RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/facebook-audit-results-rile-liberals-and-conservatives/

Results of a Facebook audit released Tuesday, finding that the social media company has “significant work” to do to satisfy concerns from conservatives, are drawing criticism from both liberals and conservatives alike.

The eight-page report, authored by former Sen. Jon Kyl with Covington law firm in consultation with 133 conservative organizations, was inconclusive on whether the platform was biased in suppressing conservative views. The report, however, was written in a manner aiming to ease criticism of the company from Republicans and President Donald Trump, who often charge that the tech giant is part of a greater movement among large tech companies in Silicon Valley stifling conservative ideas on the internet.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has been the leading Republican senator pushing for greater federal regulation of big tech, slammed the report as a “smokescreen disguised as a solution.”

Hawley proposed legislation in June stripping social media companies such as Facebook of liability protections granted under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act unless they consented to an external audit to prove political neutrality.

The Missouri senator argued the Kyl and Covington audit was whitewash and far from thorough, as the report was essentially a compilation of interviews. “Merely asking somebody to listen to conservatives’ concerns isn’t an audit,” Hawley said.

“Facebook should conduct an actual audit by giving a trusted third party access to its algorithm, its key documents, and its content moderation protocols,” Hawley said in a statement Tuesday. “Then Facebook should release its results to the public.”

Other conservatives have been critical of Kyl’s report.

Brent Bozell, the president of Media Research Center, a conservative nonprofit dedicated to exposing bias in the media, claimed the Facebook report released this week was “empty and insulting.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/08/20/cnns_wajahat_ali_white_supremacists_are_coming_for_all_of_us_trump_will_not_win.html

CNN contributor Wajahat Ali is asked what if “the squad” — the four Congresswomen led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — used the same “anti-Semitic trope” that President Trump did Tuesday when he said Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats are disloyal. Ali, a Muslim, said Muslims are with Jews and they will not be divided by race or religion.

“So, what I’m telling everyone today is a very radical idea that Donald Trump is a racist president. He’s also an anti-Semitic president. He promotes white supremacist talking points,” Ali said Tuesday on ‘CNN Tonight’ with host Don Lemon.”We’re going unite, we’re going to have our disagreements about Israel,” Ali said of his newfound Jewish-Muslim brotherhood. “That’s fine. But we’re going to unite against the common threat that is coming against all of us which is white supremacy and Donald Trump, you will not win.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274692/media-lies-about%C2%A0trumps-comments-about-jews-who-daniel-greenfield

THE PRESIDENT’S EXACT WORDS: “I can’t even believe that we’re having this conversation. Five years ago, the concept of even talking about this, even 3 years ago, of cutting off aid to Israel because of 2 people that hate Israel and hate Jewish people. I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. Where has the Democratic Party gone? Where have they gone where they’re defending these 2 people over the state of Israel? I think that any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”

Two House Dems decided to go on a trip organized by Miftah, an anti-Semitic hate group.

Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib’s since-canceled trip to Israel was sponsored by Miftah, an exceptionally anti-Semitic group that praises Palestinian terrorists and claims Jews used the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover. The organization also publishes Neo-Nazis and calls for the destruction of Israel.

And the mainstream media not only covered for Miftah and defended Omar and Tlaib, but raised a ruckus that the Jewish State had the temerity to deny the bigots entry.

Then Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib retweeted a cartoon by a bigot who had submitted a cartoon to Iran’s Holocaust cartoon contest.

Again, the media shrugged and looked away from their anti-Semitism, while celebrating them as heroes and victims.

But now, finally the media discovered “anti-Semitism”.

Trump Accuses Jewish Democrats of ‘Great Disloyalty’ – New York Times

Trump: Jewish people who vote Democratic show ‘great disloyalty’ – NBC

etc, you know the rest.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-conservatives-dont-trust-facebook-11566309603

From the Ivy League to Hollywood and the mainstream media, Americans with traditional morals or conservative politics have often felt excluded from the country’s elite, culture-creating institutions. Facebook offered an alternative: a place to express views and share news that you couldn’t find in the New York Times.

Over time, however, many conservatives lost trust in Facebook, believing it discriminated against them. The increasing scale and complexity of Facebook’s content-moderation practices made matters worse. In 2016 Facebook employees were accused of suppressing conservative articles in the news feed’s now-discontinued “trending” section. In April 2018 Congress grilled Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg about anticonservative bias, from blocked content to suspended accounts.

In response to mounting criticism, Facebook asked me to conduct a survey to hear from conservatives directly. Following substantial public interest in the project and in light of policy changes Facebook has recently made, we have decided to share our findings at this time.

Facebook placed no restrictions on how I could conduct the work. My team at the law firm Covington & Burling LLP began conducting interviews in May 2018. We cast a wide net to include as many aspects of conservatism as possible—from organizations focused on Christian values or protecting free expression to those focused on tax policy and small government. We identified individuals, groups and lawmakers who either use, study or could potentially regulate Facebook, and interviewed 133 of them. To encourage them to speak freely, we told interviewees we wouldn’t publish their identities. We presented our preliminary findings to Facebook in early August 2018 and have been discussing them with the company ever since.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-york-times-1619-project-leaves-out/

“The goal of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The New York Times that this issue of the magazine inaugurates, is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year,” The New York Times Magazine editors declare. “Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”

The scale of the opening offering is massive by the standards of modern journalism: 100 pages (with a few ads), ten essays, a photo essay, and a collection of original poems and stories from 16 additional writers.

But the 1619 Project’s effort to “reframe American history” requires cropping out some significant figures in African-American history. Perhaps no near-100-page collection of essays, poems and photos could cover every significant figure in African-American history, but the number of prominent figures who never even get mentioned or who get only the most cursory treatment is pretty surprising.

Early in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay, she reiterates the important point, “in every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.” The name Crispus Attucks is mentioned three times, but he is, as far as I can tell, the lone black Revolutionary War combatant mentioned. James Armistead was a spy for Lafayette who had access to General Cornwallis’s headquarters. Back in 1996, the New York Times wrote about the First Rhode Island Regiment, who fought at Newport and Pine’s Bridge, and in a regrouped form, Yorktown. By one account, one-quarter of the American forces at the battle of Yorktown were black. The 1619 Project does not mention the Battle of Yorktown.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/19/the-new-york-times-is-the-trump-hate-drug-kingpin/

If Russian collusion has been the opiate of the Trump-hating masses for more than two years, the New York Times was one of its biggest suppliers.

Since late 2016, desperate to drown their sorrows over Donald Trump’s shocking win, political junkies on the Left and NeverTrump Right eased their inner pain with a daily collusion fix injected courtesy of the Gray Lady. With one click on the front page or opinion section, Times’ readers could satisfy their anti-Trump addiction while making them feel, if only for a few fleeting moments, powerful and in control.

Pain would give way to rage, then a false sense of hope. Surely the man installed by Vladimir Putin would never serve out his term, they would say to themselves while feeding their insatiable craving. And just as the high wore off, the Times would offer another hit, provoking hallucinations about Trump and his corrupt family being hauled out of the White House in handcuffs by Robert Mueller.

So, in a way, you can’t blame the Times for obsessively covering the fabricated Trump-Russia collusion storyline. It’s what successful drug dealers do—keep their customers hooked on a steady drip of dope and desperate for more.

The paper’s executive editor admitted as much during a closed-door meeting with dozens of Times’ reporters on August 11, after a somewhat positive front-page headline about the president enraged Times staff and readers.

The daily supply of Russian collusion dope dried up, but Trump-hating addicts don’t need rehab just yet: The Times is stocking up another toxic potion—white supremacy—to poison the body politic and cure any collusion withdrawal symptoms.

Pivoting to the failed effort to prove that the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians to sway the 2016 election, Dean Baquet confessed his news organization trafficked the collusion drug until it lost its potency.

“The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’ And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think,” Baquet said during a “crisis town hall meeting” at the paper’s headquarters last week.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/08/19/stoking_racial_division_msnbc_does_the_dems_work_141036.html

The Democrats clearly don’t need to spend a dime on the 2020 presidential election campaign when they have almost the entire mainstream media doing free infomercials for them, and with just about the same level of authenticity and reliability as you would expect from those ads for Miss Cleo’s Psychic Friends Network.

It’s hard to know why the networks and cable news channels don’t have to declare their in-kind contributions to the Democratic Party when it is so obvious that their No. 1 goal is getting Donald Trump out of office. You can’t really blame the First Amendment because neither you nor I can make unlimited donations to the candidate of our choice or else it’s called (cue the scary music here) “daarrrrrrk money.” Our political speech is not protected by the First Amendment, so neither should the blatantly biased political speech of phony journalists who are less interested in reporting facts than expressing outrage.

Take this example from last week on MSNBC:

“If it’s Tuesday: Divide and conquer. The White House offers up a few changes to the famous Statue of Liberty poem about immigrants, putting the spotlight once again on the president’s campaign to stoke racial division.”

No. If it’s Tuesday, it’s Kasie Hunt making up stuff on “MTP Daily” to hurt President Trump because Chuck Todd is too busy stroking his own ego to do the job. There, I fixed it.