Imagine George Soros in a pair of overalls pitching his politics at the counter of the Farmers Coop in Ness City.
That image is more true than you might think, but it’s the last one the Leftist scribes at the Soros-funded Kansas Reflector want you to muster as you consume their socialist-tilted Kansas statehouse reporting.
Because the Kansas Reflector is about concealing the truth as to where your news comes from and who’s feeding it to you. Sadly, our country is rife with this kind of abscess masquerading as journalism, from the national media that killed the Election 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story to the Reflector’s recent hate piece targeting state legislators trying to protect female athletes from competition with men.
With the same tenacity as a fourth generation Kansas farmer, so-called “progressives” who want to replace your way of life with European-style Socialism are pecking away at their keyboards to change the fabric of Kansas and the country. Funded by dark money from Soros and his ilk, they’re working to grow the kind of ongoing national disaster the likes of which 15 months of Joe Biden has only given us a taste.
After all, it was only a few months ago that mentioning crackhead party animal Hunter Biden’s “oops, I wonder what I did with my laptop” story would get you booted off Twitter and algorithmed down to two readers on Facebook like the New York Post, which broke the story in 2020. It was all Russian election meddling, the high priests of Big Tech and the mainstream media told voters. Nothing to see here.
But, indeed there was much to see. The New York Times, which debunked the tale itself during the election, actually reversed itself recently by sourcing info from the laptop’s email trove while reporting another story. Emails on the laptop detailed big-money schemes from when Joe Biden was vice-president, with Hunter cooking up deals to peddle dad’s influence with foreign leaders while chipping a nice commission for “the big guy” off the top. It was the kind of bombshell the media salivated for during the Trump years and, lacking a real one, made up “Russian collusion” on their own.
It was a story voters should have known prior to the 2020 election if a real media was doing real journalism. In the end, unbiased reporting that might have hurt Joe Biden’s election chances was just asking too much – so they buried it.
So if you’re one of the legions of Trump fans who were looking for dubious voting activities to back your claims of election rigging, you were looking in the wrong place. Yes, the election was rigged all right – but ‘twas the mainstream media and Big Tech that done it.
With that kind of complicity across the American media spectrum, it’s easy to understand how freaked out Leftists were when Trump won election in 2016, and how fast they raised millions and millions of dollars from Soros, et. al., to start Leftist propaganda mouthpieces like the Kansas Reflector. The strategy was to attack conservative efforts at the grassroots level when state lawmakers confronted local topics with connections to national issues like LGBTQ preference, “green energy,” election security, Critical Race Theory and others. The mission is simple: report those stories with compassion and heart strings for the poor, dispossessed perpetual victims, and make conservatives like wind farm opposing Senator Mike Thompson look like a plaid-wearing, Floyd R. Turbo Kansas redneck.
It’s a mission conducted on a grand scale with megga funding. The Reflector is part of a network of similar Leftist “news services” birthed by an outfit called States Newsrooms, which itself is a tax-exempt shell kicked off by a pass-through funder called the Hopewell Fund, which was started by another dark money source, Arabella Advisors, to which George Soros and eBay originator turned Leftist media guru Pierre Omidyar donated millions. States Newsrooms, launched in 2019, expected to raise $27 million by the end of 2021 according to published reports, and quickly amassed presence in 26 states with unassuming online titles like the Nebraska Examiner, Arizona Mirror, Colorado Newsline, Florida Phoenix, Georgia Recorder, Idaho Capital Sun, Iowa Capital Dispatch, Kansas Reflector, Louisiana Illuminator, Maine Beacon, Maryland Matters, Michigan Advance, Minnesota Reformer, Missouri Independent, Daily Montanan, Nevada Current, New Hampshire Bulletin, New Jersey Monitor, Source New Mexico, NC Policy Watch, Ohio Capital Journal, Oregon Capital Chronicle, Pennsylvania Capital-Star, Tennessee Lookout, Virginia Mercury, and the Wisconsin Examiner.
Typically this scheme seeks out and hires a few longtime liberal journalists in the target state whose bylines are familiar with readers, in order to give street cred to the clandestine effort. The websites encourage the republication of their work, especially for near-broke local newspapers who’ve lost most of their own reporting staffs in recent years as their papers and advertiser support declined. States Newsrooms thereby broadens the reach of their message while making local papers think this well-funded ulterior motive is a favor to them.
Hence you have the Kansas Reflector attacking all state legislative actions that appear to be a threat to strengthening queer culture or green energy, sublimating straight white people or just garden variety socialism – and using struggling local newspapers to help them.
The Reflector wants to convince you it’s okay for boys who say they’re girls to beat your daughter out of a track scholarship; that it’s okay for schools to teach white kids they’re racist; that Black Lives Matter emblems belong on K-State football helmets; that massively expensive, ugly, financially unsustainable wind farms that kill home values and only make power when the wind blows are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Because that’s the Kansas envisioned by George Soros and the elitists at MSNBC.
So do yourself a solid and take what you see from the Kansas Reflector with more than a grain of salt. The truth – like a missing laptop – really is out there.
– Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.