Cheap Seats 2021

Have a Banana - 01/20

By Rich Trzupek
  We’ve seen riots and we’ve seen riots. We’ve seen riots where people were killed, businesses looted and swathes of American cities occupied by socialist slobs for weeks on end. Congressman Ocasio-Cortez urged America to understand the justifiable anger that drove the rioters to extremes.
  We’ve seen public edifices attacked and we’ve seen public edifices attacked. We’ve seen statues of important figures in American history toppled by crowds whose degree of self-righteous intolerance is only rivaled by their ignorance of their nation’s past. Speaker Pelosi dismissed the destruction, declaring that statues really don’t matter all that much.
  We’ve seen a dishonest, willfully stupid press ignore unprecedented violence as much as they possibly could and, when the rioting grew to degrees that shamed them into at least mentioning it, doing everything they could to downplay the outrages committed by protestors whom they described as “mostly peaceful.”
  We’ve seen outrages ignored time and again because they were outrages of the left. And, as the last four years have proved beyond any doubt, the legacy media is unapologetically a leftist hit squad, the communications wing of the Democrat party in everything but name.
  The left’s view, of course, is that the legacy media remains the guardians of truth and it is us, on the right, who are deluded and receive our information within an echo chamber filled with unsupportable propaganda.
  I know this not to be true, primarily because the legacy media pushes false narratives so often in the public policy of which I happen to be an expert: environmental science and regulation. Many others with my skill and knowledge in my and other complex professions know this to be true as well. Legacy journalists do not understand deeply complex technical issues themselves and therefore rely upon biased, agenda-driven “experts” on the left to tell them what they ought to say.
  This same theme repeats itself again and again, across all sorts of professions and skill sets, the biggest examples being the navel-gazing set of liberal academics who infect America’s educational system and, more troubling, big tech.
  This is all by way of preamble so we can discuss the so-called “Capitol riot” and its aftermath. The “riot” in which the only person killed was shot by an over-zealous cop and trivial damage to public and private property occurred compared to the summer riots in Seattle, Minneapolis Portland, Chicago, et al is none-the-less regretted by this author who strongly supports peaceful public protest but who deplores protests that are violent to any degree, no matter the cause or the politics of the protestors.
  It is not surprising that the legacy media jumped on the event to further demonize their hated enemy, President Trump. It is not surprising to find that CNN planted reporters amid the protesters to egg them on, hoping to incite rage and violence. It is not surprising that the legacy media dismissed the root cause of the protests – a genuinely held belief on the right that the election of Joe Biden was the result of an unprecedented degree of fraud in key battleground states for which there is a disturbing amount of credible evidence.
  What is surprising – and chilling – is the speed at which big-tech moved to shut down dissenting voices all about the internet. No sooner had the president’s Twitter account been suspended than web site after web site was disappeared by Big Tech. In what has been called the Krystal Nacht of the Internet, a segment of society despised by the liberals who run big tech were attacked and, effectively, silenced. This was all done in the name of protecting the public from something called “hate speech,” by fools who don’t understand that free speech cannot exist without what they call hate speech.
  And so, here we are, in a republic now reminiscent of the Central American nations of one hundred years ago.
  So folks, sit back, relax and have a banana. Come Wednesday, it’ll be replacing the eagle as the symbol of our brave new republic.
  Email: richtrzupek@gmail.com