The "Bloodbath" Hoax
Mainstream media outlets continue to purge trust out of spite.
Saturday, during a rally in Dayton, Ohio, Donald Trump said that there would be a “bloodbath” if he lost in November. Hysterical headlines spread from one mainstream media outlet to another, each leaving the impression that the former president was threatening violence if he wasn’t re-elected.
But of course the mainstream media is shamelessly lying about Trump’s remarks, stripping them of context so that people remain ignorant of the truth, which is that the “bloodbath” comment came in the midst of a discussion of US trade policy.
“Mexico has taken over a period of 30 years, 34 percent of the automobile-manufacturing business in our country,” the former president observed, warning that China was building auto plants in Mexico as a way to circumvent trade restrictions.
“We’re going to put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across the line,” Trump said, “and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars—if I get elected. Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars.”
Conservative commentators have pointed out the media’s mendacity, but the media is simply doubling down.
“We did not miss the full context,” Jen Psaki told her Sunday audience, “this was not some meandering off-message comment. This is his message.”
Joe Scarborough had a full blown meltdown Monday morning (click to see clip):
MSNBC’s Anna Marie Cox literally said: “We can’t take him- you know, look at what he is saying and think ‘oh, well, we’re going to be accurate for this, we’re going to say he was referring to the auto industry’ when I think we know how his supporters interpret these things.”
Then there’s this lunatic:
Never mind that a definition of the word “bloodbath” is literally “a major economic disaster”:
And never mind that these same media outlets have repeatedly used the word “bloodbath” in the past:
And never mind that one could easily argue that the media’s rhetoric about Trump is the real incitement to violence.1 Listen to these unhinged spazzes and the fear they’re trying to instill in people:
The media’s blatant lying over Trump’s “bloodbath” comment foretells how completely dishonest, inaccurate, shameless and unreliable the media will be every day if he’s re-elected. But none of this should be surprising, because we’ve already lived through four years of such coverage. Let’s take a short trip down memory lane and look at two particularly ridiculous examples.
The Koi Fish Lie
In November 2017, Trump traveled to Japan for a summit meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which entailed a “ceremonial feeding” of koi fish. Demonstrating the feeding technique to Trump, Abe took a small scoop from his box of fish food and dropped it into the water. Trump followed his lead and did the same. Abe dropped a few more scoops. Again, Trump followed. Then Abe poured the full contents of his box into the water, which Trump also did.
That’s what really happened. But CNN deceptively edited the video so that it showed Abe dump a spoonful into the koi pond, followed by Trump dumping his entire box. The network neglected to show or report that Abe had poured the contents of his fish food box into the pond before Trump followed suit.
“Trump feeds fish, winds up pouring entire box of food into koi pond,” read a headline by CNN’s Veronica Rocha.
According to a report in the Washington Examiner, “CNN was given an assist in getting this bogus story rolling by Bloomberg White House correspondent Justin Sink, who tweeted that Trump and Abe were ‘spooning fish food into the pond’ when the U.S. president, ‘decided to just dump the whole box in for the fish.’”
Here’s NBC’s White House correspondent, Monica Alba:
Not wanting to be outdone, The Guardian published a story warning that overfeeding fish is extremely dangerous for their health, adding that, “Some speculated that a poor palace employee would be dispatched to the scene to clean up the mess as soon as the two leaders disappeared inside.”
And Jezebel happily contributed with a very professional headline: “Big stupid baby dumps a load of fish food on Japanese koi pond.”
It’s important to note that in no way was any of this coverage “accidental.” Nor was it based on an “innocent mistake.” As Time White House reporter Alana Abramson pointed out:
[The White House] pool report explicitly notes that both Trump and Abe—not just the president—initially took portions of the fish food from the box before tossing out the remnants: ‘The two leaders then leaned out and began throwing spoonfuls of the food into the water, before eventually turning over the bowls and dumping the rest out,’ the pool report reads.
In other words, the truth was never difficult to ascertain, especially considering full video of the ceremonial feeding also documented Trump following the Prime Minister’s lead.
But the media perpetrated one of the most petty, pointless lies you could possibly think of because. . . why, exactly? These outlets, which have long billed themselves as Doric columns of probity and righteous practitioners of veracity, essentially let the world know that they were willing to blatantly lie about something very trivial, and in the process confirmed Trump’s “fake news” euphemism was accurate.
The Mailbox Hoax
Stupidity was taken to new heights in August 2020 when the mainstream media propagated a conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign was stealing mailboxes by the truckload in a bid to take mail-in votes away from Biden.
It all started when a Democratic activist tweeted a photo of mailboxes stacked together in Wisconsin. According to the viral tweet, it was the result of “voter suppression” by the Trump administration.
The idea that Trump was trying to steal the election by stealing mailboxes spread like a wildfire. Even Taylor Swift got in on the action:
“USPS Mailboxes Removed in Some New York Area Neighborhoods,” reported NBC News, speculating that it was politically motivated.
“Postal service removes Oakland collection boxes; leaders warn of election interference,” said a headline from the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Never Trumper” Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project compared the “White House and Trump campaign connection to the USPS shutdown” to Watergate, saying, “This is too sweeping and organized to just be some random play.”
Ana Navarro, the ABC/CNN commentator who once said that Roe v. Wade and abortion rights were necessary for families who might want to terminate special needs children in the womb, also perpetuated the conspiracy by posting pictures of USPS moving aging mailboxes with a caption suggesting that the Trump White House was behind it:
Nancy Pelosi subsequently accused Trump of launching a “campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters.”
Even Biden couldn’t help himself. “They’re going around literally with tractor trailers picking up mailboxes,” he said at a virtual fundraiser, according to reporter Holly Otterbein. “You oughta go online and check out what they’re doing in Oregon. I mean, it’s bizarre!”
A simple Google search would have revealed that the removal of postal boxes is a routine procedure carried out before and after elections, a practice going all the way back to 1833 in New York City, where the very first street corner mailbox was placed. The original viral tweet about Wisconsin was based on a photo of a yard operated by a company that routinely refurbishes mailboxes for the USPS.
It costs money to travel to and check a collection box that sits empty or collects very few envelopes, and there may come a point in time when it makes sense to get rid of it. Collection boxes are also moved all the time to adjust to the ebb and flow of mail volume.
It’s fairly obvious why mainstream media outlets are suggestively framing their “bloodbath” headlines and intentionally misrepresenting what Trump said—and why Democratic senator Brian Schatz gave marching orders on Twitter Saturday night: “Headline writers: Don’t outsmart yourself. Just do ‘Trump Promises Bloodbath if he Doesn’t Win Election.’” The idea is that most people won’t check to confirm the actual remarks, so that “Trump threatens bloodshed” becomes ingrained in voters’ heads. As Jeffrey Blehar puts it, the bloodbath hoax is a Democratic attempt “to keep the memetic image of ‘Donald Trump as January 6 chaos agent’ fresh in the minds of a public whose tolerance for four more years of Joe Biden is now lower than his actuarial chances of survival over the next five years.”
What I find remarkable is that the outlets eagerly and brazenly lying about Trump’s comments still don’t understand that they’re helping his re-election chances when they do this sort of thing. Poll after poll has shown that the Democrats are purging minority and working-class voters—ordinary Americans who are not inherently political animals like so much of the educated upper classes. These are people who care much more about their pocketbooks than loose rhetoric at a campaign rally. And to whatever extent they do care about Trump as “loose-tongued bloviator,” the vast majority of them, upon realizing they’ve been deceived yet again by outlets like MSNBC and CNN, react with contempt and conclude Trump is a victim of adversarial and dishonest coverage. These voters may not become openly pro-Trump, but as Blehar points out, they do begin to act like the villagers in the old Aesopian fable about the boy who cried wolf: “Eh, he’s bad, but he’s not bad like they say, and that makes me suspicious.”
It's getting more and more obvious when the media and social media influencers are given their talking points -- they ALL repeat the same idiotic phrases but are unable to articulate any sort of debate on the subject.
The worst part is that when they're caught -- as in the bloodbath example -- they simply double and triple down. WE ALL KNOW WHAT HE REALLY MEANT, THAT'S WHY WE CAN'T SHOW HIM ACTUALLY SPEAKING!
Wouldn't real journalists actually ASK Trump if that's what he meant?