RUTHFULLY YOURS

Social media behemoth Facebook launched a full-scale assault on President Donald Trump and conservatives earlier this year that has seen engagement on Trump’s Facebook posts plummet by 45 percent.

The crackdown on conservatives and the Republican Party’s standard-bearer came after a year of unyielding pressure from the mainstream media, politicians, and Facebook employees after President Trump’s stunning electoral upset in November 2016. The Left’s farfetched Russia-Trump electoral collusion conspiracy theory scapegoated Facebook, claiming the website spread Russian propaganda and fake news that helped Trump beat the yet-to-be-indicted Hillary Clinton.

No less a personage from the anti-Trump resistance movement than former President Barack Obama lobbied Facebook’s CEO to play rough and dirty with conservatives. At a poverty conference in South America a few days after the 2016 vote, Obama leaned on a then-skeptical Mark Zuckerberg to do something, presumably to help take his fingerprints off the electoral collusion hoax.

As the Washington Post reported:

Nine days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “crazy” the idea that fake news on his company’s social network played a key role in the U.S. election, President Barack Obama pulled the youthful tech billionaire aside and delivered what he hoped would be a wake-up call.

For months leading up to the vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. …Now huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously, although Facebook representatives say the president did not single out Russia specifically. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race.

Media companies’ ‘impartial’ algorithms disproportionately impact conservative material.

The biggest names in social media are cracking down on news. In particular, they’re cracking down disproportionately on conservative news. That’s not necessarily out of malice; it’s probably due to the fact that our major social-media sites are staffed thoroughly with non-conservatives who have no objective frame of reference when it comes to the news business.

Thus, Google biases its algorithm to prevent people from searching for guns online in shopping; temporarily attached fact-checks from leftist sites like Snopes and PolitiFact to conservative websites but not leftist ones; showed more pro-Clinton results than pro-Trump results in news searches; and, of course, fired tech James Damore for the sin of examining social science in the debate over the wage gap. Google’s bias is as obvious as the “doodles” it chooses for its logos, which routinely feature left-wing icons and issues.

YouTube has demonetized videos from conservatives while leaving similar videos up for members of the Left. Prager University has watched innocuous videos titled “Why America Must Lead,” “The Ten Commandments: Do Not Murder,” and “Why Did America Fight the Korean War” demonetized (i.e. barred from accepting advertisements) at YouTube’s hands. Prager’s lawyer explains, “Google and YouTube use restricted mode filtering not to protect younger or sensitive viewers from ‘inappropriate’ video content, but as a political gag mechanism to silence PragerU.”

Facebook was slammed two years ago for ignoring conservative stories and outlets in its trending news; now Facebook has shifted its algorithm to downgrade supposedly “partisan” news, which has the effect of undercutting newer sites that are perceived as more partisan, while leaving brand names with greater public knowledge relatively unscathed. Facebook’s tactics haven’t just hit conservative Web brands — they’ve destroyed the profit margins for smaller start-ups like LittleThings, a four-year-old site that fired 100 employees this week after the algorithm shift reportedly destroyed 75 percent of the site’s organic reach (the number of people who see a site’s content without paid distribution).

The dark and stormy night is one of those classic Victorian opening lines to the next great melodramatic novel. It’s become a caricature and a joke – appropriately, based on its overly dramatic style.

What else recently has become much the same – a caricature and a joke due to constant melodrama? How about the news media?

Stormy Daniels, who, I am quite certain, has enjoyed many dark and stormy nights, is an American porn actress. She is quite celebrated in her world, having won such awards as “Contract Babe of the Year”; “Favorite Breasts,” which she won three times; and “Crossover Star of the Year.”

Perhaps her most noteworthy recognition is a nomination for Best Safe Sex Scene in a movie. I’m not sure if she ever sat on Harvey Weinstein’s casting couch or is part of the #MeToo movement.

She is not a Russian hooker, as she was born in Baton Rouge. She said of her childhood that she “came from an average, lower-income household[.] … [T]here were days without electricity.”

Stormy’s real name is Stephanie Clifford. And despite not having ties to Russia or Putin, she is the latest shiny object being breathlessly chased by the media. No Russian collusion, but instead an alleged affair with Donald Trump.

She is not a young White House intern, but instead a porn actress who claims to have had an affair with then-citizen Donald Trump back in 2006. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid Stormy $130,000 in October 2016, just a few weeks before the election.

There is no dispute that Stormy was paid. Was it to buy her silence? Or to stifle another October surprise on the heels of the Billy Bush Access Hollywood tape? In lawsuits, settlements are paid to limit future costs and exposure, without any admission of guilt. Sometimes it’s just the most cost-effective path to take.

President Trump has denied the affair, as has Stormy Daniels. She wrote a letter dated January 10, 2018 denying an affair with Trump, “[s]tating with complete clarity that this is absolutely false.” She wrote, “He was gracious, professional and a complete gentleman to me and EVERYONE in my presence.” She concluded, “[T]he fact of the matter is these stories are not true.”

Social media is often abuzz with politics—from immigration and gun control to infrastructure and tariffs. Rarely is the social media itself the topic of discussion. But now is long past time for that discussion.https://amgreatness.com/2018/03/07/great-social-media-purge-no-one-safe-2/

It is certainly no secret that social media companies are overwhelmingly left-wing, fueling the fake “Russia” conspiracy theory, and endlessly bashing President Donald Trump. But now, the social media giants of the Internet—Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (one of the main subsidiaries Alphabet, which is the corporate parent of Google)—have been preparing their next big, heinous move: an attempt to ban right-wing voices outright from their platforms.

It started small, with random small-scale conservative accounts being banned from Twitter in small batches. Since December of 2017, a handful of fringe figures have also been banned from Twitter, including white nationalist Jared Taylor, alt-Right Internet personality Anthime Gionet (also known as “Baked Alaska”), and anti-Semitic congressional candidate Paul Nehlen. But this wasn’t the extent of it. While this period saw the banning of mostly fringe figures, a handful of larger voices were also no-platformed, including paleoconservative YouTuber James Allsup and longtime Trump advisor Roger Stone.

Then in late February, Twitter went all-out and banned more than 2,000 right-leaning accounts at once. These attacks were dismissed by the Left, who wrote off all of these accounts as either Russian bots or Nazis, without any evidence to support their claims.

The French statesman Talleyrand famously observed about the Bourbons, “they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” Something similar might be said about New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Once upon a time he was the avatar of a new age of economic interdependence that would lead to global peace. No two countries that each had a McDonald’s, he wrote, would ever go to war with each other. Then came the Balkans Wars in the 1990s. So much for the flat and interdependent world that Friedman purported to have discovered.

In a column of February 18, Friedman was in familiar form. Which is to say flat earth mode. Once more, his judgments were sweeping and apodictic. He declared a “code red” on the state of American democracy. “President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.”

The piece attracted more than 2,700 comments, “a personal record” according to Friedman, who credited the powerful public response to its being “the right column at the right time.” Funnily enough, he wasn’t even supposed to file a column that day. It wasn’t his turn in the weekly rotation. But he was so annoyed by Trump’s tweets in response to special counsel Robert Mueller’s most recent round of indictments that he emailed editor James Bennet to ask if he could file a bonus column, just for the web. “Not my day. Not in print. And it may be the most widely circulated column I’ve ever written,” he told CNN.

It is hard to know what exactly Friedman was so worked up about. It can’t be the Mueller indictments themselves, because nothing in the document released by the Department of Justice on February 17 suggests any collusion between Russians and the Trump campaign, much less Trump himself. It specifically describes the campaign staff who interacted with the paid Russians trolls as “unwitting.”

This week, a major news story broke. A 2-year-old girl was photographed looking at a really terrible painting of Michelle Obama.

“‘A moment of awe’: Photo of little girl captivated by Michelle Obama portrait goes viral,” the Washington Post cheered. “Little girl awestruck by Michelle Obama’s portrait believes she’s a queen,” urgently reported CNN. The sum total of this story is that a little girl looked at a portrait of Michelle.

Eat your heart out, North Korea. Our fake news propaganda is even tackier than yours.

Recently, a photo was released of Barack Obama meeting with Louis Farrakhan. The photo had been suppressed all these years to protect Obama’s career. Farrakhan was the racist leader of a hate group who had praised Hitler and described Jews as “satanic”. And yet he had met with the future president at a Congressional Black Caucus event. A CBC member, Rep. Danny Davis, had even praised Farrakhan.

You might think there’s a story in all that. And you would be wrong.

There isn’t a single Washington Post story on the photo. Not one. The same paper that believed its readers needed to be informed that a little girl had been photographed looking at a bad painting of Michelle Obama hasn’t found the time to report on the cover up of a meeting between top Democrats, including a future president, and the leader of a racist hate group that had once allied with the KKK.

It’s not that the Washington Post can’t report on Farrakhan. Or use Farrakhan to attack a president.

In ’15, the Post ran, “The bigotry of Trump and Farrakhan” and in ’16, “Why the Nation of Islam is praising Donald Trump”. Its stories about Obama and Farrakhan insist that the two men hate each other. A ’15 piece even attempted to link Farrakhan to Clarence Thomas, instead of Obama.

President Trump in his first year has succeeded at realizing many long-time conservative goals like tax reform and deregulation, to name a few. But for NeverTrump grumps, these achievements seem to intensify their bitter-ender anger at a political parvenu. Puffed up with self-regard about the purity of their “principles,” many have doubled-down on their criticisms of Trump’s brash, vulgar demeanor, coming off like the pompous Judge Smails sputtering over Al Czervik’s trashing of the Bushwood Country Club.

The latest outburst came from columnist Mona Charen after she lectured the CPAC attendees about their hypocrisy over the recent sexual harassment disclosures. Writing for The New York Times––the premier gate-keeper of “correct” opinion –– Charen reprised her scolding of Trump supporters that signaled to progressive monitors she is free from the Trump pox. But all she achieved beyond a pat on the head from progressives was to remind Trump voters why they rejected over a dozen establishment Republicans and then the deplorable Hillary Clinton in favor of an insurgent bulldozing his way through the stale received wisdom of those Republican politicians and pundits who’d rather be liked than win.

Most of Charen’s column comprises her self-congratulation about her “bravery,” and her claim that she and other NeverTrumpers “built and organized this party,” but now have been turned into “interlopers.” She criticizes as cowards Republicans who don’t trash Trump, and who have let “bad actors take control of the direction of our movement.” It’s interesting how Charen let slip the NeverTrumpers’ anger at the “Trumpified” common people who have crashed the elite’s private soirée, as though a political party is a swanky country club rather than a mechanism for mobilizing support for policies that serve all party members rather than a narrow political class.

This is the same thinly veiled snobbery, by the way, regularly indulged by arch-NeverTrumper Bret Stephens, who has joined David Brooks as another Times house-conservative. Stephens was delighted with Charen’s performance, and in his own column delivered perhaps the most useful explanation for why millions of Americans turned against the establishment and its mouthpieces:

Liberals tend to admire NeverTrumpers, because they see them as conservatives with a moral sense and, perhaps, a brain. By contrast, MAGA Republicans — whether of the fully or merely semi-Trumpified varieties — detest NeverTrumpers with an animus they can scarcely extend to liberals or progressives.

The New York Times published a story on March 1, based on anonymous sources, claiming that Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., had met with House Speaker Paul Ryan to blame Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., for leaking texts between Mark Warner and the attorney for a Russian oligarch connected to the author of the salacious and unverified dossier the FBI used to secure a wiretap against a Trump campaign affiliate.

It was a weird story for many reasons. For one, it was the first time the paper had even mentioned these encrypted texts, despite their newsworthiness and the dramatic twist they gave parts of the Russia investigation.

For another, the story was denied publicly by Burr, who told CNN that the account was simply wrong.

For another, it turned out that no members on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence had even seen the texts, according to Nunes and others on the committee.

But the weirdest part about the story is that The New York Times is a frequent recipient of actual leaks from House Democrats on the Intelligence Committee. On Feb. 27, Democrats on the committee leaked Hope Hicks’ testimony directly to The New York Times. In fact, Nicholas Fandos, the very same reporter on the anonymously sourced story about House Republicans supposedly leaking, received a leak from Democrats on the committee, which he immediately published under the headline, “Hope Hicks Acknowledges She Sometimes Tells White Lies for Trump.”

Quinn Norton is an engaging, funny, and stylish writer on technology and the odd communities that inhabit our digital world and make it so scary. She is also, to quote her own description, “a bisexual anarchist pacifist, prison abolitionist, & vegetarian. Currently I’m fretting about fair trade standards and ethical food.” What’s not to like?

Obviously that’s the question editors at the New York Times asked themselves not long ago, and they arrived at the same answer Edwin Starr reached when he wondered what war was good for: absolutely nothing. Earlier this month they decided to offer her a job on the paper’s editorial board. She decided to accept the job, thereby touching off a revolt from Times readers that resulted in her firing. It was six hours between the moment the Times announced her new job and the moment the Times let her go—in Internet time, roughly the equivalent of the Hundred Years’ War, except with more acrimony. The ejection of a slightly unconventional leftist from the opinion pages is the latest in a series of incidents that might give pause to the Times’s less excitable readers.

You would think Norton’s bisexuality, anarchism, pacifism, vegetarianism, and anti-prison activism would place her only slightly to the left of most people who take the Times as their daily meat. Indeed, her anxiety over ethical food should have been enough to seal the deal all by itself. But there were blemishes on her leftism, and Times readers quickly discovered them. A proctological probe of her Twitter feed showed that in years past she had used racial and sexual slurs and had once referred to a neo-Nazi as a “friend.” With protests spouting from various social media, the Times editors quietly backed Norton toward an open window and gave her a gentle push.

A few brave souls came to her defense. In the dimly remembered past—two years ago, let’s say—their explanations would have struck nearly all Times readers as exculpatory, and Quinn Norton, appropriately chastened, would have kept her job. Wired magazine, for instance, decreed that Norton’s ironic use of anti-gay language was covered by something called “in-group privilege,” a kind of Get Out of Jail Free card that she’d earned as a member in good standing of the “queer community.” The ugly racial talk and the Nazi friend were part of her larger evangelization efforts to racist louts. She was just code-switching, slipping into their lingo during her many attempts at online conversion.

I understand why most of the media is focusing on the fictional Russian collusion, Hope Hicks resigning and rumors about Jared Kushner. Since they hate Trump, they certainly wouldn’t focus on how well the economy is doing, which shows up in the following articles on the Drudge Report on March 1st

Jobless claims plunge to 49-year low…

Manufacturing Expands at Fastest Pace Since ’04…
US crude oil output hits all-time high; Takes out 1970 record…
Foreign Holdings of U.S. Securities Rise to Record $18 Trillion…

I do find this article in the WSJ, that was also published on March 1st, funny. They state that foreign investors aren’t buying as many government bonds, while the above bullet point says foreign investors hold a record amount.

I also find the following to be funny: Does Fed control Trump 2020 destiny?

Predictions about the 2020 election are absolutely nuts. I will give the authors a clue. If the economy continues to do so well that the fed believes they need to continually raise rates, Trump will probably do pretty well against the leftists who want bigger government and who want more people to be dependent on government. My guess is the majority of people will be happier with better jobs, less regulations and lower taxes, versus more food stamps, more regulations and higher taxes.

Some other headlines that most of the media are virtually ignoring:

Great consumer confidence along with business confidence;
Higher home ownership;
Declining minority unemployment, and;
Women’s employment at an 18 year high.

It is no wonder that Trump is around 50% approval in Rasmussen, which is around 7% higher than Obama at this point in his presidency. And it is also no wonder that almost all the media ignores the Rasmussen poll while touting low numbers in Gallup and CNN polls. They do enjoy misleading the public to push their agenda.