When Buzzfeed's Rosie Gray contacted Dr. Paul yesterday for a comment for her latest piece, "Tulsi Gabbard Is This Election’s Ron Paul," Dr. Paul and I discussed what the article might look like and how his comment might be used (or mis-used). Knowing Gray as an obsessive "Russiagate" promoter and manic never-Trumper, my view was that she would distort any Ron Paul quote to make it look bad for Gabbard, who Gray and the rest of the establishment journalists despise.
He declined to comment.
Proving my suspicions, Gray nevertheless twisted his polite decline into a slap in Gabbard's face.
It's not hard to spot Gray's spin on Ron Paul's decline:
Paul declined to comment for this piece through his spokesperson, Ron Paul Institute Executive Director Daniel McAdams, but other prominent libertarians and Paul insiders were eager to praise Gabbard.See how that works? Others were "eager to praise" Gabbard but Ron Paul declined. That's how a hit piece takes shape.
Of course Ms. Gray's email invitation for comment never let on that her intent was to attack rather than to report: "I'm doing a piece about Tulsi Gabbard and I was wondering if Dr. Paul might be available to speak to me for the story. Basically, it's about the ways in which her campaign is thematically echoing Dr. Paul's presidential campaigns."
Sounds innocent. Journalists like Gray are always innocent while they twist and manipulate the pieces of their stories into the appropriately loaded assault weapon. No wonder Americans now believe that the media is more destructive than banks and large corporations: it is.
The "others" who were "eager to praise" Gabbard were all non-Democrats. That was the set-up of her piece from the beginning. A former Ron Paul campaign aide was quoted speaking favorably about her, along with a Reason magazine editor and a conservative Republican who once advised a Ron Paul presidential campaign. No Democrats.
Anyone with a critical eye on the news media can spot Gray's intent: Destroy Tulsi Gabbard by pushing the narrative that she is not really a Democratic Party candidate because so many non-Democrats are interested in her campaign. She's not one of "us" in other words. A Trojan horse!
Her piece after the first Democratic debate, "Tulsi Gabbard Is Having A MAGA Moment After Her Debate Performance," makes her point with all the subtlety of a Stalin-era stenographer: "More than any other Democratic candidate, Gabbard has developed a favorable presence in the right-wing media."
See what she did there? Grey hammers home her theme: Gabbard's not really a Democratic Party candidate. If you are a Democrat who is tempted to support her, remember this: she's a RIGHT-WING, not a progressive politician. As many of Gray's other pieces are about how the "right wing" is racist, it doesn't take a weatherman to know which way Gray's wind blows.
She pulled the same trick out of her hat for this piece: No, Gabbard's campaign is not like Ron Paul's because she has been able to reach across party and ideological lines to appeal to a diverse group of potential voters (which could be a benefit in places like New Hampshire, a state with a libertarian flavor and liberal rules governing party registration for primary voters). It's like Ron Paul's race because she's attracting Ron Paul people and Ron Paul people are all "evil racists"!
Here's Gray at her deceptive best: Tulsi Gabbard's campaign is just like Ron Paul's campaign and Ron Paul is...
...a highly controversial figure who dabbled in conspiracy thinking and whose connection to fringe politics dogged his campaign, especially when racist newsletters from the 1970s through the 1990s with his name on them were surfaced.Why, Ron Paul even had the audacity to "suggest...that American military adventurism had provided a motive for the 9/11 attacks"!!!
Here's where Rosie Gray shows her true colors: by taking the Giuliani side in the Giuliani moment she openly embraces the long-discredited neoconservative position that resentment of the United States in the Muslim world is not because the US government has been bombing and killing Muslims for the past 30 or more years. No, they hate us because we are so good and so free!
Why is Rosie Gray so desperate to paint Tulsi Gabbard as an evil right-wing racist who in no way deserves the attention of any self-respecting Democratic Party voter? She's just doing the bidding of her paymasters.
Buzzfeed is not the plucky independent news outlet it likes to portray itself as being. It's largest shareholder is NBCUniversal, whose news component is as mainstream media as mainstream media can be. NBCUniversal has pumped at least $400 million into Buzzfeed.
As any struggling media outlet will agree, $400 million does not a plucky upstart make.
The purpose of Buzzfeed is to appear edgy while keeping everyone on the reservation. You must support the mainstream Democratic candidates. There is a danger that a Tulsi Gabbard might actually make a move to end the endless wars that provide a steady stream of income to the corporate news that partners with the military industrial complex to push the endless wars.
That's why Gray and her propagandists in the mainstream media pushed the false narrative that President Trump was an agent of the Russian government: his campaign rhetoric about "getting along" with Russia and ending pointless wars overseas was threatening to big media's profits. Like most politicians, his promises proved to be a lot of hot air, but still he had to be kneecapped by the fourth estate. Just in case.
I'll give this to Gray: In one way the Tulsi Gabbard campaign is like the Ron Paul campaign: the mainstream media hates both of their guts. But, thankfully, the American people increasingly hate the mainstream media's guts.
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