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Nolte: Far-Left Satire Site 'The Onion' Part of Parent Company Fire Sale

The Onion, a far-left satire site that used to be funny, is now part of a fire sale being conducted by parent company G/O Media.

The post Nolte: Far-Left Satire Site ‘The Onion’ Part of Parent Company Fire Sale appeared first on Breitbart.

Hyperbolic MSNBC’s Ronna McDaniel Debacle

The word broke on March 26 that NBC News was reversing its decision to hire former Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel as a political commentator. MSNBC hosts across the schedule broke out into frenzied denunciations of whichever executive who thought that McDaniel should be paid to speak anywhere on this hypnotically/robotically anti-Trump network.

In one of her typical half-hour jeremiads, Rachel Maddow compared McDaniel to a mobster and a pickpocket. “You wouldn’t—you wouldn’t hire a wise guy, you wouldn’t hire a made man, like a mobster, to work at a DA’s office, right? You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener. And so I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable. And I hope they will reverse their decision.”

There was no need for NBC News to hire McDaniel. One can look at the election results during her tenure at the Republican National Committee and question her expertise at winning elections. But this mobster talk underlines once again that MSNBC is not a “news” channel. It’s a hyperbole channel, constantly fearmongering its audience that the end times are near for democracy.

Maddow claimed this hiring wasn’t about Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s about “bad actors trying to use the rights and privileges of democracy to end democracy.” There are no “fact-checkers” who will get in the way of this talk. Maddow is like Bluto in “Animal House” saying, “when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.” Facts don’t matter. Rallying your audience is all that matters.

This was the essence of Maddow’s rant:

I want to associate myself with all my colleagues both at MSNBC and at NBC News who have voiced loud and principled objections to our company putting on the payroll someone who hasn’t just attacked us as journalists, but someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government. Someone who still is trying to convince Americans that this election stuff, it doesn’t really work. That this last election, it wasn’t a real result. That American elections are fraudulent.

Every conservative who’s ever watched Maddow lowlights knows that she was a leader in the Collusion Corps, someone who obsessed night after night over how the 2016 election was fraudulent because the Russians interfered with it. MSNBC doesn’t suggest that every election is fraudulent. It’s only when Democrats lose that they imply (for years) that it was fraudulent.

Since Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016 and ran around telling people it was stolen from her, Maddow has hosted a series of fawnathons with her. They discussed why Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to back Donald Trump in 2016. In 2018, Clinton even suggested the Russians may have used the National Rifle Association to funnel money into the election.

Maddow concluded by lobbying the executives who allow her on air: “Acknowledge that maybe it wasn’t the right call. It is a sign of strength, not weakness, to acknowledge when you are wrong. It is a sign of strength. And our country needs us to be strong right now.”

That may be the funniest line of all. Maddow is notorious for refusing to concede she’s wrong, especially about Trump.

In 2019, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple constructed a devastating timeline of all of Maddow’s promotions of the baseless dungpile called the Steele Dossier. He noted Maddow called it “creepy” and “unwarranted” when Michael Isikoff said she’d “given a lot of credence” to the dossier on his podcast.

Why couldn’t she acknowledge she was wrong? Instead, “Maddow declined to provide an on-the-record response to the Erik Wemple Blog.”

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

The post Hyperbolic MSNBC’s Ronna McDaniel Debacle appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Before yesterdayYour RSS feeds

Enemies of the People

(John Hinderaker)

When we started this site, exposing mainstream media bias was a big part of our mission. Using the then-new internet, we and many others held liberal outlets (i.e., virtually all of them) accountable in a way that hadn’t happened before. The effect of that effort was not that the liberal press became more accurate or more objective. Rather, they came out of the closet. For the most part, they no longer make any serious pretense of neutrality. Whether that is an improvement or not is debatable.

But, in any event, it no longer makes sense to criticize, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post for being biased. That would be like, if you were a soldier in World War II and a Panzer division was approaching, you were to say, “Those Germans are biased against us!” It isn’t a question of bias. They are just the enemy.

Donald Trump was perhaps the first major Republican politician to abandon the effort to curry favor with the press establishment. He famously denounced the fake news press (sometimes abbreviated to the press in general) as enemies of the people. The good news is, most Americans agree with him.

Rasmussen finds that Trump’s characterization is the majority view:

60% of Likely U.S. Voters agree that the media are “truly the enemy of the people,” as Trump said in 2019, including 30% who Strongly Agree. Thirty-six percent (36%) disagree, including 21% who Strongly Disagree.

That is an extraordinary finding. Respondents were asked this question:

Do you agree or disagree with this statement: The media are “truly the enemy of the people”?

And a clear majority said that they agree. The press has utterly squandered whatever respect it once enjoyed.

The Rasmussen survey also asked about the Democrats’ “bloodbath” hoax:

Former President Donald Trump recently said that it would be a “bloodbath” if he didn’t win in November. Which is more likely, that he was talking about auto workers losing jobs or that he was talking about widespread political violence by his supporters?

The result:

Forty-nine percent (49%) of voters believe Trump was talking about auto workers losing jobs when he warned of a “bloodbath,” while 40% think Trump was talking about widespread political violence by his supporters if he did not win the election. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure.

Basically, Democrats follow the Democratic Party press and swallow the Democrats’ talking points:

Among voters who Strongly Approve of Biden’s job performance as president, 78% believe Trump’s “bloodbath” comment was about widespread political violence by his supporters if he did not win the election. By contrast, among voters who Strongly Disapprove of Biden’s performance, 84% think Trump was referring to auto workers losing jobs.

But again, returning to good news, most voters believe that the media’s coverage is driven by the Biden administration’s talking points:

Among all Likely Voters, 63% believe it is likely that the major news media’s political coverage is dictated by talking points from the Biden campaign, including 42% who say it’s Very Likely. Twenty-nine percent (29%) don’t think it’s likely media coverage is dictated by the Biden campaign, including 11% who say it’s Not At All Likely.

Majorities of every political category – 78% of Republicans, 50% of Democrats and 61% of unaffiliated voters – believe it’s at least somewhat likely that the major news media’s political coverage is dictated by talking points from the Biden campaign.

So even half of Democrats admit that the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press are servants of the Democratic Party. The bottom line is that the liberal press serves certain functions on behalf of the Democratic Party: it reinforces Democrats’ talking points and keeps Democratic voters riled up. Those are valuable contributions, to be sure. But the days when the liberal media could actually drive public opinion are long gone.

NO SURPRISE: Liberal Media Ignore House Panel’s Hunter Biden Hearing  

For the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, the partisan Democrats of our “legacy media” treated the “Pelosi-Picked Panel” on Jan. 6 as a dominant story, worthy of hundreds of hours of television, both live coverage of the hearings and breathless cycles of previews and reviews.  

Once Republicans took over the House, would we have predicted this kind of committee oversight coverage would go from “hero” to “zero”?  

On Wednesday, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee held public hearings that were supposed to feature live testimony by Hunter Biden. The GOP-led committee titled the hearing “Influence Peddling: Examining Joe Biden’s Abuse of Public Office,” which was already a turnoff for Biden-voter reporters.  

That night, NBC offered two minutes. ABC and CBS did nothing. In January, Hunter Biden pulled a stunt by showing up and demanding a public hearing, and the networks covered that. On Feb. 28, Hunter showed up for a hearing behind closed doors, and the networks covered that. But when he skipped the public hearing he allegedly wanted, they skipped the story?  

Even those prestigious national newspapers—with the slogans about “All the News That’s Fit to Print” and “Democracy Dies in Darkness”—offered a big fat zero in their print editions. Nothing on Joe Biden’s abuse of office was published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Wall Street Journal. 

Then consider “public” broadcasting—the ones who have automatic and undeserved prestige because of their “for the people” branding. The “PBS NewsHour” offered nothing, not 10 hot seconds. It offered eight minutes on a potential government shutdown, so its journalists were working on Capitol Hill.  

The taxpayer-funded hour also carried five minutes on the “controversial” Texas border-enforcement law, five minutes on the Biden administration setting a timeline for ending the gasoline-powered automobile, and almost seven minutes on a Mississippi police “goon squad” that brutalized some black men. “Systemic racism” is always a staple. 

National “Public” Radio was a bad joke, as in its show “All Things Considered” never considered a story on the Biden abuses hearing. NPR’s homepage was topped the next morning by its hot story: new details on Rupert Murdoch’s British phone-hacking scandal of 2011. Its media reporter, David Folkenflik, files a hostile story on Murdoch or Fox News on a regular basis, like he was an operative being paid by MSNBC and CNN.  

NPR had a Biden mention on its homepage. Its young White House reporter, Deepa Shivaram, had a TikTok-like video shoot on Joe Biden grabbing a trendy boba tea in Las Vegas under the headline “Food stops can tell you a lot about a campaign.” Shilling Shivaram cheerfully explained, “Asian Americans make up a critical voting bloc in Nevada,” and, “Experts on food and politics say that Biden ordering this could also send a message to people who think he’s too old for the job.” 

I scrolled all the way down the homepage looking for a Biden-hearing story, to no avail. At the very bottom, there was this news from the insect world: “Scientists studied how cicadas pee. Their insights could shed light on fluid dynamics.”  

That makes it easy to describe the quality of NPR’s coverage of the Biden family scandals. It’s a warm bucket of cicada urine.  

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM 

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation. 

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The post NO SURPRISE: Liberal Media Ignore House Panel’s Hunter Biden Hearing   appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Egregious Examples of the Media Spinning Trump’s ‘Bloodbath’ Comment as Call for Violence

The legacy media is clipping and spinning Donald Trump’s comments where he stated that if he doesn’t get elected, the country’s going to experience a bloodbath, saying it’s a call to violence.

The Context

Trump spoke at a campaign rally Saturday for Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, in Vandalia, Ohio. At the event, he said:

Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.

Taken out of context, this line from the former president sounds like a call to violence to some.

However, in the previous line, he said, “We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line [into the U.S.], and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars.” He was criticizing the importation of foreign-made vehicles, specifically, those made by Chinese manufacturers.

See the full clip:

The media has jumped on the issue, saying Trump’s comments are hearkening back to Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters protested at the U.S. Capitol Building during the certification of the 2020 election results after Trump asked them to “peacefully and patriotically” protest outside the Capitol.

The Media Reaction

Numerous media outlets called out Trump for what they considered his call to violent action.

CNN analyst Maria Cardona said Trump has a history of “dark, violent, dangerous, rhetoric.” Cardona also said that Trump’s “cult MAGA supporters and followers totally know exactly what he was telling them. They demonstrated that on January 6.”

MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, President Joe Biden’s former press secretary, brought Biden campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler onto her show, who said, “This is who Donald Trump is: A loser who gets beat by over 7 million votes and then instead of appealing to a wider mainstream audience, doubles down on his threats of political violence.”

On ABC’s “Face the Nation,” former Vice President Mike Pence fought back against allegations that the former president was calling for violence, saying, “The president was clearly talking about the impact of imports devastating the American automotive industry.”

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was visibly angry after he was criticized for promoting the idea that Trump was calling for violence and for saying “democracy was on the line” in connection with Trump’s comments. Scarborough said those who claimed Trump was not calling for violence are “idiots” and that their comments were “bull—-.”

The “Morning Joe” host said, “He [Trump] knew what he was doing. We’re not stupid. Americans aren’t stupid. He was talking about a bloodbath. Sometimes a bloodbath means a bloodbath.”

Joe Scarborough is having an UNHINGED Meltdown because he got called out for amplifying the fake “Bloodbath” Hoax ?

pic.twitter.com/IRkQGPo3nB

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) March 18, 2024

Trump responded to the media’s reaction with a Truth Social post, saying, “The fake news media, and their Democrat partners in the destruction of our nation, pretended to be shocked at my use of the word BLOODBATH, even though they fully understood that I was simply referring to imports allowed by Crooked Joe Biden, which are killing the automobile industry.”

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The post Egregious Examples of the Media Spinning Trump’s ‘Bloodbath’ Comment as Call for Violence appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Special Counsel’s Testimony Again Reveals Media Bias in Political Scandals

“Both sides furious” was one reporter’s summary when special counsel Robert Hur testified in a House hearing to explain his decision not to prosecute President Joe Biden for willfully retaining classified documents, not just from his vice-presidential years but from his Senate career.

The network TV stories that night were the closest thing to “fair and balanced” we’ve seen in a long time. The Republicans decried the double standard, that Donald Trump is being prosecuted and Biden is not. The Democrats complained Hur’s report made Biden look feeble-minded (like nobody’s drawn that conclusion).

But let’s take a look at the bigger picture. While Hur was conducting his investigation, we joked that you should put his face on a milk carton. He was missing from the press.

Hur was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in January 2023. Bill D’Agostino reported at NewsBusters that over about nine months of morning and evening news coverage—from Feb. 1, 2023, through Nov. 20, 2023—ABC, CBS, and NBC spent just four minutes and 52 seconds on Hur’s inquiry.

But then there’s the breakdown. ABC aired 204 of those 292 seconds, or 70% of that airtime. NBC barely offered a minute (64 seconds), and CBS offered one paltry, 24-second news brief.

That’s not the way the network news covered Russian collusion and Robert Mueller, is it? They obsessed almost daily over that probe. From Jan. 20, 2017, through Dec. 31, 2018, NewsBusters reported the Big Three evening newscasts alone aired 2,092 minutes on investigations of Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russian government. It should not be surprising that this was the single most covered topic in their coverage of Trump in that time frame.

Here’s some rough math: Trump was punished with 858 overwhelmingly negative minutes on Russiagate in 2018, while Biden drew less than five Hur minutes over most of 2023. Very roughly, that’s about 170 to 1. But remember, the 858-minute number is only for the evening newscasts.

If Trump was “scandal-plagued,” the newscasters were the plague. If they made the political weather, it was a daily hurricane for Trump, while Biden was rewarded with “mostly sunny.”

That doesn’t mean Trump was damaged. In 2018, Trump’s approval rating actually improved, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. But that’s not how the anti-Trump media designed it.

These numbers underline the fraudulence of former Washington Post Editor Martin Baron’s slogan when he claimed, “We’re not at war. We’re at work.” Metaphorically, they were at war under Trump as the Scandal Police, and now they spend most days at the doughnut shop.

This is why the media has a major trust problem with anyone who’s not a Democrat. Trump gets Scandal Police brutality. Biden scandals are avoided until they cannot be avoided, and then reporters often repeat the taunting mantra of “no evidence, no evidence.” As if it’s not their job to look for evidence.

This bifurcated media approach to scandal presents each and every Democrat prosecutor of Trump—whether elected or appointed by Biden—as nonpartisan and apolitical. Well, unless someone like Hur spurs a bad news cycle for Biden; then he’s a “Trump appointee”—ahem, before he became a Biden administration appointee.

The Biden Justice Department is also treated like it’s as pure as newly fallen snow.

People see through this. But journalists keep thinking that people are stupid when they don’t accept their preaching. Their eternally smug self-righteousness ensures they will never be trusted again.

 COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The post Special Counsel’s Testimony Again Reveals Media Bias in Political Scandals appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Nolte: From Aaron Rodgers to ‘Bloodbath’ – Media Hoax Season Begins!

This, when we all know that if Biden loses in November, the left-wing terrorists in Antifa and Black Lives Matter will — and with the corporate media’s full approval — burn, loot, rape, and murder for the next four years.

PBS, NY Times Scowl at Conservative ‘Mandate’

The Heritage Foundation has been issuing its doorstop-length “Mandate for Leadership” books since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. But this is the first one that has inflamed The New York Times into painting it as a manual for autocracy.

On the March 8 edition of PBS’ “Washington Week With The Atlantic,” moderator Jeffrey “Obama Is Awesome” Goldberg cued up New York Times book reviewer Carlos Lozada to discuss his article “What I Learned When I Read 887 Pages of Plans for Trump’s Second Term.”

What surely delighted Goldberg was Lozada’s hot take. The Heritage book is “not about anything as simplistic as being ‘dictator for a day,’ but about consolidating authority and eroding accountability for the long haul.”

Here’s what is left unsaid. Conservatives would like to impose more political appointees on the executive branch because they feel the permanent bureaucracy is stacked with “progressives” who treat conservative presidencies as an occasion for clandestine warfare.

Under then-President Donald Trump, both career appointees and political appointees leaked to liberal media outlets with all kinds of anonymous “resistance.” One wrote a New York Times op-ed and then a book under the byline “Anonymous.” The author later revealed himself as political appointee Miles Taylor, who was barely 30 when he became a deputy chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security.

As Lozada noted in reviewing the “Anonymous” book, it was full of “stuff we already know.” It was written to be bought by Trump haters who loved MSNBC guest snark like Trump is “like a 12-year-old in an air-traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately.”

This, we know, is what Lozada means by “eroding accountability,” making it harder for liberal rags like The New York Times to undermine the Republican president from within. No one on PBS is going to ask him if anonymous sourcing “erodes accountability.” Because “accountability” is a one-way street for them.

The incentive structure is different for the bureaucracy under Democrats. Nobody at The New York Times wants an anonymously sourced war on the president. No major book publishers want a “tell-all” book lacerating the liberals for acting like 12-year-olds … or like feeble octogenarians.

Anonymous sourcing at the Times isn’t used for trashing the White House anymore. It’s now reserved for the most pedestrian stories on Team Biden. In January, John Kerry was leaving the State Department to join the Biden campaign, and it was announced “at a hastily arranged meeting, said the person, who asked to remain anonymous in order to discuss personnel matters.”

Under President Joe Biden, liberal journalists are expected to preach the most preposterous gospels. Lozada proclaimed on taxpayer-supported TV that the Heritage team wants “to politicize the Justice Department. … It’s very overt. They emphasize how, for instance, the White House Counsel’s Office and the [Justice Department] have to work as a team. That’s a quote.”

The “accountability” specialists of the pro-Biden media somehow can’t concede that the Biden Justice Department is aggressively prosecuting their opponent as a campaign strategy. Their press statements boast how their prosecutions in the Jan. 6 riot are massive and still unloading indictments.

Liberal reporters warn of Trump’s “retribution” and couldn’t possibly imagine that Biden’s seeking retribution through his Justice Department. Their “news judgment” is perfectly partisan. Implying Biden’s DOJ is nonpartisan is the most wretched misinformation you could publish.

The Heritage folks are not wrong to assert that the Left controls the permanent bureaucracy and that they’re very upset that conservatives have gotten organized. Other Republican presidents have taken their “mandate” seriously, but the “deep state”—especially defined as the anonymous sources perennially pushing statism—remains an entrenched and powerful foe.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The post PBS, NY Times Scowl at Conservative ‘Mandate’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Politico Reporter Backpedals on Definition of ‘Christian Nationalism,’ Further Exposes Her Bias

Politico reporter Heidi Przybyla said in a recent television appearance that so-called Christian nationalists believe our rights “come from God,” rather than “any earthly authority.”

After getting eviscerated online, she backpedaled to nuance her position. After all, Thomas Jefferson would qualify under her definition, since he wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights … .”

But rather than clarify her point, she retreated into vagueness and equivocation—all the better to camouflage her own parochial views.

“The phenomenon of Christian nationalism may be relatively new, but the larger questions it raises have been around for a long time,” she wrote in Politico. “Any group of activists asserting a religious imprimatur for their policy agenda should be prepared to answer a couple questions.”

First, she wrote, “are they respecting the American principle of separation of church and state?” According to Przybyla, some Christian nationalists “have made plain in their public rhetoric that their aim is to blur or even erase this line.” And second, “are they ready to play by the same rules that everyone in a democracy must as they try to influence our laws[?]”

“No doubt some people feel so strongly in their views, and the righteousness of their position, that they would like to glide right over these questions,” she asserts. These people “seek to impose their views on the rest of us by claiming that heaven is on their side.”

So, who are these people? Przybyla doesn’t offer a single example. But a glance at her previous reporting gives us a good idea of whom she has in mind.

Those Sneaky ‘Christian Nationalists’

In a February article, for instance, Przybyla and co-author Alexander Ward warn of conservatives planning to infuse “Christian nationalist” ideas into former President Donald Trump’s administration should he win a return to office in 2024.

The authors fixate on Russell Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget and current president of the conservative think tank the Center for Renewing America.

Politico apparently obtained documents that reveal CRA’s agenda. The authors admit that the documents “do not outline specific Christian nationalist policies.” They still say the think tank is “Christian nationalist,” though, because “Vought has promoted a restrictionist immigration agenda … .”

That “agenda” is likely the standard conservative view that a nation has the right to defend its borders and prevent hordes of illegal aliens from flooding in.

The reporters then sloppily attribute to Vought the claim that it isn’t a person’s background that defines whether he can enter the U.S., but rather whether he “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history.”

In the Vought article they’re presumably referring to, though, he’s citing Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony’s description of ancient Israel, not describing the conditions for American citizenship. And in the very same piece, Vought affirms the institutional separation of church and state.

In a December article, Przybyla argues that conservatives are also trying to infuse sectarian dogma into the judiciary. Among those targeted are Princeton professor of jurisprudence Robert George and Federalist Society Co-Chairman Leonard Leo.

Only the Left Can Be ‘Friends of the Court’?

The pair, she claims, were key influences in the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. George filed a “friend of the court” brief in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, in which he and legal philosopher John Finnis offered a cogent defense of the right to life of the unborn. (See George’s response to Przybyla here.)

According to Przybyla, amicus briefs like George’s apparently trace back to the nefarious efforts of Leo  and a network of conservative nonprofits. “In major cases involving cultural flashpoints of abortion, affirmative action and LGBTQ+ rights, Politico found information cited in amicus briefs connected to Leo’s network in the court’s opinions,” she wrote.

The conspiracy, she thinks, goes even deeper. “The picture that emerges,” she reveals, “is of an exceedingly small universe of mostly Christian conservative activists developing and disseminating theories to change the nation’s legal and cultural landscape.”

Why is it bad that legal scholars like George have sought to shape judicial decisions through amicus briefs, or that Leo has contributed to various political causes?

Przybyla claims that amicus briefs used to be “vehicles for neutral parties to make suggestions based on fact or law.” But when, say, a pro-life legal scholar submits an amicus brief, she implies that that’s sectarian.

Of course, submitting amicus briefs to the Supreme Court isn’t illegal, immoral, or undemocratic. It’s a common way of working to advance one’s views in our judicial system.

Liberal and leftist groups such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign, and NARAL do it all the time. Do they count as “neutral parties” for Przybyla? Presumably so.

The claim that when Christian conservatives do what left-wing groups do all the time, it’s evidence of a creeping theocracy would be laughable if she made it so plainly.

Yet, if we survey her other recent articles on the subject, that seems to be her view: When religious conservatives seek to legally influence policy, they’re trying to be “subversive to democracy” by pushing a sectarian agenda. In contrast, when her seemingly favored left-wing groups do the same thing, it’s neutral, commonsensical, and universally applicable.

But Przybyla’s views on these subjects are hardly neutral or rooted in American principles. Her claim of a “right to abortion,” for instance, is supposedly based on a “right” to privacy mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. What’s more, it contradicts the right to life of the unborn. And in Dobbs, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the Constitution protects or enshrines any such right.

She has also warned that Christian nationalism threatens “LGBTQ+ rights” and “sex education in schools.” She’s vague about what these things mean. But the terms are the common parlance of gender ideologues who want to smuggle in radical aims, like indoctrinating kids in queer theory without parental consent and offering them “gender-affirming care” (doublespeak for the medical and/or surgical mutilation of a child’s body).

The Supreme Court has not yet weighed in on this debate. If the justices ultimately side with the critics of such indoctrination and medical interventions, will Przybyla report this as another victory for those sneaky Christian nationalists?

Confused Musings or Leftist Projection?

Given her written record to date, it seems highly likely. But her confused musings on the subject look like a classic case of leftist projection. She treats her own radical views as neutral, and accuses her opponents, whose views are arguably more consistent with American principles, as sinister and sectarian.

In her most recent, “clarifying” article, Przybyla claims that those who try to impose their religious views on the public should “expect fair and well-reported coverage of their political aims and the tactics used to advance them.” And, she emphasizes, they should not expect “any extra deference for their political words or actions simply because they are motivated by religious belief.”

Fair enough. But given her own confused and sectarian views, she might as a journalist consider the wisdom of a proverb Jesus once referred to: “Physician, heal thyself.” Or would that be Christian nationalism, too?

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The post Politico Reporter Backpedals on Definition of ‘Christian Nationalism,’ Further Exposes Her Bias appeared first on The Daily Signal.

UNESCO Says Artificial Intelligence Is Sexist

UNESCO published a study that finds artificial intelligence systems are incorporating racial and sex stereotypes.

Oblivious to the Irony: Democratic Party Becoming Enemy of Democracy

I remember learning about democracy back in grammar school. We learned about it in the context of the American Revolution: Britain’s King George III may have ruled as a capricious monarch, but the intrepid Colonists fought for the then-novel concept of democratic self-government.

A cursory glance at Merriam-Webster is instructive. That venerable dictionary defines “democracy” as “government by the people” or, more elaborately, as “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”

Simple enough. But someone ought to remind our nation’s liberal elites and the foot-soldier activists of today’s Democratic Party.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous rebuke of the recent Colorado chicanery that rendered former President Donald Trump ineligible for the state’s GOP presidential primary ballot. That all nine justices agreed with Trump’s core legal argument—state actors cannot strike from the ballot alleged “insurrectionists,” absent specific implementing legislation from Congress—is nothing short of remarkable.

For months, liberal pundits and anti-Trump legal “experts” assured us that the 14th Amendment “insurrection clause” argument for Trump’s ballot disqualification was ironclad. Who can forget how, after the Colorado Supreme Court legitimized Trump’s removal in December, one-time conservative judicial stalwart-turned-Trump Derangement Syndrome patient zero J. Michael Luttig opined that the court’s logic was “masterful,” “brilliant,” and “unassailable.” Left-wing cable news outlets platformed countless other guests who ceaselessly pushed the same argument.

In the end, the argument garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court. Even Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson didn’t debase themselves by going along with such a half-baked, anti-democratic ruse. So much for “unassailable” logic!

One of the great ironies of our present age is that democracy’s would-be eponymous outfit, the Democratic Party, has become an enemy of democracy itself. The fact that party activists across numerous states pursued the extraordinary tactic of literally banning their leading opponent from the ballot is emblematic. But the anti-Trump criminal prosecutions and other unsavory lawfare tactics Democrats are also now weaponizing give the game away: Democrats hate democracy and harbor immense disdain for normal Americans’ beliefs.

Put simply, they don’t want to leave the country’s fate in our hands.

Hence, the current bizarre spectacle of Democrats ostentatiously bragging about the need to save “our democracy” while simultaneously pursuing some of the most anti-democratic stratagems in modern American history. Anything, it seems, to prevent the American people themselves from deciding the 2024 election.

To the warped Democratic mind, nothing is more “democratic” than preventing the actual demos from having its say. The horror!

An on-air MSNBC panel during the left-wing network’s Super Tuesday coverage was paradigmatic. Analyzing exit polling from Virginia, hosts Rachel Maddow and Jen Psaki could not believe voters ranked immigration as their top issue. “Well, Virginia does have a border with West Virginia,” Maddow quipped, as the others guffawed along with her.

Liberal elites to Americans suffering the myriad consequences of a wide-open southern border: Drop dead.

That’s literally “drop dead,” actually, in the case of Laken Riley, the former nursing student tragically killed two weeks ago by an illegal alien in Athens, Georgia. (Say her name, liberal media.) That’s literally “drop dead,” as well, for the majority of the 110,000-plus Americans who died of drug overdoses in 2022—70% of which were caused by fentanyl and other synthetic opioids trafficked across the border.

The reality is that during Joe Biden’s presidency, which has overseen the most illegal immigration and the most beleaguered southern border in American history, every town is a “border town.” The MSNBC clowns might delude themselves to the contrary, as they retire at night to their gated communities, driven by their chauffeurs. But that reality is still reality.

Those Americans who want their border secure, their communities safe, and their wages spared suppression by illegal alien labor are the “rubes” whom liberal elites are so passionate about denying from the democratic process that they will invert democracy itself to do so.

Destroy democracy in order to save it—don’t you see?

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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

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The post Oblivious to the Irony: Democratic Party Becoming Enemy of Democracy appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Democracy-Denying Democrats Lose in Court, Go Bonkers

The pro-Biden media perpetually pat themselves on the back. They are a gift to the people, the essence of democracy, as in, “We inform the voters and then we expect the voters to make smart choices” (the ones we recommend). But when journalists lose, they have a disturbing tendency to argue democracy lost.

On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously disapproved of the Left’s latest desperate attempt to rip Donald Trump’s name off the ballot, pushed by blue states, among them Colorado and Illinois. Their novel theory was that the 14th Amendment contains Civil War-era verbiage about keeping “insurrectionists” off the ballot.

To the average American, it might seem odd that it’s somehow “protecting democracy” to remove the Republican front-runner’s name from the ballot. That looks like throwing large obstacles in the way of democracy, not protecting it.

After the 2020 election, the geniuses at Time magazine called it “fortifying democracy” when the “progressives” engaged in elaborate strategies to prevent Trump from victory.

Journalists struggled to cope with this resounding legal defeat. CNN host Dana Bash told her frustrated liberal audience, “Unfortunately for America, the Court isn’t necessarily wrong that this is the way the Framers wanted it to be.” Those Framers, so annoying.

At another point, professor Larry Sabato groused to Jim Acosta on CNN, “You can’t save people from themselves. If they’re determined to reelect him after he organized that insurrection, then there’s nothing to stop the people from doing that.”

To sum up, democracy’s erstwhile defenders lament “the people are stupid.” Some hotheads like Keith Olbermann decried the Supreme Court as “corrupt and illegitimate” and demanded it be “dissolved.” Who are the authoritarians now?

For now, the moping pundits are focused on those alleged idiots voting in primary elections, where Trump has dominated, but they’re probably also despondent over the latest polls from Democratic newspapers like The New York Times, which found Trump leading Joe Biden by 5 points. Pollsters find Biden often loses to Trump in the swing states that will decide the race. He’s 21 points underwater on his approval rating.

Forget inflation or immigration. Team Biden wants to stick to this arrogant “democracy” posturing as the singular issue of 2024. In a New Yorker puff piece by Evan Osnos, Biden strategist Mike Donilon, the “high priest of Bidenism,” claimed the fall campaign should center on what he calls the “freedom agenda.” The Democrats aren’t the “freedom” party, unless it’s the right to abortion or to place LGBT pornography in school libraries.

Donilon predicted that as the election nears, “the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.” And who is assigned the task of putting “images in people’s minds”? That would be the pro-Biden press.

They could certainly argue that two entire years of the media putting Jan. 6 “images in people’s minds” might have prevented a “red wave” in the midterm elections. But how does that cancel out all the other issues that matter to voters?

Osnos reported that Biden was holding a notecard with all of Trump’s trolling talk—his tweeting about “terminating” some voting rules in the Constitution, his joking with Sean Hannity about being a dictator on “Day One,” his description of illegal immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.”

All these remarks go into heavy rotation (and exaggeration) in the left-wing press—and Biden is still losing. That might be because Democrats don’t want any democracy on many issues. They want debates shut down. That’s especially true of our “no equal time” press.

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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The post Democracy-Denying Democrats Lose in Court, Go Bonkers appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Feel Good Story of the Day

(Steven Hayward)

Some things even the Babylon Bee can’t make up:

MSNBC staffers scatter after bed bugs found at Manhattan HQ ahead of Super Tuesday coverage: ‘They’re scrambling

Bed bugs found at MSNBC’s Manhattan headquarters caused staffers to scatter ahead of the left-leaning network’s Super Tuesday coverage, The Post has learned.

According to a memo obtained by The Post, an “unidentified insect” was spotted Sunday in the recently revamped studio 3A — home to special election coverage and “The Rachel Maddow Show” — at 30 Rock in Midtown.

Additional studios on the third floor were also shuttered “out of an abundance of caution.”

Now I know what you’re thinking. How can you tell the difference between a bed bug and an MSNBC news person? They are both repellant parasites. You’d think professional courtesy would make MSNBC welcome bed bugs.

The Cronkite Network

(Lloyd Billingsley)

When you watch Walter Cronkite, my recent piece should have read, “you not only CBS but hear it too.” That was certainly true, particularly of Cronkite’s Vietnam coverage, but as Douglas Brinkley explained in the 819-page Cronkite, there’s more that people should know.

Cronkite had worked with Sidney Lumet to adapt the radio show “You Are There” for television. Lumet directed Network, which Cronkite saw in a private screening. As Brinkley notes, the film “hit close to home,” as “much about TV newsgathering was a sham.” As anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch) explained:

Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth. Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that’s the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth.

But, man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We’ll tell you that Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker’s house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he’s going to win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I’m speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF!

Network also cast Walter Cronkite’s daughter Cathy as Mary Ann Gifford, an heiress kidnapped by the Ecumenical Liberation Army. In the style of Patricia Hearst, kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, Gifford joins the Ecumenicals in bank robberies, which they record on film. When the Communist Laureen Hobbs (Marlene Warfield) uses the footage in her “Mao Tse-Tung Hour” show, Gifford calls her out.

“You f—— fascist! Did you see the film we made of the San Marino jail breakout, demonstrating the rising up of the seminal prisoner class infrastructure?” Hobbs tells Gifford to “blow the seminal prisoner class infrastructure out your ass!”

Network bagged four Oscars, and for cinéma vérité about television it’s hard to beat. On March 10, if anybody watched Network instead of the Academy Awards it would be hard to blame them.

This Is CNN

(Lloyd Billingsley)

As in Christian Nationalism Nonsense, and the always insightful Mark Tapson explains it for you:

The label “Christian nationalism” is the new Progressive dog-whistle for “scary American patriots.” It signals to Progressives that Americans who love God and country – which used to be the norm before our descent into a post-Christian, post-patriotism culture – are a subversive danger to democracy. Christianity, after all, imposes a moral code that chafes Progressive libertines, and nationalism, with its emphasis on state sovereignty and secure borders, frustrates their globalist ambitions.

Whenever Christians wave the Stars and Stripes, wear a MAGA hat, or pray that God blesses our country, the Left hyperventilates over the specter of a fundamentalist theocracy on the rise. They envision America becoming a Handmaid’s Tale dystopia in which white male Christian mullahs hang homosexuals and imprison women for seeking abortions. The Left’s vision of the separation of church and state, therefore, is one in which Christian patriots and their values are best excluded from the halls of government power entirely.

And so on, with Heidi Przybyla of Politico terrified that these Christian nationalists, “believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court. They come from God.” So much for the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” from the Declaration of Independence. The woke leftists, in effect, now issue a declaration of war.

Add Christian nationalist to “white supremacists,” “MAGA Republicans,” “semi-fascists,” and those 2016 loser Hillary Clinton smeared as “deplorables.” These all signify that the speaker doesn’t like you, but there’s more to it. Pronouncing people enemies of the state is to justify violence against them. This comes at a time when the Biden Junta (“Our Democracy”) has a domestic Nazi-Soviet Pact working, and sees the greatest threat from those citizens who want the nation to be great. So all those deplorable Christian nationalist and MAGA types could wind up excluded from more than the halls of government. Don’t say it can’t happen here.

MSLSD?: Racist Joy Reid’s Crackpot Conspiracy Theories on TikTok

In case you just can’t get enough of Joy Reid with an hour each weeknight on MSNBC, you can catch her sharing her wild and loose opinions on TikTok. Recently, she pounced on remarks by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., supporting the Alabama court decision that frozen embryos are children, because “we need more kids.”

Our fertility rate in America is now at a record low, but Reid just wants to use Alabama’s football coach-turned-senator as a punching bag. “Why does the state of Alabama need more kids? More kids for what?”

Reid wants to make this about immigration. “Your party, Sen. Tuberville, is the one screaming that 10 million immigrants … have streamed into the country since Joe Biden has been president. And you’re claiming that’s too many people.”

Most critics of the border crisis aren’t arguing that America is overpopulated. They’re arguing the massive influx of humanity is too much for our government systems to handle, which is the same critique emanating from Democratic big-city mayors, who have been swamped with migrants who expect free food, housing, and maybe a monthly gift card.

But Reid was primed to uncork a racial conspiracy theory, which MSNBC always encourages against Republicans. Antebellum references seem mandatory.

“There was a time when the state of Alabama absolutely needed more kids, because Alabama was a slave state,” Reid proclaimed, “and the mandate of the planter class in Alabama was for black women to produce more kids because those kids were property, and they could work more kids and make more money on their plantation.”

But what does 1854 have to do with 2024? Reid suggested there was a master plan: “Are you saying the state of Alabama needs more kids because you think that those populations will include people who may be destitute and desperate enough that when you kick out the immigrants … you can make them do the work that the migrants are doing now? ‘Cause that kind of sounds slavery-ish.”

Wait. If the immigrants flooding into America are doing “slavery-ish” work, shouldn’t Reid oppose more immigration? Reid needs to imply the immigrants pouring in are “people of color,” even if that’s not true. For the Left, appeals to limit illegal immigration must always be painted as motivated by racism.

To its credit, The New York Times has published a series of investigative reports on migrant child labor in America. One was headlined “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.”

No one imagines that led to a scathing TikTok tirade by Reid. She closed out by asking Tuberville in absentia if, since he’s a “white guy,” he’s suggesting “we need more kids” means “whites need more kids,” a “Great Replacement thing,” because if he thinks white women need to make more babies, “that’s a little creepy. A little ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’ don’t you think?”

Back in 2021, Reid took to TikTok to mock Kyle Rittenhouse for tearing up when he testified about shooting rioters dead in self-defense. Reid compared him to Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings, mocking their “male white tears,” and proclaiming these guys “Karen-out, and as soon as they get caught, they bring waterworks.”

Reid wouldn’t use this white-Karens-waterworks mockery for Hillary Clinton’s public tears when she ran for president. These videos aren’t for everyone. They’re for the hard-core MSNBC watchers who want to “own the cons,” but especially those stale, pale males. Conservatives just want to check what chemicals she might have put in her vape pen to explain that overactive imagination.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The post MSLSD?: Racist Joy Reid’s Crackpot Conspiracy Theories on TikTok appeared first on The Daily Signal.

CBS.GOV.CON

(Lloyd Billingsley)

CBS has fired Catherine Herridge, an investigative reporter who was “pursuing stories that were unwelcomed by the Biden White House and many Democratic powerhouses, including the Hur report on Joe Biden’s diminished mental capacity, the Biden corruption scandal, and the Hunter Biden laptop.” After dumping Herridge, “CBS officials took the unusual step of seizing her files, computers and records, including information on privileged sources.” These files, “likely contain confidential material from both her stints at Fox and CBS” and are now  “presumptively the property of CBS News.”

Joseph Klein traces these issues to Dan Rather, but they really go back to CBS “anchorman” Walter Cronkite, once billed as the most trusted man in America. As Douglas Brinkley showed in Cronkite, many of Cronkite’s dispatches during WWII “were propagandistic.” Cronkite coached John F. Kennedy about “getting across” on television, and long before Watergate, Cronkite “orchestrated the secret tape recording of the Republicans’ credentials committee meeting.” This was conducted,  “under the shady rationale that the covert act was good for democracy.” According to Brinkley, “it was a real black eye to Cronkite,” who said of Jimmy Carter, “He’s got one of the best brains of anybody I’ve known.”

Cronkite wrapped his regular broadcast with “that’s the way it is,” but as one wag put it, when you watched Walter Cronkite you not only saw CBS, you heard it too. That was also true of Dan Rather, who in 1986 made news his own self. A man confronted Rather demanding “Kenneth what’s the frequency?” and duly beat the fertilizer out of the CBS anchorman. The network put it off to mistaken identity, which could be true in one sense.

Government and establishment media are Siamese twins, joined at the mouth. As Catherine Herridge confirms, cross the government and you’re a goner, with your documents confiscated. Consider also former CBS investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, author of Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington, published in 2014.

Readers learn that CBS News president David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, advisor to Obama and up to his eyeballs in the Benghazi scandal. Joel Molinoff came to CBS after serving the Obama White House as director of the Intelligence Advisory Board, and before that worked for the NSA. CBS also hired Mike Morell, formerly a deputy director of the CIA. So as Attkisson explained, CBS stories on Benghazi, Obamacare and so forth might as well have been written by the White House.

Attkisson’s computer was infiltrated with spyware proprietary to government agencies such as the CIA, FBI, and NSA. The intruders planted classified information, adding “the possible threat of criminal prosecution.” Ten years later, those who expose the scandals of the Biden Junta can be sure that Big Brother is watching.

Clarence Thomas, Racist?

(John Hinderaker)

One of the big stories in the New York Times today is another Clarence Thomas smear, but with a twist: “Justice Thomas Hires Law Clerk Accused of Sending Racist Text Messages.”

The story is about Crystal Clanton, who graduated from the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University in 2022. She is coming off a clerkship with Judge William Pryor of the 11th Circuit, who calls her “an outstanding law clerk.” Justice Thomas has now hired her to clerk on the Supreme Court.

For the last seven years, Crystal Clanton has been dogged by reports of an email that she allegedly wrote, in which she supposedly said, “I hate black people.” The Times story admits that they have not seen any such message, and are relying on reporting by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, perhaps the least trustworthy source in America.

In 2017, Clanton was running field operations for Turning Point USA. Mayer did a hit piece on Turning Point that included a variety of allegations, including the one against Clanton. Mayer claimed to have seen a screen shot of the text. The story has dogged Clanton ever since. When she was offered a clerkship on the 11th Circuit by Judge Pryor, seven left-wing members of Congress lodged an ethics complaint against Pryor, based on Clanton’s alleged text. That complaint was investigated by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which found the complaint to be without merit and dismissed it.

This January 2022 story has the details. Clanton left Turning Point after the claim against her was first made, but the Second Circuit found it to be false:

The Turning Point executive “had determined that the source of the allegations against (Clanton) was a group of former employees,” [Second Circuit Chief Judge Debra] Livingston wrote. “One of these employees was fired after the organization learned that this person had created fake text messages to be used against co-workers, to make it appear that those co-workers had engaged in misconduct when they had not.”

Pryor and Maze knew about the allegations against Clanton when they interviewed and hired her. And both determined the allegations of racist behavior by Clanton were untrue and found she was highly qualified to serve as a clerk for them, Livingston wrote.

“There is nothing in the record to dispute any of this,” she noted.

Charlie Kirk is also quoted in that story:

“The media has alleged that Crystal said and did things that are simply untrue,” Kirk wrote. “I have first-hand knowledge of the situations reported on and I can assure that the media has made serious errors and omissions. The sources of these reports are a group of former employees that have a well-documented desire to malign Crystal’s reputation.”

The employee who was fired had “created fake text messages to be used against other employees,” Kirk wrote.

Crystal Clanton got to know Ginny Thomas when she worked at Turning Point, and she was evidently so distraught about her departure from that group that she lived with the Thomases for nearly a year. So Thomas knows her well. He wrote a letter in connection with the Second Circuit investigation:

“I know Crystal Clanton and I know bigotry,” Thomas wrote. “Bigotry is antithetical to her nature and character.”

Clanton didn’t respond to the Times’s request for comment in the story they published today, but back in 2017 she told The New Yorker that “I have no recollection of these messages and they do not reflect what I believe or who I am, and the same was true when I was a teenager.”

So there the matter rests. The moral of the story, I suppose, is that the Left never forgets. No matter that she was cleared by an investigation by one of the nation’s courts of appeals; once the Left gets its hands on a smear it never lets go. It will never stop trying to destroy your life. And of course, The New Yorker and the New York Times are two of the worst offenders.

Also, what makes this old story worthy of the Times’s A section? Only the fact that Justice Thomas is involved. The Times doesn’t care about a law clerk of whom few people have heard, but it cares deeply about smearing the country’s top conservative African-American. But what, exactly, are we supposed to infer from the Times story? That Clarence Thomas is weirdly favorable to those who hate black people?

A final irony: Supreme Court justices have no doubt hired any number of clerks who have written and spoken favorably about DEI, which actually is racist. But there is no controversy there: on the contrary, endorsing that form of racism is a badge of honor.

The Hamas way

(Scott Johnson)

Dan Senor’s most recent Call Me Back podcast features Matti Friedman. Among many other things, Friedman is a former AP Jerusalem bureau staffer. It is his AP experience that prompted him to think through the wide world of sickness that we see in the reaction of the outside world to Israel’s current life-and-death struggle with Hamas. Senor asks good questions and lets the incredibly articulate Friedman speak.

Senor has posted the podcast with this introduction:

Every day we see news accounts “reported” by reputable journalists. There is typically one frame in the post-10/07 War: “Gazan Palestinians are the victims of Israel.” How does this happen? How do journalists actually operate in Gaza and around the world? And is this a window into what had Hamas figured out long before 10/07 — that the forces of barbarism could manipulate the intentional press reaction to their massacre of 10/07? That is why we wanted to sit down with Matti Friedman, who is one of the most thoughtful writers when it comes to all matters related to Israel, the broader Middle East, and also trends in the world of journalism.

He writes regularly for The Free Press and is a regular contributor to The Atlantic. His newest book is called Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. Before that he published Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, and before that Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War.

Matti’s army service included tours in Lebanon. His work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, DC. He is a former Associated Press correspondent and essayist for the New York Times opinion section. But it was his time covering Hamas’s takeover of Gaza that led him to study with great detail how Hamas manipulates the media, NGOs and the international community, and how they are working from the same playbook right now, perhaps quite masterfully.

I urge interested readers to check out the podcast below.

Here are the show notes citing Friedman’s work discussed in the podcast (I especially commend Friedman’s 2014 Tablet column linked below):

“The Wisdom of Hamas” — The Free Press.

“What if the Real War in Israel Hasn’t Even Started?” — The Free Press.

“There Is No ‘Israeli-Palestinian Conflict'” — The New York Times.

“An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth” — Tablet Magazine.

“What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel” — The Atlantic.

The New York Times Gets Israel Wrong – Again

The New York Times Gets Israel Wrong – Again
The New York Times, doing its imitation of the Palestinian news agency Wafa, has yet again misrepresented the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians who would, if only they could, cheerfully destroy the Jewish state. The Times provides what it calls a “news analysis” – more rigorous, presumably, than a mere report of facts — of the current […]

Terrorists Are Crossing the Border, But Relax: ‘Experts’ Say It’s Nothing to Worry About

Terrorists Are Crossing the Border, But Relax: ‘Experts’ Say It’s Nothing to Worry About
New in PJ Media: We’re used to seeing the establishment media cheerlead for Democrat administrations, but Bloomberg went above and beyond on Wednesday with an article that was condescendingly entitled “Terrorists Crossing the US Border? Rising Encounters Explained.” Gather round, you rubes, and let your moral and intellectual superiors explain away what your lying eyes are showing […]

Even the Washington Post Isn’t Buying Biden Blaming Trump for Afghanistan Debacle

Even the Washington Post Isn’t Buying Biden Blaming Trump for Afghanistan Debacle
New in PJ Media: When you’re a Leftist politician and you’ve lost the Washington Post, what’s left? The Post editorial board chided Old Joe Biden and his henchmen on Tuesday for blaming their catastrophically botched withdrawal from Afghanistan on their all-purpose whipping boy, Donald Trump. “Instead of admitting errors,” the Post wrote about the White House assessment of the withdrawal, “the […]

The Guardian Changes Words to Erase Palestinian Terror, Distort Israeli Actions

The Guardian Changes Words to Erase Palestinian Terror, Distort Israeli Actions
When it comes to the Palestinian war on Israel, it doesn’t take much to lead an audience astray, to prepare minds with a headline, or a first sentence, in order that they receive a story in a certain way. So many people read no more than the headline, or the headline and first sentence of […]

Great Idea! Trump Calls for Defunding the FBI and DOJ

Great Idea! Trump Calls for Defunding the FBI and DOJ
New in PJ Media: Donald Trump said it in an all-caps message on Truth Social Wednesday morning: “REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS SHOULD DEFUND THE DOJ AND FBI UNTIL THEY COME TO THEIR SENSES. THE DEMOCRATS HAVE TOTALLY WEAPONIZED LAW ENFORCEMENT IN OUR COUNTRY AND ARE VICIOUSLY USING THIS ABUSE OF POWER TO INTERFERE WITH OUR ALREADY UNDER SIEGE […]

Politico Admits Case Against Trump Is Weak, Watches Our Republic Circle the Drain, Says ‘So What?’

Politico Admits Case Against Trump Is Weak, Watches Our Republic Circle the Drain, Says ‘So What?’
New in PJ Media: Donald Trump was indicted Thursday and the sun came up as usual on Friday; all this business about the United States descending to banana-republic status is just right-wing hysteria, right? Wrong. The far-Left flagship Politico thumbed its nose at patriots on Thursday, cheerfully admitting that the case against Trump is a farrago of […]

Whatever Happened to the Dems Saying That ‘Lock Her Up’ Chants were ‘Banana Republic Stuff’?

Whatever Happened to the Dems Saying That ‘Lock Her Up’ Chants were ‘Banana Republic Stuff’?
New in PJ Media: Back in 2016, it was a feature of Trump rallies: the candidate would mention Hillary Clinton, and the crowd would start chanting “Lock her up!” In Oct. 2016, at their second presidential debate, Trump himself said it to Hillary: “If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a […]

Burkina Faso suspends France 24 indefinitely after it airs interview with regional head of al-Qaeda

Burkina Faso suspends France 24 indefinitely after it airs interview with regional head of al-Qaeda
It is abhorrent that France 24 would glorify a high-level jihad leader by giving him a public forum, and then make up excuses about it. Would France 24 interview an innocent man whom Leftists deem guilty by Leftists for the “offense” of insulting Islam, or someone whose aim is to show  that mainstream Islam is […]

In Gaza, 70% Youth Unemployment Leads to Despair

In Gaza, 70% Youth Unemployment Leads to Despair
For young Gazan Arabs, life is terrible. There are scarcely any jobs, even for those with higher degrees. Positions are filled not on merit, but on the applicant’s connections to Hamas, or Fatah, or to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Corruption is colossal, siphoning off billions that ought to have gone to all of the people, […]

DC News Now tells you ‘everything you need to know’ about Ramadan, except what you need to know

DC News Now tells you ‘everything you need to know’ about Ramadan, except what you need to know
A bit of what they left out: “Ramadan is not a month of laziness but rather a month of activity, of effort, and of hard work, and as it also was in the life of the Prophet, a month of jihad, conquest, and victory.” — Palestinian Authority Supreme Sharia Judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash “Ramadan is a month […]

New York Times Claims Ancient Judaism Recognized a Variety of Genders. It Didn’t.

New York Times Claims Ancient Judaism Recognized a Variety of Genders. It Didn’t.
My latest in PJ Media is a VIP article. I am happy to be able to offer you a 5% discount on becoming a VIP member at PJ Media. Just enter the code SPENCER when you sign up here. As Leftists go about reshaping reality to suit themselves or deceiving themselves into thinking they’re doing so, they’re […]

The New York Times’ Iran Hostage – Reagan Conspiracy Theory Makes No Sense

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Either the New York Times is historically illiterate or it just doesn’t give a damn. The Left never lets go of anything or forgets its history. No conspiracy theory is too dead to be dragged up again. And with Carter on the way out, the New York Times decided to drag out its old claim […]

France 24 Investigates the Staff of its Arabic Service

France 24 Investigates the Staff of its Arabic Service
The Arabic Service of international broadcaster France 24 has had problems with its staff similar to those experienced by the BBC’s Arabic Service in 2021. It has suspended four of its journalists over their antisemitic social media posts. A preliminary Jihad Watch report is here, and more on the staffing problems of France 24’s Arabic […]

France24 suspends four Muslim journalists for extreme antisemitism and pro-jihad messages

France24 suspends four Muslim journalists for extreme antisemitism and pro-jihad messages
Any guesses on what the angle might have been when these now suspended journalists covered any topic related to Israel? Laila Odeh celebrated murderers as “martyrs.” Lebanese journalist Joelle Maroun tweeted: “If Only Hitler Was Lebanese.’” Dina Abi-Saab celebrated Hamas rocket fire upon Israel, and Sharif Bibi declared “We will eradicate you, Israel.” CAMERA said […]

Oak Lawn, Illinois: Hamas-linked CAIR stokes tensions between Muslims and police

Oak Lawn, Illinois: Hamas-linked CAIR stokes tensions between Muslims and police
There is astonishing new news coverage from Scripps News of the atrocious case of Hadi Abuatelah. If you will recall, in Oak Lawn, Illinois last July, 17-year-old Hadi Abuatelah ran from police during a traffic stop. He then resisted arrest while in possession of a loaded, and illegal pistol. Police dashcam video captured all of […]

92.5% of Palestinians Killed This Year: Members of Terror Groups Or Active in Attacks, Rest Were Caught In Crossfire

92.5% of Palestinians Killed This Year: Members of Terror Groups Or Active in Attacks, Rest Were Caught In Crossfire
Adin Haykin is an Israeli who – just as he did last year – has been documenting every single Palestinian killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank this year, and identifying their terrorist affiliations or, absent any, their participation in attacks. Elder of Ziyon put Haykin’s current thread on a Twitter Thread Reader post. […]

California TV station reports on CAIR’s benefit concert, not its Hamas ties

California TV station reports on CAIR’s benefit concert, not its Hamas ties
In the February 23, 2023 broadcast of Stockton, California’s KOVR CBS13 filed by Marlee Ginter and entitled “Personal Performance,” we learn that the Zakat Foundation of America and the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) put on a benefit concert for the victims of the devastating earthquake in Turkey. Khalil Demir runs the Zakat Foundation of […]
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