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MEDIA

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Fake News: 53 Pastors Didn’t Endorse Roy Moore After the Sexual Assault Allegations By Tyler O’Neil

By on November 15th, 2017

Contrary to numerous media reports, 53 pastors didn’t just endorse Roy Moore after the sexual assault allegations against him. Conservative Christians are very divided over whether or not to continue their support. That did not stop quite a few outlets from portraying Christian leaders as utter hypocrites, however.

“A group of 53 Alabama pastors signed onto a letter pledging their support for alleged child molester and Senate candidate Roy Moore,” Newsweek’s Carlos Ballesteros began his report. “The letter, first posted on Moore’s wife’s personal Facebook page, describes the embattled candidate as a friend to religious conservatives and a staunch opponent of the ‘Washington establishment.'”

The Newsmax report also said the letter came out Monday. “Fifty-three Alabama pastors on Monday released a letter of support for Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore despite multiple accusations of sexual misconduct on his part,” that story read.

Even conservative outlets like The Washington Examiner and RedState reported this fake news. AL.com, HuffPost, and the The Daily Caller also originally reported this lie.

What actually happened? Moore’s wife Kayla reposted an old letter … from August 15! Here’s the letter she posted:

Pastor’s Letter

Dear friends and fellow Alabamians,

For decades, Roy Moore has been an immovable rock in the culture wars – a bold defender of the “little guy,” a just judge to those who came before his court, a warrior for the unborn child, defender of the sanctity of marriage, and a champion for religious liberty. Judge Moore has stood in the gap for us, taken the brunt of the attack, and has done so with a rare, unconquerable resolve.

As a consequence of his unwavering faith in God and his immovable convictions for Biblical principles, he was ousted as Chief Justice in 2003. As a result, he continued his life pursuit by starting the Foundation for Moral Law, which litigates religious liberty cases around our Nation. After being re-elected again to Chief Justice in 2012, by an overwhelming majority, he took another round of persecution for our faith as he stood up for the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman.

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The Media That Cried Wolf By Tom Trinko

By on November 15th, 2017

In a week in which CNN cried wolf when there was no wolf by falsely condemning Trump for poor fish-feeding habits, is it surprising that decades-old charges of sexual impropriety being leveled against Judge Roy Moore aren’t being unquestioningly accepted by voters?

We can all remember a number of times when the media has proclaimed a wolf was present when we later discovered they were wrong.

There is Global Warming… err, Climate Change where we were told that by now the world would be doomed but somehow that hasn’t happened.

We were told that the black man shot in Ferguson was holding his hands up to surrender.

In the last century the media informed us that overpopulation would lead to mass starvation. Of course, that was bogus.

We were told that many women had been assaulted by Trump but the fact that they all apparently disappeared after the election makes reasonable people wonder if there was a wolf.

The media can’t stop talking about Russian colluding with Trump even though after months and months of investigation absolutely nothing has been found.

Clearly a reasonable person would hesitate before assuming that salacious charges raised weeks before a contentious election by a highly biased news source is true. The media has cried wolf so often when there was no wolf that sane people reserve judgement until there’s more proof.

That attitude is exacerbated by the fact that when wolves do appear the media often fails to mention them.

We know that none of the major networks have mentioned the fact that for more than two months a Democratic senator has been on trial for accepting bribes.

We know that the media ignored a credible claim that Bill Clinton raped a woman.

We know that the media ignores the fact that thousands of blacks are shot each year in Democrat-run cities.

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A political reality moment at the NYT By David Zukerman

By on November 15th, 2017

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, in his November 13 column, “Democrats, Don’t Be Fooled By Victory,” reflected on Democratic election wins, particularly the re-election of a Democrat as governor of Virginia.

Leonhardt noted: “The reality is, the Democratic victories occurred almost entirely in areas that had voted for Hillary Clinton last year. In Trump country, Democrats continued to struggle.” Leonhardt went on to cite Virginia, cited the study of “Patrick Ruffini, a savvy conservative pollster,” that of the 15 legislative districts that flipped from Republican to Democrat, “only a single one of those 15 districts had voted for Trump.” Leonhardt also pointed out that Ralph Northam, Virginia’s governor-elect, did worse than the current governor, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, “outside of the big metropolitan areas,” having “fared worse” than McAuliffe in 89 of Virginia’s 133 counties and cities.

Leonhardt advised Democrats “to get the white working class to focus on the working-class part of their identity rather than the white part.” This, however, would require first, that Democrats put an end to disparaging white voters and, second, that they shift their campaign pitch from demonizing President Trump to finding ways and means of seeking common ground with his voters.

An exchange on ABC’s “This Week,” November 12, between Martha Raddatz and Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez indicates that a Democratic shift away from the politics of Trump-hate will not be easy for the left:

RADDATZ: OK. In our latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, 61 percent of Americans say Democratic leaders are mainly criticizing Trump, not presenting alternatives. Is the Democratic message too much about Trump and not enough about your vision?

PEREZ: Oh, we were leading with our values in Virginia and elsewhere. And, again, we talked about health care a lot, because health care is a right for all, not a privilege for a few. And the number one issue for voters in Virginia was health care. They understand that the Republicans are trying to take their health care away.

RADDATZ: Let’s go back to President Trump again — and again, 61 percent of Americans say Democratic leaders are mainly criticizing Trump. You say that’s not true. Billionaire Tom Steyer, he’s the single biggest donor to the Democratic Party in the last two election cycles, put millions of dollars behind an ad calling for President Trump’s impeachment.

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An Immigration-Enforcement Fairy Tale from the New York Times The Gray Lady’s latest argument against stricter enforcement doesn’t pass the smell test. By Jessica Vaughan & Steven Camarota

By on November 14th, 2017

The New York Times recently highlighted a new analysis of immigration-enforcement data that is sure to be used in the coming months to undermine the initiatives of the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress. The Times article, by staff writer Eduardo Porter, argues that years of “tough” enforcement under Obama failed to improve conditions for working Americans. Been there, done that, as it were, in response to President Trump’s call for tougher enforcement.

This analysis is deeply flawed, for two reasons. First, it uses inappropriate, incomplete, and doctored enforcement statistics to present a misleading picture of recent enforcement trends. Second, Porter relies heavily on a working paper and a forthcoming analysis by pro-immigration economist Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, to argue that enforcing immigration laws does not help natives and in fact harms the economy.

Let’s examine the arguments on enforcement first. Porter states that “President Barack Obama went on a deportation spree in his first term.” To illustrate this “deportation spree,” he includes a bar graph labeled “Immigration Shock.” It claims to show annual interior apprehensions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the leading interior enforcement agency, from the period 2000 to 2015. The graph depicts a distinct “surge” beginning in 2008 and accelerating in 2009 before dropping off in 2013. This is meant to show that enforcement was ramped up considerably in the Obama administration:

The first problem with this is that Porter chooses apprehensions, or arrests, as a metric to illustrate a deportation spree. But an arrest is not the same as a deportation, and is not by itself an ideal metric for measuring the effectiveness of enforcement. Not all those arrested for immigration violations are deported. Why not just show deportations, since those statistics also are available?

Further, especially under Obama’s “prosecutorial discretion” policy, a significant number of the aliens arrested by ICE officers were released after only a short time in custody. Some of these individuals had their charges dropped or thrown out of immigration court; others were let out of custody on bond or under “supervision,” but skipped out on their hearings and melted back into the illegal population. In fact, according to our calculations, the number of interior deportations over the period 2009–2015 (1.15 million) is only 63 percent of the number of interior apprehensions (1.84 million), illustrating that a very large number of those apprehended by ICE in the interior during this time were never deported from the country. If illegal immigrants who are arrested at some point nonetheless remain in the country, then so does their labor-market impact, undermining the enforcement-does-not-help-native-born-workers argument advanced by Porter’s piece.

It gets worse. These statistics aren’t just an unsatisfactory measure of enforcement; they are also inexplicably doctored, in a way that changes the timing and shape of the enforcement surge. The apprehension totals in the bar graph, which are sourced to the Department of Homeland Security and to Peri, do not match the official statistics published on the DHS website. We asked Peri about the discrepancy, and he told us that the Times had made adjustments to the numbers. Specifically, he said, the Times had subtracted from the annual totals any cases where the apprehension location was not specified, which are collectively labeled “Unknown” in the DHS statistical tables. Peri said that the Times wanted to count only interior arrests. But the DHS table makes clear that all arrests it attributes to ICE are interior arrests (as opposed to arrests made by Customs and Border Protection officers, including the Border Patrol). It is not clear what innocent explanation there could be for subtracting these “unknown” cases.

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Celebrating Islam across North America From Mississippi to Ontario, adults and children alike are being fed the most grotesque of lies. Bruce Bawer

By on November 14th, 2017

It’s happening all over North America – including places you might think were too remote to even conceive of such activities. Take Missoula, Montana, where the local newspaper, the Missoula Current, reported last April on a group called Standing Alongside America’s Muslims (SALAM), formed a year earlier “to push back against a rising tide of Islamophobia.” The Current report on SALAM, as it happened, appeared two weeks to the day after the deadly suicide bombing in the St. Petersburg, Russia, Metro, by an affiliate of Al-Qaeda. (You already forgot that one, didn’t you?) The Current also brought the news that the Missoula City Council, in an effort to address supposed “waves of anti-Muslim sentiment,” had designated April 24-30 as “Celebrate Religious Freedom Week” to coincide with SALAM’s own “Celebrate Islam Week.”

What is SALAM all about? A tour of its Facebook page indicates that it’s especially focused on the fount of evil that is Donald Trump and on his satanic attempt to establish a “Muslim ban.” The page contains graphs and charts illustrating how few Muslims live in the U.S. and how few Americans die from jihad terror compared to other causes. (There are no charts showing the recent surge in both the population and deadliness of European Muslims.) One evening in September, SALAM sponsored a quiz about Islamic culture, containing such questions as: “What spice do Syrians like in their coffee? How do you say ‘delicious’ in Arabic? What stringed instrument do Iraqis play?” (Presumably there were no questions about the several different types of female genital mutilation, the Islamic penalty for apostasy, the punishments for homosexuality prescribed by various Islamic theological traditions, or the age of Muhammed’s wife Aisha at the time of their marriage.)

While delicately avoiding any mention of jihadist attacks, moreover, SALAM’s Facebook page does a great job of compiling stories about, for example, women who claim to have been called names for wearing hijab. It has also reprinted such garbage as a Foreign Policy article whitewashing Jonathan Brown, the head of Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, who has defended Muslim slavery, child rape, and execution of gays.

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News Nanny: The Race to Censor Internet News If we don’t fight now, conservatives will vanish from the internet. Daniel Greenfield

By on November 10th, 2017

How can you tell that internet censorship is really taking off? Easy. It’s becoming a business model.

Steven Brill is raising $6 million to launch News Guard. This new service will rate news sites on their trustworthiness from green to red. Forget politically unbiased algorithms. The ratings will be conducted by “qualified, accountable human beings” from teams of “40 to 60 journalists.” Once upon a time, journalism meant original writing. Now it means deciding which original writing to censor.

“Can trust be monetized?” The Street’s article on News Guard asks. But it isn’t really trust that’s being monetized. It’s censorship. It’s doing the dirty work that Google and Facebook don’t want to do.

The Dems and their media allies have been pressuring Google and Facebook to do something about the “fake news” that they blame for Trump’s win. The big sites outsourced the censorship to media fact checkers. The message was, “Don’t blame us, now you’re in charge.”

Facebook made a deal with ABC News and the AP, along with Politifact, FactCheck and Snopes, to outsource the censoring for $100K. When two of these left-wing groups declare that an article is fake, Facebook marks it up and viewership drops by 80%.

Facebook is reportedly considering adding the Weekly Standard to its panel of fact checkers. Even if that were to happen, it would be the difference between putting the New York Times without David Brooks or the Times with David Brooks in charge of deciding what you can read on Facebook. Adding a token conservative who is acceptable to the left doesn’t change the inherent bias of the system.

Not only does the roster of fact checkers lean to the left, but so do its notions of what’s true and false. For example, Snopes and Politifact both insist that General Pershing’s forces never buried the bodies of Muslim terrorists with pigs. But General Pershing specifically stated in his autobiography, “These Juramentado attacks were materially reduced in number by a practice that the Mohamedans held in abhorrence. The bodies were publicly buried in the same grave with a dead pig.”

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Permanent Investigation: How the Media Uses the anti-Netanyahu Playbook Against Trump And how to resist it. Daniel Greenfield

By on November 7th, 2017

The latest news from Israel’s left-wing media outlets is that Ratan Tata, an Indian billionaire, testified to the Israeli police about Prime Minister Netanyahu. The story turned out to be fake news. And that’s true of most of their anti-Netanyahu hit pieces along with the police investigations that accompany them.

But that doesn’t matter.

Americans are just now being introduced to the permanent investigation and its scandal rolodex. Israelis have been living with this Deep State assault against their democracy for much longer. Over eight long years, leftists in the judicial system and the media have manufactured a non-stop campaign of scandals and investigations against Netanyahu. The investigations and the scandals fall apart, but it doesn’t matter because there are usually several being rotated in and out from the scandal rolodex.

The scandals and investigations fall into two categories that should be familiar to Trump supporters.

Category one scandals link some random billionaire to Netanyahu through a chain of connections. The random billionaire in this case is Indian. Then there’s an Australian billionaire in Mexico, German shipbuilders and whatever part of the globe the media-judicial alliance throws a dart at next.

The fake news media in this country is following the same game plan. The latest media hit pieces target Wilbur Ross, Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, in much the same way. Indeed the Russia scandal developed out of media hit pieces that used Trump’s international network of businesses to build up very similar conspiracy theories about foreign interests and influences.

These types of scandals constantly imply corruption without ever actually proving it. But by generating a whole lot of them, they create the sense that Netanyahu or Trump must have done something wrong.

Though no one can say what, because no one can keep track of all the fake scandals.

Category two scandals are character attacks. “He’s a bad person.” Typical examples are Trump’s condolence call controversy and accusations that Netanyahu’s wife is mean to employees.

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Another Terrorist Attack, Another Whitewash of Islamic Jihad Willful blindness sixteen years after 9/11. Bruce Thornton

By on November 6th, 2017

After a Muslim immigrant from Uzbekistan murdered eight people on a bike path in New York, the usual “expert” pundits and commentators began recycling the same clichés they always use to avoid a hard, uncomfortable fact: these killings are perpetrated by Muslims who are faithfully following fourteen centuries of Islamic precept and practice.

Sixteen years after 9/11 we still don’t get the reality of Islamic jihad.

Indeed, we can’t even get simple facts straight. The NYC terrorist’s cry of Allahu Akbar, the traditional Muslim battle-cry, is consistently mistranslated. As Robert Spencer has repeatedly pointed out, the phrase does not mean “God is great,” an equivalent, as Senator John McCain has claimed, of “Thank God.” Rather, it means “Allah is greater.” Using the mistranslation obscures the triumphalist intolerance at the heart of Islam. Since the 7th century, Muslims have gone to war for the same reason Mohammed did: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’” Allah is “greater” because all other gods are “idols” or, as with Christians and Jews, distortions of Allah and his revelation to Mohammed. Hence jihad, the effort to “slay the infidels wherever you find them” until Islam and sharia law––practiced by the “best of nations,” as the Koran says, “raised for [the benefit of] men” –– comprise the sole legitimate political-social order for all of humanity.

Having misinterpreted the jihadist war-cry, these same commentators then try to separate the jihadist from the vanguards of modern jihadism such as ISIS. Despite his frank boasts of allegiance to ISIS, or the thousands of videos and photos on his cell phone including beheadings, or his request for an ISIS flag in his hospital room, we continue to hear that he is a “lone wolf,” a “self-radicalized” anomaly much like the Las Vegas mass murderer. Hence the progressive apologists retreat into the psychological analyses that have replaced philosophy and religion in the secular West. Rather than sacred scripture and doctrine, rather than glorious Muslim history and Koranic injunctions, now social conditions and mental derangement must account for this act.

So according to The New York Times, the Uzbek jihadist is the product of a “rootless life,” a neurotic with a “monster inside.” How could he be a Puritanical fundamentalist? He cursed, liked fancy clothes, and showed up late to mosque services. The Wall Street Journal reports that he was a homesick momma’s boy. As The New Republic put it, he is just a “desperate soul” vulnerable to the propaganda of ISIS, the latest in a string of mass murderers who suffer from a mental disorder, one weaponized by mass gun ownership, violent jingoism, and the “politics of fear.”

Hence after the attacks the widespread false analogy with the Las Vegas shooter. Mostly this trope was an excuse to bash Trump for his different responses to the attacks. But beyond that is the same assumption that only psychological dysfunction could explain why someone would brutally run-down bikers and pedestrians. Yet the falseness of the analogy is obvious: The Las Vegas shooter did not have a worldwide virtual community of like-minded believers inspiring and counseling Muslims to inflict murder and mayhem on unbelievers. He did not have a historical precedent in the long record of Islamic violence and aggression. He did not have several models for his crimes like the Muslims using vehicles for murder in London, Nice, Barcelona, Stockholm, Berlin, and Israel. He did not have a belief system in which such violence is enjoined as a command of God and a mark of righteousness. He did not shout “Thank God” as he mowed down his victims. He did not believe that his acts would turn him into a martyr destined for a life of eternal pleasure. He had no global organization eager to take credit for his deeds.

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How Leftism Makes Us Stupid By Andrew Klavan

By on November 6th, 2017

Perhaps the worst thing about having an exclusively leftist media is that it makes all of us, right and left, stupider. Take for example that media’s reaction to the latest Islamist terror attack in Manhattan. Evil loser Sayfullo Saipov follows the ISIS playbook by driving a rented van over innocent civilians, killing eight. He jumps out of the van shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (Allah is the greatest) and later tells police he’s glad about what he did and requests an ISIS flag in his hospital room. (I know just where to plant the pole.)

In reporting the event, CNN Crime and Justice reporter Shimon Prokupecz refused to share the police description of the killer after he was caught. Because he’s a journalist, and the last thing we want is to have journalists going around giving people information! CNN’s Jake Tapper responded to news of the loser’s Arabic shout by remarking inanely that Allahu Akbar is “sometimes said under the most beautiful of circumstances, and too often we hear it being said in moments like this.” He later clarified that he was referring to beautiful circumstances like weddings and births. Yeah, what if the guy had been waving a Confederate flag? They wear those at some weddings too.

The New York Times, a former newspaper, ran two separate articles trying to justify the triumphalist Islamic battle cry, one headline reading, “Allahu Akbar: An Everyday Phrase Tarnished by Attacks.” Actor James Woods responded by tweeting: “Let me yell it out at 35,000 feet while you’re eating Chicken Florentine in first class. Then hope someone knows the Heimlich Maneuver…” When I tried to quote this tweet to my wife, I laughed so hard I couldn’t get the words out.

None of which is to make fun of a tragedy, of course, but only of the absurd reaction of the leftist press. Because, being leftist, they reduce every issue to a binary choice: their way or hatred. Ignore the worldwide connection between Islam and terror or you’re a bigot. Support gay marriage or you’re a homophobe. Buy into government health care or you want people to die. Buy into affirmative action or you’re racist. And so on. In each of these cases, there are rational arguments to be made on both sides and, as President Trump pointed out when discussing iconoclasm, “some very fine people” who support those arguments.

But the left has, for the most part, abandoned rational argument altogether, not because leftism is always wrong about everything but because it is wrong and has been proven wrong on its central premise. It is now irrefutable that socialism destroys every nation it touches. Small homogenous nations that are essentially protected by American might can fool around with confiscatory taxes and massive social programs, but even they will have to privatize industry sooner or later to stay solvent. Otherwise socialism gets you Venezuela, and that’s only if you’re lucky enough not to wind up with the Soviet Union or Red China, with over 100 million human beings exterminated in the name of paradise.

And since each of the left’s arguments is being made not in support of Islam or blacks or women or anyone else, but in support of a bigger government with an eye toward ultimately achieving socialism, leftists can’t afford to accept or even hear the arguments from the other side.

Thus we end up with a press corps full of idiots: leftists too stupid to deliver the straight news about an act of Islamist terror. CONTINUE AT SITE

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New York Times’ coverage of Mueller is peak liberal bias Michael Goodwin

By on November 5th, 2017

A friend likens The New York Times to a 1960s adolescent who refuses to grow up.  In a perpetual state of outrage, it is a newspaper of college snowflakes who embrace all forms of diversity except thought.

It sees its liberal politics not as a point of view, but as received wisdom that cannot be legitimately disputed.

The fixation on conformity reached a new low last week when the paper rolled out a coordinated attack on those of us who believe special counsel Robert Mueller ought to resign. I say coordinated because the newsroom and the opinion page produced similar pieces on the same day, showing again how Executive Editor Dean Baquet has erased the barrier between news and opinion and turned every page into an opinion page.

In the Times’ view, there are only two reasons to question Mueller’s credibility: insanity or treason. And so we detractors stand accused of engaging in a conspiracy that will embolden adversaries like Russia and produce a “constitutional crisis.”

The animating impulse for the assault is obvious — the Times is locked into its mission of destroying President Trump, and, like Hillary Clinton, still cannot accept Trump’s election as legitimate.

Consider that the paper’s dozen Op-Ed columnists are all Never-Trumpers. That’s either a remarkable coincidence or a litmus test for hiring.

But the paper, following a bad habit it developed during Barack Obama’s presidency, is not content with advocating its positions. Behaving like a party propaganda outlet, it takes a coercive approach to anyone with a different view. Objections are demonized as heretical.

The reactionary tone of both pieces last week, and following ones by columnists Nicholas Kristof and Bret Stephens, carries the unavoidable assumption that Trump is guilty of colluding with Russia, and so critics of Mueller are subversives with unpatriotic aims.

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