Yet Another Media Tale — Trump Tear-Gassed Protesters For a Church Photo Op — Collapses That the White House violently cleared Lafayette Park at Trump’s behest was treated as unquestioned truth by most corporate media. Today it was revealed as a falsehood. Glenn Greenwald

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/yet-another-media-tale-trump-tear?token=

For more than a year, it has been consecrated media fact that former President Donald Trump and his White House, on June 1 of last year, directed the U.S. Park Police to use tear gas against peaceful Lafayette Park protesters, all to enable a Trump photo-op in front of St. John’s Church. That this happened was never presented as a possibility or likelihood but as indisputable truth. And it provoked weeks of unmitigated media outrage, presented as one of the most egregious assaults on the democratic order in decades.

This tale was so pervasive in the media landscape that it would be impossible for any one article to compile all the examples. “Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op,” read the NPR headline on June 1. The New York Times ran with: “Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church.” CNN devoted multiple segments to venting indignation while the on-screen graphic declared: “Peaceful Protesters Near White House Tear-Gassed, Shot With Rubber Bullets So Trump Can Have Church Photo Op.”

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos “reported” that “the administration asked police to clear peaceful protesters from the park across the White House so that the President could stage a photo op.” The Intercept published an article stating that “federal police used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear protesters from Lafayette Square in front of the White House,” all to feature a video where the first interviewee said: “to me, the way our military and police have behaved toward the protesters at the instruction of President Trump has almost been Nazi-like.”Nazi-like. This was repeated by virtually every major corporate outlet:

The New York Times @nytimes
This was the scene outside of the White House on Monday as police used tear gas and flash grenades to clear out peaceful protesters so President Trump could visit the nearby St. John’s Church, where there was a parish house basement fire Sunday night nyti.ms/2MhSGOQ

June 2nd 2020

7,044 Retweets12,539 Likes

At a June 2 Press Conference, then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) proclaimed with anger: “last night I watched as President Trump, having gassed peaceful protesters just so he could do this photo op, then he went on to teargas priests who were helping protesters in Lafayette Park.” Speaking on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exclaimed: “What is this, a banana republic?,” when asked about NBC News’ report that “security forces used tear gas and flash-bangs against a crowd of peaceful demonstrators to clear the area for the president.”

Media Caught In Yet Another Massive Anti-Trump Lie; Will Election Fraud Be Next?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/11/media-caught-in-yet-another-massive-anti-trump-lie-will-election-fraud-be-next/

More than a year after the events at Lafayette Square happened, and after endless media claims that President Donald Trump had peaceful protesters forcibly cleared for a photo op, we finally know the truth. Trump was right. The media were lying. And anyone who trusted the news accounts was a fool.

It’s enough to make us start to wonder why anyone should trust the media’s insistence that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Yesterday, the Interior Department’s inspector general released a report about what actually happened in Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020. As a refresher, here’s how the media reported it:

“Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo Op”
“Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church”
“Tear gas, flash-bangs used to clear protesters from Lafayette Square before surprise President Trump photo op”
“Republicans chastise Trump for ousting protesters, church photo op”
“Tear Gas Clears Way for Trump Moment at Church Damaged in Unrest”

Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats repeatedly trotted this story out during the presidential campaign to besmirch Trump

It was all a lie.

Almost Overnight, Standards of Color-Blind Merit Tumble Across American Society By Richard Bernstein

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/06/09/almost_overnight_standards_of_color-blind_merit_tumble_across_american_society_780262.html

A broad revolution is underway in the United States as traditional standards used to measure achievement and provide opportunity are being rejected by schools, corporations, and governments in favor of quotas based on race and gender.

On just his sixth day in office, President Biden signaled that the nation’s long held principle of equality for all had come to an end, signing an executive order declaring that “racial equity is not just an issue for any one department of government; it has to be the business of the whole of government” — equity referring to the idea that merely treating everybody the same is not enough, and that an equal outcome for all people has to be the goal.

Over the last few months, many Ivy League and flagship state universities have moved away from a seemingly neutral measure long used to assess applicants – standardized test scores – to give minorities a better shot at admissions.

In May, Hewlett-Packard, the technology company with 50,000 employees worldwide, decreed that by 2030 half of its leadership positions and more than 30% of its technicians and engineers have to be women and that the number of minorities should “meet or exceed” their representation in the tech industry workforce. 

That same month, United Airlines announced that half of the 5,000 pilots it would train at its proprietary flight school between now and 2030 will be women or people of color, with scholarships provided by United and JPMorgan Chase helping with tuition. There was nothing in the United announcement showing that there were enough qualified blacks and women in the pipeline so that a black/female quota of 2,500 new pilots could be filled, and nothing about what the company would do if there weren’t enough qualified candidates.

Delta Airlines, Ralph Lauren, and Wells Fargo are among other major American companies to announce hiring quotas recently as a way to redress racial imbalances, according to Bloomberg News. 

These are just some of the many “woke” initiatives embraced by many of the pillars of American society in the year since social justice protests erupted across the country in response to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

Supporters argue that racial preferences and quotas are necessary to end deeply entrenched disparities. Critics say that they are a new form of discrimination, no more justified than old forms that are widely rejected. And while the stated goal of affirmative action was to simply eliminate unfair discrimination, the equity movement is rooted in a far more expansive and pessimistic view of the United States as irredeemably white supremacist, a view meant to continually challenge American institutions and values.

The rapid transition from equality of treatment to equality of outcomes tests one of the basic post-civil rights principles of American life, namely that the same standards should be applied to all people. Once a measure is applied, not to the unique individual but to that individual’s group identity, the idea that there are neutral, common, universally applicable standards gives way to something else, something subjective and political, with different measures applied to different people, depending on their sex, race, or other characteristics.

The issue of standards, moreover, is not just a matter of values or fairness. With the United States falling behind other countries in math and science, most notably China, standards are matters of competitiveness and national security — even as the military, CIA and other federal agencies embrace equity.

REVISITING CLASSICS AT PRINCETON: EXEMPTING BLACK KIDS FROM CHALLENGE IS LOUSY ANTIRACISM. High-flying discussions about what the challenge measures? Great, but not out of a flabby idea that if black kids aren’t good at it yet it’s Because Racism. John McWhorter

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/revisiting-classics-at-princeton

I have written recently about the Princeton classics department’s decision to eliminate the requirement that students engaging closely with Latin and Greek texts be able to … read them in Latin and Greek. The new idea is that the department will attract more majors by opening up to ideas from students who may be full of beans but just not inclined to tackle complex, ancient languages. And sub rosa, the idea is clearly – as we can see from words in the official statement like underrepresented, perspectives, and experiences – that of especial interest will be black students, especially in light of today’s racial reckoning which the department openly acknowledges was the primary spur for this change.

My disappointment with this decision is because it is part of a tradition of arguments that we do black people a favor by exempting them from certain kinds of faceless, put-up-or-shut-up challenges to entry. Back in the aughts, the classic example was brilliant, fierce black lawyers confidently arguing that because black firefighter applicants don’t do as well on the entrance exams required for the job, the exams are racist and should be eliminated. More recently there has been the idea that if black kids are rare at top-ranked public schools in New York City like Stuyvesant because few excel on the standardized test one must ace to be admitted, then the solution is to eliminate the test as “racist.” The Princeton decision is a variation: to get black kids into classics, it’s supposedly immoral to expect them to master the intricacies of Latin and Greek, languages which I suppose we can see as foreign, “white” to them as well. Rather, they must be admitted in shining expectation that their class comments will be bracingly “diverse” in good old English.

* * *

My Atlantic colleague Graeme Wood is more sanguine about the Princeton decision. He argues sagely that a certain kind of student happens to enjoy working their way through languages like Latin as a kind of puzzle (I openly admit being that type), but that there are others who don’t go in for that particular task and yet are itching and well-equipped to engage and analyze classical texts regardless. Graeme notes that we do not consider it an educational tragedy that specialists in English history are not required to be able to read Old English. (Although I wonder if this analogy would hold if the idea were someone specializing in England of the first millennium, where all of the relevant linguistic matter was in Old English [and Latin].)

I can go with him here to an extent. On the one hand, as I have argued here, to engage work only in translation is, of course, to lose a lot. Yet, in making that argument here, I was referring to my own reading War and Peace in English, as I myself was not inclined to hack through it in Russian (although my being black was not the reason for this disinclination [couldn’t help it!]). The question is how important we consider that loss to be.

CHUCK BROOKS: COLUMNS ON CYBER-SECURITY

• GovCon Expert Chuck Brooks: Chief Data Officers Growing Importance In Digital Transformation of Government – GovCon Wire
• https://www.govconwire.com/2021/06/chuck-brooks-on-chief-data-officers-role-in-government-digital-transformation/

• 4 Beckoning Cyber-Threat Challenges
• by Chuck Brooks ⁦‪

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2021/05/09/4-beckoning-cyber-threat-challenges/

• A Look into Chuck Brooks’s Alarming Cybersecurity Stats
• A Look into Chuck Brooks’s Alarming Cybersecurity Stats – Security Boulevard



• The Emerging Paths Of Quantum Computing by Chuck Brooks

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2021/03/21/the-emerging-paths-of-quantum-computing/


• GovCon Expert Chuck Brooks: Strategic Paths of Cybersecurity”

• https://www.govconwire.com/2021/03/govcon-expert-chuck-brooks-strategic-paths-of-cybersecurity/



• Technado: Georgetown University’s Chuck Brooks

• Technado, Ep. 202: Georgetown University’s Chuck Brooks – Bing video

• Priority of Protecting Digital Critical Infrastructure Will Grow in 2021
• Chuck Brooks, President of Brooks Consulting International
• https://cip-association.org/priority-of-protecting-digital-critical-infrastructure-will-grow-in-


• 3 Key Cybersecurity Trends To Know For 2021
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2021/04/12/3-key-cybersecurity-trends-to-know-for-2021-and-on-/?sh=232922c14978


• GLOSERV The Growing Cybersecurity Threats To Services and Retail Industries by Mr. Chuck Brooks

• GLOSERV The Growing Cybersecurity Threats To Services and Retail Industries by Mr. Chuck Brooks – Bing video

Ilhan Omar’s Tired ‘Islamophobia’ Act By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ilhan-omars-tired-islamophobia-act/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

Every time Ilhan Omar says something incendiary and/or idiotic — which is quite often — the fallout unfolds in the same way.

First, Omar and her allies smear her critics. After a sad gaggle of Jewish House Democrats finally wrote a tepid letter asking the congresswoman to pretty please “clarify” her comments comparing Israel and the United States to the Taliban and Hamas, Omar took to Twitter to accuse them of using “islamophobic tropes.” Her spokesperson, Jeremy Slevin, claimed that the letter illustrated that “Islamophobia is a normalized part of American political discourse” — in particular, the contention that Omar’s likening of militants who target civilians to those who defend them gives “cover to terrorist groups.” Others, such as her colleague Cori Bush, demanded an end to “anti-Blackness and Islamophobia.”

Second, Omar plays the victim to chill speech. “This is the kind of incitement and hate that leads to real violence,” Omar noted, tweeting a recording of an odious racist threat that was left, presumably, in her voicemail. Of course, simply because there are terrible people in the world, doesn’t change Omar’s words. It is imperative, in fact, that we don’t let some nuts undercut our ability to freely express our political disagreements — which is what Omar is trying to do. And, if we are going to start holding politicians responsible for the actions of third parties, then Omar has a lot of answering to do for the spike in anti-Semitic violence last month.

Then again, her Democratic colleagues never accused Omar of blood libel or of hypnotizing the world for evil. They merely asked her to explain her own statement. It’s certainly not “Islamophobic” to seek clarification for why she believes the Taliban and the United States are morally comparable. It’s a simple question. Surely, Omar, who believes the U.S. was “founded by genocide” and built its power through “neocolonialism,” has some Marxist drivel to share on the topic. And if Omar can’t explain herself, perhaps a reporter will take a short break from the Marjorie Taylor-Greene beat to see what Nancy Pelosi thinks of the statement. But, whatever the case, being an African-American Muslim woman doesn’t give Omar dispensation from debate or immunity from criticism. At least, not yet.

The ‘Anti-Racist’ Who Wasn’t By Charles C. W. Cooke

http://The ‘Anti-Racist’ Who Wasn’t By Charles C. W. Cooke

A trendy progressive ideology buckles under the weight of its own paradoxes.

T oday’s edition of the Washington Post comes with the comforting news that the psychiatrist who told an audience at Yale’s medical school that “she fantasized about killing White people” was, in fact, simply expressing to the world how deeply she cares. In an April 6 lecture, prosaically titled “Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” Aruna Khilanani explained that she dreamed of “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a fu**ing favor.” Perhaps because they lacked the tools to interrogate and educate themselves, some observers responded rather negatively to these ideas. But, as Khilanani clarifies today, they have got her completely wrong: What she said was not the product of a demented, bigoted, Charles Manson–esque mind, but of a legitimate “frustration about minority mental health,” a desire to “have more serious conversations about race,” and, ultimately, love. Khilanani does what she does, she told the Post, “because I care.”

Well, that’s a relief.

It does not take an exquisitely trained mind to understand why the oft-trailed and much-coveted “Conversation about Race in America” never actually happens in earnest — and, indeed, why it is unlikely ever to happen in earnest. Thanks to the ever-shifting pseudo-scientific nonsense that underpins almost every contemporary “academic” framework, the plain words a given person uses when discussing race do not tend to matter much these days. What matters, instead, is how our self-appointed arbiters of taste wish those words to be perceived. Thus it is that any self-evidently racist comment made by a favored player is immediately justified in terms that would typically be reserved for an especially pretentious exhibit of modern art — “the intermittently blank canvas explores the tension between sound and electricity in an era of existential dread” — while the jokes, mainstream political opinions, unfortunate coincidences, and childhood indiscretions of the disfavored become crystallized into the permanent mark of the Klan. Who, in his right mind, would consent to talk on the record under these rules?

Capitol ‘Terrorism’ Commentary by Former Counterintelligence Chief Highlights FBI’s Politicization Problem By Andrew C. McCarthy

The erosion of public trust in the FBI is a big problem for the country — for both the rule of law and national security.

S tories such as the one Isaac Schorr reported Wednesday are a big part of why the FBI has lost so much of its good will on Capitol Hill and among the public.

It is not like some barroom blabbermouth called for the prosecution of former Trump officials and a number of congressional Republicans on the theory that they constitute the “command and control element” of a “terrorist group” that attacked the Capitol. Frank Figliuzzi was, for some of the Obama years, the FBI’s top counterintelligence official. And that was after he held other major supervisory positions, managing the work of hundreds of agents, particularly in Cleveland and Miami.

Figliuzzi knows he is mouthing Democratic Party political messaging that has no grounding in a rigorous analysis of evidence and applicable law — the kind of analysis the FBI wants Americans to believe it performs without grinding political axes. Yet he also knows that people who care what Frank Figliuzzi says care only because of his perceived authority as a former high-ranking FBI national-security official. His audience figures that Figliuzzi is an insider, publicly saying what the bureau is quietly thinking.

In reality, what he’s saying is bunk.

Federal prosecutors are a notoriously ambitious bunch. They well know that making cases against the former president, his aides, and pro-Trump congressional Republicans, especially terrorism cases, would thrill the Biden Justice Department. It would also please the FBI — not just the top echelon but rank-and-file agents who are not partisans, but who are well aware that over 100 cops were injured in the lawless melee at the Capitol. A prosecutor who could make such a case would be a star for life: invited to hold forth on the NBC news circuit even more often than Figliuzzi.

Figliuzzi is echoing Attorney General Merrick Garland, who told the Senate that the Capitol riot was the most “dangerous threat to democracy” he’s ever seen. For context, President Biden’s AG made that absurd claim in the course of decrying white supremacism as the nation’s “top domestic violent extremist threat.” (In Obama/Biden-speak, “violent extremist” means terrorism.) We are to believe that Trump supporters are neo-Nazis, more dangerous than Hamas, more dangerous than the Taliban, and — applying the standards of Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar — even more dangerous than the United States itself.

Prosecutors hear this stuff. They want nothing more than to make the case. If it were makable.

Government lawyers are also well aware that Democratic lawmakers, egged on by progressive legal scholars, larded their “Incitement of Insurrection” impeachment article with an allusion to the 14th Amendment — specifically, to Section 3, which potentially bars from holding federal office people who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States. The transparent point of this was to lay the groundwork for legal efforts to disqualify the 147 Republicans who supported the untenable Trump gambit to pressure Vice President Pence and Congress into rejecting the certified electoral votes of states whose election results Trump was contesting.

The Congressional Black Caucus Is Blocking A Black Republican From Joining The Group Kadia Goba

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kadiagoba/byron-donalds-congressional-black-caucus-membership

Rep. Byron Donalds, who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election win, hasn’t heard back from the powerful CBC.

The Congressional Black Caucus is blocking membership to Rep. Byron Donalds, a Republican from Florida who has tried to join the organization, a source familiar with the CBC’s plans told BuzzFeed News.

It’s been six months since the members who won election in 2020 were inducted into the CBC, a powerful and nominally nonpartisan group of Black lawmakers in Congress. Donalds, who won election for the first time last year, has not been included in that group.

The Florida representative’s office said Donalds has talked to at least three members of the CBC about joining the group, whose members are now at the forefront of police reform talks and responsible for highlighting the racial inequities around COVID-19. He’s not received an answer and the likelihood of that happening a quarter way into the 117th Congress looks bleak.

“Congressman Donalds has expressed interest in joining the CBC, but has yet to receive an official invitation,” said a Donalds aide. “If given, he’d gladly accept.” The CBC did not respond to questions about the status of Donalds’ membership, or why he was not being let in.

The snub highlights the divide between Democrats and their Republican counterparts since Jan. 6, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol during the certification of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Some Democrats have refused to partner with Republicans on legislation since the mob attack, especially if they voted against accepting the election results. Donalds was one of the Republicans who voted to deny Biden’s win.

The caucus has a history with Black Republican members of Congress. Sen. Tim Scott, arguably the most powerful Black Republican lawmaker right now, declined an invitation from the group in 2010 when he was first elected to Congress as a member of the House of Representatives.

Is a bogus Iran deal upstaging the Abraham Accords? By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/is-a-bogus-iran-deal-upstaging-the-abraham-accords-opinion-670725

Testifying before a Senate committee on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken danced around the issue of indirect negotiations in Vienna over a renewal of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran from which former US president Donald Trump withdrew in 2018.

“I would anticipate that even in the event of a return to compliance with the JCPOA, hundreds of sanctions will remain in place, including sanctions imposed by the Trump administration,” he said, hastily adding, “If they are not inconsistent with the JCPOA, they will remain unless and until Iran’s behavior changes.”

However, he acknowledged, “We don’t know at this stage whether Iran is willing and able to do what it would need to do to come back into compliance.”

America’s top diplomat may have caused news outlets around the world to highlight what could have been misconstrued as a hard-line stance toward the regime in Tehran, but he wasn’t fooling anybody else, least of all the ayatollahs. The very fact that he referred to an Iranian “return to compliance” to the deal it never upheld is sufficient cause for them to hold their ground and allow the West to grovel. You know, just as it did when Barack Obama was in the White House and intent on reaching the disastrous agreement in the first place.

It’s important to note that Blinken’s remarks came a day after International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi bemoaned the Islamic Republic’s refusal to cooperate with him on anything related to nuclear activity.

“I reiterate the requirement for Iran to clarify and resolve these issues without further delay by providing information, documentation and answers to the agency’s questions,” he told the IAEA Board of Governors. “The lack of progress in clarifying the agency’s questions concerning the correctness and completeness of Iran’s safeguards declarations seriously affects the ability of the agency to provide assurance of the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program.”