RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/11/cnn-commentator-wants-all-washington-and-jefferson-statues-removed/

Where did protestors around the nation get the idea to deface, behead, and pull down statues, even some of America’s most prominent abolitionists? Talking points spouted by CNN commentators are just one source of influence.

In a segment on CNN in 2017, Impact Strategies CEO and frequent commentator on the network Angela Rye announced her belief that statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other slave owners need to be removed.

“Whether we think they were protecting American freedom or not, [Washington] wasn’t protecting my freedoms,” she said.

Rye’s comments were in response to an argument proposed by Daily Beast Editor John Avlon suggesting that “Washington spent his life trying to unite the nation.” According to her, Avlon’s perspective is incorrect. 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/if-not-for-lies-they-would-be-mute/

Trump knows capitalism and nothing else is the key to prosperity. He knows a nation cannot stand without strong borders. He knows America cannot retain its place in the world without a peerless military. Unable to argue the point, the Left and its media auxiliary peddle the whole cloth of their daily fabrications, from Russiagate to blatant misquotation

This is part of a “news” item in The Telegraph (UK) on 6 June:

President Donald Trump has said that strong new jobs numbers marked a “great day” for George Floyd, the man whose killing last week sparked nationwide protests over police brutality against African-Americans.

Apparently referring to a surge in employment, Mr Trump said: “Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying, ‘This is a great thing that’s happening for our country.’ “This is a great day for him, it’s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody.”

The reporters who wrote this, Josie Ensor and Gareth Davies, are either malicious liars or completely and utterly incompetent. And, when it comes to Trump, ditto for much of the MSM everywhere.

I saw the live press briefing on TV as it was happening. It could not have been misinterpreted. When Trump brought Floyd into the picture he was talking about civil rights and Floyd’s death bringing renewed focus and energy into seeing that everybody is treated equally by law enforcement. He was not at all referring to job numbers. And, to reiterate, no such interpretation could possibly have been inferred by any honest reporter. Below, Trump’s actual words in context:

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/as-the-new-york-times-goes-so-goes-biden/?utm_source=recirc-

The resignation of the editorial page editor of the New York Times for publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for the military to quell the riots marks the completion of the long, slow transformation of the Democratic Party. Whatever face the Democrats present to the world, their woke left fringe is now in charge. That fringe has not only abandoned core American principles like freedom of speech and due process, it has reimagined American history as a story of “systemic” oppression and demanded radical transformation along identitarian–socialist lines. If the New York Times can’t stand up to Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of its odious and just-plain-false 1619 Project, how will Joe Biden stand up to a woke New York Times?

Past his prime, without a policy compass to speak of, Biden would be long gone if he hadn’t been the Democratic establishment’s last best hope of blocking Bernie Sanders. Biden is supposed to give the party a moderate face that will appeal to centrist voters. Increasingly, however, the bases of the two parties are becoming the real contestants in this election, while the candidates are just along for the ride. True, Trump is larger than life and a constant media obsession. Yet Trump appeals to Republicans — whether they like his style or not — chiefly because he protects them from the illiberalism and cultural overreach people such as Hannah-Jones. Trump’s larger-than-life personality matters less than it seems because he’s all about the base.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/09/campus_war_on_free_speech_spreads_to_us_newsrooms.html

Two weeks ago, if you’d asked what American institution was most intolerant of dissenting opinion, preoccupied with promoting radical ideology, and prone to erupting into disruptive temper tantrums, the answer would have been easy. Now it’s not so clear – the hysteria on college campuses has spread to America’s newsrooms.

Over the weekend, the opinion page editor of the New York Times, James Bennet, resigned under pressure, and another opinion editor, Jim Dao, was reassigned to the newsroom. Their offense was soliciting and publishing an op-ed by GOP Sen. Tom Cotton last week on invoking the Insurrection Act. After recent protests in over 700 cities, polling showed a majority of Americans, including nearly four in 10 African Americans, were amenable to using the military to restore order.

Whatever you think of the need for the Insurrection Act, which was last used during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992, Cotton’s op-ed had undeniable news value. That didn’t matter to the more than 1,000 employees of the Times who signed a letter objecting to the Cotton op-ed. “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger,” was the message that upset Times employees spread across Twitter.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/yoel-roth-explains-it-all-you-lloyd-billingsley/

President Trump recently tweeted about the dangers of mail-in ballots and voter fraud, particularly in California. Twitter attached an alert claiming the tweets were “potentially misleading” and directed users to allegedly corrective website. The president pushed back, but with a pandemic and insurrection going on, the conflict failed to get the attention it deserved.

Twitter did not reveal who, exactly, was charging the president with potentially misleading information. It soon emerged that the culprit was Twitter’s own “Head of Site Integrity” Yoel Roth, an avid tweeter his own self.

In 2017, for example, Roth referred to Trump staffers as “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE” and the content cop wasn’t done. When Kellyanne Conway goes on television, Roth tweeted, “we’re speaking with Joseph Goebbels about the first 100 days.” As Eric Idle once quipped, “I hate people who vent their loquacity with extraneous bombastic circumlocution.” On the other hand, the man is a deep thinker.

As Roth reflected in another tweet, “How does a personality-free bag of farts like Mitch McConnell actually win elections?” On that theme Roth does not hesitate to weigh in. Back in 2016, for example, he tweeted, “I’ve never donated to a presidential campaign before, but I just gave $100 to Hillary for America. We can’t f–k around anymore.” As Olson Johnson said  of Gabby Johnson’s speech in Blazing Saddles, “who can argue with that?” And as fellow tweeters might wonder, who is this powerful prose stylist?

https://jonathanturley.org/2020/06/06/lisa-page-hired-by-nbc-and-msnbc-as-legal-analyst/

Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer who resigned in the midst of the Russian investigation scandal, has been hired a NBC and MSNBC as a legal analyst.  The move continues a trend started by CNN in hiring Trump critics, including officials terminated for misconduct, to offer legal analysis on the Trump Administration. We have previously discussed the use by CNN of figures like Andrew McCabe to give legal analysis despite his being referred for possible criminal charges by the Inspector General for repeatedly lying to federal investigators.  The media appears intent on fulfilling the narrative of President Trump that it is overly biased and hostile in its analysis. Indeed, it now appears a marketing plan that has subsumed the journalistic mission.

Page appeared with Rachel Maddow and began her work as the new legal analyst by discussing her own controversial work at the FBI. Page is still part of investigation by various committees and the investigation being conducted by U.S Attorney John Durham.

I have denounced President Trump for his repeated and often vicious references to Page’s affair with fired FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok. There is no excuse for such personal abuse. I also do not view her emails as proof of her involvement in a deep-state conspiracy as opposed to clearly inappropriate and partisan communications for someone involved in the investigation.  Indeed, Page did not appear a particularly significant figure in the investigation or even the FBI as a whole.  She was primarily dragged into the controversy due to her relationship with Strzok.

Editor’s note: Author Alex Berenson first posted this essay on Twitter, but given its length, he decided to run it as a single piece of commentary on his website, AlexBerenson. In a note to readers, he writes: “‘Blue-checks’ is Twitter slang for people with verified accounts, who are often prominent reporters. As is sometimes pointed out, I also have a blue check, though I am no longer part of the media establishment.”

I’ve thought a bit about why the media blue-checks hate me so (and, let’s be honest, they do hate me so). I’m nobody, really; I don’t have a prime time news show or a syndicated column; I have all of 103,000 followers on Twitter. But I am a particular burr for three reasons:

I’m a class traitor. Not just because I worked for The New York Times for 10 years and wrote lots of hardball pieces about companies (not to mention our failures in Iraq) that make me tough to dismiss as a right-wing nutter, much as they’d like to try.

No, I’m a class traitor in another, arguably more important way, too; the media/academic left tries to cudgel its opponents with an attitude of mocking scorn and intellectual superiority. The president has been a useful foil for them in this (as they have been for him).

https://www.foxnews.com/media/amazon-alex-berenson-coronavirus-booklet-censorship-claims

Amazon is selling former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson’s booklet on coronavirus after initially claiming it didn’t meet the online retailer’s guidelines – as help rolled in from the likes of journalist Glenn Greenwald and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who considered the move blatant censorship.

“Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1,” which included an introduction and a section on death counts and estimates, was expected to hit Jeff Bezos’ Amazon on Thursday but Berenson said he woke up to an alarming email.

“They said, ‘we’re rejecting this,’” Berenson told Fox News. “It didn’t say, ‘you can appeal,’ it didn’t say, ‘here is who you should email if you have a question.’ It just said, ‘This is rejected.’”

Berenson responded by launching a protest on Twitter, calling the move “outrageous censorship from a company that gained hugely from lockdown” as millions are forced to shop online.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/what-is-fact-checking-without-facts/

On the New York Times’ disgrace

‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

How quaint seems this trenchant observation by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the greatest progressive thinkers of the 20th century’s latter half. Not because of the patriarchal pronoun presumptions of the aging white cis male; I refer to Senator Moynihan’s very assumption that there are facts. That there is an objective reality on which we can all agree, even if we disagree about what it means. And equally important, that there is a way of getting to facts, a common language of reason that enables us to investigate, communicate, and explicate.

Senator Moynihan would not recognize that paragon of 21st century progressivism, the New York Times.

On Thursday, with its snowflakes in meltdown, the Times issued an apology. What triggered the staff? Was it an earthquake, perhaps? A mass-casualty attack? An assassination? A cinnamon rugelach shortage at Zabar’s? No, this unspeakable atrocity was an op-ed . . . by a conservative Republican senator . . . and a combat veteran from, you guessed it, the South!

Oh, let’s not be too hard on them. It took a full day of mau-mauing before the Times said “Uncle” — or whatever non-binary relation we use to convey surrender these days. The Upper West Side can rest assured there’ll be no more Tom Cotton screeds to churn bile through the avocado toast — they can go back to the thoughtful essayists of Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran. No more unnerving mentions of federal statutes like . . . dare I utter it . . . the Insurrection Act that have been on the books for two centuries. Fear not, the Gray Lady’s opinion pages will now get back to the laws that aren’t on the books — for example, did you know that “without legal protection, a pedophile cannot risk seeking treatment or disclosing his status to anyone for support”? (And hey, hey, hey, what’s with the his?)