Though I doubt Ben Chin was the first Maine progressive or Democrat to be defeated by Republican-fascist lies, he's the first one they're identifying as obviously defeated by the "free speech" that those in the title freed up to lie him out of winning an election.
The progressive activist lost by 145 votes to Mayor-elect Shane Bouchard, a Republican, after he was rocked during the last nine days of the race by seven stories from a new website that caught fire on social media with help from the Maine Republican Party.
One Maine Examiner headline said “Leaked Email: Ben Chin Says Lewiston Voters ‘Bunch of Racists’” and featured an email apparently forwarded out of his campaign. In it, Chin describes a day of canvassing when he had positive interactions but also ran into “a bunch of racists.”
On Election Day, a middle-aged man leaving the polls said goodbye to Bouchard. To Chin, he said “not a racist” and refused to talk to a reporter.
Chin may be the first Maine politician derailed by a new phenomenon: Anonymous conservative “news” websites whose most effective pieces blend a kernel of truth from opposition research with large factual and rhetorical leaps that traditional media ethics would prohibit.
Um, if you think media "traditions" can be relied on to prevent that kind of thing, the New York Times lying about, slandering, making false claims about, Hillary Clinton's goes back a quarter of a century, that's long enough to be a tradition, it's certainly a habit. If Maureen Dowd's bitchy smears against her aren't a tradition at the Gray Drab, nothing is.
No profession can be trusted to police itself, certainly not one which goes to court to win itself a right to publish lies and, so, gains the same right to lie for everything right down to the gutters of the NY Post, FOX, Breitbart and the scumbag who ran (and recently sold) the website* that the racists of Lewiston - the epicenter of racist activity in Maine, to defeat someone who tried to take a higher road. It takes the ability of those they lie about to sue them into not lying, an ability the Supreme Court removed in 1964 for the New York Times - if you didn't see what that led to in later cases that made things ever worse, see my post the other day.
Multiply that effect all over the country and it's obvious that the "traditional media" which throws up its hands and wines about the war on reality that Trump and Republican-fascists like Gaetz, Gomert, Nunes, .. are winning are the ones that really got it going because, as in Lewiston, the Republicans are acting hand-in-glove with the fascist media.
* Garrett Murch, a spokesman for the Maine Republican Party, which pushed Maine Examiner posts on social media and in party emails denouncing Chin, said he didn’t know who ran the site and declined comment after being asked if the party coordinated with them.
Maine First Media was run by Bangor pastor Matthew McDonald, who said Friday that he sold it in November for “thousands” of dollars to a Nebraska man. (The Bangor Daily News isn’t naming the man because he couldn’t be reached for comment.)
Note: I am not sure that the Matthew McDonald ("pastor") is the same as the Congregationalist minister Matt McDonald in this Portland Press Herald piece, who was a Bernie Sanders supporter who also supported George W. Bush and Ron Paul. If he's the same person, I doubt he supported Sanders hoping he'd win but that he'd lose. If he's not the same person, he's seriously screwy.
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