RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theepochtimes.com/notre-dame-what-happened_2881890.html
Even as fires raged and consumed Notre Dame uncontrollably before the crying eyes of the world, the narrative was being carefully constructed in its newsrooms. Had to be an accident, most likely. Just one of those things, probably. Renovation work was going on, dontcha know. There must have been a spark in the attic and, whoosh, Notre Dame was aflame.

Maybe that is exactly what happened. However, there was something doubly nightmarish about watching not one, but two Fox News anchors (Shepard Smith and Neil Cavuto) prevent guests from discussing a spate of recent attacks, including arson, on Catholic churches in France lest some logical discussion of the possibility that we were looking at an epic attack of anti-Catholic or anti-Christian arson might ensue—and you know where that goes.

Given what we have all been through as veterans of the jihad, lo, these nearly 18 years, it’s the pathetic height of absurdity to try to stop a rational being from wondering whether there is an Islamic connection to the burning of Notre Dame—amid all of the other possibilities, including criminal negligence on an epic scale. Maybe Pierre the Electrician went off duty after a hard day’s work renovating Notre Dame yesterday, lit a Gauloise Brune, and tossed his match into some 17th century Gazettes de France heaped on the 13th century floorboards in the medieval attic—and the rest is tragedy. But maybe not.

The mainstream media can bring the conflagration “live” into our lives, burning a new scene of the last days of the West into our consciousness, but they won’t let us process it outside of their politically planted poles of “thought.” Inside their televised “safe space,” analysis is politically correct, sharia compliant, and led not by any sort of inquiring minds, but by functionaries following the playbook they were handed down from the front office.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/anti-socialists-make-the-time-100-trump-venezuelas-guaido-and-brazils-bolsonaro/

On Wednesday, TIME Magazine named the 100 most influential people, and three prominent opponents of radical socialist policies made the list. President Donald Trump has famously declared that the United States “will never become a socialist country.” Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has reversed socialism in his country, and Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó is challenging the authoritarian Nicolás Maduro.

Each of these leaders has a positive profile in the TIME 100. Former Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) praises Donald Trump for his foreign policy. Ian Bremmer hails Bolsonaro as a force against corruption, even while warning about what Bremmer sees as his “ultraconservative” dangers. Former Colombian President Juan Miguel Santos praises the courage of Juan Guaidó.

None of these profiles mentions the anti-socialism activism of these powerful leaders, but each of them has made important strides for freedom in their countries.

Trump has cut taxes, benefitting a broad swath of the American people and boosting the economy. He has also worked to free Americans from some of the excessive regulations of the bureaucratic state.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/273486/protocols-elders-washington-post-daniel-greenfield

The entire Khashoggi case is another reminder of just how thoroughly the media has mainstreamed not only Islamic terrorism, but anti-Semitism. The two beasts tend to go together. Where you’ll find Islamist activism, you’ll usually find anti-Semitism. Legitimizing one requires also legitimizing the other.

At the Jerusalem Post, Seth Franzman dug into Jamal Khashoggi’s Twitter history to find explicit anti-Semitic sentiments.

The late Saudi Arabian journalist, editor and kingdom-insider Jamal Khashoggi, writing on Twitter from 2011 until 2018, said Jews had no roots in historical Palestine, that one must know how to speak to Jews when meeting them, and that Jews were conspiring to divide al-Aqsa Mosque. The tweets, still online as of April 14, show a pattern of anti-Jewish views that even hinted at references to the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and complained that the West had laws preventing Holocaust denial.

Khashoggi also showed some genuine interest in the makeup of Israel, tweeting in June 2011 about the role of Iranian Jews in the country. In a tweet that same month, he wrote about the “desperation of the Jews to deny the Protocols.”

On September 13, 2012, he tweeted, “If this was skeptical of the Holocaust, America would not allow it to be published, because the Jews succeeded in obtaining a law that would prevent it in America and Europe.” There is no such law in the US preventing Holocaust denial, but Khashoggi used the false claim to attack Jews.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/liberal-media-bias-jussie-smollett-robert-mueller/

Covington, Smollett, Mueller, Avenatti, and other adventures in unreality.

I used to laugh every time I heard someone like Elon Musk say that we are living in a Matrix-like simulation. These days, not so much.

Don’t call the funny farm just yet. On the major question of the nature of sense experience, I remain with Aristotle and against Bishop Berkeley. Matter is real. But there is also the question of how we perceive “the news”; how established media institutions present and frame information; how we are supposed to respond to the “takes” purportedly expert and knowledgeable voices serve up to us by the second on social media. And here, I’m skeptical.

It’s hard not to be. Think of the headlines we’ve encountered since the beginning of this year. We were told the Covington Catholic boys were smug racist Trump supporters on the basis of a snippet of video. A young man, a private citizen, whose only offense was traveling to Washington, D.C., to march for life, was transformed at light speed into a symbol of hate and systemic oppression. However, just as Nick Sandmann’s reputation as a villain was about to set in stone, additional videos revealed that the students’ encounter with a far-left American Indian activist and the Black Hebrew Israelites was far more complicated than initially reported. The Covington Catholic boys had been smeared. People who cast themselves as agents of professional knowledge, expertise, and moral authority had circulated and amplified a lie in the service of a political agenda. Not for the first nor last time.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/11/boston-globe-op-ed-urges-waiters-tamper-trump-officials-food/

Luke O’Neil’s opinion article in Wednesday’s Boston Globe opens lamenting a missed opportunity to adulterate political foe Bill Kristol’s meal with urine and blood. He ends with a half-baked “joke,” telling waiters they would be “serving America” by tampering with soon-to-be-former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s food.

“As for the waiters out there, I’m not saying you should tamper with anyone’s food, as that could get you into trouble. You might lose your serving job,” O’Neil says, cleverly building in some plausible deniability. “But you’d be serving America. And you won’t have any regrets years later,” he concludes, leaving less-than-stable readers to interpret and act on this advice as they may.

Some might argue that O’Neil’s words were tongue-in-cheek: “He’s obviously not really suggesting waiters should poison her. It’s a joke!” “After all, he specifically said they shouldn’t tamper with anyone’s food.”

I would argue that O’Neil, a seasoned writer, communicated his intent quite clearly. He expressed regret over his own missed opportunity for fantasized revenge and suggested others finding themselves in a similar position would do well to strike while the iron is hot. And remember, bodily fluids aren’t just gross, they can carry diseases.

O’Neil took to Twitter on Wednesday afternoon to clarify his stance for his 36,000 followers.

“People who carry out policies of ethnic cleansing or cheerlead for disastrous wars leading to tens of thousands suffering or dead should not expect to be able to show their faces in public anymore thank you for understanding this basic premise,” said O’Neil in a tweeted response to conservative pundit Caleb Hull’s criticism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/273437/media-got-israeli-election-completely-wrong-daniel-greenfield

It ain’t over till the fat lady sings, but unless things change dramatically, Prime Minister Netanyahu is likely to form Israel’s next government. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Anyone studying the electoral math of Israel’s next government, one that is based on coalitions, not direct elections, would have had trouble coming to any other conclusion. While two startup right-wing parties appear to have committed the usual egocentric folly of wasting votes by failing to meet the threshold, as did the bizarre Gesher, the numbers are on the side of the right.

Only once the exit polls had begun coming in, did the media slowly tilt toward reporting a likely Netanyahu victory, but even so headlines covered Benny Gantz’s silly victory speech and depicted the results as a rebuke.

Considering that Likud’s numbers appear to be better than they have in a while, that’s some rebuke.

Israel’s political system (like those of most free countries) is somewhat weird. It’s understandable that the media might have trouble grasping it. But the media appeared not to care, taking its signals from those lefty Israeli reporters willing to tell it what it wanted to hear.

And this keeps happening in every Israeli election. Each time, Netanyahu’s victory is implausible and unimaginable until it actually happens.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-8-income-inequality-comes-roaring-back-into-the-news

With the demise of the Russian collusion hoax, you knew that something would have to emerge to fill the giant hole in the newspapers and the TV news shows. It looks like the old perennial of “income inequality,” after some time mostly off the front pages, is now the first mantra to be found rushing in to fill the vacuum.

So there we had Ray Dalio — serious mega-billionaire and Co-Chairman of the country’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates — showing up on CBS’s “60 Minutes” yesterday to proclaim that income inequality is a “national emergency”:

“If I was the president of the United States,” Dalio said, “what I would do is recognize that this is a national emergency. . . .” “The American dream is lost,” he said. “For the most part we don’t even talk about what is the American dream. And it’s very different from when I was growing up.”

Simultaneously, Mr. Progressive himself, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, turned up in Nevada (of all places) to promote his self-delusional presidential campaign, and chose income inequality as his theme. From today’s New York Post:

[T]here needs to be a “bigger discussion about income inequality and oppression of other groups including Latinos, Native Americans, Asian and women,” he said at the event organized by the immigrant advocacy group Make the Road.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273410/ilhan-omar-american-journalism-bruce-bawer

I first became aware of Lorraine Ali over a decade ago, when, as a staff writer at Newsweek, she cruelly savaged another Ali, namely Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who, like Lorraine, had a Muslim background, but who, unlike Lorraine, had (on 9/11) rejected her faith, courageously calling it out for its ideology of brutal conquest, its systematic subjugation of women, its inculcation of contempt for the infidel, its endorsement of such primitive practices as honor killing and forced marriage, and its prescription of the death penalty for apostasy, adultery, homosexuality, and other transgressions. In her memoir, Infidel, Ayaan (who, owing to jihadist threats, has lived for years with round-the-clock bodyguards) recounted her rise from dire poverty and barbaric oppression in Somalia and Saudi Arabia to a seat in the Dutch legislature, where, defying dhimmi colleagues, she eulogized Western freedoms and stood up for the rights and equality of Muslim women – thereby becoming, for many of us, a world-class heroine.

For Lorraine, however, the L.A.-born daughter of an Iraqi immigrant, Ayaan was, and is, a traitor against a religion that routinely romanticizes; hence, in her review of Infidel on February 26, 2007, Lorraine accused Ayaan of “throwing a rhetorical hand grenade” at Islam – thereby providing, as I wrote in my 2009 book Surrender, “a good example of how anti-jihadist rhetoric is described in violent terms by the same kinds of journalists who, when describing jihad itself, opt for delicate euphemisms.”