened to the mainstream media here in the west, given how much it sucks at doing its job. I’ve been exposed to this quite a bit recently here, whether it’s the media blindly parroting their American counterparts of playing directly into Trump’s hands, or how the gun buyback is a “resounding success with only a tiny amount of pushback.” I was actually interviewed for the latter by a journalist for a regional newspaper here, who *shock horror* wanted to get a balanced take on the subject from multiple sides
 

 
(He even said that he felt that there was a lot of anti-gun bias in the mainstream media)
 
It reminded me of something Dan Carlin and Danielle Bolelli discussed here  

Nowadays, I mean the media is in such disarray that the people who you used to rely on to provide at least some window, even if it was a flawed window, into reality are so disorganized and disoriented; their reputations are in tatters, that that leaves nothing to a conversation but name-calling and whatnot. I mean what facts would you argue with? You have your facts and I have my facts, and they never come you know they never they never cross over.

…there used to be a line that “in a democracy or a republic an informed citizenry is what’s required.” Could you call our citizenry informed and if you said no, is it their fault? I don’t know.

@Lord Goku
I’m joking about how western Journalists often talk about North Korea’s cruelty towards their civilians while ignoring the American government’s own cruelty towards their own civilians(and civilians of other countries)