By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Incite 4/7/19]

US news correspondent and political commentator, Danielle McLaughlin, a left-wing Kiwi living in the United States, used her writing and speaking skills to support Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election.
  
More often than not, McLaughlin parrots tabloid news stories which are very light on facts and heavy on psychodrama.  Rather than writing columns which could provide a unique or insightful angle, perhaps even with a hint of intellectual prowess, McLaughlin instead panders to the poll-governed herd mentality by only peddling regurgitated ‘fake-news’ – and media outlets such as NZ’s Sunday Star Times continually lap it up.

For instance, in 2016, one month out from election day, McLaughlin wrote a piece titled, “It’ll Take a Miracle to Save the Donald Now.”  Published here in New Zealand by the Sunday Star Times and then by Stuff, McLaughlin’s article told us that after the lewd Access Hollywood tape-leak, Trump was finished  – she even acknowledged the danger of making political predictions while saying this:

Predictions are a dangerous game in politics.  But absent a miracle, it’s over.

With her high-as-a-kite confidence in the veracity of the mainstream polls, McLaughlin launched into the reasons why Trump could not, and would not, win the presidency. The trouble with her “reasoning” lay in the fact that it was mostly second-hand psychobabble and emotional opinion, often typical of the feminist mind.  She ended that predictive piece with these words:

Trump, the man who ‘cherishes women,’ but has spent decades debasing them, has been hiding in plain sight for the entire election season… Oh, the irony.  Looks like he’s about to get trounced by a woman.

You’d think that after such a spectacularly amusing misread of America’s body politic, McLaughlin may have learned to pause and perhaps reconsider before confidently following the narrative of mainstream media’s talking heads, but no. 
 
Here’s McLaughlin acting out the psychodrama again in her latest hit-piece for the Sunday Star Times (published once more on Stuff), titled, “Trump and Putin picked the wrong time to joke about ‘getting rid’ of fake news.”  

President Trump’s jocular press sit-down at the G20 summit with Vladimir Putin has caused widespread ire in the press, partly because the president flippantly deflected a question from a reporter about Russian meddling in the American elections by telling Putin in an off-the-cuff manner, “Don’t meddle in our elections,” and partly because, as McLaughlin reports, he quipped about “getting rid” of fake-news. 

But did he?

Here’s McLaughlin: 

On the anniversary of the worst attack on the press in American history, the US President joked with Vladimir Putin about “getting rid” of the “fake news” at a sit-down at the G20 summit in Japan. Trump suggested Russia did not have a fake news problem. With a chuckle, Putin assured him that it did.

McLaughlin’s piece comes to us with a video clip at the top of it, but the clip does not show President Trump saying anything about “getting rid of them” [fake-news] as her headline clearly states. 

In the last few days, I have seen numerous reports on these words attributed to the president in Putin’s presence, from Fox News to the Huffington Post, but no evidence whatsoever that President Trump actually said them. This clip put out as another hit-piece on the president by the Washington Post, shows the two leaders side-by-side during the now deliciously-damned moment, but he that hath ears to hear, let him hear – both the speech and the visual edit. They are clunkier than an MSNBC-produced Democratic primary debate.

The narrative seems to have originated from Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Jacob’s Twitter feed.

I challenge McLaughlin to give us some real proof, else, as if her carelessly predictive reporting of the 2016 presidential race weren’t enough for thinking people to pass her commentary by, she ought to be dismissed for a headline that is an outright lie, told in order to make President Trump look as though he supports the murder of journalists (as Putin does).  This is simply disgraceful reportage and as a lawyer McLaughlin ought to know better, though perhaps that explains a lot.

But here’s the guts of this non-issue, if President Trump did say about the fake-news media, “get rid of them,” who in their right mind would think for a moment that he meant anything other than rid them out of the room and therefore out of his face? He deeply dislikes them, as many of us do. To link these words with murder, as McLaughlin’s dim-witted column has done overtly, makes me wonder if the woman can only ever write when she takes a break from her meds.

McLaughlin also wrote these words through the fog of the same grandiose haze:
 
This is personal for me, of course, being a member of a profession generally populated by over-worked, under-paid scribes and storytellers who see the world as it is, but aren’t afraid to talk about the world as it could be. Who endeavour to be fair, and care enough about mistakes to make retractions, but know that some without that moral clarity will take advantage of the truism that a lie will make it around the world before the truth has done up her shoelaces.

Has anybody heard McLaughlin, in the name of the moral clarity she likes to boast about possessing, either retract a word or apologise for her false reporting and commentary about Trump not being able to win the Whitehouse?

Implying that President Trump treats the press in America the same way that Putin treats the press in Russia, i.e, brutally, McLaughlin ends her latest attack by casting this direct aspersion on the president: 

The same cannot be said for Trump or Putin, who understand very clearly the job of reporting is to hold them to account, but prefer to use the power of their offices to stifle it.

So who watches the watchers?

Once again, I challenge McLaughlin to provide her readers with some evidence that President Trump has ever once used his power “to stifle” the freedom of the press. Temporarily banning Jim Acosta from the Whitehouse for obnoxiously hogging press time on a shared microphone does not count, neither does dubbing fake-news “the enemy of the people,” for that is an understatement which is protected by the president’s first amendment right, not an action, though it is clear to me that the new anti-freedom of expression Left have much trouble understanding the difference between words and actions.
 
Though she saw fit to quote him, Thomas Jefferson would spin in his grave if he could read McLaughlin’s charges toward the current president over something he supposedly said.  Jefferson wrote to his friend William Munford in 1779:

To preserve the freedom of the human mind... and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement.

“To think as we will and speak as we think.” I hate to break it to the folks with TDS, like McLaughlin, but that great dictum includes President Trump’s right to critique the viciously hostile fake-news media, so get over it.

I call upon McLaughlin to show us incontrovertibly where President Trump has acted to have a critic from the press silenced, because I can provide real examples of a president who shamefully persecuted political reporters in deed. His name is Obama and I wrote about it here:

The persecution of James Rosen of Fox News, James Risen of The New York Times, the Associated Press scandal, the persecution of Sharyl Attkisson over her reportage of the ‘Fast and Furious’ scandal and the persecution which resulted in the imprisonment of political commentator and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza.
 
D’Souza was officially pardoned by President Trump, but not before he’d gone through hell and had a lot more than his first amendment rights taken away.
 
Instead of just being another defeated sour-puss, Ms. McLaughlin needs to cough-up some hard facts as supporting evidence of her spurious journalistic claims - and the Sunday Star Times and Stuff should demand that she does before they publish one more word of her fake-news.

If not, she, and they, are to be dismissed as glaring examples of just how impoverished truthful and accurate standards are in the New Zealand press, especially when it comes to covering President Trump’s time in office.
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​If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"

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By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Incite 27/6/19]

As the week’s past events have shown, President Trump refuses to be goaded into outright war with Iran, even though they appear to be spoiling for one.  Shooting down a US unmanned drone and lying about it flying over Iranian airspace is an act of war by the Iranian regime. 

At the last moment, President Trump called off a retaliatory targeted bombing raid, which might have cost the Iranians 150 lives, thus showing not only that he exercises immense restraint, but also that he has the ability to confound his own generals; to say nothing of the anti-Trump media. Good! The Iranian regime is again on notice and, as the president stated, “I’m in no hurry to deal with Iran.”  Knowing full well that their actions are aggressively provocative, they are left dangling nervously over a precipice, where they deserve to hang until their betters are ready to deal with them in their own sweet time. 

Stiffer economic sanctions which pinch even harder around the dopes in the upper echelons of Iranian leadership have followed, while they dangle from a noose they forced President Trump to tighten around their necks.  
 
Speaking of dopes, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has commented minimally on these portentous events, as she hunkers down in her obvious political impotence, by calling for “tensions to de-escalate” and irrelevantly reiterating that:

“Our preference of course had been to maintain the Iran nuclear deal – that puts us alongside members of the EU.”

This also puts Ardern on the wrong side of history; unfortunately, a side for which she seems to have a striking affinity.

Our PM has been so busy indulging in psychobabble about “wellbeing” and all such Woman’s Weekly stuff, that she failed to notice that the The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was a piece of chronic appeasement that gave Iran a direct path to developing a nuclear weapon!  The deal was found to be so wanting; it did not even bother to address any of Iran’s well-known worldwide terrorism activities, nor the supporters of the regime’s primitive habit of chanting, “Death to Israel! Death to America!”

At the time that Jacinda’s pin-ups, Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, constructed the hastily cobbled-together semi-treaty, a deal which was never ratified by Congress, they willingly turned a blind eye to the Iranian Hezbollah network, which notorious criminal Tareck El Aissami established in Venezuela when he worked closely with late dictator Hugo Chavez and current presidential thug Nicolas Maduro. 

El Aissami had the authority to issue residency permits in the country, allowing Hezbollah intelligence networks to gain a foothold not only throughout Latin America, but also the British Virgin Islands, Panama, the United Kingdom and the United States. As soon as Trump became president, he slapped restrictive sanctions on El Aissami including his frontman Lopez Bello and the thirteen criminal drug companies connected to both men. 

Only two weeks ago, a bombshell report came out in Britain, revealing that during the Iran nuclear deal talks in 2015, former British PM David Cameron and former Foreign Secretary Theresa May covered up an explosive discovery that Hezbollah had stored 3 metric tonnes of ammonium nitrate, concealed in disposable ice-packs, inside a London factory – that’s a third more than Oklahoma City bomber,Timothy McVeigh, used to kill 168 people in 1995:

“In February this year the Conservative government proscribed Hezbollah as a terrorist group in its entirety, after earlier having only treated the ‘military wing’ as a terrorist entity. Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government and as a result, a number of countries, along with the European Union, differentiate between the group’s ‘military’ and ‘political’ activities. The U.S. and several others – now including Britain – do not distinguish between the supposed wings.”

Apparently this is what Hezbollah and Iran have been up to on British soil, while British and EU leaders quibble, in the most puerile manner, about whether the fanatical terrorist group’s ‘political wing’ is morally any better than its ‘military wing’. Imagine for a moment how silly it would have been for Winston Churchill’s administration to spend one iota of time furrowing their brows over whether any moral difference existed between the Nazi Party’s Gestapo wing and that of its SS? 

Iran’s toxic tyrant, dictator Hassan Rouhani, announced last week his threat to Europe, that unless they deliver Tehran a new deal “by July 7th 2019, the Islamic Republic would increase its enrichment of uranium” – which means closer to ‘weapons grade’ enrichment. 

Remembering that this murderous mullah is the side that our New Zealand prime minister firmly keeps us on, (along with the floundering, globalist EU), Foreign Minister Winston Peters has had to say this in response to the toxic dictator’s open threat, before Iran had even engaged in shooting down the U.S drone:
 
“While fortunately no-one has been killed, these latest attacks on vessels near the Strait of Hormuz are dramatically raising tensions in the region, and could have wider consequences… At this time any misstep or a miscalculation could lead to a serious escalation. As this Government stated in a press release on 10 May, we call on all parties involved to exercise caution, restraint and common-sense and to avoid steps that could undermine peace and security in the region.”

Escalation is exactly what Iran’s regime wants – and is crying out for.  We know from the brutality of the regime’s actions against its own private citizens, that it does not value Iranian lives. 

These are the types of leaders Ardern and Peters choose to appease, but why? Because New Zealand buys about half its oil from the Middle East which gets shipped through the Strait of Hormuz.
 
America, thanks to President Trump, is now the largest producer of oil in the world. It’s no skin off America’s nose if Iran wants to hold the rest of the world to ransom over oil shipping, it won’t directly affect the USA, but what is the rest of the world prepared to do in order to keep those sea lanes open – patrol the whole of the Persian Gulf?  I think not.

If Ardern and Peters had any sense about the integrity of Western civilisation, they would be asking President Trump for an oil deal, not insisting on going the route of appeasing a psychopathic regime, which is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons to wipe Israel off the world map, while threatening the EU.  

But Ardern does not possess any sense, because following on in the vogue of mindless sheeple who only know how to “baaaaaaaa,” she mimics the witless narratives of socialist leaders and media who despise President Trump, thereby preferring to keep our country firmly allied to the world’s worst actors instead of those who value civilisation and liberty. 

Shame on Ardern and Peters – and a pox on both their houses.
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If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​


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