RUTHFULLY YOURS

Once upon a time, David Brooks was considered the house conservative at the New York Times. But in his April 21 New York Times column he put President Donald J. Trump on a list of “strong men” that includes Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Mr. Brooks noted that Erdogan has “dismantle[d] democratic institutions and replace[d] them with majoritarian dictatorship.” The Times columnist went on to assert: “While running for office, Donald Trump violated every norm of statesmanship built up over these many centuries….” Mr. Brooks, however, does not elaborate, explain or elucidate the nature of the alleged violations.

But when it comes to discussion of President Trump, Never Trumps like David Brooks feel no need to place their anti-Trump views on a foundation of fact. For Trump-haters, the truth is in the accusation. And so, comparing President Trump to Turkey’s Erdogan, Mr. Brooks does not set forth the democratic institutions dismantled by Mr. Trump, nor does he provide evidence of the “majoritarian dictatorship” that was constructed during the first 100 days of the Trump administration. How could he, there being no such dismantling, no such dictatorship here?

Mr. Brooks recognizes “the collapse of liberal values at home,” citing “fragile thugs who call themselves students [who] shout down and abuse speakers in a weekly basis.” But are these illiberals to be found under the banner of Trumpism — or under the banner of the totalitarianism of left?

Mr. Brooks goes on to cite a study suggesting that only 57 percent of “young Americans” (age range not provided) are committed to democracy, compared to “91 percent in the 1930’s….” What is the source of this declining commitment to democracy: student Republicans, or students influenced by leftist professors? Mr. Brooks does not say. For David Brooks, apparently, critical thinking about political trends does not require precise analysis; anti-Trump innuendo will do.

I challenge David Brooks to point to any instance of political repression attributable, today, to conservatives on college campuses. I challenge David Brooks — or any of the Trump-detesting columnists at The New York Times (and aren’t they all?) — to explain how it is, that if President Trump is the American version of Kim Jong-un, the New York Times is still publishing?

The threat to the American spirit of liberty is not to be found among conservatives, or in the corridors of today’s White House. The threats to democracy, to free speech, to the free flow of information, are to be found on the left side of the political divide, from neo-totalitarians who, like the execrable Howard Dean, would limit free speech to persons who agree with the political biases of leftists — with the encouragement of Never Trumps in the media like David Brooks, who lack the ability to distinguish a duly-elected American president from the brutal dictator of a totalitarian state.

It is predictable, if not horrifying, that leftist-elitist Time magazine would print an article on the dangers of uranium falling into the wrong hands – and nowhere mention Bill and Hillary Clinton’s role in enabling the Russians to lay claim to 20% of American uranium from mines in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Texas.

Did the editors at Time forget that it was Hillary’s State Department who granted approval of the uranium sale to a Canadian firm middleman who then sold it in 2009 to the Russians in Kazakhstan – the world’s second largest holder of uranium?

Was it sheer coincidence that at about the same time the Clinton Foundation received $145 million in donations from the Canadian company, Bill Clinton received a nice speaking fee of $500,000 from Putin and the Russians for enabling the deal?

Finally, the Clinton-enabled transfer of uranium from the U.S. to Kazakhstan (controlled by Putin since 2010) is actually underscored by the article that Putin released to Pravda on January 22, 2013. In open mockery – for it was the month Hillary was leaving the State Department – Putin taunted Hillary (and the Obama administration) before the entire world by announcing that Russia now controlled 46% of the world’s uranium and the U.S. only 3%.

The headline, however, was doctored by the U.S. It did not read, as reported, “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World,” but rather (in the original Russian):

Putin’s Open Mock of Hillary: “Russia Controls Energy Weapons”

Can it be that Time’s interests are not to educate, enlighten, and warn Americans about terrorist dirty bomb threats to our country and to our soldiers abroad – but rather to conceal these threats from Americans? Does P.C. stand for “political censorship” of truth?

Enough said.

If you’ll forgive the self-indulgence, let me start by sharing a few things about my professional life since Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, in no particular order. Every day, on social media, I am attacked, dismissed, or otherwise declared an illegitimate analyst or fake conservative because of my criticisms of President Trump, even if I include praise or beneficial context.

During the election season, I lost large sums of money — large to me, anyway — because I had to turn down speeches in which I was expected to be a de facto surrogate for the Republican point of view. My appearances on Fox News have dropped precipitously. It’s not a ban or anything like that. It’s just an unavoidable fact that the way a lot of cable news works is you have a person defending the incumbent administration and a person criticizing it. I’m ill-suited for many of these debates, because I don’t fit in the obvious grooves. Some friends of National Review complain about me, including donors. Just a couple weeks ago, a prominent Republican politician chewed me out for the better part of an hour because of my criticisms of President Trump.

I could go on like this for pages, but you get the point. Or maybe you don’t. So let me explain. I offer this seeming tale of woe not out of self-pity or a desire for yours. This is the life I’ve chosen, to paraphrase Hyman Roth in The Godfather II. Indeed, I should add that I’ve also heard from hundreds of readers, peers, friends, colleagues, and more than a few politicians thanking me for my efforts to combat the attempt to redefine conservatism as mere nationalism or Trumpism.

I have written literally tens of thousands of words explaining that I will criticize Trump when I think it warranted and praise him when warranted as well. I won’t let him make me a hack or a liar. I think I’ve done a pretty good job sticking to that policy (and so has National Review).

Which brings me to the left-wing polemicist Rick Perlstein. He has a big essay in the latest New York Times Magazine. It begins with some typical bragging about his role as a historian of conservatism and some table setting about how conservatives tried to stop Trump. He then quotes me:

Then the nation’s pre-eminent birther ran for president. Trump’s campaign was surreal and an intellectual embarrassment, and political experts of all stripes told us he could never become president. That wasn’t how the story was supposed to end. National Review devoted an issue to writing Trump out of the conservative movement; an editor there, Jonah Goldberg, even became a leader of the “Never Trump” crusade. But Trump won — and conservative intellectuals quickly embraced a man who exploited the same brutish energies that [William F.] Buckley had supposedly banished, with Goldberg explaining simply that Never Trump “was about the G.O.P. primary and the general election, not the presidency.”

Perlstein doesn’t explicitly say that I (or National Review) “quickly embraced” Trump, but the insinuation is (Perlstein has a gift for snotty insinuations) that I am emblematic of this sudden, hypocritical transformation. For the reasons stated above, this came as news to me.

Now I’ve never taken Perlstein very seriously and I see little reason to start now. I’ve long known he dislikes me (he recently whined on Facebook about the outrage of NPR having me on), but he’s known for disliking conservatives generally and letting that tribal partisanship infect almost everything he writes (which is why he’s so popular with the Left). In short, who cares?

But Perlstein is writing this for the New York Times, and I think it offers a really good insight into the way the Times — and much of the mainstream media — has jettisoned so much credibility in the age of Trump.

In a recent interview CBS’s Ted Koppel denounced Sean Hannity as “bad for America” because “You have attracted people who are determined that ideology is more important than facts.”

Well, CBS proudly claims Julia Sweig as a “CBS News Analyst.” And back in 2008 the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuba spycatcher Lieut. Col. Chris Simmons (now retired), identified this very Julia Sweig as a full-fledged “agent of influence” for the Castro regime.

Any chance that an agent-of-influence for a totalitarian regime might “put ideology over facts?”

Any chance that an agent-of-influence for a mass-murdering, terror-sponsoring regime that came within a whisker of nuking America, whose agents managed the most damaging espionage against America in recent history, and whose dictator (only last year) declared America the “main enemy!”—any chance employing such a “news analyst” might be “bad for America?”

Important background: Sweig’s identifier Lieut. Col. Simmons helped end the operations of 80 enemy agents against America, some are today behind bars. One of these had managed the deepest penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in recent U.S. history. The spy’s name is Ana Belen Montes, known as “Castro’s Queen Jewel” in the intelligence community. “Montes passed some of our most sensitive information about Cuba back to Havana,” revealed then-undersecretary for International Security John Bolton.

Today she serves a 25-year sentence in federal prison. She was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, the same charge leveled against Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, carrying the same potential death sentence for what is widely considered the most damaging espionage case since the “end” of the Cold War. Two years later, in 2003, Chris Simmons helped root out 14 Cuban spies who were promptly booted from the U.S.

In brief, retired Lt. Col. Chris Simmons knows what he’s talking about.

When Ted Koppel’s current CBS colleague Julia Sweig visited Cuba in 2010 accompanied by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, something caught Goldberg’s eye: “We shook hands,” he writes about the meeting with Fidel Castro. “Then he (Fidel Castro) greeted Julia warmly. They (Castro and Sweig) have known each other for more than 20 years.”

‘Fake news” has seemingly, suddenly, become fashionable. In reality, the fake has proliferated for a decade or more, but the faux, the flawed and the fraudulent are now pressing issues because the full scale of the changes wrought upon the integrity of news and advertising by the digital duopoly—Google and Facebook —has become far more obvious.

Google’s commodification of content knowingly, willfully undermined provenance for profit. That was followed by the Facebook stream, with its journalistic jetsam and fake flotsam. Together, the two most powerful news publishers in human history have created an ecosystem that is dysfunctional and socially destructive.

Both companies could have done far more to highlight that there is a hierarchy of content, but instead they have prospered mightily by peddling a flat-earth philosophy that doesn’t distinguish between the fake and the real because they make copious amounts of money from both.

Depending on which source you believe, they have close to two-thirds of the digital advertising market—and let me be clear that we compete with them for that share. The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates they accounted for more than 90% of the incremental increase in digital advertising over the past year. The only cost of content for these companies has been lucrative contracts for lobbyists and lawyers, but the social cost of that strategy is far more profound.

It is beyond risible that Google and its subsidiary YouTube, which have earned many billions of dollars from other people’s content, should now be lamenting that they can’t possibly be held responsible for monitoring that content. Monetizing yes, monitoring no—but it turns out that free money does come at a price.

We all have to work with these companies, and we are hoping, mostly against hope, that they will finally take meaningful action, not only to allow premium content models that fund premium journalism, but also to purge their sites of the rampant piracy that undermines creativity. Your business model can’t be simultaneously based on both intimate, granular details about users and no clue whatsoever about rather obvious pirate sites.

Another area that urgently needs much attention is the algorithms that Silicon Valley companies, and Amazon, routinely cite as a supposedly objective source of wisdom and insight. These algorithms are obviously set, tuned and repeatedly adjusted to suit their commercial needs. Yet they also blame autonomous, anarchic algorithms and not themselves when neofascist content surfaces or when a search leads to obviously biased results in favor of their own products.

Look at how Google games searches. A study reported in The Wall Street Journal found that in 25,000 random Google searches ads for Google products appeared in the most prominent slot 91% of the time. How is that not the unfair leveraging of search dominance and the abuse of algorithm? All 1,000 searches for “laptops” started with an ad for Google’s Chromebook—100% of the time. Kim Jong Un would be envious of results like that at election time. CONTINUE AT SITE