Unheralded

RON SCHALOW: Rob Port Thinks He Has Credibility

Spoiler Alert: If you find Rob Port repugnant, have no interest in his antics or have just eaten, keep scrolling. I think my bizarre hobby is informative to some people who want to know what’s going on with a far right-wing propagandist in our midst but wouldn’t actually read a Port column with a 10-foot microscope.

Lately, Rob Port has been drawing inferences to his credibility. Seriously, he has. ForumComm should be concerned unless they’re shooting for some of those alternate facts. In that case, it got lucky when it found the Wasilla word bender.

First, in this sliver of Port stories, Rob wrote a screed demanding that a Steve Stark cartoon on the OPINION page be retracted. I thought, hmmm, does this puffed up prairie rooster really think that he has built up a Marshal Matt Dillon level of integrity to spend on giving orders to his employer? Where are we going to put the statue?

Actually, it wasn’t that surprising. Port has a tendency to assume that his opinion is the same as fact. He takes a lot of liberties with words. Rob uses all types of rhetorical deceit to spin the narrative. Trump’s lies don’t bother Port a bit. And Donnie’s racism is just a clever tactic.

Has Port ever made a retraction when he’s gotten a matter of fact wrong? To my knowledge, no, and he’s a prolific fabricator. That’s as scientific as I’m prepared to be. I’m very familiar with the product produced by the Aristotle of his times.

I’m not proud of it, but I’ve been keeping tabs on the kid for a few years as a curiosity. When he smeared me, I wondered how a brain like Port’s works. What makes a guy sit down and knowingly write a post littered with falsehoods and then email it to Fargo for publication?

Port has an unusual policy of summarizing a politician’s career for only the past 20 years, at least for Heidi Heitkamp, so he gave her resume a haircut to fit the false narrative he was twisting. She could have found a cure for cancer a year before his cutoff and it would have still gotten the Port treatment.

Anyway, so his policy drew a letter to the Forum complaining that Robbie skipped Heidi’s elections for tax commissioner. Most honest writers would find the election wins of significant. But not Rob. He’s a stickler. So he wrote an entire post bitching about how his honor was besmirched. The Forum Co. published it whole, like a muskie on a huge leech.

If you’re looking for the opposite of credibility you don’t have to look far back in time. On July 22, he accused former senator and current contributor to society Heidi Heitkamp of “purposely deciding” to use names of women who didn’t want to be named in a newspaper ad that included the names of other women who had survived sexual violence.

Heitkamp has taken responsibility for the campaign’s error, but this is nothing but a bald-faced lie on Port’s part. Or a hairy-faced lie. It was a sick accusation.

I could have just stayed in Heidi’s archived section for examples of Port’s dishonesty, but who has the time. I’m in my 60s.

He even gets after Heitkamp’s brother, Joel, once for evidently outing Port’s divorce on Twitter, which outraged the blogger.

Personally, I saw it in the Minot Daily News. Marriages, deaths, births, bankruptcies, divorces and other personal information are easy popular content. It’s the norm. Port didn’t use his victim card to whine about the MDN.

“Stop Rewarding Politicians for Just Winning Elections,” was the headline that preceded ma number of lies.

“In 2014 the NDWN named former state lawmaker Kylie Oversen, then only halfway through her first and only term in office, their ‘woman of the year.'”

Oversen wasn’t selected by the North Dakota Women’s Network for winning an election.

“But the left in North Dakota — which very much includes the NDWN, a group that isn’t likely to ever honor a conservative woman — has tapped (Ruth) Buffalo as a rising star and so she gets the plaudits.”

That’s not true either.

“It happens locally too. When Heidi Heitkamp won election to the U.S. Senate in 2012 the Fargo Forum named her their person of the year. At that point, she hadn’t held elected office in more than a decade. All she’d done, recently, won an election.”

Heidi Heitkamp worked for a living. Boiling down a person’s life and career to days in government is very dishonest.

“We’ve been cutting our revenue sources — income tax, corporate tax, oil extraction tax — for a decade, and then appear to be surprised when we ran out of money and we had a budget shortfall,” Kylie Oversen, candidate for tax commissioner and titular chairwoman of the North Dakota Democratic Party, said recently.

Calling Kylie Oversen the “titular” chairwoman of the North Dakota Democratic Party is simply a lie. And she is telling the truth about the tax cut for oil. Port doesn’t understand simple math.

“In related news, Kylie Oversen, titular chairwoman of the North Dakota Democratic Party and candidate for Tax Commissioner, made it clear that she doesn’t like the idea of North Dakotans getting additional tax relief but didn’t want to just come out and say that.”

Still not “titular.” Still a lie. Oversen said nothing that Port could understand.

“First, Ruth Buffalo received just 26 percent of the vote last year. Her opponent, Republican Jon Godfread, received 64 percent. Yet Buffalo is now an expert on what North Dakotans want?”

False premise: Rob Port has received zero percent of the vote for anything and didn’t get discovered as a latent genius at Minot High, either, but he claims authority on things he cannot know, like running a university or going to college.

“C’mon. North Dakotans have made it pretty clear, in one election after another, that they aren’t buying what liberal Democrats like Buffalo are selling. Which isn’t to say she can’t keep trying to sell us her bill of goods. Just that she maybe shouldn’t say she’s talking for some majority of citizens in the state.”

Rep. Buffalo showed the polling numbers that showed a large percent were against flaring. She did speak for the majority. Port is in favor of more flaring and functions as an oil industry tool.

“Buffalo presumes to speak for North Dakotans, and for the MHA Nation, when she really has no standing to speak for either. Second, Buffalo invokes the interests of the Three Affiliated Tribes, of which she is a member. Problem is, the tribe’s leadership supports overturning this rule.”

Buffalo has plenty of standing. She can stand anywhere and offer her opinion on any topic. Port doesn’t decide who can speak any more than Trump can decide who hates America.

Nobody, not even someone, told Port this; “Someone Just Told Me I Can’t Criticize a Politician Because I Don’t Have the Right Skin Color or Gender.”

Color was not a factor. Politicians have the right to take exception to bottom feeders who lie about them.

“If you’re a hard left progressive looking for a North Dakota politician to idolize, the pickings are pretty slim.”

False premise: Watch a Trump rally if you want to see idolatry. What Democrat has a cultish Kevin Cramer type of adoration who he admits that Trump is using racism as a tactic, but he’s fine with it?

“That’s why, I suppose, when I criticized Rep. Buffalo for refusing to answer questions about what sort of remuneration she may have received for speaking at a star-studded event hosted in Tennessee by a left wing group active in North Dakota politics I got a wave of criticism.”

No one is under any obligation to fulfill Port’s desire to twist their words. Reasonable people can agree that he’s not a journalist, but he is a shill for Republicans.

“Maybe she is. She certainly isn’t willing to take my questions, fleeing before them into the comfortable and credulous arms of local left wing media, a turn of events which suggests she may not be fit to hold elected office in the first place.”

Not dealing with blogger Port doesn’t disqualify a person for office. Such hubris from a mediocre newspaper employee. Credulous? Is he calling Chris Hagen gullible and Buffalo a liar? Port believes his own bullshit which suggests that he is not fit for anything.

“How about anyone, of any skin color or gender, can question any politician they want? Because public servants serve the public. All members of the public.”

Of course, they can offer a question. That doesn’t mean any person has to talk to a dishonest blog-boy with delusions of credibility.

A Port interview with the High Plains Reader:

“I would not withhold a story on somebody I consider a friend. I use my judgment. If I consider something to be news, then I write about it. That’s just the way it is. I think that people know that about me,” Port said.

Would people know that he would stab a friend in the back? Sure, I assumed that.

“Now I say that when I write something that’s a fact, it’s a fact, because I check them out and am convinced that it’s fact.”

Well, that sure isn’t true.

“I also put in some opinion — and people may disagree with the conclusions that I draw — but I think that the one thing even most of my critics and maybe detractors will agree upon is that if I say something is a fact, it’s a fact.”

Well, that sure isn’t true.

“They said I don’t have an editor; but I also have an open comment section and I have a Twitter account and I have a Facebook account, and when I’m wrong about something, people can call me into account and hold me accountable for that. Because digital journalism is such a two-way street, that editor function is almost sort of performed by the crowd,” Port said.

I called him out on his lies about me and he blocked me six ways from Sunday, so that’s another lie.




One thought on “RON SCHALOW: Rob Port Thinks He Has Credibility”

  • CuckservativesGetTheRopeToo August 19, 2019 at 8:32 pm

    Rob Port isn’t “far right”. Rob Port BLOCKS people to the right of him.

    Port believes in globalism over nations, promotes pornography as a measure of “freedom” that we should forcefully deliver to the Middle East and champions “tolerance”, “diversity” for diversity’s sake, unlimited immigration, open borders and “gay marriage”. Port is someone who is five to ten years behind whatever the self proclaimed progressives push on the social front.

    If you’re a left winger, you can go to his blog and spout whatever political opinions you desire. Outside of spam or crapflooding or porn or legally actionable threats, you can say whatever you want. Say anything. You will not get banned.

    But if you’re among the right wing -the real right wing, not the globalist fake right who are merely ten years behind the current left- then Port will actually ban those people because we reveal what he really is.

    Port is a cuck. Call him a bigot, sexist or a racist or say that he is being unfair and he will dance to your tune looking for approval. The charge doesn’t even have to be true. It usually isn’t. But he will dance! That’s how the left plays Port for a fool.

    We on the right just have to tell Port some basic facts and then watch as Rob Port turns into a “progressive” who denies simple reality and blocks out those facts. You on the left own Port. He’s actually one of yours. On something like economics or government policy, he’s more to the right. Morally and socially, however, Port is a straight up left winger; right on down to the feminine-like hysterics proclaiming that those who deliver hate-facts are “bigots”, “racists” and “homophobes”.

    Reply

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