RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/defiant-federal-judge-calls-out-the-media-democrat-complex/

One D.C. Circuit jurist pulled no punches as he sounded the alarm on ‘one-party control of the press and media.’

‘T he flak only gets heavy when you’re over the target.” This oft-cited World War II fighter-pilot wisdom is the best way to understand the strident reaction to Judge Laurence Silberman, the formidable senior jurist on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, as a result of the dissent he filed in a recent libel case.

In the course of controversially urging the Supreme Court to reconsider the foundation of its modern libel jurisprudence, New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), Judge Silberman had the audacity to notice that the mainstream media function as an adjunct of the Democratic Party. When this development is combined with the activist progressivism of Silicon Valley techies who control social-media platforms, the result, he concluded, is “one-party control of the press and media.” This “threat to a viable democracy” is apt to lead “to countervailing extremism” — hard to argue with that these days.

Silberman’s point was that, without constitutional justification, the Supreme Court’s judicially legislated federalization of libel law substantially enhanced the power of the press. New York Times v. Sullivan supplanted the traditional state common law of defamation with a rule, speciously claimed to be mandated by the First Amendment, that requires defamed public figures to prove actual malice — i.e., to prove that any libelous statements were intentionally false or made with reckless disregard for their falsity. This daunting burden makes it virtually impossible for public figures — including private persons who are transmogrified into celebrities by the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence — to sue successfully, even in cases where they have been slandered with false information.

This might not be a terrible result if the media were scrupulously non-partisan. But once the media and other channels of information exchange become adjuncts of one political party, the Court’s standard creates an incentive to portray the opposition party in the worst light, knowing that any misimpressions thereby created and any reputational damage will not be actionable.

More to the point, whatever one thinks of the policy choice that it is better to encourage more reporting, rather than accurate reporting — such choices are for legislatures to make, not the courts.

https://townhall.com/columnists/larryoconnor/2021/04/02/dr-scott-atlas-just-unloaded-on-fauci-birx-cdc-dir-walensky-and-mask-mandates-n2587330

I just finished an interview with Dr. Scott Atlas. Dr. Atlas was a member of President Donald Trump’s COVID task force. He’s a well-known health care policy advisor, a Senior Fellow at Standford’s Hoover Institution and was Chief of Neuroradiology at the Stanford University Medical Center. 

He’s also been an outspoken critic of the widespread lockdown strategy recommended by Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx and employed by the vast majority of American governors over the past year. 

Generally, when I sit down for an interview with a figure like Dr. Atlas, my goal is to elicit some response or statement that separates this “media hit” from any other interview Dr. Atlas may have committed to. The thought process is: “If I can generate one good headline out of this interview, I’ve done good work.” 

Well, Dr. Atlas went above and beyond here. He is so candid and so direct in his observations and criticisms of his former colleagues and those now directing policy for the Biden White House I’m at a loss as to where to begin. 

One good headline? How about several?  

O’CONNOR: Could you lend a little bit of context to Dr. Fauci taking credit for the vaccine? 

ATLAS: The vaccine development was first initiated by the president’s realization that he was going to do what turned out to be a very smart thing, which was to take the risk away from the company’s developing the vaccines and just paying for hundreds of millions of doses and development and production in advance of them even having the vaccine developed, and that was a smart gamble. But then after that, the point of the development and vaccine distribution and everything was done by other people. 

Dr. Slaoui was in charge of the vaccine development program. General Perna and FEMA and other people were in charge of logistics and distribution planning. Alex Azar the Secretary of HHS and his team were overall in charge of Operation Warp Speed. 

The name that you mentioned earlier is missing from the list of people that were involved in the vaccine. 

O’CONNOR: That’d be Dr. Anthony Fauci. I just want to quote him, “When I saw what happened in New York City almost overrunning our healthcare system, that’s when it became very clear: the decision we made on January 10th to go all out and develop a vaccine may have been the best decision that I’ve ever made with regard to intervention as a director of the institute.” From your first-hand knowledge of this situation, this was not his decision? 

ATLAS: For him to claim credit for that is sort of unconscionable. 

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-disintegration-of-the-aclu-james-kirchick

Think of the American Civil Liberties Union during the last two decades of the 20th century, and a certain type of person invariably comes to mind: shrewd, thick-skinned, and possessed of an unwavering—some might say irritating—commitment to principle. The men and women of the ACLU were liberals in the most honorable, but increasingly obsolescent, meaning of the term. They understood that the measure of democracy lies in the impartial application of its laws, and were prepared to defend anyone whose constitutional rights were trampled upon, irrespective of their political views or the repercussions that mounting such a defense might entail.

The archetypical ACLU figure was also often Jewish, as immortalized in the 2003 Onion story, “ACLU Defends Nazis’ Right to Burn Down ACLU Headquarters.” That joke was based upon the real-life case of National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, wherein the organization represented a group of neo-Nazis who were denied a permit to march through a Chicago suburb that was home to a significant number of Jewish Holocaust survivors. The image of Jewish ACLU attorneys defending the free speech rights of American neo-Nazis was a source of shame for some Jews but pride for many others, a testament to Jewish confidence in the institutions and values of American liberalism. No American minority had reaped more from its faith in the country’s professed commitment to pluralism and tolerance than the Jews, a gift they repaid many times over by supporting the institutions—the universities, the Democratic Party, the ACLU—which upheld them. In the same way Lenny Bruce classified Ray Charles and fruit salad as Jewish (while claiming that “Evaporated milk is goyish even if the Jews invented it”), so the ACLU was seen as scrappy, authentic, and emblematic of an underdog quality. As Bruce might have put it: the ACLU, Jewish; the McCarthyite American Jewish League Against Communism, goyish.

No one embodied that late-20th-century cultural archetype of the fiercely outspoken, intellectual, principled, and Jewish ACLU activist more than Ira Glasser. From his appointment as national executive director in 1978 until his retirement in 2001, Glasser transformed the ACLU from a mom and pop outfit into a “nationwide civil liberties powerhouse,” broadening its mandate to include issues such as sexual orientation discrimination and abortion rights. Through his ubiquitous and spirited media appearances, Glasser became the face of civil liberties in America. When Vice President George H.W. Bush campaigned to succeed his boss in 1988—and spoke like a Connecticut blueblood’s idea of a Texas hayseed—he derided his opponent Michael Dukakis as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.” It was guys like Glasser whom Bush was trying to conjure up in the minds of the voting public.