RUTHFULLY YOURS

At this point in the first Trump administration, the Left’s derangement at the election of an NOKD outsider is already well into the red zone. Exhibit A:

At one point during the online streaming of the game last month, two white announcers for a Forest City radio station, KIOW, began riffing on the Hispanic names of some players from the mildly more diverse community of Eagle Grove. “They’re all foreigners,” said Orin Harris, a longtime announcer; his partner, Holly Jane Kusserow-Smidt, a board operator at the station who was also a third-grade teacher, answered: “Exactly.”

For some people, this is as American as it gets.

Mr. Harris then uttered a term occasionally used these days as a racially charged taunt, or as a braying assertion that the country is being taken back from forces that threaten it. That term is, simply, the surname of the sitting American president.

No, really: the surname of the sitting president is now racist.

Last year’s contentious presidential election gave oxygen to hate. An analysis of F.B.I. crime data by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, found a 26 percent increase in bias incidents in the last quarter of 2016 — the heart of the election season — compared with the same period the previous year. The trend has continued into 2017, with the latest partial data for the nation’s five most populous cities showing a 12 percent increase.

In addition, anti-Muslim episodes have nearly doubled since 2014, according to Brian Levin, the director of the center, which he said has also counted more “mega rallies” by white nationalists in the last two years than in the previous 20. “I haven’t seen anything like this during my three decades in the field,” he said.

One might point on that there have been plenty of Muslim anti-Christian episodes since 2014, including the recent attempted suicide bombing in Times Square, which was “provoked” by the sight of Christmas posters. This creature, an “immigrant” from Bangladesh, was kind enough to confess that he tried to kill Real Americans “for the Islamic State.” Of course, he had to taunt Trump:

The Facebook post, published by his account on Monday morning, read: “Trump you failed to protect your nation.”

Maybe the Times will take that into consideration the next time it’s tempted to run an inflammatory headline like this:

‘Trump, Trump, Trump!’ How a President’s Name Became a Racial Jeer

And what would a Times story be without quoting a couple of its favorite Morning Joe “experts”?

According to several scholars of American history, the invocation of a president’s name as a jaw-jutting declaration of exclusion, rather than inclusion, appears to be unprecedented. “If you’re hunting for historical analogies, I think you’re in virgin territory,” said Jon Meacham, the author of several books about presidents, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Andrew Jackson.

Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, agrees. “If you’re looking at modern presidents, fill in the blank and see if it can be used in the same way,” he said. “You will see it has not. Hoover? Or Eisenhower? Can you imagine a situation like that?”

Shortly after the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes, published a report called “The Trump Effect: The Impact of the 2016 Election on Our Nation’s Schools.” Based on a survey of more than 10,000 educators, it detailed an increase in incidents involving swastikas, Nazi salutes and Confederate flags.

It is a far cry from wearing a button that says “I Like Ike.”

“The message here,” Mr. Beschloss said, “is ‘Trump is going to come and get you — and we support that.’” CONTINUE AT SITE

CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times have ignored sexual harassment allegations against Democratic Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings, whose alleged sexual harassment of a staffer resulted in a $220,000 taxpayer-funded settlement in 2014.http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/15/cnn-wapo-nyt-ignore-top-democrats-220k-sexual-harassment-settlement/

The three outlets have yet to report on the massive settlement to Hastings’ accuser, former committee staffer Winsome Packer, which Roll Call first revealed a week ago on December 8. Packer accused Hastings of making sexual advances, touching her legs and threatening her job. The former staffer said she was “blackballed” for speaking out.

Hastings claimed that he was unaware of the settlement and called the sexual harassment allegations “ludicrous” on Friday.

Two Florida Democrats, Rep. Frederica Wilson and Rep. Lois Frankel, have said they are standing by Hastings, who was cleared by an ethics committee investigation in 2014. Democratic New York Rep. Kathleen Rice previously said that ethics committee investigations are not “real” accountability.

Other Democrats have been able to avoid talking about Hastings’ allegations, thanks to a lack of interest from news organizations like WaPo, the NYT and CNN.

Hastings is one of four congressmen (including three Democrats) who have indicated that they will remain in Congress, despite allegations that they engaged in or covered up sexual harassment or assault.

Democratic New York Rep. Gregory Meeks has similarly avoided scrutiny from the establishment media after The Daily Caller revealed that he allegedly fired a staffer in retaliation after she reported being sexually assaulted at a campaign donor’s business.

Meeks fired the staffer just weeks after she filed a complaint with the Office of Compliance. Meeks admitted that Payne’s firing was unrelated to the quality of her work, according to her lawsuit. The staffer, Andrea Payne, settled with Congress in 2006 after suing over her firing.

Few things are better than watching the media weep in despair as President Trump continues to deliver on his promises. One of those things, however, is watching as the intellectually honest among them are forced to admit that he is winning.

And that is exactly what has been happening in recent weeks. Two of the largest and most biased media outlets, marching through vales of tears, admitted that President Trump, arguably, has kept more of his promises than any President in modern history.

The first of these delicious offerings is CNN’s “Donald Trump — Keeper of Promises.” Then, like an early Christmas present, came the second piece in the Huffington Post: “Sadly, Trump is Winning.”

Both articles highlight all of Trump’s major accomplishments and track how closely they line up to his promises on the campaign trail. And both delineate his accomplishments as occasion for lamentations which, of course, cannot ring as anything other than delightful music in the ears of Trump supporters.

CNN talks about how Trump has made good on his word to withdraw from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Paris Agreement, while also swiftly moving to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and de-certify the Iran Deal. These were all bad deals for our country that Trump promised supporters he would renegotiate, and he is doing that. After fighting the courts for months, his travel ban has finally been fully implemented. Most recently, of course, he made the bold move of declaring Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel, much to the chagrin of the globalist elite and Islamists around the world. GDP growth has been soaring at levels of 3 percent or higher for the last several quarters, and the stock market continues to reach for the sky, with its latest milestone being 24,000.

The Huffington Post piece makes clear, even in the title, that Trump’s success is an occasion for their mourning; yet even they can no longer deny that by Trump’s metrics, he is winning. HuffPo focuses on how Trump recently succeeded in having his OMB Director, Mick Mulvaney, take over the controversial, Obama-era Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), after its former director Richard Cordray resigned. Mulvaney quickly acted and removed many of the Obama-appointed CFPB personnel. Trump himself continues to fill up judicial vacancies with judges who, on average, are rather young and very conservative, from the same mold as Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Most recently, the GOP’s tax cut bill advanced through the Senate, and now faces the last few hurdles in the conference committee as it appears fairly likely to head over to President Trump’s desk.

Turn on CNN at any hour of the day and there will be frowning talking heads reading teleprompter conspiracy theories about President Trump.

Where do all these theories even come from?

Some of them are generated by the small number of media outlets, CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times, that still have enough staff on their payrolls to carry on their mockery of journalism.

But mostly they come from Twitter.

If you’ve seen one self-righteous tantrum about the sacred fire of journalism, you’ve seen them all. The dirty truth is that the media mostly just puts a professional gloss on trending Twitter topics. That’s why CNN did a story about a dog whose ear, according to the nation’s top news network, looks like Trump’s face. (Yes, this really happened.) It’s also where a lot of the media’s political stories come from.

When President Trump recognized Jerusalem, the mainstream media take offered ‘expertese’ twaddle about it being a rash move that will destabilize the process by giving Islamic terrorists the idea that they can’t get everything they want by killing Jews and walking away from peace negotiations.

But lefty Twitter, a boiling cauldron of frustrated celebrities, conspiracy theories and seething rage, wasn’t looking for policy critiques. It trained its hate laser on the announcement, noticed a few slurred words and decided that President Trump had dementia and should be removed from office.

A day later the media was on it.

The media’s experts had once again been made irrelevant. Their spin was sidelined for a Twitter conspiracy theory that showed how the centers of power in mainstream media journalism had shifted.

The rash of media stories speculating about President Trump’s health shows not only how biased the media is (we already knew that), how unprofessional it is (we knew that one too), but that it spends most of its time pandering to its own social media echo chamber. The media repackages conspiracy theories from Cher, Debra Messing or Mark Ruffalo so that a #Resistance celeb will retweet them.

The same strategy has made the Washington Post and the New York Times into profitable operations as the media’s social media strategy has narrowed down to making stories go viral in a leftist echo chamber. And that means playing into their obsessions and conspiracies about President Trump.

The former Fox News Anchor and part-time lingerie model, now working at the network where Matt Laurer locked his doors when not prowling the halls, has once again taken the lead in portraying President Donald Trump as a sexual predator who should be driven from office.

Now that Sen. Al Franken has said he will resign, Rep. John Conyers is on his way out, the Roy Moore dragon has been slain, the no longer politically useful Bill Clinton has been conveniently bashed, and the Democrats are once again pure as the driven snow, the decks have been cleared to for a full frontal assault on the man who dared save the country from that great defender of women who have been assaulted, Hillary Clinton.

Little more than a year after the Republican debate where Megyn Kelly grilled Trump on sexual harassment allegations, she resurrected three of his debunked accusers to regurgitate their earlier charges on her Dec. 11 show:

Jessica Leeds, Samantha Holvey and Rachel Crooks on Monday morning told NBC News’ Megyn Kelly about their alleged experiences with Trump. Lisa Boyne, a fourth accuser, joined them for a news conference later that day…

Leeds, Holvey and Crooks reflected on what it was like to watch Trump get elected after they had accused him of sexual harassment and assault…

Leeds first spoke to The New York Times last year, alleging that Trump groped her on an airplane more than 30 years ago

“He was like an octopus,” she said. “His hands were everywhere.”

That’s not how another passenger on that flight remembered the transatlantic flight., casting significant doubt on the tall tale told by Jessica Leeds of groping by the Donald in the first class section..He portrayed Leeds as something between a groupie and a stalker who was rebuffed by Trump, according to the New York Post:

Donald Trump’s campaign says a British man is countering claims that the GOP presidential nominee groped a woman on a cross-country flight more than three decades ago.

The man says he was sitting across from the accuser and contacted the Trump campaign because he was incensed by her account — which is at odds with what he witnessed.

Political elites on both sides of the Atlantic are still frothing over President Donald Trump’s retweeting of three videos recording Muslims acting badly. The videos originated with a reviled British organization, Britain First, deemed a hate group by the British establishment for linking Britain’s high levels of Muslim immigration to incidents of Islamic terrorism. One such video, from 2013, shows a Muslim cleric in a Syrian village deliberately shattering a terra cotta statue of the Virgin Mary. The second, also from 2013, shows a scene of civil anarchy in Alexandria, Egypt, in which Islamists push two teenagers off a turret onto a lower roof level and beat at least one to death. The third, from May 2017, allegedly shows a Muslim teenager in the Netherlands push over a white boy on crutches and repeatedly kick him while he is on the ground.

By retweeting, Trump was “normalizing hatred,” according to elite opinion. He ignored the “context” of events, claimed the New York Times—such as the fact that the icon-smasher was not just a “Muslim,” as identified in the original tweet, but an extremist cleric whose group had previously destroyed another Mary statue in his village. Why that “context” should defuse concern about the spread of radical Islamic ideology is mysterious. Likewise, while it’s true that the fatal stomping in Egypt occurred during a time of civil and political unrest, that “context” does not change the reality of remorseless violence.

As for the third video, the media and Dutch officials pounced on the fact that the tweets identified the teen assailant as a Muslim migrant, when he was in fact born in the Netherlands. Thus, his Muslim identity is allegedly irrelevant. This is the familiar strategy whenever a second-generation Muslim commits an act of terrorism in the West (which this assault clearly was not): the fact that the terrorist was not a first-generation immigrant supposedly means that Islamist terrorism is not an immigration problem. To the contrary, terrorism by second-generation Muslim immigrants is more of an immigration problem than first-generation terrorism, since it shows a failure to assimilate Western values.

The fury that Trump’s tweets have inspired is hard to square with cable news’ predilection for running endless repeats of videos showing police-officer use of force against civilians. If the media ever provided “context” for those videos, it passed by too fast for the eye to catch. That context might include the suspect’s behavior leading up to the officer’s use of force or the 911 calls that triggered an officer’s investigation—such as the Cleveland police dispatcher’s report of a black male who “keeps pulling a gun out of his pants and pointing it at people,” which led to the tragic shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014, who was doing just that with an exact replica toy pistol. It could include the number of armed robberies and drive-by shootings in a neighborhood to explain how an officer might assess the risk of armed violence from a resisting suspect.

This context is almost never offered, however, en route to the false narrative that we’re living through an epidemic of police violence against black males. The media’s stoking of that narrative has had a far greater effect on the nation’s crime rate and on race relations than Trump’s retweets have had on public perceptions of Islamic violence.

There’s only one American journalist who truly merits a Pulitzer Prize this year: Glenn Greenwald. He’s been on the biggest story of the year from day one. No, I don’t mean Russiagate, the main stage for the media’s preening self-advertisements of its heroic “resistance,” like “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” In fact, the narrative holding that Donald Trump colluded with Russia is the chief piece of evidence that Greenwald has used to nail the year’s real top story—how the American press became a woozy facsimile of Pravda.

Last week, Greenwald called out the press for its latest blunder: “Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time,” wrote Greenwald. “The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.”

The question of why everyone got the same big scoop on the same day—only to find that the story was totally wrong—is a thread that leads to some very interesting places. So let’s follow it.

CNN claimed that an email sent to Donald Trump and his campaign officials that linked to WikiLeaks documents was dated Sept. 4, 2016—therefore showing that WikiLeaks, and by implication the Kremlin, had offered the Trump campaign an exclusive preview of damaging Democratic National Committee emails. But in fact, the email was dated Sept. 14—10 days later—and linked to a trove of documents that WikiLeaks had publicly released a day earlier, meaning the big scoop proving Trump’s Russia ties was, in fact, a story about spam.

“Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy,” Greenwald continued, “which would presumably include all the people who have spent the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots and the like—would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news.”

I’m not generally a big fan of Greenwald. His attacks on Israel are gross; His continued defense of Edward Snowden, who turned over information to an adversary that may endanger American lives, seems, at best, naïve and self-serving. That said, the last few years have certainly brought me around to his view that abuses of our national-security-surveillance apparatus and the power it gives to unelected bureaucrats are a real threat to how Americans live. But finally it doesn’t matter what I think about Greenwald’s opinions—he might believe that a race of super-intelligent gender-neutral cats rules the galaxy next to ours, or that John Travolta has an important message for all mankind—because good journalism isn’t about the personal or political beliefs of individual reporters. All that actually matters is whether you use the tools of the trade to get the story right.

But that sort of thing isn’t what matters to journalists anymore, or else they wouldn’t have spent the past year running pieces about Trump and Russia that are almost immediately falsified, then updated with clarifications, or corrected, or retracted, and then are vanished down the memory hole—with no institutional accountability or apparent concern for truth. This startling unconcern goes back at least as far as that big Washington Post “exclusive” in January about Russia hacking an electrical dam in Vermont—a story that was entirely false. Since then, it’s all been downhill.

How many times has the media since promised the smoking gun that will finally and incontrovertibly prove that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to swing the Presidency away from Hillary Clinton? Boom! And then nothing. Poof.

It’s a wonder that President Donald Trump devotes so much time to discrediting the press, when the press does so much to discredit itself.

The media’s errors over the past week haven’t been marginal or coincidental, but involved blockbuster reports on one of the most dominating stories of the past year, Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. They all slanted one way — namely, toward lurid conclusions about the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with the Russians.

Every media outlet makes mistakes. It’s easier than ever to run with fragmentary or dubious information in a frenzied news cycle that never stops. But underlying the media blunders was an assumption — not based on any evidence we’ve yet seen — of Trump guilt in the Russia matter. This was news, in other words, too anti-Trump to check.

On the day it broke that Michael Flynn had pled guilty to lying to the FBI, Brian Ross of ABC News had a seemingly epic scoop. He reported that Flynn would testify that Donald Trump directed him to make contacts with Russian officials prior to the election. This was the collusion equivalent of a four-alarm fire. A New York Times columnist tweeted, “President Mike Pence, here we come.” The stock market dropped several hundred points.

Then Ross “clarified” the story to say that Trump instructed Flynn to reach out to the Russians after the election. This wasn’t a minor detail of chronology; it ripped the heart out of the story. Ross’s blockbuster went from a suggestion of collusion to a suggestion of the normal course of business during a presidential transition. ABC suspended Ross for a month.

CNN followed this up with its own botched report on how Don Trump Jr. allegedly got a heads-up email prior to the release of a batch of WikiLeaks emails during the campaign. The item rocketed around the Internet — accompanied by explosive imagery — and was repeated by other major news organizations. The only problem is CNN flubbed the date. The email came after the release of the documents, not before. Once again, supposed evidence of collusion evaporated upon contact with better-informed, follow-up reporting. CNN corrected its dispatch, and one of its correspondents called the episode “a black eye.”

Around the same time, Bloomberg reported that Robert Mueller had subpoenaed Trump records from Deutsche Bank, before clarifying to say that Mueller had subpoenaed people related to Trump, perhaps Paul Manafort. A Mueller move that would have crossed a Trump “red line” against investigation of his finances — risking a constitutional showdown — had become something more ambiguous.

If the press had less faith that Robert Mueller is on the verge of bringing the Trump presidency to its knees, it might exercise a little more discrimination. When your only frame of reference for the Mueller investigation is Watergate, everything looks like a proverbial smoking gun. When for professional reasons (the story of the century) and perhaps partisan ones (a hated Republican kicked out of the office) you’re rooting for the worst, you let your guard down.

The most effective way for the media to have refuted Donald Trump’s 24/7 accusations of “fake news” would have been to publish disinterested, factually based accounts of his presidency. The Trump record should have been set straight through logic and evidence.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/11/fake-truth/

So one would think after a year of disseminating fake news aimed at Donald Trump (Melania Trump was leaving the White House; Donald Trump had removed the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the West Wing; Trump planned to send troops into Mexico, etc.) that Washington and New York journalists would be especially scrupulous in their reporting to avoid substantiating one of Trump’s favorite refrains.

Instead, either blinded by real hatred or hyper-partisanship or both, much of the media has redoubled their reporting of rumor and fictions as facts—at least if they empower preconceived and useful bias against Trump. But after the year-long tit-for-tat with the president, the media has earned less public support in polls than has the president. It is the age-old nature of politicians of every stripe to exaggerate and mislead, but the duty of journalists to keep them honest—not to trump their yarns.

A Dangerous Tic
Last week, ABC News erroneously reported that Michael Flynn, in a supposed new role of cooperation with the prosecution, was prepared to testify that Trump, while still a candidate, ordered him improperly to contact (and, by inference, to collude with) Russian government officials.

For a while, the startling news sent the stock market into a fall of over 300 points. Was the purported pro-business Trump agenda shortly to be derailed by “proof” of a possible impeachable offense? A little while later, however, ABC was forced to retract that story, to suspend Brian Ross (the reporter involved), and to offer a correction that Trump actually had been president-elect at the time of the contact and completely within his elected purview to reach out to foreign governments.

Reuters, likewise eager to fuel the narrative of a colluding Trump, asserted that the Mueller investigators had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank records of Trump and his family. Again, the leaked inference was that the inquiry suddenly was coming near to hard evidence of Trump wrongdoing and was thus entering its penultimate stage. In truth, Mueller has more routinely subpoenaed the records of Trump associates, not Trump himself or his family.

In the most egregious example of peddling fake news, CNN reported that candidate Trump had once received an email entrée to unreleased Wikileaks documents—again suggesting some sort of collusion with Russian or pro-Russian interests. But that narrative was soon discredited, too. CNN failed to note that the email was sent 10 days later than it had originally reported, and instead referred to information already released into the public domain by Wikileaks.

In this same brief period, Washington Post reporter David Weigel, perhaps eager to suggest that Trump’s popularity among his base was at last waning, tweeted a sardonic captioned photo of half-empty seats at a Trump rally in Pensacola, Florida. He soon offered a retraction and noted his tweeted image wrongly showed the venue well before the actual start of the event—a fact he surely must have known.