RUTHFULLY YOURS

Now it can be told. A CNN host named Brian Stelter confided to his audience this week about conversations occurring off-camera and off the record across the media landscape. According to Mr. Stelter:

President Trump’s actions and inactions in the wake of Charlottesville are provoking some uncomfortable conversations, mostly off the air if we’re being honest. In discussions among friends and family, and debates on social media, people are questioning the president’s fitness. But these conversations are happening in news rooms and TV studios as well.

Usually after the microphones are off, or after the stories are filed, after the paper has been put to bed, people’s concerns, and fears and questions come out. Questions that feel out of bounds, off limits, too hot for TV. Questions like these: Is the president of the United States a racist? Is he suffering from some kind of illness? Is he fit for office? And if he’s unfit, then what?

These are upsetting, polarizing questions. They’re uncomfortable to ask.

It’s not clear why Mr. Stelter wanted to raise the question of whether he and his colleagues are being honest. But there is certainly a question of just how uncomfortable CNN has been about raising issues related to President Trump’s health and character. “My impression is that since President Trump’s inauguration, there’s been a lot of tiptoeing going on,” added Mr. Stelter.

Perhaps he was referring to the program he hosted a month into the Trump presidency. Mr. Stelter called Mr. Trump’s words “a verbal form of poison” and said the President instills “fear in many people.” Then, appearing above a CNN headline saying, “TRUMP’S NIXON-ESQUE PRESS BASHING,” Mr. Stelter invited Carl Bernstein to tiptoe into the story. The former Washington Post reporter pronounced that Mr. Trump’s attacks on the press “are more treacherous than Richard Nixon’s ” and proceeded to reference Stalin and Hitler.

Mr. Bernstein has had plenty more to say on Mr. Stelter’s program, even before the inauguration. Here’s a transcript from a CNN appearance by Mr. Bernstein in March of last year:

STELTER: Carl, I want to come to you. You’re in Los Angeles this morning. You’ve been talking about this, talking about Trump for months as a neo-fascist. I want you to tell me why and how you view this current moment.

BERNSTEIN: Well, it’s a difficult term and the word “neo” meaning “new”, has a lot to do with it, a new kind of fascist in our culture, dealing with an authoritarian, demagogic point of view, nativist, anti-immigrant, racism, bigotry that he appeals to, and I think we need to look at the past. And I’m not talking about Hitlerism and genocide, and I’m not making a direct parallel to Mussolini — but a kind of American fascism that we haven’t seen before, different than George Wallace who was merely a racist. This goes to authoritarianism. It goes to despotism. The desire for a strong man who doesn’t trust the institutions of democracy and government. And my point is that we now need on cable news to have a debate, a historical debate about what fascism was and is and how Donald Trump fits into that picture, because it is something very foreign to our political culture in terms of a major presidential candidate in the 20th, or 21st century. And that debate is going on in print, online, but it is not part of our debate on cable.

As many have pointed out, since about 4 p.m. on August 12, the media coverage of Charlottesville has been much more about President Trump’s statements than about James Fields, Heather Heyer, an auto ramming, a riot, a white supremacist rally, or a statue of Robert E. Lee.

Talking heads, Capitol Hill pontificators, CEOs, and ordinary folks on Facebook have criticized the president’s Saturday remarks as inadequate at best and an oblique expression of complicity with the Ku Klux Klan at worst. For one erstwhile supporter they necessitated a clean break with the president. Julius Krein explained to Slate that he was forced to revise his views of Trump by “the simple and obvious fact that somebody died, and it was obvious that there was some neo-Nazi psychopath who killed that person. To not state the obvious, to fail to ‘tell it like it is,’ I thought was pathetic.”

It’s easy to see why Krein would think that President Trump was expected to address one simple and obvious fact—that a neo-nazi murdered someone in Charlottesville—because Krein, like virtually everybody, acquired his information about the president’s statement from the media. For example, the report about the events of August 12 on NPR’s website indicates, with respect to Trump’s statement, that the “obvious” facts about Charlottesville were exactly those mentioned by Krein, and it even notes that although President Trump approached the microphone about an hour after the car ramming, his remarks somehow overlooked both the ramming and its victims. Sure sounds like the president flunked a no-brainer, or was up to something odd.

Unfortunately for the president’s critics, what was obvious to them whenever this completed narrative reached them could not have been obvious to President Trump when he began to speak at 3:35 p.m.. Why? Because at that moment it was not obvious to anybody. The hospital where the victims of the car ramming were being treated announced that one person was dead and 19 were wounded at 3:53, more than 10 minutes after the president finished his remarks.

It is true that the mayor of Charlottesville had tweeted information about an unspecified death at 3:16, but the tweet did not link the fatality to the car ramming or to any specific cause. So when Trump was preparing his statement, and while he gave it, he did not know the “obvious fact” that Krein and so many others now insist he ought to have addressed, that a person had been killed. And he also did not know that her killer was a neo-nazi psychopath, because the driver’s identity was not announced by the police until 9:46 pm.

In fact, when President Trump addressed the cameras on the afternoon of August 12, he was not there to share with the nation his views of a terrorist attack, as many with 20/20 hindsight suppose. He was there to offer reflections on a disturbing riot which had been going on in Charlottesville since about 11:00 a.m., and about which he had already commented in a tweet at 1:19 p.m., when the simple and obvious fact that now summarizes Charlottesville to everybody was as unobvious as it could possibly be, because it hadn’t happened, and nobody imagined that it would (except possibly James Fields). From about 11:30 a.m. to 1:42 p.m. (when the ramming occurred) the obvious fact of Charlottesville was an ongoing riot, and this continued to be the case at 3:35 p.m. when the car ramming, its effects, and its causes were still subjects of unconfirmed report and speculation.

The president did not choose the time of his statement because it was opportune with respect to the status of the events in Charlottesville, but because a media appearance about a different matter was already scheduled for that hour. If his schedule had been free, then within about 20 minutes of 3:35 he likely would have learned part of what is now so crystal clear to Krein and others, and his eventual statement would probably have been very different. But at 3:35 he could not craft a statement around an event, the facts of which were not yet established and confirmed, much less obvious to everybody.

The New York Times is blaming the Jews for Donald Trump.https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/08/21/new-york-times-blames-the-jews-for-donald-trump/

That’s what I took away from two pieces in the newspaper over the weekend.

The first was a news article from Jerusalem, headlined, “As Trump Offers Neo-Nazis Muted Criticism, Netanyahu Is Largely Silent.”

The article faulted the Israeli prime minister for failing to condemn President Trump in a manner that the Times judged to be sufficiently speedy and specific.

This is strange on two fronts. First, it’s a double standard. When Netanyahu publicly faulted former President Barack Obama for the Iran nuclear deal, the Times complained he was meddling in US politics and making an enemy out of an American president. Now that Netanyahu is doing his best to avoid a public fight with an American president, he gets criticized for that, too.

Second, the Charlottesville marchers weren’t just antisemites, they were also, at least reportedly, racists. It was a Confederate statue that triggered the whole thing, not any Jewish symbol. But the only country whose leader got put on the spot in a full-length Times news article, at least so far as I can tell, was Israel. There was no full-length Times news article I saw about any majority black African or Caribbean countries or majority Asian countries (other than Israel) and their prime ministers’ or presidents’ reactions or non-reactions to Trump’s response to the Charlottesville events. Maybe there were some such Times articles that I missed. But I usually read the paper pretty carefully, and I sure did not spot any.

In the same Saturday issue of the Times came a column by Bret Stephens headlined “President Jabberwock and the Jewish Right,” critical of “right-of-center Jews who voted for Donald Trump in the election.” This is such a small group in proportion to Trump’s overall support that it’s hard to see why it merits an entire column. Not a single one of these “right-of-center Jews who voted for Donald Trump in the election” is actually named in the column, which claims that such Jews are now subject to “moral embarrassment.”

The column says Jews should have known not to vote for Trump because of “the denunciations of ‘globalism’ and ‘international banks’ and the ‘enemy of the American people’ news media.” Yet on July 3, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt sent a message denouncing “the old fetishes of so-called international bankers.” Plenty of Jews nonetheless voted for FDR without any moral embarrassment. Likewise, Bernie Sanders attacks the press, including CNN and the New York Times, just about as vociferously and directly as Trump does. Plenty of Jews voted for Sanders, too, and Sanders’ attacks on the press haven’t been widely interpreted as antisemitic.

In my own view, the danger of antisemitism right now is less in the Oval Office and more in the Times comment section and editorial moderation. It was just days ago that the Times was assuring us that its decision to award a gold ribbon and “NYT Pick” stamp of approval to a reader comment describing Netanyahu as a “parasitic thug” was an inadvertent mistake. Yet in the comments on the Stephens column, the Times again awards a gold ribbon and “NYT Pick” label to a comment that reads in part, “It also remains to be seen whether American Zionists have learned to stop prioritizing ‘good for Israel’ over ‘good for America.’” That comment, which earned “thumbs up” upvotes from at least 410 Times readers, could have easily fit into the Times news article about the Charlottesville racists and antisemites “in their own words.” (It was also consistent with the Stephens column itself, which explicitly mentioned Israel as part of “the gist of the Jewish conservative’s case for Trump,” but omitted taxes, deregulation, or the Supreme Court.)

There was an extended d

Last week, multiple major Internet corporations essentially cooperated to kick a hate site, The Daily Stormer, off the Internet. Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Google, and various other companies withdrew their services, and now one of the Internet’s most odious sites lives mainly on the “dark web,” largely inaccessible to the casual user.

This was an ominous development for free speech — and not because there is anything at all valuable about The Daily Stormer’s message. It’s an evil site. Its message is vile. Instead, The Daily Stormer’s demise is a reminder that a few major corporations now have far more power than the government to regulate and restrict free speech, and they’re hardly neutral or unbiased actors. They have a point of view, and they’re under immense pressure to use that point of view to influence public debate.

It’s a simple reality that the lines of Internet communication are in progressive political hands, these progressive corporations look to left-wing activists to define hate, and a large number of leftists believe to the core of their beings that “hateful” speech should be censored and suppressed whenever possible.

For example, just this week ProPublica, a respected journalism outlet, decided to study “how leading tech companies monetize hate.” The article begins by highlighting not the Klan or a white-supremacist militia but instead Jihadwatch.org. And how did it choose Jihad Watch? It relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that is notorious for supplementing its lists of white-supremacist hate groups with its own ideological enemies list, one that a university radical would love.

It singles out mainstream Christian organizations like the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom as hate groups because they defend and support orthodox Christian beliefs on marriage, sexuality, and gender identity. It challenges Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch because he argues that “traditional Islam itself is not moderate or peaceful.” That’s a highly debatable proposition (indeed, there are Muslims who agree with Spencer), but is it akin to white supremacy? After all, enormous numbers of people in the Muslim world believe in the death penalty for, among other things, blasphemy or apostasy. Those are mainstream Muslim views. Are those views “moderate?” Are those views “peaceful?”

The SPLC even calls American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray — Charles Murray — a “white nationalist.” Does that mean ProPublica is going to call out corporations that help AEI process its online donations? ProPublica does at least acknowledge the controversy over the SPLC’s rankings but then waves it away by arguing that the SPLC “documents its decision” about the Family Research Council by “citing the evangelical lobbying group’s promotion of discredited science and unsubstantiated attacks on gay and lesbian people.” But did ProPublica do its own research on the FRC? What about the many other mainstream groups the SPLC labels as hateful? From its story, it looked like ProPublica simply accepted the SPLC list and ran its analysis.

In fact, the SPLC’s language about the FRC is so inflammatory and one-sided that in 2012 it inspired a man named Floyd Lee Corkins to attempt to massacre as many FRC employees as he could and stuff Chick-fil-A sandwiches in their dead mouths. In 2016, the SPLC inspired a violent attack on Charles Murray when he tried to speak at Middlebury College. A number of the protesters reported that they hadn’t read Murray’s work. They relied entirely on the SPLC’s inaccurate summary of his views.

The New York Times is engaged in an ongoing effort to rehabilitate Communism. For some inscrutable reason, it has published a series of articles nostalgic for the Soviet Union’s Gulag-filled past, most recently explaining “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.”

So when I write that Lindy West — who did not author any of those articles — is becoming the craziest writer at the Times, I understand the gravity of the claim I am making.

A contributing opinion writer covering feminism and popular culture, West has written eight articles for the Times, including six since July. I think the best way to describe her is as the unrestrained id of the Democratic party. She is convinced, as if by impulse, that conservatives are terrible people, and will say so at every opportunity. I can see no evidence of any self-regulating mechanism in her work. No, the author of Shrill: Notes from a Loud Women, lets it all out.

On Wednesday, West called Republicans every name in the book. She started off relatively mild: Republicans — aside from Trump — pretend to be “on the side of goodness and rationality and respect. Do not let them off the hook so easy,” she wrote. Apparently, we right-wingers are all on the side of badness, irrationality, and so forth.

For West, this was only the beginning. “Sure, pre-Trump Republicans traded more in dog-whistles and plausible deniability than overt Nazi sloganeering,” she wrote. “But the goal was the same: white men in charge, white women at their elbows. Systematically enforced poverty turning millionaires into billionaires. Bigots may have swapped subtext for the Jumbotron, but what is the substantive difference?”

In her eyes, there is no “substantive difference” between normal, pre-Trump Republican rhetoric and “overt Nazi sloganeering.” Further, what Republicans want, she claims, is to keep women and minorities down, and to perpetuate systemic poverty. That is the goal, she believes, of half the country. That is their vision of success in politics.

Unfortunately, the article would descend further into the mud. After pulling a Gore Vidal — all but calling Republicans crypto-Nazis — she doubled down, rebuking the conservatives who criticized Trump’s comments on Charlottesville. “It is easy to denounce Nazis. Republican lawmakers, if you truly repudiate this march and this violence, then repudiate . . . ,” she wrote, before launching into a list of 18 things that Republicans must disavow — including opposition to abortion, environmental regulations, gun control, reparations for African Americans, Obamacare, and transgender rights — in order to “truly” oppose Nazism.

You might suspect that this was just a one-off, over-the-top column from West in response to President Trump’s outrageous Charlottesville comments. That would be a charitable interpretation — something West has never once offered the Right — but a false one. Pick one of West’s articles at random, and you will almost always discover a clearly stated claim that conservatives are evil.

Just last week, West was criticized for writing, “Abortion is liberty” in the Times. She could have also been mocked for claiming that “contrary to what the pundit economy would have you believe,” the procedure is “not particularly controversial.” But this was just a sideshow to her real theme, sounded at every opportunity: Anyone who disagrees with her has bad intentions. “To legislatively oppose abortion is to be, at best, indifferent to the disenfranchisement, suffering and possibly even the death of women,” wrote West. “At worst it is to revel in those things, to believe them fundamental to the natural order.”

Something dramatic and important happened yesterday in Boston, but the mainstream provided a counternarrative to mask the shame of it all. The media violated the normal rules of the TV news game – if it bleeds it leads and find a victim — in order to protect the sacred resistance narrative’s presumptive good guys.

The real story of yesterday is that the Boston Police there advised a small crowd of free speech advocates – nary a white supremacist among the speakers – to stop the program early and [I paraphrase] “RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!” I am sure they said it a bit more diplomatically, that the group’s safety could not be guaranteed as a mob of 20,000 approached. The crowd had warmed up and psyched up by marching and chanting their way 2.4 miles from Roxbury Crossing. Antifa, with a record of violence was on hand. The police advised evacuation. To protect them from the throngs already assembled, they put them into police wagons and ferried them to safety.

The only violence and arrests (“dozens” according to ABC News) were on the left, including a disgusting attack on an elderly woman that pushed her and Old Glory to the ground.

Boston police were even attacked with bottles of urine and tweeted out a plea for “individuals” to stop it.

Absolutely no groups are ever to be associated with this vicious act, and none were in the major media that did manage to cover the attack, so far as I saw. But I am reasonably sure that none of the free speech crowd threw urine at the police as they were being sheltered from a hostile throng and given safe haven. But that sort of thing is best left to inference in the media’s view. You can find many of the bare facts in the narrative mentioned above and none of the finger pointing in the statement and answers to reporters made by Boston Police Commissioner William Evans. It is well worth the minute and half it takes. Hat tip: Jim Hoft.

For Mark Zuckerberg: Hamas are ok, neo-Nazis are not: Micah Avni

Attached is a link to the Hamas Media Office Facebook page. Hamas is a terrorist organization and is officially recognized as such by the United States government. Hamas has murdered more Americans, and more Jews, over the past twenty years, than all of the neo-Nazis on the planet together have since World War II. Significantly more.

After my father, Richard Lakin, was brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists almost two years ago, I began a campaign to pressure Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook and the other social media giants to proactively remove materials that incite to hatred, violence and terror. I have written to Zuckerberg directly, published opinion pieces, spoken at conferences, appeared in the media, participated in movies, initiated legislation andfiled law suits.

Over the past year, Facebook and Zuckerberg have issued numerous corporate statements talking about how seriously they are taking the issue of terrorism. Unfortunately, those statements are fake news. Facebook has yet to take any significant action. The facts speak for themselves: the Hamas Media Office Facebook pageattached to this post is just one of many examples which include theHamas TV Facebook Page, and numerous private Facebook groups used by Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (the Hamas military branch) to communicate. Just type their name into Facebook in Arabic to see the long list:
كتائب الشهيد عز الدين القسام

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, Facebook took down a few neo-Nazi and white supremacist pages. Zuckerberg posted “There is no place for hate in our community…That’s why we’ve always taken down any post that promotes or celebrates hate crimes or acts of terrorism – including what happened in Charlottesville.”

Of course, I applaud Zuckerberg for acting against neo-Nazis. What I cannot accept is his refusal to take action against Hamas (a recognized terrorist organization) and other radical Islamic groups and leaders who openly and actively incite to hatred, violence and terror. Clearly, Zuckerberg has the ability to identify and take down these posts and pages; yet, for the most part, he refuses to do so.

Why? It’s big business. Facebook makes billions of dollars from traffic generated around hate speech and incitement to violence and terror. Not to mention fake news, cyberbullying, and lots of other unpleasant stuff.

Zuckerberg and Facebook have proven that they are not responsible enough to wield the massive power which they have amassed. It is time for governments to intervene and regulate social media.

An internal civil war is tearing at the fabric of Fox News. The events of the past week have brought the long-simmering conflict closer to the surface. The legitimacy and viability of President Trump are under constant assault in the mainstream media as never before – and that is saying something. Fox News Channel executives, staff, and on air talent are taking sides. The future direction of the right-of-center, fair and balanced Fox News approach to presenting the news may well be in serious doubt.

One week ago in Charlottesville, Virginia, a melee that involved Nazis, the alt-right, Antifa, and anarchists resulted in the death of one woman with at least 20 more people injured. The whole country seems to be taking sides or at least trying to understand what really happened that led to such a violent confrontation over the future of Civil War statues and monuments on public land. Most mainstream news organizations are siding with the left-wing narrative and blaming President Trump for his unconventional reaction to the events at Charlottesville. They are also largely absolving the anarchist and Antifa participants of any responsibility for the violence that took place.

Fox News still has its defenders of Trump. But they are increasingly being outnumbered by other hosts, contributors, and guests on the channel. Newsweek, an anti-Trump publication, put it this way in its August 17 story “Fox News Can’t Stop Literally Crying About Donald Trump’s Worst Week Yet:”

It’s been a bizarre week for the folks at Fox News…. For many of the network’s personalities, it’s been one of the most challenging weeks since Trump took office – and the tears have been steadily streaming on live television for its millions of viewers nationwide.

A Trail of Tears

On Thursday, August 17, during a live discussion of the Charlottesville rally five days earlier, Fox News anchor and host Melissa Francis, according to Newsweek, was having a hard time:

“I am so uncomfortable having this conversation,” Francis said, bursting into tears. “I know what’s in my heart, and I know that I don’t think anyone is different, better or worse based on the color of their skin. But I feel like there is nothing any of us can say right now without being judged.”

Melissa Francis

As Newsweek described the moment:

The tears arrived after Francis’s fellow anchors, Juan Williams and Marie Harf [Harf is in fact a contributor, not an anchor], both rejected her support for the president’s statements[.] . . Francis was then comforted by Harris Faulkner, a black female anchor for the network’s show Outnumbered, who said “there have been a lot of tears on our network, and across the country and around the world.”

There was more crying when Abby Huntsman, filling in as a Fox & Friends weekday co-host on Wednesday morning, was discussing the controversy over Confederate statues and the President’s reaction to Charlottesville with two black guests. Newsweek provided the transcript:

“It’s beyond a monument. This is about hatred. This is about white supremacy,” Democratic contributor Wendy Osefo said Wednesday.

“There are good people on both sides of this debate.…” Huntsman responded, seemingly attempting to pivot away from an emotional conversation.

But when she leaned on her Republican pundit Gianno Caldwell for support, she was met with more disdain for the president’s behavior – and more tears.

“I come today with a very heavy heart,” Caldwell said, wiping away tears. “Last night, I couldn’t sleep at all because president Trump, our president, has literally betrayed the conscience of our country.”

“No…” Huntsman interjected, trailing off.