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December 2017

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MARILYN PENN: BIPOLAR DEMOCRATS

By on December 13th, 2017

In a serendipitous bit of typesetting, two opposing views of human nature are posted in Saturday’s Times. On the op-ed page are Gail Collins and Greg Weiner, each propounding the justice of forcing Al Franken to resign; the former stressing his refusal to accept total responsibility for his vaguely remembered misdeeds, the latter insisting that a statesman’s character is paramount in his calling and his role is to “refine and enlarge,” not simply reflect the public’s views (Federalist 10 NYT op-ed 12/9/17) Then, on the back page is an article about Judge Jack Weinstein calling for more alternatives in sentencing violent offenders facing prison.

The Al Franken lynch-mob sees his non-violent transgressions as rendering him unfit for his elected office and have no pangs of conscience on drastically affecting his career and life. The judge is worried about violent men “who have been trapped in a gang culture, and condemned to a life of poverty and probable crime.” The particular young men in this case broke into a family’s apartment where five children under ten witnessed the gun wielders terrify and rob the victims. Collins and Weiner have no truck with mercy for Franken, a comedian at the time he committed the heinous act of posing for a picture that simulated groping a sleeping woman. The judge has so much mercy that he surely short-changes those law-abiding men of East New York who have sufficient character and determinatiion to graduate from school, get jobs and avoid lives of crime. The giveaway is his viewing the criminals as “condemned” to their lifestyle, as opposed to having opted for it as a quicker more lucrative path than the daily drudge of school and work.

Kristen Gillibrand, our New York senator who got the job largely through monetary and political help of both Clintons, had this to say about the current epidemic of cleansing society of abusive males: “I think when we start having to talk about the differences between sexual assault and sexual harassment and unwanted groping you are having the wrong conversation. You need to draw a line in the sand and say none of it is ok.” (Capitol News Conference) What would Judge Weinstein say to this type of non-differential thinking if the senator were representing one of the criminals in his courtroom? Is an unwanted grope really no different than a rape? And if we condemn those who are tried in the court of public opinion for deeds committed years and decades ago, why not ask Ms. Gillibrand to resign for having accepted the favors of a man who committed perjury and didn’t need to search his memory. All of us could see the truth as plainly as that finger wagging across our tv screens protesting that he “had not had sex with that woman” – the one whose dress was stained with DNA from an appendage that yielded far more credible evidence than that lying finger.

Democrats and feminists who supported Bill then, now have to decide whether it’s better to admit to being hypocrites or stick with being too dense to make distinctions between sexual harassment and sexual assault. They also must ask themselves how their movement has failed to give its constituency the necessary gumption to stand up for themselves in the workplace. Rules about sexual harassment have been in place since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and many women have availed themselves of this recourse. After all the talk of giving women a voice, are we really willing to settle for applauding women who, years after the fact, slink into the groupthink hashtagmetoo? What can we say about the women who preferred saying nothing and collecting large sums of money for their silence? At the same time that we accept the stories women tell without the need for independent corroboration, we are encouraging a stampede of indiscriminate firings that give the lie to the notion of due process. Senator McCarthy had more to go on than the senators who just killed Al Franken with an act of meaningless hypocrisy. Al would have had a better shot in Judge Weinstein’s criminal court than with the esteemed jury of his senatorial peers.

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Target: New York Another terror attack in America’s biggest city reminds us of the ongoing threat—and the problems with U.S. immigration policy. Seth Barron

By on December 13th, 2017

Two attacks on Manhattan in the last six weeks by ISIS-inspired terrorists demonstrate that the jihadi threat is serious and real. Sayfullo Saipov, the Uzbeki national who murdered eight people with a truck on Halloween, and Akayed Ullah, the Bangladeshi whose pipe bomb appears to have detonated prematurely in the subway system this morning, are adherents of a radical ideology that urges armed struggle against the West. They’re also recent immigrants to the United States, each arriving around 2010 from their respective countries.

According to New York’s political leadership, these terrorists attack America—and New York City, in particular—because they hate our policy of openness to the world. “We are a target by many who would like to make a statement against democracy, against freedom,” said Governor Andrew Cuomo at a press conference this morning. “We have the Statue of Liberty in our harbor and that makes us an international target.” Seconding this theme, Mayor de Blasio announced, “the choice of New York is always for a reason: we are a beacon to the world and we actually show that a society of many backgrounds and many faiths can work . . . and our enemies want to undermine that.”

If we’re to take this logic to its conclusion, Saipov and Ullah acted in violent opposition to American immigration policy. They hate the fact that the United States, alone among the world’s major countries, admits unskilled migrants in huge numbers, and allows recent non-citizen immigrants to sponsor their family members to come here, virtually without limit. According to New York’s governor and mayor, the visa status of Saipov and Ullah is irrelevant (and unmentionable). What’s important is to recognize that these jihadis hate multiculturalism and open borders.

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Double Standards and Distortions The media condemns President Trump for “normalizing hatred”—while it looks the other way on Islamist violence and black-nationalist hatred.Heather Mac Donald

By on December 13th, 2017

Political elites on both sides of the Atlantic are still frothing over President Donald Trump’s retweeting of three videos recording Muslims acting badly. The videos originated with a reviled British organization, Britain First, deemed a hate group by the British establishment for linking Britain’s high levels of Muslim immigration to incidents of Islamic terrorism. One such video, from 2013, shows a Muslim cleric in a Syrian village deliberately shattering a terra cotta statue of the Virgin Mary. The second, also from 2013, shows a scene of civil anarchy in Alexandria, Egypt, in which Islamists push two teenagers off a turret onto a lower roof level and beat at least one to death. The third, from May 2017, allegedly shows a Muslim teenager in the Netherlands push over a white boy on crutches and repeatedly kick him while he is on the ground.

By retweeting, Trump was “normalizing hatred,” according to elite opinion. He ignored the “context” of events, claimed the New York Times—such as the fact that the icon-smasher was not just a “Muslim,” as identified in the original tweet, but an extremist cleric whose group had previously destroyed another Mary statue in his village. Why that “context” should defuse concern about the spread of radical Islamic ideology is mysterious. Likewise, while it’s true that the fatal stomping in Egypt occurred during a time of civil and political unrest, that “context” does not change the reality of remorseless violence.

As for the third video, the media and Dutch officials pounced on the fact that the tweets identified the teen assailant as a Muslim migrant, when he was in fact born in the Netherlands. Thus, his Muslim identity is allegedly irrelevant. This is the familiar strategy whenever a second-generation Muslim commits an act of terrorism in the West (which this assault clearly was not): the fact that the terrorist was not a first-generation immigrant supposedly means that Islamist terrorism is not an immigration problem. To the contrary, terrorism by second-generation Muslim immigrants is more of an immigration problem than first-generation terrorism, since it shows a failure to assimilate Western values.

The fury that Trump’s tweets have inspired is hard to square with cable news’ predilection for running endless repeats of videos showing police-officer use of force against civilians. If the media ever provided “context” for those videos, it passed by too fast for the eye to catch. That context might include the suspect’s behavior leading up to the officer’s use of force or the 911 calls that triggered an officer’s investigation—such as the Cleveland police dispatcher’s report of a black male who “keeps pulling a gun out of his pants and pointing it at people,” which led to the tragic shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014, who was doing just that with an exact replica toy pistol. It could include the number of armed robberies and drive-by shootings in a neighborhood to explain how an officer might assess the risk of armed violence from a resisting suspect.

This context is almost never offered, however, en route to the false narrative that we’re living through an epidemic of police violence against black males. The media’s stoking of that narrative has had a far greater effect on the nation’s crime rate and on race relations than Trump’s retweets have had on public perceptions of Islamic violence.

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Port Authority Jihadist Charged with Federal Terrorism Crimes Obama is gone, but ‘violent extremism’ is still seen as a law-enforcement issue By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on December 13th, 2017

The terrorism charges filed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday against the Port Authority jihadist underscore that, while the rhetoric from the White House is different, the change of administrations from Obama to Trump has not altered the Justice Department’s approach to terrorism: It is regarded principally as a law-enforcement issue, and its connection to Islamic doctrine goes studiously unnoticed.

The five-count complaint filed by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York charges that Akayed Ullah, by attempting a mass-murder attack, materially supported the Islamic State terror network (ISIS). Ullah was scorched in the blast, and a few people near him suffered relatively minor injuries. Fortunately, he failed to kill and maim, as he told police he had hoped to do, a goal made manifest by his plan to strike at the height of the morning rush in one of the world’s busiest transportation hubs.

The 27-year-old Bangladesh native became a permanent resident alien through a combination of reckless government immigration policies — the visa lottery, by which his uncle got in, and chain migration, which enabled Ullah to follow in 2011. The complaint alleges that he was “inspired” by the Islamic State, law-enforcement parlance for a terrorist who is not a member of the “inspirational” jihadist organization or otherwise directed by it (i.e., no “operational” connection).

In the politically correct fashion that confuses the medium with the message, the government asserts that Ullah’s “radicalization” began three years ago and consisted of “view[ing] pro-ISIS materials online.” In other words, the Internet is the culprit.

Of course, it is actually sharia-supremacist ideology that “radicalizes” young Muslims. Typically, they imbibe it not merely through the Internet but by immersing themselves at extremist mosques and in communities in which the ideology is prevalent. Regardless of how the ideology is conveyed, it is the fervor of religious obligation that it incorporates, not the fact that it is easily found online, that explains its power. To grasp this, it is necessary to face up to the fact that the ideology is drawn from Islamic scripture and supported by centuries of fundamentalist scholarship. It is a frightening construction of Islam, but a well-rooted one, which is why so many devout Muslims fall prey to it.

Alas, it remains verboten in the Justice Department to acknowledge the obvious. The complaint thus tells us that Ullah was taken in by “violent extremist ideology” — as if he could as easily have been “inspired” by Antifa as by ISIS.

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Islamic Extremism: Who is Purest of Them All? by Giulio Meotti

By on December 13th, 2017

In the twentieth century, targets were churches and synagogues; today, they are churches, synagogues, mosques, temples — wherever there is a faith, even a Muslim one, that these Islamic fundamentalists want to “purify”.

Radical Islam has declared war on the pillars of the West: modernity, science, rationalism, tolerance, equality under the law, freedom of expression and the dignity of the individual, to name only a few. Many of these ideas are currently under threat in Western Europe.

Many Europeans might sentimentally think of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims pouring into Europe as “the new Jews” – even though their culture is virtually opposite to the Jews’ — but perhaps the Europeans should be aware that they have now forced the Jews to flee twice in the modern era.

Islamists are erasing civilizations. Is Europe’s next?

The number of victims in the jihadist attack at a Sufi Mosque in Egypt has risen to 305 and is destined to rise even more. Inside this number there is another one, even more tragic: the 27 children murdered by Islamic terrorists. It has been not only one of the world’s most sickening terror attacks since 9/11. It was, in intent, a genocidal attack aimed to erase a religion and a community from the face of earth.

The murder of children is the most ruthless face of the war that radical Islam has declared: Palestinian children used as human shields by Hamas, Israeli children butchered in buses and cars, Iraqi children massacred by smiling terrorists with candy, French children brought as recruits to Raqqa, Iranian children sent by the Ayatollah Khomeini to Iranian camps, Christian children wiped out by the Taliban in Pakistan, Western children murdered in Barcelona, Manchester and Nice, and the children of Beslan forced to drink their own urine before being killed. How much longer will we have to update the ferocity of radical Islam?

Some Muslim writers have compared the savagery of extremist Muslims to that of the Nazis. In his novel “Le village de l’Allemande”, the Muslim Algerian writer Boualem Sansal compared the similarities: “Single party, militarization, propaganda, falsification of history, xenophobia, affirmation of a plot hatched by Israel and the United States, etc.” According to another Muslim dissident, Naser Khader, “the radical Muslims are the Nazis of Islam”.

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Locked up in the Islamic Republic of Iran by Denis MacEoin

By on December 13th, 2017

What is genuinely troubling was the way in which Robert Levinson’s fate has been kept largely secret. The Iranian authorities have never revealed who captured him, who currently holds him, what charges have been laid against him, or even if he is still alive. And no effort has been made to negotiate his release, set a prison term, or work by the rules of international intelligence or diplomacy.

An Iranian revolutionary court charged Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, without the slightest evidence, of “plotting to topple the Iranian regime”. This was done in a trial without a defence lawyer, without any details of her “offence”, and ended in a sentence to five years in prison.

All of you will be familiar with articles on individuals who have been imprisoned, tortured, or even executed in several Muslim countries. Many such individuals are Iranians, imprisoned unjustly for their beliefs or actions that would be considered perfectly innocent or even praiseworthy in the West. Since the revolution of 1979, Iran has been not only the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, but also one of the world’s most consistent human rights abusers. In Amnesty International’s most recent (2016-2017) report on rights issues in the country, it listed abuses under numerous headings:

Freedom of expression, association and assembly
Torture and other ill-treatment
Unfair trials
Freedom of religion and belief
Discrimination – ethnic minorities
Women’s rights
Death penalty

Iran has the sixth highest number of prisoners in the world, although it comes only nineteenth in the size of its population. In 2011, there were 250,000 prisoners overall, a figure that dropped by 2014 to 225,624 — still a very high figure. Even North Korea — which has a vast range of political prison camps, forced labour camps, and other facilities, albeit with a small overall population — has fewer: the U.S. State Department human rights report for 2016 says that estimates of the prison population total range between 80,000 and 120,000.

Iran is also notorious for the number of executions it carries out, often for drug-related crimes, but also on religious and political charges. In an article by Iran expert Majid Rafizadeh, president of the International American Council (IAC), Iran has overtaken China as the world’s worst offender in extreme use of execution as a punishment, often for offences that would not even carry penalties in any Western country, including the United States:

Since January 2016, Iran has executed at least 230 people, that is at least one person a day on average. The number of executions has recently increased and Iran ranks first in the world, followed by China, when it comes to executions per capita. Iran executed approximately 1000 people in 2015.

In the Amnesty International report on Iran, there appears one paragraph of considerable concern for foreign citizens and Iranians with dual nationality, notably US and British citizenship:

Several foreign nationals and Iranians with dual nationality were detained in Tehran’s Evin Prison with little or no access to their families, lawyers and consular officials. These prisoners were sentenced to long prison terms on vague charges such as “collaborating with a hostile government” after grossly unfair trials before Revolutionary Courts. The authorities accused the prisoners of being involved in a foreign-orchestrated “infiltration project” pursuing the “soft overthrow” of Iran. In reality, the convictions appeared to stem from their peaceful exercise of the rights to freedom of expression and association.

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Jihad Festering in America by A. Z. Mohamed

By on December 13th, 2017

Saudi influence on American administrations, and relationships between senior officials in both countries, is behind Washington’s ignoring Riyadh’s “well-established… involvement in supporting terrorism and terrorist groups.” — Report by the Institute for Gulf Affairs (IGA), released on June 1.

The IGA report, covering the three-year period since then and including extremely serious charges against both Saudi Arabia and previous U.S. administration and security officials, indicates the urgency with which the current administration needs to treat the issue and act upon it.

A new investigative report reveals that hundreds of Saudi and Kuwaiti nationals residing in the United States — some with dual citizenship, and most students subsisting on government scholarships — have joined ISIS and other terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq during the past three years.

Titled “From American Campuses to ISIS Camps: How Hundreds of Saudis Joined ISIS in the U.S.,” the report — released June 1 by the Washington-D.C.-based think tank, The Institute for Gulf Affairs (IGA) — provides details of the flow of students leaving American institutions of higher learning to fight in the Middle East.

According to a 2016 working paper produced by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Saudi Arabia is the second-largest source of ISIS fighters from Muslim-majority countries, with an estimated 2,500. If the IGA report is accurate, a whopping 16% of these fighters were in the U.S. when they joined ISIS.

An equally disturbing finding of the report is that the Saudi government, which has been monitoring its nationals in the U.S., is fully aware that many of their own citizens are joining ISIS and not only has done little to stop them, but has kept information about the subject from American authorities.

This finding completely contradicts the 2014 State Department assertion that “Saudi Arabia has continued to cooperate with the United States to prevent acts of terrorism … through information exchange agreements with the United States.”

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Trump Withdraws from Globalist Migration Compact Defends U.S. sovereignty on immigration policies. Joseph Klein

By on December 13th, 2017

The Trump administration has decided to withdraw from participation in the United Nations Global Compact on Migration, representing another significant departure from the global governance policies of the Obama administration. In September 2016, during the waning days of the Obama administration, the United States had joined with the other member states of the UN to adopt a “non-binding “political declaration, the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. They agreed to undertake negotiations towards a consensus on international norms by September 2018 to help guide member states’ immigration policies. U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said in a recent statement, announcing U.S. withdrawal from participation in this globalist compact, that “our decisions on immigration policies must always be made by Americans and Americans alone. The global approach in the New York Declaration is simply not compatible with US sovereignty.”

The New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, Ambassador Haley said, “contains numerous provisions that are inconsistent with U.S. immigration and refugee policies and the Trump Administration’s immigration principles.” The Declaration says, for example, that all migrants are “rights holders,” which are “universal.” It seeks a commitment to “strengthening global governance of migration.” It calls for applying international law to a state’s implementation of its own border control procedures. It calls for migration policies that promote “family reunification” – a euphemism for chain migration. It stipulates that migrant children should receive “education within a few months of arrival” with budgetary prioritization to facilitate this, all without any consideration of cost, language issues or the impact of such prioritization on the funding of the educational needs of the host country’s own citizens.

Predictably, UN officials and open border advocates have protested the Trump administration’s decision “to disengage from the process leading to the global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration,” as UN General Assembly President Miroslav Lajcak put it in a statement issued by his office. They claimed that nothing in the New York Declaration or in an ultimate global compact would be legally binding. National sovereignty would be respected, they promised. If that is so, however, what did Mr. Lajcak mean when, in that same statement, he talked about a commitment to “strengthening global governance of migration,” which is also the language used in the New York Declaration itself?

How would “global governance” work if there is technically no legally binding treaty? It would work through the insidious process of using the United Nations to forge an “international consensus” among representatives of the UN member states around broadly worded “international norms.” Such norms would purport to create, or broaden the scope of, a “universal” right, declared as such by all or a significant majority of the member states. As interpretations of norms acknowledging such rights are repeated in international bodies and incorporated into the laws or judicial rulings of more and more member states, they can then become a part of what international lawyers refer to as legally binding “customary international law,” whether there is a formal treaty or not. In the words of a prominent legal treatise (Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States), customary international law results “from a general and consistent practice of states that they follow from a sense of legal obligation.”

The UN can set in motion a process under which customary international law is created. As the Restatement treatise notes, the “United Nations General Assembly in particular has adopted resolutions, declarations, and other statements of principles that in some circumstances contribute to the process of making customary law.” A United Nations Global Compact on Migration may well fall into this category. Only if a member state persistently objects to a particular requirement of customary international law, would it generally be exempt from it. That is why it was imperative for President Trump to make clear when he did that the United States would not participate in the global migration compact and that it considers itself to be bound legally only by its own immigration laws.

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Who Really Lost in Alabama Learning the wrong lessons Daniel Greenfield

By on December 13th, 2017

The Alabama Senate election was about everything except Alabama. And in the end, Alabamans stayed home and let the inevitable turnout tide of passion politics take its course. Minority voters rallied to Obama. Republicans stayed home. And the GOP is now holding on to a bare one-seat Senate majority.

The Democrats had abandoned Alabama, along with much of the South. They weren’t interested in Doug Jones until they smelled weakness. And they still aren’t interested in representing Alabamans now. They just want another Senate seat to bring them closer to blocking and impeaching President Trump.

Alabama isn’t a place to them. It’s another chess piece in a Washington D.C. game that they can use to block judicial nominations, shut down the government and reverse the results of the previous election. They have Alabama now, but history suggests that unless they learn the lessons that cost them their former strongholds in the South, they won’t hold on to the seat that they paid a very pretty penny for.

The Alabama River follows a long and meandering course. But not nearly as long and meandering as the dark river of money that poured into the Alabama Senate race.

The tide of cash swirled, eddied and drifted along the secret rivers that flowed from Washington D.C. and San Francisco, from Las Vegas and New York City, and decided an election. Timed spending meant that they could avoid revealing their donors. And the biggest spender in the race had no money.

Some of these rivers had strange names.

There was Highway 31.The real Highway 31 links Alabama to Michigan. But the Highway 31 SuperPAC was a money route worth over $4 million leading back to Washington D.C. and New York City. Behind the local name were Senate Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC and the Obama/Hillary Priorities USA Action which was best known for a slimy ad accusing Mitt Romney of killing a steelworker’s wife.

Soros money may have poured down Highway 31 as the secretive shell group became the biggest outside spender in the race. Even though officially its bank account was empty. Instead consulting firms run by Obama staffers did the work on credit for Highway 31. That meant Highway 31 didn’t have to reveal its donors until after the election. Meanwhile Highway 31 ran an ad warning Alabama voters that their votes in the election were a matter of “public record” and that their “community will know.”

Coming up behind Highway 31 was Stand Up Republic. Like Highway 31, Stand Up Republic is a folksy false front. Behind the name that could easily belong to a jeans company or a chain of comedy club is Evan McMullin, a former CIA agent, Wall Streeter and independent 2016 presidential candidate.

Stand Up Republic claims to be fighting for “democratic norms”. McMullin claims to be a Never Trumper conservative. Neither claim holds up very well considering that the only known donor to SUR is Persian billionaire Pierre Omidyar who provided $250,000 to McMullin’s group. The Franco-Persian tycoon is best known for funding The Intercept, a radical left-wing site that specializes in undermining national security and which will be forever linked to the Snowden spy case.

McMullin has claimed that, “Donald Trump is not a loyal American and we should prepare for the next four years accordingly.” His own loyalties appear to be rather complicated. Omidyar’s SUR grant is listed alongside grants like Veterans Against Islamaphophia and Strategies for American Muslim Communities.

Out of these murky waters came $500K in ads.

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Why Glenn Greenwald Deserves a Pulitzer Prize For his poignant and intrepid rebuke of the American media’s obsession with a false narrative By Lee Smith

By on December 13th, 2017

There’s only one American journalist who truly merits a Pulitzer Prize this year: Glenn Greenwald. He’s been on the biggest story of the year from day one. No, I don’t mean Russiagate, the main stage for the media’s preening self-advertisements of its heroic “resistance,” like “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” In fact, the narrative holding that Donald Trump colluded with Russia is the chief piece of evidence that Greenwald has used to nail the year’s real top story—how the American press became a woozy facsimile of Pravda.

Last week, Greenwald called out the press for its latest blunder: “Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time,” wrote Greenwald. “The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.”

The question of why everyone got the same big scoop on the same day—only to find that the story was totally wrong—is a thread that leads to some very interesting places. So let’s follow it.

CNN claimed that an email sent to Donald Trump and his campaign officials that linked to WikiLeaks documents was dated Sept. 4, 2016—therefore showing that WikiLeaks, and by implication the Kremlin, had offered the Trump campaign an exclusive preview of damaging Democratic National Committee emails. But in fact, the email was dated Sept. 14—10 days later—and linked to a trove of documents that WikiLeaks had publicly released a day earlier, meaning the big scoop proving Trump’s Russia ties was, in fact, a story about spam.

“Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy,” Greenwald continued, “which would presumably include all the people who have spent the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots and the like—would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news.”

I’m not generally a big fan of Greenwald. His attacks on Israel are gross; His continued defense of Edward Snowden, who turned over information to an adversary that may endanger American lives, seems, at best, naïve and self-serving. That said, the last few years have certainly brought me around to his view that abuses of our national-security-surveillance apparatus and the power it gives to unelected bureaucrats are a real threat to how Americans live. But finally it doesn’t matter what I think about Greenwald’s opinions—he might believe that a race of super-intelligent gender-neutral cats rules the galaxy next to ours, or that John Travolta has an important message for all mankind—because good journalism isn’t about the personal or political beliefs of individual reporters. All that actually matters is whether you use the tools of the trade to get the story right.

But that sort of thing isn’t what matters to journalists anymore, or else they wouldn’t have spent the past year running pieces about Trump and Russia that are almost immediately falsified, then updated with clarifications, or corrected, or retracted, and then are vanished down the memory hole—with no institutional accountability or apparent concern for truth. This startling unconcern goes back at least as far as that big Washington Post “exclusive” in January about Russia hacking an electrical dam in Vermont—a story that was entirely false. Since then, it’s all been downhill.

How many times has the media since promised the smoking gun that will finally and incontrovertibly prove that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to swing the Presidency away from Hillary Clinton? Boom! And then nothing. Poof.

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