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Congratulations, National Review! You Got Your Wish! It was all worth it, these principled conservatives will tell you, because conservatism had to be destroyed in order to save it from Trump. By George S. Bardmesser

By on December 20th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/19/congratulations-national-review-you-got-your-wish/

“The incoming “president” is a caricature, his running mate has a voting record to the left of Bernie Sanders, his staff is determined to turn America into a Venezuela-of-the-North, but, you know, character. It was all worth it, these principled conservatives will tell you, because conservatism had to be destroyed in order to save it from Trump.”

The biological entity known as Joseph R. Biden will be inaugurated on January 20. Success has a thousand fathers—and one of them is a conservative publication where many principled conservatives spend their days tearing down the most conservative president in generations.

I therefore would like to congratulate National Review and its principled conservers of conservatism on a job well done. At long last, your efforts to undermine Donald Trump and make yourselves irrelevant have borne fruit. For National Review this has always been less about policy and more about “personal and moral character.” With Joe Biden, National Review can finally have a man of real character in the Oval Office. Mission accomplished, guys.

In the run-up to November 3, the leading lights who conserve conservatism at that magazine thundered against Trump. The theme was always the same: character. Trump’s—unlike his opponent’s—was so lacking, so threadbare, so inadequate to the task, that nothing Trump ever did or would do could make up for the deficit.

Take Kevin Williamson. Williamson, who was booted from the Atlantic a few years ago because his pro-life views were said to be incompatible with “journalism,” reserves special contempt for President Trump. In case anyone doubted where Williamson stands, he wrote a piece shortly before the election, dripping with sarcasm and denigrating Trump’s accomplishments. That Trump was able to achieve anything at all in the face of four years of non-stop sabotage of his presidency is itself remarkable—but Trump’s lack of character trumped all.

So I want to congratulate Kevin Williamson on the election of Joe Biden. There are many reasons for the hardcore Left and the harder-core Left to celebrate, but for those National Review conservatives conserving conservatism, certainly character is first and foremost. Take abortion—Biden has been lying about his “opposition” to abortion for decades. For that matter, he’s been lying about his religion for decades—he is no more a Catholic than I am a Rastafarian.

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Jeffrey Toobin and the Media’s Curious Code of Decency By Mark Heimingway

By on December 19th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/12/19/jeffrey_toobin_and_the_medias_curious_code_of_decency_144888.html

Some 3,000 Americans a day are dying of COVID-19, a significant chunk of the country won’t accept November’s election results, and Russian hackers appear to have compromised much of the federal government. Amid this mayhem, the mainstream media found time to address an issue that most Americans haven’t given a second thought: Will Jeffrey Toobin’s career survive?

In case you haven’t heard – or have mercifully forgotten – during an Oct. 15 New Yorker magazine staff meeting held on Zoom, the 60 year-old Toobin “was seen lowering and raising his computer camera, exposing and touching his penis, and motioning an air kiss to someone other than his colleagues,” according to a New York Times report. Dozens of staff members from the venerable magazine were assembled online for an election simulation exercise, which in retrospect sounds like an unfortunate euphemism.

On Nov. 11, Condé Nast, which owns The New Yorker, fired Toobin from a job he’d held for 27 years. Although he’s on self-imposed leave at CNN, he is still employed as its chief legal analyst. “Three CNN employees say that network president, Jeff Zucker, is a big fan of Mr. Toobin’s and a believer in second chances,” reports the Times.

Society’s blithe acceptance of ubiquitous Internet pornography might make an inadvertent indiscretion in front of your home computer seem understandable to many. However, for Toobin this isn’t a first transgression – it’s déjà vu all over again. His smarmy behavior has been public knowledge for a very long time. The Times recounts how in 2003 the married Toobin asked out a colleague. Before they could even go out, he left her an answering machine message explicitly describing in vulgar detail the sex acts he wanted to perform with her.

In 2008, Toobin had an affair with Casey Greenfield, the much-younger daughter of veteran political journalist Jeff Greenfield. When Casey Greenfield became pregnant, Toobin reportedly offered her money to have an abortion. When she refused, he told her he would make her regret the decision. After the child was born, Toobin had to be dragged into court and forced to pay child support.

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News Reporting On Crime Isn’t Racist, It’s Essential By John Daniel Davidson

By on December 19th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/18/news-reporting-on-crime-isnt-racist-its-essenti

The smart people at Harvard’s Nieman Lab want you to know that reporting on crime is really just another way of perpetuating white supremacy.

Among the many things 2020 has helped clarify is that journalism, particularly the journalism practiced by the corporate media, is in bad shape. From the media’s coverage of impeachment (remember that?), to the presidential election, to the pandemic and the riots and everything else, it has become painfully obvious that the establishment press isn’t interested in journalism as such, but in woke political activism and race hustling.

So no wonder the very smart journalists at Harvard’s Nieman Lab want to “defund the crime beat” because reporting on crime is apparently now racist.

That’s the gist of a recent piece published as part of Nieman’s series on “predictions for journalism 2021.” It’s not so much a prediction as a shoddy argument, though, and it opens with the blanket claim that “Crime coverage is terrible.”

It’s racist, classist, fear-based clickbait masking as journalism. It creates lasting harm for the communities that newsrooms are supposed to serve. And because it so rarely meets the public’s needs, it’s almost never newsworthy, despite what Grizzled Gary in his coffee-stained shirt says from his perch at the copy desk.

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A Second Zionist Jew’s Exit from New York Times Opinion Page Is Called ‘Disgrace’ By Ira Stoll

By on December 19th, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/12/18/a-second-zionist-jews-exit-from-new-york-times-opinion-page-is-called-disgrace/

A second openly Zionist staffer has exited the New York Times editorial page as the newspaper’s publisher interviews candidates for the editorial-page editor job.

In June, a Republican senator, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, wrote a Times op-ed headlined “Send in the Troops,” calling for the deployment of the US military to quell what the article called an “orgy of violence” and “rioters and looters” in American cities following the death in police custody of George Floyd. More than 800 Times staff members signed a letter protesting the article’s publication, and more than two dozen New York Times employees called in sick to protest the op-ed.

New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet resigned after the publication of the Cotton article, but others sought to blame its appearance on two Jewish opinion-page staffers, Bari Weiss and Adam Rubenstein. I covered the episode at the time under the headline “Republican Senator Writes New York Times Op-Ed. Zionist Jews Get Blamed.”

“‘Blame Weiss and Rubenstein’ is the NYT’s new motto, and unlike its previous one, actually accurately describes what the paper aims to do every day of the week and twice on Shabbos,” quipped Seth Mandel, executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.

Weiss left the Times in July, complaining of “unlawful discrimination” and “constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.” Now Rubenstein has also departed. He did not reply to a message asking why, but Weiss, on Twitter, wrote that he “was hung out to dry by his own colleagues.”

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Ivanka, Hunter and Vanity Unfair Tim Graham

By on December 18th, 2020

https://townhall.com/columnists/timgraham/2020/12/18/ivanka-hunter-and-vanity-unfair-n2581779

No media analyst believes Vanity Fair is a “news” magazine. It’s a glossy liberal rag. But on Dec. 16, it displayed some amazing partisan gymnastics on the offspring of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

This headline by writer Bess Levin was certainly clickbait for the haters: “Ivanka Trump Faces Off With Father to See How Many People They Can Kill With COVID-19.” We can guess no “independent fact-checkers” will get involved to insist that, in reality, the Trumps aren’t plotting to kill hundreds of thousands of people.

Just a month ago, Vanity Fair ran a story by a purported ex-best friend of Ivanka Trump’s in which she claimed that Trump once asked, “Why would you tell me to read a book about f—ing poor people?”

Levin’s Ivanka screed carried a subhead reading, “The first daughter, a noted epidemiologist, doesn’t think lockdowns are ‘grounded in science.'” That’s not exactly what Ivanka tweeted in response to a video of a businessman frustrated with the lockdowns. “These blanket lockdowns are not grounded in science,” she said. “These arbitrary rules imposed by callous politicians are destroying lives. It is just wrong for small business owners to have fight so hard to keep their American dream alive.”

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For NY Times, no news is fit to print about Rep. Swalwell and a spy By Joe Concha,

By on December 17th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/530640-for-ny-times-no-news-is-fit-to-print-about-rep-swalwell-and-a-spy

If you’re a New York Times subscriber who also watches the broadcast network evening news and considers that your news diet, there’s a very good chance you haven’t heard about Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and his ties to an accused Chinese spy a few years ago. 

To review why this is absolutely worthy of coverage, Swalwell’s interaction with the alleged spy known as Fang Fang included, according to Axios, Fang placing an intern in Swalwell’s office and helping to fundraise for his 2014 reelection campaign. In 2015, the FBI provided Swalwell a “defensive briefing” to warn him of the threat she appeared to pose. 

So, the first obvious question is this: Given how easily Swalwell was duped, why did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) shortly thereafter place him on the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees the CIA and therefore has access to the highest level of sensitive, classified information? 

The New York Times doesn’t seem to care about getting an answer to that question. 

Of the biases we see in major media, the sin of omission is one that seems to occur only when the protagonist of a major story has a (D) next to his or her name. So, when the New York Times, which has a whopping 7 million subscribers and is considered the country’s most influential publication, doesn’t see the Swalwell story as a story at all, it tells you just as much about its moral compass as it does its editorial decisions. 

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Is America’s Fourth Estate (Free Press) in Foreclosure? by Leni Friedman Valenta with Jiri Valenta

By on December 16th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16863/free-press-foreclosure

The modern meaning [of the fourth estate]… refers to the press as a fourth and free power — as even a “watchdog” — over the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our government. Today, however, it is the watchdog that needs watching.

It was all right for the New York Times, as its editor-in-chief, Dean Baquet, admitted, to have “built our newsroom” around the fake Russia Hoax for two years, but substantiated facts concerning the Biden family’s influence peddling were apparently “not fit to print.”

So far, still to be answered, is the question: If elections can ignore legalities with impunity, how, going forward, can there be trustworthy elections?

The “fourth estate” refers to freedom of the press. The term may have first been used by the philosopher-statesman Edmund Burke, who in 1787 highlighted the press as free and apart from the other three British “estates” — clergy, royalty and commoners.

The modern meaning, however, refers to the press as a fourth and free power — as even a “watchdog” — over the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our government. Today, however, it is the watchdog that needs watching.

The foundation on which the United States is built, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, is enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Before our eyes, however, this freedom is being distorted, strangled and withheld.

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New York Times Attacks Election Skeptics How the fourth estate has turned into Biden’s fiefdom. Tue Dec 15, 2020 Joseph Klein

By on December 15th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/ny-times-editors-brook-no-claim-biden-election-joseph-klein/

The New York Times editors reached a new low of hypocrisy with their December 11th editorial entitled “The Republicans Who Embraced Nihilism.” Failure to embrace Joe Biden as the legitimate president-elect is tantamount in their eyes to embracing a nihilist rejection of America’s democratic process itself. That’s not surprising given the editors’ hysterical warning before the election that Trump’s re-election campaign “poses the greatest threat to American democracy since the Second World War.” Forget about the real threats posed by nuclear-armed Communist nations and global Islamist terrorism. President Trump is the existential threat to the country, the editors exclaim. Fueled by their hatred of Trump, it’s not much of a leap for the Times’ editors to do what they can to help push Biden over the finish line by whatever means necessary.  

The Times editorial began by bemoaning widespread Republican support for Texas’s failed constitutional challenge to the results of the presidential election in four other states where Joe Biden was declared the winner. But most of the editorial was taken up with attacking Republican supporters of President Trump more generally for daring to question the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s purported election victory. The editors descended into lobbing false accusations that such Republicans are engaging in “election denialism,” “undermining the rule of law,” an “assault on truth,” and “anti-democratic tendencies.”.

The real nihilists and election deniers are the Democrats and their shills in the media, who refused to accept Donald Trump as the duly elected president of the United States in 2016 or to acknowledge the legitimacy of his presidency. Obsessed with their hatred of President Trump, these deniers wouldn’t recognize the truth if it slapped them in the face. They were complicit in undermining the rule of law and democracy by concocting and pursuing endless bogus charges against Trump, starting with the Russian collusion hoax. The New York Times has been a leading generator of fake news hit jobs against the president.

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The Bombshell Story The New York Times Still Hasn’t Informed Its Readers About Leah Barkoukis

By on December 14th, 2020

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2020/12/14/the-bombshell-story-the-new-york-times-has-failed-to-inform-its-readers-about-n2581453

Axios published a yearlong investigation last week about an alleged Chinese spy who developed ties to politicians at both the local and national level between 2011 and 2015, including with Congressman Eric Swalwell, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee.

“Through campaign fundraising, extensive networking, personal charisma, and romantic or sexual relationships with at least two Midwestern mayors, [Christine] Fang was able to gain proximity to political power, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials and one former elected official,” Axios reported.

Federal investigators had to step in and give Swalwell a briefing about Fang, after which he “cut off all ties” to her. Nevertheless, she had helped him during his 2014 re-election campaign and placed an intern in his office. 

While Swalwell has not been accused of wrongdoing and Fang left the U.S. in 2015, many are calling into question his seat on the Intelligence Committee. 

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) filed a complaint with the House Ethics Committee on Friday, asking that an investigation be opened immediately into the allegations. And Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) said if Democrats keep him on the committee, the GOP “will have to conduct an investigation.”

Swalwell’s office declined to comment for the Axios report “to protect information that might be classified,” but the Democrat later floated the theory that President Trump was behind the story because he’s been critical of him over the years.

There are so many angles to cover about this bombshell story and yet at the time of this writing, The New York Times has still not reported a single one. Even CNN and The Washington Post have touched it. 

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Domenech: John Brennan And Intel Officials Are Lying To Us And The Media Pays Them To Do It By Evita Duffy

By on December 14th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/14/domenech-john-brennan-and-intel-officials-are-lying-to-us-and-the-media-pays-them-to-do-it/

On “Fox and Friends” Monday morning, The Federalist Publisher Ben Domenech said President Trump’s options are very limited in his fight to win the 2020 elections, but that doesn’t mean Trump has to pretend the election was entirely fair or conducted without interference from media and Big Tech.

There were substantial examples of worrisome election fraud that are going almost entirely unnoticed by the corporate media, Domenech argued.

“My real concern is that going forward we don’t have the mechanisms in place to look into this to find out what happened and to the degree that there was either fraud… [and how] we can prevent [it] in the future,” he said.

Domenech cited the “massive media and big tech conspiracy,” which flagged the infamous Hunter Biden scandal as “Russian disinformation.”

Biden’s son is suspected of money laundering in China and the Ukraine, with evidence that his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, was aware of it and may be compromised.

Domenech pointed out that when the New York Post broke the story, big tech was actively “banning people [and] suspending people for sharing this New York post story that has been if not fully verified, something that is clearly not Russian disinformation.” The scandal “certainly should have been something that the American people were allowed to know about and share in advance of this election,” but they were deceptively not.

Highlighting the dishonesty, Domenech explained how corporate media employs intelligence officials who “signed on to this ridiculous letter claiming that this was Russian misinformation without a scintilla of evidence.”

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