Virginia Gubernatorial candidate Terry McCauliffe (D) reportedly ended an interview at the half-way mark and berated the reporter for not asking “better questions.”
According to ABC7, the network had reporter Nick Minock conduct two interviews with the opposing candidates for governor – one with former governor Terry McCauliffe and the other with businessman Glenn Youngkin (R). To keep it fair and balanced, the interviews were to be 20 minutes apiece, wherein both candidates would be asked about their platforms. However, mid-way through McCauliffe’s interview, the former governor abruptly ended the discussion and scolded the reporter for not asking “better questions.”
“If you watch those entire interviews on our website, we do want to point out that the Terry McCauliffe interview is shorter than our interview with Glenn Youngkin,” said an ABC7 anchor during a Tuesday broadcast. “That was not by our doing.”
“Nick offered 20 minutes for both candidates exactly to be fair for the interviews,” he continued. “McCauliffe abruptly ended 7 News’ interview after just 10 minutes and told Nick that he should have asked ‘better questions’ and that Nick should have asked questions 7 News viewers ‘care about.’”
The footage of McCauliffe abruptly ending the interview and scolding the reporter can be viewed on the ABC7 website. The moment came shortly after journalist Nick Minock asked McAuliffe about vaccine mandates for children, which the former governor used to then segue into the subject of abortion:
[Youngkin] is a Donald trump right-wing agenda. He will ban abortions. Your viewers should be very clear on this. He wants to ban abortions here in Virginia. He says election integrity is the number one issue. No, it isn’t. Healthcare, COVID, education, job creation.
Just then, a McAuliffe staffer interjected to tell Nick Minock that he was “over time,” prompting the former governor’s exit.
“Alright, we are over. That’s it. That’s it. Hey I gave you extra time,” said the former governor. “C’mon man. You should have asked better questions early on. You should have asked questions your viewers care about.”
“Well, we did,” responded Minock.
Current polls show that McAuliffe and Youngkin are tied in a virtual dead-heat in the race to become the next governor of Virginia, with Youngkin having a slight edge.
“The poll, conducted October 11–13 among 1,095 likely voters, shows Youngkin with 48.4 percent support compared to McAuliffe’s 47.5 percent support, giving Youngkin a 0.9 percent edge,” Breitbart recently reported.
Here’s the awkward video of @TerryMcAuliffe walking out half way through what was supposed to be 20 minute interview with local ABC affiliate pic.twitter.com/EjQ6OL22Fo
We’re two weeks away from Election Day and, as I’ve said, D.C. metro TV markets are being saturated with McAuliffe ads attacking Youngkin as a Trump puppet — that’s actually the closing argument for the McAuliffe campaign, which can’t lay a glove on Youngkin otherwise. No wonder McAuliffe is losing: Biden sucks so bad, even a lot of Democrats must be thinking it wouldn’t be so bad to have a Trump puppet as governor.
“That’s the thing about a Missing White Woman story — the damsel-in-distress angle only works, in terms of TV news ratings, if the missing woman is young and attractive, preferably blonde. Males can and do go missing, but those disappearances never dominate national news. It’s always a woman, and a young, attractive woman — if she’s old, fat or ugly, nobody cares if she goes missing. But the nubile blonde? Oh, yeah, that’s nationwide headline stuff, because she’s Prime Rape Bait, and sex is the secret ingredient in the Missing White Woman story.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Sept. 22
Going off on seemingly irrelevant tangents is one of my bad habits, and perhaps I should begin by telling you that this is not a post about the case of Gabby Petito, who was apparently strangled to death by her fiancé, Brian Laundrie. In saying “apparently,” I don’t mean to raise doubt about the cause of her death — the autopsy confirmed that she was strangled — but rather it’s because so far Laundrie has not been formally accused of Gabby’s death, but is what police call a “person of interest.” The manhunt for Laundrie continues, but this isn’t a post about that; rather, it’s about how social media is affecting the beliefs and behavior of young people. Gabby Petito evidently got the idea that she could find a career as a social-media “influencer,” by monetizing her Instagram posts and YouTube videos on the #vanlife hashtag. That was what she and Laundrie were doing on that trip out West where she got strangled to death.
So here is this blue-eyed blonde girl from the affluent Suffolk County hamlet of Blue Point, N.Y., deciding at age 21 that the thing to do is to save up, buy a van and then go driving westward, recording her travel experiences for an online audience, up until the point where she became the poster girl for the #strangledtodeath hashtag.
Excuse my caustic sarcasm, but Gabby Petito is an extreme example of a much larger problem of young people ruining their lives by following whatever trendy fashion caught their attention on social media.
Back in 2014, when I began my deep-dive into radical feminism, the reason was because I could see it becoming trendy, mainly because the strategists behind the Hillary Clinton campaign saw that promoting feminism as a “brand” would be helpful to her 2016 presidential bid.
That’s something many people don’t understand — a lot of trends these days don’t just spontaneously happen. The Democrat-Media Complex exerts a very powerful influence, and the army of naïve young women who suddenly became all “F–k Yeah Feminism!” circa 2014 are evidence of how easily people can be manipulated. And if you pay attention to such trends over time, you’ll notice that the same cohort of impressionable youth will jump from one issue to the next as the focus of their online activism, depending entirely on what narrative the Democrat-Media Complex happens to be promoting at any given time. The same twentysomething crowd that was ready to #SmashPatriarchy in 2014 shifted seamlessly to ranting against the “Alt-Right” and the sinister influence of Vladimir Putin in 2017. Then, quite suddenly in May 2020, the same people were marching in the streets for #BlackLivesMatter, and all the other activist causes they’d been concerned with were forgotten.
The marionettes in this puppet-play never notice the strings, and it does not seem to occur to them to ask, “Why should I care about this?” or “Who is really benefitting from my activism?”
Because I spent so many years inside newsrooms, seeing how the daily diet of news is assembled, I’m rather cynical about this stuff. As a blogger, there is always pressure to be part of the herd, everybody bleating in unison about the same stories — whatever is on Fox News, etc. From my perspective, resisting this herd mentality is part of the value-added calculation of my efforts: What is the value of my becoming the 27th blog to write about a particular subject? And if I’m going to dogpile on the same issue everybody else is writing about, how can I find something to say about it that is different? Otherwise, I might as well just be linking headlines or posting video clips. But you don’t get a lot of that kind of thinking — “What’s the point of what I’m doing?” — when the left-wing mob jumps onto something like the George Floyd story. Everybody just echoes the same insipid slogans, as if the sheer number of people mindlessly repeating this message is the whole point.
The frightening conformity of these mobs ought to attract more critical scrutiny than it does. On June 2, 2020, thousands of Instagram accounts posted nothing but a black square with the hashtag #BlackoutTuesday, which was basically the antithesis of critical thinking.
Examined closely, we can view this as an example of what Thomas Sowell famously called The Vision of the Anointed. What really matters to these people is perception — on the one hand, they wish to be viewed by their peers as “socially conscious,” but on the other hand, they’re also posing in a mirror to admire their own reflection, so to speak. Their perception of themselves as morally and intellectually superior is very important to them, and this drives them to join various “causes” as a venue for proving their superiority, both to themselves and others, so that over the course of time, their lives become a sort of political pageant.
There is a disturbing thoughtlessness to how such people behave. One day, the Instagram “influencer” is posting about her favorite coffee shop or the new sweater she bought, but then the next day, she’s repeating militant “social justice” slogans, demanding an end to oppression, etc. And this strange shift doesn’t seem to bother her in the least; whatever cognitive dissonance it may engender is expiated through an ostentatious display of hyperemotionality — literally crying about the latest “injustice” she saw on CNN. There is absolutely no rationality or objectivity to this kind of trendy activism; it’s all about feelings. Viewed objectively, nobody benefitted from her posting that black square on Instagram as an expression of BLM solidarity, but it made her feel like she was doing something, rather than being a passive spectator.
And we might just laugh at all this — “LOL silly kids!” — were it not for the fact that so many of them take it so seriously, to the extent that they are ruining their lives for “social justice.” Let me explain, for the benefit of any young woman who does not yet understand this: You’re not going to meet nice guys at an anarchist rally. Whatever else you might say about Republicans, the party tends to attract people who share certain beliefs, including an appreciation of the value of hard work, sobriety, thrift, etc. The young woman who starts hashtagging all those Communist “social justice” slogans is communicating to the world at large her contempt for the values of all decent and honest Americans.
On the one hand, she’s making it easy for guys seeking companionship of the conveniently slutty variety. Check her Instagram account, and if she was all about #BlackoutTuesday in June 2020, buddy, you’re in like Flynn. Of course, on the other hand, there’s the risk of herpes to consider. But why would I bring up Ella Dawson at this late date? (She’s “taking a break from men,” for which men should be grateful.)
A moment of total candor from Ella Dawson.
Even if you were the kind of reckless daredevil who would risk a hookup with someone like Ella Dawson, however, you certainly wouldn’t consider her “wife material.” No, when it’s time to settle down, any intelligent guy will be looking for a nice Republican girl, instead of some dingbat “progressive” who’s hashtagging social justice slogans. So the girl who thought it was all cool and clever to jump on the “activist” bandwagon as a 19-year-old college sophomore is apt to find herself at 29 living in a tiny apartment, with her cat, and prescriptions for Valtrex and Lexapro.
What Ella Dawson did to her life by becoming a “pro-sex” feminist is just slightly less stupid than what Gabby Petito did with her life. But as hashtags go, #DamagedSkank is not much better than #ShallowGrave.
You can tell by the TV ads that are running in the D.C. metro market that the Terry McAuliffe campaign is in deep trouble. The essence of the Democrat’s pitch, in the off-year gubernatorial campaign, is that Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin is a puppet of Donald Trump.
Let’s be clear about just who Glenn Youngkin actually is — a Richmond native who attended Rice University on a basketball scholarship (he’s 6-7), majored in engineering and management, and later got an MBA from Harvard. He spent 25 years with the Carlyle Group investment firm. If he is, or ever was, an extremist, nobody has discovered any evidence of this. Youngkin is Mister Clean, a calm and level-headed businessman without scandals in his past, and this is why the only way the McAuliffe campaign can try to attack him is by playing the “Orange Man Bad” card.
It should not be necessary for McAuliffe to attack Youngkin at all. A former governor, McAuliffe has near-100% name recognition in Virginia, while Youngkin is a little-known political newcomer. Virginia has been trending “blue” for the past 15 years; Hillary won Virginia 50%-44% in 2016, and Biden won the state by a 10-point margin last year.
Terry McAuliffe would have been cruising toward a November landslide, were it not for the disastrous failure of Joe Biden’s presidency. Since early August, Biden’s job-approval number in the RCP average has dropped about 7 points, while disapproval has risen by 9 points. Biden has been “underwater” in the polls for six weeks and, now that Americans are increasingly concerned abourt shortages of basic consumer goods because of the supply-chain issue, there is little hope of recovery.
Virginia Republican Glenn Youngkin holds less than a one-point lead over former Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) in the state’s gubernatorial race, according to a Trafalgar Group poll released Friday.
The poll, conducted October 11–13 among 1,095 likely voters, shows Youngkin with 48.4 percent support compared to McAuliffe’s 47.5 percent support, giving Youngkin a 0.9 percent edge.
The remaining respondents are split, 1.3 percent in favor of a third party or write-in candidate and 2.8 percent undecided. The third party candidate on the ballot, Princess Blanding, identifies as a Liberation Party member and will primarily serve as an alternative for Democrat-aligned voters. The poll’s margin of error is three percent.
Of the last three Trafalgar polls, this most recent one marks the first time Youngkin has led McAuliffe in the blue-leaning state. The last poll, taken at the end of August, showed McAuliffe with a slight edge over Youngkin, 46.6 percent to 46.3 percent. The one before that, taken in early July, had McAuliffe up by close to two points, 46.8 percent to Youngkin’s 45 percent.
McAuliffe said this month in candid remarks during a virtual rally with state Democrats that President Joe Biden, whose approval rating is hovering at record-low levels, is causing his campaign “headwinds.”
“But we’ve got to get Democrats out to vote,” McAuliffe said, per a clip of the event. “We are facing a lot of headwinds from Washington, as you know. The president is unpopular today unfortunately here in Virginia so we have got to plow through” . . .
Which is why Democrats are now saturating the TV airwaves with commercials depicting Youngkin as a Trump puppet — which might actually backfire, if you stop to think about it. After all, there must be a certain number of Biden voters who now feel “buyer’s remorse” over their role in electing this senile incompetent as president, so telling them that the Republican gubernatorial candidate is a Trump clone? No, that’s not necessarily going to make them want to vote Democrat again.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
Whatever one may think about the Astros, it would be very hard to argue that stud pitcher Justin Verlander is not the league leader in babelicious baseball wives, since he’s married to the voluptuous and seemingly always cheerful Kate Upton. Here we see Mrs. Verlander as a guest on some late night talk show not hosted by Greg Gutfeld.
No joy in RFK this week. My Senators lost two out of three to the Indians and then went To Shea Stadium where they ran into Steve Carlton and Tom Seaver back-to-back. Hoping to break the four-game losing streak against the Braves at the Launching Pad. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
What’s causing the supply-chain crisis? One word: California.
Sundance at Conservative Treehouse has a long article explaining this: California passed an emissions law that required trucks to meet standards that the majority of trucks in America can’t meet. Basically, about half the truckers in America are banned from operating in California. Because California ports — specifically Los Angeles and Long Beach — are the most convenient for shipments from Asia, this policy created a transportation problem that major importers tried to solve by diverting shipments to other ports. So then you had ships from Asia going through the Panama Canal to reach ports in New Orleans, Tampa, Jacksonville, Savannah, etc. However, the necessary infrastructure (especially cranes to offload cargo containers) to handle the increased loads at those other ports could not be created overnight. Thus, the bottleneck in California (caused by that state’s stringent emissions laws) led directly to bottlenecks at every other port in America.
The Constitution clearly allots to the federal government the authority to regulate interstate commerce, but California’s law — one Democrat-controlled state’s “Green New Deal” — is clearly having a disastrous impact on this commerce. Donald Trump would have put a stop to this, but Biden got 64% of the vote in California, and Biden would very much like to impose those job-killing policies on the whole country.
