RUTHFULLY YOURS

Since February’s violence in Berkeley, which stopped a scheduled speech on campus by Milo Yiannopoulos, the media and the political Left’s relationship with Antifa has been similar to that of your favorite codependent couple; they’re either publicly and passionately in love with each other or loudly breaking up for-the-very-last-time and taking out restraining orders.https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/03/media-normalizes-political-violence-mainstreaming-antifa/

At the time of the Milo controversy, politicians and the mainstream media were quick to point out that Antifa was not of the Left, but was, as reports went, a loose group of anarchist provocateurs engaging in black bloc tactics. Social media was replete with intimations that the protesters were actually agents provocateurs designed to make the Left look bad. Robert Reich, the former secretary of labor for Bill Clinton who is now a professor at Berkeley, wrote that the February riot: “…raises the possibility that Yiannopoulos and Brietbart [sic] were in cahoots with the agitators, in order to lay the groundwork for a Trump crackdown on universities and their federal funding.” The optics were bad, so Antifa had to be kept at arm’s length.

Charlottesville changed all that, as an overzealous and seemingly politically motivated media and an all too eager political class worked to recast Antifa as the heroes within an overly simplistic narrative. This gave the group and its philosophy of violent opposition to “offending” speech the daylight it needed to grow a fig-leaf of acceptability, which, in turn, emboldened its members to commit more brazen acts of intimidation and violence—the most recent example having occurred, again, in Berkeley.

Charlottesville proved once more that the media is unworthy of the trust the people want to place in it. Keen to pounce reflexively and at any opportunity on a president they abhor, the mainstream press provide cultural cover for Antifa’s political violence.

In a textbook example of psychological projection, they ascribed to the president actions and motivations which proved to be their own: making excuses for political violence. The claim that President Trump was too forgiving of neo-nazis and Klansmen turned out to be a more accurate description of their own assessments of Antifa. The media all but lionized the group, mitigated criticism of it, and allowed the political violence Antifa engages in to be swept under the rug of good intentions.

Instead of reporting honestly about the events and actors at Charlottesville and the clashes that followed, the media weaved a dramatic tale of good versus evil where narrative lorded over nuance and the drama couldn’t be bothered with the pedantry of details.

By framing the events of Charlottesville in almost infantile terms—Nazis-bad-everyone-against-Nazis-good—the media placed Antifa right alongside goodwill counterdemonstrators. This normalization of Antifa with the peaceful protesters at the rally may have yielded eyeballs and the short-term political gain of hurting President Trump, but this reductionistic narrative has also served to mainstream and embolden Antifa by playing into the group’s self-identification as the people’s revolutionaries.

Only One Kind of Evil
Despite his much criticized and maligned initial pronouncement on the events in Charlottesville, in noting the “violence on all sides” Trump was, in fact, more nuanced about the situation than all the journalism-school graduates sent to cover the event. On that day there were neo-nazis who rightly deserve scorn clashing violently with Antifa who likewise deserve scorn. But the media couldn’t be bothered to note such nuance. Their simple-minded narrative would only allow that Good and Evil needed to clash on that day. There could be only one kind of evil in Charlottesville. Seeing both a political opportunity and the ability to profit off strife, the media set about creating a mythos. So let it be written so let it be done.

President Trump’s visit to flooded parts of southern Texas went off without a hitch yet he has been besieged with scathing attacks by rabid left-wingers and their media allies desperate to find fault with him and treat his every action as a crazed assault on the time-honored political norms of the country.

Despite what you may have seen on CNN or heard on NPR, from this writer’s perch, Trump did more or less everything right. The trip, which didn’t take Trump into devastated Houston proper, was ordinary and comforting. In a word it was presidential. The president wasn’t there to rescue babies or house pets from flood zones – he was there to reassure the victims of Hurricane Harvey and let the nation know that the dire situation there was being handled properly, which, apparently, it is. Federal aid is flowing to the region, he said.

The visit to stricken areas was what one political junky called Trump’s first “natural disaster test.” He passed.

Before boarding Air Force One, the president hailed the “incredible” spirit of the people of Texas. “Things are being handled really well, the spirit is incredible,” he said at the White House. “It’s a historic amount of water, never been anything like it. The people are handling it amazingly well.”

Trump spoke an undeniable truth when he added that “tragic times such as these bring out the best in America’s character.”

In recent days Trump’s Twitter feed has been filled with the usual, otherwise unremarkable expressions of hope and optimism that Americans have come to expect from their president in times of crisis.

“First responders have been doing heroic work. Their courage & devotion has saved countless lives – they represent the very best of America,” read one tweet.

“Texas & Louisiana: We are w[ith] you today, we are w[ith] you tomorrow, & we will be w[ith] you EVERY SINGLE DAY AFTER, to restore, recover, & REBUILD!” read another.

“After witnessing first hand the horror & devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey, my heart goes out even more so to the great people of Texas!” read another tweet.

Another read, “I will be going to Texas as soon as that trip can be made without causing disruption. The focus must be life and safety.”

“Many people are now saying that this is the worst storm/hurricane they have ever seen. Good news is that we have great talent on the ground,” read a tweet.

This is what a president in modern times is expected to do. He is supposed to comfort the afflicted, promise things will get better, and reassure a worried populace.

But no matter what Trump did or didn’t do in coastal Texas, the media would have found an excuse to whine about him. Shouting obnoxiously and exploding with haughty indignation has worked for these people ever since the president declared his candidacy at Trump Tower. Trump’s presidency is an abomination to these people and his every action an impeachable offense.

So naturally, on cue the media set to bitching and moaning about Trump supposedly not acting presidential and being out of his depth.

These journalists are willing to tolerate a Republican president if they have to, but they won’t put up with one who is bold, assertive, and who dares to defend himself and relentlessly promotes his agenda. But when Obama did the same, even at times and in circumstances when it made reasonable people wince, he was given a pass.

Take the Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson, for example. “Even in visiting hurricane-ravaged Texas, Trump keeps the focus on himself,” shrieked her biased, subjective headline.

“With his wife at his side, he sounded as if he were addressing a political rally instead of a state struggling to start to recover – but it was a tone that matched the screaming crowd,” she wrote.

Trump is a showman. That’s what he does and that’s what helped him vanquish umpteen challengers for the GOP nod and Democrat Hillary Clinton, something just about nobody thought he could pull off.

Johnson’s sentence could have been used to describe at least every second or third day when Barack Obama was Narcissist-in-Chief, whether he was speaking to a large, worshipful audience in a venue with a conspicuous echo effect, complaining that Cambridge, Mass., police “acted stupidly,” rhapsodizing about dead street thug Trayvon Martin as the son he never had, proselytizing before the whole world that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” or informing Dallas, Texas, cops’ widows that a Black Lives Matter sniper gave their husbands exactly what they had coming.

Liberals feel no compunction about making the accusation on Page 1. The retraction — if it ever happens at all — is buried deep on page 27, seen by no one.
have mastered most aspects of manipulating an already-sympathetic mainstream media to their advantage, but there is perhaps no liberal skill more highly developed and accomplished than this one: their ability to exploit virtually any situation or occurrence to their political advantage by making an outrageously inaccurate accusatory statement about conservatives. Liberals feel no compunction about making the accusation on Page 1. The retraction — if it ever happens at all — is buried deep on page 27, seen by no one.

It seems that almost every single headline or trending story on the figurative front page (printed, digital or broadcast) of the liberal mainstream media (the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, CBS/NBC/ABC News, Facebook, “Good Morning America,” “The View,” etc.) falls into one of the categories below. The particulars may change depending on what the circumstances of the day might be, but the general themes below remain constant and reliable, and can be adapted to the President, another officeholder or any high-profile conservative as needed:

Conservatives only want tax breaks so their wealthy donors can give them more money.
Every natural disaster (hurricanes, floods, tornados, etc.) is further evidence of the harm caused by Global Warming, the existence of which conservatives continue to deny — even in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus. In other words, natural disasters are the fault of conservatives.
Conservatives are anti-women, proven by their desire to defund Planned Parenthood and their unwillingness to address gender-based wage inequality.
Conservatives are anti-Hispanic, proven by their irrational obsession with immigration and their desire to keep Hispanics out of the country.
Conservatives have little regard for the environment and will willingly let environmental protections slide if doing so means that their big business cronies will prosper.
Conservatives care more about Wall Street than Main Street and always prefer policies that favor the high-end financial class to the detriment of the ‘average guy.’
Conservatives are warmongers and always favor a big military buildup, with lots of fancy weapons to make themselves feel powerful.
Conservatives applaud police brutality against the poor and downtrodden, especially against minorities.
Conservatives want to perpetuate a climate of discrimination and oppression against blacks, and therefore favor limiting or eliminating government-mandated race-based admission and hiring programs.
Conservatives are morally inferior to liberals, as evidenced by their admiration of Southern Civil War symbols, their acceptance of hate groups and their intolerance of same-sex marriage/gender-identity issues. It has nothing to do with conservatives’ religious beliefs (religious beliefs are an anachronistic irrelevancy anyway) and everything to do with conservatives’ moral shortcomings and lack of intellectual sophistication.
Conservatives are heartless and cold, since they want to repeal and replace Obamacare, even if that means pulling healthcare away from the previously uninsured, resulting in the death of thousands. Conservatives want to hurt the elderly by ending Medicaid, in order to divert those funds to other wealthy conservative interests.
Conservatives are self-centered, short-sighted and fundamentally dishonest, while liberals are selfless, far-seeing and primarily concerned only with the greater good.

Liberals know all this quite well. They know how the game is played and they know how to get around the rules. All the above anti-conservative clichés can be convincingly, factually refuted, but the explanations are long and tedious, well past the attention span of the average person.

The idiocy of the hard left is in full display in a Huffington Post article by Jessica Schulberg entitled: “Sebastian Gorka, Who Has Downplayed Threat of White Supremists, Still Teaches Marines About Terrorism.” Ms. Schulberg claims that Sebastian Gorka, an adviser to President Trump, has been overly critical of Islam, yet dismissive of a white nationalist threat.

What makes Ms. Schulberg’s article particularly poignant is Gorka’s recent removal from the White House. Gorka does argue that Islam is an inherently violent religion that encourages its adherents to engage in acts of terrorism. What many consider inappropriate, others embrace. For example, President Sisi of Egypt, a pious Muslim, contends that there is violence within Islam and, as a consequence, he has called for a revolution from within. This comment was echoed by the King of Bahrain, also a pious Muslim.

It is not coincidental that most terrorist attacks worldwide have been committed by Muslims, notwithstanding the obvious fact that most Muslims are not terrorists. This distinction is made by Professor Gorka, but conspicuously overlooked by Ms. Schulberg.

By comparison white supremists, hateful as they are, do not represent a comparable threat to national security. The evidence is clear, aside from the bombing in Oklahoma City, there isn’t evidence these neo Nazis and skinheads are prepared to launch terror attacks against the nation. In fact, instead of exaggerating their number and influence, it should be noted that they represent .0001 percent of the American population. That said, these people are loathsome and potentially dangerous, but they are not at present a challenge to national security.

The fact that these groups are conflated suggests more about the alt left than Sebastian Gorka. The planned assaults on the erstwhile president’s adviser was designed to undermine President Trump, now a pin cushion of the Left, and the sensible view that within Islam are prescribed activities for terrorism. One need not be a lecterer at Marine University to recognize the global jihad and what it means for the United States.

This article at Huffington Post is – to put it politely – simply ugly propaganda. In the days that passed we have grown accustomed to this kind of piece on the pages of various blogs and news outlets. I doubt it will affect Sebastian Gorka’s reputation, except for a few who are persuaded by left wing group think. But it is yet another step in the on going culture war. Mischaracterization, exaggeration, deception are the tactics in this battle. It is sad but true that George Orwell lives in “newspeak” where war is peace, truth is lies, tolerance is intolerance and the enemies of this democratic republic can make indefensible claims with impunity.

For many Republicans, what matters most about Donald Trump is that he’s demonstrated resolve against the enemy — not the Islamic State or the Taliban, but the media.

The media has become for the Right what the Soviet Union was during the Cold War — a common, unifying adversary of overwhelming importance. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, religious conservatives and libertarians could agree that, whatever their other differences, godless communism had to be resisted. This commitment was the glue of the GOP coalition, and the basic price of admission to conservatism.

Now, a policy of containment, preferably rollback, of the mainstream media occupies that central role. Trump may not be delivering on his agenda, but he’s a righteous, unyielding warrior against the media. And this is the one nonnegotiable. To put it in terms of the famous Isaiah Berlin essay, the fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one thing — CNN sucks.

The Right’s hostility toward the media is long-standing. In fact, no one has improved on what Spiro Agnew said in a famous speech in Des Moines, Iowa, in November 1969, or even really said anything new.

Agnew complained that after President Richard Nixon gave a televised speech, his words were instantly subjected to “querulous criticism.” He pointed out that the media is in a bubble, living “in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C., or New York City.” And he wanted to limit the power of this “small and unelected elite.”

Newt Gingrich demonstrated the transformative potential of theatrical attacks on the media in his show-stopping performances at two South Carolina primary debates in 2012. He wouldn’t have won the state without them.

Trump’s insight was basically, “What if every day were like that?” After witnessing the fate of two candidates who got savage coverage in the general election, despite being a media darling in the case of John McCain and being an earnest, well-meaning man in the case of Mitt Romney, Republican voters were ready for harsher stuff.

Trump had long had his own problems with the media, namely that it wasn’t nearly favorable enough to Donald Trump. With his talents as a showman, his taste for combat and his instinct for what energizes an audience, he was ideally suited to transfer his long-developed personal sensitivity to slights from reporters to the ideological realm of Republican presidential politics. In large part, he rode his mutual enmity with the media to the White House.

It remains a lifeline. Most commentators saw Trump angrily saying indefensible things about Charlottesville at the news conference last week; most Republicans saw him gamely standing his ground in front a group of braying reporters. At his rally in Phoenix, Trump upped the rhetorical ante and used the media’s lack of credibility to try to undermine the critique of his Charlottesville remarks.

It helps him that the press is, indeed, worse than ever before. As the media environment has fractured, organizations feel less obligation to try to cultivate a broader audience. And as politics becomes more culturally charged, the divide between the heartland and the coasts where the media lives and works becomes important.

Earlier this week the Village Voice—the weekly paper that gave me my start in the writing business—announced the end of its print edition. The paper that invented the counterculture will now live on the Internet alone.

Over the last half-century, digital technology has driven many publications into bankruptcy, or deported them to the cloud. But the sad fate of the Voice’s print edition has special irony: early computers played an accidental role in transforming a struggling neighborhood paper into what author Kevin McAuliffe called “the Great American Newspaper.”

On December 8, 1962, Local 6 of the International Typographical Union (ITU) called a strike against four New York City dailies; three others shut down in solidarity, effectively leaving New York without daily papers. Because it was the Christmas season, advertisers were desperate to find other outlets. Some of them discovered a thin Greenwich Village weekly called the Voice.

At first it looked like the strike would be resolved quickly and the Voice’s advertising gold rush would be temporary. But insiders knew the main issue was not salary or hours, or even job security. The real issue was automation.

Throughout the 1950s, Bert Powers, head of Local 6, had been following the steady development of automated typesetting. It was still a feeble technology, a whisper of things to come, but Powers could already see that automation was faster, cheaper, and easier to use. His union’s lumbering hot-type machines were direct descendants of Gutenberg’s fifteenth century printing press. If the new system was allowed into newsrooms and printing plants, ITU typesetters would lose their jobs. And so, in a kamikaze attack that wrecked the newspaper business in New York City, Powers kept the Local 6 picket lines up.

As the newspaper strike stretched into weeks, and the weeks to months, competitors grew fat on diverted ads. Radio and TV coverage expanded rapidly. New publications, such as the New York Review of Books, sprang to life. For the Village Voice, which had been balanced on the edge of insolvency for years, the long strike was a godsend to ad revenue and newsstand sales.

That the Voice had made it to 1963 was already something of a miracle. When they started the weekly in 1955, the paper’s three founders—Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, and Norman Mailer—knew that Greenwich Village was an international symbol of cool. Since the early 1900s the neighborhood had been famous for creative oddballs, free thinkers, and sex: a reputation like that should be easy to market.

Trouble is, they had no idea how to publish a 12-page paper. Fortunately, their friend Jerry Tallmer had worked on the student paper at Dartmouth and knew the ropes. Tallmer came on board as associate editor and, along with writers like John Wilcock and photographer Fred McDarrah, helped the Voice build a small but loyal readership, at an attractive price—an annual subscription (52 issues) cost $3.00.

Is the New York Times botching its legal defense against Sarah Palin’s libel claim? In June the Times published an editorial containing fake news about the former Alaska governor and GOP vice-presidential candidate. Now the newspaper is seeking to have her lawsuit dismissed. But Mrs. Palin’s legal team says that Times lawyers are demanding a legal standard that would effectively make it impossible for any public official to win a libel case.

In the June editorial, which followed the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise and others, the Times recycled a bogus claim that Mrs. Palin had incited Jared Lee Loughner to shoot Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011. The false allegation hinged on the publication of a map targeting swing congressional districts that was published by a political organization tied to Mrs. Palin. The smear had been debunked years ago—including in the pages of the New York Times. There was no evidence that Loughner had ever even seen the map.

The day after the editorial first appeared online in June, the Times posted a correction saying that it had “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established.”

As for the Times’ publication of the initial flawed story, to win her case Mrs. Palin will need to prove “actual malice” on the part of Times staff, meaning they knew the story to be false or they published with reckless disregard for the truth. This is a very high legal bar, as it should be. When people enter the political arena, they should expect that a free press will vigorously seek to hold them to account.

The Times had several options in mounting a defense. Two months ago Callum Borchers described a few of them in the Washington Post. Perhaps the most obvious was to argue that Times writers had mistakenly consulted initial false media accounts from 2011. “The Times could argue that its editorial writers were aware of these reports but, in their rush to publish quickly after the shooting of Scalise, committed an honest oversight and missed the follow-up reports — including the ones in their own paper — that debunked the notion of a link between Palin’s committee and Loughner,” wrote Mr. Borchers. He further described other potential defenses:

The Times also might contend that, although it got the particulars wrong, it was right to say that the map produced by Palin’s committee contributed generally to a toxic political climate that many people believe makes violence more likely….

Alternatively — and despite the correction — the Times could argue that the factors which motivated Loughner are matters of opinion, not fact, and that an opinion of what inspired the shooting is protected free speech, however dubious the conclusion.

But now along comes another argument from the defendant. Last week, the New York Times reported:

The editor of The New York Times editorial page testified on Wednesday that he did not intend in an editorial to blame the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin for a 2011 mass shooting, but was instead trying to make a point about the heated political environment. The editorial is the focus of a defamation lawsuit brought by Ms. Palin against the news organization.

The editor, James Bennet, said he had wanted to draw a link between charged political rhetoric and an atmosphere of political incitement after a gunman opened fired in June on a baseball field where Republican congressmen were practicing, injuring several people including Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. But Mr. Bennet said he was not trying to make a direct connection between a map of targeted electoral districts that Ms. Palin’s political action committee had circulated and the 2011 shooting in Arizona by Jared Loughner that severely injured Representative Gabby Giffords. CONTINUE AT SITE