RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/19/the-propaganda-of-the-left-is-a-weapon-of-war/

Propaganda is the single deadliest weapon of the leftist putsch in America.

The hallmark of propaganda is that outright lies are more useful than the truth. The New York Times’ vile lies about Justice Brett Kavanaugh were so flimsy, they couldn’t last the day.

Yet even after the Times’ correction (which amounted to a retraction), Democrats kept shooting the fake ammunition. That’s because their target isn’t actual investigations or impeachment proceedings. The lie itself is the goal. Once out, even if retracted, it serves their purpose: to smear and intimidate. Truth need not apply.

The more outrageous, ugly, and frightening the propaganda, the more powerful it is. That’s all that is necessary for success. The lie doesn’t even have to be plausible. It just has to meet the base desires of the targeted audience.

Democrats want to believe President Trump supports neo-Nazis, and that Justice Kavanaugh is a sexual predator, so that political norms of two-party rule need not be followed.

Democratic Party voters today want to believe that the admirable and upright Justice Brent Kavanaugh is a moral monster, because of the coming showdown on abortion.

Classic propaganda reverses black and white, truth and falsehood. Abortion must be presented as the moral high ground, and pro-life as a moral cesspit.

Propaganda is crude and ugly because it is not meant to convince the opposition. It is purely for motivating one’s own side to unjust, even horrific, deeds, such as destroying a fine man with false sexual accusations.

The New York Times, once again, is leading the political charge to bring down the political enemies of the Left, just as they did with the Russian collusion hoax attempted coup against President Trump.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/18/new-york-times-ends-its-spanish-language-version/

The New York Times announced Tuesday that it would be shutting down its Spanish-language version, NYT en Espanol, according to The Hill.

A spokesperson for the Times confirmed to The Hill that the publication had “discontinued NYT en Espanol as a separate, standalone operation” after it had launched three years prior, admitting that “it did not prove financially successful.”

NYT en Espanol’s editor Paulina Chavira defended the work of the now-defunct branch of the Times, saying that it had “published over 900 opinion articles and 100 additional original articles,” and stated her belief that “writing in Spanish is always a good business decision…and time will prove it.”

The Times spokesperson additionally reiterated that the shutdown of NYT en Espanol would “not affect coverage of Latin America,” which will continue operation with staffers located in “Medellin, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro.”

https://spectator.org/the-kavanaugh-clownshow-cavalcade/

At some point, we’re going to progress past simply assuming every “exposé” by certain organs among the legacy media, with the increasingly ridiculous New York Times most prominent among them, are mere propaganda, and convert that assumption into conviction or even dogma.

And at that point we will almost assuredly not be wrong.

The furor over the latest round of false accusations against Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh provides a good case in point, because one can’t help but notice that while the Left’s storytellers in Hollywood have largely lost the ability to produce material that isn’t a reboot or a sequel, a similar affliction has taken hold of the storytellers in New York and D.C.

Kavanaugh went through a meat grinder no American citizen should ever endure solely for the purpose of attaining a government job after a host of Democrat hacks on Capitol Hill and in newsrooms concocted a series of unsubstantiated and clearly false allegations that as an adolescent and young adult he engaged in ungentlemanly behavior with females of his acquaintance. As those allegations were vetted it became quite clear that the accusers were liars with a political agenda clearly in mind — namely, to keep Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court for fear of his judicial decision in future abortion cases.

The moral implications of destroying a man’s reputation and psyche in preservation of the ability to destroy other human beings yet unborn never apparently troubled any of these people, something that holds a lesson for the rest of us.

But now there’s a sequel, or perhaps a reboot, of Kavanaugh’s ordeal, thanks to the Times’ pimping, by way of an article over the weekend, a forthcoming book by a pair of its storytellers. In that book is included a “fresh” allegation that Kavanaugh engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior with a female acquaintance decades ago.

Specifically, that “friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hands of a female student at a drunken dorm party.”

But on Sunday night, the Times sheepishly ran a correction to the article, noting that the supposed victim declined to be interviewed by the feds who vetted Kavanaugh and friends of hers say she doesn’t remember the incident.

So how did the Times uncover this shocking and Very Seriously True You Guys allegation?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/hating-kavanaugh-killing-journalism-daniel-greenfield/

Robin Pogrebin, a culture reporter for The New York Times, and Kate Kelly, a Wall Street reporter for the same paper, got together to write The Education of Brett Kavanaugh despite being curiously unqualified.

In sharp contrast to Carrie Severino, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and chief counsel for the Judicial Crisis Network, who co-authored Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation, neither Pogrebin nor Kelly are especially familiar with the world they’re writing about.

And it shows.

Why send a business journalist and a culture reporter to write a book about a legal battle in Washington D.C.? There are two answers. The Education of Brett Kavanaugh is being published by Penguin Random House. Pogrebin is the daughter of leftist feminist author Letty Cottin Pogrebin. Pogrebin’s books, including her last major book Deborah, Golda and Me (Pogrebin has turned on Israel, allying with anti-Israel groups and endorsing boycotts of parts of Israel) have tended to be published by Penguin.

That’s the less cynical answer. The more cynical answer is that nobody actually cared.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/nyt_oped_brazenly_calls_for_packing_the_supreme_court.html

Just two days after publishing its disgraceful, deceptive op-ed impugning Justice Kavanaugh, the op-ed page editors of the New York Times implement stage two of the paper’s campaign today with an op-ed by its own writer Jamelle Bouie: “To Balance the Scales of Justice, Don’t Be Afraid to Pack the Court.”

The subtitle alone gives away the game: “The lifetime appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh cry out for Democratic hardball in response.”

So they slime justices appointed by President Trump and campaign on destroying the Court’s authority because those appointees are somehow illegitimate.

Lying behind all of this is the growing conviction on the Left that the Supreme Court no longer will be a vehicle for imposing progressive policies without having to change the law or the Constitution.  Even worse, the SCOTUS may become a vehicle for limiting or rolling back some of those policies it formerly imposed — pre-eminently Roe v. Wade, but also other court-imposed doctrines that the Left assured us were now “the rule of law” once the progressive court decided them.

When the Left loses a game, it tries to change the rules.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/cnn-trump-derangement-everything-but-news/

Trump derangement, all the time: lies, smears, threats, and profanity. Viewers are noticing — and leaving.

For a while, we thought MSNBC had temporarily usurped CNN as the font of fake news — although both networks had tied for the most negative coverage (93 percent of all their news reports) of President Trump’s first 100 days in office.

A cynic would argue that CNN had deliberately given Trump undue coverage during the Republican primary on the theory that he would be the weakest Republican in the general election and would therefore be the weakest challenger to Hillary Clinton. CNN president Jeffrey Zucker at one point had bragged that in the primaries, Trump made CNN money. Only later, after Trump’s nomination, did Zucker regret giving so much airtime to Trump and his boisterous rallies.

“If we made any mistake last year, it’s that we probably did put too many of his campaign rallies in those early months and let them run,” the contrite Zucker conceded in October 2016, at a talk at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Yet Zucker admitted that Trump had been a “publicity magnet” as a primary candidate, and, more important, “Trump delivered on PR; he delivered on big ratings.”

So CNN’s Zucker gave copious coverage to Apprentice-star Trump both to win ratings and to ensure the nomination of a candidate who was polling anemically against Hillary Clinton — with the intention of then reversing course and destroying Trump in the general election.

The ratings gambit worked; the second aim, of aiding a Clinton victory, did not. And now CNN is focused on another strategy: to destroy the perceived Frankenstein monster that Dr. Zucker helped to create.

Just recently, MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell broke a story based on a single unnamed sourcewho said that Deutsche Bank documents (which the source had not seen) would soon prove that Russian oligarchs had co-signed a loan application for Donald Trump — O’Donnell was apparently trying to resurrect the Russian-collusion zombie. The story was discredited within 24 hours by denials from the bank — as O’Donnell did his part to destroy what was left of the credibility of progressive cable news.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-york-times-walks-back-new-kavanaugh-sexual-misconduct-accusation/

The New York Times on Sunday was forced to walk back a new sexual misconduct allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, updating a bombshell article to clarify that the alleged victim has no memory of the incident.

The opinion essay by Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly details their upcoming book “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation” and describes several sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh, including a previously unreported claim that the FBI did not investigate during the judge’s contentious confirmation process.

Kavanaugh’s high school classmate, Christine Blasey Ford, testified to Congress during his confirmation hearings that Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and covered her mouth at a drunken house party when they were teenagers. Several other accusations surfaced against him during those weeks, including from a Yale classmate, Deborah Ramirez, who claimed that Kavanaugh had thrust his penis in her face at a drunken dormitory party, causing her to push it away and accidentally touch it.

The Times reporters detailed a previously unreported alleged incident similar to the Ramirez one. Another Yale classmate, Max Stier, who now heads a Washington nonprofit, told Congress and the FBI that he had witnessed Kavanaugh “with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.” The FBI did not investigate that allegation.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/andrew-sullivan-ny-times-abandons-liberalism-for-activism.html

EXCERPT:

The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms. That’s why this issue wasn’t called, say, “special issue”, but a “project”. It’s as much activism as journalism. And that’s the reason I’m dwelling on this a few weeks later. I’m constantly told that critical race theory is secluded on college campuses, and has no impact outside of them … and yet the newspaper of record, in a dizzyingly short space of time, is now captive to it. Its magazine covers the legacy of slavery not with a variety of scholars, or a diversity of views, but with critical race theory, espoused almost exclusively by black writers, as its sole interpretative mechanism.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that view deserves to be heard. The idea that the core truth of human society is that it is composed of invisible systems of oppression based on race (sex, gender, etc.), and that liberal democracy is merely a mask to conceal this core truth, and that a liberal society must therefore be dismantled in order to secure racial/social justice is a legitimate worldview. (That view that “systems” determine human history and that the individual is a mere cog in those systems is what makes it neo-Marxist and anti-liberal.) But I sure don’t think it deserves to be incarnated as the only way to understand our collective history, let alone be presented as the authoritative truth, in a newspaper people rely on for some gesture toward objectivity.

This is therefore, in its over-reach, ideology masquerading as neutral scholarship. Take a simple claim: no aspect of our society is unaffected by the legacy of slavery. Sure. Absolutely. Of course. But, when you consider this statement a little more, you realize this is either banal or meaningless. The complexity of history in a country of such size and diversity means that everything we do now has roots in many, many things that came before us. You could say the same thing about the English common law, for example, or the use of the English language: no aspect of American life is untouched by it. You could say that about the Enlightenment. Or the climate. You could say that America’s unique existence as a frontier country bordered by lawlessness is felt even today in every mass shooting. You could cite the death of countless millions of Native Americans — by violence and disease — as something that defines all of us in America today. And in a way it does. But that would be to engage in a liberal inquiry into our past, teasing out the nuances, and the balance of various forces throughout history, weighing each against each other along with the thoughts and actions of remarkable individuals — in the manner of, say, the excellent new history of the U.S., These Truths by Jill Lepore.

But the NYT chose a neo-Marxist rather than liberal path to make a very specific claim: that slavery is not one of many things that describe America’s founding and culture, it is the definitive one. Arguing that the “true founding” was the arrival of African slaves on the continent, period, is a bitter rebuke to the actual founders and Lincoln. America is not a messy, evolving, multicultural, religiously infused, Enlightenment-based, racist, liberating, wealth-generating kaleidoscope of a society. It’s white supremacy, which started in 1619, and that’s the key to understand all of it. America’s only virtue, in this telling, belongs to those who have attempted and still attempt to end this malign manifestation of white supremacy.

I don’t believe most African-Americans believe this, outside the elites. They’re much less doctrinaire than elite white leftists on a whole range of subjects. I don’t buy it either — alongside, I suspect, most immigrants, including most immigrants of color. Who would ever want to immigrate to such a vile and oppressive place? But it is extremely telling that this is not merely aired in the paper of record (as it should be), but that it is aggressively presented as objective reality. That’s propaganda, directed, as we now know, from the very top — and now being marched through the entire educational system to achieve a specific end. To present a truth as the truth is, in fact, a deception. And it is hard to trust a paper engaged in trying to deceive its readers in order for its radical reporters and weak editors to transform the world.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/12/the-intelligence-community-works-for-the-president/

It’s simply hard to know where to begin to respond to the staggering chutzpah of Jennifer Rubin’s recent Washington Post opinion column accusing the president of undermining our intelligence community.

Rubin used the recent leak regarding the exfiltration (a fancy word for “removal”) of an undercover “asset” in Russia as a hook to make the case that the president is somehow responsible for outing this source and therefore harming U.S. interests. Her column is an example of the backward view elite leftists have towards democracy and the Constitution. These elites, in desperate need of a remedial civics class, have convinced themselves that our elected president must learn to take orders from the intelligence community.

Here is a partial inventory of what is demonstrably wrong with Rubin’s piece:

President Trump is not responsible for outing the secret CIA mole.

Rubin relied on this badly sourced story from CNN, which reported, “The removal [of the mole] happened at a time of wide concern in the intelligence community about mishandling of intelligence by Trump and his administration. Those concerns were described to CNN by five sources who served in the Trump administration, intelligence agencies and Congress.”

When you read CNN is using a former intelligence official as a source, there’s a good chance it’s using one of its own paid get-Trump contributors.