Anatomy of a Hit Piece
Mother Jones vs #WalkAway: Peeling back the curtain on leftist "journalists"
On January 17th, liberal propaganda outlet Mother Jones published what would be the latest in a long line of liberal media hit pieces against Brandon Straka, founder of the #WalkAway Campaign.
“From Hairstylist to Jan 6th Influencer: Meet the Man Helping the GOP Whitewash the Insurrection”, authored by Stephanie Mencimer. Her Twitter account features the usual middle-aged white liberal woman histrionics — Orange man bad! Elon Musk bad. Billionaires bad* (except the ones that run the Democratic Party, of course.)
Ironically enough, after clicking the article, readers are greeted by a button asking us to join Mother Jones’s mailing list to “Fight disinformation”.
Those of us who #WalkAway from the left are often left with one central question concerning the media: Do they know they’re lying? Are they just misinformed? Or is there a deliberately deceitful agenda at play?
Let’s take an inside look to find out.
In preparation for this piece, Ms. Mencimer called Brandon Straka to set up an interview. This interview was recorded in its entirety (as agreed to by both parties).
What proceeded was a stark contrast to what one might expect in reading the final piece. A multi-part, multi-hour conversation, which was a surprisingly friendly and jovial interaction between two human beings. Straka laid out truths about J6 so undeniable that Mencimer would have to knowingly distort them just to publish her piece.
She writes:
Straka has been spinning this version of history ever since he left home detention in early 2022. His social media feeds and public appearances like the one in New Hampshire brim with commentary alleging his prosecution was part of a liberal conspiracy designed to silence him. “The left coordinated a massive effort to take me out that included the FBI, the DOJ, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Soros-funded lawfare, the entire Democrat Marxist state media, Antifa, and more,” he tweeted in December 2023…
But there is a voluminous record— including court records, texts and depositions obtained by the House January 6 committee, and his own copious social media posts and videos he streamed—that tell a very different story from the one Straka now tells publicly.
While it’s true that he didn’t commit any violence on January 6, Straka wasn’t exactly a neutral bystander. He’d been an underappreciated player in the “Stop the Steal” movement that sought to overturn the 2020 election results and helped lay the groundwork for the insurrection.
This public narrative that Mencimer is anguishing to convince her readership of is starkly different than the one she acknowledges to Straka in private.
Here she flat-out admits that Brandon was persecuted because of his effectiveness and influence, and most likely would not be charged today if he wasn’t a well-known and successful anti-leftist activist.
In the clip below Mencimer reads an excerpt from the book “Sedition Hunters” by Ryan Reilly, a far-left reporter for NBC whose beat is providing unwavering support and defense of the FBI and DOJ’s treatment of January 6th defendants (which has led to the suicides of at least 4 of these J6 defendants). Even Reilly, who has shown an almost bizarre infatuation with Straka and his case, acknowledges in his book that Straka would not have been charged if not for his public profile.
In private, Mencimer acknowledges that she was wrong to refer to Straka as a “rioter” numerous times in the past. Yet in her article, Mencimer states once again that Straka was “a part of a mob of rioters”.
Mencimer continues:
“I don’t believe there was an insurrection,” [Straka] told me. “There just wasn’t.”
Straka’s views aren’t unusual among January 6 defendants. In a report published in September 2022, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) found that very few of the people prosecuted for J6 crimes have rejected the anti-democratic goals of the attack on Congress. Of the 217 defendants in the study who’d been sentenced by mid-July 2022, only 48 had repudiated the political goals of the riot. Of those, only 10 admitted the 2020 election wasn’t stolen.
In this paragraph, Mencimer employs a typical left-wing journalist tactic: introducing a non-truth as a truth, and sandwiching it discretely in the middle of another point, in order to subconsciously plant this mistruth into the reader’s brain and attempt to make it a new and accepted “fact”. In this case, Mencimer is citing junk report statistics on the current beliefs of J6 defendants. While making her readers believe she’s focusing on the statistics from the report, Mencimer subtly introduces the idea that the “goal” of January 6th was an “anti-democratic” “attack on Congress”.
Up until now, the leftist media has overwhelmingly propagandized that the purpose of January 6th was to stop the certification of Joe Biden to install Donald Trump. Now Mencimer is telling us that the goal was to “attack Congress”.
But there is an even more stunning, and extremely poignant, admission here by Mencimer. There is no more pretense. The liberal media is now saying the quiet part out loud. The true motive behind the continued persecution of J6 defendants is now, and has always been, reeducation. This piece is an extension of that — a modern-day struggle session.
Mencimer herself admits as much.
And THERE IT IS.
“People thought that with all these prosecutions, that it would somehow EVISCERATE a part of the MAGA movement, or it would get all these people to change their minds about how they feel about politics or about Trump. And that really didn’t happen”.
They say a “gaffe” is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. For Stephanie Mencimer and her entire political agenda — that was a big ole gaffe.
This is the smoking gun. The point has finally emerged. This was, and forever will be, the sole goal of the January 6th saga. Getting people to change their views and not support Trump.
ADD: The point on they didn’t want J6 defendants to recover. She’s upset that effective activists like B and Simone Gold have survived.
The left cannot win by competing in a free and fair market — a free market of ideas, a free market of law, a free market of equal justice. They can only win by beating their political enemies into submission. Slimy Stephanie nonchalantly asks why MORE of the J6ers being targeted haven’t just given up their deeply held principles and beliefs no matter how much they’ve been brutalized. In public, she wears the mask of feigning concern for “Our Democracy” — yet behind closed doors, she ponders why those darn conservatives won’t just become radical leftists!
One of the most galling things about the J6 inquisition has been its one-sidedness. The blatant way that leftists can “storm the Capitol” or question elections to no consequences, as have seen over and over and over again — from BLM’s “Summer of Love” to the protests of Brett Kavanaugh, to the “Free Palestine” movement.
As Straka points out, the left has a long history of claiming stolen elections. Maybe they are the ones responsible for insurrection?
Mencimer continues, as liberal media coverage of Straka often does, by diminishing his current accomplishments. What follows is a lengthy diatribe on Straka’s pre-#WalkAway years as a hairdresser and artist.
In 2000, he moved to New York, did community theater, and scored a 2013 spot as a contestant on Wheel of Fortune. Somewhere along the way he picked up a substance abuse problem but sobered up in 2015. He subsequently got a cosmetology license that may have helped pay the bills, but it left him far from the spotlight he craved.
The liberal media’s insistence on constantly referring to Straka as a “hairdresser” is one key way in which they insert their agenda to diminish Straka and the #WalkAway movement. Straka is not known for being a hairdresser. He is known as the founder of the #WalkAway Campaign. The reference to Straka by his previous employment, while ignoring and refusing to report the success he has had as the head of an organization that has raised millions of dollars over a few short years, is a tactic that nearly every left-wing media outlet has used since Straka came up in 2018. This tactic serves two purposes: to marginalize Straka’s success as an activist and business leader, and to provide tacit permission to the readers to indulge in their desire to believe that Straka is not intelligent or capable enough to be listened to.
Imagine them referring to other successful people this way. Why don’t they credit Madonna as “former Dunkin Donuts employee”? Or Jeff Bezos as a “former McDonald’s cook”? Remember, these are the same people who constantly bang the drum that the political right wants to erase the successes and achievements of minorities in our culture.
Furthermore, Straka did not “pick up a substance abuse problem, but sobered up”. He struggled with addiction, joined a 12-step program and got clean, and recently celebrated his 9th year free of drugs & alcohol. To this day he helps and counsels others on maintaining sobriety.
These linguistic sleight-of-hand tricks paint a fuller picture of why the liberal media so despises Brandon Straka.
They hate that he comes from a working-class background. They hate that he’s a creative. They hate that he’s a gay man who will not conform to the party line. They hate that he walked away from the left — and they really hate that no matter how hard they try, they cannot beat him into submission, or make him grovel.
Straka, on the “contrition” that is expected of him:
It was towards the end of the interaction between Straka and Mencimer that her most revealing assertion was made. After three years of being vilified — tarred and feathered as a “rioter” by Mencimer and others in the liberal media — Straka posed her a simple question:
STRAKA: “Do you still think I’m a rioter?'“
MENCIMER: “No… I think this is sort of a language problem that we all have in general, that we lump a bunch of people together”.
She is correct. We do have a language problem. The problem being that dishonest actors like Mencimer are the ones in control of the language. They are the ones creating and perpetuating this “language problem”. They get to shape and mold the language of discourse in whichever way they please.
They will continue the J6 “rioter” hysteria. They will write 6,000-word essays fanning the flames of fearing the “rioters” who they themselves in private do NOT believe caused any such riot!
For all the talk of Brandon Straka’s theatrical background, in reality, it is the liberal media “journalists” who are actors. They have cast themselves in a specific role they play, and it is a performance for them. They aren’t simply deceptive, they are willfully and knowingly deceptive. There is only so much of their own propaganda that they even believe.
At one time, the purpose of a free press was to hold government accountable and to speak truth to power in order to prevent a powerful government from doing harm to its citizens. Now, the left-wing media is nothing more than a propaganda arm of the government that not only ignores stories that cast the government in a negative light, but actually cheers the government on as it uses its power to crush and destroy citizens whose political beliefs fall outside of those of the leftist state media.
One might feel a certain sadness upon this realization. If it wasn’t for the liberal media mouthpieces and their insistence on playing this role — fire and brimstone for anyone an inch to the right of Karl Marx! — we might be able to all get along. We might have some level of mutual understanding.
This thesis is the cornerstone of both Brandon Straka’s work, and the #WalkAway movement at large: The media is deliberately and deceptively dividing us every single day.
It is incumbent on us to not allow them to.
Despite the dishonesty of her piece in totality, there was however one thing that Menicmer most certainly got right:
If the liberal deep state prosecution was supposed to silence Straka, as he’s alleged, the conspiracy has surely failed.
That is correct.
The multi-faceted attempt to silence and destroy Brandon Straka has failed spectacularly. Both he and the #WalkAway movement continue growing, continue speaking up, and continue shining a light on the deception of leftist media rags like Mother Jones.
WATCH the full-length unedited discussion between Brandon Straka and Stephanie Mencimer HERE.
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