RUTHFULLY YOURS

For far too long, I was convinced that the media were, on the whole, reliable purveyors of the news. For nearly three years I freelanced happily at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Music and Public Affairs, never suspecting that the Mothercorp was a hive of Liberal propaganda and an artesian fount of scandalously disingenuous broadcasting. It took 9/11 and the generally extenuating media reports over time, faulting the U.S. and exempting Islam, to shake up my thinking and turn me into a sceptical fact-finder.

The media are especially adept at creating villains out of whole cloth for public consumption to advance a particular and often dubious purpose. How else explain the transformation of significant political figures into synonyms for perfidy and opprobrium. I’m thinking in particular of Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater and Enoch Powell, all of whom considered themselves patriots and enunciated unpopular or anti-establishment truths, costing them their reputations both in their lifetimes and for posterity.

As Diana West writes of McCarthy, “after more than 60 years of ‘McCarthyism’—the perpetual slander of Joseph McCarthy as a ‘witch-hunter,’ as opposed to an honest accounting of this fearless investigator of deep and widespread infiltration of the US government by Stalin’s secret agents…Americans have been conditioned to…hate, loathe and revile McCarthy…The slander of ‘McCarthyism,’…has had the dire effect of bludgeoning our abilities to detect or even acknowledge the existence of any constitutional enemies, especially ‘domestic.’ ”

Favorable commentators will admit that McCarthy may have been guilty of exaggerations and errors, but as the Venona transcripts have verified, he was right overall. He may have manifested as vindictive, yet he was remorseless in his campaign to isolate Communist sympathizers in government circles who worked to subvert the country. This, of course, made him anathema to a treasonous press and a political establishment that had much to hide, whether their complicity or their negligence.

Barry Goldwater has fared no better. When asked in a July 9, 1964 interview in Der Spiegel about his advocating the use of nuclear weapons to defoliate the jungles in Vietnam, Goldwater replied “About a month‐and‐a­ half ago on a television show I was asked a technical ques­tion, how could you get at the trails through the rain forests of North Vietnam. Well, I served in the rain forests of Burma and I know that the only practical way to get at them is defoliation so an answer to a technical question like this—one pos­sible way of doing it even though I made clear this would never be done, would be the use of low‐yield nu­clear devices” (emphasis mine). As the Daily Mail History section pointed out, “Democrats painted Goldwater as a warmonger who was overly eager to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam.” And, of course, with few exceptions like the Daily Mail, the MSM was all over it, painting Goldwater as a nuclear warhawk, a kind of Dr. Strangelove. (The film appeared on January 29, 1964, 10 months before the Johnson-Goldwater election. The writing was already on the wall.)

Josef Goebbels called it the Big Lie, the deliberate misrepresentation of facts and reality in order to achieve a political objective. It’s been part and parcel of the New World Disorder we’ve lived under for the past century, ever since Vladimir Lenin first used a Big Lie to disguise his seizure of power from Russia’s post-czar provisional government in November 1917, by telling the Russian people he was preventing a coup not perpetrating one.

America’s first major encounter with the Big Lie, with all its disastrous consequences, started 50 years ago today, when the American mainstream media — CBS and the other networks, plus the New York Times and the Washington Post — decided to turn the major Communist Tet offensive against U.S. forces and South Vietnam on January 30, 1968, into an American defeat, rather than what it actually was: a major American victory.

We’ve all lived in the disorder and chaos that campaign set in motion ever since.

By the end of 1967, the Communist cause in the Vietnam War was in deep trouble. The build-up of American forces — nearly half a million men were deployed in Vietnam by December — had put the Vietcong on the defensive and led to bloody repulses of the North Vietnamese army (NVA), which had started intervening on the battlefield to ease the pressure on its Vietcong allies.

Hanoi’s decision to launch the Tet offensive was born of desperation. It was an effort to seize the northern provinces of South Vietnam with conventional troops while triggering an urban uprising by the Vietcong that would distract the Americans — and, some still hoped, revive the fading hopes of the Communists. The offensive itself began on January 30, with attacks on American targets in Saigon and other Vietnamese cities, and ended a little more than a month later when Marines crushed the last pockets of resistance in the northern city of Hue.

It not only destroyed the Vietcong as an effective political and military force, it also, together with the siege of Khe Sanh, crippled the NVA, which lost 20 percent of its forces in the South and suffered 33,000 men killed in action, all for no gain. By the end of 1969, over 70 percent of South Vietnam’s population was rated by the U.S. military as under government control, compared with 42 percent at the beginning of 1968.

Having been one of the early targets of social media censorship on Facebook, YouTube et al, I have advocated for anti-trust action against these bullying behemoths. It is good to see establishment outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and National Review coming to the same conclusion, or at least asking the same questions.

Just this week, Facebook launched its latest of many attacks on my news site, the Geller Report. It labeled my site as “spam” and removed every Geller Report post — thousands upon thousands of them, going back years – from Facebook. It also blocked any Facebook member from sharing links to the Geller Report. The ramping up of the shutting-down of sites like mine is neither random nor personal. The timing is telling. The left is gearing up for the 2018 midterm elections, and they mean to shut down whatever outlet or voice that helped elect President Trump, the greatest upset in left-wing history.

In fighting this shutdown, we had to go back to the drawing board in our lawsuit against these social media giants. The basis of our suit was challenging Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) under the First Amendment, which provides immunity from lawsuits to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, thereby permitting these social media giants to engage in government-sanctioned censorship and discriminatory business practices free from legal challenge.

Facebook and Google take in roughly half of all Internet ad revenue. According to the Wall Street Journal:

In the U.S., Alphabet Inc.’s Google drives 89% of internet search; 95% of young adults on the internet use a Facebook Inc. product; and Amazon.com Inc. now accounts for 75% of electronic book sales. Those firms that aren’t monopolists are duopolists: Google and Facebook absorbed 63% of online ad spending last year; Google and Apple Inc. provide 99% of mobile phone operating systems; while Apple and Microsoft Corp. supply 95% of desktop operating systems.

Both companies routinely censor and spy on their customers, “massaging everything from the daily news to what we should buy.” In the last century, the telephone was our “computer,” and Ma Bell was how we communicated. That said, would the American people (or the government) have tolerated AT&T spying on our phone calls and then pulling our communication privileges if we expressed dissenting opinions? That is exactly what we are suffering today.

Ma Bell was broken up by the government, albeit for different reasons. But it can and should be done.

It’s not a little ironic that, according to Breitbart:

AT&T has called for an “Internet Bill of Rights” and argued that Facebook and Google should also be subjected to rules that would prevent unfair censorship on their platforms.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a shock wave hit South Vietnam on Jan. 30, 1968. In a coordinated assault unprecedented in ferocity and scale, more than 100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers stormed out of their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. They went on to attack more than 100 towns and cities across South Vietnam.

The following 77 days changed the course of the Vietnam War. The American people were bombarded with a nightly stream of devastating television and daily print reporting. Yet what they saw was so at odds with the reality on the ground that many Vietnam veterans believe truth itself was under attack.

The Tet Offensive had ambitious objectives: cause a mass uprising against the government, collapse the South Vietnamese Army, and inflict mass casualties on U.S. forces. The men in the Hanoi Politburo—knowing the war’s real center of gravity was in Washington —hoped the attack ultimately would sap the American people’s will to fight.

A key component of this strategy was terror. Thousands of South Vietnamese government officials, schoolteachers, doctors, missionaries and ordinary civilians—especially in Hue City—were rounded up and executed in an act of butchery not often seen on the battlefield.

Despite their ferocity, by most objective military standards, the communists achieved none of their goals. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces held fast, regrouped and fought back. By late March they had achieved a decisive victory over the communist forces. Hanoi wouldn’t be able to mount another full-scale invasion of South Vietnam until the 1972 Easter offensive.

But in living rooms across America, the nightly news described an overwhelming American defeat. The late Washington Post Saigon correspondent Peter Braestrup later concluded the event marked a major failure in the history of American journalism.

Braestrup, in “Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington” (1977), attributed this portrayal to television’s showbiz tradition. TV news editors put little premium on breadth of coverage, fact-finding or context.

The TV correspondent, Braestrup wrote, like the anchorman back home, had to pose on camera with authority. He had to maintain a dominant appearance while telling viewers more than he knew or could know. The commentary was thematic and highly speculative; it seemed preoccupied with network producers’ insatiable appetite for “impact.” CONTINUE AT SITE

If you need an example of what The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway described as “panic and fear out there in official D.C. in response to dramatic lack of substance underlying Trump-Russia collusion,” look no further than the latest propaganda coming from the cabal of anti-Trump commentators on the Right.

After 18 months of helping the media and Democrats frantically sell every tweet, phone call, meeting, email, and sideways glance between Trump and his team and any person with a Russian last name as proof of election collusion, they are getting desperate. Self-righteous pundits who have staked their credibility and their careers on the failure of Trump’s presidency are slowly realizing they are on the losing end of this gambit.

Not only did Trump not destroy the Republican Party as they predicted, he galvanized the party during a surprisingly active and successful first year—cutting taxes, eliminating federal regulations, appointing conservative judges, and strengthening America’s hand abroad. Each day, a company announces its plans to raise wages or give bonuses due to the dramatic drop in the corporate tax rate, subsequently exposing the modern-day Democratic party’s contempt for the working class as party leaders mock those windfalls as “crumbs.” Hell, he even brought Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to his knees and guided the GOP to its first government shutdown victory since the invention of shutdowns.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has yet to produce any meaningful charges and is bordering on farcical. (The latest big news is that Mueller’s staff recently interviewed “at least one member of a Facebook team” associated with the Trump campaign. Maybe they’ll interrogate the yard-sign coordinator next.) In an unexpected twist, it is now evident that the DNC, Clinton campaign and possibly top officials in the Obama Administration conspired to orchestrate the Trump-Russia scheme starting in April 2016. As new evidence to support this shocking prospect emerges on a near-daily basis, Republicans—and even non-political Americans—have responded, as Hemingway said on Fox News, in an “appropriate range of reaction [from] calm determination to get to the bottom of this, to absolute outrage about what has happened at the FBI.”

Those of us who have known and worked with Bill Kristol have been stunned by his behavior since Donald Trump cinched the Republican nomination for President. While Kristol isn’t the only longtime conservative thinker to exile himself to #NeverTrump island, his scorched earth diatribes against any conservative who sees a confluence of interest between Trump’s populism and movement conservatism have no equal in the conservative media.

In an interview with CNBC’s John Harwood, Kristol launched at Fox News’ Tucker Carlson his latest, and perhaps most vicious assault against those advocating a conservative – populist philosophy and agenda.

Saying that Carlson’s top-rated primetime Fox News show was close to “racism” Kristol delivered this astonishing monologue:

…I do feel now we’re in a different world. I mean, now you look at — Tucker Carlson began at The Weekly Standard. Tucker Carlson was a great young reporter. He was one of the most gifted 24-year-olds I’ve seen in the 20 years that I edited the magazine. He had always a little touch of Pat Buchananism. I would say, paleo-conservativism. But that’s very different from what he’s become now. I mean, it is close now to racism, white — I mean, I don’t know if it’s racism exactly — but ethnonationalism of some kind, let’s call it. A combination of dumbing down, as you said earlier, and stirring people’s emotions in a very unhealthy way.

And Kristol wasn’t done attacking Fox News in his appearance on John Harwood’s show. He also took to the air on anti-Trump flagship “Morning Joe” to offer this commentary on Fox News in general:

I mean, it’s funny, but it’s sad… I mean the Joe McCarthy clip you showed earlier — it’s sort first time, tragedy, second time, farce in a way, right? It’s not a farce, I mean — what really strikes me is Bannon is gone, the alt-right is sort of discredited. But Bannonism is winning. Look at the Hill Republicans, look at the conservative commentators, many of them — they are now in the possession of serious conspiracy theorizing, paranoia, hostility to basic American government institutions in a way that I would have a year, 18 months ago would have been impossible.

Tucker Carlson for his part offered this mild-mannered rebuttal:

I’m not even sure what he’s accusing me of. He offers no evidence or examples, just slurs, and then suggests that I’m the demagogue. Pretty funny. Kristol’s always welcome on my show to explain himself, though I assume he’s too afraid to come. What a shame. It would be revealing.

Tokyo Rose was the infamous American-born Japanese woman Iva Ikuko Toguri D’Aquino whose voice was heard by Allied troops in the South Pacific during WWII. Iva Ikuko Toguri was born in Los Angeles on July 4, 1916. She visited Japan after college and was stranded there after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Toguri renounced her U.S. citizenship and worked in radio. Radio disinformation was the fake news media propaganda tool of its time. Tokyo Rose broadcast from Radio Tokyo on the Zero Hour radio show to demoralize Allied soldiers by telling them that their girlfriends back home were seeing other men. She returned to the U.S. after the war and was convicted of treason. She was released from prison after six years and pardoned 20 years later by Gerald Ford. Tokyo Rose died in Chicago in 2006.

The Democrat Party subversively refuses to accept the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the election of President Donald Trump. They continue to deny the legitimacy of Constitutionally elected President Donald Trump with seditious attacks against him. In flagrant violation of our American Constitution ex-president Barack Obama is leading the lawless anti-American Resistance movement attempting to overthrow the sitting government of President Trump. It is truly shocking.

America is a country of freedom because it abides by its laws. Political opponents are bound by election outcomes to insure the peaceful transition of power – it is what separates America from the bloodshed of third world coups. So, what is the purpose of Obama’s seditious Resistance movement? What is being resisted?

The coverage adds up to nothing more than Mueller is looking at every possible angle … which is his job.

That doesn’t absolutely rule out the chance that the prosecutor is on a witch hunt. After all, he did bring a lot of Hillary Clinton supporters onto his team. On the other hand, he was hiring from a pool of DC attorneys that strongly tilted that way.

But none of his actual actions so far show any such bias. Of course he was going to indict Paul Manafort and his partner over egregious (but Trump-unrelated) sleaze, and pin down Mike Flynn, George Papadapoulos and so on.

But the public record shows no reason to think any of them has anything on the president: e.g., the campaign rejected Papadapoulos’ push for a Trump-Putin sitdown.

This still leaves the theoretical possibility of obstruction-of-justice charges. But that seems beyond dubious when there’s no underlying crime to cover for — and Trump 1) had every legal right to fire Jim Comey and 2) never tried to shut down or impede the investigation.

It looks like Mueller is close to wrapping up, since he’s moving to interview the president — and talking to the central figure is pretty much always the final step in such investigations. (Whether Trump should talk is another matter: His lawyers surely worry that his sloppy way of talking could land him in trouble when he’s otherwise already in the clear.)

According to members of the Fourth Estate, Donald Trump is a fascist or something close to it. As yet unreported is the charge that he roasts puppies over a slow fire, but given the media’s Trump Derangement Syndrome — a virus especially virulent at the ABC — it is only a question of time.

President Trump’s “fake news” awards last week inspire me to make some Trump Derangement Awards on our local scene. It was only last night (Jan 23), for starters, that the ABC’s $400,000-plus woman Leigh Sales on 7.30 was fawning over Michael Wolff, author of a hatchet-job book on Trump, Fire and Fury, purporting to be an inside account of the presidency. Sales’ questions were as soft as a week-old puppy’s tummy.

LEIGH SALES: What is Trump like in private? When staff attempt to brief him on issues that he needs to know about, what is he like in those moments?

For heaven’s sake, Ms Sales! The White House says Wolff never got one interview with President Trump. Wolff never claims he did. In a typical obfuscation, he says he has had three hours of conversation with Trump including during the election campaign.

And in terms of the ABC’s impartiality charter, how’s this for a smug, insulting question from Sales about the American President, our most powerful ally in a rapidly-shrinking free world?

LEIGH SALES: How did Trump’s advisers work out what policies he wants and what he wants to do?

It’s almost beyond belief, except that this is indeed the ABC. Trump is such a total moron, Sales suggests, that he’s just a puppet of nameless advisers. Trump himself, Sales imagines, has had nothing to do with turning the US into an energy superpower, driving home the biggest US tax cuts in 30 years, and sending the Dow Jones soaring 30% in the year to date.