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Google’s New ‘Fact-Checker’ Is Partisan Garbage The tech giant is dishonestly manipulating perceptions about conservative sites before people even read them.By David Harsanyi

In the midst of the “fake news” hysteria last year, Google launched a project to help curate reliable information for its readers by identifying articles and sites that need fact-checking. And this may come as a surprise to some of you, but it looks like the tech giant’s truth project is imbued with a tiny bit of ideological and political bias.

Eric Lieberman at The Daily Caller recently found that the fact checks displayed in Google’s search engine results are targeted almost exclusively at conservative publications. You can test it out yourself.

Now, you may believe that conservatives are hopeless liars in need of relentless correcting, so I’ll concede the point for argument’s sake. Even then, you’d have to admit it’s a small miracle that, according to Google’s search engine, not a single prominent liberal or mainstream site in the entire universe has ever uttered a dubious or questionable claim.

Luckily for us, there are methods available to analyze the veracity of Google’s project. One way, for example, is to take a “reviewed claim” made against The Federalist, the site I happen to know best, and contrast it to the coverage of other sites.

Consider the case of a woman named Eileen Wellstone. Out of many thousands of pieces published by The Federalist over the past four years, a single one mentions the name Eileen Wellstone. That article, detailing the sordid history of Bill Clinton, mentions her name exactly once: “Another woman, Eileen Wellstone, claimed Clinton raped her while he was at Oxford University in the late 1960s.”

For some reason, in this “reviewed claim” against The Federalist, Google sends the reader to a Snopes fact-check that argues that Clinton wasn’t expelled from Oxford over this alleged rape — a point I concede sounds completely accurate and is also an assertion that no one has ever made in this publication.

So the question is, does Google tag every article that relays accusations of sexual misconduct or rape as “unproven,” or just the ones against Bill Clinton? Or is the mention of Wellstone specifically worthy of a claim? The Wellstone case has not only been cited in all types of publications (and not in efforts to debunk it, either; 1,2,3,4,5, and so on) but by The Washington Post’s own fact-checker.

In a 2016 article detailing allegations against Bill Clinton that might be brought up by then-candidate Donald Trump, WaPo notes, “Eileen Wellstone says she was assaulted by Clinton when he was a student at Oxford University in 1969.” There is virtually no difference between that statement and the one published in The Federalist. Not that Google search engines users would know this when they search for the influential newspaper.

Why is Teen Vogue Sexualizing a 9-Year-Old Boy? by Sarah Rumpf

It’s hard to stay woke these days. The rules keep changing. And for the many conservatives like me who are supportive of gay rights, the activist left seems determined to make things as complicated and stressful as possible.

The latest eyebrow-raising story comes from Teen Vogue, in the form of a nine-year-old boy named Nemis Quinn Mélançon Golden they describe as “impressive and magical.”

You might be asking yourself, what could a 9-year-old boy do that a magazine geared towards teens would call “magical”?

Well, Golden is a drag queen who has gone by the name “Queen Lactatia” since he was seven:

When he was seven, this pint-size boy — who had a habit of wearing his sister’s tutus and princess costumes when he was two — officially transformed into a queen called Lactatia. Now he’s a miniature fixture on the Montreal drag scene. “I was always a drag queen, but I never knew it until my sister showed me RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Nemis explains. Drag, the subversive art of deconstructing gender through over-the-top aesthetics and performances, has become Nemis’s main source of empowerment and pride.

“All hail Queen Lactatia!” the short article declares triumphantly as it invites the reader to peruse a slideshow of Golden in various outfits.

Hang on just a minute here.

“Lactatia”? As in “lactating”? Why is a child being publicly paraded with a nickname related to breastfeeding?

Why is a child being publicly paraded like this at all?

Specifically, why is this child wearing makeup and costumes that are designed to be sexually attractive when worn by adults?

When a little six-year-old girl named JonBenét Ramsey was found murdered in the basement of her family home in 1996, a significant portion of the media attention and public debate centered around her participation in child beauty pageants.

Were the makeup, costumes, and song-and-dance routines too sexualized to be proper for a child? Did they make her attractive to a pedophile, and is that why she was killed?

Haberman: Wolff Creates A Narrative That Is Notionally True, “The Details Are Often Wrong” Posted By Ian Schwartz (???????)

Maggie Haberman, New York Times columnist and White House reporter, appeared on CNN’s New Day Friday to talk about author Michael Wolff, his non-journalistic methods, and how he misreported events and quotes in his new book Fire and Fury.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN: All right, so President Trump is slamming this new behind- the-scenes book as phony and full of lies. And the accuracy of some of the author, Michael Wolff’s, reporting is in question. So let’s talk about that.

Joining us now is CNN political analyst and White House correspondent for “The New York Times,” Maggie Haberman. Maggie has interviewed the president numerous times and her reporting is mentioned in the book.

Maggie, we also want to mention, you contributed to a new report about the Trump administration and the Russia inquiry, but we will get to all of that obstruction of justice talk at the top of the hour if you’ll stick around. If we don’t scare you away.

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: I’ll wait. I’ll just do this one.

CUOMO: One drama at a time, if you please.

CAMEROTA: One drama, yes.

HABERMAN: Yes. OK.

CAMEROTA: Don’t rush us.

HABERMAN: OK. It’s very early. We’ve got time.

CAMEROTA: Listen, you are a reporter with great sources in the White House and great access. So when you read Michael Wolff’s book, do you believe it?

HABERMAN: I believe parts of it. And then there are other parts that are factually wrong. I mean the thing about Michael Wolff and his style, which apparently nobody in the White House appears to have done a cursory Google search on him and sort of what his M.O. is, but he believes in larger truths and narratives. So he creates a narrative that is notionally true, that’s conceptually true. The details are often wrong. And I can — I can see several places in the book that are wrong.

Egypt: State-Run Media vs. President el-Sisi by A. Z. Mohamed

Egypt’s state-run press persists in the practice of condemning the United States and Israel — an attitude that contradicts President el-Sisi’s positions and vision for reforming Islam.

This is one of the conflicts that still beleaguer Egyptian society — or perhaps signs of a growing power struggle.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi responded to U.S. President Donald Trump’s official recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital with cautious pessimism. He warned his ally in the White House not to take measures that would undermine prospects for peace in the Middle East. The delicate balancing act he has been performing, to avoid jeopardizing his relationship with Washington, and at the same time not antagonize the Palestinians and much of the Egyptian public, was probably to be expected.

Not expected was the depth of extremist anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment spread by Egypt’s state-run media. Two particularly jarring examples illustrate this disturbing trend.

The first was from television host Ahmed Moussa, on the Sada Elbalad network, who proceeded to denounce the United States as the world’s bully, an international thug that supposedly both manages terrorism and manipulates it to justify its policies. He claimed that it was Egypt that led the world against Trump’s Jerusalem declaration, and that the U.S. was trying to control Egypt by lodging false accusations of human rights violations and discrimination against Christians. He actually said this in spite of “what have now become regular assaults by Islamic militants on the country’s Coptic community.”

The second, and even more disturbing, example was a broadcast by Al Nahar TV’s Gaber Al-Armouti. First, Al-Armouti celebrated a prayer delivered during the Friday sermon at Cairo’s Al-Azhar Grand Mosque, by its imam, Mohammed Zaki: “May Allah doom Trump with defeat.” Then he said he wished that the imam had cursed Israel, its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and all of its people. He subsequently praised the female teenage Palestinian provocateur, Ahed Tamimi, who slapped an Israeli soldier and called him a “moron and son of moron.” When her father, during a phone interview with Al-Armouti, said that his daughter’s attorney is Israeli and trustworthy, the host ignored the comment, and repeatedly yelled, “Zionist occupation,” and “Zionist enemy,” referring to Israelis as kelab (the derogatory Arabic word for “dog.”)

Abandoning the NeverTrump Ship By Mike Sabo

With 2017 safely behind us and a new year beginning, the NeverTrump faction continues to offer opinions on President Trump that range from thoughtful and surprisingly honest to ill-considered and seething with resentment.

Among the more thoughtful examples was an end-of-the-year column by Tim Carney, the more-or-less NeverTrump commentary editor at The Washington Examiner. Every year, Carney owns up to his biggest political miscalculation over the previous 365 days.

For 2017, his most glaring mistake was predicting Trump “wouldn’t appoint a restrained, conservative judge to the Supreme Court.” Contrary to Carney’s grave doubts, Trump “gave us a superbly qualified, brilliant, conservative justice in Neil Gorsuch.” Although it’s early yet, Gorsuch already looks like a very able successor to former Justice Antonin Scalia, a man he greatly admired for his judicial mind, character, and integrity.

Carney harbors major reservations on what he considers the president’s many character flaws (he argues these helped lose “winnable” races in Virginia and Alabama and risks the GOP alienating young voters). Nevertheless, he thinks it’s “possible that Trump will prove himself obviously better than Clinton. And that’s not what I expected.”

What about Evan McMullin, the candidate Carney voted for in 2016? He writes:

These days, I find myself regularly wishing I could make McMullin go away. Like almost every McMullin voter I know, I’m embarrassed by his post-election behavior. Most conservatives who voted for McMullin maintain a critical and skeptical stance towards Trump. McMullin, though, has joined the performative #Resistance, blasting as counterrevolutionaries anyone who doesn’t go far enough in castigating every action of the president, even the harmless and salutary ones.

Ouch.

This tracks with the results of an unscientific Twitter poll Sean Davis of The Federalist recently conducted, in which 90 percent of more than 2,300 participants said they regret voting for McMullin.

NeverTrump Pretzel Logic
Other commentators weren’t as thoughtful as Carney. Jonah Goldberg twisted himself into a logical pretzel in his final National Review column of 2017.

Trying to get around the problem that has plagued the likes of Jennifer Rubin and David Frum—rejecting policy positions they formerly held simply because Trump holds them—Goldberg adopts another noxious form of post hoc rationalization.

He admits Trump has had a bevy of policy successes—from “a record number of judicial appointments, including a Supreme Court justice” to “the defeat of [the] Islamic State”—but argues the president had little or nothing to do with these victories.

“Tax reform was carried across the finish line by the GOP congressional leadership,” he writes. “Net neutrality was repealed by independent Republicans at the Federal Communications Commission.”

While technically correct, Goldberg’s statements are literal to the point of absurdity. It’s akin to saying since Ulysses S. Grant didn’t personally fight in every battle as commander of the Union armies in the waning days of the Civil War, he didn’t deserve credit for those final victories. The only reason for tax reform and Net Neutrality repeal—to say nothing of a host of other regulatory reforms—is that Trump rather than Hillary Clinton won the election.

How Trump Really Beat the Media By letting the media beat itself. Daniel Greenfield

President Trump’s end year remarks to the New York Times acerbically summed up his relationship with the media. “I’m going to win another four years… because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there.” The answering outburst of rage and contempt from the media burned all the hotter because the statement was not only intentionally provocative; it was also true.

The media has never been able to quit Trump. Its conviction that it can destroy him through coverage has repeatedly proven false. But that hasn’t stopped the media from throwing more coverage at him. And its motive for the non-stop coverage has always been the selfish pursuit of ratings, clicks and sales.

The New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN are all busy playing Trump-slayers when what they really want is four more years of rising subscriptions, ad sales and profits. Few politicians understand that conflict of interest better than Trump who has spent most of his adult life playing the media.

These days the media needs Trump more than ever. Its old purpose, reporting the news, is as dead as the telegraph. Reporting is expensive. It requires infrastructure and personnel. And it isn’t very profitable. In the age of the internet, few people will sit around and watch the pointless reporting from the scene of an event that was once the staple of local news and cable news.

And repurposing viral videos and stories can only fill so much of that hole. But the media doesn’t really report news either. Mostly it repurposes it to create narratives that it can then milk for days or months. Whether it’s a missing airliner, #MeToo or Russian collusion, the best narratives are part mystery, scandal and thriller. The news isn’t just fake: It’s metafictional. It turns real life into fodder for fiction.

The media has crossed the mirror’s edge where reality television, recreations of crimes and movies based on true stories once lived. It lives and dies by turning the news into a fictional narrative. And narratives are cheap. Every news network can run video of Mueller slowly walking down a hallway while a panel of experts discusses what the latest leak really means for President Trump. For the cost of a green room, a limo and a little promotion, CNN can have its very own House of Cards drama.

The View of the Blinkered By Victor Davis Hanson

When a director of the FBI admits he deliberately leaked to the press the contents of his own private notes, written on government time, of a confidential conversation with the President of the United States—a possible criminal offense—for the sole purpose of eliciting the appointment of a special counsel (a gambit which resulted in the selection of his friend Robert Mueller), then most Americans have no compunction about seeing FBI leadership as ethically compromised and something gone terribly wrong at the highest echelons of the once hallowed agency.

That is not “bashing the FBI,” but admitting that the current generation of leaders at the FBI and the Justice Department by their very behavior have bashed their own agencies and loyal and professional subordinates.

All the brilliantly degreed economists of the past decade could not craft policies to achieve even 3 percent growth. All the wittiest and “in the know” advisors had little clue about how to radically reduce illegal immigration. All the supposedly empathetic and moral crusaders more or less wrote off a broad swath of America as clingers, deplorables, and irredeemables—losers in a preordained global world—whose lack of the right stuff earned them deserved oblivion.

The result is that the deities of Washington and New York still do not quite know how and why Trump was elected, or why he well might be reelected—the result of half the country’s profound lack of confidence in the morality and competence of the coastal and gentry managerial classes. And to the degree our elite think they know why many Americans believe that their reputations are undeserved, it is a revelation so disturbing that they are not by background, education, and experience capable of understanding, appreciating, or responding to it.

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Deep State Dossier Disinformation Establishment media ignore the real sources of the Russia investigation. Lloyd Billingsley

George Papadopoulos was the “improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration.” Like the Trump campaign itself, advisor Papadopoulos “proved to be a tantalizing target for a Russian influence operation.”

Thus opens a 2500-plus-word December 30 New York Times piece headlined “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt,” by Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazetti and Matt Apuzzo, with reporting by Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan and Matthew Rosenberg. The multiple authorship betokens serious investigation but this piece shapes up as dezinformatsiya and the Times gives it away in the early going.

“It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign,” that started the investigation, and there is some truth to that. The dossier, one of the dirtiest tricks political tricks in US history, was only part of a plan revealed by FBI counterintelligence boss Peter Strzok in the office of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. As a Strzok email explained: “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40. . .”

Like FBI boss James Comey, Strzok was a partisan of Hillary Clinton, the likely reason he got the job of spearheading the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. It was Strzok who changed “gross negligence” to “extremely careless,” freeing the Democrat from the prospect of criminal charges. As David Horowitz said, it was the greatest political fix in American history.

Donald Trump went on to win the White House but for Democrat “progressives,” that meant that Trump and Putin must have teamed up to steal the election from Hillary. That is the real source of the Russia investigation, sanctified in December 2016 by Senators Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Jack Reed. None was a fan of Trump and it recently emerged that McCain associate David Kramer, formerly with the State Department, met with dossier co-author Christopher Steele. The New York Times piece fails to mention Mr. Kramer and remains reluctant to follow the money, supposedly the first rule of investigative reporting.

The Clintons are not exactly short on cash and FBI deputy director “Andy” McCabe got some $500,000 from the Clintons for his wife’s political campaign. The establishment media are not curious whether Peter Strzok got a piece of the action, and if so how much. The Clinton’s faithful Odd Job would not be the first FBI man to grab the gold from under the table.

As the Dossier Scandal Looms, the New York Times Struggles to Save Its Collusion Tale The totality of the evidence undermines the Times’ collusion narrative. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Trump Adviser’s Visit to Moscow Got the F.B.I.’s Attention.” That was the page-one headline the New York Times ran on April 20, 2017, above its breathless report that “a catalyst for the F.B.I. investigation into connections between Russia and President Trump’s campaign” was a June 2016 visit to Moscow by Carter Page.

It was due to the Moscow trip by Page, dubbed a “foreign policy adviser” to the campaign, that “the F.B.I. obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court” in September — i.e., during the stretch run of the presidential campaign.

You’re to be forgiven if you’re feeling dizzy. It may not be too much New Year’s reverie; it may be that you’re reeling over the Times’ holiday-weekend volte-face: “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt.”

Seven months after throwing Carter Page as fuel on the collusion fire lit by then-FBI director James Comey’s stunning public disclosure that the Bureau was investigating possible Trump campaign “coordination” in Russia’s election meddling, the Gray Lady now says: Never mind. We’re onto Collusion 2.0, in which it is George Papadopoulos — then a 28-year-old whose idea of résumé enhancement was to feign participation in the Model U.N. — who triggered the FBI’s massive probe by . . . wait for it . . . a night of boozy blather in London.

What’s going on here?

Well, it turns out the Page angle and thus the collusion narrative itself is beset by an Obama-administration scandal: Slowly but surely, it has emerged that the Justice Department and FBI very likely targeted Page because of the Steele dossier, a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed disguised as intelligence reporting. Increasingly, it appears that the Bureau failed to verify Steele’s allegations before the DOJ used some of them to bolster an application for a spying warrant from the FISA court (i.e., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court).

Thanks to the persistence of the House Intelligence Committee led by Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), the dossier story won’t go away. Thus, Democrats and their media friends have been moving the goal posts in an effort to save their collusion narrative. First, we were led to believe the dossier was no big deal because the FBI would surely have corroborated any information before the DOJ fed it to a federal judge in a warrant application. Then, when the Clinton campaign’s role in commissioning the dossier came to light, we were told it was impertinent to ask about what the FBI did, if anything, to corroborate it since this could imperil intelligence methods and sources — and, besides, such questions were just a distraction from the all-important Mueller investigation (which the dossier had a hand in instigating and which, to date, has turned up no evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy).

Lately, the story has morphed into this: Well, even if the dossier was used, it was only used a little — there simply must have been lots of other evidence that Trump was in cahoots with Putin. But that’s not going to fly: Putting aside the dearth of collusion evidence after well over a year of aggressive investigation, the dossier is partisan propaganda. If it was not adequately corroborated by the FBI, and if the Justice Department, without disclosing its provenance to the court, nevertheless relied on any part of it in a FISA application, that is a major problem.

Why Can’t the American Media Cover the Protests in Iran? Because they have lost the ability to cover real news when it happens By Lee Smith

As widespread anti-regime protests in Iran continue on into their third day, American news audiences are starting to wonder why the US media has devoted so little coverage to such dramatic—and possibly history-making—events. Ordinary people are taking their lives in their hands to voice their outrage at the crimes of an obscurantist regime that has repressed them since 1979, and which attacks and shoots dead them in the streets. So why aren’t the protests in Iran making headlines?

The short answer is that the American media is incapable of covering the story, because its resources and available story-lines for Iran reporting and expertise were shaped by two powerful official forces—the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Obama White House. Without government minders providing them with story-lines and experts, American reporters are simply lost—and it shows.

It nearly goes without saying that only regime-friendly Western journalists are allowed to report from Iran, which is an authoritarian police state that routinely tortures and murders its political foes. The arrest and nearly two-year detention of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian drove this point home to American newsrooms and editors who might not have been paying attention. The fact that Rezaian was not an entirely hostile voice who showed “the human side” of the country only made the regime’s message more terrifying and effective: We can find you guilty of anything at any time, so watch your step.

The Post has understandably been reluctant to send someone back to Iran. But that’s hardly an excuse for virtually ignoring a story that threatens to turn the past eight years of conventional wisdom about Iran on its head. If the people who donned pink pussy hats to resist Donald Trump are one of the year’s big stories, surely people who are shot dead in the streets in Iran for resisting an actual murderous theocracy might also be deserving of a shout-out for their bravery.

Yet the Post’s virtual news blackout on Iran was still more honorable than The New York Times, whose man in Tehran Thomas Erdbrink is a veteran regime mouthpiece whose official government tour guide-style dispatches recall the shameful low-point of Western media truckling to dictators: The systematic white-washing of Joseph Stalin’s monstrous crimes by Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty.

Here’s the opening of Erdbrink’s latest dispatch regarding the protests:

Protests over the Iranian government’s handling of the economy spread to several cities on Friday, including Tehran, in what appeared to be a sign of unrest.

“Appeared”? Protests are by definition signs of unrest. The fact that Erdbrink appears to have ripped off the Iran’s government news agency Fars official coverage of the protests is depressing enough—but the function that these dispatches serve is even worse. What Iranians are really upset about, the messaging goes, isn’t the daily grind of living in a repressive theocratic police state run by a criminal elite that robs them blind, but a normal human desire for better living standards. Hey, let’s encourage European industry to invest more money in Iran! Didn’t the US overthrow the elected leader of Iran 70 years ago? Hands off—and let’s put more money in the regime’s pocket, so they can send the protesters home in time for a hearty dinner, and build more ballistic missiles, of course. Erdbrink is pimping for the regime, and requesting the West to wire more money, fast.