RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

CNN hit a new low – and that‘s saying a lot – Tuesday night in its coverage of President Trump’s speech in Phoenix. The former news channel is now little more than a propaganda mouthpiece for the Deep State. On Tuesday, it used a half dozen anti-Trump panelists, with no one representing a counter view, to introduce a new fake news meme: Not only is the 45th POTUS a racist and a Nazi-sympathizer but an imminent national security threat to the United States.

To reinforce this spin, CNN’s Don Lemon, who outed himself as a Trump hater in an out of control alcohol fueled on camera appearance last New Year’s Eve, trotted out CNN’s new contributor, former Obama regime Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Don Lemon live on CNN New Year’s Eve 2016

Clapper’s incendiary comments about Trump’s speech immediately went to the top of CNN’s Web site, and led many other mainstream news reports as well. Clapper’s and the other CNN commentators’ tirades eclipsed any coverage of what Trump actually said in his 80 minute speech to an enthusiastic crowd of over 19,000 at the Phoenix Convention Center..

CNN.com home page screenshot August 22, 2017 11 P.M. P.D.T.

Speaking of President Trump, Clapper said:

I really question his ability, his fitness to be in this office and I also am beginning to wonder about his motivation for it. Maybe he is looking for a way out.

In its article about Clapper’s appearance, CNN reported:

Clapper said he found the President’s rally “downright scary and disturbing.” Clapper denounced Trump’s “behavior and divisiveness and complete intellectual, moral and ethical void. How much longer does the country have to, to borrow a phrase, endure this nightmare?”

Clapper on CNN

Clapper continued to pile on. With his patina of national security expertise (and notwithstanding his obvious lie to Congress in 2013 while testifying under oath), he was accorded high expert status by program host Lemon.

Clapper also said he is worried about the President’s access to the nuclear codes. “In a fit of pique he decides to do something about Kim Jong Un, there’s actually very little to stop him,” Clapper said. “The whole system is built to ensure rapid response if necessary. So there’s very little in the way of controls over exercising a nuclear option, which is pretty damn scary.”

Lemon continued to refer to Clapper’s comments after his appearance ended. The one-sided echo chamber panel members tried to one up each of their in their disdain for the president. It was only 12 days ago that CNN fired its last conservative commentator and Trump defender, Jeffrey Lord, citing as an excuse his use of a politically incorrect tweet. On Tuesday, the “Republican” on the CNN panel, a NeverTrumper named Rick Wilson, did his part to bash Trump. Wilson, by the way, revealed way back in March 2016 to the delight of the left wing media that he planned to vote for Hillary Clinton.

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.