The Expansion of Taxpayer-Subsidized “Journalism” It’s not just NPR or PBS. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-expansion-of-taxpayer-subsidized-journalism/

One of the things I spent the last ten years warning about was that the leftist propaganda messaging system we call the media was…

1. Failing economically

2. Transitioning to nonprofit and otherwise government-subsidized status

… at some point, other conservatives will realize what’s going on when it becomes obvious enough, but for now it’s an issue that virtually nobody is paying attention to even as Republican Senate and House members continue to sponsor bills providing special tax benefits to local media outlets.

New York however is the first state in the nation to make it official.

The state budget, set to be finalized Saturday, includes the nation’s first payroll tax credit for local news organizations in a bid to encourage new hiring amid the ongoing struggles of journalism outlets to cover their communities.

“A thriving local news industry is vital to the health of our democracy,” bill sponsor Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a Manhattan Democrat, said in a statement. “It’s our responsibility to help ensure New Yorkers have access to independent and community-focused journalism.”

There’s virtually no such thing as independent journalism anymore and when Democrats say “protecting democracy”, they mean promoting party propaganda while smearing political opponents.

‘The Most Secure Election in American History’ by John Eastman

This article is based on a briefing from John Eastman to Gatestone Institute.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20588/most-secure-election

What did the founders do? They committed an act of treason by signing the Declaration of Independence. They recognized at some point you have to take on the established regime when it is not only unjust, but when there is no lawful way to get it back on track. These matters frame our own nation.

Texas had just filed its original action in the Supreme Court against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan — four swing states whose election officers had clearly violated election law in those states and with an impact that put Biden over the top in all four.

In Georgia, the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, signed a settlement agreement in March of 2020 in a suit that was filed by the Democratic Committee that essentially obliterated the signature verification process in Georgia. It made it virtually impossible to disqualify any ballots no matter how unlike the signature on the ballot was to the signature in the registration file. The most troubling aspect of it, to me, was that the law required that the signature match the registration signature. When Brad Raffensperger, who is not part of the legislature, unilaterally changed the rule from what the legislature had adopted by statute, that change was unconstitutional, not just illegal.

Unilaterally, [the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Kathy Boockvar] got rid of a statute that election officials in Pennsylvania had been applying for 100 years to require signature verification. She then asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to approve what she had done….In other words, all of the statutory provisions that were designed to protect against fraud were obliterated in Pennsylvania. We ought not to be surprised if fraud walked through the door left open by the unconstitutional elimination of these statutes.

To this day, there are 120,000 more votes that were cast in Pennsylvania than their records show voters who have cast votes. Think about that: 120,000 more votes than voters who cast votes. The margin in Pennsylvania was 80,000.

Election officials in heavily Democrat counties [in Wisconsin] also set up drop boxes. They even set up what they called “human drop boxes” in Madison, which is the home of the University of Wisconsin. For two or three consecutive Saturdays before the election, they basically ran a ballot harvesting scheme at taxpayer expense with volunteers – whom I suspect were actually supporters of the Biden campaign — working as “deputized” county clerks to go collect all these ballots, in violation of state law.

A lot of these came in with the witness signatures, but the address not filled in. The county clerks were directed by the Secretary of State to fill the information in on their own. In other words, they were doctoring the evidence.

They were doing Google searches to get the name, to fill in an address to validate ballots that were clearly illegal under Wisconsin law. All told, those couple of things combined, more than 200,000 ballots were affected in a state where the margin victory was just over 20,000.

Then in Michigan, we had similar things going on. We probably all saw the video of election officials boarding up the canvassing center at TCF Center in Detroit so that people could not observe what was going on. There were hundreds of sworn affidavits about illegality in the conduct of that process in Detroit.

The judge, without holding a hearing on a motion to dismiss, at which the allegations of the complaint are supposed to be taken as true, rejected all the sworn affidavits from all the witnesses who actually observed the illegality, and instead credited the government affidavit – without the government witness evening being subject to questioning on cross-examination.

In those four states, and in Arizona and Nevada as well, there is no question that the illegality that occurred affected way more ballots than the certified margin of Joe Biden’s victory in all of those states. It only took three of those six states — any combination of three — for Trump to have won the election.

Well, first of all, that mantra….: “All the cases, all the courts ruled against Trump.” First of all, that is not true. Most of the cases were rejected on very technical jurisdictional grounds, like a case brought by a voter, rather than the candidate himself.

Individual voters do not have standing because they lack a particularized injury. Those were dismissed. There is no basis for claiming that there was anything wrong with the claims on the merits. It is just that the cases were not brought by the right people.

There was one case where one of these illegal guidances from the Secretary of State was challenged before the election. The judge ruled that it was just a guidance, and that until we get to election day to find out if the law was actually violated, the case was not ripe — and it got dismissed. Then the day after the election, when election officials actually violated the law, the case gets filed again, and the court says, “You can’t wait until your guy loses and then bring the election challenge. It’s barred by a doctrine called laches. This is the kind of stuff that the Trump legal team was dealing with in those 65 cases.

Of the cases that actually reached the merits –there were fewer than a dozen of them, if I recall correctly — Trump won three-fourths of them. You have never heard that in the “New York Times.”

The 65 Project was formed — I think I’ve seen reported that they received a grant from a couple of George Soros-related organizations of $100 million — to bring disbarment actions against all of the lawyers who were involved in any of those cases.

Will Israel Be A Game-Changer In The 2024 Election? I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/22/will-israel-be-a-game-changer-in-the-2024-election-ii-tipp-poll/

In recent weeks, the Biden administration has distanced itself and U.S. policy from Israel’s response to attacks from Hamas and Iran, two of Israel’s bitterest enemies. Americans show sharp political divisions in their support of Joe Biden’s policy shift toward the U.S.’ long-time Mideast ally.

Hardly a day goes by without more news from the Mideast, much of it related to Israel’s retaliation following Hamas’ shocking Oct. 7 invasion, resulting in at least 1,200 dead and 240 kidnapped and held as hostages in Gaza and elsewhere.

This month, after Israeli missiles killed the Iranian general who masterminded the raid, Iran launched a massive missile and drone strike against Israel. It was successfully defended by Israel and its regional allies, including the U.S. Israel followed up with an April 18 offensive of its own on key military and nuclear sites in Iran.

For this month’s nationwide online I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,432 voters taken from April 3-5, we asked Americans about the cooling of formerly warm ties between the U.S. and Israel:

“In recent weeks, the Biden administration has shifted away from Israel by refusing to veto an anti-Israel measure at the U.N., blocking some arms shipments to Israel, and giving aid to Gaza, now controlled by the terrorist group Hamas. Do you agree or disagree with this shift away from Israel?”

Those who answered the poll, with a margin of error, were given five possible responses: “agree strongly,” “agree somewhat,” “disagree somewhat,” “agree somewhat,” and “not sure.”

Americans are split almost equally between “agree” (37%) and “disagree” (35%). Broken down further, 19% said they “agree strongly,” while 18% said they “agree somewhat” with Biden’s shift away from supporting Israel. Among those on other side of the issue, “11%” said they disagreed “somewhat,” while 24% said they disagreed “strongly.”

A hefty 27% said they were not sure.

At Columbia I Am Told: ‘Go Back to Poland’ My Israeli flag was stolen and burned. I was hit. And the school is preventing the NYPD from protecting us. By Jonathan Lederer

https://www.thefp.com/p/at-columbia-i-am-told-go-back-to?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Since the first protest on Columbia’s campus in support of a “Free Palestine” on October 12, I have committed, along with my twin brother and a number of our friends, to show up at these protests with our Israeli and American flags.

There are often hundreds of people chanting for “intifada” and a handful of us. Suffice it to say, I can think of more pleasant ways to spend a New York City night. We do it for a simple reason: we want to tell Jews at Columbia—and around the world—that we refuse to be bullied off of our own campus.

For nearly seven months, I have been asked the same question by many people in my life: “Do you feel safe on campus as a Jew?” I wear a kippah—I can’t pass. And I have always maintained the importance of standing our ground rather than letting fear drive us away.

Nothing will stanch that pride, but the situation at Columbia has escalated to a point where my physical safety is in danger.

That is not a metaphor, nor an expression of safetyism. On Saturday night, April 20, I was assaulted and harassed repeatedly inside the gates of Columbia University.

For five days now, protesters have been camped out on Columbia’s South Lawn demanding financial divestment from Israel, an academic boycott of Israel, a call for cease-fire, and an end to Columbia’s real estate purchases. Their newest demand is to defund Columbia’s public safety, the only people on campus supposedly tasked with keeping us safe.

On Saturday night, the situation on campus hit a new low. Amid multiple protests both inside and outside of Columbia’s gates, my friends and I decided to show our pride yet again, as we have on so many occasions since Hamas began its war.

For an hour, 20 of us stood on the sundial in the middle of Columbia’s campus with Israeli and American flags and sang peaceful songs such as Matisyahu’s “One Day” and “V’hi She’amda”—a much-needed ode to the hope and perseverance of the Jewish people in the face of enemies who seek our destruction.

They Were Assaulted on Campus for Being Jews At Yale, Sahar Tartak was stabbed in the eye. At Columbia, Jonathan Lederer’s Israeli flag was burned and he was hit in the face.Bari Weiss

https://www.thefp.com/p/at-columbia-i-am-told-go-back-to?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

For a second, imagine that black students at Columbia were taunted: Go back to Africa. Or imagine that a gay student was surrounded by homophobic protesters and hit with a stick at Yale University. Or imagine if a campus imam told Muslim students that they ought to head home for Ramadan because campus public safety could not guarantee their security.

There would be relentless fury from our media and condemnation from our politicians.

Just remember the righteous—and rightful—outrage over the white supremacist “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where neo-Nazis chanted “The Jews will not replace us.” 

This weekend at Columbia and Yale, student demonstrators did all of the above—only it was directed at Jews. They told Columbia students to “go back to Poland.” A Jewish woman at Yale was assaulted with a Palestinian flag. And an Orthodox rabbi at Columbia told students to go home for their safety.

Demonstrators on these campuses shouted more chic versions of “Jews will not replace us.” At Columbia they screamed: “Say it loud and say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here.” At Yale they blasted bad rap with the following lyrics: 

Fuck Israel, Israel a bitch / Bitch we out here mobbin’ on some Palestine shit / Free Palestine bitch, Israel gon’ die bitch / Nigga it’s they land why you out here tryna rob it / Bullshit prophets, y’all just want the profit

These campus activists are not simply “pro-Palestine” protesters. They are people who are openly celebrating Hamas and physically intimidating identifiably Jewish students who came near. We are publishing the accounts of two of those students—Sahar Tartak and Jonathan Lederer—today.

Students—all of us—have a right to protest. We have a right to protest for dumb causes and horrible causes. At The Free Press, we will always defend that right. (See here and here, for example.)

It is not, however, a First Amendment right to physically attack another person. It is not a First Amendment right to detain another person as part of your protest. And while Americans are constitutionally protected when they say vile things, like wishing upon Jews a thousand October 7s, we are certainly free to criticize them and to condemn institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth who stand by and do nothing meaningful to stop it.

The students who support terror have given in to madness. Refusing to condemn them is madness.

There are courageous students who see that madness clearly. Please read these essays by Jonathan Lederer and Sahar Tartak.

We’ll continue to follow this unfolding story. If you believe in the kind of journalism we do, become a paid subscriber today. — BW

At Columbia I Am Told: ‘Go Back to Poland’By Jonathan Lederer

The Getting of Donald Trump Roger Franklin

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/04/the-getting-of-donald-trump/

Forgive the foggy memory, for I can’t quite place the sign that announced in carefully painted white-on-black block letters just a single word, ‘BELIEVE’. Tennessee or Kentucky maybe, because the road it was beside wound through narrow valleys and hillsides waiting winter-naked for the first green sheen of the northern spring. And there it was, on the other side of a low fence fronting a roughly cleared plot, this handmade testament to … what exactly? This was in the South, albeit only just below the Mason-Dixon line, where churches large and small are regular as milestones along the way and almost as common.  Around the next turn, no doubt, there would be another little billboard instructing the passerby where belief is best invested, with Jesus or the Bible seeming most likely. But there was nothing, no second sign to deliver the expected one-two punchline. Just ‘Believe’, and that was that.

Until an oncoming 18-wheeler switched the focus to evasive driving and self-preservation, it was a riddle to occupy for a mile or two the thoughts of a solitary motorist. What species of rustic obsessive would go to such trouble and for what purpose? Today, though, with some seven months to run before the 2024 election and a criminal trial like no other getting under way, belief for the sake of believing seems almost to make sense. To abandon the comfort of delusion would mean chewing over some deeply unpalatable truths, not least about the full machinery of the law being deployed in the selective and unprecedented prosecution of one man, a former president and current White House contender.

But believe what you want to believe. Everyone is doing it, and why not? Your ‘truth’ is as valid as that of the next they, zim or zey. If the facts disagree, if the evidence contradicts, well there’s the handy expedient of not really being required to care too much. You have your belief and that’s enough. An eager willingness to believe the unbelievable, it’s all that’s needed anywhere and everywhere. The more what is obvious and unhidden goes unremarked and unquestioned, the better for a troubled nation’s peace of mind, at least in the short term.

At the New York Times such belief demands what is unfolding in a southern Manhattan courtroom be painted as a triumph for American fair play, as laid out in a recent editorial built upon a believer’s ‘truth’ that, as usual, simply isn’t true:  “Donald Trump, who relentlessly undermined the justice system while in office,”  the editorial begins. No examples of Trump’s alleged perfidy, no names or cases are cited, and certainly there is no mention of the many harassing and vexatious lawsuits brought against Trump, for that might ruffle what the Times prefers to perceive and present as a moral crusade in which its editorial voice speaks for all the noble traditions of courtroom probity and decorum. Trump, the leader column assures the core readers its authors know are equally eager to believe, “is enjoying the same protections and guarantees of fairness and due process before the law that he sought to deny to others during his term.”

Israel Is Not Committing ‘Genocide’ in Gaza By Danielle Pletka & Sahar Soleimany

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/israel-is-not-committing-genocide-in-gaza/

The accusation has a malicious ulterior motive: advancing antisemitism.

In the months since Hamas’s October 7 attacks, there has been a full-force campaign to frame Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza as a genocide. And it’s not just an accusation pushed by the extreme Left. This is a campaign endorsed by foreign governments, international organizations, the media, and even elected U.S. officials. But why? It’s not simply that Israel’s actions in Gaza fail to meet the legal standard of genocide, but that other wars on a single population — Bashar al-Assad’s on Syrian Sunnis, the Chinese Communist Party’s on Muslim Uyghurs — stir no similar outrage. There’s a name for that double standard: antisemitism.

“Genocide” has a definition in law. For Israel’s actions to meet the legal criteria of genocide, there must be evidence of more than just a high casualty count or the leveling of property. Per the United Nations, genocide requires an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” As statements by Israeli officials have made clear, their intentions in Gaza are limited to eliminating Hamas’s operational capacity and bringing home hostages. (Hamas, however, has openly declared its intent to wipe out Israel and the Jewish people. Just read their charter.)

Any proper debate about genocide first requires understanding the casualties in Gaza, because whom Israel targets — and how — determines the legitimacy of the war effort. The only source of data on casualty figures has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health, which claims that 70 percent of the more than 30,000 people who have died are women and children. Despite mounting evidence that the health ministry’s numbers are statistically impossible, they continue to be legitimized by the U.S. government and widely distributed by mainstream media, and have even been used to discredit the Israel Defense Forces’ own statistics on eliminated Hamas combatants. West Point’s John Spencer, the premier expert on urban warfare, has repeatedly stated that the precautions Israel has taken to prevent civilian harm throughout this war — including during last month’s raid of al-Shifa Hospital, in which the IDF killed or captured hundreds of Hamas fighters — not only surpasses that of any military in history, including our own, but goes above and beyond what is required by international law.

Why Is Judge Juan Merchan Refusing to Honor Trump’s Due-Process Rights? Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/why-is-judge-juan-merchan-refusing-to-honor-trumps-due-process-rights/

The principal duty of judges in the United States is to protect Americans from government overreach. Judge Merchan is doing the opposite.

I observed in a post this week that, compared to some of Donald Trump’s other recent complaints about Judge Juan Merchan, there is more substance to his grousing about the judge’s denial of his request that the trial be adjourned for a day so that he may be in attendance at the United States Supreme Court next Thursday, April 25. That’s the day the justices will hear argument on the question of whether the former president has immunity from prosecution in the 2020 election-interference indictment brought in Washington, D.C., by Biden Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith.

There are competing legal and practical considerations here.

Practically speaking, if I’m a Trump appellate lawyer, I would prefer that he not come to the Supreme Court argument. I don’t think the justices would appreciate the spectacle. I am thinking in particular of the three justices Trump appointed (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett), who would inevitably be on the receiving end of looney left-wing bloviating that Trump was in attendance for the purpose of pressuring them — bloviating helped along, naturally, by Trump lawyer/flack Alina Habba’s clueless remark in January, in connection with Colorado’s effort to remove Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause, that Kavanaugh would “step up” for Trump because the former president “fought for” his nomination and “went through hell to get [him] into place” on the Court.

CDC Demonstrates Failure of Public Health Management of the COVID-19 Pandemic Dr. Harvey Risch

https://johnhabelesmd.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=8t06w&next=https%3A%2F%2Fjohnhabelesmd.substack.com%2Fp%2Fcdc-shows-failure-of-public-measures&utm_medium=email

In so many words—and data—CDC has quietly admitted that all of the indignities of the Covid-19 pandemic management have failed: the masks, the distancing, the lockdowns, the closures, especially the vaccines, all of it failed to control the pandemic.  It’s not like we didn’t know that all this was going to fail, because we said so as events unfolded early on in 2020, that the public health management of this respiratory virus was almost completely opposite to principles that had been well established through the influenza period, in 2006.  The spread of a new virus with replication factor R0 of about 3, with more than one million cases across the country by April 2020, with no potentially virus-sterilizing vaccine in sight for at least several months, almost certainly made this infection eventually endemic and universal.

Covid-19 starts as an annoying, intense, uncomfortable flu-like illness, and for most people, ends uneventfully two-three weeks later.  Thus, management of the Covid-19 pandemic should not have relied upon counts of cases or infections, but on numbers of deaths, numbers of people hospitalized or with serious long-term outcomes of the infection, and of serious health, economic and psychological damages caused by the actions and policies made in response to the pandemic, in that order of decreasing priorities.  Even though numbers of Covid cases correlate with these severe manifestations, that is not a justification for case numbers to be used as the actionable measure, because Covid-19 infection mortality is estimated to range below 0.1% in the mean across all ages, and post-infection immunity provides a public good in protecting people from severe reinfection outcomes for the great majority who do not get serious “long-Covid” on first infection.

Ruthie Blum: Blinken’s Willful Blindness

https://www.jns.org/blinkens-willful-blindness/

Though it’s almost blasphemous to mention the Abraham Accords and the Oct. 7 massacre in the same sentence, the two have something important in common. Both exposed the lie that the “path to peace” must pass through Ramallah and Gaza City.

The first illustrated that previously hostile Arab and other Muslim-majority states—with modernization and self-preservation against the common threat of a nuclearized Iran in mind—were ripe for mutually beneficial ties with Israel.

The second proved, as if any additional evidence were required, that the road to hell—like that leading to the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust—was never paved with good intentions; it has been tarred all along by Islamist ill will and evil Palestinian deeds.

To Israel’s peril and America’s detriment, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden never internalized the former and has yet to acknowledge the latter. As soon as it took office, it began to undermine the historic agreements brokered by former President Donald Trump between Israel and the Gulf states.

At the Negev Summit in March 2022 in Sde Boker, where then-Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid hosted his Bahraini, Egyptian, Moroccan and Emirati counterparts, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that “regional peace agreements are not a substitute for peace with the Palestinians.”

His resuscitation of this false premise was bad enough, especially as it coincided with an uptick in Palestinian terrorism in the streets of Israeli cities. But the fact that the overall context was Team Biden’s attempt to revive the nuclear deal with Iran from which Trump had withdrawn made it all the more significant.

This example of a disastrous foreign policy born of a disconnect from reality isn’t ancient history, by the way. The gathering in question took place a mere year and a half before Palestinian butchers broke through the Gaza border fence, raping, beheading, immolating and mutilating at least 1,200 Israelis (and foreigners), while abducting 250 others.