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MEDIA

The nefarious purpose behind The Atlantic’s ‘Trump and the military’ hoax By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/the_nefarious_purpose_behind_the_atlantics_trump_and_the_military_hoax.html

“On Thursday, The Atlantic accused Trump of disrespecting the military. By Friday, it was clear that the story existed to paper over Biden’s military problems.”

On Thursday, The Atlantic published an article that used anonymous sources to claim that President Trump repeatedly disparaged American troops, both living and dead. By Friday morning, Democrats were weaponizing the article to cover for Biden’s serious problems with the military: His support for the Iraq War, and the way the Obama administration weakened the military. Trump, however, revitalized the military and fought for the troops.

The article’s primary allegations are that Trump refused to visit a WWI cemetery because of his hair, said the Marines who died taking Belleau Wood were “suckers” and “losers,” and drew back in revulsion from troops who lost limbs. Every assertion is false. People with first-hand information who were willing to go on the record exposed how terribly The Atlantic lied about Trump.

John Bolton, a Trump foe, was clear. “I was there,” he said, about the decision to cancel the Belleau Wood trip, and “I didn’t hear that.” Contemporaneous documents support Bolton, but The Atlantic ignored them:

Here’s How We Know The Atlantic’s Hit Piece on Trump Is Pure Fiction By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/09/04/heres-how-we-know-the-atlantics-hit-piece-on-trump-is-pure-fiction-n890999

A report published Thursday by The Atlantic cited anonymous sources claiming that President Donald Trump didn’t want to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 because the troops there who died in battle were “losers” and “suckers. The media has largely reported on this story as though it were true or at least likely to be true.

“The Atlantic Magazine is dying, like most magazines, so they make up a fake story in order to gain some relevance,” Trump tweeted on Friday. “Story already refuted, but this is what we are up against. Just like the Fake Dossier. You fight and fight, and then people realize it was a total fraud!”

Even CNN’s Brian Stelter seemed to acknowledge that the claims of anonymous sources aren’t as convincing.

“But it is also incumbent on the sources, on the people that are talking to [Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey] Goldberg, on the people that are talking to other outlets — the president’s denying it explicitly, so it’s put up or shut up time,” Stelter said. “Why aren’t these people coming forward and putting their names to these quotes?”

Perhaps because it’s a lot easier to lie when your name and reputation aren’t on the line. But there are at least five witnesses who have gone on the record disputing the allegations made in The Atlantic.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary, called The Atlantic story B.S. on Twitter, “I was actually there and one of the people [who were] part of the discussion – this never happened. I have sat in the room when our President called family members after their sons were killed in action and it was heart-wrenching,” she said. “These were some of the moments I witnessed the President show his heart and demonstrate how much he respects the selfless and courageous men and women of our military. I am disgusted by this false attack.”

My run-in with the New York Times ‘This is where we now are. A reporter is in fear of being canceled if he doesn’t cancel someone else’ Andrew Sullivan

https://spectator.us/andrew-sullivan-run-new-york-times/

” A reporter is in fear of being canceled if he doesn’t cancel someone else. This is America returning to its roots. As in Salem.”

It’s never a good sign when you’re watching a scene of street terror in yet another gut-churning YouTube video and you find yourself thinking: ‘Hang on a minute, that’s around the corner from my apartment!’ But there’s a now infamous video from last week where a mob of enraged millennials with their fists pumped in the air surrounded a lone young woman sitting outside a Washington restaurant where I often eat. Like a scene from the Cultural Revolution, the crowd demanded she shout certain slogans and raise her clenched fist in solidarity — or be damned as a racist. Most of her fellow diners took the path of least resistance. She wouldn’t. The chants grew louder: ‘White silence is violence!’ They started screaming in her face. She wouldn’t cave. Wokeness, in case you hadn’t noticed, has entered a more intense phase. Not so long ago, you were canceled for something you did or said or wrote. Now you’re canceled just for saying absolutely nothing at all.

I had a much milder experience of this during the past week when the New York Times decided to run a profile of me. The hook was that I was forced to leave New York magazine last month because, according to the NYT, I had not publicly recanted editing an issue of the New Republic published…in 1994. The issue was a symposium on The Bell Curve, a book by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein that explored the connection between IQ, class, social mobility and race. My crime was to arrange a symposium around an extract, with 13 often stinging critiques published alongside it. The fact I had not recanted that decision did not, mind you, prevent TIME, the Atlantic, Newsweek, the NYT and New York magazine from publishing me in the following years. But suddenly, a decision I made a quarter of a century ago required my being canceled. The NYT reporter generously gave me a chance to apologize and recant, and when I replied that I thought the role of genetics in intelligence among different human populations was still an open question, he had his headline: ‘I won’t stop reading Andrew Sullivan, but I can’t defend him.’ In other words, the media reporter in America’s paper of record said he could not defend a writer because I refused to say something I don’t believe. He said this while arguing that I was ‘one of the most influential journalists of the last three decades’. To be fair to him, he would have had no future at the NYT if he had not called me an indefensible racist. His silence on that would have been as unacceptable to his woke bosses as my refusal to recant. But this is where we now are. A reporter is in fear of being canceled if he doesn’t cancel someone else. This is America returning to its roots. As in Salem.

‘You’re nothing but a stooge’: C-SPAN callers go all in on Brian Stelter and trash CNN as ‘the enemy of the truth’ Spencer Neale

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/youre-nothing-but-a-stooge-c-span-callers-go-all-in-on-brian-stelter-and-trash-cnn-as-the-enemy-of-the-truth

One of CNN’s top political commentators sat through a string of frustrated C-SPAN callers during a Tuesday morning segment on the network.

Appearing on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, two separate callers criticized Brian Stelter, decrying his anti-Trump obsession and accusing his home network of obfuscating the news cycle. One caller from Minnesota said Stelter’s new book, Hoax, is propaganda that would be used to divide the nation during unprecedented levels of tension across the political aisle.

“I don’t know if there’s any journalists left at CNN, but I know that if I were to estimate about 300 different distortions or misinformation that we get out of CNN … if you added all that up to 46 months, it comes out to be 300,000-plus distortions of truth,” the caller said. “This is how low you’ll go is that you went out, and you made lies, and you defamed a child, and then, you had to settle out of court to pay this child for distorting information about this young individual.”

Video HERE.  

New York Times Manipulates Data To Indict President Trump On Coronavirus By Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/01/new-york-times-manipulates-data-to-indict-president-trump-on-coronavirus/

If you read the New York Times, you’d think the U.S. has fallen by the wayside in its fight against the novel Wuhan coronavirus and Trump is to blame.

If you read the New York Times Tuesday morning, you’d think the United States has fallen by the wayside in its fight against the novel Wuhan coronavirus, faring no better in the global pandemic against the invisible enemy than allied nations in the developed world.

In his Tuesday morning briefing, Times writer David Leonhardt kicked off September with a comparative analysis of the United States’ pandemic standing relative to other developed nation’s outlining what he deems “America’s Death Gap.”

“Here’s a jarring thought experiment,” Leonhardt explains. “If the United States had done merely an average job of fighting the coronavirus – if the U.S. accounted for the same share of virus deaths as it did global population – how many fewer Americans would have died? The answer: about 145,000.”

Vernon Jones accuses ‘liberal media’ of supporting ‘violent mob’ that attacked him and other Trump supporters by Carly Ortiz-Lytle,

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/vernon-jones-accuses-liberal-media-of-supporting-violent-mob-who-attacked-him-and-other-trump-supporters

Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones accused the “liberal media” of ignoring the attacks on him and other guests while leaving President Trump’s Republican National Convention nomination acceptance speech.

“Where is the liberal media? Why haven’t they reached out to me and the others and allowed us to share our experiences of the threats that we experienced so the American people can see first hand what happened? But they won’t because they support, with the Democrats and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, destruction of our cities.” Jones said in a video posted to social media.

Sitting in front of a backdrop that read “Democrats Failed Blacks,” Jones said that he was met by a “violent mob” of Democrats, Black Lives Matter and antifa, and supporters of Biden and Harris.

“They want to see it demolished so they can blame it on Donald Trump. If this had been the other way around, and Biden supporters were attacked by Trump supporters, it would have been all over the network.”

Clinesmith, the Russia Lie, and the Deep State By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/clinesmith-the-russia-lie-and-the-deep-state/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_

A scandal barely exists if the leading news outlets unite to draw a veil over it.

Picture a lawyer you know. Fairly persnickety with details, no? Covers all bases. Doesn’t mess up the easy stuff. Rarely messes up the hard stuff. This is a person who knows the rulebook. Now picture that same person working for the FBI. Doubly careful, in this gig. It’s the big time. Now picture that same person working for the FBI on a major political issue — no, the major political issue. The one the whole world is talking about. Belt and suspenders, right? Make that six belts and four pairs of suspenders. This person is not going to get caught with his pants down, ever. Every t will be crossed, crossed again, then crossed again in the presence of a notary public.

So when you cast your eye over what former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith did to earn himself a criminal record as a felon during the Trump–Russia fiasco, your mind should reel. Clinesmith, like others in the FBI, knew that former Trump adviser Carter Page had done some work for the CIA that involved contacts with Russian intelligence. But Clinesmith wanted permission from the FISA judge to continue to conduct clandestine surveillance of Carter Page. Clinesmith knew Page was spying on the Russians, not spying for the Russians, but he needed to keep this under wraps so the court might think Page was talking to Russians as part of a nefarious collusion effort between Russia and the Trump campaign. So when Clinesmith’s superior at the FBI asked whether Page was a CIA contact in 2017, because he or she needed to be able to swear under oath that Page was not, Clinesmith forwarded an email from the CIA — but altered the email to reverse its meaning. The email said Page had been in touch with the CIA, but Clinesmith added the words “and not a source.” The lie that Page wasn’t briefing the CIA was critical to winning court approval for trying to dig up dirt on the Trump campaign via spying on Page.

New York Times Manipulates FBI Lawyer’s Guilty Plea To Hide Real Spygate News By Mollie Hemingway

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/17/new-york-times-manipulates-fbi-lawyers-guilty-plea-to-hide-real-spygate-news/

A New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his role perpetrating the Russia collusion hoax was tasked with framing the news that a former top FBI lawyer was to plead guilty to deliberately fabricating evidence against a Donald Trump campaign affiliate targeted in the Russia probe. The resulting article is a case study in how to write propaganda.

Adam Goldman broke, and cushioned, the news that former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was to plead guilty to fabricating evidence in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant application to spy on Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page.

His job was to present the news as something other than an indictment of the FBI’s handling of the Russia collusion hoax, to signal to other media that they should move on from the story as quickly as possible, and to hide his own newspaper’s multi-year participation in the Russia collusion hoax. One intelligence source described it as an “insult” to his intelligence and “beyond Pravda,” a reference to the official newspaper of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Here’s how Goldman did it.

Mild Headline With Ludicrous Spin

The New York Times used to put every Russia collusion story it had on the front page. Then, when the narrative fell apart, the Times moved on to a new narrative of redefining America as irredeemably racist.

Untangling the Media Myths of Covid-19 They’re countless. States that reporters shamed have done the best, and the U.S. is average among its peers. By Gerard Baker*****

https://www.wsj.com/articles/untangling-the-media-myths-of-covid-19-11597099357?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Has there been in recent history a more tendentious, hysterical, data-denying and frankly disreputable exercise in misdirection than the way in which much of America’s media has covered the Covid-19 epidemic?

Perhaps we can forgive them the endless repetition of pandemic porn; the selectively culled stories of tragedy about otherwise completely healthy young people succumbing to the virus. While we know that the chances of someone under 30 being killed by Covid are very slim, we know too that news judgments have always favored the exceptional and horrific over the routine and unremarkable.

Perhaps we can even forgive them the rapidly shifting headlines—each one shouting with absolute certitude—about the basic facts of the virus and its context: its lethality and transmissibility, the merits of mask-wearing, or the effectiveness of this or that therapy. The science is evolving, and so too is the reporting.

But there are larger representations of this massive and complex story that we should mark as simply unforgivable.

Teen Vogue calls for the abolishment of private property, capitalism By Eric Utter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/teen_vogue_calls_for_the_abolishment_of_private_property_capitalism.html

Teen Vogue recently published an op-ed by columnist Kandist Mallett in which she declared that no one should have the right to own property. She called for the elimination of landlords while averring that “an eviction crisis is coming” due to the coronavirus pandemic’s heavy toll on the United States, which, she says, is evidence of “the failures of capitalism.”

Mallett noted that “The pandemic didn’t create this housing crisis, but it did further expose the cruelty of payment-based housing.” No, but she herself may have just exposed the futility of payment-based higher education.

She rambled on: “Instead of seeing housing as a right and something that should not be commodified, the state enlists its own armed forces—sheriffs and police—to remove occupants from residences if they cannot pay rent. The lack of protections for non-landowners should be to no surprise from a country founded on the genocide and colonization of indigenous peoples.”