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Trump’s Presidential Grace and Class in Texas Yet Fake News critics pounce on his every step — as if each one is an impeachable offense.Matthew Vadum

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 and the Headlines By Steven Feinstein

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 Fake News Media of Sweden by Nima Gholam Ali Pour

In most democratic countries, the media should be critical of those who hold power. In Sweden, however, the media criticize those who criticize the authorities. Criticism is not aimed at the people who hold power, but against private citizens who, according to the journalists, have the “wrong” ideas.

TV4 and all other media refused to report that it was Muslims who interrupted the prime minister because they wanted to force Islamic values on Swedish workplaces. When the Swedish media reported on the event, the public were not told that these “hijab activists” had links with Islamist organizations. Rather, it was reported as if they were completely unknown Muslim girls who only wanted to wear their veils.

The Swedish media are politicized to the extent that they act as a propaganda machine. Through their lies, they have created possibilities for “post-truth politics”. Instead of being neutral, the mainstream Swedish media have lied to uphold certain “politically correct” values. One wonders what lifestyle and political stability Sweden will have when no one can know the truth about what is really going on.

In February 2017, after U.S. President Donald Trump’s statements about events in Sweden, the journalist Tim Pool travelled to Sweden to report on their accuracy. What Tim Pool concluded is now available for everyone to watch on YouTube, but what is really interesting is how the Swedish public broadcasting media described him.

On Radio Sweden’s website, one of the station’s employees, Ann Törnkvist, wrote an op-ed in which Pool and the style of journalism he represents are described as “a threat to democracy”.

Why is Pool “a threat to democracy” in Sweden? He reported negatively about an urban area in Stockholm, Rinkeby, where more than 90% of the population has a foreign background. When Pool visited Rinkeby, he had to be escorted out by police. Journalists are often threatened in Rinkeby. Before this incident, in an interview with Radio Sweden, Pool had described Rosengård, an area in the Swedish city of Malmö heavily populated by immigrants, as “nice, beautiful, safe”. After Pool’s negative but accurate report about Rinkeby, however, he began to be described as an unserious journalist by many in the Swedish media, and finally was labeled the “threat to democracy.”

One might think that this was a one-time event in a country whose journalists were defensive. But the fact is that Swedish journalists are deeply politicized.

In most democratic countries, media are, or should be, critical of those who hold power. In Sweden, the media criticize those who criticizes those who hold power.

In March 2017, the public broadcasting company Sveriges Television revealed the name of a person who runs the Facebook page Rädda vården (“Save Healthcare”). The person turned out to be an assistant nurse, and was posting anonymously only because he had been critical of the hospital where he worked. Swedish hospitals are run by the local county councils, and thus when someone criticizes the healthcare system in Sweden, it is primarily politicians who are criticized. Sveriges Television explained on its website why it revealed the identity of the private individuals behind Facebook:

“These hidden powers of influence abandon and break the open public debate and free conversation. Who are they? What do they want and why? As their impact increases, the need to examine them also grows.”

It is strange that Sveriges Television believes that an assistant nurse who wants to tell how politicians neglect public hospitals, is breaking “the open public debate and free conversation”. This was not the only time that the mainstream Swedish media exposed private citizens who were criticizing those who hold power. In December 2013, one of Sweden’s largest and most established newspapers, Expressen, announced that it intended to disclose the names of people who commented on various Swedish blogs:

“Expressen has partnered with Researchgruppen. The group has found a way, according to their own description, without any kind of unlawful intrusion, to associate the usernames that the anonymous commentators on the hate websites are using to the email addresses from which comments were sent. After that, the email addresses have been cross-checked with registries and authorities to identify the persons behind them.”

The term “hate websites” (hatsajterna) is what that the mainstream media uses to describe some of the blogs that are critical of Islam or migration.

It is one thing to be critical of bloggers who you may consider have racist opinions. But exposing the people who have written in comments sections of various blogs in one of Sweden’s biggest newspapers is strange and terrifying.

The Lying Heart of The Left By Herbert London President, London Center for Policy Research

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.

Trump’s Evil Empire Trump rode his mutual enmity with the media to the White House. By Rich Lowry

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.

Fiber Yields to Cyber The famed Village Voice goes web-only. Clark Whelton

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.

James Freeman:Palin, Fake News and the Times Will the famously skeptical Judge Rakoff accept the ‘Oops’ defense?

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

ESPN Bumps Asian Sportscaster “Offensively” Named Robert Lee Daniel Greenfield

This is Robert Lee.

ESPN, and its offering of Social Justice Sports all the time, was worried that lefties might be offended by his name. Or that they might confuse him with General Lee.

ESPN confirmed Tuesday night that it had decided to pull an announcer from calling a University of Virginia football game because his name is Robert Lee. This Robert Lee is Asian.

“We collectively made the decision with Robert to switch games as the tragic events in Charlottesville were unfolding, simply because of the coincidence of his name. In that moment it felt right to all parties,” reads the ESPN statement posted at t he popular Fox Sports college-football blog Outkick the Coverage.

I like the “collectively” part. Because that makes it so much better.

In one of those great ironies that totalitarian movements like the left seem to excel at, ESPN engaged in discrimination to prevent some sort of vague abstract “triggering” of “marginalized peoples”.

Also now every Asian man named Robert just became offensive. Maybe there should be a law passed forcing everyone named Robert Lee to change their name. For social justice.

“It’s a shame that this is even a topic of conversation and we regret that who calls play by play for a football game has become an issue,” ESPN said in its statement.

The only shame here belongs to ESPN which has utterly lost its mind.

Geoffrey Luck: The Australian Broadcasting Company The : You Pay, They Twist

Terror attacks? Sshhh, never mention Islam! Riots in Virginia? Skip the broader picture to focus on an unrepresentative handful of neo-Nazis. It’s the national broadcaster’s way: all the news that’s fit to omit, as not told by reporters who know what not to mention.

That the ABC is Fake News is not new. What’s new is that the ABC’s fakery is now entrenched. Unashamedly and blatantly, Australia’s largest news-gathering and publishing organization lies by omission, distorts by selection and excludes inconvenient truths. ABC News is now the mouthpiece of a progressivist, sentimentalised cadre of activists dedicated to the destruction of the pillars of Western society – free speech, modern history and Christianity. Its reporting of events unfolding around the world feed audiences a deliberately blinkered, but subversively coloured interpretation.

Nowhere is this more obvious than its protection of Islam. No discussion of the vicious expansionist objectives of the Islamists is allowed in programmes; news coverage successfully suppresses facts on which viewers and listeners might draw conclusions unfavourable to Muslims.

Exhibit 1: This last week’s coverage of the attack on pedestrians in Barcelona. The ABC sent two senior reporters from London to cover the aftermath of the atrocity. Over several days they managed to avoid mentioning the ideology energizing the perpetrators.

Ten hours after ISIS had claimed responsibility for running down men, women and children with a truck, the ABC’s 7pm TV news bulletin aired this exchange:

News anchor Jeremey Fernandez: “What more do we know about who carried out this attack?”

Senior reporter James Glenday: “Police are focusing on the 17-year-old driver of the van, but they believed that as many as eight people have been involved in the planning of the attack here.”

A deliberate avoidance of the direct question.

This refusal to call out Islamic terrorists, ISIS, the Caliphate or other extreme muslims is now endemic. Ever since the first Paris attacks, when correspondents Barbara Miller and Lisa Millar danced cleverly around the question of responsibility, ABC News has worked hard to avoid naming Islam. When challenged, denial has been based on early uncertainties: the lack of official confirmation, or the possible confusion of local political issues. Often, social deprivation, unemployment and racism have been blamed for atrocities.

Exhibit 2: The Charlottsville riot was a heaven-sent event with which to beat the Alt-Right. And when President Trump dared to suggest that there was violence from both sides in the streets, he gave new cause to attack his “white supremacy”. So we were served by the ABC with replays of the mother of Heather Heyer, killed in a deliberate car crash: “She went to the demonstration to make the world a better place.” This sanctimonious gush encapsulates the ABC’s policy of replacing facts with sentimentality.

Exhibit 3: And have we heard from our national broadcaster’s many North American correspondents the full story of the statues? This has been an Alt-Left campaign building for months, if not years, to remove all historical traces of the South’s part in the Civil War, its flag and its champions. Ignoring the incitement of the hard-left Southern Poverty Law Centre, the ABC has deliberately characterized the events as an upsurge of Nazism and white supremacy.

The facts: After years of argument, the Charlottesville Council voted in June to rename Lee Park (which contained the Robert E Lee statue) as Emancipation Park. A permit to hold a Unite the Right rally in Emancipation Park on August 12 was first granted by the city, then revoked on August 7. On August 9, the city granted two permits for counter-protests to the Peoples Action for Racial Justice, to be held only a mile away.

CNN Viciously Attacks POTUS for Phoenix Speech and Suggests He’s a National Security Threat By Peter Barry Chowka

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.