MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Clarence Thomas Discloses, the Media Opposes The justice’s 2022 filing confirms the Journal’s debunking of ProPublica’s botched April story. James Taranto

Posted By on September 1st, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/clarence-thomas-discloses-the-media-opposes-journal-crow-ethics-402ad421?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

One reason Americans don’t trust the media is that politically biased reporters routinely adulterate the news with tendentious language and prepackaged opinions. The result is crude propaganda—lousy opinion writing and unreliable information rolled into one and deceptively packaged as straight news.

Here’s an example from CNN (emphasis mine): “Justice Clarence Thomas disclosed Thursday that Republican megadonor Harlan Crow paid for private jet trips for Thomas in 2022 to attend a speech in Texas and a vacation at Crow’s luxurious New York estate, as ethics questions continue to rock the Supreme Court.”

What actually happened is too mundane to rock anything: The Judicial Conference of the U.S., which regulates judges’ financial disclosures, changed its rules regarding “transportation that substitutes for commercial transportation.” A private plane trip is now considered a gift, which is subject to disclosure, rather than “personal hospitality,” which isn’t. The rule took effect in March, and Justice Thomas complied with it for his 2022 form.

This week’s coverage is another demonstration that disclosure is a mug’s game. If you follow the rules perfectly, “ethics experts” will fault you for failing to disclose when it isn’t required and for what you disclose when it is. Gabe Roth, who heads an outfit called Fix the Court, tells CNN that although Justice Thomas “says he plans on more closely following the disclosure laws moving forward, his penchant for living a lifestyle few of us can only dream of [sic] is not reflected in today’s report.” Mr. Roth adds that the justice “should go back and amend earlier disclosures to recount the full extent of the lavish gifts he’s received over the years.” The connection with judicial ethics is unclear: As CNN notes in passing, Mr. Crow has never had business before the court.

Justice Thomas’s 2022 disclosure form also vindicates my reporting last April on a real-estate transaction that ProPublica—which styles itself “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force”—attempted to spin into a scandal.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Hurricane Ron DeSantis If he can do the executive job, maybe his skill at small talk is immaterial.

Posted By on September 1st, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ron-desantis-hurricane-idalia-florida-a4ec7f61?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Ron DeSantis spent Thursday visiting rural Florida counties hit by Hurricane Idalia, and during his morning news update the Governor was in command of the details. “As of 6 a.m. today,” he said, “there are approximately 146,000 power outages reported across the state,” but thousands of borrowed linemen were at work, and 420,000 accounts had already been restored.

As of the night before, Mr. DeSantis said, authorities had done about 40 successful rescues. “All state bridges, including the Cedar Key Bridge, have been cleared, and that happened within 12 hours of landfall,” he added. Schools? “Thirty of the 52 districts that closed during the storm are open today, and an additional eight will be open tomorrow.” Fuel, water, tarps? “All that stuff we have an abundance of, and we’ll be providing that as needed.”

The driving winds in Florida’s Big Bend region were enough to rip off roofs and topple a gas-station canopy. Yet worse appears to have been avoided because Idalia hit mostly rural areas, after a forecast of its path that Mr. DeSantis called “pretty doggone accurate.” The contrast is with Hurricane Ian last year, which was predicted to hit the Big Bend but veered into Fort Myers and killed about 150 Americans.

Mr. DeSantis received high marks for his handling of that disaster, in particular after the state Transportation Department made swift emergency repairs to two bridges the storm damaged, stranding thousands of residents.

Hurricane Idalia cleanup isn’t over, and perhaps there will be hiccups. But if there aren’t, we’ll know it by what we don’t read in the national press. The Governor will get no credit for success.

This seems to be Mr. DeSantis in his element, examining the figures, the emergency response plans, the Covid-19 statistics, and then synthesizing it into government policy. Everyone knows an introvert like this, and the flip side of the personality type is that Mr. DeSantis, now a 2024 presidential candidate, has proved less than adept at making small talk with Iowans.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Truth is essential to a functioning democratic republic, which is why the left manipulates it By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on August 31st, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/truth_is_essential_to_a_functioning_democratic_republic_which_is_why_the_left_manipulates_it.html

Today provided a great example of how the media simultaneously confess to Biden’s little lies while hiding his big ones

A democratic republic cannot work when a corrupt politician holds allegiance to interests other than those of the electorate. The media’s primary role should be to expose that corruption to the American people. Instead, today, the Washington Post continued the cover-up, confessing to Biden’s small crimes while ignoring his treasonous ones.

Biden is slowly but steadily being exposed as a liar about something fundamental to his presidency. His fundamental lie has been that he has denied to the American people that he was in business with his son, with the two men receiving millions from governments and companies with interests antithetical to America. Leftists must do damage control and, funnily enough, the Washington Post’s damage control came out on the same day as a conservative article lambasting the media for ignoring Biden’s lies.

On the conservative side, writing at The Federalist, Mark Hemingway published a well-sourced, very detailed essay about Biden’s lies and the media’s cover-up. The title and subtitle tell the story:

If The Media Insisted On Calling Trump A Liar, That Standard Must Be Applied To Biden’s Corruption Lies

One of the distinguishing features of Trump’s presidency was an aggressive press corps that felt obligated to call out Trump’s ‘lies’ — so why won’t they apply this same standard to Biden who is inarguably a world-class liar?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Report: Hunter Biden’s Firm and Vice President Biden’s Office Exchanged Over 1,000 Emails By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on August 31st, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/31/report-hunter-bidens-firm-and-vice-president-bidens-office-exchanged-over-1000-emails/

New records released by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) reveal that Hunter Biden’s firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, exchanged over 1,000 emails with the office of then-Vice President Joe Biden during the Obama Administration.

As the New York Post reports, the records were released by NARA on Wednesday after a request from the conservative legal advocacy group America First Legal (AFL). At least 861 emails were sent or received by the Office of the Vice President during the period of time between January of 2011 and December of 2013, and over 200 more emails remain hidden due to the Biden White House citing executive privilege.

“Release would disclose confidential advice between the President and his advisors, or between such advisors,” NARA claimed in its statement responding to AFL.

The emails that were released show that Rosemont Seneca was given direct lines of communication to Joe Biden’s office, and were often given crucial information regarding various White House social events in order to seek audiences with government officials. Among the information shared with Hunter’s business partners were White House guest lists, seating arrangements, and guest biographies for numerous official events, such as the 2012 United Kingdom State Dinner, the 2013 Turkey State Luncheon, and the 2014 France State Dinner.

In one such example, lobbyist Doug Davenport frantically begged for a last-minute ticket to the 2013 White House Christmas tour.

“Hey guys……I am in a bad spot. I have a guy from Apple who is dying to take his 4 colleagues on a REGULAR WH Tour…see the tree, etc…..this Friday,” Davenport’s email reads. “I know it is WAY short notice, but I would owe you my life if you could tell me any way possible to get my hands on some public tour tix for this Friday? Or am I just way out of line???”

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

From One Unapologetic Media Hoax to the Next A discredited media has never expressed remorse for damage done By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 31st, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/31/from-one-unapologetic-media-hoax-to-the-next/

Joe Biden lied repeatedly when he claimed he knew nothing of his son Hunter’s influence-peddling businesses.

The President further prevaricated that he had no involvement in Hunter’s various shake down schemes.

Yet, the media continued to misinform by serially ignoring these facts.

Had journalists just been honest and independent, then candidate Joe Biden might have lost a presidential debate and even the 2020 election. The public would have learned that Hunter’s business associates and his laptop proved Joe was deeply involved in his son’s illicit businesses.

Later, as the evidence from IRS whistleblowers mounted, the White House stonewalled subpoenaed efforts and sought to craft an outrageous plea deal reduction in Hunter’s legal exposure.

Reporters ignored the Ukrainians who claimed Joe Biden himself talked to them about quid pro quo arrangements.

They again discounted Hunter’s laptop that explicitly demonstrated that Hunter was whining that he had handed over large percentages of his income to his father Joe—variously referred to as the Big Guy and a “ten percent” recipient on many deals.

They played dumb about Joe Biden’s use of pseudonyms and alias email accounts to hide thousands of his communications to Hunter and associates.

They attacked the former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who now claims Biden was likely bribed by Ukrainians.

Yet the media can no longer hide the reality that the President of the United States likely took bribes to influence or alter U.S. policy to suit his payers. Those two crimes—bribery and treason—are specifically delineated in the Constitution as impeachable offenses.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Lori Lowenthal Marcus Princeton Case Shows That When Jews Get Attacked, It Suddenly Becomes “Academic Freedom”

Posted By on August 31st, 2023

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/362264/princeton-case-shows-that-when-jews-get-attacked-it-suddenly-becomes-academic-freedom/

It is unacceptable that while non-Jewish students get protection from microaggressions, Jewish students don’t merit protection from macroaggressions, especially when those aggressions have nothing to do with academic freedom.

“Wokeness” and cancel culture operate in reverse when it comes to the Jews. For all other minorities, the Woke Police eagerly sniff out barely perceptible (or non-existent) “harm” caused by a teacher’s stray phrase in a classroom, an actor’s comments, an author’s opinion, or a physician’s approval of biological facts. When such a “sin” is discovered, the woke world demands not merely retraction of the offending statement and a craven apology for the statement’s issuance, but also abnegation of the sinner. And then the offenders are often officially cancelled—literally removed from the rolls of respectability in “polite” society—driven from jobs, deprived of clients, their names rendered unmentionable by anyone who does not him or herself want to become the next victim of an auto-da-fe.

But then there are statements about Jews. For these, even the most outrageous and wildly unfounded assertions about Jews and/or the Jewish State are not only permitted to be uttered but also tweeted and retweeted, expounded upon and, most significantly, taught as truth in classrooms.

When someone is so naïve as to demand that a baseless and false attack on the Jews be treated the same way as a statement about any other minority, a unique phenomenon is revealed. In this case, the speaker is not embarrassed into a craven apology, or obliged to endure a struggle session in which he confesses his sin and promises to be an ally of the Jews. Rather, when Jews or Israel are the subject of such a statement, the same bevy of Moral Inquisitors who demanded cancellation of anyone allegedly maligning any other ethnic group piles on not to demand cancellation of the antisemites, but to protect the antisemites and to excoriate the Jews.

BOOKS Comments turned off

‘Night,'” Elie Wiesel & The Ongoing Presence of Evil” Sydney Williams

Posted By on August 31st, 2023

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Unlike other soldiers who returned home from World War II, my father did speak of his experiences – at least some of them, and to me, his oldest son. I remember his admonishment – we should never forget what the Nazis did to the Jewish people over the dozen years they held power. And I never have.

Re-reading Elie Wiesel’s book every few years is a worthy habit. In the 2006 edition, translated by his wife Marion, he wrote in the introduction: “Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.” He is right. Those who grew up like me in the 1940s and ‘50s, in comfortable post-War America amid loving families, and with only the distant, vague threat of the bomb, can never understand the fear of those threatened with abandonment, imprisonment, torture, and death by the Third Reich.

Yet, as I read this book for the third or fourth time, I found myself thinking in broader terms – beyond just Europe, the Jewish people, and Nazis. While true goodness is rare, evil is ubiquitous across all classes, races, religions, and nationalities. It comes in all sizes, shapes, and colors. It infects individuals. But it is political/universal evil that concerns this essay. The human capacity to inflict harm is global. It knows no borders. Consider: Approximately forty percent of the ten to fifteen million Africans sold into slavery in the Americas between 1500 and 1900 died, either in Africa or aboard ships. Many of the survivors died in captivity. It is estimated that up to twelve million indigenous people were killed between 1492 and 1900, in South, Central, and North America.

Things were worse in the 20th Century. The Nazis killed an estimated sixteen million soldiers and civilians. An estimated one and a half million Armenians were killed by Turks between 1915 and 1923. Approximately ten million Russians were killed between 1917 and 1923, during their revolution. Between six and twenty million Russians and others were killed by Stalin, including about four and a half million Ukrainians during the Holodomor (1932-1933). Forty percent of U.S. prisoners held in Japanese POW camps are estimated to have died. Estimates are that up two million Muslims and Hindus were killed in post-independence India.  It is estimated that between forty and eighty million Chinese were killed by Mao Zedong, including the famine (1959-1961) and the cultural revolution (1966-1976). Between 1975 and 1979, the Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, led by communist dictator Pol Pot, killed between one and a half million and three million of their seven million population. Today, Iran supports Muslim terrorists around the world, and sub-Saharan African Islamists kill about twenty-five thousand Christians every year. Man’s capacity for evil is untold.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Peter Wood: Disinfo-nation: the new censorship is here to stay The list of topics on which the government and mass media feel called to protect us from ‘disinformation’ is very long

Posted By on August 31st, 2023

https://thespectator.com/topic/disinfo-nation-censorship-here-to-stay-disinformation/

Lying is the great American pastime. We’ve been at it ever since some of the Pilgrim fathers shined on some of the folks back home with tales of the Eden they had found on the barren coast of Massachusetts:

For fish and fowl, we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us; our bay is full of lobsters all the summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter; we have mussels; and …

As the American Socrates, P.T. Barnum, may once have said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Or he may have not said. The Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel in 1894 said he said it, but P.T. denied it. Whom are we going to believe: the lying liar of Fiji Mermaid fame or the dissembling deceivers of the Sentinel?

Relax. We don’t have to choose. Men were deceivers ever.

Time’s up. Stop relaxing. We’ve been summoned by our betters to purge America of the scourge of “disinformation.” Or at least the spreaders thereof. A whole new academic discipline has emerged of spotting and discrediting said disinformation. Professor Robert Beckman at the School of Media Studies at the New School, for example, teaches “Fighting Disinformation: A News Media Literacy Video Series.” Beckman is far from alone in this academic quest. “Syracuse University Professors Seek Solutions to the Plague of Disinformation,” declares one headline. Two profs at that institution scored a $600,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security for that little venture. In fact, combatting disinfo is one of the hottest trends on campus these days.

Of course, the academy is only one part of the battlefield. Ever since federal judge Terry Doughty filed an order in the Western District of Louisiana declaring that government officials couldn’t treat Twitter, Meta and other social media companies as their personal playthings, the progressive establishment has been aghast. If Judge Doughty’s order stands, it would mean the moral guardians who protect us from “disinformation” would have to let Americans decide for themselves whom and what to believe. They would no longer be able to set up shop in the offices of Elon Musk’s little enterprise, the New York Times or even the Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo No to the Politics of “Whiteness” The case against right-wing racialism.

Posted By on August 31st, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-to-the-politics-of-whiteness

In recent years, I have devoted considerable time to exposing the radical Left’s politics of “whiteness,” which posits that white identity, culture, and power are irredeemably oppressive and must be “abolished” in favor of alternative modes of being. “Whiteness” represents the metaphysical essence of left-wing race politics: an irreducible force of evil, a master synonym for racism, oppression, inequality, and suffocating bourgeois norms; anything saturated with its properties can be automatically categorized and condemned. In practice, the politics of whiteness has translated into the demonization of European-Americans in primary school curricula, the performance of elaborate “white privilege” rituals in the workplace, and outright segregation in many public institutions. All of it is done to solve “the problem of whiteness.”

Some pushback has resulted. In the years following the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, conservatives have exposed the poisonous politics of left-wing racialism, shutting down some of the bureaucracies that push it and proposing a reaffirmation of the ideal of colorblind equality. Unfortunately, some on the right would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, preferring instead to adopt the basic framework of identity politics and simply reverse its polarity. Dismayingly, a sentiment is rising in some corners of conservative politics that the answer to left-wing identity politics is right-wing identity politics.

The main argument for this position is that colorblind equality is unattainable. Left-wing racialism has been embedded in our institutions, laws, and policies to such an extent that it cannot be rolled back using conventional means. All politics is friend-enemy politics, this faction argues, and given the demographic decline of European Americans, whites will eventually need to activate “white racial consciousness” to secure their basic interests. European Americans once had robust ethnic identities, but after generations of assimilation and intermarriage, those distinctions have lost their salience and consolidated into a homogenous, generalized “white identity.” If there is to be a racial spoils system, then each group must get its share—including whites.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Parents Revolt Against Trans-Missionaries The destructive fad is off the rails, and every parent must be ready to act By Larry Sand

Posted By on August 31st, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/30/parents-revolt-against-trans-missionaries/

As I noted recently, fads aren’t always harmful things. Nehru jackets, lava lamps, and mood rings may have set you back a few bucks, but that was the extent of it. Some fads, like the various eating disorders that were with us in the 1970s, were recognized as dangerous and treated as mental health problems. Today, though, becoming transsexual is treated simply as a lifestyle decision.

But as Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist, points out, “Trans is clearly identifiable as a fad, comparable to preceding fads, or ‘transmissible psychological diseases,’ like outbreaks of alleged multiple personality disorder, hysteria, self-mutilation, and anorexia. The typical victim is a young female with an underlying neurosis that seeks a socially acceptable form of expression. These forms of expression vary with the times.” Peterson goes on to say that the current trans fad will be viewed as we now view lobotomies. 

These days, 5.1% of adults younger than 30 claim to be trans or nonbinary, and this is being used as a political cudgel by many with a nefarious agenda. In reality, a staggering 99.4% of the population does not have the physical traits that cause someone to become transgender, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, an LGBTQ advocacy group. The 0.6% of the adult population who are truly gender dysphoric – a condition that causes extreme distress – certainly deserve empathy and respect.

Unlike most fads, the trans variety is being promoted in our government schools, and many of them try to conceal the student’s condition from parents. In fact, as of now, 1,040 school districts across the country have adopted policies instructing or encouraging faculty and staff to keep students’ gender identities a secret from parents, according to Parents Defending Education. Those 1,040 districts include 18,335 schools and a whopping 10,712,558 students. It should come as no surprise that 593 of the districts are in California.

To put it bluntly, California is predominantly run by power-hungry extremist individuals who don’t give a rip about parents or the sanctity of the family unit, and it is very difficult for traditional moms and dads to exert power on the state level. Hence, the local school board is the place where parents can find allies in their quest to stave off the trans-missionaries. And in July, Chino Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) in San Bernardino County, with 32,000 K-12 students, got the ball rolling. The district banned Pride flags in the classroom and requires that staff tell parents when a child is using a name or pronouns that don’t match the sex determined at birth.