Ironically for a 70-year-old populist, Donald Trump brilliantly harnessed the power of social media to get his message out during the presidential campaign. Eschewing big money ad buys and network sit-downs, Trump re-wrote the rules of campaigning by talking directly to the American people.

And he’s showing every indication of continuing to do that sort of direct engagement during his presidency. The latest example is in the form of a short video Trump released [Monday].

In the two-minute video, the president-elect lays out which executive actions he plans to take on his first day in office. Watch it here.

Fake Hate

If you’ve been following the mainstream media (I don’t suggest it) you may have heard about a reported surge in hate crimes since Donald Trump’s rise to prominence, and even in just the two weeks since he won the election.

But a significant share of these purported hate crimes seem to be made up. A female Muslim student in Louisiana reported that she had her hijab pulled from her head and was robbed by men in a truck wearing Trump hats.

Many major media outlets reported the story. It turns out the story was false and the student has been charged with filing a false police report.

In another instance, news of a KKK rally in honor of Trump’s election victory spread quickly across the internet. But of course it turned out to be a lie. The photo of the event happened to be an old photo of people carrying a Gadsden flag.

It’s nothing new that the left is contriving hate incidents. This has been going on for a long time. The University of Virginia has for a couple years been embroiled in a scandal in which a major mainstream publication — Rolling Stone magazine — made up an instance of rape in order to advance their narrative of a rape epidemic on college campuses.

Unfortunately, as the saying goes, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. That’s particularly true in today’s world of Twitter and Facebook.

Meanwhile, when the hate is directed at conservatives or Trump supporters, it is usually ignored, such as when a boy wearing a “Make American Great Again” hat was beaten by anti-Trump protestors in Maryland.

We know that many of the disturbances at Trump rallies were initiated by the left because it knew that the media would report on the violence as if Trump was the one encouraging it. A Wikileaks release showed that Democrats sent agitators to Trump rallies to cause trouble.

Totalitarian political movements on the right and left have often engaged in these kind of false flag episodes for centuries. They create violence to advance the narrative that their opponents are stirring up violence and thus should be feared. And the media happily run with it.