RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-media-finally-discover-antifa/

The media abdicated their responsibility last summer by minimizing the violence.

L ast summer, New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof headed to Portland to try to locate the “radical-left anarchists” then–president Donald Trump kept mentioning in his campaign speeches. “Help Me Find Trump’s ‘Anarchists’ in Portland” Kristof implored his readers, as he roamed the city, running into well-meaning musicians, activists, technicians, and doctors, but, alas, no anarchists. The masked “protesters” who had thrown mortars, M-80s, and bricks at cops guarding the federal courthouse in Portland only a few weeks earlier were nowhere to be found. The “protesters” who in the week before Kristof’s column was published had been involved in dozens of acts of vandalism, destruction, and violence, including assaults on cops with “flaming projectiles” and bricks, had disappeared. Kristof’s piece is the equivalent of writing a column about the January 6 riot and focusing on the protesters who didn’t go into the Capitol.

Kristof’s piece was one of the most ham-fisted efforts, but he wasn’t alone. The day before left-wing CNN pundit Josh Campbell flew into Portland to mock concerns about violence — “I also ate my breakfast burrito outside today and so far haven’t been attacked by shadowy gangs of Antifa commandos” — a pro-Trump marcher had been shot to death, allegedly by an Antifa member. There was a concerted effort by many in the national media to play down the extent and damage of protests that summer, which turned out to be the most expensive domestic upheaval in insurance history, with costs exceeding $1 billion. Minority neighborhoods and city centers were often left to looters at night, as elected officials were often paralyzed by the fear of offending Black Lives Matter protesters. Some pundits would even argue the property destruction wasn’t “violence” at all — from the comfort of their homes, of course.

Turns out, as the Washington Post reports today, that the extremism Kristof and Campbell couldn’t locate anywhere within Portland’s city limits has done great damage to the city’s poorest communities. It turns out that de-policing efforts — the Portland city council cut $15 million as a “defund” effort and now has a cop shortage — have left some of the most vulnerable neighborhoods open to spikes in violent crime. Anarchists, writes the Post, have hijacked Portland’s “social justice movement,” exacerbating the problems BLM protesters were supposedly trying to fix.

Not that this is surprising to anyone who wasn’t in the liberal bubble. Local stories about black leaders attempting to distance themselves from Antifa were already being written in the summer. A month after Kristof’s column, Mark Hemingway detailed the corrupt 50-year influence of hard-left radicalism in the city in the Wall Street Journal. None of this was useful at the time. An election was coming.

A few weeks before Kristof’s piece, Portland mayor Ted Wheeler had even asked Governor Kate Brown for National Guard troops. One imagines it was not to stop peaceful schoolteachers from being heard on criminal-justice reform. Soon, the feds sent agents to protect the courthouse, which was under nightly attack. Hysteric Charles Pierce claimed that cops had “softly Pinochet’ed in broad daylight.” In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg did him one better, writing that “Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun.” (No hyperbole was left on the table during the Trump years.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/05/31/new-york-times-publishes-photo-of-girl-killed-by-israelis-who-was-also-killed-by-israelis-in-2017-n1451060

It was supposed to be heartbreaking: on Friday, the New York Times published a front-page series of photos with the headline “They Were Just Children,” little Palestinian Arab children who had supposedly been murdered by the evil Israeli war machine during the latest round of Hamas jihad attacks. The only problem was that one of the photos, prominently featured on the top row, was of a little girl whom Palestinian Arab propagandists, using the very same photo, had reported murdered by the Israelis in January 2017. It was just the latest example of the fact that Israel’s atrocities are so many and so brazen that Palestinians have to fabricate evidence of them – and the establishment media eagerly plays along.

The Times photo imbroglio came just over a week after Palestinian Arabs on Twitter claimed that a photo of another little girl depicted the victim of an Israeli airstrike; it was actually a photo of a Russian child model who has never been anywhere near Gaza and is still very much alive.

Shortly before that, a supporter of the Palestinian jihad against Israel tweeted: “Israel is now using white phosphorus on the city of Beit Hanoun in Palestine! It can burn human flesh until it reaches to the bones. White phosphorus is prohibited globally and it’s been considered as a war crime!” Included was a gruesome photo of a woman whose hair had been partially burned off and her face severely burned as well. There was just one minor detail that the tweet omitted to mention: the photo was not from Gaza in May 2021, but from Afghanistan in 2009.

This deception has been going on for years. It is perpetrated on an industrial scale by Palestinian propagandists in order to make Israel seem to be an oppressive occupying power. The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process details the breadth and sophistication of this deception.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/covid-censorship-consensus-daniel-greenfield/

“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made,” Facebook conceded, after the theory of a Chinese lab leak gained fresh currency.

It was not the first time that an idea suppressed by the Silicon Curtain had been revived despite the best efforts of the Big Tech monopoly to suppress it.

But Facebook warned that it will go on censoring to “keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge,”

Wherever these new facts and trends emerge from, it won’t be from its platforms.

The social media monopoly isn’t admitting that it was wrong. What it’s actually saying is that it’s up to high level authorities to decide what is true and what people can be allowed to say.

The Big Tech giant’s warning contains a series of admissions about how it sees the role of its platforms and the people who use them. Facebook, Instagram, and its younger cousins are not places where a new consensus can emerge by discussing serious issues. It’s where the proles are expected to listen to whatever they are told what to think and to do by their betters.

Facebook isn’t the place where influential people discuss ideas. Like network television or the New York Times, it’s meant as a top-down medium that tells a passive public what to think.

It’s hard to think of any greater expression of contempt by a company for its user base.

At the heart of Facebook’s COVID-19 censorship regime is the conviction that ideas are dangerous and during a pandemic people should not be allowed to make up their own minds.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/jim-treacher/2021/05/25/chinese-communist-party-shelled-out-millions-for-propaganda-in-american-newspapers-n1449515

As more and more Americans allow themselves to accept that this [EXPLETIVE DELETED] pandemic finally might be ending, as we start to see “the light at the end of the tunnel” that the oldest POTUS in American history keeps yammering about, a lot of stuff that’s been in the back of our minds over the last 15 months is starting to tiptoe to the front. We’ve all got persistent little questions like: How did all this happen, anyway? Who’s responsible? How much of what we’ve been told about the origin and spread of COVID-19 is true, and who benefits from the lies? And sooner or later, those questions all end up having the same answer: the Chinese Communist Party.

For the past year, our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press have insisted it’s a lunatic conspiracy theory to speculate that COVID-19 might have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But suddenly they’ve all reversed themselves, and now they’re admitting that a lab leak is not only possible but probable. (Without ever admitting they were wrong for an entire year, of course, and that they tried to silence anyone who dared to say anything about a lab leak. Their pride won’t allow them to admit error. Honesty is too much to expect from the people who never stop congratulating themselves for bringing us the truth.) As legendary science fiction writer Philip K. Dick put it: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” And the lab-leak theory isn’t going away, despite the best efforts of a lot of people who want you to shut up about it.

https://www.city-journal.org/facebook-and-its-fact-checkers-spread-misinformati

At the end of a recent 800-meter race in Oregon, a high school runner named Maggie Williams got dizzy, passed out, and landed face-first just beyond the finish line. She and her coach blamed her collapse on a deficit of oxygen due to the mask she’d been forced to wear, and state officials responded to the public outcry by easing their requirements for masks during athletic events. But long before the pandemic began, scientists had repeatedly found that wearing a mask could lead to oxygen deprivation. Why had this risk been ignored?

One reason is that a new breed of censors has been stifling scientific debate about masks on social media platforms. When Scott Atlas, a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, questioned the efficacy of masks last year, Twitter removed his tweet. When eminent scientists from Stanford and Harvard recently told Florida governor Ron DeSantis that children should not be forced to wear masks, YouTube removed their video discussion from its platform. These acts of censorship were widely denounced, but the social media science police remain undeterred, as I discovered when I recently wrote about the harms to children from wearing masks.

Facebook promptly slapped a label on the article: “Partly False Information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.” City Journal appealed the ruling, a process that turned out to be both futile and revealing. Facebook refused to remove the label, which still appears whenever the article is shared, but at least we got an inside look at the tactics that social media companies and progressive groups use to distort science and public policy.

The “independent fact-checkers” of my article are affiliated with a nonprofit group called Science Feedback, which has partnered with Facebook in what it calls a “fight against misinformation.” The group describes itself as “nonpartisan,” a claim that I would label “Mostly False” after studying dozens of its fact-checks enforcing progressive orthodoxy on climate change and public health. I didn’t see anything that would have displeased the journalists and officials promoting lockdowns and mask mandates. Nor did I see anything that would have displeased a Democrat, particularly during the last presidential campaign. In October, when Donald Trump was predicting that a vaccine was imminent, the group labeled that prediction “Inaccurate” and proclaimed that “widespread Covid-19 vaccination is not expected before mid-2021.” (Fact check: The vaccine rollout began in December.)

My article was flagged because it cited a study by a team of researchers in Germany who established an online registry for thousands of parents to report on the impact of masks on their children. More than half of those who responded said that masks were giving their children headaches and making it difficult for them to concentrate. More than a third cited other problems, including malaise, impaired learning, drowsiness, and fatigue.

The study passed peer review at a medical journal, Monthly Pediatrics, but it didn’t satisfy Facebook’s fact-checkers. Science Feedback labeled the study “Unsupported” on the grounds that it “cannot demonstrate a causal relationship between mask-wearing and these effects in children, due to limitations in its design.” The critique listed various limitations: the parents who responded to the registry were a self-selected sample; the parents couldn’t be sure if their children’s problems were due to masks or to something else; there was no control group of children who didn’t wear masks.

https://spectator.us/topic/elite-anti-semitism-boston-globe/

Some people think the vicious attacks on Jews happen only in Times Square or in Los Angeles restaurants. Not so. They think the apologists for these crimes are limited to the Squad and extreme leftists, some of whom actually tweeted it is wrong even to condemn anti-Semitism. That sewer of hatred would be dreadful enough, but the problem is bigger than that.

The thugs on the street have some ideological backing from the mainstream media and, of course, universities. Take a truly noxious cartoon in the Boston Globe, one of America’s most prominent newspapers. It appeared in the May 22 print edition (page A9) and online on May 21. The drawing and text by Christopher Weyant efficiently consolidated elite hatred of Israel and Jews into a neat, toxic mix.

It is shameful that the Boston Globe printed it and tried to ensure its national distribution by posting it as an official newspaper tweet. The tweet was still live on May 25. Spewing this hatred is not a problem, for the Globe or Twitter, apparently.

The cartoon is both vile and factually incorrect. More important, it is exactly what modern, intellectual anti-Semitism looks like. The idea is to link the Jewish state to deliberate, willful killing of innocents, to inhumanity and brutal militarism.

In what ways is the cartoon wrong?

First, contrary to the drawing, Israel’s air campaign made every effort to avoid civilian casualties. Even a cursory investigation by the artist and the Boston Globe’s editorial page editors would have demonstrated that point. Either they didn’t bother to look, or they ignored the inconvenient facts because they undermined their editorial viewpoint.