RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you have to choose one aspect of the liberal worldview to hate the most, it should be that impulse to blame bad, negative reactions to sound policy on the sound policy, rather than the bad actor.

To put it in fewer words, we can’t change what we do out of fear of reprisal. Well, we shouldn’t anyway.

It’s funny that this concept is not entirely lost on our friends on the left or our betters in the press. After a terror attack, much lip service is given to the continuation of daily life—to not change who we are or what we do in order to placate evil. But it only seems to apply, for them, to mundane things like attending concerts or trips to the ballpark.

If it’s sound foreign policy or acting in our own national interest that angers a terrorist or terror-supporting regime, however, then suddenly, “blame the victim” becomes all the rage. That’s where Chris Cuomo’s question on Friday morning comes in. CONTINUE AT SITE

Gatestone Institute, far from being “anti-Muslim”, is pro-Muslim. Gatestone does not want to see Muslims deprived of freedom of speech, flogged or stoned to death for supposed adultery. Gatestone is also opposed to “honor” killings, children forced into marriages; homosexuals flogged or killed, and so on. Is one to assume that NBC and its followers do want to see these abuses? Good to know.

Gatestone is, however, openly committed to educating the public about an aspect of Islam, namely Sharia law, which, according to the European Court of Human Rights and others, is incompatible with liberal democracy.

NBC states that Russian trolls tweeted a total of four Gatestone articles — out of more than 200,000 tweets identified by Twitter as being linked to Russian accounts. By way of comparison, the database shows that Russian trolls tweeted seven articles from Heidi Przybyla, the author of the NBC report.

A search of articles on Sputnik, the Russian government-controlled news agency, turns up 1,650 pages of NBC citations. “If getting retweeted 4 times makes you a Russian spy, NBC must be the Kremlin.” — Daniel Greenfield, journalist

The crimes are being played down by German authorities, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments. The director of the Criminal Police Association (Bund Deutscher Kriminalbeamter, BDK), André Schulz, estimates that up to 90% of the sex crimes committed in Germany do not appear in the official statistics.

NBC’s claims are based on truths, half-truths and untruths all woven together and framed in way not only to misrepresent Gatestone’s work, but also to destroy its reputation and that of others.

In what has been described as a desperate attempt “to keep the failing Russiagate conspiracy theory alive,” NBC News has published a false and defamatory report about Gatestone Institute. The article, originally published on April 23, 2018, has since been has been altered online several times.

The original report libels Gatestone Institute as an “anti-Muslim think tank” that is “part of an echo chamber that includes Russian media.” It is the NBC report, however, that seems to be part of an “echo chamber” to damage and delegitimize the current, duly elected, administration — and anyone ever associated with it — while using Gatestone Institute as a tool do that.

NBC’s report begins with an iteration of the Russia-Trump collusion story: that Gatestone’s former chairman, Ambassador John Bolton, now U.S. National Security Advisor, who has described Russia’s attempts to undermine the U.S. election as an act of war, was affiliated with “a nonprofit that has promoted misleading and false anti-Muslim news, some of which was amplified by a Russian troll factory,” implying that he was somehow colluding with Russia to spread anti-Muslim propaganda. NBC initially provides no evidence for this claim, but buried deep inside the article it asserts that, according to its “exclusive database,” Russian trolls tweeted a total of four Gatestone articles — out of more than 200,000 tweets identified by Twitter as being linked to Russian accounts. Bolton, on the contrary, is usually criticized for having hawkish views on Russia.

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”

I was meeting with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin; and their spouses in a Los Angeles restaurant to talk about how they were turned into heretics. A decade ago, they argued, when Donald Trump was still hosting “The Apprentice,” none of these observations would have been considered taboo.

Today, people like them who dare venture into this “There Be Dragons” territory on the intellectual map have met with outrage and derision — even, or perhaps especially, from people who pride themselves on openness.

It’s a pattern that has become common in our new era of That Which Cannot Be Said. And it is the reason the Intellectual Dark Web, a term coined half-jokingly by Mr. Weinstein, came to exist.

What is the I.D.W. and who is a member of it? It’s hard to explain, which is both its beauty and its danger.

Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.The closest thing to a phone book for the I.D.W. is a sleek website that lists the dramatis personae of the network, including Mr. Harris; Mr. Weinstein and his brother and sister-in-law, the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers. But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.

Her latest piece has the Left rattled.

It happens intermittently, without warning, on no fixed schedule. First: eerie wails in the distance. Then comes the rustle of terrified feet, soon growing into the low roar of a stampede. The faces of the tormented show a mixture of hostility, disbelief, and confusion. Thomas Pynchon captured the mood in his famous description of the V-2 rocket attacks on London, at the start of Gravity’s Rainbow: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” This week the screaming across the skies of the Internet could mean only one thing: Another Bari Weiss column had arrived.

Some right-leaning writers are provocateurs, but Weiss, a New York Times columnist and editor, is not Kevin Williamson or Ben Shapiro. She writes reasonable, even-tempered essays from a commonsense perspective. In her latest, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” a profile of a loosely affiliated group of public intellectuals from left and right who don’t share much in common except for a belief that ideas should be freely discussed, you’d be hard-pressed to identify a single point that’s outrageous or even controversial.

The media has never shown much interest in Hillary and the DNC laundering over $10 million in campaign funds through a law firm to hide the purpose of creating a fake dossier. Instead, the media is having a collective orgasm about a porn star and a $130,000 payment.

The $130,000 payment appears to be pure blackmail about an unverified seven hour rendezvous that occurred in 2006. Why did Stephanie Clifford, who went by the name Stormy Daniels when having sex on camera for money, wait until less than one month before the election to come forward?

Do people think that if Stormy Daniels had much information that it would have only cost $130,000?

Can the media think of any other porn star who has been treated as pure as the driven snow by the media because of one unsubstantiated claim of a seven-hour rendezvous 12 years ago?

I want to know if Stormy claimed the $130,000 as income on her 2016 tax return. If not, she is a felon but no journalist seems to be interested.

Why hasn’t the media asked the porn star if she kept track of all her encounters with men in such a detailed manner, and if she has had the occasion to extort money from others?

The New York Times published an op-ed Monday with the headline “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!” The piece was festooned with a celebratory exclamation mark, as though the mere declaration needed that something extra, like a Broadway production (“Mama Mia!”) or television game show (“Jeopardy!”).

The piece was written by Jason Barker, who is an associate professor of philosophy (!) at Kyung Hee University in South Korea. He’s also the author of the novel “Marx Returns,” so he writes fan fiction as well. In his article, Barker triumphantly declares Marx’s legacy to be a success because “countless books have appeared, from scholarly works to popular biographies, broadly endorsing Marx’s reading of capitalism and its enduring relevance to our neoliberal age.”

He then proceeds to describe the Marxist states which emerged primarily in the 20th century as “ironic,” based solely on the idea that Marx endorsed a concept in which there was no need for a state at all. How then does he explain the tenets of the “Communist Manifesto” in which industry, wealth, property, and even the lives of children should belong to the people as a whole? He doesn’t. This is philosophy where no explanation is needed. For someone who seems to be a fan of irony, he either overlooked or discarded the very definition of the term “state.”

But irony can be easy to miss. Indeed, as Barker’s article was being made ready for publication, a Marxist dictator was stepping across the 38th parallel into the very country where the professor teaches, in an historic event heralding yet another potential collapse of a communist regime.

As so many have done before him, Barker labors under the false assumption that communism has never truly been attempted in its purest form, and thus the term as well as the definition cannot be ascribed to failed states such as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the German Democratic Republic, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

More irony: Marxist dictatorships labeled themselves “republics.”

Jason Zengerle publicly announced his profile of Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine with the snarky tweet, “My latest for the @NYTmag on Devin Nunes, who’s been propagating, not to mention falling for, conspiracy theories since before the Deep State was even in a gleam in Donald Trump’s eye.”

It’s an accurate summation of the hit he attempted to place on Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). The only problem is the case he attempts to make is riddled with errors and full of embarrassing and deliberate material omissions.

For example, Zengerle writes that a “suspicious” Nunes was wrong to believe that “Obama administration officials were ignoring evidence in a cache of documents collected from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, showing that Al Qaeda was much stronger than the administration publicly contended.” Zengerle says Nunes’ predecessor as chairman of the intel committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, agreed with Obama officials’ assessment and told Nunes the documents Defense Intelligence Agency officials were analyzing at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., showed nothing significant on that score.

“But Nunes wasn’t convinced. On a Saturday in May 2013, he flew from Washington to Tampa and paid a visit to Centcom headquarters himself, where he demanded to meet with the analysts reviewing the documents, in the hope of uncovering evidence of Al Qaeda’s strength—and an Obama administration cover-up,” Zengerle writes. “But after a meeting with the Army major general who headed Centcom’s intelligence wing, Nunes came back to Washington empty-handed.”

No matter how you feel about Donald Trump or the Washington-based journalists who cover him, you should be angered by what was offered Saturday as entertainment at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Michelle Wolf, recently of Comedy Central and soon to have her own series on Netflix , was foul-mouthed about Mr. Trump and downright cruel about members of his administration, several of whom were in the room. Worse, though it proved to be beside the point, she wasn’t funny.

“Trump is so broke,” she quipped, that “Southwest used him as one of their engines.”

She called Vice President Mike Pence a “weirdo”: “He thinks abortion is murder, which, first of all, don’t knock it till you try it. And when you do try it, really knock it. You know, you got to get that baby out of there.”

Ms. Wolf’s material—most of which was laced with too much profanity to print here—wasn’t about the First Amendment, as some suggested. Nor was it about the #MeToo movement, which she attempted at one point to hide behind. It was simply a Saturday Night Massacre of dignity and common sense.

It helped prove two unfortunate truths: First, the notion of having working journalists dress up for “nerd prom,” as they call it, and fawn over celebrity guests while listening to a hired comic roast the officials they cover each day was never a good idea. Now, in the freewheeling age of social media, it’s completely bankrupt.

Second, Mr. Trump was right to skip the event. No reasonable person, even among his harshest critics, would have expected him to sit through this. CONTINUE AT SITE