RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-china-class-fights-trump

Chances are that by the time you get to the end of this article, there will be news of another information operation targeting Donald Trump. There’s one a day now—each trumpeting a new mortal threat to the republic or some dastardly revelation based on sources that are usually anonymous. Whatever it is, it will serve the same purpose as the hundreds of similar sallies launched over the last four years—namely, to preserve and protect the position and privileges of America’s ruling elite.

Trump stories are rarely about Trump. The same stories, or versions of them, would have targeted anyone who threatened to sever the American political, corporate, and cultural elite’s economic lifeline to the Chinese Communist Party. It is largely because Trump sought to decouple the United States from the CCP that America’s China Class, which owns the platforms on which Americans communicate, has waged a relentless campaign of information warfare against him through its social media and prestige media brands.

Consider the last two anti-Trump info ops: He gratuitously denigrated the historical suffering of African Americans, and he expressed contempt for America’s war dead. These are the sort of false allegations that political operatives are tasked to manufacture and disseminate during election season. Their purpose is to reinforce a negative impression of the opposing party among whatever cohort is being addressed, and make the target spend resources—time and money and sometimes blood—on defense. That’s politics 101, since the time of the Romans.

What’s new is that this is now journalism too. Since the internet defunded the press at the end of the 20th century and social media became the dominant player in America’s information space, journalism has abandoned the traditional standards and practices that once defined reporting. For instance, the smear holding that Trump is contemptuous of the military was supposedly based on four anonymous sources recalling exchanges from three years ago, which have been contradicted by dozens of named sources, some of whom were physically present when the comments were supposedly made—and some of whom have been public Trump opponents. In traditional journalistic terms, that’s not a news story—that’s a failed attack line.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/uae-and-democratic-muslim-extremist-partnership-caroline-glick/

The U.S.-brokered peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, which is scheduled to be finalized this week at the White House, strikes a major blow to the twin forces of Islamic imperialism and terror in the Middle East: the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood and the Shi’ite regime in Iran.

The tripartite alliance between the United States, Israel and the UAE, openly supported by Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, gives an institutional structure to a pro-American regional bloc of moderate, anti-jihadist governments all with proven track records of action against the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran and their surrogates.

Based as it is on shared interests, the Israel-UAE alliance is likely to persevere in the years to come. But America’s continued participation in the alliance is significantly tied to the outcome of the presidential elections.

In 2014, the UAE published a list of 82 designated terrorist groups. Nestled between al-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS) was the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a group with deep ties to the Democratic Party.

The UAE designation was not a slander. As former U.S. prosecutor Andrew McCarthy chronicled in his 2010 book, “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America,” CAIR was founded in 1994 as a front organization for the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian branch, Hamas. In conjunction with other Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood front groups and fundraising arms, CAIR’s job was to promote political Islam. Its operations, based in Washington, were to focus on political influence. To achieve this end, it presented itself as a civil rights organization.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/party-pants-fire-accuses-trump-lying-american-don-feder/

Here’s a play on the old lawyer joke: How do you know when a Democrat is lying? The choices are: 1. During a campaign, 2. When he’s talking about Trump, 3. When his lips are moving 4. All of the above.

It was Honest Joe’s most memorable line from another week of lackluster campaigning: “Trump lied to the American people,” the old duffer said. Because the president didn’t get hysterical about the Wuhan virus initially – because he tried to reassure the public – he lied!

Admittedly, it was a mistake to tell people to come to San Francisco’s Chinatown when the virus broke out. No, wait, that was House Babbler Nancy Pelosi. At the same time, Democrats condemned Trump for stopping flights from China, interfering with the PRC’s germ-warfare project.

If POTUS had gone before the cameras at his first Coronavirus press conference and run around waving his arms and shouting: “The Black Death is coming. It’s the end of the world,” they’d now accuse him of spreading hysteria. “This is the time for calm deliberation.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/16/study-up-to-95-percent-of-2020-u-s-riots-are-linked-to-black-lives-matter/

A report accompanying the data project, however, reads like an upscale attempt to blame the police for criminals’ decision to steal, kill, and destroy.

Contrary to corporate media narratives, up to 95 percent of this summer’s riots are linked to Black Lives Matter activism, according to data collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). The data also show that nearly 6 percent — or more than 1 in 20 — of U.S. protests between May 26 and Sept. 5 involved rioting, looting, and similar violence, including 47 fatalities.

ACLED is a nonprofit organization that tracks conflict across the globe. Its U.S. project that collected the summer protest data is supported by Princeton University. The project’s spreadsheet collating tens of thousands of data points documents 12,045 incidents of U.S. civil unrest from May 26, 2020 to Sept. 5, 2020. May 26 is the day after George Floyd’s death in police custody with enough fentanyl in his system to have died of an overdose if police had never touched him.

Of the 633 incidents coded as riots, 88 percent are recorded as involving Black Lives Matter activists. Data for 51 incidents lack information about the perpetrators’ identities. BLM activists were involved in 95 percent of the riots for which there is information about the perpetrators’ affiliation.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/15/strzok-interviews-reveal-fbis-disgrace/

Can constitutional democracy continue to coexist with a lawless secret police that targets innocent people?

By his smartly dressed appearance, one would never know Peter Strzok wasn’t still a senior FBI agent. He looked to be straight out of central casting as he began his “Meet the Press” interview on Sunday with this book-promoting slander, “I think it is clear, I believed at the time in 2016, and I continue to believe, that Donald Trump is compromised by the Russians. And when I say that, I mean that they hold leverage over him that makes him incapable of placing the national interests, the national security ahead of his own.”

Nothing is more sleazy and corrupt than a current or former FBI agent implicitly claiming to have access to secret evidence of a target’s guilt when the time to produce such evidence has long since passed.

Imagine that you’ve just weathered four years of an FBI investigation during which the press consistently published character-assassinating falsehoods attributed to “people familiar with the investigation.” Your enemies, who personally hate you, launch the investigative team with unlimited manpower and money and staff it with political opponents. Federal agents entrap your allies in process crimes, coerce a plea by threatening a man’s family, repeatedly deceive a court to conduct intrusive surveillance, steal thousands of emails without a warrant, and deliberately prolong the investigation despite knowing from day one that you are innocent. 

When the day finally comes for the persecutors either to put up or shut up, they do neither, publishing a slanted report full of smears without ever giving you the chance to rebut the charges in court. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16337/self-censorship-in-the-us

The US nominally enshrines the most far-reaching freedom of speech, thanks to the First Amendment of the Constitution. Yet the average number of Americans who self-censor is slowly beginning to approximate that of Germany, where… “Nearly two-thirds of citizens are convinced that ‘today one has to be very careful on which topics one expresses oneself’, because there are many unwritten laws about what opinions are acceptable and admissible”.

It is, however, not surprising. American campuses have steered a “leftist” course for decades. The tilt has had familiar consequences: the proliferation on campus of “safe spaces”, trigger warnings, de-platforming of conservative voices and a “cancel culture” aimed at professors and students who do not conform to an on-campus political orthodoxy that has become increasingly totalitarian. Most recently, the dean of University of Massachusetts Lowell’s School of Nursing, Leslie Neal-Boylan, was fired by the school after writing “Black lives matter, but also everyone’s life matters” in an email to students and faculty.

When citizens stop voicing their concerns in public about current events, policies and ideas out of fear that they will lose their livelihoods and social standing, it is — or should be — a huge problem in a democracy.

A democratic society of fearful citizens who dare not speak about what is on their minds — often important issues of their time — is doomed to succumb to the will of those who bully the hardest and shout the loudest.

A recent survey of 2,000 Americans by Cato Institute/YouGov found that 62% of Americans say “the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive”. This is up from 2017, when 58% agreed with this statement. “Majorities of Democrats (52%), independents (59%) and Republicans (77%) all agree they have political opinions they are afraid to share”.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-police-heroism-in-compton/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Last Friday, when we marked the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, one thing that did not get enough attention was the sacrifice of the police, firefighters, and other first responders, hundreds of whom were killed that day. First responders is an apt term for them. They are the people who show up. They knowingly charge into the dangers from which most of us flee.

Then on Saturday came the atrocious attempted murder of two Los Angeles County deputy sheriffs in Compton, by an assassin who is still at large. Once again, what is striking is the heroism of the police. It is awesome to see, but it is routine heroism if, like me, you’ve spent lots of time around cops.

One of the deputies who was shot was Claudia Apolinar, a 31-year-old former librarian, the mother of a six-year-old boy and on the job for a year, saved her 24-year-old partner (who has not been publicly identified at this time). Deputy Apolinar had been shot in the jaw area and the upper torso, and was bleeding profusely. Yet, she had the presence of mind, and the courage under circumstances where she could not be sure the attack was over, to lend medical aid — apparently including application of a tourniquet to her fellow deputy.

What do we see on the other side of the equation? A sneak attack on two law-enforcement officers who were simply protecting a community rife with anti-police hostility. More of those precious “peaceful protesters” blocking the entrance to the nearby hospital to make it difficult for ambulances to get through, with some of the “peaceful protesters” chanting, “We hope they die!” And other locals celebrating the deadly ambush of police.

Pure evil.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/california-forest-fires-taxes-homelessness-same-old-fall-problems/#slide-1

Tech titans and Bay Area Bourbons grow rich, the middle class flees, forests burn.

F all is almost here in California. So we know the annual script.

A few ostracized voices will again warn in vain of the need to remove millions of dead trees withered from the 2013–14 drought and subsequent infestations, clean up tinderbox hillsides, and beef up the fire services. They will all be ignored as right-wing nuts or worse.Environmentalists will sneer that the new forestry sees fires as medicinal and natural, and global warming as inevitable because of “climate deniers.”

Late-summer fires will then consume our foothills, mountains, and forests. Long-dead trees from the drought will explode and send their pitch bombs to shower the forest with flames.

Lives, livelihoods, homes, and cabins will be lost — the lamentable collateral damage of our green future. Billions of dollars will go up in smoke. The billowing haze and ash will cloud and pollute the state for weeks if not months. Tens of thousands will be evacuated and their lives disrupted — and those are the lucky.

California’s deer-in-the headlight progressive officials will blame “climate change” for the conflagrations. The accompanying power brownouts, tardy responses, and official blame-gaming will follow as a prelude for still more solar-panel farms and still less forest management.

There could be a long answer to explain why California for years abandoned dead drought- and insect-stricken trees — over some 60 million of these withered, towering time bombs in their coastal and Sierra forests — to rot. But the short of it was that the kindling and tinderboxes were seen as perfect green mulch for flora and fauna.