The Tuesday July 21st, 2 am attack on Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s home was done by around 30 vandals dressed in black and with black masks, and complete with what were said to be projectiles fired at the Mayor’s home, along with fireworks, and graffiti.
The fact that it happened just one day after Trump weirdly went out of his way to mention Oakland in his speech that focused on why federal troops were in Portland, has a number of Oakland residents reaching for a conspiracy theory – one that may not be far-fetched.
The Republican President Trump, mentioned New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Baltimore. But then, after a pause, he added “And Oakland is a mess!” Implying that he was sending in federal troops, and saying the cities’ mayors are “liberal Democrats.”
But San Francisco Mayor London Breed is also a “liberal Democrat”, but Trump never mentions her. And even with San Francisco also having Sanctuary City status. And even with the good number of times Mayor Breed has attacked Trump in the media. Maybe it is because she’s black and female? You think?
It’s clear that Trump and the conservative media have made Libby Schaaf a target of their constant ire. Something about her being a white woman, a former cheerleader, leader of a majority minority city, and willing to defy Trump has him bugged. And he’s the President of The United States (Cue the return of President Obama for a 3rd term here, but we’ll take Joe Biden).
In being bugged by Libby, Trump has deliberately ignited the conservative media machine against her. Breitbart, the legendary blog started by the late Andrew Breitbart, has a virtual online library of posts on Mayor Schaaf. The blog has so much focused on Libby you’d think she was running for POTUS, herself.
And take the recent Lake Merritt noose controversy, where a large number of reports of hangman nooses popped up around Oakland’s central gathering place for the people on June 16th and 17th of this year.
When Libby gave a press conference on the problem, a black man named Victor Anari Sengbe, and who’s real name is Anari Sengbe, popped up to say that there was no problem, because he made “fitness swings”. Channel 7 ABC News incredulously said that because Sengbe was black, and lived in Oakland, and said the noose was his, and there was no problem, it was all good and ok.
Except that it was not okay. This blogger learned that Sengbe lives in San Franciso and came to the Bay Area from Washington D.C., thus leading to the obvious question “What the hell was he doing in Oakland?” A question never asked nor answered by the mainstream media. A media that was all too eager to spread the idea that, because a dude was black, and dressed in what appeared to be African garb (it was his own design), something as racially troublesome as a noose was not a problem.
That, alone, was fishy to me. But, fishier still was when the story wound up on Breitbart and then was picked up by The Daily Caller and Newsmax (ran by Trump friend Christopher Ruddy and once called the “great right hope” of the Republican Party), and by the next week, was the focus of Bill Mahr’s stupid jokes.
And yes, Bill Maher, like Breitbart and Newsmax, mentioned Libby by name.
I am sorry, but that does not happen by accident. Especially when the liberal left mainstream media completely ignored the story about Libby and the Lake Merritt noose problem. (Once again, the work is left to the liberal blogs like Oakland News Now Daily to take up where the mainstream media turned right.)
In “The rise of the pro-Trump media machine”, Axios’ Sara Fischer, wrote this: “Pro-Trump media is spreading across the U.S., disseminating Trumpian rhetoric about fake news and mainstream media bias through every medium.”
She went on to prove it by listing the following efforts:
The big picture, from Rodney Benson, chair of NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication: “Many of the media moving toward subscriptions have disproportionately left-liberal audiences. … While liberal media draw their circles ever tighter around themselves (via paywalls, high-level content, etc.), conservatives are fighting to extend their mass reach.”
The latest: “Bill O’Reilly is in talks to head back to cable news in his old 8 p.m. slot, but this time at Newsmax TV,” according to N.Y. Post’s “Page Six.”
Newsmax owner Chris Ruddy is close friends with President Trump, and O’Reilly’s return to the spotlight would add a prominent voice to a news outlet friendly to the president (though O’Reilly has criticized Trump in the past).
We see this trend in every medium:
Radio: Executives at Salem Radio, the parent company of some of the most popular conservative talk shows, pressured radio hosts to cover Trump more positively, according to emails obtained by CNNMoney.
Broadcast: Sinclair Broadcasting, the largest owner of local TV stations, has drawn criticism for its “must-run” editorials and scripts — peppering local newscasts with pro-Trump talking points — but continues the practice.
Cable: Very few people were surprised by this week’s New York mag story about Fox’s Sean Hannity speaking regularly at night with Trump. The network’s pro-Trump, prime time coverage in focuses heavily on stories that highlight the supposed dishonesty of mainstream media.
Digital: A handful of local news sites, like “Tennessee Star” and the “Arizona Monitor,” are popping up, with headlines supporting GOP candidates that are then sometimes featured for GOP election ads, Politico reports. These sites are intentionally framed to look like real news websites, as outwardly conservative sites, like The Daily Caller and Breitbart, see traffic dips.
Again, folks, this is by design, and not accident.
The effort is the creation of Brad Parscale, the now-recently fired head of the Trump election and re-campaign, was noted in ABC News this way:
Former White House Chief Technology Officer under President Barack Obama, Jason Goldman, who has been sounding the alarm to Democrats regarding Trump’s digital advantage over presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, called the web of pro-Trump influencers pushing protests against stay at home orders and conspiracy theories “clearly part of the way [the Trump campaign] has weaponized disinformation in a coordinated way.”
“The pro-Trump influencers create a closed ecosystem of disinformation; one that is immune to fact-checking because its target audience is consistently getting the same message from multiple channels about, for example, Trump’s response to the pandemic,” Goldman told ABC News. “But more importantly [the strategy] is to create a media environment in which nothing can be trusted. There are no expert sources, the media elites are lying to you, it’s all a deep state conspiracy, etc.
“If there’s no objective truth except what you can find by ‘doing your own research’ there is little left but tribal loyalty,” he said.
But I personally believe The Trump Machine extends beyond media outlets and to political organizations that do everything from hold rallies to cause riots and mayhem, for a purpose. In the case of Oakland and the noose issue, it was to further divide the nation using a main media market, Oakland and the Bay Area, that’s also regarded as a bastion for liberalism. And it has the one person Trump wants to tag as his messaging agent, Mayor Schaaf.
In this case, here is how I believe his system worked:
Donald Trump had instructions to mention Oakland in his Federal Troops Portland Press Conference. But Trump almost blows the plan by forgetting to mention Oakland, which explains why there was a pause in his prose. Trump mentions Oakland, and in doing so, his operatives launch a group of trained political actors who attacked her house, and not with the intention of influencing the City Council vote. No, that’s small potatoes for entire Brad Parscale’s designed effort. It’s for the objective of giving America the impression that Oakland really is the mess Trump said it was, and so President Trump has to send the fed stormtroopers in to fix it. Trump saves Oakland, the bastion of liberalism from the very ��radical left” that controls it. And in Trump’s mind, the plan crafted by Brad Parscale would help him sail back in to The White House.
The Democrats Weak Media Strategy Allows This To Work
In 2016, I tried to warn the Democratic Party that we were up against an incredibly coordinated Republican social media and blog effort. They had Twitter farms and many bots, and that was during the time some were getting on me for making my own version of what the GOP had. It comes as no surprise to me that Twitter’s Jack Dorsey lets Trump run over his own terms of service, allowing conservative coders the chance to make multiple Twitter account coordinated efforts, while allowing people like me to see their accounts suspended for having the same multiple Twitter accounts its terms of service allows. And all because I rightly expressed concern over Ivanka Trump’s planned CES Las Vegas speech amid her father declaring war on Iran!
Democrats need to wake up, and fast. Too many people assume Trump’s behind and losing in the polls. But he is President and has the bully pulpet, an digital army, and a real one on the ground to carry out its dirty work, from hanging nooses at Lake Merritt then saying there’s no racism, to storming Mayor Schaaf’s home to make it look like Trump needs to send in the Feds. Trump’s going to keep doing this until Democrats fashion a strategy to stop him. This has nothing to do with making America better, and everything to do with Trump’s hunger for power and more power, Democracy, diversity, and harmony be damned. They are his enemies.
Stay tuned.