RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/28/bre-payton-beloved-staff-writer-passed-away/

Bre Payton, our beloved staff writer for The Federalist, passed away on Friday in San Diego, California following a sudden illness.

Bre was born in California on June 8, 1992, to George and Cindy Payton.

She received her high school diploma from the Western Christian High School Private Satellite Program. She graduated from Patrick Henry College in 2015 with a degree in journalism.

Bre joined The Federalist in April of 2015. In the space of just a few years, she became a rising star on cable news, regularly featured as political commentator on Fox News Channel, Fox Business Channel, and OANN.

Bre brightened the lives of everyone around her. She was joyful, hard-working, and compassionate, and she leaves behind friends and colleagues for whom she brought nothing but sweetness and light.

Though we are heartbroken and devastated by Bre’s death, we are comforted in the knowledge that she was a woman who lived a life marked by deep Christian faith, trusting in her Savior, Jesus Christ – in the God who promises the way our story ends is that “He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.”

Bre is survived by her parents, George and Cindy; siblings James, Jack, Christina, and Cheekie; and boyfriend Ryan Colby. Her family would appreciate privacy and your prayers as they grieve this loss.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/27/bombshell-khashoggi-foreign-governments-influence-agent/

The Washington Post has caused itself a major scandal since it has come to light they and their martyred “reformer” Jamal Khashoggi were publishing anti-Saudi propaganda for Qatar. They tried to bury this in a pre-Christmas Saturday news dump, but that can’t stop the damage this will do to their reputation.

“Text messages between Khashoggi and an executive at Qatar Foundation International show that the executive, Maggie Mitchell Salem, at times shaped the columns he submitted to The Washington Post, proposing topics, drafting material and prodding him to take a harder line against the Saudi government,” the Post wrote December 21.

The Post says they were unaware of this, although Khashoggi’s Qatar connections were well known. They will have to answer for what is either incompetence in connecting these dots or simply not caring as Khashoggi’s attacks on President Trump and the Saudis fit right in with their narrative. The Qatar Foundation denies they were paying him to produce the anti-Saudi material.

But during Security Studies Group research for our report on the information operation after his death, we heard from reliable sources familiar with the investigation that documents showing wire transfers from Qatar were found in his apartment in Turkey. They were immediately put out of reach by Turkish security services, so they did not show the collusion between Khashoggi, Qatar, and Turkey prior to his death. We have published a new, unredacted set of findings about the case. It is damning to Qatar, Turkey, and the Washington Post.

Khashoggi may have been operating in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act by doing this on behalf of Qatar. This is the same law that caused both Gen. Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort legal jeopardy by not filing their attempts to influence the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign entity. The op-eds published in the very influential Washington Post certainly qualify as attempts to change U.S. policy against Saudi Arabia and in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, which Qatar supports in spite of its status as a terrorist organization with most other Gulf countries.

Turkey had control of the narrative after the killing as the only primary source for the media, with Qatar backing up their tales. Both had eager partners in western media outlets. Security Studies Group tracked this phenomenon in our paper, “Khashoggi case- Analysis of an Information Operation”: “Although Turkish-language media supported and helped to drive the narratives, as did Arabic-language media controlled by Turkish ally Qatar, the main outlets that Turkish intelligence used to execute their operation were major Western English- language journalist outlets.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-constant-spin-zone-11545870180?cx_testId=0&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

President Trump and his wife Melania made a surprise visit to American soldiers in Iraq on Wednesday, and you would think that would be a straightforward event to write up. Report how and when he arrived, whom he visited, and what he and some of the soldiers said. These holiday trips have become a ritual for all Presidents, and the troops appreciate the Commander in Chief’s display of support.

Yet here are the first two paragraphs of the news dispatch on the Trump visit that the Washington Post published on its website Wednesday afternoon, Washington time:

“President Trump touched down Wednesday in Iraq in his first visit to a conflict zone as commander in chief, a week after announcing a victory over the Islamic State that his own Pentagon and State Department days earlier said remained incomplete.

“The president’s visit to Al Asad Air Base west of Baghdad, which was shrouded in secrecy, follows months of public pressure for him to spend time with troops deployed to conflicts in the Middle East and punctuates the biggest week of turmoil the Pentagon has faced during his presidency.”

We’ll admit we stopped reading there, so perhaps there was actual news later in the story. But can anyone reading those opening two sentences wonder why millions of Americans believe Donald Trump when he tells them that he can’t get a fair shake from the press?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/george_soros_person_of_the_year.html

Call it Saddiq Khan’s London. Call it Jeremy Corbin’s London. The right call is to note the unmitigated gall of the Financial Times, the bible of the securities marketplace, having bestowed its “Person of the Year” honoraria upon fellow globalist George Soros.

While The Hague fiddles as George Soros ages (currently 88), with nary an interested tribunal convened for his participation in the Holocaust, his is a case deserving of dispensing charges related to “crimes against Humanity,” the “smoking gun,” his own “undisputed truth” offered during a CBS 60 Minutes interview (Sunday, December 20, 1998), concerning his youth as a willing “aide de camp” to a non-Jewish “godfather” – a serf in Hungary’s Ministry of Agriculture, having groomed a willing Soros to accompany him on his appointed rounds delivering deportation notices and cultivating lists of the properties confiscated from Soros’s fellow Jews – Soros with requisite clipboard, the Jews on their requisite death march to Auschwitz. In the interview, Soros offered no less than soulless quips, defending his conduct of complicity under the Reich.

When questioned by correspondent Steve Kroft as to his activities, Soros maintained, “My character was made because I thought ahead anticipating events,” adding, “The confiscations weren’t difficult at all.”

Since one cannot teach a young sociopath new tricks, a movement to beatify Soros at eighty-eight is in full swing, as noted with his being honored by The Financial Times. Even his son Alexander, a student at UCLA Berkeley, has come out of the shadows, seeking to ban negativity toward his father, having written an op-ed for The New York Times, “The Hate That Is Consuming Us” (October 24, 2018), wherein the reader, at first glance, would think Alexander’s screed concentrates on the crime at large against his father, whereby a mad bomb-maker and sender chose the elder Soros as one of his victims. Instead, the crux of the article showcases Alexander focusing his wrath on President Donald Trump, the man and his populist politics, crucifying an innocent via the Pontius Pilate playbook, as the son offers his own rendition of “The Executioner’s Song.” Note: Alexander, by offering the determined flippancy of the nefarious particulars surrounding his father’s life and times in 1944 Budapest, merely states, “My father grew up in the shadow of the Nazi Regime in Hungary.” Whether Alexander was conscious or not, his sin of omission opened a can of worms over his father’s life and times in 1944 Budapest. In the meantime, George Soros has shown he’s still not finished with the Jews.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/der-spiegel-reporter-was-a-rotten-apple-and-cnn-went-bananas-for-him/

These are tough times for journalists, at least according to journalists. The president who loved and nurtured them all (except Fox News) has been replaced by a president who hates and battles them all (except Fox News). Journalists came up with the idea of “fake news” to explain why Hillary Clinton lost, then watched helplessly as they themselves were branded “fake news.” Jim Acosta gets shouted down every time he bravely stands up in the White House and asks a question makes a speech. Things are bad out there.

As if all that isn’t enough to make journalists feel sorry for themselves, seven of them were killed in the United States in 2018. Five reporters in Maryland were murdered during a shooting rampage by a lunatic who’d held a longstanding grudge against their newspaper, and two others were killed by a falling tree while reporting on a rainstorm in North Carolina. Somehow, these two incidents mean America is now one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists. Somebody keeps a list every year, and now we’re on it. This is welcome news for journalists who need to think of themselves as martyrs. Move over, firefighters, because the real heroes are here!

And now, journalists have to deal with yet another hardship: Being reminded that their industry richly rewards liars.

Have you heard of Claas Relotius, star reporter for Der Spiegel? Me neither, at least until today, but apparently he’s a respected, award-winning journalist. And now, Der Spiegel has some bad news about him:

Claas Relotius, a reporter and editor, falsified his articles on a grand scale and even invented characters, deceiving both readers and his colleagues…

For example, he included individuals in his stories who he had never met or spoken to, telling their stories or quoting them. Instead, he would reveal, he based the depictions on other media or video recordings. By doing so, he created composite characters of people who actually did exist but whose stories Relotius had fabricated. He also made up dialogue and quotes…

Since 2011, just under 60 of his articles were published in DER SPIEGEL magazine or on SPIEGEL ONLINE. By his own admission, there are at least 14 articles in question that are at least in part fabrications.

Which means the number is probably higher.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/human-extinction-hot-again-11545177213

Before condemning any more Donald Trump tweets, take a look at what his critics in Beijing and Manhattan are publishing. The message from both locales is highly disturbing. Still, there’s reason to hope the President can successfully negotiate with China’s communist dictatorship, even if he’ll never win over the editors of the New York Times.

This week the Times runs an op-ed with the headline: “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” Strolling along the frontiers of radical environmentalism, author Todd May ponders whether we should all kill ourselves but appears to prefer extinction by attrition:

One might ask here whether… it would… be a good thing for those of us who are currently here to end our lives in order to prevent further animal suffering. Although I do not have a final answer to this question, we should recognize that the case of future humans is very different from the case of currently existing humans. To demand of currently existing humans that they should end their lives would introduce significant suffering among those who have much to lose by dying. In contrast, preventing future humans from existing does not introduce such suffering, since those human beings will not exist and therefore not have lives to sacrifice. The two situations, then, are not analogous.

Kudos to Mr. May for discovering that the death of 7.7 billion people might involve some measure of suffering. Such keen insights may ultimately leave readers more amused than shocked, especially when they get to the bottom of the story and learn that he is no less than a “philosophical adviser” to a television program starring Ted Danson. It remains unclear from the Times op-ed whether the author is in charge of all philosophical advice for the NBC comedy “The Good Place” or merely one of a number of people ready to offer such assistance on set. CONTINUE AT SITE