RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

http://www.speroforum.com/a/VWQZLMMUMI23/81499-Wolf-Blitzer-asks-if-Barcelona-attack-was-copycat-of-Charlottesville-incident?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=HYBUWYZPDJ23&utm_content

Veteran CNN anchorman Wolf Blitzer wondered out-loud on Thursday whether the terrorist attack Barcelona was somehow related to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a man drove a car into a crowd and killed a protester and injured several. Spanish police have arrested a Muslim man of North African origin in the hours after the attack, which claimed the lives of at least 13 persons and injured 50. In that case, the terrorist drove a truck at high speed down the famous Las Ramblas pedestrian mall in the Spanish city.

Blitzer said, “Yeah, there will be questions about copycats,” as part of his coverage of the attack in Spain. “There will be questions if what happened in Barcelona was at all — at all — a copycat version of what happened in Charlottesville, Va., even though there may be different characters, different political ambitions. They used the same killing device: A vehicle going at high speed into a group, a large group of pedestrians.”

Europe has seen at least six similar attacks this year, including the deadly attack on London Bridge. Thursday’s attack recalled the deadly violence of Bastille Day 2016 in which a Tunisian Muslim man mowed down tourists and locals celebrating the holiday in Nice.

In Charlottesville, a 20-year-old man is accused of driving a car into a group of people counter-protesting a so-called white supremacy rally. So far, there has been no evidence to support any linkage between the incident in Virginia and the terrorist attacks in Europe. So far this year, there have been six major terrorist attacks in Europe. ISIS has claimed responsibility for similar attacks in which pedestrians have been mowed down in vehicular attacks. Israel has seen similar attacks.

When a news organization reports an impending weather event based on forecasts from the National Weather Service, or warns of potential seismic activity anticipated by the U.S. Geological Survey, or alerts the public concerning an infectious-disease outbreak being tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no one questions the news organization’s motives, because the underlying information is factual and derived from a reliable, nonpartisan, and authoritative source.

CNN presents itself as a news organization, yet today it posted a dubious story titled “Here are all the active hate groups where you live,” based entirely on data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC is not the equivalent of the National Weather Service, the USGS, or CDC, to put it mildly. It is risible for CNN to recite SPLC data uncritically, with no additional validation, as a credible list of “domestic hate groups,” let alone to describe SPLC’s data as “widely accepted.” As I recently chronicled in City Journal, the SPLC is far from a reliable, nonpartisan, and authoritative source.

The SPLC has been criticized from all points of the political spectrum for its incessant fundraising (resulting in the accumulation of a “surplus” exceeding $300 million, some of which is invested offshore in Cayman Island accounts), lavish executive salaries (some topping $400,000 annually), and a litigation program calculated to generate sensational headlines rather than tangible results alleviating “Southern poverty.” Morris Dees, one of SPLC’s co-founders, has used the SPLC to promote his political agenda—and enrich himself.

As for chronicling “hate groups,” the SPLC is principally focused on maintaining lists of individuals and groups with opposing politics, and subjectively labeling them “hate groups” or “extremists,” often without justification. SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok, who is in charge of maintaining the lists, has declared that “our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them.” Even Politico has called SPLC’s agenda into question, asking “Has a Civil Rights Stalwart Lost Its Way?” The writer of that story, Ben Schreckinger, noted the frequent charge that “the SPLC is overplaying its hand, becoming more of a partisan progressive hit operation than a civil rights watchdog.” Politico’s skeptical look at SPLC joined a torrent of criticism appearing in other publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harper’s, The Weekly Standard, Reason, The Federalist, and even The Progressive.

What exactly is a “hate group”? The FBI doesn’t keep track of such groups, but the SPLC purports to do so, using subjective criteria that do not include the use or threatened use of violence. Instead, SPLC labels groups based on their political views, designating as “hate groups” such diverse entities as magazines, websites, record labels, and even religious sects. In the popular perception, “hate group” is a label that appropriately describes the KKK, neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, and similar groups—and the SPLC does in fact label them as such—but the SPLC misleadingly lumps these odious groups together with mainstream organizations with which it disagrees, solely because of their views regarding, among other issues, LGBT rights, immigration policy, and opposition to Sharia Law.

To nice, nerdy James Damore’s surprise, Google does not want to engage in a discussion of how their hiring discrimination against white and Asian males can be justified. Google’s corporate culture has been exposed as an Orwellian pig farm, where social justice warriors (SJWs) send daily missives on the correct way to think. Those who express contrary opinions are bullied, sent to HR for reprogramming, fired and – not punished enough – put on Silicon Valley blacklists to ruin their careers.

Several managers have openly admitted to keeping blacklists of the employees in question, and preventing them from seeking work at other companies. There have been numerous cases in which social justice activists coordinated attempts to sabotage other employees’ performance reviews for expressing a different opinion. These have been raised to the Senior VP level, with no action taken whatsoever.

This would just one more sorry tale of progressive bullying, but for one thing. This is the company that runs the largest search engine in the world. Political bullying is supported and instigated by top management. Groupthink is official HR policy. These SJW Marxists are not content with a reign of terror within the company. They are after your free speech on the Internet.

Our Brave New World is in Silicon Valley, and is coming to you right now, with growing Internet censorship of conservative viewpoints.

Allum Bokhari has a series of must-read Breitbart Rebels of Google interviews with whistleblowers who have had enough:

AB: Many people now fear that Google, Facebook, and other companies are moving to control and censor their content. Are these fears justified?

Hal: That is absolutely what Google is trying to do. The pro-censorship voices are very loud, and they have the management’s ear. The anti-censorship people are afraid of retaliation, and people are afraid to openly support them because everyone in their management chain is constantly signaling their allegiance to far-left ideology.

Google employees in the advertising department are trying to stop ads that support conservative websites. They are fiddling with search engines “to demote results” to web content that is anti-communist, anti-Islamist, or non-PC.

Think about Google blocking Internet content that is anti-communist. The progressive left is a euphemism for old left Marxists. They are the ideological and often literal grandchildren of Stalinists. (As are Obama, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod and Obama’s head of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, all red diaper babies). No wonder tyrannical behavior comes to naturally to them.

Damore is not alone. He is only the first casualty of Google’s war on free thought to make headlines. The company immersion in leftist politics and punishment of rebels reached critical proportions in Obama’s second term. Google is facing trial in November for an earlier complaint to the National Labor Relations Board.

White House adviser Stephen Miller made short work of CNN’s Jim Acosta at yesterday’s White House press briefing on immigration. Acosta enjoined, “It sounds like you’re trying to engineer the racial and ethnic flow of people into this country through this policy,” by giving preference to English speakers. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s 1.2 billion English speakers are African or Asian.

Acosta claimed that preferential treatment for English-speaking applicants would benefit people from Great Britain and Australia. Scathingly, Miller replied:

I am shocked at your statement, that you think only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English. It reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree. This is an amazing moment. That you think only people from Great Britain or Australia would speak English is so insulting to millions of hard-working immigrants who do speak English from all over the world. Jim, have you honestly never met an immigrant from another country who speaks English, outside of Great Britain and Australia? Is that your personal experience?

There are about 1.2 billion English speakers in the world, including 125 million Indians, 90 million Filipinos, 79 million Nigerians, 30 million Bengalis, 28 million Egyptians and 15 million Pakistanis, according to Wikipedia. More than half of all English-speakers are non-European. Barely a tenth of English speakers outside the United States live in Britain, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Acosta’s gaffe was epically ignorant and racist in the extreme.

Acosta repeatedly interrupted Miller, chanting “Give me your tired, your poor…,” a line from Emma Lazarus’ 1883 sonnet The New Colossus which is engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty. If anything, Miller handled the CNN journalist too gently. He might have said: America had no restrictions to immigration in 1883, and millions of white European immigrants poured into the American heartland. To accommodate them we drove out the Native Americans. By 1890 there were only 250,000 Native Americans left in the United States, compared to 2 million or more before European settlers arrived. In other words, we gave privileges to white people and killed or displaced people of color. You can argue the merits of this policy, but we don’t want to return to a situation in which immigration occurs at the expense of people who were here first.”

For the record, I do not believe that the United States should have sacrificed its future to protect hunter-gatherers who require several dozen square miles of land to sustain one inhabitant. That of course does not excuse the crimes committed against Native Americans. Nonetheless, it is in the public interest to short the circuits in the tiny little minds of progressive journalists.

This morning, the Washington Post published leaked transcripts of President Trump’s January phone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia. At the time of the calls, many of their key details were leaked to the Post, which reported on them extensively. So why release the full transcripts now?

One reason is that they show Trump saying all sorts of embarrassing things. He calls New Hampshire a “drug-infested den.” He acknowledges that his promise to get Mexico to pay for a border wall has left him cornered, and he describes the wall as, in actuality, “the least important thing that we are talking about.” It is worth noting that Trump did not threaten to send troops to Mexico, as had been previously reported. But he did tell President Enrique Pena Nieto that America was “willing to help” Mexico fight the “pretty tough hombres” who run its powerful drug cartels.

This could all have been reported in a regular article. Publishing full transcripts of phone calls including the comments of foreign leaders, however, is bad for the country. They should not have been leaked — that is the first, most egregious problem — and they should not have been published. Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council during President Obama’s second term, wrote on Twitter that, “I would’ve lost my mind if transcripts of Obama’s calls to foreign leaders leaked.” And he would have been well within his rights to do so.

Presidents need to be able to converse openly, honestly, and bluntly with foreign leaders. They sometimes need to reveal things that they cannot say publicly. This allows them to develop both personal and working relationships. Though it can be unpleasant to contemplate, politicians need this kind of flexibility to move past public pronouncements and get down to their nations’ real interests.

Neither Trump nor his foreign counterparts can have such flexibility in their mutual dealings if they fear that their remarks will be leaked to the press and then to the public.

For example, the Post’s transcript shows that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia told President Trump that he thinks the Germans made a huge mistake in letting in so many refugees. Turnbull even linked that decision to the Brexit vote in Britain. He’ll now have to answer for that comment at home and whenever he next meets with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. Similarly, the Post quotes President Peña Nieto musing about “creative ways” to pay for Trump’s border wall. In public, Nieto’s position is far more intransigent, but it is a good thing that he was able to level with our president and explain the constraints of his own political situation. In the future, Turnbull, Nieto, and every other foreign leader will think twice before opening up.

There is also another risk. Tamara Cofman Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, speculated on Twitter that President Trump may now “refuse notetakers at other major phone calls/meetings.” This would not be unreasonable of him. After all, he can only tolerate so many leaks that damage his ability to do his job before he says enough is enough.

Republican Senator Jeff Flake (Arizona) appeared on Tuesday’s Hardball to promote his new book Conscience of a Conservative, and host Chris Matthews felt that familiar thrill up his leg at the thought that Flake’s book hits the GOP and President Trump hard, according to Newsbusters.

Matthews introduced the interview by referring to Flake as “the most outspoken Republican critic of president Donald Trump. And he makes it clear he blames his own party for enabling Trump’s rise to power. Well, with the title borrowed from former Senator Barry Goldwater, the book is called Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle.”

Flake played up the comparison to Goldwater:

Barry Goldwater in 1960 thought that the conservative party, the Republican Party had been compromised by the New Deal. And so he wrote Conscience of a Conservative. I think today we’ve been compromised by other forces. Protectionism, you know, populism, and I don’t think those bode well in the long term. That’s not a government policy.

Matthews gushed that he’s “fascinated with how tough you are on Donald Trump”:

Very hard hitting on Trump. “Demagoguery” is the word you used. Populism, protectionism, you used all the tough words and you don’t like them. You don’t think this President is good for the country, do you?

Flake conceded that he thinks Trump has made “great…cabinet picks” yet “where I think that he’s profoundly unconservative is on things like free trade.” He went on to tell an eager Matthews that Trump is not a conservative. “Conservative foreign policy ought to be measured and deliberate and sober and that’s not what we have today.”

Matthews waxed enthusiastic about the book. “I think it is a tough, well-written book and I just want to keep you to it. Anyway, a portion of your book focuses on conservative conspiracy theories and the recent spread of fake news. Most notably, you criticized those who pushed the false notion that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.”

“To me, the original sin was saying Barack Obama was born in Kenya or whatever and denying he was a legitimate President, calling him sort of a con-artist. That was, to me, racist in its nature, to claim the guy’s not a true American when he was clearly, to make fun of his documentation to say he was sort of an illegal immigrant. I think you’re dead right on that. I don’t understand why your party went along with it,” an appreciative Matthews added.

Matthews went on to read two excerpts from the book, then declared that Flake’s book contained the “same principles” as Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative. He also predicted that “everybody’s going to talk about this book” seeing as how “it’s a tough, hard-hitting book” and “very compelling.”

Thanks but no thanks, Chris. We think conservatives should spend more time combatting the left than undermining a Republican President, so we’ll pass on Flake’s unhelpful book.