More Fake News: Media Contrived Photos to Diminish Trump’s Inauguration Crowd

trump inauguration crowd photo shows sparse audience

Last week the mainstream media devoted huge resources of time and space to comparing photos of President Obama’s inauguration audience to photos of President Trump’s inauguration audience. Major news media all over the US pushed the subject for an entire week. Their claims that Trump had a comparatively small audience were so exaggerated that the newly elected president’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, devoted his first press meeting to rebutting the media he will have to work with for the next four years over what he claimed were false representations.

The press fought back by saying the story was important because President Trump, they claimed, lied when he said through Spicer and his own tweets that his audience was as big as Obama’s — that it was, in fact, the biggest ever — and that it stretched all the way from where he stood to the Washington Monument. Many in the mainstream media claimed the president was lying and that the president was clearly obsessed with himself for making such a big deal out of this. They said the president was attacking the media for simply reporting the truth that it is obliged to tell.

The following photos will show who was really obsessed and who was driving this story to the undeserved importance that it got:

Can honest photos lie?

Sometimes it is not the lie you tell but the truth that you manipulate that creates the lie. Here is the photo comparison that went around the world last week where it is perfectly obvious which president had the larger inauguration crowd:

Fake news comparison of photos of Trump's inauguration crowd and Obama's inauguration crowd

Oh my gosh, who cannot possibly tell from looking at these photos that Trump’s audience was minuscule? The Obama crowd has packed the place, but Trump’s audience looks like everyone is huddling for mutual support. Both photos are completely true. Both were taken at essentially the same time. There is no photoshopping. So, clearly the dozens, if not hundreds, of mainstream media outlets that ran the comparison photos or other photos very much like them, were telling the truth! The new presidents audience is practically nonexistent.

Oh, but wait a minute …

… and scroll down …

Here is another photo taken of Trump’s audience at the time of his inauguration:

Trump's inauguration crowd fills the National Mall

Well, no wonder President Trump said that, from where he stood on the capital steps as he gave his inaugural address, his audience packed the mall from the capital building all the way to the Washington Monument. Is this even the same event as the one shown around the world by many major media corporations?

As it turns out, the only thing the mainstream media’s comparison photos actually reveal is whose audience — Trump’s or Obama’s — arrived first!

The comparison photos were each taken about an hour before the inauguration speech began. The third photo of the huge Trump audience was taken at the time of the inauguration. It was all a matter of timing. To explain why Obama’s crowd surged into the mall an hour or so earlier than Trump’s, consider the following likely explanations:

  • Obama’s crowd gathered on a bright and sunny day. Trump’s crowd attended on a rainy day. People don’t like to stand in the rain, so perhaps Trump’s supporters have enough sense come in out of the rain for as long as they can until the event is ready to begin.
  • Obama’s audience had more reason to arrive early. They were attending a unique historic event — the inauguration of America’s first Black president — in which position of the audience on the lawns of the mall is on a first-come-first-serve basis. People wanting to attend might reasonably think they would not even find standing room at a first-of-its-kind event and so would go extra early to make sure they reserved a space for themselves.
  • The people who find it easiest to get to the inauguration are those who live right in Washington, D.C., and 91% of D.C. voted for Clinton, which figures since D.C. is the heart of the political establishment that Trump intends to change … or drain.
  • Nearly a hundred protest groups, made up largely of Democrats who said they refused to accept the election results (after castigating Donald Trump for not being willing to say before the election that he would accept the results no matter what) said they were coming with the intentions of diminishing the event. Many of those groups said they would do all they could to block streets and block access points to try to make sure the inauguration couldn’t even happen. With such determination and planning, might they have actually managed to slow down people’s ability to get to the mall … just a little?
  • With so many protests going on, Trump’s supporters might have lallygagged in route to watch some of the action.
  • Because of the numerous threats of violence, the security fences set up around the mall had fewer access points onto the mall, through which everyone had to be screened. Couldn’t fewer access points have caused it to take longer for the crowds to get through?

(Also note that the MSM repeated used subway data to show ridership down by about 300-400,000 on Trump’s inauguration. They ignore the fact that in 2008 Uber and Lyft did not exist. Now there are 50,000 Uber and Lyft drivers in D.C. Metro areas. 50k times and average of two riders per car times 3-4 trips that morning per car to the mall = 300-400,000 people off the subway and taken by Uber and Lyft. Many other forms of transportation may have been higher, too, which are all ignored in the cherry-picked data.)

Here is a another comparison photo taken of Obama’s inauguration during his speech from the same direction as the Trump inauguration speech photo.

Fake news through photos - Obama inauguration audience photos that is used for comparison is from much further back

Holy smokes! Obama’s first inauguration audience is still massively bigger, erupting clear out onto the streets.

Oh, wait a second. That photo, used by many media outlets for comparison with Trump’s audience, was taken from the balcony of the Capital Building. The photo taken for Trump’s audience was shot from much closer to ground level and was taken from approximately the center of the Obama inauguration photo. Thus, it misses all the audience gathered on the bleachers and is narrower so it doesn’t even include the side streets.

Was Obama’s audience bigger? Probably, but it’s hard to tell from the photos. I think I can see a hint of white space still showing among Trump’s crowd in the far distance of the third photo … if I put a jeweler’s loop in one eye. I would imagine Obama’s inauguration was better attended because many people waited all their lives to see a Black president, and it took place on a beautiful sunny day. In fact, I would hope it was bigger because it was a major historical milestone. I find it impressive, therefore, that the crowd that gathered to watch the 44th White man to get inaugurated was almost as large as the nation’s first Black presidential inauguration in a city with a large Black population.

If you want to compare Trump to another very popular White president, let’s look at William Jefferson Clinton’s second inauguration:

Now I can see all kinds of wide-open lawn out on the mall. So, it turns out that, when judged against popular liberal presidents, Trump’s audience was quite large after all!

And that’s how you create fake news through true photos.

First, pick a time of day where photos from the same timeframe happen to work well for diminishing the apparent audience of the president whose inauguration you want to diminish. People will naturally think that taking the photos at almost the same time must surely makes them the fairest possible comparison, never mind that it was before the event was actually happening and that many things about the day were different. Second, pick comparison photos that appear to be from the same angle but that are really narrower and closer in for the president whose inauguration you wish to minimize. Third, present it all as fact … because it is! Carefully chosen facts to present the story you want to create.

Here’s a more important question: Was there even enough difference between Trump’s inauguration audience and Obama’s to merit making a story out of it, much less spreading the story all over the globe, much less going on about it for a week, much less grilling the president’s spokespeople about why the president lied about his audience size as Chuck Todd did on NBC for an entire thirteen minutes, during which he referred to Kellyanne Conway’s statements as “ridiculous” and claimed that her “alternative facts” were “falsehoods?”

Todd claims, “I’m curious why President Trump chose to send out his press secretary to essentially litigate a small and petty thing like inaugural crowd size.”

Indeed, the difference in audience size (visually anyway) was a very small and petty thing. So, why did the mainstream media make such an endlessly repeated story out of photos that don’t even present a true picture? What was their purpose in presenting a non-story as if it were a big story? If I would give them the benefit of the doubt, I’d say that they genuinely believed that photos taken at the same time actually revealed the real difference in audience size, but that they also didn’t take any time to check out other times as I did because they were so eager to join those who wanted to diminish Trump’s inauguration. After all, this extra research only took me seconds.

I cannot give them that benefit of the doubt though because I found all these photos on a site that playing up the difference in crowd size, but the accurate photo was buried a few photos deep in a slide show, while the false comparison was at the top of each story. So, they could have easily seen that Trump’s crowd was larger than Clinton’s, larger than Bush’s, and very nearly as large as the first Black presidents, but they shoved that onto the back page.

Trump is essentially saying, “I’m not going to let you guys continue to get away with this fake news you keep creating. Every time you do it, I’m going to knock your heads together so that your audiences can start to see how unfairly biased you really are.”

It’s not petty for the simple reason that Trump and his team know the media will continue to create such fake news throughout the entire four years of his presidency unless he doesn’t take them to task as brusquely as possible (his style anyway) to make it clear they will never simply “get away with it.” He’s going to do his best to make sure they damage themselves every time they go fake.

In fact, the mainstream media must be obsessed with taking down Trump because several of their anchors nearly broke down in tears when Trump won, and Chuck Todd couldn’t let go of it for the entire thirteen minutes of the above interview. Conway kept trying to talk about other things Trump did, and Todd kept clinging like a dog on a pork chop to this one fake-news story in order to make his claim that the president and his spokespeople were lying when they said the crowd was enormous.

As Conway summarizes, “As for this issue of crowd size, I think it is a symbol of the unfair and incomplete treatment that this president often receives.”

She notes that Nielsen ratings showed fifty percent more people watching Trump’s inauguration than watched Obama’s second inauguration (when being the first Black president was no longer a unique historic event that would hugely skew popularity). The combined estimate could be the basis for Trump saying that both the audience present at the event and the viewer audience were the largest in history (“both,” not “each;” in other words, when added together). Trump’s Nielsen count was above average for inaugurations, but the Nielsen ratings were not mentioned in any of the many mainstream stories about audience size and not a fact that Todd was even willing to acknowledge … because it didn’t fit into his agenda.

Todd responds by merely going back to drilling Conway as to why Trump sent Spencer out on his first press conference to “utter a provable falsehood.”

Some of Todd’s statements:

  • “The first time he confronts the public, it’s a falsehood.”
  • “It undermines the credibility of the entire White House press office on day one.”
  • “Alternative facts are not facts; they’re falsehoods.”
  • “You sent the press secretary out there to utter a falsehood on the smallest, pettiest thing!”
  • “What was the motive to have this ridiculous litigation of crowd size?”
  • “Why a provable falsehood … that now calls into question everything the secretary states?”

If it’s such a petty topic to litigate publicly, why does Todd spend almost all of the thirteen minutes going back to it? Why did major media spread the misrepresentative photos all over the nation and make a huge deal out of them? Just as Conway states, Todd wants his audience to hear that Trump’s estimate of audience size is a falsehood. He particularly wants them to hear that such a falsehood “calls into question everything the administration will say from this point on.” That seems to be his goal in drilling into this.

The mainstream media focused obsessively on this petty topic because it hopes to diminish and discredit Trump from the onset. (If you repeat fake news long enough, it becomes a fact in people’s minds.) Todd says what he wants people to think just like an attorney argues a point before the jury that he knows will be ruled out by the judge because all that matters is that the seed is planted in the minds of the jury.

Todd even laughs at Conway, as if scoffing at her response, when she says crowds are hard to quantify, and she retorts that the way he laughed at her is symbolic of the way Trump’s people are treated by the press. Clearly, the comparison pictures that numerous major networks, websites and newspapers chose to focus on do not present a fair or balanced view of Trump’s audience size, and it was THEY, not Trump, who whipped up this petty controversy in the first place.

As Conway says at the end, the only reason Trump and his press secretary responded as they did is because of comments like Todd’s when he concluded that Trump’s statement about the size of the crowd calls into question everything he will ever say from this point on. When the press tries to stake out that much political ground from such a petty difference in opinion by claiming a brand-new president is uttering falsehoods, you have to think they are desperate to bring him down. They’re used to presidents who don’t want to make enemies of the press and don’t want to get into arguments, so they are accustomed to sliding such fake news through as unquestioned fact. Trump isn’t going to let that happen.

What are “alternative facts,” and when is false, false and fake, fake?

Here was Trump’s reply to the mainstream media’s misconstrued photos that set them off to calling him a liar on many of major networks and websites:

We had the biggest audience in the history of inaugural speeches. I won’t allow you or other people like you to demean that crowd and to demean the people that came to Washington, D.C., from faraway places because they like me.

The capital crowd might have been smaller, but it was still huge (especially when you consider the wet weather and the attempt made to prevent the inauguration from happening at all); and if it’s true, as Conway states, that the television audience (always vastly greater than the on-scene crowd) was fifty percent greater than the television audience for Obama’s second inauguration, then Trump may have actually had the largest inaugural audience in history. It is, at least, an arguable opinion, far from a clear falsehood. There is room for someone feeling good about the envy to think it just might have been the biggest in history if you add up all web streaming, television and the on-site crowd.

I can see where someone like Todd might think that “alternative facts” sounds like a euphemism for “falsehoods” because things are either facts or they’re not, right? Well, look at the photos above. Every one of them is a fact, but the conclusion the press drew was a blatant misrepresentation of the event’s actual crowd size.

Kellyanne Conway meant that Sean Spicer was presenting some additional facts – like the Trump inauguration photo I’ve presented above — that provide an alternative perspective. As it turns out, maybe taking photos at the same time of day for comparison, when that time is not the actual time of the inaugural address, presents a false impression. (I mean, why not use photos from four hours before the event when the only people there were the set-up crews?) What matters is not how big the audience was an hour or two before the event but how big it was when the new president was actually inaugurated and then gave his speech.

Since Todd ends by claiming Conway and Trump were attacking him with some “weird Twitter feed you guys are obsessed with,” you be the judge as to who was obsessed and who was doing the attacking throughout the television interview.

Is it any wonder the media’s approval rating is worse than Trump’s, though they harp about his approval rating all the time? (By the way Rasmussen Reports says Trump’s approval rating is 59%, not the roughly 30% that the mainstream media keeps quoting. Rasmussen is a conservative organization, but their polling for this election put Clinton ahead by 2% the day before the election, which is about where most had it.)

The attempts to forge fake news into accepted fact by frequent repetition are enough to make me think seriously about spending half as much time on economics and starting a new website dedicated to filleting fake news wherever I find it. I have no problem with the media attacking Trump if he does lie because fair is fair, and I hate lying politicians. But fake is also fake; and I hate lying news even more. I expect lies from politicians. They’ve been doing it for centuries; but the news back in the days of Walter Cronkite made some attempt not to simply run smear campaigns based on misconstrued facts and attempted to overcome their own personal biases in order to be objective.

This week, the biggest fake news was from the mainstream media via a true photo that showed the National Mall more than half empty. The lie came by indicating that photo provided evidence of audience size for Trump’s inauguration — fake news that was made much worse when they followed it up by accusing the president of lying when he claimed his audience was huge.

That’s my opinion. Please state yours below.

Still need more evidence of the media faking it with true photos?

Here’s a video that has some shots of Trump’s enormous crowd. Because you can see Trump speaking in the video, you know the timing. (Skip to 3:37 if it doesn’t start there as it should.) Nothing to be ashamed of there! It’s PACKED OUT!

See related fake-news article:

The Fake-Stream Media Devours Itself

19 Comments

  1. Ping from Jackie A.:

    Great article, David. Thank you!

    Its hard to believe just how dishonest many of the MSM are, especially Chuck Todd, with the way he treated Kellyanne Conway. Her usage of the the term “Alternative Facts” is used in law, as she stated in another interview. I will attache one of my sources.

    Encyclopedia of Forensic and Legal Medicine
    Factual underpinnings and Limitations

    “The cross examination of the expert will include challenges to
    qualifications implications of bias, and dispute and disputes of the
    foundational facts. It will often focus on alternative facts consistent with
    the other party’s view of the evidence. Often, the expert will be asked
    ‘hypothetical questions’ during such cross examinations that will include
    contrary or different factual contentions.”

    Encyclopedia of Forensic and Legal Medicine, Volumes 1-4, Second Edition is a pioneering four volume encyclopedia compiled by an international team of forensic specialists who explore the relationship between law, medicine, and science in the study of forensics.

    Academic Press, Sep 29, 2015 – Law – 3120 pages

    • Ping from Knave_Dave:

      For sure, Jackie. The MSM diced her up for that, as if she was saying there are falsehoods that are alternative facts when what she meant was their are facts like the photos shown above that show an alternative story. In this case, the alternatives facts can be accounted for by timing. Just because a photo is taken at the same time of day it doesn’t mean the crowd formed its peak at the same time of day. So, two photos taken at the same time seem to present a view that shows Trump’s crowd was greatly lacking; but give Trump’s crowd a little more time to show up, and it’s nearly as big as Obama’s. (Not bigger as Sean Spicer claimed, but certainly comparable and bigger than a lot of other inaugural crowds — nothing that merited being diminished by the MSM as it was over and over.)

  2. Ping from Gary Cathro:

    Hi David,
    You still have not convinced me that this is “More Fake News”, as you say. I think there may be reason to believe the initial story – that the crowds were not so large – not as grand as the Twitterer in Chief boasts.

    In the period following the inauguration, when the story was still warm, I happened onto the Breitbart site (following a smell ?) and found my way to the comments section, which I often find interesting, and across the spectrum. There I found a brave person going against the current, and as it happens, the usual toxic commentary found in these dark corners. He casually suggested that his analysis using CNN’s Gigapixel (new to me) strongly suggested that the news was not fake. I checked it out myself and it was persuasive.
    And, I also spent a bit of time turning the camera around and zooming in on the guests sitting in the gallery and the funny expressions on their faces at that time. Bush Jr. staring right into the camera, as I recall, Hillary, wearing a clear plastic bag as it had, presumably, just started to rain, looking very bored, etc, and all former presidents and first ladies seated near one another, across the gallery. This may be the same camera that shot the photos we’ve seen down the mall. It sits atop a scaffold high above the dignitaries. using it is similar to following Google Earth’s cameras wherever you want to. Amazing.

    So, in response to your question of timing . . . this photo from the CNN Gigapixel would have been taken well into Trump’s speech, and not at the start – before the crowds arrived as you suggest, but taken after the now prophetic rains began to fall, or sprinkle . . .

    Here is the link which I’d bookmarked. It’s from some sort of photography site :

    http://imgur.com/gallery/isDBI

    Regards,
    Gary Cathro

    • Ping from Knave_Dave:

      When I look at the link you provided, I have to wonder what is wrong with the eyes of the person who posted it. He shows the CNN gigapixel pic and circles some reference points in a zoomed-in section near the rear. The very back has a thin area of white with very few people walking about that is about three bodies deep if you were to lay the people shown in that area head to foot across the space. The rest of the area is entirely packed. He, then, compares that to the false representation pic that I posted at the top of this story and says it looks like his zoom of the Gigapixel pic proves the other pic is right.

      That is just mind-numbing to me. Look at the circled areas that appear to be small roped-off lawn sections that are his reference points. The entire space between those four circles is packed. In the pic that I have claimed is a false representation and he has claimed is true, that area is almost completely empty.

      I’m read from someone who attended the event and was way out on the mall that there were several areas that ran across the mall where people were not allowed to stand in order to allow people to get back and forth. I would suspect one of those areas across the front of the media tent as it would seem to me that would be an important area to be able to move back and forth in without having to press through a packed crowd. In other words people were allowed to walk through those areas but were told not to stand in them. I mentioned this area in the article above.

      The Gibapixel pic also shows that all the other areas that looked empt in the “fake” photo, were completely packed, and this person doesn’t show any of those areas because his own zoomed-in shots cover them.

      I don’t can’t even comprehend how anyone can look at the Gigapixel photo where even this guy had to zoom in and zoom some more to find one thin strip at the very back that was shy of people and say the area was not packed all the way to the back as Trump said — that Trump was lying. Obviously, he doesn’t have zoom eyeballs, so he could not possible zoom in to see such an extremely distant and small detail. From where Trump stood, the Gigapixel pic show the place packed as far as the UNAIDED eye can see.

      Also, the mainstream medias comparison to Obama’s first inauguration speech, rather than his second was so blatantly unfair to begin with. Obama’s first inauguration was a major historical milestone in that it would forever be the inauguration of the first Black president in a nation where Blacks began as slaves, and it happened in a city that has about 300,000 Black people. The Black people in that city alone could have filled much of the mall since it was so easy for them to attend, given the event was in their own town.

      The Gigapixel photo doesn’t lie, and it clearly proves the area had somewhat less than Obama’s first inauguration but somewhat more than his second and more than Bill Clinton’s first. So, for the press to ridicule Trump’s attendance was absolutely misleading.

    • Ping from Peter Harris:

      “You still have not convinced me that this is “More Fake News”, as you say.”

      I think poor Dave has trouble convincing himself, when he wakes up each morning.

      These pathetic Trump supporters, are so in denial, it points to yet another example of their relevance deprivation.
      Maybe these photos are “fake news” also?

      http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/pro-donald-trump-rallies-us-supporters-handful-nationwide-us-president-protest-muslim-ban-a7603876.html

      http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/2/27/1638350/-Check-out-these-massive-pro-Trump-rallies-around-the-country-today-Sad

      http://metro.co.uk/2017/02/28/millions-of-people-turned-out-for-pro-donald-trump-rallies-6479244/

  3. Ping from Auldenemy:

    Another great article David. Thank you. This entire, ‘Fake News’ meme is now consuming our own main stream media here in the UK. Whole programmes are being devoted to it by Channel 4 News and the BBC. Both are fully signed up members of club Neo Liberal, both endlessly pushed the Clinton cause while damning Trump. Both still do all they can to promote the EU while constantly claiming Brexit voters are not, ‘educated’. In fact the BBC recently ran a long article on its website, claiming with great gusto that it has accrued demographic proof that those areas in England with the highest Brexit votes are all the poorest and have little to zilch voters who have a degree. Well, in Scotland the Remain vote won out and was strongest in the poorest and least, ‘educated’ areas (Glasgow and Dundee). The latter are strong holds of SNP supporters (Scottish Independence Party). The SNP have a huge majority in the devolved Scottish parliament so they govern Scotland. Their First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon is pro the EU so of course her huge support base in Scotland voted to stay in the EU. So you could argue that Scotland’s majority vote to stay in Eurocrat Land came from mostly, ‘uneducated’ people!

    The argument that only stupid people vote against the Neo Lib. status quo, media backed politics of the West is pathetic. Exactly when did having a degree make anyone’s opinion more valid than someone who hasn’t got one? I should add that I don’t say that because of some chip on my shoulder. I in fact have a degree but it is not something I have ever been proud of, or in any way thought made me more intelligent than someone who doesn’t have one. I have never used it after my name, even close friends aren’t aware I have a degree. In fact even before I started my degree I was un sure about entering a world I knew would be divorced from reality in many ways. I was right, it was divorced from reality. Most of my tutors were cruising along on a nice salary, with a nice pension and were far too smug because un like the cut and thrust of the real world they never got challenged. I can honestly say that I have encountered cleaners with far more wisdom than some people I have known with degrees. In fact the education system has been so dumbed down in the US, UK and Europe, that let’s face it, outside of really mentally challenging degree courses (Mathematics and the Sciences), a trained ape could now pass most of today’s degree courses. In the UK that happened over 20 years ago when technical colleges were allowed to turn themselves into universities (but still with tech. level tutors!). In came the age of tuition fees and youngsters with no real academic ability being pushed towards higher education, along with access to student loans most of them never pay off. Now just about every youngster in the UK goes on to higher education, so we have the ridiculous situation of people who want to go into catering or be hairdressers having to study these at college first!!

    Here we are, in this dumbed down West where just about everyone has some kind of official qualification or a degree and yet hardly anyone reads a book, writes a letter or even knows how to boil an egg anymore. I apologise for digressing but I am infuriated by the main stream media constantly claiming that Remain voters (those who voted to stay in the EU), are more intelligent than those of us who voted to leave it. So to me that is another example of, ‘Fake News’ from institutions that dare to claim that they are the bastions of, ‘Truth’.

    Getting right back to the specifics of your article. I happened to notice a comment by an American to an article on Zero Hedge about this same topic (the MSM in the USA – and indeed over here – claiming that far fewer people attended Trump’s inauguration than Obama’s first one). This commentator said that she and her husband waited hours in a huge queue of people who were trying to access the long area in front of where the inauguration takes place. She said that previous inaugurations were easy to get to, that it was much harder this time round because every single person had to stop at a barrier and be tested with a metal detector. She added that the process was absurdly slow because there were only three officials carrying out these metal detector procedures. To prove her statement was true she downloaded a link to Utube. Her husband had taken a short film of a street near the inauguration, full of people proudly sporting red, Trump caps who never made it to the official inauguration area in time thanks to being held back by only three people with metal detractors trying to check through thousands of people. I took the link and the Utube film of this (taken on her husband’s mobile), is obviously genuine.

    That one comment to a Zero Hedge article concerning the MSM trying to once again trash Trump’s popularity, was a perfect example of the extent the MSM go to in twisting the truth and thus peddling fake news. Of course there are rubbish sites on the Internet that are full of garbage but anyone with more than two brain cells quickly sees them for what they are. Internet sites are not on our radar all the time, un like the MSM which is why the fake news peddled by the latter is unforgivable. Realising that they have been sussed, the MSM are now desperately throwing out reports about all the fake news on some non main stream sites, I presume in some desperate bid to make themselves look clean. Yesterday Channel 4 (a popular news outlet here and completely Left Wing) was again on to the theme of fake, non main stream media news; how Russian business interests feed false info. to certain Internet sites, how these sites create other sites to carry it, how it is all a plot to bring down the West….bla…bla. How stupid in fact do the MSM think we ‘uneducated’ masses are? Do they think we are incapable of realising that Putin is one tough cookie, an ex KGB man with a massive military who has made it very clear that he is sick of the EU encroaching further and further into ex Soviet countries? Do they think we don’t realise that yes, Russia will fight like dogs and if needs be go full on nuclear if ever the West sets foot in their country. Their entire history has been about living hard lives; being ruled by hard Royal dynasties followed by hard dictators, and in between being invaded by first Napoleon and then Hitler. That history is in the very DNA of Putin, just look at his face.

    So no one who has enjoyed the democracy of the West could possibly want to be ruled by Putin! For the Western media to constantly portray Trump as in love with Putin is ridiculous. What Trump doesn’t want is what Hillary Clinton wanted desperately, a war with Russia. She wanted it because she is a psychopath. Her, ‘We came, we saw, he died’ reaction to Gaddafi being over thrown and dying a horrible death said it all. Yes, he was a lunatic dictator who did terrible things but there are lunatic dictators all over Africa and other parts of the world which America has taken no interest in over throwing. It appears rather strange that America, the UK and EU are only interested in over throwing dictators who run oil rich countries, or leaders who happen to run ex Soviet countries and have dared to remain pro Russian (Ukraine). By over throwing Gaddafi (which is something Hillary Clinton pushed Obama into), Libya is now a complex shXt hole, with no proper or stable government and waring tribes carving up the country as they battle it out for supremacy. The death, destruction and now total mess in that region, caused primarily by Hillary Clinton, has also unleashed hundreds of thousands of war torn and impoverished young men from all over Africa, into Europe. Day after day, thousands of mainly illiterate, young male Muslims from Gambia, Somalia and Nigeria are launched by people smugglers from Libya into the Mediterranean on flimsy boats that are then picked up by UK and EU navy boats, taken to Italy and then to refugee camps. Like those from the Middle East and Asia who poured in last year, they then head to Northern Europe to access the better welfare systems, some of them stealing and raping as they go (with the MSM actively not reporting on this). This when Europe is already struggling with two million Muslim refugees and economic migrants in the space of a single year (2016), due to Angela Merkel inviting all the world’s war torn and poor to Europe last year without even consulting with other EU members first!! If that doesn’t tell the world who runs the EU (even before Merkel’s wet dream of a European, borderless superstate with one federal government is realised), then nothing will. Thanks to the West being infested by a status quo, Neo liberal agenda for at least the past 25 years, this is where we are at. Brexit was the derided, forgotten, indigenous white population of the UK saying, ‘Enough of this!’ The same just happened in the USA with Trump. The, ‘Deplorables’ did what the, ‘Uneducated’ in the UK did, and stuck their two fingers up at their NWO masters who are ruining their lives and their liberty as democratic Westerners who are sick of being demonised by their own leaders! Millions of us who are sick to death of PC on steroids, of being told we are racists for not wanting our countries to become full of Muslims who are out breeding us so will eventually take over the West unless we stop allowing them to enter our countries. We don’t want this, ‘borderless’ world the elites are determined we must have. Our nations are an extension of our family, Our nation is our home. That is true of every Muslim country too, which is why they bring their cultural and religious identity with them when they move to America or Europe. That is the lie of, ‘integration’. It happens on some levels but not on others and it cannot happen properly between a population with a long, Christian heritage and one with a long Muslim one. Even if the entire West becomes Muslim, China and Russia will never allow their countries to become full of Muslims and nor will Japan. Can you imagine Muslims ever getting into Russian, Chinese or Japanese politics as they do in Western ones? In fact the growing Muslim population in the UK is now demanding Sharia law!

    So here’s to common sense, which sadly used to be much keener in the West in the days before we all became spoilt with material junk. It’s so easy to be a Snowflake, to light candles and wave banners demanding the whole world should be allowed to move to a financially bankrupt USA, UK and EU. Here in the UK our health service is now on its knees due to decades of too much immigration. We have the highest population in our history and yet our indigenous birth rate has been shrinking for decades. House prices in the UK are now impossibly high, rents are soaring and we have the worst housing shortage since the end of WWII. Some of ours schools contain children from so many different ethnic backgrounds that up to 45 – yes 45 – different languages are spoken. The Snowflakes call this, ‘Diversity’, I call it a, ‘Mess’. The greatest hypocrisy of the Neo Liberal agenda, is in its craftiness to slowly dissolve all common sense in the West by using not just political force but the education system and getting the MSM fully on board. While it pretends to value the lives of all the poorest and war suffering of the world and peddles this endlessly to the gullible Snowflakes who so easily gobble it up, these very same Neo Libs have caused many of the wars and thus suffering in this world. These are the politicians of the West who also, one after another, gave the green light to abortion on demand. Untold millions of white, western citizens never even made it out of the womb. Where were/are their rights in this Brave New World of Neo Liberal garbage and endless, officially sanctioned Fake News?

    Multum In Parvo

  4. Ping from Simon Saunders:

    There’s also video though, which shows the inauguration through from the start to when people are leaving. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Am1WalVvU so the “matter of timing” you’re talking about doesn’t apply.

    • Ping from Knave_Dave:

      This is far from the “Truth in 60 Seconds,” and it shows more than anything how timing matters. The video has several major edits in it, particularly around the time when the direction of the crowd’s movement begins to shift, including one where the crowd stops moving entirely while the camera zooms way forward and then all the way back. Then suddenly the crowd starts moving again. Then there is another one where the image seems dissolved over itself right at the point where the direction of the crowd shifts and goes dark enough that you cannot make out the size of the crowed for a moment.

      • Ping from Simon Saunders:

        Lol doesn’t take much to push you into full conspiraloon does it. Video doesn’t show what I want it to show? MUST be chopped up, even though it’s very obviously a continuous take. To quote your man in the Whitehouse, SAD!

        • Ping from Auldenemy:

          If you had bothered to read David’s other articles you would know that Trump isn’t his, ‘Man in the Whitehouse’. He has made it very clear in previous articles what he thinks of Trump and I assure you it isn’t flattering. Please see my reply to this article (the fact that thousands of Trump supporters never made it to the official inauguration area thanks to only three people checking them through with metal detectors).

          I don’t think you understand at all that some of us are not at all Trump supporters but simply understand how and why he ended up in office. Equilibrium is the key to peaceful co existence. When that balance is lost there is always a time when a back lash comes. When corrupt, greedy and power mad political, banking and multi national forces converge under cover of Neo Liberalism and use the education system and most of the MSM to spout garbage, even people who are not normally interested in politics start voting for change. Trump and Brexit aren’t necessarily an answer to the problem but they are a clear indication to the ruling, status quo, Neo Liberal elites that many millions of people in the West are now starting to gag on an overdose of PC policies which are a veneer, underneath which lies a desire to take away our right to free speech and our desire not to see our countries turned into waring ghettos of religious and cultural divide. If anything is, ‘Sad’ it is your ignorance or denial of that fact. If you are young then your ignorance is forgivable. If you are middle aged or older then you are in denial and that is less forgivable. Many Germans went into denial about Hitler.

          Multum In Parvo

          • Ping from Knave_Dave:

            As much as I wanted an anti-establishment candidate, I couldn’t bring myself to vote for someone who has proven himself over many years to be a lifelong narcissist, more full of himself than any human being I’ve ever witnessed and a buffoon who often seemed to pretend he was going to run for the sake of garnering lots of media attention to himself and his eponymous company, but who repeated dodged out of actually doing it.

            I hope he does well, but his cabinet full of Goldman Sachs banksters doesn’t bode well, nor does his return to trickle-down economics with its vast gifts to the richest among us, nor do his ham-fisted starting moves. I like his objective of curbing rampant immigration, but his opening move was extremely clumsy, and I suspect his manner of doing everything through executive decree, rather than trying to push his Republican congress to make the right permanent changes is going to result in more sloppy moves. He has absolutely no cures proposed for the problems that really ail our economy, as I’ve discussed many times elsewhere. His goal is save us by doubling down on our debt, which isn’t going to work any better in the long run than it did for Obama. (Doesn’t fix any underlying problems, the worst of which IS debt.) He has Larry Kudlow for one of his top economic counselors, whom I consider a complete loss economically — a shill for giving to the rich at every turn who believes in voodoo economics.

            As I’ve said all along, I think the establishment will simply use Trump as their fall guy when all the problems that already exist fall to pieces.

            That said, Trump does have the guts to tackle the establishment, and maybe he will start to see where the problems lie more clearly now that he is in power. He talks about draining the swamp, but he drained it all directly into the White House, so that’s an odd fix. His divisive way of doing things inflames his enemies (who want to be enflamed anyway because they love the establishment apparently).

            I think it’s going to be a colossal mess of mass revolts, and I’m not sure Trump has the clear vision to steer us through all of that. BUT he’s got the guts, so I hope he makes it. I do think his campaigning has given him a heart for the average person because he’s seen how they turn to him to be their hero, and I think he’d like to fulfill that role. (If nothing else, it would serve his narcism well; but I think he does have a true love for America and wants to do well for it.)

            I hate fake news wherever I see it, and I see enormous amounts of it coming from the mainstream media toward Trump.

            • Ping from Auldenemy:

              It must be annoying when people like Simon read one article by you and construe from it that you must be an avid Trump supporter! I remember prior to the vote, your brilliant article on both candidates; how you directed the sword of truth at both Trump and H. Clinton and in doing so showed just how hard it was for many Americans to have to make a choice between a billionaire huckster (Trump) and a greedy, corrupt, psychopath (Clinton). If I was an American I would have found that one tough choice. If made to vote I would have chosen Trump simply as the lesser of two evils. Hillary, like the EU, wants a war with Russia and Trump doesn’t. Putin is far from, ‘clean’ but a war between super powers is a Dante’s Inferno scenario. So I would take the bragging huckster over the psychopath.

              Yes, Trump has surrounded himself by fellow billionaire hucksters, in the form of ex Goldman Sachs parasites. Would it have been different under Hillary? I don’t think so considering the Clintons have been paid literally hundreds of millions by Goldman to make sure they owned them. Their son-in-law’s now defunct Hedge Fund stinks off Clinton and Goldman dirty deeds. The son-in-law is ex Goldman, the CEO of Goldman (Frankenstein-Blankenstein), invested personally into that Hedge Fund. It looks like Bill Clinton contacted Angela Merkel to request she gave the green light on the third Greek bailout (which she was against), specifically because his son-in-law’s new business depended upon that deal. There is the added stench of Merkel handing $4 million to the Clinton Foundation (heads of other EU countries have done the same with their tax payers money, some handing over far more).

              Yes, Trump the, ‘Swamp Drainer’ did just fill the Whitehouse with the swamp. I think Banksterville – in my opinion the true rulers of the West – made it very clear to him that he was free to get on with his pet projects concerning immigration and trying to create more jobs in America, and certainly free to go on the attack where China and trade is concerned because in a worst case scenario the USA military complex gets another big boost. I think the deal was, ‘You get to play John Wayne to your Rust Belt supporters and in return you remove Dodd-Franks and let us get on with the serious business of finishing what we started in 2008, as in looting the West’. While an over simplification, I truly think that is the general theme of the new fix in the Whitehouse between the real rulers, Banksterville, and their new political puppet in office.

              I agree totally about Trump being a bragger, having no clue about thinking before he opens his mouth and his stupidity in thinking he can railroad through his immigration policies by Executive Order so as to by-pass Congress. Yes, a better immigration policy for the US is required (as it is for the UK and EU), but as you say, it has to be properly planned out. Trump has spent his whole working life as a business dictator. He might be used to attending business meetings and listening to business advisors but he won’t be used to board meetings where everyone has a vote. He decides, and he alone. If he thinks he can do that as President he is wrong. The Constitution was designed the way it was so as to keep the President in check, that is the whole purpose surely of Congress? It is your version of our Parliament and was born out of it. MPs here get to vote on Bills proposed by the government. The Prime Minister can’t railroad anything substantial through without consulting Parliament. Of course that is the official, political front that is shown to the public in the US, UK and EU. It is a show of democracy but sadly there are darker forces always in the background and they always appear to lead back to Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, the Military Complex and the big multi nationals. The CIA seemed to have gone rogue decades ago (probably after they got away with their involvement in assassinating their own President).

              I think two key things are happening in the West; the first is that millions of actually not extreme – or even politically inclined people – are simply tired of a Neo Liberal front in politics which they know is a complete fake. They know because they saw how easily Banksterville got bought out governments to bail them out and hand the bill to Main Street. They then watched Banksterville just merrily carry on in corrupt mode. Any new regulations were just another front. One big bank after another has paid hefty fines for breaking one rule after another post 2008. It is no more than a business tax. No senior management is ever hauled before a judge, let alone prosecuted. Meanwhile Main St. grows poorer under the crushing burden of those bailouts. The second greatest problem for more and more Westerners is watching uncontrolled and mostly Muslim immigration take place in their countries, this at a time when indigenous Americans and Europeans are struggling to keep their heads above water. Our countries are sinking in debt and yet here is this Neo Liberal agenda merrily allowing all and anyone into our countries. Some of these immigrants are committing terrible crimes but don’t get deported and the media won’t report it if it is only one person with their throat cut, or one woman raped by a Muslim asylum seeker in Germany, Austria, Sweden, Britain etc. The fact that now hundreds of rapes have been committed in Europe by so called asylum seekers is not reported by most of the MSM. Yes, most Muslims are peaceful but that doesn’t mean the lunatic ones can just be ignored and allowed to roam about Europe and the USA as they please until eventually they commit a bigger atrocity. To talk of this is to immediately be accused of racism by the established elites in the West and their media shills. That is ridiculous and another reason why people who are not racist and have no problem with controlled immigration voted for Brexit and in the USA, Trump. Both Trump and Brexit are the desperate cry of ordinary citizens, hollowed out between Banksterville and a Neo Liberal agenda peddled by paid out elites, who have simply had enough.

            • Ping from Knave_Dave:

              I’m going to take the last part of this and see if it will work to append it to your article on immigration.

        • Ping from Knave_Dave:

          I guess we’re watching a different video. Looks extremely chopped up to me. Huge changes in lighting, sudden total blurring of the image, sudden zoom in and zoom out all right ONLY right before the point where the flow of the crowd reverses. And, of course, you are completely ignoring far superior high-resolution photos that prove the crowd was packed all the way back to the media pavilion. One blurry, chopped-up video doesn’t negate other very clear photographs that show a packed audience. So, believe the photographically inferior one (blurred, suddenly darkened, overlapped images) because you want to because it shows what you want to believe over crystal-clear images that tell a totally different story. That’s why fake news works. Willingness to believe it, even when its flaws are evident.

      • Ping from Auldenemy:

        David I have just replied to your article. Seeing Simon trying to trash it I have found the commentary on Zero Hedge by one Trump supporter saying how thousands of his supporters waited hours but never made it into the inauguration area due to only three officials with metal detectors checking them through. It won’t paste a screen shot of that and the Utube link proving these people were kept from attendance. It won’t work if I copy it into an email and try to copy it to here. Do you have an email address that I can send it to? It proves conclusively that a huge amount of Trump supporters were stopped – intentionally or otherwise – from making it to the actual inauguration area.

        • Ping from Knave_Dave:

          If you go to the Youtube video directly, you’ll see a button that says “share” under the video. Click that, and it will bring you a highlighted link. Simply copy that link and paste it into your comment, and my site should automatically embed the video once you save your comment. If it doesn’t, it should, at least, show the link.

          • Ping from Auldenemy:

            David, I can’t seem to make this work. When I read the comment from a Trump supporter on Zero Hedge saying thousands of his supporters couldn’t get to the official area in time (due to only three officials with metal detectors checking them through), I took the link provided to their short YouTube clip showing this. It appeared completely genuine so I took a screen shot of their comment and link (just as a personal reference). As I said, even copying that screen shot to email format on my tablet, it won’t then copy on to your site. I have written (copied) out the YouTube address for this link and I plugged it into Google but nothing comes up. Anyway, here is that address again. Maybe you can make it work. It is frustrating because obviously I want to provide this proof to you that one way or another, many Trump supporters were stopped from getting to the inauguration. I expect you know that Anti Trump protestors did their best to block side roads so as to delay Trump supporters getting to the inauguration (again, there is film of this on YouTube). Anyway, here is that link but I can’t seem to make it work (I have checked that I copied it out correctly).

            https://youtu.be/49_WxvufaZg

            • Ping from Knave_Dave:

              The problem appears to be that the video no longer exits on YouTube. Sometimes that is because the person who put it there pulled it, and sometimes because YouTube pulled it. I have that happen a lot, too. I post a video with an article here. And a week later, it no longer works. You can write to me at “postmaster [at] thegreatrecession.info” and send me the links, and I’ll double check to see if I can get it to work.

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