RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-moderate-genocidal-madmen-of-hamas/

In an opinion essay for Politico magazine, NYU history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat finds similarities between former president Donald Trump and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “Mussolini, Trump and What Assassination Attempts Really Do.”

“Assassination attempts are an effort to change a political order in one fell swoop. But history shows that they often backfire, and more often serve not to eliminate a strongman, but to strengthen him and his cult of personality. Mussolini showed how that’s done,” she writes.

Ben-Ghiat explains that Mussolini was shot while walking through the streets of Rome after giving a speech to a conference of surgeons. The bullet grazed Mussolini’s nose; he posed for a photograph hours later with a big white bandage on his nose.

“The history of Mussolini’s consolidation of power and the attacks that punctuated that process carry lessons for our understanding of the mentality and methods of Donald Trump after the attempt on his life at a rally last month,” she adds.

After Trump was shot in the ear at the rally in Butler, Pa., he stood to his feet and raised a fist to the crowd and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight.”

“With that gesture, Trump tended to his personality cult, reassuring millions of his devoted followers that he had survived and was unbeaten — just as Mussolini did with his photo almost 100 years before,” Ben-Ghiat writes, adding, “The danger is what comes next.”

Media Misses

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/15/the-woke-medias-grotesque-gloating-over-the-shooting-of-trump/

Imagine being taken off the airwaves because your bosses are worried you might gloat over an attempted murder. That, reportedly, has been the fate of pundits on MSNBC’s maddeningly woke talk show, Morning Joe. It’s been pulled from the air today, in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, allegedly out of fear that a guest might make an ‘inappropriate’ comment about the shooting. CNN has the lowdown. It reports that MSNBC benched its best-known show, despite the ‘seismic’ events of the past 48 hours, as a pre-emptive strike against the possibility that one of the ‘stable of two-dozen-plus guests’ would say something nuts about the violence visited on Trump.

If this is true – and we have no reason to doubt that it is, given the liberal media’s been full of ‘inappropriate’ chatter on the shooting of Trump – it is terrifyingly revealing. That one of America’s top liberal broadcasters seemingly cannot trust its own talking heads to be sombre and decent in the aftermath of the attempted slaying of a former president is extraordinary. It points to more than the problem of shock-jockery, where people who say outrageous things tend to get the most clicks and clout. It speaks to something worse than Trump Derangement Syndrome. No, it shines a light on the wholesale unanchoring of the woke elites from the norms of democratic politics, and their drift into an alternative world of invective and vengeance.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-new-york-times-fact-checks-biden

To measure the terror now gripping the mainstream media in the wake of the Biden–Trump debate, consider this: the New York Times is now fact-checking Joe Biden in favor of Donald Trump.

Monday’s print edition of the Times contains an article titled “In ABC Interview, Exaggerations about Polling and Trump.” The article applies a level of scrutiny to Biden’s Friday interview with ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos that is nearly unprecedented toward a Democratic candidate.

The Times now quotes Biden verbatim, with the clear intention of putting his verbal shuffles on full display:

Biden: “After that debate, . . . I did events in—in—in Georgia, did events like this today, large crowds, overwhelming response, no—no—no slipping.”

So remorseless is the Times toward Biden’s speech stumbles that it even records a missing syllable:

“The New York Times had me behind before anything having to do with this race—had me hind—behind 10 points.”

Factual errors that before would have been allowed to pass unnoticed are now harvested and amplified:

Before the interview on Friday, Mr. Biden said of Mr. Trump at a rally in Wisconsin that he would “beat him again in 2020.” At a Fourth of July barbecue with military members and their families, Mr. Biden referred to Mr. Trump as “one of our former colleagues” before correcting himself. And at a fund-raising reception in East Hampton, New York, he confused Italy and France when referring to the location of a veterans’ cemetery he recently visited.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media/2024/06/american-medias-lethal-self-inflicted-wounds/

Perhaps it still does, but 40-odd years ago the US Information Agency would take reporters newly arrived from overseas on little junkets to show how America worked. The Wall had yet to fall, the Cold War continued and Washington wished to put the benefits of democracy and free enterprise on display. I went on only one such trip, in early 1980, which is some time ago, so if what I recall of our stop at the Los Angeles Times is fogged by the years, please forgive a memory perhaps a little blurred at the edges.

What I do recall is being herded, our troupe of international freeloaders — black faces, white and asian, the only genders then on offer, plus some colourful headgear and a robe or two — through a vast acreage of newsrooms until finally, having also inspected loading bays and presses, we were assembled before the vacant desk of the editor-in-chief. A tall, athletic man with a beaky countenance arrived, sat down, delivered some pro forma remarks on the First Amendment, Fourth Estate and the vital role his newspaper played in the lives of Los Angelos and, indeed, the nation and world. The chap with the kente cloth cap asked why Africa received so little attention, and there were questions about November’s presidential election, Carter vs Reagan, and how it would be covered. This is the bit that remains crystal sharp.

“Without fear or favour and in pursuit of the facts,” said the LA Times/Mirror group’s supreme editor, Otis Chandler, the fourth generation of the family that had owned and run the LA Times for more than a century. Like Katherine Graham at the Washington Post, his was a hands-on clan. After the rote boilerplate about the sacred duty of the press, the force of Chandler’s conviction in pledging a thorough, unbiased eye on the looming presidential contest was, well, memorable. The details escape me, except that he went on at some length about the dollar investment that would go into the election coverage, a sum I remember as being in the astonishing multi-millions. The LA Times‘ reputation and that of the Chandlers were as one and worth protecting. Indeed, it was also matter of redemption. Before Otis, the LA Times had been a nakedly biased, right-wing denouncer of all things Democrat, especially unions, which made it the target of a 1910 bombing that left almost two dozen dead.