RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you’ll forgive the self-indulgence, let me start by sharing a few things about my professional life since Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, in no particular order. Every day, on social media, I am attacked, dismissed, or otherwise declared an illegitimate analyst or fake conservative because of my criticisms of President Trump, even if I include praise or beneficial context.

During the election season, I lost large sums of money — large to me, anyway — because I had to turn down speeches in which I was expected to be a de facto surrogate for the Republican point of view. My appearances on Fox News have dropped precipitously. It’s not a ban or anything like that. It’s just an unavoidable fact that the way a lot of cable news works is you have a person defending the incumbent administration and a person criticizing it. I’m ill-suited for many of these debates, because I don’t fit in the obvious grooves. Some friends of National Review complain about me, including donors. Just a couple weeks ago, a prominent Republican politician chewed me out for the better part of an hour because of my criticisms of President Trump.

I could go on like this for pages, but you get the point. Or maybe you don’t. So let me explain. I offer this seeming tale of woe not out of self-pity or a desire for yours. This is the life I’ve chosen, to paraphrase Hyman Roth in The Godfather II. Indeed, I should add that I’ve also heard from hundreds of readers, peers, friends, colleagues, and more than a few politicians thanking me for my efforts to combat the attempt to redefine conservatism as mere nationalism or Trumpism.

I have written literally tens of thousands of words explaining that I will criticize Trump when I think it warranted and praise him when warranted as well. I won’t let him make me a hack or a liar. I think I’ve done a pretty good job sticking to that policy (and so has National Review).

Which brings me to the left-wing polemicist Rick Perlstein. He has a big essay in the latest New York Times Magazine. It begins with some typical bragging about his role as a historian of conservatism and some table setting about how conservatives tried to stop Trump. He then quotes me:

Then the nation’s pre-eminent birther ran for president. Trump’s campaign was surreal and an intellectual embarrassment, and political experts of all stripes told us he could never become president. That wasn’t how the story was supposed to end. National Review devoted an issue to writing Trump out of the conservative movement; an editor there, Jonah Goldberg, even became a leader of the “Never Trump” crusade. But Trump won — and conservative intellectuals quickly embraced a man who exploited the same brutish energies that [William F.] Buckley had supposedly banished, with Goldberg explaining simply that Never Trump “was about the G.O.P. primary and the general election, not the presidency.”

Perlstein doesn’t explicitly say that I (or National Review) “quickly embraced” Trump, but the insinuation is (Perlstein has a gift for snotty insinuations) that I am emblematic of this sudden, hypocritical transformation. For the reasons stated above, this came as news to me.

Now I’ve never taken Perlstein very seriously and I see little reason to start now. I’ve long known he dislikes me (he recently whined on Facebook about the outrage of NPR having me on), but he’s known for disliking conservatives generally and letting that tribal partisanship infect almost everything he writes (which is why he’s so popular with the Left). In short, who cares?

But Perlstein is writing this for the New York Times, and I think it offers a really good insight into the way the Times — and much of the mainstream media — has jettisoned so much credibility in the age of Trump.

In a recent interview CBS’s Ted Koppel denounced Sean Hannity as “bad for America” because “You have attracted people who are determined that ideology is more important than facts.”

Well, CBS proudly claims Julia Sweig as a “CBS News Analyst.” And back in 2008 the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuba spycatcher Lieut. Col. Chris Simmons (now retired), identified this very Julia Sweig as a full-fledged “agent of influence” for the Castro regime.

Any chance that an agent-of-influence for a totalitarian regime might “put ideology over facts?”

Any chance that an agent-of-influence for a mass-murdering, terror-sponsoring regime that came within a whisker of nuking America, whose agents managed the most damaging espionage against America in recent history, and whose dictator (only last year) declared America the “main enemy!”—any chance employing such a “news analyst” might be “bad for America?”

Important background: Sweig’s identifier Lieut. Col. Simmons helped end the operations of 80 enemy agents against America, some are today behind bars. One of these had managed the deepest penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in recent U.S. history. The spy’s name is Ana Belen Montes, known as “Castro’s Queen Jewel” in the intelligence community. “Montes passed some of our most sensitive information about Cuba back to Havana,” revealed then-undersecretary for International Security John Bolton.

Today she serves a 25-year sentence in federal prison. She was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, the same charge leveled against Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, carrying the same potential death sentence for what is widely considered the most damaging espionage case since the “end” of the Cold War. Two years later, in 2003, Chris Simmons helped root out 14 Cuban spies who were promptly booted from the U.S.

In brief, retired Lt. Col. Chris Simmons knows what he’s talking about.

When Ted Koppel’s current CBS colleague Julia Sweig visited Cuba in 2010 accompanied by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, something caught Goldberg’s eye: “We shook hands,” he writes about the meeting with Fidel Castro. “Then he (Fidel Castro) greeted Julia warmly. They (Castro and Sweig) have known each other for more than 20 years.”

‘Fake news” has seemingly, suddenly, become fashionable. In reality, the fake has proliferated for a decade or more, but the faux, the flawed and the fraudulent are now pressing issues because the full scale of the changes wrought upon the integrity of news and advertising by the digital duopoly—Google and Facebook —has become far more obvious.

Google’s commodification of content knowingly, willfully undermined provenance for profit. That was followed by the Facebook stream, with its journalistic jetsam and fake flotsam. Together, the two most powerful news publishers in human history have created an ecosystem that is dysfunctional and socially destructive.

Both companies could have done far more to highlight that there is a hierarchy of content, but instead they have prospered mightily by peddling a flat-earth philosophy that doesn’t distinguish between the fake and the real because they make copious amounts of money from both.

Depending on which source you believe, they have close to two-thirds of the digital advertising market—and let me be clear that we compete with them for that share. The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates they accounted for more than 90% of the incremental increase in digital advertising over the past year. The only cost of content for these companies has been lucrative contracts for lobbyists and lawyers, but the social cost of that strategy is far more profound.

It is beyond risible that Google and its subsidiary YouTube, which have earned many billions of dollars from other people’s content, should now be lamenting that they can’t possibly be held responsible for monitoring that content. Monetizing yes, monitoring no—but it turns out that free money does come at a price.

We all have to work with these companies, and we are hoping, mostly against hope, that they will finally take meaningful action, not only to allow premium content models that fund premium journalism, but also to purge their sites of the rampant piracy that undermines creativity. Your business model can’t be simultaneously based on both intimate, granular details about users and no clue whatsoever about rather obvious pirate sites.

Another area that urgently needs much attention is the algorithms that Silicon Valley companies, and Amazon, routinely cite as a supposedly objective source of wisdom and insight. These algorithms are obviously set, tuned and repeatedly adjusted to suit their commercial needs. Yet they also blame autonomous, anarchic algorithms and not themselves when neofascist content surfaces or when a search leads to obviously biased results in favor of their own products.

Look at how Google games searches. A study reported in The Wall Street Journal found that in 25,000 random Google searches ads for Google products appeared in the most prominent slot 91% of the time. How is that not the unfair leveraging of search dominance and the abuse of algorithm? All 1,000 searches for “laptops” started with an ad for Google’s Chromebook—100% of the time. Kim Jong Un would be envious of results like that at election time. CONTINUE AT SITE

No one should waste their time watching any of the five Sunday news programs. They are all of a piece, joined at the hip in their singular campaign against President Trump. The hosts of each show are leftists, including Chris Wallace of Fox; that apple did not fall far from the tree. The rest of them, Dickerson (CBS), Todd (NBC), Tapper (CNN), Stephanopoulos, and Radditz (ABC) are fleas on the same dog. Not one of them is distinguishable from the other. They proudly antagonize any conservative guest then strive and grovel to inflate Democrat guests. They verbally bully every Republican and lick the boots of every Democrat. Whatever talking points are issued to them, they obediently beat them to a pulp. They do this on every show, every week. Each program is a submissive arm of the Democrats. They do not offer objective news, they aim to indoctrinate, to propagandize. Their panels are chock full of progressives with maybe one token conservative who is regularly shouted down. The progs happily pronounce the Trump administration a failure after less than a hundred days in office. These people are out of their minds.

On Sunday April 2, each host continued to push the fake story about Trump colluding with Russia during the presidential campaign. The left has historically been partial to Russia, ready to appease the former Soviet Union in the blink of an eye or on a hot mic, until they pounced on the collusion hoax to explain Clinton’s loss to Trump. There are numerous illicit connections between the Clintons, their foundation and campaign personnel involving millions of dollars but the Democrats have swept all those under the rug. Instead they have devised a fake scandal with which to endlessly indict the Trump administration.

Chris Wallace, while interviewing EPA head Scott Pruitt, cited NOAA numbers without revealing that that institution along with NASA has been caught falsifying those numbers. Wallace cited wildly fabricated predictions on the consequences of increasing CO2 in our atmosphere. The Obama administration’s EPA doomsday “studies” were used over the past eight years to justify ever-multiplying regulations that have hamstrung the economy. It never occurs to Wallace to verify anything that comes from the left; he accepts whatever fake studies they distribute to the mind-numbed media, willing dupes all. These people care not a whit about the country and the preservation of our democratic republic. At this point in time they care only about taking out Trump and they will go to ridiculous and dangerous lengths to do it.

Mysteriously, not one of the five Sunday shows addressed the revelations of Evelyn Farkas, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia, on MSNBC on March 2, two days before Trump tweeted his “wiretapped” accusation. The video came to light just this past week and verifies what Trump has been saying. She made it abundantly clear that she and her fellow travelers were trying to gather existing and feloniously garnered intel on Trump and to see that it was leaked to the NYT and Washington Post, which it was. This is a dangerous and treasonous bunch, our mainstream media. Obama’s abrogation of the Constitution throughout his eight years in office was effective permission for the media to disregard the few rules of objective journalism that were still minimally observed. Today, it is all-out war against the new administration. Media lies to take Trump down are now de rigueur.