RUTHFULLY YOURS

Our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the media can’t seem to figure out why nobody trusts them anymore. Their profession tends to poll about as well as the dregs of society, like pimps and drug dealers and politicians. And yet the less respect journalists earn, the more they demand. The less professional they are, the more they scold us for talking back to them. The more we expose their lies, the louder they lie.

There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about conspiracy theories, so I thought I’d examine a few of them.

Let’s start off with a look at the once-respected magazine with the increasingly ironic title Newsweek. Earlier this week, Nina “Presidential Kneepads” Burleigh published a story with a sensational headline: “How an Alt-Right Bot Network Took Down Al Franken.” Wow, sounds juicy!

According to Burleigh, Franken’s downfall wasn’t due to his own actions. It had nothing to do with the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct by numerous women. It wasn’t because his own colleagues in the Senate demanded his resignation. No, it was all a nefarious plot by evil Russians and white nationalists and other popular villains of the day. The bad guys used nefarious Internet magic to take Franken down, apparently because they wanted a slightly less famous left-leaning Minnesota liberal to take his Senate seat.

There was just one problem: It wasn’t true. At all. Whoops!

Editor’s note: Magdi Khalil, an Egyptian-born human right’s activist and Copt now living in America, explains how he escaped Egyptian-style terror only to suffer from a sort of Facebook Terrorism. In the Arab world, Khalil is a well-known political analyst and prolific writer who frequently appears on Al Jazeera, where he debates dictatorial and radical Islamist opponents.

My name is Magdi Khalil, I am an American citizen and a resident of Virginia. My Facebook page can be found here.

I currently work as an analyst researcher at an American institution. For over 20 years, I have been a well-known commentator on Middle Eastern affairs and the executive editor of international pages for a Cairo-based newspaper. I also made more than a thousand TV appearances as a political commentator on various programs broadcast on Middle Eastern TV channels. I have published more than 2,000 articles and research, and authored a number of books. While most of my published work is in Arabic, I have also published many articles in English.

I am also a human rights advocate, and have been involved in founding several human rights centers, including Coptic Solidarity in Washington, and the Middle East Freedom Forum. I currently serve as a member of the advisory board of MEMRI, the board of directors of Coptic Solidarity, as well as being the director of the Middle East Freedom Forum.

Given my strong advocacy for human rights and the rights of religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East, and my outspoken stance and writings against Islamic terrorism, I naturally attracted the ire and hostility of Egyptian and Middle Eastern intelligence agencies, as well as extremist Islamic groups. My activities, including my Facebook page, became a favorite target for those agencies and groups, which have at their disposal electronic “militias” working to flood Facebook Administration and other social media with a deluge of false complaints against their perceived opponents.

Unfortunately, I have had to deal with this issue repeatedly. Furthermore, I suspect that there may be some staff members in Facebook Administration, particularly in Middle East-based offices, who support these entities and target their opponents.

The “uniform” the eighties band Gang of Four was singing about is not the one our Armed Forces wear. Our military uniforms are the emblem of a superb professional fighting force that is accountable to Constitutional limits, and commanded by a civilian president elected by the sovereign people. No, progressives love the uniform worn by the “strong man,” the “man on horseback,” the “great leader,” what in Latin America is called a “caudillo,” or “cacique,” or more crudely, “El Gran Chingon,” the thugs with the gaudy Gilbert-and-Sullivan uniforms bedecked with rows of phony medals.

Hence the left’s admiration for Castro, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Chavez, and most recently Kim Jong Un’s sister, the head of propaganda for the North Korean terror state whom the left’s media lackeys effusively praised during her appearance at the Olympics. No matter how blood-stained, any tyrant can be an object of the left’s affection, as long as he or she is on the side of “revolution” against the hated capitalists and the repressed bourgeoisie. This century-long love affair explains the endless parade of useful idiots making pilgrimages to totalitarian hell-holes like Stalin’s Russia or Chavez’s Venezuela or Castro’s Cuba, there to swoon over the Potemkin heaven on earth.

It also accounts in part for the surreal, cult-like worship of the tin-pot messiah Barack Obama, whose very trouser crease could thrill the starry-eyed pundit, whose banal rhetoric could send tingles down the leg of the most hard-bitten journalist. That’s why Obama’s use of Executive Orders and his “phone and pen” to subvert the Constitution’s separation of powers was celebrated by the same progressives who squeal about any Republican president’s “imperial overreach.”

Never mind that the FBI failed to heed and follow up repeated and explicit warning about Nikolas Cruz before his shooting rampage in Parkland, Florida. Never mind the FBI was too busy chasing phantom Russian collusion to locate a future killer that any nerd living in his parent’s basement could have located with ease. According to mental health professional Jimmy Kimmel, Trump made Parkland happen by rescinding Obama administration regulations barring the mentally ill from getting guns:

Kimmel kept addressing Trump by adding that politicians and the president like to say that mass shootings are a mental health issue. He then said that one of the first acts of Trump’s presidency was to roll back a regulation designed to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill.

“Your party voted to repeal the mandates on coverage for mental health,” Kimmel said. “So I agree, this is a mental illness issue because if you don’t think we need to do something about it, you are obviously mentally ill.”

What in fact happened is that President Trump and the Republican Congress removed regulations not designed to protect the public but intended to disarm innocent and law-abiding senior citizens based on the assumption that if they need help handling their finances they must be dangerous and must be disarmed. When was the last time grandpa shot up his nursing home?

The reality is somewhat different from Kimmel’s slanderous falsehood. As Snopes reports:

The media have been on a walk-of-shame bender since 2016. They were whored out by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, swallowed the Christopher Steele dossier, and still get drunk-dialed by the Left. The cheap-date journos show up every time.Each morning, the media floozies trudge through the quad wearing their “I’m With Her” t-shirts from the night before while they come up with a new cover story for their bad behavior. They lie, distort what actually happened, change the subject, and make excuses for why they got in bed with an ungrateful lover. “Hey, it’s better than sleeping with that other guy!” They insist they’re not being used, but everyone who sees them meander back to the dorm knows they are.

Last week was perhaps one of the tawdriest of the walks of shame taken by the flat-on-its-back, call-me-later commentariat. Still desperate to prove their Hillary hook-up was worth it, the media had several flings over the past several days: North Korea, FBI Director Christopher Wray (again), a white supremacist group, and Russian social-media bots all got bedded. Like the easy girl who never learns her lesson, journalists and opinion-writers keep ruining their reputations in the futile hope of getting some love from their greedy suitors in the #Resistance, then they traipse their escapades through news websites and social media to justify their deed.

Let’s take a look at last week’s Walk of Shame, shall we?