Louisiana Voice

“I Hope Obama Fails”

–Rush Limbaugh, following Obama’s election in 2008*

Does this sound like someone wanting what’s best for the country or what’s best for his political party? I mean, personally, no matter who wins, I always hope that the results will be favorable for my country.

*(Pulled from the archives to illustrate how mean the Democrats are)

One month ago today, LouisianaVoice ran a STORY about a major screw-up by a Shreveport television station that read more like the script for a possible sequel to Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. That movie was a hilarious spoof of local television news departments and their so-called reporters.

Not so hilarious was the decision by Nexstar Media Group, Sinclair Broadcast Group, ABC Network, Disney and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to pull the Jimmy Kimmel Show (“suspended indefinitely” was the term actually used) following Kimmel’s observation Monday that the Trump administration has attempted to capitalize on Kirk’s shooting by painting shooter Tyler Robinson as part of the “radical left” that is spewing hate and violence. The fact that both Sinclair and Nexstar have major transactions pending before the FCC couldn’t be a factor, could it? Nah, of course not; that would be political extortion.

Of course, when Jamie Allen, host of The Allen Report on Sinclair affiliate KDNL in St. Louis said in 2018 that he was “getting ready to ram a hot poker up [then 17-year-old Parkland shooting survivor-turned-gun control spokesman] David Hogg’s ass,” we heard not a peep from the FCC, Sinclair or the Trump administration.

But today, on his way back from his visit to London, Trump suggested that networks that give him bad publicity or criticize him should “maybe” have their licenses revoked, ignoring or ignorant of the fact that the FCC regulates only local TV stations, not networks. But then, ignorance is nothing new to Trump whose signed an executive order in the earliest days of his second administration proclaiming his undying devotion to freedom of speech.

Of course, his idea of free speech is “free for me, but not for thee.”

He should be familiar with McCarthyism. Ol’ Tail Gunner Joe McCartthy who tossed around charges of communism the way Trump does hoax and witch hunt, had as his legal counsel an attorney named Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn also served as DONALD TRUMP’S legal counsel in the 1970s and 1980s.

And McCarthyism is what the Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel firings seem to bring to mind. In fact, Christopher Anders, director of the Democracy and Technology Division of the ALCU said just that. “This is beyond McCarthyism. Trump officials are repeatedly abusing their power to stop ideas they don’t like, deciding who can speak, write and even joke.” He called it a “grave threat to our First Amendment freedoms.”

But let’s take a closer look at both Sinclair and Nexstar.

Sinclair often requires its stations to air specific reports that are political skewed to the far right. A December 2016 the Washington Post conducted a review of Sinclair’s internal documents, as well as reviews of the newscasts and public affairs programming on the company’s stations, according to Wikipedia. It revealed that more broadcast time was given to favorable or neutral coverage of Trump’s campaign than to other candidates in the primary and general election campaigns of 2016. The coverage included distribution of reports favorable to Trump’s campaign or challenging to Clinton’s on a “must-run” basis, as well as Sinclair managers offering local reporters and anchors questions of “national importance” to use in interviews with candidates, a common company practice, according to Livingston, so that other Sinclair stations can share the content.

Now, Nexstar. What can we say? Going back to that LouisianaVoice story of exactly a month ago, we find a Nexstar TV station in Shreveport, KTAL, going after the news anchor of rival station KTBS without ever bothering to fact-check its own sources. That story has resulted in the filing of a libel lawsuit by the former KTBS anchor in a case he’s pretty certain to win, providing it ever actually goes to trial. The smart money is on an out-of-court confidential settlement.

Funny thing about that lawsuit: KTAL, as noted, is a Nexstar-owned station.

Seems to me they have enough on their plate to worry about without having to micro-manage a late-night comic.

But it does conjure up the question of whether or not Will Rogers could make it in today’s world.

Just for informational purposes, here is a list of Louisiana Sinclair-owned TV stations:

New Orleans Market 

• WGNO: (ABC)
• WNOL-TV: (The CW)*
• WDSU: (NBC)

Shreveport Market 

• WPMI-TV: (NBC)
• KSHV-LD: (The CW)*

…and Nexstar’s Louisiana stations:

Baton Rouge market:

• WGMB (FOX)
• WVLA (NBC)
• WBRL-CD** 
• KZUP-CD**
• Lafayette:
  • KLFY (CBS)
• Monroe:
  • KTVE (NBC)
• Alexandria:
  • WNTZ (FOX)
• Shreveport:
  • KTAL (NBC)

*(CBS/Warner Bros. merger)

**(Commodore TV System)

Because of Donald Trump’s paranoia and narcissist personality, we’re headed pell-mell to a network TV news world of Les Nessmans and Ted Baxters.

About that pop quiz: apparently there were many who read Tuesday’s post (according to the stats provided by my web page host), but few who submitted responses.

That could be attributable to a fear of reprisals. After all, there have been scattered reports of people losing jobs or being kicked out of school for what this administration might consider to be negative content about Charlie Kirk.

But one of the advantages of being 82 is that I don’t have to worry about losing a job or getting expelled from school so, I can pretty much say what I think so long as I don’t libel anyone. My opinions are mine and as long as we have a First Amendment, I will continue to comment on events as I see fit.

As for the test to determine which quote was from Kirk and which was from KKK Grand Blizzard David Duke, here are the results:

• “Racial idealism, or racialism, is the idea that a nation’s greatest resource is the quality of its people. It means examining all questions of government on the basis of whether the proposed measure is good or bad for our race. … Neither Communism, Capitalism, nor any other materialistic doctrine can save our race; our only racial salvation lies in a White racial alliance uniting our people with the common cause of racial idealism.” DUKE
• “Are facts racist too? Are white parents racist because they don’t want their children to go to school where their children are ten times more likely to be robbed or abused, intimidated, beaten, or even killed or raped?” DUKE
• “We’ve been conditioned to see a video of white people in MAGA hats standing in front of a Native American and assume that the white people are racists.” KIRK
• “I don’t want to see this country resemble or look like or become like Mexico.” DUKE
• “We have been propagandized by liars and fakers in the media to believe that America is a vicious, racist country and indiscriminate attacks on black people by whites happen all the time. But the numbers tell the truth. Black attacks on white people happen 3X more often than white on black crime, despite blacks being only 13% of the population. Why won’t the media just tell the truth? Why lie when those lies result in innocent people dying?” KIRK
• “Americans needs to understand that the election of Donald Trump has forestalled our slide into the abyss of cultural Marxism and the surrendering of our national heritage and identity to that of the global community.” KIRK
• “Thank you, President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa,” DUKE
• “Well, I have the same vision I think that the Founding Fathers of this country had. My vision would be a nation in concert with its traditions, its values, its heritage, a nation where our children are safe in the streets, where we have decent education, where the vast American majority is not facing racial discrimination.” DUKE
• “Marriage and motherhood make women happier, because of course they do.” KIRK
• “Jews are filled with more hatred and rage for our race, for our heritage, for our blood than perhaps you can imagine.” DUKE
• “The number one funding mechanism of radical, open border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits” is “Jewish donors.” KIRK
• “Conservatives are branded bigots and we are falsely accused of hate speech when we express traditional values and ideas that have made America the greatest country on Earth.” KIRK
• Affirmative action is a very nice term for racial discrimination against better-qualified white people in jobs, employment, promotions and scholarships and college admittance.” DUKE
• “…[T]hey do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. So, they had to steal a white person’s slot.” KIRK
• “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” KIRK
• “We’ve got massive numbers of non-European immigrants coming in, which will change the status in America from an overwhelmingly European-American nation to an overwhelmingly non-European-American nation.” DUKE

It’s enough to make you sit back and think about where we’re headed as a country, doesn’t it?

Clay Higgins as Batman’s Bruce Wayne: here to save Gotham City

So, where has Clay Higgins been all this time?

The U.S. representative from Louisiana’s 3^rd Congressional District has been strangely slow to speak out about 44 separate mass shootings in which at least five persons died in the U.S. since he first took office in 2017.

The worst of these, the Paradise, Nevada massacre that left 60 dead and 867 people injured, elicited not a peep from Mr. Law and Order. Nor did the 26 deaths in the Sutherland Springs, Texas, church shootings in November 2017. Crickets.

Or the 23 killed in the El Paso in August 2019. Yawn.

Nor did the 21 killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas in May 2011 prompt the Cajun John Wayne to speak out against gun violence. Not his problem

Neither did the 19 killed in the Lewiston, Maine in October 2023, or the 17 murdered in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida in February 2018. Boring.

All total, in the 8 ½ years Higgins has been ensconced inside the Beltway, no fewer than 433 human beings have lost their lives in those mass shootings. I’ll save you the trouble to calculating the average casualty count: it’s 9.8 deaths per incident, or 51 deaths per year since he’s been in office.

Yet, through all that carnage, we never heard a sound from the former deputy sheriff public information officer.

Until Charlie Kirk was killed last week. Now, as the Louisiana Illuminator so succinctly put it, Higgins is pursuing his “atypical” quest for political relevance by suddenly rising up and proclaiming that anyone who “belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk” should be banded from social media for life, kicked out of school, fired, or have driver’s licenses and/or business permits revoked – which penalty might apply.

Ironically, it was on social media that he posted the message, “There are societal limits to the freedom of speech.”

Apparently, those limits do not apply to Donald Trump who during the 2016 presidential campaign, hinted that the “Second Amendment” might be appropriate solution for Hillary Clinton. It also must have not applied when he urged his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021 to storm the U.S. Capitol or when he told Russia to “do what the hell you want” in regards to Ukraine.

No one is to “belittle” Charlie Kirk but it’s okay for Trump to wistfully dream about making the West Bank into a resort getaway even as Israel obliterates its buildings and murders innocent children.

It was Kirk himself who, when locked out of Twitter, said, “We are seeing right now that Big Tech has become the enforcement and the communication arm of the Biden campaign and the Democrat Party.”

“There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” sniffed Attorney General Pam Bondi, as if there existed some sort of clear definitive line that separated the two. After all, free speech to one might well be hate speech to another. Who decides?

I hope not Clay Higgins, who said, “If they ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man who dedicated his whole life to delivering respectful conservative truth into the hearts of liberal enclave universities, armed only with a Bible and a microphone and a constitution… those profiles must come down.”

As I said in my first paragraph, where the righteous hell has Clay Higgins been while those 433 men, women and children – especially the children – were being slaughtered?

Okay, students, it’s pop quiz time, so take out your pencils and paper.

Today, I’m going to give you a series of quotations and your job will be to determine if each quote was said by Charlie Kirk or David Duke.

So, put away your iPhones and I don’t want to catch any of you googling your answers. Do your own work and send in your responses.

The answers will be posted tomorrow.

Okay, begin.

• “Racial idealism, or racialism, is the idea that a nation’s greatest resource is the quality of its people. It means examining all questions of government on the basis of whether the proposed measure is good or bad for our race. … Neither Communism, Capitalism, nor any other materialistic doctrine can save our race; our only racial salvation lies in a White racial alliance uniting our people with the common cause of racial idealism.”
• “Are facts racist too? Are white parents racist because they don’t want their children to go to school where their children are ten times more likely to be robbed or abused, intimidated, beaten, or even killed or raped?”
• “We’ve been conditioned to see a video of white people in MAGA hats standing in front of a Native American and assume that the white people are racists.”
• “I don’t want to see this country resemble or look like or become like Mexico.”
• “We have been propagandized by liars and fakers in the media to believe that America is a vicious, racist country and indiscriminate attacks on black people by whites happen all the time. But the numbers tell the truth. Black attacks on white people happen 3X more often than white on black crime, despite blacks being only 13% of the population. Why won’t the media just tell the truth? Why lie when those lies result in innocent people dying?”
• “Americans needs to understand that the election of Donald Trump has forestalled our slide into the abyss of cultural Marxism and the surrendering of our national heritage and identity to that of the global community.”
• “Thank you, President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa,”
• “Well, I have the same vision I think that the Founding Fathers of this country had. My vision would be a nation in concert with its traditions, its values, its heritage, a nation where our children are safe in the streets, where we have decent education, where the vast American majority is not facing racial discrimination.”
• “Marriage and motherhood make women happier, because of course they do.”
• “Jews are filled with more hatred and rage for our race, for our heritage, for our blood than perhaps you can imagine.”
• “The number one funding mechanism of radical, open border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits” is “Jewish donors.”
• “Conservatives are branded bigots and we are falsely accused of hate speech when we express traditional values and ideas that have made America the greatest country on Earth.”
• “Affirmative action is a very nice term for racial discrimination against better-qualified white people in jobs, employment, promotions and scholarships and college admittance.”
• “…[T]hey do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. So, they had to steal a white person’s slot.”
• “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”
• “We’ve got massive numbers of non-European immigrants coming in, which will change the status in America from an overwhelmingly European-American nation to an overwhelmingly non-European-American nation.”

Professor’s note: If you are gainfully employed or a university student, you run the risk of termination/suspension if you participate in this test despite the guarantees of the First Amendment and Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s insistence that freedom of speech “was not an abstract principle” to Kirk.