The Media is the Massage Tony Thomas *****

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media/2022/02/the-media-is-the-massage/

Why is the media so mistrusted? That’s not a question much raised at journalism schools or debated on the ABC’s The Drum. The mistrust is because the left-leaning media dispenses such muck that only fools give it any credibility. Read on and I’ll document that statement– understatement, really — using as case studies the giant global news wholesalers such as Agence France Press (AFP) and Associated Press (AP), and the New York Times, flagship of America’s progressive newspapers.

In Australia reporters are the second-least trusted of 30 occupations, ahead of politicians but behind delivery drivers. That’s according to a Readers Digest poll last year. Among 46 countries, the US media is the least trusted (29 per cent), according to a Reuters Institute poll last year. Australians who trust the media were 43 per cent, which is less than in Poland, Croatia and South Africa. Within the US, last October’s Gallup Poll assessed trust in media at 36 per cent, the second-lowest on record. Only 11 per cent of Republicans – who comprise half the population – trust the media, and only 10 per cent of Americans trust the media’s reporting on COVID.[1]

The normal focus is on mastheads like the New York Times and Washington Post – and here The Australian, Age and Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). But such a narrow focus detracts from the less obvious role of news wholesalers AFP, AP, Reuters and Bloomberg. Without them your morning paper or online bulletin would be half empty.

In days gone by the wire services’ watchword was political and ideological neutrality. Playing such a straight bat made them unremarkable. But now AFP, Reuters and Bloomberg have literally signed the climate pledge and partnered with 460 other media groups at Covering Climate Now (CCN). That “partnership” involves hyping warming and cancelling whatever doesn’t fit the narrative. And AP, in a jaw-dropping breach of journalistic ethics, this month began hiring 20 climate-crazed reporters using an $US8 million gift from five green/Left billionaire philanthropies. From now on we’ll be reading the best AP climate news that can be bought with activists’ money. Here’s a snapshot of the agencies’ reach:

AFP: This world’s oldest news wholesaler (186 years) has 1700 journalists operating in 150 countries. It’s independent but gets about 40% of its funding from French government subsidies.

The Gathering Storm in the West Few are listening any more to the clueless Justin Trudeaus and bumbling Joe Bidens and all the toxic hypocrisies they embody. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/20/the-gathering-storm-in-the-west/

Canada is now governed by absurdism, and it is symptomatic of an ailing Western elite.

Liberal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week invoked martial law to arrest and financially destroy truckers on the charge that their largely peaceful protests are “dismantling the Canadian economy” that had already been dismantled for two years under some of the most draconian lockdowns in the world. The trucker “sect,” Trudeau added, is guilty of felonious “unacceptable views.” But his rhetoric still cannot square the circle of demonizing vital workers while conceding he cannot run his country without them. 

He has invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in the law’s 34-year history, even as the highly infectious Omicron variant wanes after spreading natural immunity and yet proving relatively mild in its effects. Trudeau has neither science nor good governance on his side, especially given how civil the protests have been. The truckers, who more or less work in solitary cabs, are better informed about the “science” and are themselves mostly vaccinated.  

Whether by accident or intent, the truckers have now become iconic of far larger issues. Their resistance to government vaccination mandates transcends them. And so, they are playing the role of the proverbial straw that may break the back of a once compliant Canadian citizenry, burdened by over two years of masks, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates. 

They are Howard Beales yelling, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” or the iconic Tunisian peddler Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi whose self-immolation prompted the Arab Spring, or Tank Man who stood erect in Tiananmen as an oncoming tank finally swerved around him. The truckers are saying to the Canadian people, “Watch and we will kindly show you why you always privately suspected that this prime minister and his ilk were frauds.” As in the case of earlier exasperated rebels, we do not know the exact consequences that will follow, only that the leaders who targeted the dissidents will likely end up worse than their targets. 

Dude Looks Like a Lady – Ivy League Swimming Style By Brian C. Joondeph

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/dude_looks_like_a_lady__ivy_league_swimming_style.html

Rock group Aerosmith released a song in 1987 entitled, “Dude looks like a lady” about a man with an effeminate appearance who could be mistaken for a woman. Today the inverse is playing out in the athletic world, where a lady who looks like a dude — a male who has transitioned to a female as much as basic biology permits — is making a mockery of women’s sports.

I speak of Lia Thomas, a transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer who last week, “Dominates 200 yard freestyle at Ivy League swimming championships and sets a new tournament record.” But Lia wasn’t always a woman swimmer. In fact, not too long ago she was a dude, but she looks more like a lady these days, yet she still swims like a dude, and that is where the problem lies.

Lia Thomas wins the 200 yard freestyle Ivy League 2022 championship by a wide margin

This saga began last fall and in brief involves a University of Pennsylvania swimmer named Will Thomas, an unremarkable member of the men’s team whose life and swimming career went on hiatus due to COVID. During his year off, Will the dude became Lia the lady, and is now a member of the Penn women’s swim team. While a mediocre men’s swimmer, Lea is anything but as a women’s swimmer. “UPenn trans swimmer, 22, sparks outrage by smashing women’s competition records after competing as a man for three seasons.”

As a female swimmer, Lia is the phenomenon she would not likely have been as a male swimmer.

After Jeffrey Epstein Found “Hanged” at 1 AM, Associate Found “Hanged” at 1 AM Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/02/after-jeffrey-epstein-found-hanged-1-am-associate-daniel-greenfield/

I just finished watching an episode of Columbo in which the plot was less implausible than the entire Jeffrey Epstein saga. 

After Epstein, somehow wound up being found hanging in his cell, which was supposed to be impossible, now Jean-Luc Brunel, one of his associates, to be found hanging in his prison cell.

A modeling agent and close associate of the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his prison cell in Paris, French prosecutors said Saturday.

Police said Jean-Luc Brunel was found hanged in his cell Friday night at La Santé Prison in the heart of Paris. He had been in police custody for over a year as French prosecutors investigated him on suspicion of raping minors over the age of 15 and sexual harassment. He was also considered a witness in an investigation into child sex trafficking.

The prosecutor’s office said Saturday that an investigation was under way to determine the cause of Mr. Brunel’s death.

Suicide, I’m sure.

FBI Still Silent on Murder of DHS Whistleblower Philip Haney FBI and DHS see something, say nothing. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/fbi-still-silent-murder-dhs-whistleblower-phillip-lloyd-billingsley/

Today, February 21, marks two years since Philip Haney, author of  See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad was “found deceased” in Amador County, California, killed by a gunshot to the chest. The Amador County sheriff’s office told Frontpage there was “no new news” in the case, which invites a look at the FBI.

The Amador sheriff, “reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist in analyzing documents, phone records, numerous thumb drives and a lap top that were recovered from the scene and Mr. Haney’s RV. Those items and numerous other pieces of evidence, were turned over to the FBI. The FBI has performed a forensic examination of these items. We expect to receive these reports within the next few weeks.”

That was on July 22, 2020, and “no new news” since then on the thumb drives, documents and laptop in FBI custody. Those materials offer a broad range of possibilities.

According to Kerry Picket in the Washington Examiner, Haney was “recently in contact with top officials about returning to work for the DHS.” So maybe he had new information on terrorists. Haney was good at finding such information, but it wasn’t always welcome at the Department of Homeland Security.

As Haney explained in The Hill on May 5, 2016, the DHS ordered him “to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS).” The DHS investigated Haney nine times, revoked his security clearance, and ginned up fake complaints about job performance.

The Odyssey of Roosevelt Montás By M. D. Aeschliman

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-odyssey-of-roosevelt-montas/

His education in the ‘Great Books’ and in the purpose of the humanities has enabled him to write a valuable and persuasive book.

Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, by Roosevelt Montás (Princeton University Press, 248 pages, $24.95)

Roosevelt Montás was born very poor in a remote rural village in the Dominican Republic in 1973 and managed to immigrate with family members to the United States in 1985, living in impoverished circumstances and broken homes in New York City. He has now written a poignant and edifying book about how he emerged from such circumstances and ended up getting bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in English and comparative literature from Columbia University and becoming a key instructor and administrator in the famous Columbia undergraduate liberal-arts program generally known as the Core Curriculum, now a century in operation. Rescuing Socrates is a valuable and thoughtful book both sociologically and educationally, making a contribution to the ongoing debate over the past, present, and future of liberal-arts education in the United States.

It is temptingly easy to see Montás’s success story in assimilating to Anglophone, elite Western intellectual culture as in fact the rare exception that proves the general rule that for poor, immigrant, racial- and ethnic-minority students the very structure of Western high culture and institutions is essentially irrelevant, useless, exclusive, humiliating, and destructive. What about the other 95 percent of such students who did not happen to encounter a passionately committed high-school teacher who encouraged a bookish young man’s accidental discovery of a discarded copy of some of Plato’s dialogues?

Yet Montás’s book is sufficiently complex and deep in its treatment of large-scale cultural and curricular issues to warrant wide and careful reading about our current educational condition. Though he has indeed become a vigorous spokesman for “Great Books” education, his own upward path is not unduly idealistic or unrealistic about ethnic, linguistic, and class dynamics: Only on the surface is it a story of “making it.”

Living in socially anarchic urban circumstances, Montás went to a nonselective, multiethnic high school in the New York City borough of Queens, and a dedicated teacher mentored him and suggested he enroll in an intensive summer program, at Columbia University, sponsored by New York State for able lower-income and socially disadvantaged students, HEOP: the Higher Education Opportunity Program. The social and emotional costs of this program were wounding but were ultimately outweighed by the benefits of induction into the middle-class Anglophone educational milieu that enabled him subsequently to get admitted on scholarship to Columbia.

Trudeau Government Moves to Make Expanded Surveillance Powers over Financial Transactions ‘Permanent’ By Nate Hochman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trudeau-government-moves-to-make-expanded-surveillance-powers-over-financial-transactions-permanent/

As all eyes were trained on the aggressive police sweep of the Ottawa trucker convoy this week, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s administration was quietly moving to implement a sweeping expansion of surveillance power at the federal level. 

The Trudeau government’s financial war against the truckers has been covered at length. But one underreported aspect of this broader assault on Canadian civil liberties is the effort to bring crowdfunding and payment service providers — two of the most prominent routes for financial transactions on the Internet — under the permanent control of a centralized government authority.

In a February 14 news conference, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said that the government was using the Emergencies Act to broaden “the scope of Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use.” That broadened power requires all forms of digital transactions, including cryptocurrencies, to be reported to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. (I.e., “Fintrac”). “As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with Fintrac, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to Fintrac,” Freeland said. She justified the move as a way to “mitigate the risk” of “illicit funds” and “increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by Fintrac and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement.” Trudeau, standing behind Freeland at the press conference, nodded his head in agreement.

The Fall of Canada, The Danger in the U.S. What the murder of Canadian democracy means to the rest of the world. Dr. Naomi Wolf

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/fall-canada-danger-us-dr-naomi-wolf/

Reprinted with permission from NaomiWolf.substack.com.

The world has watched, in pain, as images of police violence from Ottawa, and of a bid for Canadian tyranny (that I would ever write those words!) are flashed around the world.

As usual, I hate to be Cassandra; but the chessboard ahead is all too clear. On Feb 12, 2022, I warned, during an appearance on Steve Bannon’s WarRoom, that we all must all now brace for a period during which the powers that now clearly seek to enslave our planet, and subdue our human species, will be broadcasting scenes of civil society mayhem, and of shocking violence against protesters.

I also predicted that there would be food shortages and other economic harms that would be blamed on the protesting truckers, and I warned too that people should print out their bank and any liquid asset records, as there would be cyberattacks on financial institutions and the freezing of accounts. All of that, of course, took place in the week that followed.

I recently received a kind note on social media thanking me for my bulletins about the near future as it helped people, the writer explained, to stave off shock and disorientation. I have often spoken about how tyrants rely on just these effects of shock and disorientation to “tenderize” a targeted population, so I will keep alerting you all to the near future, as unpleasant as that task can be.

So in this essay I wish to explain, especially to Canadians, what martial law really is, and how very dangerous it is, since many leaders there, especially Parliamentarians, appear to be in the treacherous “hangover” state of thinking that they still inhabit the old world that died when Justin Trudeau declared emergency law. I also wish to warn what happens historically at this moment in the decline of a formerly democratic nation, and what the murder of Canadian democracy — at least for now — means to the rest of the world.

Russia’s Mercenary Power Play Putin’s aspirations extend far beyond the former Soviet Union.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-mercenary-power-play-emmanuel-macron-vladimir-putin-wagner-group-mali-11645211128?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

France said last week that it will withdraw military forces from Mali, where Paris has led a counterterrorism campaign for nearly a decade. This is a setback for the fight against Islamic extremism, but it is also a victory for a Russian power play in Africa.

“We cannot remain militarily engaged with de facto authorities whose strategy and hidden objectives we do not share,” French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday of the Malian government. He added that the pullout of some 2,400 French troops could take as long as six months as France considers where in the region to re-station forces fighting Islamic State and al Qaeda.

Mr. Macron acknowledged that Mali is free to choose its security partners but warned that Russian mercenaries with “predatory intentions” were arriving in the country. “The junta which is in power after two coups d’etats considers them to be the best partners they can find to protect their power, not to fight against terrorism,” he said.

Mr. Macron is referring to Russia’s guns-for-hire Wagner Group. U.S. Africa Command recently confirmed the presence of the Russians and American officials have suggested they would be paid $10 million a month, though Mali denies it. The mercenaries’ numbers and influence are likely to grow as France pulls out.

Presidents Day: Washington and Lincoln Call the American People to Reclaim their Rights from Government The key to preventing our nation’s downfall. Scott S. Powell

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/presidents-day-washington-and-lincoln-call-frontpagemagcom/

With the shock and awakening of Americans that the freedoms, rights and opportunities they had taken for granted for centuries and decades have been brazenly stripped away in the last few years, this President’s Day 2022 may well be one of our most significant holidays. Presidents Day is unique among American holidays in providing the opportunity to remember and appreciate why George Washington and Abraham Lincoln—whose birthdays fall in February—were the two greatest U.S. presidents. 

While Washington was the founding father of the United States becoming the first President in 1789 after final success in the War of Independence, Lincoln would save the nation from division and collapse—bringing an end to the Civil War and the scourge of slavery as the sixteenth President in 1865.  In short, Lincoln saved the republic that Washington made possible.  And two remarkable men they were, whose wisdom, judgment and foresight are timeless and more relevant today than they were in their times.       

In both Washington and Lincoln we are confronted with flawed men who made mistakes, but whose remarkable qualities of character were so formidable that they became part of the essence of what we call “American exceptionalism.”  It’s particularly notable that both presidents readily admitted that it was not their own abilities that made the difference but rather their faith, trust and reliance on God that gave them their strength and opened the way for ultimate success.