2018.10.12 Robert E. Lee

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Trump does a speech in Ohio, on how great Ulysses S. Grant was (an Ohio native). And to do so, you mention the greatness of the foes he overcame: so in passing, he mentioning that Robert E. Lee was a great general... and was defeated by Grant. NBC spun that sentence fragment into a “WATCH: President Trump says ‘Robert E. Lee was a great general’ during Ohio rally, calling the Confederate leader ‘incredible.'” -- and creates a twitter and media storm about how tone deaf and racist Trump is. Only Trump said that Grant was the "incredible" one. It took NBC two days to quietly retract -- but, as usual, there are 3,000 retweets and 6,000 likes of the FakeNews before the correction, and the distracted are on to other things.

More

FakeNews is inventing a meme by omitting context and inventing "of course Trump loves the confederate General" through sloppy reporting. Also

  1. Robert E. Lee was a great General
  2. he gave up slaves before the war and before Grant did
  3. he spoke/wrote against the institution of Slavery
  4. he gave us Arlington Cemetery,
  5. he was a celebrated American general both before, during and after the Civil War.


So whether he was a Confederate or not, doesn't change what he was, despite the left's Stalin'esque efforts to whitewash history, or pretend that everyone from the South was bad, and everyone from the North was good.

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📚 References

NBC
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Trying to decide which major channel is worse on news is not easy, thanks to all of them vying for the title of least trustable. Here's some of NBC's lowlights.
Fake News
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While the term goes back 100 years, the history is summed up well in a Sharyl Attkisson TedTalk on FakeNews. While our media has always had false narratives and bad stories that are Fake News (exampled include: Edward R. Murrow's "See it now" McCarthy'ing Joe McCarthy (1954), Richard Jewel story (1996), story about a plane crashing into Camp David after 9/11 (2001), Duke LeCross Rape Case (2014), Michael Brown and 'hands up, don't shoot' narrative (2014), and so on). We didn't use the term "Fake News", just liberal media bias or incompetence, but it's been around since the first liberal got sloppy or partisan at a newspaper, somewhere back in Roman times.

Then on September 13, 2016 Hillary Clinton supporters Google and Eric Schmidt, used a shell charity (a non-profit called "First Draft,") to start seeding the term to attack right wing websites ("to tackle malicious hoaxes and fake news reports"). Hillary Clinton and her surrogate David Brock of Media Matters admitted in a campaign letter that they pressured Facebook to join the effort. Google warned Conservative websites to remove stories that Google didn't like, or they'd take away their ad revenue. And Barack Obama and the liberal media followed along, regurgitating what they were told: none were going to let this opportunity (to curate what information we could see) go to waste, all in the name of protecting free speech. All coincidentally done at the same time, in what could only be a coordinated campaign attack.

Unfortunately for them, it backfired when people noticed that the mainstream liberal media made more errors and was less honest, and started throwing it back in their face. Fake News applied more to the News, Google, Facebook, Obama and other curators and finger pointers than their victims. Donald Trump used that to hijack the term and use it back against them. The left tried to change the narrative and pretend that Trump had created the term, and they wanted to stop using it and claimed it was a hateful term and an attack on free press to point out the Presses bias or errors. And that's where we are today.

Is Trump a racist?
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Let's start by reviewing what words actually mean:

Racism - ray•se•zem. noun: the belief that ALL members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

Not-racism: Racism isn't dating, employing and marrying foreigners, or being a loudmouthed douche, it's not insulting an individual because you don't like them (even based on race, or something they said/did): that's just a personal attack. Those might be insensitive, but words have actual meanings. Mexicans aren't a race. Islam is not a race. The border wall or getting tough on illegal immigration isn't racism. It certainly wasn't labelled that when Bill and Hillary were for it. It's not winning awards for racial inclusiveness, hugging and hanging out with celebrities of other races, nor celebrating other races with monuments. So there's actually no real evidence of his Trump's racism, but lots of evidence of the self-deluded bias of his detractors, and the gullibility of their followers who repeat accusations without understanding them..