Why all the surprise at the result of the US Election?

   

The mainstream media, along with a host of celebrities, didn’t shy away from telling America how to vote this year. Sadly for them, people just didn’t seem to listen.

Liberals and the mainstream media are reeling from what they refer to as Donald Trump’s “shock victory” in the long, drawn-out 2016 US Presidential Election.

One wonders how journalists across the globe can report on this ‘shock’ when they are the very people tasked with analysing public opinion and impartially reporting their findings in the run up to what has been one of the largest media events this century.

Everyone was name-called to the extreme

In the months leading to the infamous show-down between the scandal-beleaguered Hilary Clinton and her much reviled opponent, the press were busy applying the ‘appropriate’ news filters to paint Trump as the worst kind of racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamaphobic, anti-immigration, bigot on the face of our dear planet earth.

Trump certainly can be odious, with blunt mannerisms rarely seen in politics, but even more serious were the allegations levelled against Secretary of State Clinton in over her three decades in politics. You won’t have read about most of those in the mainstream media because they didn’t cover it.

What the mainstream media failed to respect, perhaps rather than recognise (because they can’t be that impervious to external stimuli can they?) was the growing number of Americans who are increasingly uncomfortable, if not downright disgruntled, by the left’s attempted lockdown on freedom of speech and expression. This intolerance to diversity of opinion (one of the only kinds of diversity the left fails to champion) clearly has a knock on effect on the debate in the US.

The left has a tendency, instead of engaging in intellectual debate, to label opposing opinions with an endlessly regurgitated set of buzzwords usually ending in ‘ist’ or ‘phobe’. This lazy approach has allowed them to shut down healthy debate and diversity of opinion, especially in the media and, worryingly, on university campuses.

Similar behaviour happening in Ireland

Similarly, in Ireland as debate about the Right to Life, or 8th, Amendment rages on, the pro-abortion side face little to no scrutiny of their assertions – or their behaviour – by a media that is decidedly on their side. Those who are uncomfortable with the idea of abortion, or the deliberate ending of the life of a defenceless unborn child, are dismissed as woman-haters, God-freaks, and bigots, even though, as was pointed out in a recent Irish Times article by Phelim McAleer, most of the leaders of pro-life groups in this country are women.

During their third and final live televised debate Trump and Clinton discussed late term abortion. Trump expressed disgust at the barbaric nature of a ‘procedure’ where a fully formed unborn child is deliberately killed up to hours before his/her due date, describing how the child is ‘ripped out of its mother’s womb’. Hilary’s rebuttal? “That’s not what happens”. One wonders if Secretary Clinton is under the impression that the abortionist presses a button on the mother’s tummy and the baby goes straight to heaven?! Americans were clearly concerned about the abortion issue, as abortion was the number one google search topic related to Clinton on election day.

Clinton was caught lying on abortion

Furthermore Clinton has been caught lying about her extreme position on abortion.

When Republican Party candidate Senator Marco Rubio accused Clinton of supporting abortion up until a baby’s due date, she denied the assertion calling it “pathetic” during an interview on US talk show Face:Nation. She also denied supporting no restrictions on non-medical abortion up until birth. However during an interview on The Political View, Clinton restated her position that the unborn child has absolutely no constitutional rights, and therefore abortion up until birth is acceptable, saying, “Under our law that is the case, I support Roe vs Wade.”To many Clinton is synonymous with lack of respect for human life – any human life – her presidential campaign was backed by 9 out of 10 of the world’s leading arms manufacturers. Is this really a surprise? Clinton is the embodiment of a political establishment that will happily declare war anywhere it likes. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen. Clinton received $2 5million in political donations from Saudi Arabia, the nation supporting the current humanitarian crisis in Yemen, a country where half the children are now starving.

Something bigger than Trump’s election is happening: ever increasing numbers of people are sick of politicians who promise change that never materializes, sick of the policies of the extreme left, and perhaps most poignantly, sick of the palpable exclusion of honest, open debate and being told what they should think.

   

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Alice Lane

   

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