Walk Away Part Two
The main stream media “coverage” of the Walk Away Campaign and its march on Washington this past Saturday could not have been more disparaging. Casey Michele, writing in Think Progress, said, verbatim, that the Walk Away march “has all the signs of a grifting operation”, i.e., petty swindling. (How he came up with “petty swindling” at an event where ALL of the organizers were unpaid volunteers, is beyond me!). On July 17, CNN claimed (there they go again!) that Walk Away was being used by Russian “bots” (software programs that automatically run scripts over the internet) to interfere (yet AGAIN) in our elections. (I wonder if the liberals are again setting up a scape goat in case their hoped for “blue wave” doesn’t quite materialize: “it’s those damned Russians AGAIN”!) The WalkAway campaign had a bit of fun with that one, selling shirts that many of the march’s participants wore during the match that proclaimed: “I am NOT a Russian Bot”. Several media outlets went on to report dismal turnout. One Source even went so far as to claim that only “a hand full” of participants showed up.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, having participated in the event I can say with great certainty, that:
1) I am NOT a Russian Bot and that the participants all appeared to be living breathing human beings.(Although I did visit Russia recently, I did not “collude” with them in any way).
2) There were THOUSANDS of participants. My estimate would be similar to the estimate made by the Washington Times which was 5,000 people. And the five thousand that showed up did so despite pouring rain, strong winds, and generally nasty conditions. And, the majority of those stood continuously for the five to six hours the event lasted.
So, what gives? The answer is simple. The left believes that the best way to fight authentic threats to their stranglehold on American society, is to:
1) IGNORE the threat.
2) Direct attention elsewhere.
And, sad to say, there’s some merit to that strategy. When Rudy Giuliani ran for President in 2008, he was considered to be a formidable threat to liberal hegemony. So what did the liberal press do? They simply IGNORED him. He had nearly zero press coverage going into the early caucuses and primaries, and, as a consequence, was knocked out cold. Taking their strategy in the opposite direction, they frequently try to direct attention AWAY from the threatening politician. I remain convinced that Donald Trump got so much press early in his campaign because the liberal media felt that his chances of winning against Hillary were zero, or something less than that. Accordingly, they directed attention away from what they felt were more formidable candidates such as Rubio, Kasich, etc. It turned out, of course, that this was a huge miscalculation, but the strategy itself was sound.
So, the media is avoiding #WalkAway like the plague. Despite a highly successful march, and despite the 370,000 people who have signed on to the campaign online, the media, by and large, has ignored it, and has tried to direct America’s attention at other things, the most prominent being, of course, our President’s unconventional style and his many and varied controversial (and sometimes ill advised) tweets.
Whether this media strategy will work this time around remains to be seen. One of the major reasons to think that #WalkAway and many similar campaigns across America will make a difference in November sits in front of you, dear readers, right now: the internet. Partisan media sources like CNN, MSNBC, NBC, the NYT and WaPo are no longer the sole purveyors of information and opinions. One of the points made by several speakers at the rally, was that, what they call independent “Citizen Journalists” are revolutionizing discourse in America’s public square. One speaker remarked that Citizen Journalists are the “new CNN”. I couldn’t agree more, and am proud to be a tiny portion of that brigade.