RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/14/the-washington

“Dissent? A different point of view? Criticism? Don’t try to understand! Engulf your audience in the comfortable refuge of their enemies’ “racism.”

Over the last three evenings, Americans watched Tucker Carlson refuse to be cowed by the sophisticated, well-funded, coordinated information operation designed to chase him off the air and make him unemployable for life.

One of the points he’s raised, not so much in his own defense, but rather as a counteroffensive against his enemies, is that Media Matters for America (MMfA)—his primary tormenter—enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the corporate Left media (CLM), to whom it can feed propaganda with the assurance that it will be regurgitated verbatim. “Symbiotic” because they need and feed off one another. MMfA lacks a sufficiently large megaphone to broadcast its message. The CLM, by contrast, not only has such a megaphone; fundamentally it is a megaphone. It’s lazy and so relies on others to feed it stories, which MMfA is only too happy to do.

As if to prove Carlson right, the Washington Post on Thursday published an embarrassingly spoon-fed story from (you guessed it) MMfA. It’s a perfect case study in how the CLM spins and misleads without lying and peddles propaganda under the guise of “news.”

The premise of the piece is accurately encapsulated by its title: “Tucker Carlson says he’s the victim of a powerful bully. Meet the 24-year-old who found the tapes.”

See what they did there? The Post deliberately glides right past who and what Carlson actually means by “bully”: MMfA itself, its deep-pocketed donors, its Democratic Party backers and beneficiaries, the rent-a-mobs it can instantly gin up on Twitter and even in person, and of course its media lackeys—emphatically including the Post. Instead, they try to say that Carlson’s “bully” is merely a lone “24-year-old” who “lives in the basement of a D.C. house she rents with five other people, a few cats and a dog named Noodles.”

Awww!

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/13/

Victor Davis Hanson is about as accomplished and credentialed a commentator you can find. He’s an author, a military historian, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a farmer in California. President George W. Bush awarded Hanson the National Humanities Award in 2007. By all accounts and appearances, he is a decent, humble man who spends a great deal of time analyzing our current political moment and discussing what it portends for the future.

Hanson also is a supporter of President Trump. This heresy has earned him scorn from quarters on the Left and the so-called Right. His new book, The Case for Trump, has generated a barrage of criticism from the cabal of NeverTrumpers. Embittered by their humiliating miscalculation of Trump’s candidacy and shamelessly contorting their previous views to be able to contradict the president, these anti-Trump “conservatives” viciously attack anyone who dares to support the president. This includes Hanson.

In a particularly vile hit piece posted on The Bulwark, the new blog of Weekly Standard refugees who were left unemployed after the publication was shuttered in December, Gabe Schoenfeld accused Hanson of defending evil—that evil being President Trump. Bulwark editor Charlie Sykes recently threatened to “raise the opportunity costs” for pro-Trump commentators, Hanson specifically. To do so, Sykes enlisted the facile services of Schoenfeld, an advisor for the failed Mitt Romney presidential campaign, to pretend to write a book review that was little more than an ad hominem attack on Hanson.

Schoenfeld intimates that Hanson is a racist, an anti-Semite, and a Nazi sympathizer.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/the-bulwark-embarrasses-itself-further-with-attack-on-victor-davis-hanson/

Being of a charitable disposition, I early on decided that the kindest response to the Bulwark, the NeverTrump redoubt started by Bill Kristol following the implosion of the Weekly Standard, was silence. If this tiny cohort of bitter and unhappy souls were determined to embarrass themselves in public, the best we could do was turn away. Non ragioniam di lor, as Dante says in another context, ma guarda e passa. It would be cruel to let daylight in upon madness.

I said nothing when, for one of their opening acts, their Editor-in-Chief Charles Sykes pronounced anathema upon me and Henry Olsen, the distinguished Ethics and Public Policy scholar, for the sin of supporting the President of the United States on some issue or other. I was planning to continue to follow Wittgenstein’s advice at the end of the Tractatus and pass over in silence the twisted attack on Victor Davis Hanson’s new book on the president, The Case for Trump, by Hudson Institute Fellow Gabriel Schoenfeld, but the ad hominem viciousness of the piece together with its surreal mischaracterization of Hanson’s argument prompts me to weigh in.

Longtime readers will know that I have had my own innings with Schoenfeld over Donald Trump. I hesitate to speak again not only because calling attention to Gabe Schoenfeld is a little like calling attention to the disheveled fellow you find screaming at passersby on the street outside your office but also because Victor Hanson has himself delivered a devastating response to Schoenfeld’s attack. I cannot improve upon Victor’s definitive retort, but it is worth iterating one or two elements of the exchange.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/censoring-judge-jeanine/

“The monstrous events of 9/11, and the other deadly jihadist attacks that have taken place across the Western world (and elsewhere) in the years since, were not betrayals of Islam but acts of obedience to core Islamic scriptures. It’s vitally important for free people in the West to understand these plain facts. But simply to hint at them, apparently, is as verboten at Fox News as it is at CNN.”

At the beginning of every episode of her popular Saturday evening program on Fox News, Justice with Judge Jeanine, Judge Jeanine Pirro reads what she calls her “opening statement” — an editorial, as it were, about an issue of current interest. This past Saturday, March 9, Pirro’s “opening statement” was about first-term Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitism, which has been an issue before but which last week led to an unprecedented amount of criticism and to calls for a House resolution explicitly condemning the Minnesota Democrat.

Instead of passing such a resolution, however, the House passed one that not only didn’t mention Omar by name but that shifted focus entirely from Omar’s obviously Koran-based Jew-hatred to other matters. For example, the resolution cited a long list of prejudices (against “African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other people of color, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and others”) that it attributed to “white supremacists.” It also devoted several paragraphs to “Islamophobia,” excoriating “the irrational belief that Muslims are inherently violent, disloyal, and foreign” and reprehending “unfair allegations that [Muslims] sympathize with individuals who engage in violence or terror or support the oppression of women, Jews, and other vulnerable communities.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/03/10/sharyl_attkisson_who_decides_what_news_is_fake_news.html

SHARYL ATTKISSON: We’ve entered a brave, new world in the information age where it can be tough to know what’s real. Now there are movements to help us sort through it all— to teach our kids media literacy, to “curate” our information, and cull out “fake news.” Sounds like a good idea. After all, who doesn’t want their news straight up? But what if some of those efforts are actually attempts to control the narrative? Today’s cover story examines “The Curators.”

In January, the website BuzzFeed had a bombshell: anonymous sources claimed President Trump instructed his attorney to lie to Congress. And that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had the goods. It wasn’t long before Mueller took an unusual step— publicly denying it.

President Trump: I think that the BuzzFeed piece was a disgrace to our country.

Jeffrey Toobin: The press screwed up and they should apologize and you know the media isn’t as great as it thinks it is. This is a bad day for the news media. I mean, let’s not kid ourselves.

https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2019/03/u-s-government-media-network-fires-journalists-for-report-critical-of-soros/

At the request of a scandal-plagued Democratic senator tried for bribery and corruption, the head of the government’s international media networks is abusing his office to punish employees behind a broadcast critical of leftwing billionaire George Soros. U.S.

Agency for Global Media (USAGM) Chief John F. Lansing, an Obama appointee, is utilizing Stalinist techniques to retaliate against the journalists and producers involved in the Spanish-language segment which aired in May 2018 on Television Martí and was available for months online. Eight reporters and editors at the taxpayer-funded media outlet have been fired and Lansing has ordered a review of all content to address “patterns of unethical, unprofessional, biased, or sub-standard journalism.”

An employee at the Miami, Florida-based Martí headquarters said in a local newspaper report “the environment that has been created by the upper hierarchy of the Agency for Global Media is repressive. People write with fear. Adjectives are no longer used.”

Television Martí—and its radio counterpart—operate under the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB) and comprise one of the USAGM’s five international multimedia networks. The others are Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting. The media outlets get about $685 million a year from American taxpayers and reportedly reach 345 million people worldwide in 59 languages.