RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/541990-the-power-to-change-what-we-are-social-media-as-the-new-fifth-estate

Could Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey ever have imagined that his social media platform would become a U.S. president’s preferred manner of communicating with the American electorate and beyond? It did, and the pattern became a familiar one: President Trump tweeted out to his Twitter “followers” — mostly his political base — but also, compulsorily, to those in the news media. Journalists then projected his 148-character statements to the country and the world. Trump ended his single presidential term banned from the platform, severely hobbled politically in part because of that.

By now, articles on every topic, from politics to sports to culture, embed tweets and links to actual pages. Since to view these one must possess an account, the ubiquity of the Twitter platform — and others like it — only increases. Putatively, at least, one must be on them to be informed. Whether Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat or another site, social media now wield power beyond what possibly could have been imagined at their inception.

Some legislators and editorialists wonder whether this makes us vulnerable to the whims of unelected individuals, in the form of the owners of social media companies. If an American president can be muzzled, can’t anyone?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/the_new_york_times_doesnt_understand_what_a_conspiracy_theory_is.html

Even as Biden blatantly violates American law and sovereignty by erasing our southern border, remember that the Hispanic culture meshes with conservative values. Hispanics are pro-life, pro-marriage, and pro-gun; believe there are two sexes; and, until leftist activists get hold of them, have a solid worth ethic. Unsurprisingly, then, Hispanic men are drawn to conservativism. To the New York Times, this is as baffling as believing in the “conspiracy theory” of violent Black Lives Matter protests.

On Saturday, the New York Times took up “A Vexing Question for Democrats: What Drives Latino Men to Republicans?” The subheading to that caption provides an admirable summary of exactly what it is that makes Hispanic men support conservative values:

Several voters said values like individual responsibility and providing for one’s family, and a desire for lower taxes and financial stability, led them to reject a party embraced by their parents.

In other words, they like conservative values for the same reason people of other races and creeds like them: They’re universal values that create strong, stable families and, in turn, strong, stable nations. Take, for example, Erik Ortiz, 41, a hip-hop music producer who now lives in free and open Florida, but who grew up in the South Bronx:

“Everybody was a liberal Democrat — in my neighborhood, in the Bronx, in the local government,” said Mr. Ortiz, whose family is Black and from Puerto Rico. “The welfare state was bad for our people — the state became the father in the Black and brown household and that was a bad, bad mistake.” Mr. Ortiz became a Republican, drawn to messages of individual responsibility and lower taxes. To him, generations of poor people have stayed loyal to a Democratic Party that has failed to transform their lives.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/03/media-memoryholes-the-sicknick-story/

During his Senate testimony, FBI Director Christopher Wray publicly admitted his agency does not know how Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died. “We’re not at a point where we can disclose or confirm the cause of death,” Wray, clearly uncomfortable, told Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) on Tuesday morning.

Unfortunately, no one on the Senate Judiciary Committee confronted Wray with the now-retracted story that Officer Sicknick was murdered by Trump supporters using a fire extinguisher. Republicans missed a golden opportunity not just to expose the New York Times’ primary role in seeding the bogus account but also to confront their Democratic colleagues who voted to convict Donald Trump partially based on the notion his comments on January 6 led to the death of a police officer. “The insurrectionists killed a Capitol Police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher,” according to the House Democrats’ impeachment memo.

But suddenly, the news media have lost all interest in what happened to Sicknick. After nonstop coverage—including somber videos of the police procession in his honor and a memorial in the Capitol Rotunda, attended by Joe Biden, just days before the impeachment trial began in February—major news organizations have memoryholed the initial account about the fire extinguisher; some apparently have forgotten about Sicknick altogether.

The New York Times, the paper responsible for launching the lie, didn’t bother to mention Sicknick in its coverage of Wray’s testimony—the paper of record, however, did publish a lengthy piece Monday detailing how “Pro-Trump Forces Pushed a Lie About Antifa at the Capitol Riot.” Take a moment and savor the irony.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/washington-post-fact-checkers-called-president-daniel-greenfield/

Once upon a time, the media used fact checkers to check its own facts before publishing a story. And then the media stopped checking its facts and started smearing everyone else.

The media’s false claim that Russia had somehow rigged the 2016 election to help President Trump win with “disinformation” became the basis for a media movement pressuring Big Tech to let the media’s fact checking censors silence conservatives with their ‘fact checking’.

Even as the media discarded all of its remaining standards, it claimed truth as its standard.

“This is an apple. Some people might try and tell you that it’s a banana,” CNN lectured viewers. “They might scream banana, banana, banana over and over and over again.”

At the Washington Post, which had declared war on President Trump early on, fact checking became its own industry. Glenn Kessler, the head of the Post’s fact checking team, and two junior members published a book last year titled, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth. It was the last hurrah for the team which shut down its presidential fact checking operation in 2021

But Kessler and the Post continued touting its fake database claiming that President Trump had made “30,573 false or misleading claims” even while making it clear that the game had changed. When Joe Biden falsely claimed that there was no vaccine when he came into office, Kessler insisted that it was a “verbal stumble, a typical Biden gaffe”, but not false or a lie.

ttps://amgreatness.com/2021/02/27/where-are-all-the-retractions-of-the-brian-sicknick-story/
The Capitol Police officer did not die after being attacked by Trump supporters with a fire extinguisher on January 6. Yet news organizations and lawmakers refuse to correct the Big Lie.

Law enforcement officials, according to several news reports, now are searching for someone who allegedly released bear spray into a crowd of police officers January 6 outside the Capitol building. The suspect might have sprayed the chemical at Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died January 7 reportedly from injuries sustained in the chaos. 

“In a significant breakthrough in the case, investigators have now pinpointed a person seen on video of the riot who attacked several officers with bear spray, including Officer Sicknick,” the New York Times reported Friday night.

With that one sentence, the Times buried for good its own original account of what happened to Sicknick—the now-debunked claim Trump “loyalists” beat him to death with a fire extinguisher. The Times seeded the fabricated story in a January 8 article; the paper “updated” the article—in reality, a retraction—on February 12 after pressure from a few outlets, including American Greatness.

The “bear spray” assault is just the latest change in the slowly unraveling mystery surrounding Sicknick’s untimely death. (He was 42.) His grieving mother told the Daily Mail last week she believes her son died of a stroke and isn’t sure if any sort of repellent spray caused it. The D.C. Medical Examiner’s office, in what can only be interpreted as a cover-up, refuses to release any autopsy or toxicology report, even though Sicknick was cremated weeks ago.

The public, and his family, may never know exactly how he died.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/a_culture_of_lies.html

Almost everything you are being told to believe by the mainstream media is a lie.

The legacy media has long since chosen sides and will brazenly cover up anything that could reflect poorly on Democrats, yet will assiduously traffic in any and all innuendo, hearsay, and slander that they feel will harm Republicans/conservatives/Trump supporters. They gleefully promulgate prevarication in their unending quest to damage Democrats’ political opponents.

Hatred-addled late night television hosts compete to see who can spout the most ignorant inanities. Colleges and universities no longer care about providing their students a well-rounded, classical education. They care only of indoctrinating them into the anti-West, anti-capitalist, anti-Christian ideology of multiculturalism and Critical Race Theory, or CRT.

Big, multinational corporations now reflexively parrot the false rot emanating from Big Academia. And Big Tech now silences, stifles and cancels anyone who believes in the founding principles of the United States, the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights. Together they have become the Father of Lies. Don’t believe them.

And what are they lying about, you ask? Virtually everything. They claim that if a White person eats, makes or sells a taco, for instance, that it is a form of “cultural appropriation.” No, it means they like tacos. It is a compliment to the culture that originally produced them. It is the same for White people who are fond of blues music. Is it likewise “appropriation” if a Black person wears Levi’s jeans or anyone outside of China utilizes a printing press? Should Johannes Gutenberg be reviled for making improvements on same?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/24/losing-an-american-genius/

Rush Limbaugh created modern national talk radio as we now know it—from nothing. For over three decades he kept at rapt attention weekdays—live from noon to three—the largest conservative audience in broadcast history. Over 15 million tuned in each week. 

Last week—32 years, and over 23,000 hours of on-air commentary after Rush went national in August 1988—he is gone, at 70 years young. 

By the 1990s he had become the voice—literally and iconically—of the conservative movement and its hot/cold liaisons with the Republican Party. Rush was hated by the Left because he was deadly effective in fighting them, and feared at times by the Republican establishment—because he could also be deadly effective in fighting them. 

Limbaugh had an uncanny sense of what conservative populism could do—such as abruptly end Barack Obama’s control of Congress after just two years, in the sweeping Tea Party midterm election of 2010.  And he also instinctively sensed what it should not do: endorse Ross Perot’s Quixotic third-party surge of 1992 that eventually would split the conservative vote and ensure Bill Clinton the presidency with just 43 percent of the popular vote. 

Rush was a master comedian. His pauses, intonations, and mock tones were far funnier than those of our contemporary regulars on late-night television comedy. He was a gifted mimic, an impersonator, with as wide a repertoire and as skilled at impressions as the masters of the past like Vaughn Meader, David Frye, and Rich Little. Yet Rush worked mostly behind the mike, without the aid of an on-stage presence. 

https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/24/political-hacks-at-newsweek-run-anti-science-fact-check-on-study-promoting-hydroxychloroquine/

A study by Baylor University Medical Center researchers published in the American Journal of Medicine in January 2021 found hydroxychloroquine is a potential treatment for COVID-19.

The study, which was originally written and posted on the PubMed website in August 2020, says, “When started earlier in the hospital course, for progressively longer durations and in outpatients, antimalarials may reduce the progression of disease, prevent hospitalization, and are associated with reduced mortality.”

After the American Journal of Medicine posted the study in January, it began circulating around the internet with captions and headlines such as: “After 440,000 Americans are Dead — Facebook and American Journal of Medicine Admit Their Stand on HCQ was Wrong — These People Should be Prosecuted.”

In late March and early April, former President Donald Trump endorsed treating COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine, which was echoed by the August study. Immediately, he received severe pushback from medical journals and associations as well as the corporate media, who warned that hydroxychloroquine has no benefit as a treatment and is even potentially dangerous. This is despite the fact that hydroxychloroquine has been safely used against malaria and various immune deficiency syndromes for decades.

Tech giants Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube followed suit by censoring and suppressing anyone who deviated from the prescribed left-wing narrative that hydroxychloroquine is an ineffective and dangerous method of treating the Wuhan virus.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/02/23/house_dems_misguided_effort_to_muzzle_conservative_media_145292.html

On Feb. 24, House Democrats will hold a hearing on “traditional media’s role in promoting disinformation and extremism.” This hearing is a dangerous threat to American democracy and goes entirely against what the Founders intended when they made a free press Americans’ guaranteed First Amendment right in the Constitution.

It’s also just the latest threat against free speech from the left, which has now mainstreamed a despotic desire to use government to cancel conservative speech. Just last week, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called for Fox News to be on trial for supporting former President Donald Trump. This is the same Kristof who recently began calling for a War on Terror-style campaign against Trump supporters and “the ecosystem that produces them” — completely missing the key difference between the right to free speech and the lack of rights to commit political violence.

Kristof’s dangerous rhetoric joins that of other influential mainstream media figures who are targeting media they deem too friendly towards Trump. Washington Post columnist Max Boot wants cable companies to cut off Fox, and MSNBC commentator Anand Giridharadas suggests that the outlet shouldn’t even exist. 

Freedom of expression is essential to a flourishing democracy, which is why I oppose unconstitutional limits on free speech. It’s why I supported the rights of liberal groups like the Brennan Center to oppose my nomination to the Federal Elections Commission 20 years ago even though they said things I felt were often unfair and sometimes untrue. Kristof has the right to publish his views if they are peaceful, just as Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh have said things that Democrats don’t like. Calls to shut down a major news source like Fox, or even its smaller allies in the conservative media world, whether through corporate deplatforming or government force, cross the line from opposing ideas to undermining our civil society.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/if-the-media-had-investigated-cuomos-covid-response-the-way-they-did-cruzs-cancun-trip-thousands-of-new-yorkers-could-still-be-alive?itm_source=parsely-api&utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email

This week, with historic winter storms knocking out power for millions of Texans, Senator Ted Cruz traveled with his family to Cancun for a beach vacation. Shortly after photos of Cruz boarding a flight hit the internet, two things happened. 

First, social media went into a frenzy. The beach trip instantly became the number one trending topic on Twitter, with reporters, media personalities, commentators, and others lambasting Cruz for his ill-timed journey.

Second, the legacy media began digging for more details regarding the trip. Who else had gone? What hotel were they staying in? How long was the trip originally scheduled to last?

Soon, the full force of the American media apparatus was deployed. Hordes of photographers wandered the Cancun airport hoping to catch a glimpse of Cruz on his return voyage, while investigative reporters began reaching out to close friends and neighbors of the Senator’s wife, Heidi, in a quest for more information. 

Within 24 hours of the first photos emerging, reporters had obtained transcripts of text messages sent between Heidi Cruz and her closest friends, which shed light on the trip. 

Meanwhile, members of the legacy media breathlessly searched for answers from Cruz’s staff, demanding to know further details of the trip and posting hourly updates of their findings. 

As the specifics of the trip emerged, and the media firestorm intensified, Senator Cruz boarded a return flight for Houston, issuing a statement apologizing for his decision and the timing of his getaway, saying it was “obviously a mistake.” 

The saga served as an impressive reminder of the investigative capabilities of our news media, and the impact that dogged reporting can have on the decisions of policy makers.