RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://nypost.com/2021/02/11/read-the-column-the-new-york-times-didnt-want-you-read/

Last weekend, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote a piece criticizing the rationale behind the forced ouster of Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr., but it was never published. Stephens told colleagues the column was killed by publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Since then, the piece has circulated among Times staffers and others — and it was from one of them, not Stephens himself, that The Post obtained it. We publish his spiked column here in full.

Every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system and every ethical organization cares deeply about intention.

It is the difference between murder and manslaughter. It is an aggravating or extenuating factor in judicial settings. It is a cardinal consideration in pardons (or at least it was until Donald Trump got in on the act). It’s an elementary aspect of parenting, friendship, courtship and marriage.

A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention. Most of what is cruel, intolerant, stupid and misjudged in life stems from that indifference. Read accounts about life in repressive societies — I’d recommend Vaclav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” and Nien Cheng’s “Life and Death in Shanghai” — and what strikes you first is how deeply the regimes care about outward conformity, and how little for personal intention.

I’ve been thinking about these questions in an unexpected connection. Late last week, Donald G. McNeil Jr., a veteran science reporter for The Times, abruptly departed from his job following the revelation that he had uttered a racial slur while on a New York Times trip to Peru for high school students. In the course of a dinner discussion, he was asked by a student whether a 12-year old should have been suspended by her school for making a video in which she had used a racial slur.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/nikole-hannah-jones-runs-the-new-york-times/

It doesn’t matter how many times Hannah-Jones embarrasses the paper. She will not be reprimanded, much less removed from her position.

T here is no rule of law in the workplace. Across all industries, star talent is treated differently — and allowed to get away with more — than your average employee. It’s true in the boardroom, in professional sports, and in the newsroom.

Yet even awareness of this truth is not enough to prepare you for the curious case of Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times. Time after time, Hannah-Jones, creator and compiler of the Times’ 1619 Project, is allowed to publicly embarrass the paper in the public sphere with her juvenile behavior, and to sow discord within it by showing utter contempt for her colleagues. And time after time, she emerges from the turmoil untouched, leaving a trail of discarded journalists in her wake. Even more significant, her signature achievement and the worldview it represents have become the de facto governing documents and principles by which the Times makes personnel decisions.

Most recently, this power dynamic was exemplified by the Times’ firing of longtime science reporter Donald McNeil Jr. and its reaction to Hannah-Jones’s doxxing of Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium. McNeil was let go after a story about his use of a racial slur — ironically in the context of discussing when it should merit cancellation, not while using it maliciously — resurfaced. The “incident” occurred in 2019, and upon investigating it, the Times deemed it unworthy of punishment. In the new, post-1619 Project newsroom, however, McNeil needed to be expelled after more than four decades at the paper. According to Executive Editor Dean Baquet, the Times would “not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” And yet, Hannah-Jones had used the epithet on Twitter in the past, and she has been not just tolerated, not only celebrated, but venerated. When Sibarium reached out to Hannah-Jones for comment on this double standard, she posted his polite email request — which included his phone number — on Twitter in an attempt to shame him.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/cair-leader-shares-social-media-posts-islamist-who-joe-kaufman/

Now that Hassan Shibly has resigned his position as Executive Director of CAIR-Florida, after his wife’s accusations of domestic violence, it has left CAIR-Florida Communications Director Wilfredo Ruiz in the top leadership position of the group, at least until the group names a new Executive Director. This should result in extra scrutiny for Ruiz, beginning with his recent social media postings copied from Muslim extremist Abdur Rahman al-Ghani, who refers to Jews as “demonic” and “the children of Satan,” and Ruiz’s own anti-Semitic ramblings. Up until now, Ruiz’s radical activity has been ignored by news networks that continue to interview him. Why?

Wilfredo Amr Ruiz has been with the Florida chapter of CAIR, since December 2011. CAIR or the Council on American-Islamic Relations was created, in June 1994, as part of a US Hamas network led by then-global head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook, who was deported from the US in 1997. While with CAIR, Ruiz has also served as legal counsel for the American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA), a group that was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), in July 2010, for promoting “venomous” anti-Semitic material on its website. Besides being its lawyer, Ruiz founded AMANA’s Puerto Rico and Connecticut chapters.

Since 2017, Ruiz has been involved with the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the US arm of South Asian Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), and is now a representative for ICNA’s WhyIslam. ICNA has advertised Hamas and Hezbollah on its website, and in December 2017, ICNA organized an event featuring Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation (FIF), a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks. For decades, ICNA has harbored and placed in its top leadership Ashrafuz Zaman Khan, a JI militant who was sentenced to death, in absentia, for the December 1971 murders of 18 people in Bangladesh.

https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2021/02/06/no-really-fox-fire-lou-dobbs/

“Lou Dobbs retweets attacks on Fox News. “Fox is Finished.” “Fox is in a race with itself to the bottom.”

Cashiering the most ardently pro-Trump host on American television makes no sense in that context. If anything, you would think they’d have wanted Dobbs to do an extra hour of “greatest president ever” propaganda every night — or even switch him over from Fox Business to MacCallum’s old slot on Fox News. Remember, Dobbs isn’t just a star of Trumpist media, he’s so tight with the former president that Trump reportedly would patch him through on speakerphone during White House meetings to offer his take. “John Kelly once told me that he learned to watch Lou Dobbs to understand what the president might think or say about a topic,” said WaPo reporter Josh Dawsey this morning.

You don’t shed a guy like that lightly. Even Fox Business staffers were surprised by his cancellation, according to the Post.

The universal suspicion is that Fox dropped the hammer in response to the defamation suit Smartmatic filed against Fox and Dobbs on Thursday, but that doesn’t fully add up. If Fox were in the process of dumping all of its anchors who’d entertained theories about Smartmatic’s machines being rigged, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo would be gone too. In reality, Bartiromo is getting a tryout in MacCallum’s former 7 p.m. slot on FNC and Pirro just launched a new show (about castles in America, of all things) on Fox’s streaming platform. Fox doesn’t seem poised to dump either of them; on the contrary, it’s giving them more work.

Plus, as a matter of basic PR, it would look exceptionally weak for Fox to flush Dobbs within 24 hours of Smartmatic’s suit being filed. As John said, it feels like an admission of wrongdoing in context: “The bad man did a little slander, fine, but we’ve gotten rid of him now so we shouldn’t have to pay.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-new-york-timess-internal-mob-takes-down-another-of-its-own/?utm_source=recirc-%5BSCREENSIZE%5D&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

Earlier this week, I wrote at length about the growing tide of illiberalism in the United States. This morning, I was forwarded an email sent out by the management team at the New York Times that illustrates precisely what I was talking about. For sake of clarity, I will quote the whole thing, starting with the preface:

———- Forwarded message ———
From: NYT Mail <*@nytimes.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 4:31 PM
Subject: A Note From Dean and Joe
To: All Company Employees <*@nytimes.com>

Colleagues,

We are writing to let you know that Donald McNeil Jr. will be leaving the company. Donald joined The Times in 1976 and has done much good reporting over four decades. But we feel that this is the right next step.

We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent. We are committed to building a news report and company that reflect our core values of integrity and respect, and will work with urgency to create clearer guidelines and enforcement about conduct in the workplace, including red-line issues on racist language.

Every person in leadership at The Times is dedicated to building a culture where each of our colleagues feels supported and respected. It’s vital that we get this right. To those of you who have reached out to us with your honest and sometimes painful feelings about this incident, we thank you.

Donald has offered a statement to his colleagues, which is below.

— Dean and Joe

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/05/msnbcs-nicolle-wallace-paints-trump-supporters-as-domestic-terrorists-points-out-that-americans-were-droned-during-gwot/

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace on Friday likened President Trump and millions of his supporters to domestic terrorists while fondly reminiscing about the days when American citizens overseas were killed by drone strikes during the global war on terror.

Wallace, who served the Bush White House as Communications Director in 2005 and 2006, made the comments during an MSNBC panel discussion about the impeachment trial of former president Trump.

Wallace described the widely held beliefs that the 2020 election was rigged and that draconian Covid restrictions are unnecessary, as “ideologies” that incite domestic terrorism.

“There is until the end of April a persistent threat of domestic extremism,” Wallace said. “Domestic terrorism carried out in the ideology of and around this belief that the election was fraudulent, that the Covid restrictions are unnecessary—all of those ideologies pushed by Donald Trump.”

Wallace brought up the Bush/Obama era policy of droning suspected terrorists overseas, which she described as “attacking terrorism at its root.”

https://www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/1008864?dkt_nbr=010104430ayz&section=us&keywords=dobbs-trump-voter-fraud&year=2021&month=02&date=05&id=1008864

Fox News has canceled ”Lou Dobbs Tonight,” the program hosted by one of the media’s most steadfast supporters of Donald Trump and the former president’s claims of voter fraud, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday. 

Dobbs’ program, which has been airing twice nightly at 5 and 7 p.m. ET on the Fox Business Network, will be replaced next week with ”Fox Business Tonight,” with rotating substitute hosts Jackie DeAngelis and David Asman, who filled in for Dobbs on Friday. This, according to a Fox rep who confirmed the news to the Times.

Dobbs, 75, remains under contract at Fox News, the newspaper said, but his future on the conservative news network is murky. 

The cancellation comes a day after a large voting software company, Smartmatic, filed a $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox News and three of its hosts — Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. The company said the hosts helped to spread lies about Smartmatic’s role in the presidential election, to the detriment of its reputation and its business.

Fox News has been in turmoil as long-time viewers have abandoned the channel since Election Day. Former President Donald Trump has attributed his election loss to Joe Biden to unfair coverage by Fox News as well as massive voter fraud.

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

In 2018, Mark Robinson stood up before the city council in Greensboro, North Carolina, and gave an impassioned defense of the Second Amendment. That video went viral and led to him entering politics. Last year, Robinson became North Carolina’s Republican Lieutenant Governor. This year, when a local paper published a cartoon calling the entire North Carolina Republican party a KKK entity, Robinson (who is black) ferociously attacked the newspaper for its dishonesty and ignorance. He needs to give master classes in handling the media.

To get a sense of the man, I recommend that you take the four minutes to watch his defense of the Second Amendment in the face of the Greensboro city council’s plan to ban gun shows from coming to the city. It’s epic:

This man is not a shrinking violet. So, as I said, that speech was the springboard to a successful political career that saw Mark Robinson go from private citizen to North Carolina Lieutenant Governor in just two years.

On Tuesday, WRAL.com published a cartoon that showed the Republican party as the KKK party. The cartoon revolves around the North Carolina Board of Education’s plan to have “inclusive” social studies standards. In a word, the standards are “woke” – they are the usual anti-American stuff about America being a racist, imperialist, destructive, hate-filled, yadda, yadda, yadda country.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/crucifying-jordan-peterson-bruce-bawer/

Jordan Peterson was a relatively unknown clinical psychologist and University of Toronto professor until his brave 2016 challenge to a draconian Canadian law on transgender pronouns drew widespread attention. Millions watched his brilliant, wide-ranging YouTube lectures about life, truth, feelings, personality, and values. For a while there he seemed ubiquitous, giving interviews and lectures around the world and, in the process, becoming the planet’s most famous living public intellectual. He published a massive bestseller, 12 Rules for Life.

Then, suddenly, he disappeared. For the last two years he’s been in medical hell, experiencing torturous pain and being brought to the brink of death by a puzzling malady that took him, in search of answers, to hospitals, clinics, and rehab centers in Canada, the U.S., Russia, and Serbia. Meanwhile his wife was diagnosed with a rare and deadly cancer from which she now seems, miraculously, to have recovered. On top of everything else, he, his wife, and his deeply devoted adult daughter all contracted the COVID virus.

Emerging from this nightmare and prepared to step back onto the public stage, Peterson agreed to a major interview with Decca Aitkenhead for the Sunday Times of London. The story appeared on January 31; on the same day, Peterson posted on YouTube a recording of the nearly three-hour Zoom conversations that he and his daughter, Mikhaila, had with Aitkenhead. In the recording (which as of Wednesday had accumulated half a million hits), Peterson is friendly and forthcoming, but emotionally fragile as a consequence of his long torment; at one point he breaks into tears and has to step away from the microphone. Mikhaila, for her part, spends an hour and a half telling Aitkenhead the full story of Peterson’s illness, complete with vivid particulars. And Aitkenhead poses throughout as entirely sympathetic, sounding more like a compassionate social worker than a journalist.