RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

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.

“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Ben Rhodes gloated. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Rhodes, the White House’s “Obama whisperer”, was explaining how he had pulled the wool over the media’s eyes on the Iran Deal to a journalist. The media responded to the story by attacking the journalist who reported it, not Rhodes for viewing them as easily manipulated useful idiots.

The media knew that it knew nothing. And it didn’t care. It just didn’t want outsiders to know it.

What ties together the debate about Russian collusion, fake news and Fusion GPS is the implosion of the media. What were the professional reporters doing while Rhodes was manipulating the 27-year-olds? They were working at places like Fusion GPS and ‘story laundering’ narratives to the kiddies.

The media markets its investigative journalism chops even as investigative journalism no longer fits into its business model. Companies like Fusion GPS and political manipulators like Ben Rhodes step into the vacuum by covertly providing them with the core product. Much of the media is really in the business of ‘story laundering’ by rewriting talking points, smears and hit pieces from organizations like Fusion GPS.

The readers get talking points served to them without ever knowing who actually produced them. The forensic examination of the Trump dossier answered some of these questions. Hillary Clinton hired Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS hired a British former intelligence officer. And he got his material from, among other sources, a Russian intelligence officer. And they passed the material to the media and the FBI.

It took a great deal of effort, including a congressional subpoena, a national scandal and the threat of impeachment, to peel back the workings of the media and expose how the dossier sausage got made. Most packaged media stories never receive this level of scrutiny. And the media is quick to indignantly defend its lack of transparency and reliance on anonymous sources in its Trump hit pieces.

But what the current controversy really reveals is the decline and fall of the media.

The media has outsourced story generation to the shadowy underworld that produced the Trump dossier. Much as NPR outsourced its coverage of the Iran Deal to Ploughshares and the Iran Lobby in exchange for $100K. This isn’t bias in the conventional sense. It’s native advertising all the way. The media ‘rents’ space to outside interests. It rewrites their stories in the house style and runs them.

Sometimes, like NPR, there’s a financial arrangement. Other times the media gets stories that it lacks the resources and the time to generate on its own. Or access. And sometimes it’s just a political alliance.

Missouri declared itself under a state of emergency on two occasions, months apart, after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., on August 9, 2014, and there were many other outbursts of violence and property destruction. All of this unrest was based on a lie started by Brown’s unreliable friend Dorian Johnson and amplified by an eager, credulous media: That Brown was unresisting, had his hands in the air and was begging not to be shot when he was killed by police officer Darren Wilson.

Sometimes it falls to a dramatist to correct journalists, and the journalist-turned-filmmaker-turned playwright Phelim McAleer has done a public service in sifting out the truth in Ferguson, a breathless 90-minute courtroom drama in which all dialogue is taken verbatim from the 25-day grand-jury proceedings that resulted in a decision not to charge Wilson. (The current production closes November 4 at the 30th Street Theatre in Manhattan but the play, which is being funded via crowdsourcing, will be restaged later in a different venue if interest is sufficient.)

Thirteen actors, some performing multiple roles, play the witnesses and the prosecutors who question them in a case everyone is aware the world is watching. Brown, routinely described in the media as an “unarmed teen,” as if the fists of an enraged 289-pound man do not constitute a threat, was under the influence of a large dose of marijuana when he and his friend Johnson were stopped by Wilson because they were walking down the double yellow line in the middle of the street. In Brown’s right hand, the officer noticed, was a box of cigarillos, which was of interest because he had just heard over the radio that a man matching Brown’s description had just robbed a small convenience store of a box of cigarillos and angrily shoved a clerk who tried to stop him.

McAleer and director Jerry Dixon begin the play, which takes place on a single set representing the grand-jury room, in an unassuming manner. Secondary witnesses describe unimportant encounters with Brown in the hours before he lost his life at noon. One laborer remarks that Brown was mentally “slow.” A cop who trained Wilson describes him as eager to work with the mostly black community and says he enjoyed buying meals for young people. The testimony of one sketchy witness, a white woman, falls apart when she says she walked through a passage that was physically blocked, and denies having read newspaper accounts of the shooting. In fact, she has posted Facebook comments beneath one such story, comments expressing such sentiments as “They need to kill the f*****g n*****s.” Another witness, a black man, has told the FBI he saw Wilson standing over the prone body of Brown pumping many bullets into his back. A prosecutor drily informs him that as he has a) given a statement inconsistent with the autopsy report and b) changed his story, he stands no chance of being invited to testify at any trial in the matter.