Urban Outfitters t-shirt sums up what’s wrong with our election

AUGUST 25, 2016 BY BOOKWORM 6 COMMENTS

I cut through an Urban Outfitters store today because it shaved off a lot of walking on the way to See’s Candies. (By the way, if you ever come to the San Francisco Bay Area, be sure to visit See’s Candies for some of the best chocolate candies available in America — and the store hasn’t changed its look one bit since the 1920s, which makes it wonderful.) While racing through the store, I saw the t-shirt that illustrates this post.

To me, that t-shirt perfectly sums up how we find ourselves with the Progressives backing the most corrupt candidate ever in the history of American elections and the Republicans backing a man who is part bulldozer, part bully, part hard-nosed businessman, part two-year-old attention span — and he’s the better of the two candidates by far. Thanks to the media’s relentless shilling, combined with the Leftist takeover of education, we’ve got several generations of people who proudly acknowledge their ignorance, but still think they’re qualified to vote based upon what the media tells them to do.

The media effect is so pernicious that even hardened #NeverTrumpers like Ben Shapiro (who loathes Trump at a visceral level) are waking up to the fact that Hillary cannot become president— and that if she does, it’s because of media misinformation combined with low-information voters (i.e., the t-shirt people):

After over two decades in the heart of America’s spotlight, Hillary Clinton is still an unknown quantity for most Americans. That’s thanks to one factor and one factor only: the love and worship of the mainstream media.

Over the weekend, no less than six terrible stories broke that would have crippled anyone else’s campaign.

[snip]

So, what was the media’s response to this tidal wave of incompetence and corruption?

They focused on the Trump campaign’s internal mess, naturally. That’s what they always do.

And that’s why Trump became the Republican nominee.

The media once painted former Gov. Mitt Romney the way they paint Donald Trump, and they excoriated anyone who dared to ask about President Barack Obama’s botched Benghazi policy. They scoffed at Romney’s suggestion that Obama’s Russian policy had emboldened Moscow. They castigated legislators like former Rep. Michele Bachmann for connecting Huma Abedin to Islamic radicalism via the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.

By the time Trump came along, the American people had already rejected the media’s capacity for truth-telling. So when the media targeted Trump and Trump refused to be cowed by them, many Republicans resonated to Trump’s call. They believed that Trump would hit Clinton with all the material the media covered up and ignored.

So far, that hasn’t panned out. Trump’s been far too distractible to focus on Clinton. But that doesn’t mean that he couldn’t. If Trump were to target Clinton, he’d be doing the job Americans thought they elected him to do: exposing the empress who’s protected by the media Praetorian Guard.

If he doesn’t, Clinton will become president, scandals and all. The media are still the gatekeepers, and they still have no intention of allowing Clinton to become the story when Trump’s tweets can be.

I don’t just blame the media for Trump, though. I blame the GOP gatekeepers who vote back so viciously against the cheerful, focused, freedom loving Tea Party movement, which the GOP feared would destablize its power base. Rather than welcoming in the Tea Party, the GOP shut it out — and now it, and perhaps the whole nation, pays the price.