Media Corruption
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Media Invent New Biden Standard: ‘Proof’ And A ‘Smoking Gun’ Of Bribery Scheme Or It’s Not A Scandal At All
The New York Times reacted to that explosive development with a shrug. “Republicans have claimed repeatedly — and so far without proof — that the investigations implicate the president in corruption and crimes,” the paper’s post-testimony article said.
Still no proof! That’s all, folks! Everybody can go home!
Mike Allen of Axios was similarly unmoved. “In closed-door House testimony yesterday,” he wrote, “Hunter Biden’s former business partner didn’t give Republicans the smoking gun they’d hoped would show President Biden and his family used government connections for profit.”
It’s funny. I don’t recall every news item about the forever-long Russia-collusion story coming with an equivalent disclaimer about how Democrats had once again fallen short of proving anything. Where were the underwhelming notes about a failure to secure the “smoking gun”? Nowhere. Every time the saga was treated like an incremental unmasking of a coming certainty.
The walls are closing in… The noose is tightening… We’ve turned a corner… Wait for it… It’s coming… Just a minute… Okay… Hold on… One more time…
Democrats can literally claim anything with nothing to show for it — like, say, that it’s “clear” Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election — and it’s taken by the media as an authoritative allegation of grave consequence.
But when Republicans put forth truckloads of evidence — sworn testimony by three credible witnesses, text messages, government communications in conflict with the Bidens’ public accounts, FBI documentation of a confidential source detailing an alleged bribe between Biden and a Ukrainian energy magnate — it is steadfastly noted by the media that none of it amounts to “proof” or a “smoking gun.”
Indicting Trump for 'knowingly false statements' about election sets US on dangerous path
Special counsel Jack Smith made history on Tuesday.
It wasn't just the federal indictment of a former president. Smith already did that in June with the indictment of Donald Trump on charges that he mishandled classified documents.
No, Smith and his team have made history in the worst way by attempting to fully criminalize disinformation by seeking the incarceration for a politician on false claims made during and after an election.
The hatred for Trump is so all-encompassing that legal experts on the political left have ignored the chilling implications of this indictment. This complaint is based largely on statements that are protected under the First Amendment. It would eviscerate free speech and could allow the government to arrest those who are accused of spreading disinformation in elections.
Supreme Court has ruled on lies by politicians
In the 2012 United States v. Alvarez decision, the Supreme Court held 6-3 that it is unconstitutional to criminalize lies in a case involving a politician who lied about military decorations.The court warned such criminalization "would give government a broad censorial power unprecedented in this Court’s cases or in our constitutional tradition. The mere potential for the exercise of that power casts a chill, a chill the First Amendment cannot permit if free speech, thought, and discourse are to remain a foundation of our freedom."
That precedent did not deter Smith. This indictment is reminiscent of the case against former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. His conviction on 11 corruption-related counts was unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court in 2016, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing that federal prosecutors relied on a "boundless" definition of actions that could trigger criminal charges against political leaders.
Smith is now showing the same abandon in pursuing Trump, including detailing his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, before the riot while omitting the line where Trump told his supporters to go to the U.S. Capitol to "peacefully" protest the certification.
While the indictment acknowledges that candidates are allowed to make false statements, Smith proceeded to charge Trump for making "knowingly false statements."
On the election claims, Smith declares that Trump "knew that they were false" because he was "notified repeatedly that his claims were untrue."
The problem is that Trump had lawyers and others telling him that the claims were true. Smith is indicting Trump for believing his lawyers over his other advisers.
What if the George Floyd narrative is false?
While some of this national reckoning on race has been helpful, activists have used Floyd’s death to push forward an entire movement on diversity, equity and inclusion that has gone beyond the criminal justice system and infiltrated schools, corporations, and every aspect of society. All based on the narrative that the system is biased against blacks.
What if that narrative was false?
In 2021, for the first time, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension began documenting the race of criminal offenders in all crimes reported in the state. Using the 911 call as the starting point instead of the arrest offers the unique ability to focus analysis of race based criminal justice system performance on offenders rather than on "per capita" data sets of uninvolved law-abiding citizens. The difference is significant, given 98 percent of white and 85 percent of black Minnesotans are law abiding.
In our new report titled Dispelling the Myth of Unwarranted Racial Disparities in Minnesota’s Criminal Justice System, Center of the American Experiment is one of the first to use this new data set in an analysis of Minnesota’s criminal justice system. Offender data and other traditional data sets were used in an analysis which compared white and black adult offenders as they moved through Minnesota’s criminal justice system in 2021.
Is NPR Trying To Start A Race War?
On Tuesday, the outlet blamed the success of American country music on racial prejudice. In a podcast episode titled “How racism became a marketing tool for country music,” NPR brought on a historian to outline the myriad ways country music is a vehicle for white supremacy. The host, Britany Luse, introduces the episode by previewing questions to Amanda Martinez, a country music historian at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Luse wants to know “how country music became this symbol of racism” and why country music stars remain popular despite artists who currently lead the charts “peddling racist rhetoric today.”
“Is racism really what it takes make country music number one?” Luse asks. “I wanted to know how country music became this symbol of racism.”
The episode went to air over recent allegations of racism against country music stars currently at the top of the charts. Jason Aldean’s recent number-one hit, “Try That In A Small Town,” drew controversy over the suggestion that inner-city riots such as the record-devastating outbursts that erupted in 2020 wouldn’t be tolerated outside major metropolitan areas.
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The podcast host also brought up Morgan Wallen, because he used the N-word one time, and Luke Combs, because the song that has him in the number three spot is apparently adapted from a black queer woman. While social justice warriors might otherwise be flattered by Combs’ tribute to 1988 Grammy winner Tracy Chapman, the cancellers have to see victimization in everything, so they manufacture a narrative about race so they can continue to label everything “white supremacist.” NPR has now decoded country music as a primary pillar of systemic racism, courtesy of the taxpayer.
I'm sure Tracy Chapman has no problem depositing the royalty checks flow in.
Song sucked when Tracy did it, Jason's version is no better. I change the station on the 1st chords!
Trump Prosecutor Jack Smith Drives News Actress Wild on Air
Now they’re back at it, this time with Jack Smith, Trump’s current prosecutor on the Jan 6 stuff. Check out this wild CBS news panel segment, delivered by the sultry news actress in a nearly breathless whisper. “Jack Smith is someone who has run in… over a hundred triathlons,” she begins.
“A hundred triathlons!”
“He was reportedly at one point hit while he was on his bike by a truck. And ten weeks later, he ran another triathlon,” she continues in hushed tones. “This is a man of a lot of grit and a lot of determination.”
The superhero we need.
What’s honestly very, very sad — tragic, one might even say — is that there is almost surely a menopausal NPC liberal in Brooklyn or Berkeley or wherever fully captivated by the nearly overt sexualization of a career federal prosecutor to the point of developing a one-way, television-mediated relationship with Jack Smith like he’s a character in a tawdry novel, much in the same way that the CBS news actress has.
Honestly, these people would’ve fallen in love with Chris Christie if he brought charges against the bad orange man, so Jack Smith shouldn’t feel so grand about his newly conferred star power.
Getting Conservative History Straight
Matthew Continetti: The Washington Post's go-to authority on conservatism
Washington Post reached for superlatives last year in describing Matthew Continetti’s The Right. This voice of the establishment Left explained that Continetti, besides being an AEI senior fellow and a onetime distinguished editor of the Washington Free Beacon, may be the premier intellectual historian of the American Right. Continetti’s admirers found something exceptional in his analytic examination of his controversial subject. He spared no effort telling us a harsh truth: American conservatism is beset by right-wing extremists, like the hoi polloi who just “can’t be weaned away” from Donld Trump. This movement also includes other more conventional conservatives who are putting up with extremism in their ranks. Conservatives need vigilant gatekeepers, and Continetti believes he is up to the job.
According to the Post, “Continetti tells a story of conservatism that has often been marked by an elite inability or unwillingness to police extremism, and at times an active embrace of it.” Moreover, “in Continetti’s telling, those events partly represented long-festering tendencies inside the movement and the GOP. When racist, white supremacist and alt-right elements sought to violently overturn democracy, he writes, ‘all of the unreason and hatred that had been slowly growing in the body of the Right burst into the open.’”
Supposedly these telltale tendencies did not first emerge in the last few years. Repeatedly falling prey to its own extremism, ”the right’s noninterventionist streak during the lead-up to World War II too easily collapsed into Charles Lindbergh’s antisemitism and flirtation with Nazism. The anti-communism of the 1950s too easily shaded into support for Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts.” Continetti just can’t get certain facts straight. For example: Conservative anti-Communism did not collapse into “McCarthyite witch hunts.” Many of those whom the late Wisconsin senator accused of being Communist collaborators or unreliable government workers for security reasons, were exactly what McCarthy and congressmen of both parties stated they were. Not only the conservative researcher M. Stanton Evans but the more centrist historian Arthur Herman demonstrates that the investigations of McCarthy and his colleagues were usually something more than “witch hunts,” although these hearings were not always conducted as dispassionately as they might have been.
Further, there is a superabundance of scholarship by widely respected historians Wayne Cole and Justus Doenecke that proves that neither Nazi sympathy nor hatred for Jews was a mainstream sentiment in the America First movement. Although Lindbergh and his associates gravely underestimated the danger posed by Nazi Germany, Nazi ideology had nothing to do with their position. America Firster Hamilton Fish, the congressman from FDR’s district in upstate New York, was an early advocate of black civil rights; and another prominent America Firster John Borah, an Idaho U.S. Senator, was a left-of-center Progressive. Many members of America First, who opposed having the U.S. enter the European war between 1939 and 1941, came unmistakably out of the Left.
Those who were antiwar were understandably upset that the American government pulled the country into World War I, a bloodbath that ended in a grossly unjust peace treaty. These anti-interventionists mistakenly viewed Hitler’s romp across Europe as a repetition of the struggle among the European Great Powers that erupted in 1914. But I wouldn’t expect Continetti to delve very deeply into such matters. As the Post’s go-to authority on conservatism, Continetti may not have to worry about irksome historical details.
New York magazine loves Continetti’s scholarly insights almost as much as does the Post: “Continetti, after studying the intersection of conservative thought and politics over the last century, finds cranks and bigots were there all along, hardly powerless, and frequently working hand in hand with Buckley and other conservatives who had supposedly banished them.” It is easy to understand why Continetti has such fans. He tells the “opposition” exactly what it wants to hear. But he also receives from the conservative establishment (remarkably enough) equal honors. For several years Continetti occupied among the Fox news Allstars the position that had been held by his father-in-law Bill Kristol. This occurred after Bill had unequivocally joined the Left. Matt, who didn’t bother to change sides, is now basking in the exuberant approval of the liberal and conservative establishments alike.
If this historian of the Right was less fixated on his left flank, he might have raised some obvious questions while talking to the Washington Post. For example, he might have inquired whether anyone there was playing a similar gatekeeping role to the one he’d assumed for the Right. Does the leftist national press go after those on its left for being too extreme? Do the Post’s editors denounce its own left wing in language as abrasive as that which Continetti hurls at Trump and Trump’s supporters? It would also be fair to ask whether the Post would care about Continetti’s historical opinions if he didn’t devote such energy to kicking around the Right. There is a vast literature on the American Right, which the Post’s editorial board has certainly never praised as extravagantly as it has Continetti’s modest achievement. But then most self-described conservative historians of the American Right (and I can think of multitudes) don’t try to sound like the Post’s editorial page.
Sunday Shows on Liberal Networks Completely Ignore Devon Archer Testimony in Biden Scandal
The majority of Sunday news shows this weekend completely ignored the devastating testimony from Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer last week.
It’s not surprising because most people know at this point that the liberal media is now basically the public relations arm of the Democrat party.
They’re not going to report on or discuss anything that might harm Joe Biden, or any other Democrat for that matter.
Washington Post quietly ‘updates’ Hunter Biden laptop story after Devon Archer testimony
Glenn Kessler, the paper’s chief fact-checker, has made six updates and authored an entirely new article about The Post’s bombshell reports in October 2020 and May 2021 that revealed Hunter Biden introduced his father to Pozharskyi at Café Milano in Georgetown months after joining the natural gas firm’s board.
The initial fact check relied on statements from Andrew Bates — then a spokesman for the Biden campaign and now deputy White House press secretary — and Michael Carpenter, a former Biden foreign policy adviser and now a permanent US representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Bates said there was no record of the 2015 dinner on the vice president’s public schedule. Carpenter said he did not recognize Pozharskyi’s name, except apparently from The Post’s reporting. Other Biden reps denied the event happened at all.
Throughout the 2020 campaign, Biden also denied he spoke with his son about any foreign business arrangements, a line his representatives parroted for years.
Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business partner, blew a hole in those claims earlier this month when he testified before the House Oversight Committee that the Biden/Kessler characterization of the matter was “not correct.”
Media Are Purveyors Of Climate Narratives, Not News
“The important thing to remember is that the media these days are not purveyors of news. They’re purveyors of narratives. And when the narrative is that you peasants don’t get to have air conditioning, you don’t get to have gas stoves, you don’t get to have steak because you’re going to drive us to an apocalypse, then you can believe that we’re not going to see the real news about the volcanos erupting underwater changing the global temperature,” Federalist Editorial Director Kylee Griswold said on Newsmax.
So much for Spartan politics. Is Devereaux correct in his critique of Sparta’s military?
Devereaux disagrees with the presentation of the Spartans as “superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom,” and he argues the Spartans’ military might is overrated. To support this revisionist statement, he claims they were “tactically and strategically uncreative,” that they lacked military innovation, and that their famous agoge educational system was not “an intense military bootcamp” but rather “primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics.”
It’s true that the Spartans weren’t eight-foot-tall super soldiers with Arnold Schwarzenegger muscles who thought only of war and whose six-packs could stop a bullet. But they were still widely recognized to be the best soldiers of ancient Greece.
Qualified Spartan men fought as full-time professional soldiers at a time when the rest of the Greek world relied on part-time hoplite levies with only limited military training. The warriors from other Greek city-states were usually farmers first and soldiers second — but Spartans dedicated their lives to battle.
It is this commitment to having a professional standing army that allowed the Spartans to gain a significant edge over their enemies. Spartans put a premium on fitness as well as continual drilling: They “drilled relentlessly, until they could execute tactics with perfection.” As the historian Paul Cartledge points out in The Spartans, their “constant drilling” led to “tight co-ordination, rigid discipline and high morale,” granting them a level of professionalism that their adversaries simply could not match.
Other advantages of Spartan armies included their unique ability for “stealthy movement by night” (as Cartledge explains), their wearing of a red uniform that gave their armies the appearance of unity, and their high officer-to-soldier ratio that improved their command ability and made maneuvering more efficient.
Perhaps the best argument for Sparta’s fearsome reputation is what their enemies knew about them. Devereaux might think the Spartans were pansies, but he’d have a tough time convincing the Athenians, who, for almost the entire three-decade duration of the Peloponnesian War, refused to meet the Spartans in open battle on land. The only major pitched land battle that Athenians and Spartans fought during this war was the Battle of Mantineia — a decisive loss for the Athenians.
Finally, Sparta played a crucial role in defending Greece during the Persian king Xerxes’ invasion. They not only fought to the death at Thermopylae, but they were also all-important in the Battle of Plataea, in which an alliance of Greek city-states defeated the main Persian army and finally banished the Persians from mainland Greece forever.
thefederalist.com
Devereaux disagrees with the presentation of the Spartans as “superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom,” and he argues the Spartans’ military might is overrated. To support this revisionist statement, he claims they were “tactically and strategically uncreative,” that they lacked military innovation, and that their famous agoge educational system was not “an intense military bootcamp” but rather “primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics.”
It’s true that the Spartans weren’t eight-foot-tall super soldiers with Arnold Schwarzenegger muscles who thought only of war and whose six-packs could stop a bullet. But they were still widely recognized to be the best soldiers of ancient Greece.
Qualified Spartan men fought as full-time professional soldiers at a time when the rest of the Greek world relied on part-time hoplite levies with only limited military training. The warriors from other Greek city-states were usually farmers first and soldiers second — but Spartans dedicated their lives to battle.
It is this commitment to having a professional standing army that allowed the Spartans to gain a significant edge over their enemies. Spartans put a premium on fitness as well as continual drilling: They “drilled relentlessly, until they could execute tactics with perfection.” As the historian Paul Cartledge points out in The Spartans, their “constant drilling” led to “tight co-ordination, rigid discipline and high morale,” granting them a level of professionalism that their adversaries simply could not match.
Other advantages of Spartan armies included their unique ability for “stealthy movement by night” (as Cartledge explains), their wearing of a red uniform that gave their armies the appearance of unity, and their high officer-to-soldier ratio that improved their command ability and made maneuvering more efficient.
Perhaps the best argument for Sparta’s fearsome reputation is what their enemies knew about them. Devereaux might think the Spartans were pansies, but he’d have a tough time convincing the Athenians, who, for almost the entire three-decade duration of the Peloponnesian War, refused to meet the Spartans in open battle on land. The only major pitched land battle that Athenians and Spartans fought during this war was the Battle of Mantineia — a decisive loss for the Athenians.
Finally, Sparta played a crucial role in defending Greece during the Persian king Xerxes’ invasion. They not only fought to the death at Thermopylae, but they were also all-important in the Battle of Plataea, in which an alliance of Greek city-states defeated the main Persian army and finally banished the Persians from mainland Greece forever.
Is This Sparta? Revisionists Get The Legendary Warriors All Wrong
A Foreign Policy article completely ignores Sparta’s well-merited, legendary military reputation and falsely tars Sparta as 'fascist.'
thefederalist.com
Crossfire Erupts On Airwaves After Hunter Biden Special Counsel Appointment
“If this special counsel is truly independent — even though he failed to bring proper charges after a four year investigation and he appears to be trying to move the case to a more Democrat-friendly venue — he will quickly conclude that Joe Biden, his troubled son Hunter, and their enablers, including the media … should face the required consequences,” an unnamed spokesperson said.
Whereas White House adviser Steve Benjamin declined to make any comment about the special appointment during a weekend appearance on MSNBC —sticking to the stated view that the criminal case is a personal matter for Hunter Biden — Democrats in Congress took to the airwaves on Sunday to defend the Department of Justice and the president.
Column: Presenting Trump's Democrat Prosecutors as Nonpartisans
This has happened over and over again. New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg isn’t described in media accounts as an elected Democrat who ran on getting Trump. New York state Attorney General Letitia James, who sued Trump over business fraud, isn’t described as an elected Democrat who ran on getting Trump. They don’t talk about Jack Smith’s wife, the filmmaker who made a Netflix gushfest for Michelle Obama.
In this case, Fani Willis ran for D.A in 2020, and almost immediately began an investigation of Trump. All of these Democrat politicians are drawing adulation from Democrats – at the same time as reporters present them as nonpartisans.
There’s not just an elected Democrat prosecutor in Willis, but a grand jury selected in Fulton County which voted Biden over Trump by a margin of 73 to 26 percent. This is similar to jury pools in Washington, DC (Biden won 92 percent to 5), or Alvin Bragg’s territory of New York County (Biden drew roughly 603,000 to Trump’s 85,000). In every case, the jury is going to be chock-full of Biden-voting Democrats. NBC’s Savannah Guthrie vaguely mentioned Fulton being a “blue county.”
Jack Smith used a D.C. grand jury before indicting Trump in Florida. Now Democrats will worry about a second grand jury in Florida – it might not be as “reliable.”
Many a Trump-voting Republican can believe that after all the media bias and suppression, Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020 in a squeaker, and still believe that a prosecutor comparing Trump to an organized-crime boss looks like a mudslinging Democrat.
The pro-Biden media have constructed a rhetorical device where Trump faces a “myriad of legal problems” like this can’t be described as a pack of Democrat prosecutors building their own careers by taking down Big Orange.