A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump
Headlines recently proclaimed that eight of Trump’s “fake” electors accepted immunity deals. Of course, in reporting the news, the corporate outlets all missed the real story — that the electors’ testimony failed to incriminate anyone, including Trump, and that the county prosecutors engaged in massive misconduct. Equally appalling, however, was the corrupt media’s continued peddling of the “fake electors” narrative.
There were no “fake” electors. There were contingent Republican electors named consistent with legal precedent to preserve the still ongoing legal challenges to the validity of Georgia’s certified vote.
Nor was appointing an alternative slate of electors some cockamamie plan devised by Trump lawyers. On the contrary, Trump’s election lawyers and the contingent electors followed the precise approach Democrats successfully used when the date Congress established for certifying an election came before the legal challenges John F. Kennedy had brought in Hawaii were decided. And that approach allowed Kennedy to be certified the winner of Hawaii’s three electoral votes on Jan. 6, 1961, even though the Aloha State had originally certified Richard Nixon the victor.
The Hawaii scenario in 1960 mirrors in every material respect the facts on the ground in Georgia on Dec. 14, 2020 — the date both the Democrat and Republican presidential electors met and cast their 16 electoral votes for Joe Biden and Donald Trump respectively.
Here’s What Happened in Hawaii Six-0
Election day in 1960 fell on Nov. 8 and pitted Kennedy, a Democrat, against Republican Richard Nixon. The outcome remained unknown for some time, with a total of 93 electoral votes from eight different states undecided in the days following the election. Hawaii was one of those states.
By Dec. 9 of that year, Kennedy had accumulated enough electoral votes to win the White House, but Hawaii’s winner was still in question. While the presidency did not depend on Hawaii’s three electoral votes, Democrats there had challenged the initial returns that gave Nixon a 141-vote edge, or 0.08 percent margin of victory.
Based on the original count in favor of Nixon, the acting governor of Hawaii, Republican James Kealoha, certified the Republican electors on Nov. 28, 1960. On Dec. 13, over the objections of the state attorney general, state circuit court Judge Ronald Jamieson ordered a recount. Then, on Dec. 19, both the Nixon and Kennedy electors met, “cast their votes for President and Vice President, and certified their own meeting and votes.”
In casting their electoral ballots for Kennedy, the three Hawaiian Democrats certified they were the “duly and legally qualified and appointed” electors for president and vice president for the state of Hawaii and that they had been “certified (as such) by the Executive.” The Hawaii electors further attested: “We hereby certify that the lists of all the votes of the state of Hawaii given for President, and of all the votes given for Vice President, are contained herein.”
Two of the three Democrat electors were retired federal judges, William Heen and Delbert Metzger, and Heen personally mailed the Democrat electoral votes to Congress on Dec. 20. In fact, the envelope containing the certificates, further attested: “We hereby certify that the lists of all the votes of the state of Hawaii given for president … are contained herein.”
Ten days later, on Dec. 30, 1960, Judge Jamieson held that Kennedy had won the election. In so holding, Jamieson stressed the importance of the Democrat electors having met on Dec. 19, as prescribed by the Electoral Count Act, to cast their ballots in favor of Kennedy. That step allowed the Hawaii governor to then certify Kennedy as the winner of Hawaii’s three electoral votes and, in turn, Congress to count Hawaii’s electoral votes in favor of Kennedy.
The Peach State Repeat
The Georgia situation in 2020 mirrored the events of 60 years ago in Hawaii.
Election day in 2020 fell on Nov. 3, although by then many ballots had already been cast, given the adoption of mass mail-in and early voting. Trump held a lead in Georgia until the morning of Friday, Nov. 6, when Biden overtook the incumbent. With the margin remaining tight, on Nov. 11, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced a statewide audit.
Following the audit, Biden remained in the lead by approximately 12,000 votes, leading Raffensperger to certify the election results on Friday, Nov. 20, 2020. Republic Gov. Brian Kemp signed the certification the same day. Then on Nov. 21, Trump requested a recount, as allowed under Georgia law given the closeness of the count.
On Dec. 4, 2020, then-President Trump and Republican elector David Shafer filed suit in a Fulton County state court against Raffensperger, arguing tens of thousands of votes counted in the presidential election had been cast in violation of Georgia law. While Trump’s lawsuit was still pending, on Dec. 7, 2020, based on the recount, Raffensperger recertified Biden as the winner of Georgia’s 16 electoral votes by a margin of 11,779.
Trump and Shafer’s Fulton County lawsuit contesting the election results remained pending on Dec. 14, 2020, the date the presidential electors were required by federal law to meet. Thus, while the Democrat electors met and cast their ballots for Joe Biden, the Republican electors met separately and cast their 16 votes for Trump.
At that time, Shafer made clear the Trump electors had met and cast their votes to ensure Trump’s legal battle in court remained viable. Nonetheless, following Biden’s election, Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis targeted the Republican electors as part of her criminal special purpose grand jury investigation.
While the grand jury has since issued a report and been disbanded, Willis agreed to grant immunity to eight of the electors, likely to push them to implicate the other electors. However, their lawyer confirmed in a court filing that none of the electors implicated anyone in criminal activity.
Since then, Shafer’s attorneys, Holly Pierson and Craig Gillen, wrote Willis a detailed letter reviewing the Hawaii precedent. The attorneys noted they had made three prior written requests to meet “to discuss the factual and legal issues” relevant to Shafer’s role as a contingent Trump elector but had “not yet received any response to those requests.”
The 11-page, single-spaced letter then proceeded to detail both the Hawaii precedent for Shafer’s actions following the 2020 election and the legal advice the Republican elector received that “he and the other contingent presidential electors should meet at the state capitol building on December 14, 2020, and perform the duties of a presidential elector to preserve potential remedies in the event Trump et al. v. Raffensperger, et al. was successful.”
In addition to detailing the Hawaii precedent from 1960, Shafer’s lawyers highlighted the fact that in contesting the 2000 election, lawyers for then-Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore cited that very precedent to support his position that two elector slates could be appointed. In fact, Democrat Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii suggested the 2000 Florida electoral dispute be resolved based on that Hawaii precedent too. And three Supreme Court justices in Bush v. Gore cited the Hawaii precedent as a basis for allowing the Florida recount to proceed.
As the letter and Hawaii precedent make clear, Shafer and the other Trump electors not only did nothing wrong, but they acted prudentially to ensure that if the state court lawsuit resolved in the president’s favor, Georgia’s electoral votes would be properly counted on Jan. 6, 2020.
Here we see one of the only differences between Trump’s legal challenge and Kennedy’s: The Hawaii state court promptly resolved the merits of Kennedy’s legal challenge, while in violation of the Georgia Election Code that requires lawsuits contesting elections to be heard within 20 days, the Fulton County court delayed assigning a judge to hear Trump’s election dispute and then delayed the first scheduled hearing until Jan. 8, 2021 — two days after Congress certified Biden the winner of the 2020 election.
Now you know the rest of the story. There were no fake electors. The question now is whether Willis will charge Shafer and others with fake crimes.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Antony Blinken represents neither the beginning nor the end of the info ops run to convince voters the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Revisiting the contemporaneous coverage of the laptop story in light of last week’s revelations about Blinken reveals the scandal extends far beyond the Biden campaign and involves government agents.
Last week, news broke that a former top CIA official, Michael Morell, testified as part of a House Judiciary Committee investigation that Blinken, now-secretary of state and then-Biden campaign senior adviser, had contacted Morell to discuss the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story.
Blinken and Morell reportedly “discussed possible Russian involvement in the spreading of information related to Hunter Biden.” According to Morell, Blinken’s outreach “set in motion” what led to the public statement signed by 51 former intelligence agents that falsely framed the laptop as Russian disinformation.
This revelation is huge — but it’s only a start to understanding the scope of the plot to interfere in the 2020 election by framing the laptop exposing Biden family corruption as foreign disinformation.
The First Clue
The first hint that Blinken’s outreach to Morell was a single spoke in the wheel of the Biden campaign’s deception came from a follow-up email Blinken sent Morell on Oct. 17, 2020. In it, Blinken shared a USA Today article that reported “the FBI was examining whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a ‘disinformation campaign.’” The very bottom of Blinken’s email contained the signature block of Andrew Bates, then a Biden campaign spokesman and the director of his “rapid response” team, suggesting Bates had sent the article to Blinken for him to forward to Morell.
Blinken forwarding an article claiming the FBI was investigating the laptop as a potential “disinformation campaign” is hugely significant because we know the FBI was doing no such thing. The FBI knew both that the laptop was authentic and that John Paul Mac Isaac had possession of the hard drive, just as the New York Post had reported, albeit without identifying the computer-store owner by name.
The USA Today article nonetheless furthered the narrative that Morell and the other former intelligence officials would soon parrot in their “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails” — that the emails have “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
For those who lived through the Russia-collusion hoax, it was the USA Today article and the presidential campaign’s use of Russia to deflect attention from the Biden scandal that bore the “classic earmarks” of an information operation — one that mimicked Hillary Clinton’s ploy four years prior. Given the similarities between the two Russia hoaxes, it seemed likely the Biden campaign worked with the press to push the Russian-disinformation narrative.
USA Today Didn’t Start the Falsehood
Sure enough, the legacy press began pushing the narrative days before Blinken emailed Morell the article on Oct. 17.
On Oct. 14, 2020, the same day the New York Post broke the first laptop story, Politico ran an article, co-authored by Russia-hoaxer extraordinaire “Fusion Natasha” Bertrand, raising questions about the authenticity of said laptop. “This is a Russian disinformation operation. I’m very comfortable saying that,” Bertrand quoted former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Biden adviser Michael Carpenter.
At the time, Carpenter also ran the Penn Biden Center — the same place a cache of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president and senator were discovered in a closet.
Politico also quoted Bates, whose signature block would later appear on Blinken’s email to Morell. Bates spun the scandal as one about Rudy Giuliani, who had provided a copy of the hard drive to the Post, and Giuliani’s supposed connection “to Russian intelligence.”
Intel Community Helped Peddle Russia Hoax 2.0
As was the case with the Russia-collusion hoax, the Biden campaign received an assist from the intelligence community. On Oct. 14, 2020, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence analysts “had picked up Russian chatter that stolen Burisma emails” would be released as an “October surprise.”
Burisma, of course, was the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter Biden nearly $1 million to sit on its board during his father’s final year as vice president.
The chief concern of the intelligence analysts, the Times reported, “was that the Burisma material would be leaked alongside forged materials in an attempt to hurt Mr. Biden’s candidacy.”
Lying Leakers Advance the Narrative
The next day, another foundational Russia-collusion hoaxer, Ken Dilanian, published an “exclusive” at NBC. Citing “two people familiar with the matter,” Dilanian claimed that “federal investigators are examining whether emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation.” Dilanian also quoted Bates, who again focused on Giuliani and his alleged connection to Russia.
The Washington Post also embraced the narrative on Oct. 15, reporting, “U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence.” Based on “four former officials,” The Washington Post reported that Giuliani had interacted with people tied to Russian intel.
More Lies Leaked to USA Today
This brings us to USA Today’s Oct. 16, 2020, article, “FBI Probing Whether Emails in New York Post Story About Hunter Biden Are Tied to Russian Disinformation.”
“Federal authorities are investigating whether a Russian influence operation was behind the disclosure of emails purporting to document the Ukrainian and Chinese business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden,” USA Today opened its article, citing “a person briefed on the matter” and immediately bringing up Giuliani.
According to USA Today, that person “confirmed the FBI’s involvement but did not elaborate on the scope of the bureau’s review.”
The next day, Oct. 17, USA Today followed up with the article, “A Tabloid Got a Trove of Data on Hunter Biden from Rudy Giuliani. Now, the FBI is Probing a Possible Disinformation Campaign.”
It began by saying the New York Post portrayed the laptop contents as a “smoking gun.” “Enter the FBI,” USA Today interjected, reporting that “federal authorities” are investigating whether the laptop is “disinformation pushed by Russia” and claiming there are many questions about the laptop data’s authenticity.
“Experts say the story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign,” it continued, using language strikingly similar to what the former intel officials would use days later.
Blinken Uses Reporting to Prod Morell
It is unclear which of the two USA Today pieces Blinken forwarded to Morell because both articles included the FBI investigation claims. It seems likely, however, that Blinken sent Morrel the second article because USA Today’s Oct. 17 coverage included a quote from supposed “experts” who said the New York Post “story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign.”
That language tracked near-perfectly the wording used by the 51 former intelligence officials in their infamous Oct. 19 statement, which claimed the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
That’s Not All
Morell’s contact with Blinken reportedly went beyond the phone call and email. According to CNN, following his conversation with Blinken, “Morell had conversations with other former intelligence community officials, which is what led to the letter,” and then Morell “circled back to the Biden campaign to let them know that the letter efforts were underway.”
In testimony to House oversight investigators, Morell told how Biden’s campaign helped strategize releasing the statement, according to a letter Reps. Jim Jordan and Michael Turner sent to Blinken last week. Specifically, “Morell testified that he sent an email telling Nick Shapiro, former Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Director of the CIA John Brennan, that the Biden campaign wanted the statement to go to a particular reporter at the Washington Post first and that he should send the statement to the campaign when he sent the letter to the reporter.” Shapiro was another signatory of the statement.
Politico, however, eventually first broke the story and published the statement, under the headline “Hunter Biden Story is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say.”
Mission Accomplished
In his testimony to House investigators, Morell “explained that one of his two goals in releasing the statement was to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election,” Jordan and Turner wrote. In fact, according to attorney Mark Zaid, who represents several of the signatories, “when the draft [statement] was sent out to people to sign, the cover email made clear that it was an effort to help the Biden campaign.”
Both parts of the ploy worked. When the final presidential debate arrived on Oct. 22, 2020, and then-President Trump confronted Biden with the details revealed in Hunter’s “laptop from hell,” Biden responded by telling the American public:
There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. They have said that this has all the … five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend, Rudy Giuliani.
Biden Campaign Thanks Morell for the Assist
Morell testified that after the debate he received a call from Jeremy Bash, who was one of the 51 signatories of the statement. Bash asked Morell if he had a minute to talk to Steve Ricchetti, head of the Biden campaign. Bash testified that he said “yes,” Bash got Ricchetti on the line, and the Biden campaign representative thanked Morell “for putting the statement out.”
More Than Dirty Politics
Morell’s testimony revealed Blinken and the Biden campaign’s role in prompting the bunk statement from the former intel officials. But the contemporaneous media reporting exposes a larger scandal: Representatives of our government helped promote that narrative by falsely telling media outlets the FBI was investigating whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a Russian-disinformation campaign.
The FBI’s role in assisting the Biden campaign’s plot transforms this case from one about dirty politics to a scandal involving government interference in the 2020 election. Accordingly, the House oversight committees need to determine which members of the FBI or intelligence agencies were responsible for the false media leak and whether anyone working on behalf of the Biden campaign collaborated with those government actors.
The committees thus need to gather evidence and question not merely Blinken, but every signatory of the statement, especially Bash; members of the Biden campaign, such as Bates and Ricchetti; and Biden advisers, including Carpenter.
While Blinken provides an entry point to unraveling the Russian-disinformation hoax, there is much more to learn.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
To support their left-wing agenda, corporate media occasionally allow members of the conservative movement or Republican Party to appear for a few moments on camera to give an illusion of balance. These select few are always significantly outnumbered by the legion of left-wing activists who dominate these programs and have to really use their time smartly and effectively to fight the propaganda and agenda-pushing that dominate our press.
In the case of Brendan Buck, the corporate media are engaged in a deliberate disinformation operation against the public. They have mislabeled him as someone representative of Republican voters when, in fact, he parrots some of the most preposterous Democrat talking points and ignores obvious facts to push back against those talking points.
Buck trades on the fact that he was a longtime top aide to former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Like many of the old-guard GOP establishment operatives, he has had to deal with the widespread voter rejection of the Romney-Ryan era he helped craft. For him, this has included joining with left-wing critiques of those who supplanted the former GOP leaders. It is not surprising, therefore, that Democrat activist Chuck Todd frequently uses Buck on his Sunday morning news panel for NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The panel this past week also included Democrat activist and NBC host Symone Sanders-Townsend; Valerie Jarrett’s daughter Laura, who is a legal analyst at NBC; and an anchor from the left-wing PBS “NewsHour.” Buck was ostensibly supposed to balance out those three and the hard-core partisan Todd.
Instead, he allowed every single left-wing talking point to pass by without even a slight reproach. In some cases, he joined in enthusiastically.
For example, Todd led a subliterate discussion about Tennessee on Sunday. In the real world, the situation was that a trans-identified shooter in Nashville murdered three Christian children and three of their caregivers. Left-wing activists, including three elected Democrats, responded by orchestrating a takeover of the legislature in an attempt to restrict self-defense rights. The manner in which they led this takeover of the legislative assembly included violations of rules for which they were removed from committees and, in two cases, the legislative body. Many in the propaganda press have willfully lied about these facts to push a left-wing narrative.
So, in Chuck Todd’s world, this story meant there were “loud echoes from our recent past in the south and in the ’60s,” and it “felt like a whole bunch of people who just don’t deal with dissent.” He allowed Sanders-Townsend to falsely claim, “What is happening in Tennessee, and frankly across the South, is in fact Jim Crow.” She even said the potential pardon of a man convicted in a self-defense shooting of a Black Lives Matter demonstrator “is an assault.”
Now, I’m no fancy-pants Republican media strategist, like Buck’s bio claims he is. I don’t have a single day, much less decades, of experience in Republican messaging, as Buck has. And I certainly don’t get paid the big bucks to fight four left-wing activists on NBC while posing publicly as the representative of the majority of the country that is not represented by those activists. But I know literally any Republican on Earth could have done a better job than Brendan Buck did in this circumstance.
He said, and I quote, “Yeah. Well, this is again a situation where there’s no infrastructure. There’s nobody calling the shots. We are being defined as extreme, and it’s why Republicans are on the run in just about everywhere across the country.”
By the way, he said “again,” because earlier in the program he had joined with his left-wing buddies as they spouted falsehoods about which party’s abortion views are, in fact, extreme.
Are you kidding me? Now, do I expect Todd or Sanders-Townsend or any other Democrat activist to push a narrative of Republicans being extreme and on the run? Of course, I do. But why is Brendan Buck, Paul Ryan’s longtime aide, pushing this falsehood?
Just a cursory review of the most recent news shows this is simply not true. The Associated Press wrote just last week in an article headlined “North Carolina state lawmaker switches parties, gives GOP supermajority,” that, “A Democrat in the North Carolina state House switched to the Republican Party on Wednesday, giving the GOP veto-proof control in both chambers of the legislature and handing Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper a setback in trying to block hardline conservative policies in his final two years in office.”
Buck may agree with his super-duper best friend Todd that Republicans are just so extreme for supporting safe streets, biological reality, protection of children, sane foreign policy, constitutional order, and the like, but outside the confines of that NBC studio, there’s a very different world he should probably think about visiting. A world with Republicans, for one thing, but also a world where Democrats are forced to flee the party that Buck thinks everyone is running to:
Cotham, a former teacher and assistant principal who had served in the House for nearly 10 years through 2016 before returning in January, announced her decision at a news conference at North Carolina Republican Party headquarters. ‘I will not be controlled by anyone,’ Cotham said as she announced she would switch her party registration to the GOP. She said the Democratic Party is no longer a big tent party and tries to bully its members. She said that she was considered a ‘spy’ and a ‘traitor’ and that the turning point was when she was criticized for using the American flag and praying-hands emoji on social media and on her vehicles.
The range of topics corporate media are eagerly dishonest about is reaching a level that is a serious threat to the republic. In service of a Democrat agenda, they lie with alarming frequency about nearly everything — including crime, abortion, radical gender ideology, racism, taxes, foreign policy, gun rights, civil liberties, free speech issues, freedom of religion, the right to protest, due process, dueling standards of justice, and other important issues.
Those lies affect political and policy outcomes with devastating effects on the American people.
The GOP establishment from the past may be having a temper tantrum about how unpopular the views of the Romney-Ryan era are, but they need to have that tantrum on their own time, not during these limited opportunities to push back against the vile lies of the corporate media.
Democrats and their media organs have enough tools for disinformation. There is no need for Brendan Buck to be one of them.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and Presiden
A Manhattan grand jury has indicted former President Donald Trump, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office confirmed following late-Thursday media leaks. While the indictment remains under seal, one thing seems certain: America has now entered the era of “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” politics.
The Democrat district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, breathed new life into the infamous boast of Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, when the Manhattan prosecutor targeted the former president in connection to a 2016 payment made to Stormy Daniels. Bragg’s decision to push for an indictment against Trump, presumably for falsifying business records, promises to herald in a new political age — one in which local prosecutors will target partisan enemies, big and small, making a mockery of the criminal justice system in the process.
The fact that news of the charges leaked to the left’s favorite scribes at The New York Times, while the indictment remained still under seal, punctuates perfectly the Sovietesque times in which we live: The legacy media may not be state-run, but they peddle propaganda, nonetheless.
Guesswork
Until the indictment is unsealed, any discussion of the charges requires some guesswork, and with sources late Thursday reportedly telling CNN the grand jury charged Trump with more than 30 counts, the prognostication is much more difficult. But from earlier reports, it appears the D.A.’s criminal case against Trump revolves around Sections 175.05 and 175.10 of the New York penal code.
Both sections define the state crime of “falsifying business records,” with Section 175.05 providing “a person is guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree when, with the intent to defraud, he makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.” Section 175.10 converts the “second degree” misdemeanor to a felony if the person falsified business records with the “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission” of another crime.
The factual theory for charging the former president with falsifying business records seems to rest on “Trump allegedly causing the Trump Organization to falsely report payments made to Michael Cohen in 2017 as ‘legal expenses,’ when the money instead reimbursed (and then some) Cohen for the $130,000 payment he made to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to keep the porn star from publicly claiming she had sex a decade earlier.” The Trump Organization then reportedly paid Cohen $35,000 a month for “legal services” in 2017, while Cohen never provided any legal work for the business.
Legal pundits believe the indictment will ratchet up the alleged falsifying of “legal expenses” offense to a felony by charging Trump with lying about the payments to Cohen to conceal a violation of federal election law. Cohen has already admitted to paying off Daniels to advance Trump’s electoral chances, and he appears poised to be a star witness against Trump. Another possibility, however, is that the Manhattan D.A.’s indictment accuses Trump of falsifying the organization’s “legal expenses” to aid in tax fraud.
The U.S. attorney has already declined to charge Trump with federal election law violations, making any attempt by Bragg to tie the federal offense to the state charge of falsifying business records reek of political payback.
Bragg’s expected use of Trump’s physical absence from New York — ironically because he was serving as commander-in-chief in D.C. — to sidestep the five-year statute of limitations that applies to a felony of falsifying business records, will also add to the stench of the case. And a public that watched Trump hounded since he first announced his candidacy for president isn’t likely to focus on the legal technicalities of the statute of limitations. Rather, the average American will consider the delayed charging of Trump to be a desperate ploy to concoct a crime.
Trump himself was quick to advance this theory, opening his press release by calling the indictment “political persecution and election interference at the highest level in history.” “From the time I came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower,” the former president continued, the “Radical Left Democrats … have been engaged in a Witch-Hunt to destroy the Make America Great Again movement.”
“You remember it just like I do,” Trump stressed, ticking off the attacks: “Russia, Russia, Russia; the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine; Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2; the illegal and unconstitutional Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.”
30-Count Craziness
Trump will reportedly appear in a Manhattan court on Tuesday for his arraignment. Whether the indictment is unsealed before then is unknown. But the leaks continue, including, as noted above, news that the grand jury reportedly charged Trump with more than 30 criminal counts.
Unless Bragg has uncovered something much beyond the details already reported about the Daniels payment, the Manhattan prosecutor will have only made matters worse by pushing for an indictment of the former president on more than 30 criminal counts. Given the lack of leaks about anything new, the most likely scenario is that the grand jury got to 30-plus counts by charging Trump with separate counts for each of the monthly payments made to Cohen in 2017. Then, the grand jury could add additional counts for each month Trump allegedly made the payment to “aid or conceal the commission” of another crime.
With this approach, it isn’t hard to see how easily the grand jury could convert one hush-money payment into some 30 crimes. And while the left and the Never Trump right might see a lengthy indictment as further proof of Trump’s malfeasance, if the indictment contains no new details, the piling on to reach the reported 33 counts against the former president doesn’t make Trump look more guilty — it makes Bragg look more like Beria.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The Censorship Complex — whereby Big Tech censorship is induced by the government, media, and media-rating businesses — threatens the future of free speech in this country. To understand how and why, Americans need to talk about speech — and the government’s motive to deceive the public.
To frame this discussion, consider these hypotheticals:
Two American soldiers training Ukraine soldiers in Poland cross into the war zone, ambushing and killing five Russian soldiers. Unbeknownst to the American soldiers, a Ukrainian soldier filmed the incident and provides the footage to an independent journalist who authors an article on Substack, providing a link to the video.
Russia uses its intelligence service and “bots” to flood social media with claims that the Ukrainians are misusing 90 percent of American tax dollars. In truth, “only” 40 percent of American tax dollars are being wasted or corruptly usurped — a fact that an independent journalist learns when a government source leaks a Department of Defense report detailing the misappropriation of the funds sent to Ukraine.
A third of Americans disagree with the continued funding of the war in Ukraine and organically prompt #NoMoreMoola to trend. After this organic hashtag trend begins, Russian operatives amplify the hashtag while the Russian-run state media outlet, Russia Today, reports on the hashtag trend.
Following the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank, the communist Chinese government uses social media to create the false narrative that 10 specifically named financial institutions are bordering on collapsing. In reality, only Bank A1 is financially troubled, but a bank run on any of the 10 banks would cause those banks to collapse too.
In each of these scenarios — and countless others — the government has an incentive to deceive the country. Americans need to recognize this reality to understand the danger posed by the voluntary censorship of speech.
Our government will always seek to quash certain true stories and seed certain false stories: sometimes to protect human life, sometimes to protect our national defense or the economy or public health, sometimes to obtain the upper hand against a foreign adversary, and sometimes to protect the self-interests of its leaders, preferred policy perspectives, and political and personal friends.
Since the founding, America’s free press provided a check on a government seeking to bury the truth, peddle a lie, or promote its leaders’ self-interest. At times, the legacy press may have buried a story or delayed its reporting to protect national security interests, but historically those examples were few and far between.
Even after the left-leaning slant of legacy media outlets took hold and “journalists” became more open to burying (or spinning) stories to protect their favored politicians or policies, new media provided a stronger check and a way for Americans to learn the truth. The rise of social media, citizen journalists, Substack, and blogs added further roadblocks to both government abuse and biased and false reporting.
Donald Trump’s rise, his successful use of social media, and new media’s refusal to join the crusade against Trump caused a fatal case of Stockholm Syndrome, with Big Tech and legacy media outlets welcoming government requests for censorship. With support from both for-profit and nonprofit organizations and academic institutions, a Censorship Complex emerged, embracing the government’s definition of “truth” and seeking to silence any who challenged it, whether it be new media or individual Americans — even experts.
The search for truth suffered as a result, and Americans were deprived of valuable information necessary for self-governance.
We know this because notwithstanding the massive efforts to silence speech, a ragtag group of muckrakers persisted and exposed several official dictates as lies: The Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation, Covid very well may have escaped from a Wuhan lab, and Trump did not collude with Putin.
But if the Censorship Complex succeeds and silences the few journalists and outlets still willing to challenge the government, Americans will no longer have the means to learn the truth.
Consider again the above hypotheticals. In each of those scenarios, the government — or at least some in the government — has an incentive to bury the truth. In each, it could frame the truth as a foreign disinformation campaign and offer Americans a countervailing lie as the truth.
A populace voluntarily acquiescing in the censorship of speech because it is purportedly foreign misinformation or disinformation will soon face a government that lies, protected by complicit media outlets that repeat those lies as truth, social media websites that ban or censor reporting that challenges the official government narrative, hosting services that deplatform dissenting media outlets, advertisers that starve journalists of compensation, and search engines that hide the results of disfavored viewpoints.
The window is quickly closing on free speech in America, so before it is locked and the curtain thrown shut, we must talk about speech. We need to discuss the circumstances, if any, in which the government should alert reporters and media outlets to supposed foreign disinformation and how. We need to discuss the circumstances, if any, under which Big Tech should censor speech.
Americans need to have this discussion now — before the Censorship Complex makes it impossible to do so.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Any candidate who is playing footsie with the propaganda press, in an incomprehensible ploy to curry favor with them, disqualifies himself from contention.
On Saturday night, former Vice President Mike Pence addressed the annual Gridiron Club dinner, a white-tie gathering of Beltway media and political insiders. He took the opportunity to praise the D.C. media, attack Tucker Carlson, and condemn Donald Trump.
“History will hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6,” Pence said. “Make no mistake about it: What happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way,” Pence said of Tucker Carlson’s journalism, which is at odds with the official narrative.
Pence praised the corporate media as well, saying, “We were able to stay at our post in part because you stayed at your post. The American people know what happened that day because you never stopped reporting.”
As if Pence’s views on the virtues of the propaganda press weren’t disappointing enough, his handlers bragged to the same media that he had lavished them with praise and attacked Trump and Carlson as part of his long-shot campaign to win the Republican nomination for president.
Really. According to a new Politico article, the Pence team intentionally crafted their remarks because they “believed it would help Pence win over his most skeptical audience these days: Washington insiders and journalists.”
No offense, but how are these people political professionals? How many decades of political history have taught everyone with a pulse that Republican pandering to the media is a fool’s errand? In what world does this strategy make sense?
The strategy has never worked and will never work.
Consider the media’s most beloved Republican presidential contender, 2008 nominee Sen. John McCain. The Arizona senator was treated so well by the media for his self-styled “straight-talk” and attacks on fellow Republicans that he used to refer to them jokingly as his “base.” It’s true that their support of him did help him obtain the nomination. But the moment he posed even a tiny threat to Sen. Barack Obama, the true object of their devotion and affection, they turned on him in a heartbeat. He might as well have been Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, or Mitt Romney.
Nothing about Pence suggests he would receive even a short honeymoon of the type McCain benefited from. He should have learned this lesson when, as governor of Indiana, he caved to media demands that he decrease religious freedom in his state. His cowardice did not result in favorable media coverage then or while he was vice president. They loathe every single thing about him. They even mock him for how he and his wife protect their marriage!
It’s true that attacking fellow conservatives or Republicans will always generate some favorable media coverage. It’s the only way a non-leftist can be published in The New York Times, for instance. It’s the primary way to get airtime on NBC or CNN. It’s self-abasing and a dereliction of duty to your voters, but, hey, a fleeting moment of non-hostility from the corporate press is worth it, right?
Contrast Pence’s effort with how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis handles corporate media. He treats them as if he understands they are Republicans’ most steadfast political opponents. In press conferences, he points out the flaws in their assumptions and lies in their questions. He does not give them breaking news in the futile hope that they will be nicer to him later. He treats non-leftist press the same as or better than he treats the corrupt propaganda press. His communications team publicly posts the ridiculous questions they’re asked, and how they answer those questions. He refuses to treat requests as legitimate if they come from media who have lied about him.
The only thing worse than a Republican who impotently complains about “media bias” instead of understanding that the country is in the midst of an all-out information war is a Republican who actually praises the press for its war on Republican voters.
Substantively Wrong
The other main problem with Pence’s pandering to the corporate press is that it was substantively in error. It rewrites his own history in the chaos and drama of the 2020 election. Here is Mike Pence in December of 2020, for example:
And as our election contest continues, I’ll make you a promise: We are going to keep fighting until every legal vote is counted. We are going to keep fighting until every illegal vote is thrown out! We are going to win Georgia, we are going to save America, and we will never stop fighting to Make America Great Again!
And here is Mike Pence on Jan. 4, 2021, just two days prior to the big rally and subsequent riot at the Capitol:
I share the concerns of millions of Americans about voting irregularities. I promise you, come this Wednesday, we’ll have our day in Congress. We’ll hear the objections, we’ll hear the evidence!
Moments before that “day in Congress” began, Pence issued his letter to Congress saying he believed his role that day would be only ceremonial. However justified, it was something of a shock to the voters who had supported him and the president in their battle over election irregularities. If he wants to blame third parties for riling up the masses, he may want to consider his own role.
Pence is also wrong to attack Carlson for showing video footage of the riot at odds with the official narrative put forth by Nancy Pelosi and her cronies in the press. Tucker’s footage did not deny the violence that Pelosi and her fellow Democrats showed day after day for years for partisan gain. But it did show that Jacob Chansley was given something of a tour of the Capitol that day and was not viewed as violent by any of the many police officers he encountered. It showed that mysterious witness Ray Epps gave testimony about his whereabouts that contrasted with video evidence. And it showed that the Jan. 6 Committee’s show-trial had lied by omission when it falsely conveyed Sen. Josh Hawley’s behavior as the riot unfolded.
Calling these journalistic revelations a “disgrace” to reporters who lack Carlson’s independence and courage is shameful and reprehensible.
Finally, Pence was wrong to effusively praise the corporate press for its behavior in the aftermath of Jan. 6. The media never “reported” or covered the event or its circumstances so much as it exploited them for political purposes. The very same media that excused and vociferously defended the violent and deadly Black Lives Matter riots that besieged the White House, a federal courthouse, and police precincts, turned on a dime to treat the Jan. 6 riot as a literal insurrection, an absolutely absurd claim. The same media that reacted with abject horror and hysteria to the suggestion that order should be restored in cities across America as violent rioters terrified the citizens suddenly decided in the case of Trump supporters that First Amendment protections of speech, press, and assembly were negotiable, constitutional rights to a defense were unimportant, and certain citizens didn’t deserve speedy trials or due process.
No American should praise such behavior from the propaganda press. And no man seeking the votes of Republicans should pander to the propaganda press for political reasons, even if it weren’t delusional to think it would work.
The country is in the midst of an information war. The corporate media are a more formidable political opponent of Republicans than any Democrat running for office. Any candidate for the Republican nomination had better have a plan to protect and defend Republican voters and their goals. And any candidate who is playing footsie with these political opponents, in an incomprehensible ploy to curry favor with them, disqualifies himself from contention.
While federal funding is not solely responsible for the rapid expansion of the Censorship Complex, it is the most troubling because our government is using our money to censor our speech.
While the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s coverage of the Global Disinformation Index have revealed an expansive Censorship Complex that seeks to silence Americans for money, politics, ideology, and power, much still needs to be unraveled.
A search of government contracts and grants for the eight fiscal years from 2016 through today for the keywords “misinformation” or “disinformation” reveals 538 federal government grants and 36 contracts were awarded to a wide range of academic institutions and non-governmental organizations.
Mapping out the connections among the various award recipients, the government, and the pro-censorship left will require more work. But this simple snapshot confirms taxpayers’ money is funding the expansion of the Censorship Complex, as the prior eight fiscal years, from 2008 to 2015, reveal the federal government awarded only two federal contracts and seven federal grants for “disinformation” or “misinformation” research.
Likewise, an initial investigation into the nonprofits and academic institutions mentioned in the “Twitter Files” reveals government grants, donations from other liberal nonprofits, and money from leftist billionaires funded the expansion of the Censorship Complex. Research also shows the non-governmental organizations pushing the disinformation narrative are uniformly directed and run by former government employees, left-wing media types, and left-leaning or anti-Trump individuals.
Alliance Securing Democracy
Of the think tanks identified in Twitter communications, Alliance Securing Democracy (ASD) might be the most notorious thanks to Matt Taibbi’s exposé on ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard.
Devised by former FBI agent Clint Watts and launched in August of 2017, Hamilton 68 proclaimed its digital dashboard an aid to “help ordinary people, journalists, and other analysts identify Russian messaging themes and detect active disinformation or attack campaigns as soon as they begin.” Based on some 644 accounts that Hamilton 68 claimed it had “selected for their relationship to Russian-sponsored influence and disinformation campaigns,” ASD maintained its dashboard allowed users to track online Russian influence.
The problem is, as Taibbi wrote: “The Twitter Files expose Hamilton 68 as a sham.”
Apparently unbeknownst to ASD, Twitter had reverse-engineered how Hamilton 68 supposedly tracked online Russian influence and found “No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops.” The entire methodology was flawed.
Yet ASD played a key role in the push to censor speech as supposed “disinformation,” with the dashboard serving as “the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years” by “virtually every major news organization.” In addition to the media spreading disinformation about disinformation, Watts testified before Congress, telling senators that the Hamilton 68 dashboard provided the means for the U.S. government “to have an understanding of what Russia is doing in social media.”
Watts further revealed in his testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, that he “tried to provide to the U.S. government directly through multiple agencies” the Hamilton 68 information, telling the lawmakers they should “want to equip our intelligence agencies, our law enforcement agencies, and the Department of Defense with just an understanding … of what Russian active measures are doing around the world.”
Whether any of those “multiple agencies” relied on the inaccurate information included on the Hamilton 68 dashboard is unclear.
Members of the House and Senate did rely on Hamilton 68, however. As I reported earlier this month: “Rep. Adam Schiff and Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal, and Sheldon Whitehouse, among others, not only pushed the unfounded claims that Russian bots were behind the trending hashtags, but they also demanded that Twitter and other tech companies investigate and stop such supposed interference.” Democrats pushed this false narrative even when Twitter executives warned staffers that the Russian-interference story didn’t stand.
In addition to Watts, the ASD advisory council includes a cornucopia of former government bigwigs from Democrat administrations: Michael McFaul, a former ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration; Michael Morell, former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama; John Podesta, former chair of Hillary for America and an official in the Clinton and Obama White Houses; and Jake Sullivan, former deputy chief of staff to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key adviser for both Clinton and Obama during their general elections.
Laura Thornton, who previously worked at the National Democratic Institute, a nonprofit loosely affiliated with the Democrat Party, currently oversees ASD. And Rachael Dean Wilson serves as the managing director for ASD. Wilson previously worked for the late Sen. John McCain for six years, serving as his communications director and adviser to his 2016 re-election campaign.
German Marshall Fund
According to its website, ASD is a project of the German Marshall Fund, which “is heavily funded by the American, German, and Swedish governments.” The fund has also received grants from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. The ASD likewise receives financing from left-leaning foundations, such as the Craigslist founder’s Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
The Election Integrity Partnership
Another prominent organization the “Twitter Files” revealed as pushing for censorship — including multiple censorship requests flowing through that group to the tech giant — is the Election Integrity Partnership, which is run out of Stanford’s Internet Observatory.
Stanford’s Internet Observatory launched on June 6, 2019, to “focus on the misuse of social media,” and within two years, the project grew from an initial team of three to a full-time team of 10 assisted by some 76 student research assistants. In 2020, Stanford announced the creation of the Election Integrity Partnership, which “brought together misinformation researchers” from across four organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
As a private institution, Stanford University is not funded directly with tax dollars, but it receives millions in government grants. Private grants also flow into the California university and directly fund the Election Integrity Partnership, including money from the same foundations that funded the nonprofit behind Hamilton 68, such as money from the Craigslist and eBay founders.
Atlantic Council Project
Further research on the other members of the Election Integrity Partnership reveals the Atlantic Council receives donations and federal grants, including from Facebook, Google, and the U.S. Department of State. And as will be shown shortly, the Atlantic Council is also connected to the Global Disinformation Index.
Graphika
Another member of the Election Integrity Partnership, Graphika, describes itself as a “network analysis company that examines how ideas and influence spread online.” Graphika’s chief innovation officer, Camille Francois “leads the company’s work to detect and mitigate disinformation, media manipulation and harassment.” Francois was previously the principal researcher at Google’s Jigsaw unit.
According to CNBC, one of Francois’ first projects at Graphika was a “secretive” assignment for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Working with a team of researchers from Oxford University, Graphika analyzed data provided by social media firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee to assess Russia’s exploitation of “the tools and platform of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to impact U.S. users” and influence elections.
As a private organization, Graphika’s funding details remain obscure, but in congressional testimony, Dr. Vlad Barash he “oversee[s] our work with DARPA and with our colleagues from leading academic institutions on developing and applying cutting edge methods and algorithms for detecting the manipulation of 21st Century networked communications.”
According to government data, Graphika — also known as Octant Data, LLC and Morningside Analytics — received numerous Department of Defense contracts. Additionally, Graphika received a $3 million grant from the DOD for a 2021-2022 research project related to “Research on Cross-Platform Detection to Counter Malign Influence.”
Graphika received a second nearly $2 million grant from the DOD for “research on Co-Citation Network Mapping.” The organization had previously researched “network mapping,” or the tracking of how Covid “disinformation” spreads through social media.
The Center for Internet Security
The “Twitter Files” also made mention of the Center for Internet Security. In 2018, that nonprofit launched the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), which “it claims supports the cybersecurity needs of election offices.” As part of those efforts, the Center for Internet Security crafted a one-page document for election officials, with directions for reporting misinformation or disinformation to the EI-ISAC. The federal U.S. Elections Commission would link to the CIS flyer on its government webpage.
The CIS flyer directed election workers to submit supposed “misinformation or disinformation” to the EI-ISAC, stating it would then “forward it to our partners at The Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).” CISA would then “submit it to the relevant social media platform(s) for review,” including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, TikTok, Nextdoor, and Snapchat.
CIS further said it would share reports of misinformation or disinformation with the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University. And from the “Twitter Files,” we see examples of the Election Integrity Partnership providing the Twitter team CIS’s reports of misinformation or disinformation, prompting the censorship of speech.
The Center for Internet Security is heavily funded by government grants. According to Influence Watch, the nonprofit “provides cyber-security consulting services to local, state, and federal governments,” and has been awarded $115 million in federal grants by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense since 2010. It has received $3.6 million in cybersecurity contracts from numerous federal agencies, according to its webpage, and a $290,000 grant from the eBay founder’s left-leaning Democracy Fund.
The president and CEO of the Center for Internet Security is another former high-level government adviser, John Gilligan. Gilligan “previously served in senior advisory positions in intelligence and security for the United States Airforce, Department of Energy, and White House Cyber Security Commission under the Obama administration.”
Clemson University
Other emails released as part of the “Twitter Files” reveal Clemson University’s role in the push for censorship at Twitter. And as was the case with Hamilton 68’s dashboard, Twitter’s team had concerns about Clemson’s disinformation research.
In one email, Twitter noted that Clemson’s center had asked the tech company to review its “findings regarding the latest list of accounts.” Internal communications show the Twitter team noting that while they saw “some inauthentic behaviors,” they “were unable to attribute the accounts to the IRA,” the Russian “troll” farm.
After noting that Twitter had already shared information with Clemson researchers, the tech giant’s head of safety, Yoel Roth, sent another email. “There is nothing new we’ll learn here, analytically,” Roth said. “We’re not going to attribute these accounts to Russia … absent some solid technical intel (which Clemson have not ever been able to provide).”
Defending Democracy Together
Clemson’s research was used by another group joining the “disinformation” trend, Defending Democracy Together (DDT). In 2018, DDT launched the RussiaTweets.com project to supposedly provide “the evidence of Russian interference in American politics.”
This evidence, according to DDT, came from a list of tweets “compiled and published by Professors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren,” which purportedly all came from the Russian troll factory, Internet Research Agency (IRA). Both Linvill and Warren hail from Clemson University, raising the question of whether it was the list they provided to Defending Democracy Together that Twitter executives “were unable to attribute” to the IRA.
Defending Democracy Together was founded in 2018, and its leadership consists of Never Trumpers, William “Bill” Kristol, Mona Charen, and Charlie Sykes, as well as DDT’s co-founder and director Sarah Longwell, who has promoted advertisements “to advocate against the policies of the Trump administration and to weaken public support for the Trump presidency.”
Funding for DDT, according to Influence Watch, includes money from left-wing mega-donor and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar through Democracy Fund Voice and from the Hopewell Fund, which is “part of a $600 million network of left-wing funding nonprofits managed by Arabella Advisors in Washington, D.C.” Additionally, OpenSecretsreported that DDT was “the biggest ‘dark money’ spender of 2020,” with DDT spending “$15.4 million in ‘dark money’ during the 2020 election cycle on supporting presidential candidate Joe Biden and opposing former President Donald Trump for reelection.”
The University of Buffalo, Lehigh University, and Northeastern University are likewise involved in the disinformation project, with a Clemson News release revealing that faculty at those universities, along with researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, launched a project titled “Disinformation Range to Improve User Awareness and Resilience to Online Disinformation.” The government, through a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, is supporting those efforts.
The Aspen Institute
The Aspen Institute is also entwined in the Censorship Complex, having hosted in the fall of 2020 “a series of off-the-record briefings to help prepare every major US newsroom and tech platform for potential hack-and-leak operations and a contested post-election environment.” One of the briefings involved a tabletop exercise facilitated by Aspen’s Garrett Graff that posed a hack-and-leak October surprise involving Hunter Biden.
Twitter’s Yoel Roth attended that event just two weeks before the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story. And soon after that story broke, Graff and his Aspen Institute colleague Vivian Schiller took to Twitter to frame the story as “crap” and “nonsense.” Schiller’s former jobs include CEO at NPR, head of news at Twitter, general manager at The New York Times, and chief digital officer at NBC News.
Soon after Graff and Schiller pushed the Hunter Biden story as misinformation, Twitter blocked the Post’s story and froze the conservative outlet’s account, even though internal communications revealed the Post had not violated Twitter’s terms of service. Despite its extensive coordination with the FBI to prepare to combat foreign election interference, Twitter didn’t ask the bureau if the scandal was Russian disinformation. Instead, Twitter representatives testified to Congress that the company “relied on the tweets of supposed experts, making the tech giant’s decision to censor the Post’s story even more outrageous.”
After the Post broke the Biden family pay-to-play scandal, several left-leaning “journalists” spent the day speaking of “misinformation,” while uniformly ignoring the substance of the story. One must wonder how many of those so-called journalists had attended Aspen’s training session.
Since then, Aspen has expanded its focus on disinformation and misinformation, launching a “Commission on Information Disorder” to develop what the institute calls “actionable public-private responses to the disinformation crisis.”
The Global Disinformation Index
Another nonprofit, the Global Disinformation Index, has already begun pushing an “actionable response to the disinformation crisis,” by pressuring advertisers to dump news outlets based on GDI’s view of their “disinformation risk.” However, as the Washington Examiner revealed in Gabe Kaminsky’s investigative series, the GDI’s December 2022 report, prepared in partnership with the University of Texas-Austin’s Global Disinformation Lab, brands only conservative outlets as the top “riskiest.” Conversely, the “least risky” outlets all lean left, other than The Wall Street Journal, and are also the same outlets that got the most significant news stories of the last decade wrong.
Like the “disinformation” nonprofits named in the “Twitter Files,” GDI has received federal grants and is connected to other left-leaning nonprofits and individuals seeking to censor speech. Its advisers likewise hew left, such as “journalist” Anne Applebaum, who said Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings were not interesting, and Finn Heinrich of the leftist George Soros’ Open Society group.
The composition of GDI’s “advisory panel” is also noteworthy because the same individuals guiding GDI’s mission to starve conservative sites of advertising dollars are connected to three of the organizations behind the Election Integrity Partnership’s push for censorship at Twitter. That fact would be difficult to discover today, though, as GDI scrubbed its “advisory panel” section of its homepage after the blacklist scandal broke.
According to the archived GDI homepage, advisory panel members include Ben Nimmo, the global lead at Meta; Franziska Roesner, a University of Washington professor; and Camille Francois of Niantic. Nimmo was a founding member of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) and a senior fellow for that lab. He was also “the first director of investigations at Graphika.” Francois also serves as the chair of Graphika’s advisory board and is identified on Graphika’s webpage as its chief innovation officer. Roesner is a faculty member at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
Together then, three of the four organizations that partnered with Stanford to run the Election Integrity Partnership, which pushed Twitter to censor speech in advance of the 2020 election, were also connected to the Global Disinformation Index.
Global Engagement Center
A strong connection also exists between GDI and the U.S. government through an arm of the State Department, the Global Engagement Center, which has also made several appearances in the “Twitter Files.”
The Global Engagement Center, which proclaims itself “a data-driven body leading U.S. interagency efforts in proactively addressing foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine U.S. interests using disinformation and propaganda,” awarded the Global Disinformation Index a $100,000 grant as part of the U.S-Paris Tech Challenge. The State Department sponsored that “Tech Challenge” in “collaboration” with, among others, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Park Advisors, and Disinfo Cloud. According to a State Department spokesman, the Global Engagement Center began funding Disinfo Cloud in 2018 and also awarded approximately $300,000 to Park Advisors to manage Disinfo Coud to fight “disinformation, terrorism, violent extremism, hate speech.”
The “Twitter Files” revealed that, in addition to funding private organizations pushing for censorship, the State Department’s Global Disinformation Center attempted to insert itself into Twitter’s review and censorship process. When those efforts failed, the Global Disinformation Center pressed its unsupported claims of disinformation to the media.
Additional research is needed to understand the full scope of the Global Engagement Center’s role in the Censorship Complex, but what little is known now suggests the State Department provides load-bearing support for the project. A recent report from the Foundation for Freedom Online also exposes the National Science Foundation as a key funder in “the science of censorship.”
While federal funding is not solely responsible for the rapid expansion of the Censorship Complex, it is the most troubling because our government is using our money to censor our speech.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Unlike the military-industrial complex, the Censorship Complex affects all aspects of governance, controlling the information available to you on every topic.
The Biden administration may have abandoned plans to create a “Disinformation Board,” but a more insidious “Censorship Complex” already exists and is growing at an alarming speed.
This Censorship Complex is bigger than banned Twitter accounts or Democrats’ propensity for groupthink. Its funding and collaboration implicate the government, academia, tech giants, nonprofits, politicians, social media, and the legacy press. Under the guise of combatting so-called misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, these groups seek to silence speech that threatens the far-left’s ability to control the conversation — and thus the country and the world.
Americans grasped a thread of this reality with the release of the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s reporting on the Global Disinformation Index, which revealed the coordinated censorship of speech by government officials, nonprofits, and the media. Yet Americans have no idea of the breadth and depth of the “Censorship Complex” — and how much it threatens the fabric of this country.
In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned against the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” via the new sweeping military-industrial complex. Its “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — [was] felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.” Replace “military-industrial” with “censorship,” and you arrive at the reality Americans face today.
Origins of the Censorship Complex
Even with the rise of independent news outlets, until about 2016 the left-leaning corporate media controlled the flow of information. Then Donald Trump entered the political arena and used social media to speak directly to Americans. Despite the Russia hoax and the media’s all-out assault, Trump won, proving the strategic use of social media could prevail against a unified corporate press. The left was terrified.
Of course, Democrats and the media couldn’t admit their previous control over information converted to electoral victories and that for their own self-preservation, they needed to suppress other voices. So instead, the left began pushing the narrative that “disinformation” — including Russian disinformation — from alternative news outlets and social media companies handed Trump the election.
The New York Times first pushed the “disinformation” narrative using the “fake news” moniker after the 2016 election. “The proliferation of fake and hyperpartisan news that has flooded into Americans’ laptops and living rooms has prompted a national soul-searching, with liberals across the country asking how a nation of millions could be marching to such a suspect drumbeat. Fake news, and the proliferation of raw opinion that passes for news, is creating confusion,” the Times wrote, bemoaning the public’s reliance on Facebook.
“Narrowly defined, ‘fake news’ means a made-up story with an intention to deceive, often geared toward getting clicks. But the issue has become a political battering ram, with the left accusing the right of trafficking in disinformation, and the right accusing the left of tarring conservatives as a way to try to censor websites,” the Times wrote, feigning objectivity. But its conclusion? “Fake and hyperpartisan news from the right has been more conspicuous than from the left.”
Two days later, Hillary Clinton repeated the narrative-building phrase, condemning what she called “the epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year.” But then, as if to remind Democrats and the legacy press that he had wrestled control of the narrative from them, Trump branded left-wing outlets “fake news” — and just like that, the catchphrase belonged to him.
Disinformation Is Scarier if It’s Russian
That didn’t deter the left in its mission to destroy alternative channels of communication, however. The media abandoned its “fake news” framing for the “disinformation” buzzword. “Misinformation” and “mal-information” were soon added to the vernacular, with the Department of Homeland Security even defining the terms.
But silencing conservatives would require more than merely labeling their speech as disinformation, so the various elements of the Censorship Complex deployed what they called “the added element of Russian meddling” in the 2016 election, with Clinton amplifying this message and blaming the spread of social media misinformation for her loss.
Priming the public to connect “disinformation” with Russia’s supposed interference in the 2016 election allowed the Censorship Complex to frame demands for censorship as patriotic: a fight against foreign influence to save democracy!
The Censorship Complex Expands
The Censorship Complex’s push to silence speech under the guise of preventing disinformation and election interference hit its stride in 2017, when FBI Director Christopher Wray launched the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) purportedly “to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States.”
The “most widely reported” foreign influence operations these days, Wray said, “are attempts by adversaries — hoping to reach a wide swath of Americans covertly from outside the United States — to use false personas and fabricated stories on social media platforms to discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.” Wray’s statement perfectly echoed the claims Clinton and Democrats had peddled ad nauseam in the press, and it foreshadowed how the Censorship Complex would soon mature.
The launch of the FITF in 2017 brought together numerous representatives from the deep state. The FBI’s Counterintelligence, Cyber, Criminal, and Counterterrorism Divisions worked closely with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, and other intelligence agencies, as well as “state and local enforcement partners and election officials.”
Significantly, the FITF viewed “strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies, including threat indicator sharing,” as crucial to combatting foreign disinformation. That perspective led to the FBI’s hand-in-glove relationship with Twitter, which included monthly and then weekly meetings with the tech giant, some of which CIA representatives attended. This symbiotic relationship also led to the censorship of important — and true — political speech, such as the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop, which exposed the Biden family’s pay-to-play scandal right before a critical presidential election.
State Department Renovates Its Wing
In 2011, by executive order, the Department of State established the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications to support government agencies’ communications “targeted against violent extremism and terrorist organizations.” While renamed the Global Engagement Center in 2016, the center’s counterterrorism mission remained largely unchanged. But then at the end of that year, Congress expanded the Global Engagement Center’s authority, directing it “to address other foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation activities.” And with language straight out of the Russia hoax playbook, the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 further refined the Global Engagement Center’s mission:
The purpose of the Center shall be to direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and foreign non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States and United States allies and partner nations.
Together, the State Department and the many intelligence agencies behind the FITF worked not just with Twitter but with the array of tech giants, such as Google and Facebook, pushing for censorship of supposed mis-, dis-, and mal-information. But the deep state was not alone. The “disinformation” contagion also reached the Hill, nonprofits, think tanks, and academic institutions with both politics and a desire to suckle at the federal teat driving a frenzied expansion of the project. Together these groups pushed for even more silencing of their opponents, and the Censorship Complex boomed.
The danger Eisenhower warned the country of in 1961 is mild in comparison to the threat of the Censorship Complex. Unlike the military-industrial complex that reached only one function of the federal government, the Censorship Complex affects all aspects of governance, controlling the information available to you and your fellow Americans on every topic.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
When the New York Post dropped its bombshell reporting on documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in October of 2020, Twitter did not reach out to the FBI to ask whether the reporting was Russian disinformation — despite extensive coordination with the FBI to prepare to combat foreign election interference. Instead, according to testimony at Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing, Twitter relied on the tweets of supposed experts, making the tech giant’s decision to censor the Post’s story even more outrageous.
The House Oversight Committee, now in the hands of Republicans, questioned four former Twitter executives on their decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., pushed Twitter’s former global head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to explain the timing of Twitter’s decision to censor the New York Post story.
Biggs noted that in an 8:51 a.m. email on Oct. 14, 2020, Roth had taken the position that the laptop “isn’t clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy.” But then, by 10:12, Roth emailed his colleagues with Twitter’s decision to censor the story, stating that “the key factor informing our approach is consensus from experts monitoring election security and disinformation that this looks a lot like a hack-and-leak operation.”
What cybersecurity experts had Roth consulted between 9 a.m. and 10:15 a.m. on Oct. 14, 2020, the morning the Post story broke, Biggs asked the former Twitter executive.
Roth responded that the experts were ones the Twitter heads were following on the platform. “We were following discussions about this as they unfolded on Twitter,” Roth explained. “Cybersecurity experts were tweeting about this incident and sharing their perspectives, and that informed some of Twitter’s judgment here.”
Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., was incredulous: “After 2016, you set up all these teams to deal with Russian interference, foreign interference, having regular meetings with the FBI, you have connections with all of these different government agencies, and you didn’t reach out to them once?”
“That’s right,” Roth said, noting he didn’t think it would be appropriate.
Instead, Twitter relied on the tweets of supposed national security experts.
Who those experts were, Roth didn’t say, but here we have another strange coincidence: In his testimony on Wednesday, Roth told the committee that a few weeks before the Post story dropped, he had participated in an exercise hosted by the Aspen Institute, with other media outlets and social media companies, that posed a hack and leak October surprise involving Hunter Biden. Roth testified that Garrett Graff facilitated that event.
And at 8:23 a.m. on Oct. 14, 2020, after the Post story broke, Graff tweeted his playbook for how the media should react to “this Biden-Burisma crap.”
Graff followed about some 10 minutes later, tweeting, “Also, what a TOTAL coincidence that this fake Hunter Biden scandal drops the literal day after it becomes clear that both of Bill Barr’s other intended October surprises—the Durham investigation and the unmasking investigation—have fallen apart??!”
Not long after Graff began pushing the “fake” Hunter Biden scandal narrative, Vivian Schiller joined in, calling the Hunter Biden story “nonsense” and claiming Graff’s exercise was “to test readiness of some MSM.”
And who is Schiller? According to Graff, Schiller “designed and ran” the Hunter Biden tabletop exercise that Roth participated in. She was also the former head of news at Twitter, in addition to previously being the CEO of NPR, among other gigs.
In addition to Graff and Schiller, CNN’s consultant and so-called national-security expert weighed in at 8:23 a.m., questioning the “amplifying” of the New York Post’s story, stressing that “amplification is the key to disinformation.”
Natasha Bertrand also tweeted an early morning “warning” that a Russian agent had been “teasing misleading or edited Biden material for nearly a year.”
Bertrand, also known as Fusion Natasha for falling for Fusion GPS’s Steele dossier and Alfa Bank hoax, was joined in pushing the disinformation narrative by The Washington Post’s alleged fact-checker Glenn Kessler.
By 8:30 a.m., Kessler had shared The Washington Post’s policy “regarding hacked or leaked materials,” and told Twitter users to “be careful what is in your social media feeds.”
Mother Jones’ D.C. bureau chief David Corn followed with a 9:07 tweet declaring that the “whole story” was predicated on “false Fox/Giuliani talking points” and pronouncing the Post as advancing “disinformation.”
Twitter’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden story was bad enough before, but to think the executives may have relied on so-called experts like these raises the outrage another octave.
Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel James Baker likewise indicated in an email that he had “seen some reliable cybersecurity folks question the authenticity of the emails in another way (i.e., that there is no metadata pertaining to them that has been released and the formatting looks like they could be complete fabrications.)” Baker, however, did not say whether he had spoken with the “cybersecurity folks,” and given that when pushed by the committee he hid behind attorney-client privilege, getting any more answers from Baker seems unlikely.
Beyond learning that Twitter executives opted to rely on the tweets of so-called experts over asking the FBI if the laptop was fake, Wednesday’s hearing consisted mainly of grandstanding — some on both sides of the aisle — and Democrats attempting to make the hearing about Trump when they weren’t complaining that the entire session was a waste of time. One additional salient fact came out, however, in addition to a review of the basics of Twitter’s censorship efforts.
Specifically, Roth clarified for the House committee that the FBI had not previously warned that an expected “hack-and-leak” operation was rumored to likely involve Hunter Biden. Rather, according to Roth’s testimony, the rumor that the hack-and-leak operation would target the Biden son came from another tech company.
Roth claimed in his Wednesday testimony that his Dec. 21, 2020, statement to the Federal Election Commission was being misinterpreted. In that statement, Roth had attested that “since 2018 he had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.” His signed declaration then noted that the “expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
According to Roth, he should have worded his statement differently because it was not the FBI that had raised Hunter Biden as a potential subject of the hack and leak, but a peer company. One would think, however, that Roth would have clarified this point to his lawyer some two-plus years ago when Twitter’s Covington & Burling attorney represented to the FEC in a cover letter that accompanied Roth’s statement that “reports from the law enforcement agencies even suggested there were rumors that such a hack-and-leak operation would be related to Hunter Biden.”
Clearly, the former Twitter executives seek to separate themselves from the FBI, but “The Twitter Files” make that next to impossible to accomplish. And, really, being beholden to the so-called experts tweeting out warnings of supposed Russian disinformation would hardly be an improvement.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The media fell head over heels for a shoddy propaganda operation spearheaded by an ex-FBI agent. Twitter, internally, understood the operation to be partisan hackery but never spoke out. Organizations full of influential ex-government officials promoted the operation. And it’s only thanks to Matt Taibbi’s most recent contribution to “The Twitter Files” that we know the full extent of institutional corruption in the mind-boggling case of Hamilton 68.
American intelligence operatives have a history of using credulous reporters to spread disinformation for political purposes. (Remember when President Nixon’s team forged cables about John F. Kennedy and tried to get them in Life? Or the fate of Jean Seberg and her baby, thanks in part to COINTELPRO and the Los Angeles Times?) We’ve learned more and more about this in the years after the Cold War, yet elite media outlets eagerly swallow tactical disinformation when it confirms their priors.
The consequence? Self-appointed disinformation police in government and media shape American politics with actual disinformation, crafted specifically to quiet dissent.
New Information
Given access to Twitter’s internal records by new CEO Elon Musk, Taibbi pulled the company’s communications surrounding Hamilton 68 and reported his findings last Friday. The project styled itself as a “dashboard” that tracked Russian disinformation on Twitter.
As Taibbi wrote, “The secret ingredient in Hamilton 68’s analytic method was a list of 644 accounts supposedly linked ‘to Russian influence activities online.’ It was hidden from the public, but Twitter was in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s sample by analyzing its Application Program Interface (API) requests, which is how they first ‘reverse-engineered’ Hamilton’s list in late 2017.”
The files unearthed by Taibbi show Twitter’s internal audit of the Hamilton 68 list found it to be, in the words of former executive Yoel Roth, “bullish-t.”
“These accounts are neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots,” another employee said. What Hamilton 68 was passing off as foreign disinformation was largely legitimate speech from anti-establishment American tweeters. Here’s Roth again: “Virtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard] will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”
The “dashboard” confirmed elites’ bizarre anti-Trump Russia-collusion narrative by secretly classifying as Russian activity political speech from Americans with whom they disagreed.
Who ran Hamilton 68? Created by former FBI Special Agent Clint Watts, the project was supported by the Alliance for Securing Democracy and the German Marshall Fund. That means a host of powerful former government officials with long histories in and around intelligence agencies promoted the shoddy research for years or, at the very least, were complicit in Hamilton 68’s work by lending their support. Watts himself is an NBC News and MSNBC contributor. (Bill Kristol is a member of the Alliance’s advisory board.)
Institutional Corruption
It gets so much worse on three fronts: academia, Big Tech, and media.
First, Taibbi notes the suspicious research was promoted uncritically by elite American universities, including Harvard and Princeton. Second, the files show Twitter declined to call out Hamilton 68 publicly, opting to “play a longer game here,” in the words of one employee who now advises Pete Buttigieg at the Department of Transportation.
Third, and most importantly, Twitter’s efforts to privately nudge reporters away from the story failed miserably. Taibbi found, “[Emily] Horne wrote several times that she had no luck in steering journalists away from these hack headlines. ‘Reporters are chafing,’ she wrote, adding, ‘it’s like shouting into a void.’” Horne works for the Biden administration as well.
This is a damning illustration of the institutional corruption rotting American politics and culture. You may wonder how ex-spooks could create a secret list, hide their results, pass off the research as legitimate, convince just about every major media outlet to run with the findings, convince elite universities to run with them, and keep Twitter quiet in the process. The answer is that some institutional powerbrokers are corrupt, some are inexcusably incompetent, and others are a combination.
Media Enable It All
If the media, however, had a semblance of the competence and virtue journalists claim to have, there would be much more incentive for powerful people in other institutions to stop behaving badly.
Watts and Co. did not make an honest mistake. When leftists at Twitter saw the same information, they immediately and literally called BS — privately, at least. Even their warnings could not dissuade dozens of journalists and politicians from blasting Hamilton 68’s findings to millions of Americans for years. This was an attempt to create junk science, hide the results with a laughable excuse, and use it to bolster a false narrative that discredited a political opponent.
“This was an attempt to create junk science, hide the results with a laughable excuse, and use it to bolster a false narrative that discredited a political opponent.“
Journalists did their part and took the bait. Bear in mind that NBC News and MSNBC have used Watts himself as a national security contributor for years, ignoring plenty of evidence that he was a dishonest propagandist using their airwaves to advance the interests of intelligence agencies. They actually used their own “disinformation” reporters to spread more disinformation.
My colleague Mollie Hemingway called this out all the way back in 2018, when the likes of Adam Schiff, Dianne Feinstein, and an astounding array of media outlets were promoting Hamilton 68.
“Hamilton 68 won’t let anyone review their dashboard to determine in any way if they’re tracking actual Russian propaganda bots, or just conservative Americans who, for instance, care about FISA abuse,” Hemingway wrote. “Yet Hamilton 68’s claims are repeated uncritically by a media that asks no questions about the methodology.” (Twitter seemed to be misrepresenting its internal knowledge at the time, as well.)
Five years ago, making that point was met with attacks from anti-Trump activists who engaged in amateur intellectual gymnastics to classify every argument they disliked as Russian propaganda. The effect was to turn down the volume on people who were undercutting the campaign against Trump, empowering their own false narrative. Taibbi’s reporting vindicates the people who pushed back.
Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist and host of Federalist Radio Hour. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young America’s Foundation. She’s interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including “Fox News Sunday,” “Media Buzz,” and “The McLaughlin Group.” Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center, co-host of the weekly news show “Counter Points: Friday” and a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.
Soon after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he gave a few reporters access to the tech giant’s internal communications, resulting in scandalous revelations about Twitter’s routine collusion with and censorship direction from the FBI — revelations you likely haven’t heard much about from the corporate media.
“The Twitter Files” showed that this symbiotic relationship between the feds and a so-called private company involved the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story right before the 2020 election, the silencing of Covid dissenters, and even the squelching of regime-challenging journalists, among other bombshells. According to the communications, the federal government paid Twitter some $3,000,000 for its assistance.
Notwithstanding these explosive revelations, backed up by the internal communications of high-level Twitter executives, the corporate media have ignored the scandals. But why?
Here are five reasons the corrupt press has refused to adequately cover “The Twitter Files.”
1. Giving Credence To Trump’s 2020 Election Claims Would Be Unforgivable
Accurate coverage of “The Twitter Files” would require the media to report on the FBI’s role in burying the Hunter Biden laptop story shortly before the 2020 election. Among other things, “The Twitter Files” revealed the FBI met monthly and then weekly with Twitter’s team, warning them of various foreign efforts to interfere in the election. Those internal communications, when coupled with an earlier statement Yoel Roth, the then-head of Twitter’s site integrity, provided to the Federal Election Commission, establish the FBI was behind Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden story.
“Since 2018 he had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security,” Roth stated. “During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October,” Roth said, adding that from those meetings he learned “that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.” Roth then explained that those “prior warnings of a hack-and-leak operation and doubts about the provenance of the materials republished in the N.Y. Post articles,” led Twitter to conclude “the materials could have been obtained through hacking.”
When Roth’s statement is read together with the internal emails establishing that Twitter banned the New York Post’s blockbuster reporting under the guise that the materials had been hacked, the FBI’s responsibility for causing the censorship of this politically explosive story is clear. And because the FBI knew Hunter’s laptop had not been hacked and that the materials on it were authentic, by prompting the censorship of the story, the FBI knowingly interfered in the 2020 election.
Or as Donald Trump put it on Truth Social after “The Twitter Files” broke: “The biggest thing to come out of the Twitter Targeting Hoax is that the Presidential Election was RIGGED — And that’s as big as it can get!!!”
For the press to honestly cover “The Twitter Files,” then, would require it to give credence to Trump’s “RIGGED” claims — something it just cannot stomach. Instead, the corrupt media have responded to “The Twitter Files” with silence or spin.
2. Being the Press Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
A second reason the press refuses to cover “The Twitter Files” stems from the corrupt media’s inability to acknowledge its own bias, wrongdoing, and hackery. To report on the many scandals exposed by the files would require media elites to face their own involvement in censoring news and their failings as so-called journalists.
While historically, journalists stood in unity with their fellow reporters, when Twitter and other tech companies censored and then deplatformed the New York Post, the press — in the main — remained silent. In contrast, when Musk temporarily suspended reporters’ accounts who had posted location tracking information in violation of Twitter’s new rules, a thud sounded as the same journalists collectively collapsed on their fainting couches.
Not only did these supposed standard-bearers of journalism not condemn the censorship, most ignored the story. Those that did not ignore it, such as NPR, discussed not the details of the scandal, but their justification for ignoring it. “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR intoned.
Covering “The Twitter Files” now would be an implicit admission that they were wrong not to report on the laptop story and that they were equally amiss in failing to condemn the censorship of the Post.
“The Twitter Files” also raise an uncomfortable set of questions for news outlets, namely: Did the FBI warn legacy media that supposed Russian disinformation, in the form of potentially hacked materials involving Hunter Biden, would drop? Is that why they ignored the story and allowed the censorship of the Post to go unchallenged?
Reporting on “The Twitter Files” would force legacy outlets to confront the potential reality that the FBI had played them and that they were willing to trust the government rather than be a check on its abuse.
“The Twitter Files” also vindicate Musk and counter the media narrative that his Twitter takeover spelled the beginning of the end for the tech giant. Not only did the avalanche of predicted hate speech not materialize, but under Musk’s leadership, Twitter’s newfound transparency has served both the public interest and a (functioning) free press. Reporting on these facts, then, would require the press not only to acknowledge its own failings but to apologize to Musk and admit their own complicity — things they are apparently unable to do.
3. Condemning the Feds Would Shut Down Sources and Hurt Their Heroes
The media are likely also ignoring “The Twitter Files” to protect their sources — both literally and figuratively.
Many of the same FBI agents and governmental officials, such as Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who pushed for Twitter to censor speech probably serve as regular sources for the legacy media. This scenario is especially likely if the FBI pushed for the press to censor the Hunter Biden story, as it had with Twitter and Facebook. Reporting on “The Twitter Files” would thus force the media to hammer some of the same individuals who give them valuable leaks. Condemning those individuals could shut down various source networks the corrupt media can’t risk.
The media likely also don’t want to “hurt” their sources or the FBI agents who pushed the Russia disinformation lie to tech companies because they see themselves on the same anti-Trump team.
Just as the media refuse to condemn the Department of Justice and FBI agents involved in pushing the Russia-collusion hoax because the press favored the unwarranted attacks on Trump that hamstrung his administration, the leftist media silently applauds the FBI’s interference in the 2020 election because it helped deny Trump a second term.
In this regard, the legacy media and the deep state share the same worldview — that the ends justify the means. The media will thus keep mum about what the FBI did because they’re grateful that intelligence agencies destroyed Trump’s chance to defeat Biden by prompting the censorship of the October surprise.
4. The Russian Bogeyman Must Be Preserved at All Costs
Ignoring “The Twitter Files” also helps the media preserve their Russia, Russia, Russia narrative.
The various “Twitter File” threads revealed several damning details concerning Russia’s supposed interference in American politics. First, they exposed how the FBI and federal intelligence agencies used Russia’s supposed interference in the 2016 election to push for more resources and collaboration with tech giants. Second, the files revealed that, notwithstanding federal agents’ claims, there were no systemic efforts by Russia to use Twitter to interfere in the U.S. elections. To the contrary, the internal communications showed the FBI pushing for evidence of Russian interference and Twitter executives countering that they weren’t seeing issues.
Third, as detailed above, “The Twitter Files” exposed that the Hunter Biden laptop story was not only not Russian disinformation but that the FBI used that excuse anyway to prompt censorship of the story.
Fourth and finally, the internal Twitter communications showed that the trending of the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag was not prompted by Russian bots or Russian-connected accounts and that Democrats such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Schiff’s claims to the contrary were false. Those communications also revealed that even though Twitter negated the Russian-interference theory — telling politicians point blank that the evidence showed #ReleseTheMemo was trending because of organic interest in the hashtag — Democrats and the media continued to push that false storyline.
Reporting on “The Twitter Files” would require the media to first acknowledge they were wrong in their #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag coverage. But what’s more, covering Twitter’s internal communications would force the press to dispel the notion that Russia is the bogeyman behind every Republican candidate and every negative story about Democrats.
Corrupt media need to maintain Russia as the bad guy for future elections, however, and to counter future scandals affecting Democrats. Accurate reporting on “The Twitter Files” would lessen the effects of any later resort to a Russia, Russia, Russia narrative — and the press can’t have that.
5. Reporters Prefer Their Role as Propagandists to Journalists
While there are many practical reasons the press refuses to report on “The Twitter Files,” as a matter of principle, it all comes down to one: The legacy media have none.
The so-called journalists working at outlets that were once the standard by which all journalists were judged today value politics more than they do their professional obligations. Informing the public and providing a check on the rich, the powerful, and the politicians are no longer the end goals of corrupt reporters; rather, they seek to use their power to advance their own personal beliefs and agendas.
In short, the reporters refusing to cover “The Twitter Files” prefer their role as propagandists to journalists.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
News broke late yesterday that a search of the president’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, uncovered additional classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president, stored unsecured in the family garage and separately in another room of the house. And I still haven’t stopped laughing.
Since August of 2022, when the FBI launched an unprecedented raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, the entirety of the anti-Trump universe insisted — insisted — that the recently departed commander-in-chief’s possession of documents marked classified was a big f-ing deal.
Never mind that Trump had declassification authority as the president of the United States, or that the documents were stored at his home under the watchful eye of his Secret Service protection. Ignore too the fact that the National Archives could have worked with Trump to coordinate the storage of the documents under the technical possession of the government, but at a location of the former president’s choosing, just as was done with former President Barack Obama.
But because the loony left couldn’t resist one more sequel in their get-Trump franchise, as Trump exited the Oval Office, a backbench bureaucrat at the National Archives launched another hoax meant to finally, finally destroy Trump. Several leaks and a year-plus later, the plot culminated in the raid of Trump’s home followed by the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Trump.
And because the National Archives and the Biden administration went nuclear against Trump for possessing documents at Mar-a-Lago marked classified, they have no option but to pretend to treat Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents in an equally serious way. So, the National Archives referred the matter to the Department of Justice, just as it had with Trump, even though when it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mishandling classified documents, no criminal referral followed.
Likewise, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed a U.S. attorney to investigate Biden’s mishandling of the classified documents, to create the impression of equal justice under the law. Of course, given Garland’s appointment of a special counsel to investigate Trump, a plain ol’ ordinary U.S. attorney doesn’t level up, and for that, the attorney general is already receiving heat.
But the heat comes from the hypocrisy, not the gravity of the situation.
The Biden classified documents scandal is not a serious scandal. The botched withdrawal from Afghanistan is a serious scandal. Biden’s refusal to faithfully execute his duties as president of the United States by securing the southern border is a serious scandal. The Biden family pay-to-play escapades are a serious scandal. And the weaponization of the FBI and the intelligence community to interfere in the 2020 election and hand Biden the presidency is a serious scandal. This is not.
Laughable. Delicious. Outrageous. It is all those things and becomes more so by the day, with news that more classified documents are reposed in a residential garage, in addition to the closet at a D.C. think tank. And the story just becomes funnier the more the corrupt press tries to distinguish Biden’s possession of classified documents from Trump’s because Biden himself on video declared the possession of classified documents in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home to be “just totally irresponsible.”
But a garage, Joe? Seriously? And is not knowing there were classified documents there, as Biden claims, any better?
The bottom line here is simple. This entire scandal is a joke. And now, thanks to the get-Trump franchise, irresponsible Biden will be forever cast as a laughingstock — and so will the propagandists in the press.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Every president probably stashes away classified documents. The chances of any president being successfully prosecuted for pilfering them are infinitesimal. Nevertheless, now that we’ve learned Joe Biden has engaged in the same behavior as Donald Trump — perhaps worse, considering vice presidents are afforded less leeway on classified documents — precedent and transparency, our very democracy, demand Attorney General Merrick Garland name a special counsel to investigate (I get results!)
Right now, none of the rationalizations offered by the media for Biden’s actions over the past few days are operational. When the story first broke, outlets stressed that one of the vital “distinctions” between the two incidents was that Biden was in possession of fewer documents than Trump. Biden aides, we learned, had been utterly shocked to discover only a “small number” of classified documents “locked” in the personal offices of the president’s “think tank” — as if the location or the number of documents, or the alleged lock, rather than the contents, were the most newsworthy aspect of the story.
Today, we learned that a second “batch” of classified documents was uncovered at an “undisclosed” location. Suddenly, everything got incredibly vague. Biden aides, we are told, began diligently rummaging through boxes to ensure they were in complete compliance with the law. A completely independent source told collusion-hoaxer Ken Dilanian that the “search was described as exhaustive, with the goal of getting a full accounting of all classified documents that may have inadvertently been packed in boxes when Biden cleared out of the vice president’s office space in January 2017.” It’s heartening to know that the Bidens are such diligent, law-abiding folk.
Yesterday, we were told that classified documents that are found in a serious office setting, rather than just “lying around” in a home, was an important difference between the two cases. Today, Biden’s lawyer says that “small number” of classified documents was also found “locked” in Biden’s garage and an “adjacent” room of his Wilmington home. (Don’t worry, the president assures us it was safely stored next to his beloved Corvette.) You know, if we find another “small number” of documents, we might just have ourselves a full cache.
No doubt, journalists are super curious to know how those classified documents got into Joe’s garage. I mean, the guy had a think tank office at his disposal in D.C. Moreover, the initial documents were alleged to have been discovered before midterms, and yet we’re only hearing about new ones months later — and in convenient dribs and drabs.
Soon after CBS’s initial story, a four-byline puff piece from CNN reported that the documents found in the think tank were related to Ukraine, Iran, and the U.K., so not just keepsakes and letters and such. This week we also learned, in another soft-peddled report by The New York Times, that Biden, despite his insistence that he knew nothing about his son Hunter’s foreign entanglements, had met with a liaison from the Ukrainian energy interest Burisma, among many other revelations. Recall, Obama officials had also raised concerns about the Biden family business. Is there any chance those Ukrainian documents would have been embarrassing to the president? Seems a reasonable question.
What’s important now, we’re going to be instructed, is that Biden “immediately” contacted the authorities and is fully “cooperating.” Is it possible, and I’m just theorizing here, that Biden and his aides are lying? For one thing, cooperating is fine, but it’s not everything. Trump has every right to hire a lawyer and fight the Archives over documents. Maybe he’s got a case, maybe he doesn’t. But perhaps Biden also simply picked an opportune time to cooperate with his own administration in an effort to avoid any transparency. Far from “immediately” handing over this material, the president’s been in possession of classified documents for nearly seven years. How does the DOJ know there aren’t more documents stashed away? How does it know Biden, like Trump, didn’t put them in his garage on purpose? Because he says so?
Don’t get me wrong, it’s entertaining watching the comically obvious attempts to mitigate the damage. But if Biden hasn’t done anything wrong, he has absolutely nothing to fear.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
Election results hadn’t even started rolling in yet when the Very Smart People covering election night for CNN began making fools of themselves with their go-to 2022 talking point: democracy on the ballot.
“The numbers in these [exit polls] do not line up with what we were seeing in the polling data going into this election about what people cared about and the order in which they ranked it,” announced the network’s Chief National Affairs Analyst Kasie Hunt, stating what was obvious to anyone who understands that polls aren’t primarily designed to reflect public opinion; they’re intended to shape it to benefit Democrats and rack up donor dollars.
If CNN’s out-of-touch poll analysis is a joke, then the punchline came from CNN’s Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash: “And you know what’s missing from this — one, two, three, four, five — top-five issues? Democracy. It’s not even in here.”
It’s not shocking that “democracy” doesn’t crack the top list of issues on the minds of voters, who care far more about how much it cost them in gas money just to get to their polling place and what gender-bending nonsense their kids could be learning in math class at the very moment they were casting their ballots. What is shocking is that the media elites nestled inside the Acela Corridor and D.C. Beltway ever thought Americans were buying the “democracy under threat” propaganda they were selling. Of course, “democracy” is not a top issue for a voter who has just finished casting a ballot — the most fundamental way he participates in democracy.
I’m SHOCKED that voters’ #1 concern after freely taking part in the democratic process isn’t ✨democracy✨ https://t.co/4K0uV8fkhH
— Kylee Griswold (like the family vacation) (@kyleezempel) November 8, 2022
As President Joe Biden and his administrative state ran the country into the ground in the midterm lead-up, voters repeatedly voiced their concerns loud and clear. Americans suffering under unsustainable gas prices and grocery bills have consistently cited inflation as their No. 1 issue, followed by the economy and jobs generally, and then the humanitarian crisis at the southern border that’s been seeping into non-border states. Out-of-control crime and drugs are next on the list, with the left trying and failing to scare Americans into worrying above all else about a woman’s “right” to kill her preborn child and about “democracy.”
Add to those concerns Americans’ exasperation with the sexualization of their kids in schools funded by their own tax dollars, the continued dumping of beaucoup bucks into a foreign war and even more to satisfy climate alarmists, and nagging memories of the deadly Afghanistan withdrawal, Covid tyranny, and every time Democrats feigned “nothing to see here” for an incoherent Biden. Election Day motivations are no mystery.
As The Federalist’s Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland wrote this week, “It’s difficult to say whether the ‘democracy at risk’ pitch speaks more of desperation or of stupidity, but either way, the promotion of this buzz-phrase in the final days of the election season proves an implicit acknowledgment that it is Democrats who are at risk in Tuesday’s election. … A red wave will not be an end to our representative democracy. It will just be an end to the Democrat representatives.”
If the media really cared about democracy, they would be talking about Maricopa County in the battleground state of Arizona, where the Democrat in charge of running elections is on the ticket for governor and untold Election Day voters (which skew overwhelmingly Republican, as opposed to mostly blue early voters) may have been prevented from casting a ballot due to machine issues. If they were really worried about threats to democracy, they would stop “election denying” and concocting wild conspiracies whenever they lose. And they’d stop shattering voter confidence by pushing mass mail-in balloting and laughing about Election Day turning into election month.
Though the left fantasized otherwise, many things about the 2022 election were obvious from the start: Pollsters would be wrong, Roe would be overemphasized, Trump candidates would overperform, Beto O’Rourke was never going to happen — and democracy was never on the ballot. CNN is just catching up.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The Biden administration and the corporate media continue to assure Americans that the FBI’s raid on former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was both legally justified and of the utmost necessity. But the deep-state cabal and the leftist media cartel provided similar assurances about Crossfire Hurricane and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s targeting of Trump, with the assurances later proving worthless.
Here are five times SpyGate taught Americans to distrust and disprove accusations leveled at Donald Trump.
1. Devin Nunes’ Memo Exposing FISA Abuse
On February 2, 2018, the House Intelligence Committee, then-chaired by Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, released a four-page memo detailing abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by the FBI.
Before the memo’s release, the FBI publicly opposed the move, claiming in a public statement that the bureau had “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” Justice Department officials likewise opposed releasing the memo, warning that “doing so would be ‘extraordinarily reckless.’”
The then-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, also sought to scuttle the release of the memo — or at least preempt the detailed revelations of FISA abuse — by calling the memo a “conspiracy theory” in an op-ed for The Washington Post. In it, Schiff condemned the release, saying the memo was “designed to suggest that ‘a cabal of senior officials within the FBI and the Justice Department were so tainted by bias against President Trump that they irredeemably poisoned the investigation.’”
Nancy Pelosi, who is now speaker of the House, likewise attacked Nunes, demanding in a letter to then-House Speaker Paul Ryan that Nunes be removed as Intelligence Committee chairman. Nunes “disgraced” the committee with his “dishonest” handling of the committee’s review of the Russia collusion problem, Pelosi wrote. Nunes’ committee, Pelosi claimed, had become a “charade” and a “coverup campaign … to hide the truth about the Trump-Russia scandal.”
In response to the Nunes memo, former FBI Director James Comey told the country the memo was “dishonest and misleading.” Comey further claimed it “wrecked the House intel committee, destroyed trust with Intelligence Community, damaged relationship with FISA court, and inexcusably exposed classified investigation of an American citizen.”
Former CIA Director John Brennan also attacked Nunes, calling his exposure of the FISA abuse “appalling” and an abuse of his chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee.
Of course, years later, Nunes was proven correct, as the inspector general’s report confirmed, establishing that the Republican House Intelligence chair had, if anything, understated the FISA abuse.
For all the assurances the DOJ, FBI, their former leaders, and top politicians provided the American public, they were either lying or wrong — or both because there was “a cabal of senior officials within the FBI and the Justice Department … so tainted by bias against President Trump that they irredeemably poisoned the investigation.”
2. Surveillance Warrants Are Hard to Get
In addition to wrongly condemning Nunes’ memo, government officials attempted to calm concerns over the FISA surveillance by assuring the public that the process of obtaining a surveillance warrant was “rigorous” and that to obtain surveillance of American citizens, a court must find “probable cause” that warrants the wiretap.
Adm. Michael Rogers, then a commander of United States Cyber Command, testified about the FISA process during a March 2017 congressional hearing. In response to a question posed to eliminate “confusion in the public” about the collection of personal data, Rogers confirmed that the National Security Agency “would need a court order based on probable cause to conduct electronic surveillance on a U.S. person inside the United States.”
During the same hearing, the then-recently fired former FBI Director Comey expanded on the surveillance process. “There is a statutory framework in the United States under which courts grant permission for electronic surveillance either in a criminal case or the national security case based on the showing of probable cause,” Comey testified before Congress. “It is a rigorous, rigorous process, involving all three branches of government,” the former FBI director stressed, noting it must go through an application process and then to a judge who must approve the order.
The IG report on FISA abuse proved the promised rigor didn’t exist. And the later conviction of Kevin Clinesmith for “falsifying a document that was the basis for a surveillance warrant against former Trump campaign official Carter Page,” punctuated that reality. The facts revealed in the IG report further established that Americans’ faith in the FISA Court to serve as a check on the government was misplaced, with the judges serving as but a rubberstamp of the DOJ’s surveillance applications. So much for those assurances.
3. Don’t Worry, ’Merica, No Spying on Trump Took Place
A third assurance Americans received from the powers-that-be was that no spying on the Trump campaign occurred. The inspector general’s report on FISA abuse disproved those reassurances as well, revealing that the “Obama Administration Spied on the Trump Campaign Big Time.”
This reality pushed Russia-collusion hoaxers into esoteric discussions on the true meaning of “spying.” Even the United States Senate played the “it depends what the meaning of spying is” game, with New Hampshire Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen quizzing FBI Director Christopher Wray on whether he would agree with then-Attorney General William Barr’s use of the word “spying.”
“I was very concerned by his use of the word spying, which I think is a loaded word,” Shaheen bemoaned. “When FBI agents conduct investigations against alleged mobsters, suspected terrorists, other criminals, do you believe they’re engaging in spying when they’re following FBI investigative policies and procedures?” the senator asked Wray.
“That’s not the term I would use,” Wray replied, before noting that different people use different colloquialisms.
The discussion did not end there, however, with Shaheen pushing Wray on whether he had seen “any evidence that any illegal surveillance into the campaigns or the individuals associated with the campaigns by the FBI occurred.”
“I don’t think I personally have any evidence of that sort,” Wray replied.
But even sidestepping the silly debate over what “spying” means, the guarantee Shaheen provided the American public — that no illegal surveillance into the Trump campaign or individuals associated with the Trump campaign had occurred — proved worthless.
The Department of Justice has since admitted that it illegally surveilled former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and that such surveillance reached Trump campaign documents. So, yes, our federal government illegally surveilled the campaign of a presidential candidate.
4. Redactions Are Necessary to Protect Sources and Methods
A fourth key commitment conveyed to Americans throughout the multi-year unraveling of the Russia collusion hoax concerned the need to redact details in the publicly released documents. Such redactions were necessary to protect sources and methods, our overlords assured us.
For instance, in a December 9, 2019 press release Wray issued in conjunction with the DOJ’s inspector general’s report on FISA abuse, Wray “emphasized that the FBI’s participation in this process was undertaken with my express direction to be as transparent as possible, while honoring our duty to protect sources and methods that, if disclosed, might make Americans less safe.” Wray further promised that the FISA abuse report presented all material facts, “with redactions carefully limited and narrowly tailored to specific national security and operational concerns.”
Republican Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley challenged that portrayal of the redactions, suggesting in a letter to then-Attorney General William Barr that several footnotes “were classified in the IG report only because they contradict certain claims made in the public version of the inspector general’s report on FISA warrants documenting misconduct in the FBI’s spying operation of the Trump campaign.”
“We are concerned that certain sections of the public version of the report are misleading because they are contradicted by relevant and probative classified information redacted in four footnotes,” Grassley and Johnson wrote. “This classified information is significant not only because it contradicts key statements in a section of the report, but also because it provides insight essential for an accurate evaluation of the entire investigation.”
The Republican senators then asked for the four footnotes to be declassified, stressing that “the American people have a right to know what is contained within these four footnotes and, without that knowledge, they will not have a full picture as to what happened during the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
In April of 2020, Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell declassified the footnotes. And, as Grassley and Johnson had represented, the redactions weren’t necessary to protect “sources and methods.” Rather, the blacked-out lines were essential to distorting portions of the FISA report and to keeping the public in the dark about the full scope of the Spygate scandal.
Another document declassified by Grenell exposed that Mueller’s team falsely represented to a federal judge (and the American public) the substance of Michael Flynn’s December 2016 telephone conversation with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
As I reported following Grenell’s declassification of the transcript of the call between Flynn, Trump’s then-incoming national security adviser, and Kislyak, Mueller’s office deceived the country and a federal court when prosecutors claimed Flynn had discussed U.S. sanctions with his Russian counterpart. The transcripts established that, contrary to court filings, Flynn never raised the issue of sanctions with the Russian ambassador.
The release of the Flynn transcript did reveal, however, the FBI’s secret “sources and methods” — but the sources and methods were those of deep-state actors seeking to rid themselves of the president’s chosen national security adviser by launching a perjury trap and then lying about what Flynn said.
5. Crossfire Hurricane Was Properly Predicated
To this day, both DOJ’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Wray maintain that the FBI’s launch of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was properly predicated. Publicly released FBI documents say otherwise.
Former FBI agent Peter Strzok explained the supposed predicate for launching Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, in the opening “Electronic Communication” that he both prepared and approved. According to Strzok, the FBI opened the umbrella investigation into the Trump campaign after the government had “received information” “related to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s website/server.”
But Strzok’s summary of the information received made no mention of any intel obtained by the FBI related to the DNC hacking. Rather, the supposed intel “consisted of information received from an unnamed representative, now publicly known to be Alexander Downer, a then-Australian diplomat” stationed in London. The opening memorandum explained that Downer had relayed “statements Mr. [George] Papadopoulos made about suggestions from the Russians that they (the Russians) could assist the Trump campaign with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton.”
The opening document then asserted that Papadopoulos “also suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs. Clinton (and President Obama.).” The electronic communication added a caveat, though, noting that it was unclear whether Papadopoulos “or the Russians were referring to material acquired publicly of [sic] through other means. It was also unclear how Mr. Trump’s team reacted to the offer.”
Thus, while Strzok framed the information received by the FBI as evidence “related to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s website/server,” the remainder of the Electronic Communication contradicted that claim and in fact acknowledged that the material might refer to “publicly acquired” information.
What the FBI did — or rather didn’t do — after the launch of Crossfire Hurricane further confirms the sham predicate set forth by Strzok in the Electronic Communication.
While Papadopoulos’s statements to Downer supposedly prompted the FBI to open the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, agents failed to question Papadopoulos for six months. The FBI also put little (or no) effort into determining who purportedly told Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on Hillary. The supposed source of that statement, Joseph Mifsud, could have been easily located soon after the launch of Crossfire Hurricane if the FBI genuinely believed Russia had conspired with the Trump campaign to hack and release the DNC emails.
Agents pursuing a legitimate investigation “would have immediately scoured Papadopoulos’s London-based connections and discovered he was associated with the London Centre of International Law Practice around the time he met with Downer. From there, the FBI could have easily fingered Mifsud as a possible source for the information, since he was listed as a board advisor and public source searches would show Mifsud had connections to Russia. (The intelligence community would have also hit on Mifsud’s many connections to Western intelligence agencies.)”
But the FBI did none of this, waiting instead until late January 2017 to quiz Papadopoulos on the source of the supposed inside information coming from Russia. Yet, Wray and the DOJ’s inspector general want Americans to trust them when they say that agents launched Crossfire Hurricane based on Papadopoulos’s London chat with Downer over drinks.
Special Counsel John Durham, however, says otherwise, having released a statement following the DOJ’s report on FISA abuse that informed the public that, “based on the evidence collected to date,” his team had “advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”
The special counsel’s public statements prove significant for two reasons. First, Durham’s comments refute the inspector general’s conclusions regarding the predication of Crossfire Hurricane. But beyond that, the fact that Durham needed to correct the record shows the lack of trust due the DOJ and even the inspector general’s office — something further confirmed during the special counsel’s prosecution of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann.
Each of these five falsehoods peddled by the government to the public during the Russia collusion hoax has a clear corollary in the current scandal involving the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. And after the lies, pretext, and political warfare exposed during the unraveling of SpyGate, the DOJ and FBI’s current entreat to an angry public to “trust them” will be ignored — as it should.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Left-wing media (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, etc.) are avoiding the elephants in the room, like the Hunter Biden laptop and all the Joe Biden corruptions and disasters.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Sen. Ron Johnson is not planning his Senate retirement anytime soon. The Wisconsin lawmaker is running for reelection, he announced this week, at which the corrupt media predictably came out, guns blazing.
CNN’s Chris Cillizza, for instance, announced that the “Senate’s leading conspiracy theorist is running for another term,” and The Nation ran an article calling him an “off-the-deep-end” senator.
But while attention-seeking pundits attack Johnson for opinions that don’t conform to the left-wing narrative (opinions held among many Americans outside the Beltway, by the way), his opinions are often proved to be exactly right. There’s quite a long list of “Ron John” statements and actions that, after sending the media into a tizzy and Big Tech giants into a censorship spree, have held up quite well over time. Here are some of them.
Jan. 6
During a February 2021 hearing to examine the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Johnson condemned the violence then went on to read an eyewitness account of the day’s events. Originally published in The Federalist, it detailed the presence of provocateurs in the crowd and confusion among many of the pro-police “MAGA” protesters who didn’t attend the rally to perpetrate violence.
Yet the account Johnson read was entered into the record without objection from lawmakers of either party. And since then, instead of learning more information about Jan. 6 that refutes eyewitness accounts of “provocateurs,” Americans have been treated to political playacting (including literal musical theater) from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s sham commission, more hyperventilating from the media, and repeated stonewalling from the FBI on questions about potential provocateurs caught on video, such as Ray Epps.
Johnson was also ahead of the game on the Capitol Police component of Jan. 6, including pushing to correct the media and Capitol Police’s lies about what happened to the late Officer Brian Sicknick.
COVID Shots
Johnson has been a consistent voice for those who don’t feel they have one on Covid shots and the mandates that accompany them. He’s given Americans a forum to discuss their firsthand adverse shot reactions, for which he’s been smeared in the corrupt media as “fundamentally dangerous” and as a peddler of “misinformation.”
In November 2021, YouTube suspended Johnson’s channel for the fifth time for seven days for a video of a panel on vaccine-related injuries, labeling it “Covid misinformation.” Yet we know adverse reactions do occur.
In April 2021, when Johnson questioned forcing every American to get vaccinated and slammed the idea of pushing vaccine mandates on citizens, Anthony Fauci came after him on MSNBC — which other outlets amplified, calling the senator an “idiot anti-vaxxer.”
Fast-forward to 2022, and Johnson has been vindicated: Even with a federal vaccine mandate in place, case numbers are up higher than ever; and even the triple-vaccinated are still contracting and spreading the virus.
Early COVID Treatment
Big Tech has twice censored the sitting U.S. senator by nuking videos discussing early Covid treatments. In February 2021, YouTube removed videos of sworn testimony from Dr. Pierre Kory about early treatments. Then in June, YouTube suspended Johnson’s account for one week for remarks he made about early Covid treatments in Milwaukee.
Shutting down scientific inquiry and debate is inherently anti-science, however, as scientists who dissent from some of the questionable Covid conventional wisdom have pointed out.
“For science to work, you have to have an open exchange of ideas,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, has said of this type of censorship. “If you’re going to make an argument that something is misinformation, you should provide an actual argument. You can’t just take it down and say, ‘Oh, it’s misinformation’ without actually giving a reason. And saying, ‘Look it disagrees with the CDC’ is not enough of a reason. Let’s hear the argument, let’s see the evidence that YouTube used to decide it was misinformation. Let’s have a debate. Science works best when we have an open debate.”
We didn’t have to wait for ground-breaking scientific discovery on this one; we’ve known since the beginning of the pandemic that children are at almost zero risk of dying from coronavirus, and now we know that Covid shots don’t prevent people from contracting nor spreading the virus. Johnson was scientifically spot-on to oppose vaxx mandates for children, given children’s near-zero risk from a bout with Covid versus the potential risks of shot complications.
Hunter Biden
Corporate media ginned up all types of attacks when Johnson, as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, dug into the Biden family corruption linked to Hunter Biden.
The New York Times described it using the “Russian disinformation” moniker. Time Magazine smeared him as the Senate’s “one-man Biden prosecutor.” And the Washington Post described Johnson’s investigation as a nakedly partisan ploy to get Donald Trump re-elected.
This was all a distraction from the fact that Johnson and Sen. Chuck Grassley successfully revealed millions of dollars in questionable financial transactions between Hunter Biden and his associates and foreign individuals, including the wife of the former mayor of Moscow and people with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Johnson triggered the media in July when he mouthed to a Republican group that climate change is “bullsh-t.” The corporate media went berserk, with CNN and Chris Cuomo calling Johnson a climate change “denier.”
The senator has reinforced repeatedly that he doesn’t deny that the climate is changing, but rather that he isn’t an “alarmist” and doesn’t buy Democrats’ apocalyptic predictions.
Big surprise, plenty of data backs this up. The American Enterprise Institute has documented 50 years of failed doomsday predictions by so-called “experts” in the corrupt media and Democrat Party. For instance, ABC claimed in 2008 that Manhattan would be underwater by 2015. In 2011, The Washington Post claimed that cherry blossoms would bloom in winter.
Climate genius Al Gore also predicted in 2008 that five years later the North Pole would be free of ice. And in 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., predicted that Miami would be underwater in a few years. Yet in 2022, Miami is still very much above ground.
Mouthwash
Last month, Johnson noted a number of simple things Americans can do to keep themselves heathy, such as taking Vitamin D, Vitamin C, and zinc, and gargling mouthwash to reduce viral load if they get COVID.
Johnson’s mouthwash claim about viral load is supported by scientific research, however, such as this study. Additionally, Dr. Bruce Davidson, a faculty member of the Georgetown Department of Otolaryngology, conducted a study on the use of antiseptic mouthwash to control coronavirus, published in the American Journal of Medicine, and found that mouthwash can help protect people from Covid-19 pneumonia.
JUST NOW: Ron Johnson, on a Wisconsin tele-town hall, pushes mouthwash as a COVID treatment.
"By the way, standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus. If you get it, you may reduce viral replication. Why not try all these things?" pic.twitter.com/V0cdxPYc7K
Even FackCheck.org had to admit, “Johnson is right that mouthwashes ‘may’ reduce the virus’ ability to replicate in people.”
Natural Immunity
On July 14, Johnson claimed natural immunity is “as strong if not stronger than vaccinated immunity,” against which WaPo deployed its fake fact-checkers.
Johnson’s claims, however, come straight out of a pair of studies that confirmed natural immunity is stronger than COVID vaccine-acquired immunity. The pre-print Israeli study found that people with natural immunity could be 13 times less likely to contract the virus than those who were solely vaccinated, contradicting CDC findings.
Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician who was a professor at Harvard Medical School for a decade, dissected and compared the CDC study and the Israeli pre-print and explained why the latter is more reliable.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Alengthy New York Times editorial over the weekend has set the stage for this week’s Jan. 6 anniversary coverage. “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now,” declare the Times editors, warning that Republican lawmakers in 41 states “have been trying to advance the goals of the Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them.”
The argument itself, that tweaking state election law is somehow a subversion of democracy, is absurd and incredibly lazy. But it’s important to note, if only because it will serve as the baseline narrative for the entire corporate media’s Jan. 6 coverage this week. Their message — they will all have more or less the same message — is simple: all Republicans are insurrectionists, the GOP is the enemy of the people, and the only way to preserve American democracy is to ensure that only Democrats can win elections.
To make this case, the Times’ editors had to stage a kind of linguistic insurrection. Lawful, constitutional efforts by elected representatives to change state election laws amount, in the Times’ telling, to a “bloodless, legalized” insurrection that “that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.”
That’s no different than saying “speech is violence.” It’s nonsensical. By definition, there’s no such thing as a “bloodless, legalized” insurrection, any more than there could be a “mostly peaceful” riot. That said, the Times editors are wrong about one thing: state laws, including state election laws, can and often are challenged in court.
But the nonsense here serves a purpose. If the Jan. 6 riot can be conflated with perfectly valid GOP-led efforts to shore up state election rules, then perhaps those efforts can be wholly undermined, regardless of what voters in red states want. The irony is that it isn’t GOP lawmakers trying “to wrest control of electoral votes from their own people,” as the Times editors charge; it’s the Democrats and their media allies.
Consider that last year, 44 states enacted some 285 bills related to elections. In blue states, those bills tended to loosen certain election rules and requirements, especially for mail-in and absentee ballots. That makes sense given that Democrats tend to vote by mail-in ballot far more often than Republicans. Making mail-in and absentee voting easier is merely a way to boost Democratic votes in any given state. It’s simple.
By contrast, Republican-led states tended to pass laws limiting or more strictly defining the rules for mail-in and absentee voting, on the theory that absentee balloting is inherently less secure and more susceptible to fraud, especially when paired, as it often is, with practices like ballot-harvesting.
Republican lawmakers’ motivation here was to prevent a repeat of the free-for-all of the 2020 election, which saw a raft of last-minute changes to mail-in and absentee voting rules, justified on account of the pandemic. Many Republicans rightly felt that judges who overruled state legislatures and re-wrote state elections laws by fiat (as happened in Pennsylvania), undermined the integrity of the election.
By passing such reforms, Republican lawmakers were responding to actions taken by Democrats, unelected public health officials, and Democrat-friendly judges to overhaul state election rules ahead of 2020. If you wanted to be disingenuous about it, you could argue that Democrats staged a “bloodless, legalized” insurrection before the 2020 election even took place.
That’s why the Times and the rest of the corporate press want so badly to talk about Jan. 6 instead of getting into the nitty gritty of what these Republican-passed election reforms actually do. You’ll notice the media always describe these laws as “restricting voter access,” even when they do no such thing. The entire conversation is a bit of legerdemain, nothing more. That’s why you’ll never read a piece in the corporate press about how Georgia’s new election law, which President Joe Biden called “Jim Crow on steroids,” actually makes voting easier than it is in Biden’s home state of Delaware.
Remember that when you read breathless remembrances of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol this week. Yes, the riot was bad and should have been put down with overwhelming force — just as the riots all throughout the summer and fall of 2020 should have been.
But the actions of a relatively small group of rioters that day have absolutely nothing to do with the perfectly valid efforts of GOP lawmakers to ensure that election rules are not changed at the last minute by unelected judges or public health officials. Equating the two, pretending they share a common cause and motivation, is a way to discredit the valid arguments of Republicans, smear them as “insurrectionists,” and eventually justify efforts to silence them.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Texas Monthly, The Guardian, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Just a year after a record 81 million Americans voted for Joe Biden, they’re now being told it didn’t work out. BOB ANDERSON / MORE ARTICLES
When The New York Times begins publishing op-eds saying Joe Biden should not run again, and that he should announce it soon, then the gig is officially up. Biden is a lame duck. Perhaps someone should tell him.
Columnist Bret Stephens is right to note that the president would be 86 years old at the time of the next election cycle, and that he now “seems … uneven. Often cogent, but sometimes alarmingly incoherent.” More simply, Joe is old and tottering—and he’s unpopular to a startling degree. As Stephens notes, even passage of a multi-trillion-dollar “infrastructure” spending bill didn’t boost his numbers much. He suggests the president liberate his party by freeing new (and younger) candidates to begin exploring a path to the presidency.
Sure, the question of Joe’s future “need(s) to be discussed candidly, not just whispered constantly.” At the same time, can we also ask the other obvious question candidly? Why did the media cover for an elderly septuagenarian with clear age-related issues, thrusting him into a job he was never truly capable of holding—and subjecting the nation to a dangerous period without a strong leader? It’s fine to have a mea culpa moment, and truth delivered late is better than truth denied forever, but as the nation stumbles along with a puppet president there should be some accountability.
Just a year after a record 81 million Americans voted for Biden, they’re now being told it didn’t work out. Sorry. It’s coming within the timeframe of the traditional presidential “honeymoon,” that brief period presidents are normally at their zenith of political power and brimming to pass a bold agenda. Perhaps we should give the public some adjustment time to avoid whiplash from this quick pivot. After all, it wasn’t long ago that the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin was telling them Biden was completely fit for duty, someone who “with his aviator sunglasses (plus his promotion of exercise during the Obama administration), projects vitality and energy.”
Just more than a month before the election last year, a Forbes article claimed Trump and Biden might be “super agers” who would be expected to significantly outlive other men their age. Trump’s activity on the campaign trail perhaps warranted that description, but Biden not so much. He spent more days underground than Punxsutawney Phil and showed frequent difficulty with coherency on the campaign trail, from trying to describe COVID losses “for the past hundred years” to quoting “you know, the thing.”
Days after Biden’s election victory last year, Matt Viser of the Washington Post tweeted that “Joe Biden would often jog onto stage, showing how physically vigorous he is and attempting to dispel questions about his age. Now that he’s the oldest president-elect in American history, that doesn’t change.”
Has it changed now, Matt?
The truth is that establishment Democrats wanted Joe, and they selected him, despite his age and numerous warning signs regarding his mental acuity. He was the blank canvas on which anything could be written, and he could be sold as a “moderate.”
As Bernie Sanders surged in the polls in early 2020 with 45 delegates after the first three primaries and Joe languished in a distant third place with 15, the party took control. Rep. Jim Clyburn stepped in and delivered an influential endorsement in South Carolina that pushed African-American support to Biden’s campaign, propelling him to victory. Stories immediately appeared claiming Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg had “no realistic path to the nomination.”
Despite trailing early in fundraising behind the well-organized Sanders fundraising machine, the Democrat establishment pivoted to push donations to Biden. As the NYT admitted in an article at the time, “The elite world of billionaires and multimillionaires has remained a critical cog in the Biden money machine.” Bernie’s small-dollar donors were no match for the large bundles of corporate and PAC cash. With a lot of help from a sycophantic media, Biden was elected president of the United States, without serious inquiry regarding his physical and mental abilities. Now, suddenly, it’s time to plan Joe’s exit before the new Oval Office carpet has fully settled in place?
We should note that it wasn’t Joe stumbling up the stairs of Air Force One that troubled Democrats into questioning Joe’s fitness. They didn’t question his stability when he at times spoke gibberish. They didn’t seem worried when his physical exam failed to report on his cognitive ability. No, his collapse in the polls is why Joe is suddenly being challenged on the question of running again, and despite Chuck Todd’s protestations, it can’t be blamed on Trump.
It turns out that the public is a bit smarter than Democrats guessed. Reading prepared speeches from a teleprompter is not a substitute for leadership. Neither is putting one’s head down on the presidential podium like a child in the face of tough questions about a military failure in Afghanistan. The blame game can only get a president so far. After voters finish expressing ire at the press for being misled about Biden’s abilities, perhaps they will turn and express sympathy for the old man who so desperately wanted the job. Having run twice before, the party eventually picked him, but not before the gas had run out of his tank.
Joe may have always been a politician, but the man behind the podium now is not the same as the one who ran in 2008, and certainly not the man who ran in 1988. Stripped of his dignity, he has become a caricature of a president, adorned with all of the symbols of the office, but lacking the substance necessary to perform.
Every Trump voter can still name his key issues: closing the border, beating China, restoring American jobs, making America energy independent, and above all, to “Make America Great Again.” Less than a year into his presidency, it’s hard to recall Biden standing strongly for anything in particular, having served more as an official signer of policy goals for leftist special interest groups than for his own agenda.
The truth is that even as his campaign wobbled toward the finish line last year, they were still struggling to coin a definitive slogan. That few can remember the eventual decision speaks to the vacuousness of this man and this presidency.
Joe is in the process of sinking not only himself but also his party in the upcoming midterms and possibly the 2024 election, so the door to retirement is being planned. Perhaps Democrats will at least give him the courtesy of a final national address, a chance to read from the presidential teleprompter one final time. At the end, he can sign off blissfully with, “Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America … end of message.”
Bob Anderson is a partner and CFO of a hotel development company and a former aerospace engineer who worked on the International Space Station and interned in Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) at the Pentagon. He is also a licensed commercial pilot.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki fields questions at a White House news briefing on Monday, where she had to answer for a comment from President Biden on Friday that discouraged the prime minister of India from taking questions from the media. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
On Jan. 24, just days after President Joe Biden took office, official CNN Democrat brown-noser Brian Stelter shared a chyron from his television show on Twitter.
“Psaki Promises to Share ‘Accurate Info’ (How Refreshing),” it read. The insinuation, of course, is that there wasn’t any accurate info from the Trump administration — but don’t worry, help was on the way!
Now, as it turns out, there’s a caveat to that refreshing promise: Psaki will be sharing “accurate info” (if often incomplete or misleading), but if President Joe Biden is going to be sharing information, your questions had better be “on point.” If they’re on a topic he doesn’t like, he’s not going to answer. (Psaki herself will probably promise to “circle back” to whatever the question was at a later date.)
On Friday, Biden met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Before their meeting, however, the president badmouthed the U.S. media and counseled Modi not to take any questions.
“The Indian press is much better behaved than the American press,”Biden told Modi. “I think, with your permission, you could not answer questions because they won’t ask any questions on point.”
WATCH: President Biden, during meeting with Indian PM Modi:
“The Indian press is much better behaved than the American press…I think, with your permission, you could not answer questions because they won’t ask any questions on point.” pic.twitter.com/VppL7973ma
That didn’t seem quite so refreshing, particularly after an incident with U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson earlier in the week when Biden’s staff shooed away reporters in the Oval Office.
During a meeting between Biden and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, staff abruptly order journalists to leave. pic.twitter.com/kJ4itX2kU4
Psaki was called on the carpet by the Washington press corps on Monday, given that reporters weren’t happy at the president telling the Indian prime minister to avoid taking questions. The White House press secretary tried to recontextualize — and made the problem worse in the process.
“I think what he said is that they’re not always on point,”Psaki said.
“Now I know that isn’t something that anyone wants to hear in here, but what I think he was conveying is, today he might want to talk about COVID vaccines, some of the questions were about that,” she continued.
Psaki was just confronted by two reporters about Biden asking Indian Prime Minister Modi to not take questions from the American press.
Psaki then embarrassingly justifies the remark by saying sometimes the Press doesn't ask about what Biden wants to talk about.
“Some of the questions are not always about the topic he’s talking about in that day. I don’t think it was meant to be a hard cut at the members of the media, people he’s taken questions from today and on Friday as well,” she added.
Another reporter — CBS News Radio’s Steven Portnoy — followed up, saying, “It happened that he was sitting next to prime minister of India, the world’s largest democracy, when he said that. It also followed the incident on Wednesday when he was sitting next to the prime minister of Great Britain. Is the president reticent to take questions when he’s sitting next to a foreign leader in the Oval Office? Can we expect him to do that in the future?”
“Steve, he took questions earlier that day on Friday. He’d already taken questions that day. I think that was the context of his comments,” Psaki said. “And he’s taken questions standing next to a foreign leader many, many times in the past, and will continue to.”
Good on @WSJ's @Catherine_Lucey & @CBSNewsRadio's @StevenPortnoy for repeatedly pressing Jen Psaki on the fact that Biden blew off the press last week with U.K. PM Boris Johnson & took a swipe at them last week behind their backs, telling Indian reporters not to ask questions. pic.twitter.com/dUS24W8X90
There was also one other problem with Biden’s remark, as Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich noted.
“The president said that the Indian press was better behaved than the U.S. press, but the Indian press is ranked 142nd in the world, according to Reporters Without Borders, for press freedoms,” she asked.
“How does he say that about the U.S. press compared to the Indian press?” she asked.
“Well, I would just say to you that, having now worked for the president, serving in this role for nine months, having seen that he’s taken questions from the press more than 140 times, including today and Friday, that he certainly respects the role of the press, the role of the freedom of free press,” Psaki said.
“We ensure that we have press with us, of course, when we travel, that we have press with us for sprays in foreign capitals, and we will continue to. I think that should speak to his commitment to freedom of press around the world.”
FTR, Fox's @JacquiHeinrich also asked: "The President said that the Indian press was better behaved than the U.S. press, but the Indian presence ranked 142nd in the world, according to Reporters Without Borders for press freedoms. How does he say that about the U.S. press[?]" pic.twitter.com/mhNwt4OwSD
It’s worth noting that Psaki had all weekend to work on her answer to this. She knew full well this was going to be one of the things she had to answer when she walked into the Brady Press Briefing Room in the West Wing of the White House. The best the press secretary and her team could come up with: You guys need to start asking the kinds of questions the president wants to hear. Talk about what he’s talking about. See, this is why he never takes questions from the press. Focus, people!
It was an embarrassment — to Psaki and the president. And even the shamelessly pro-Biden press corps had to know it.
For whatever reason, Brian Stelter hasn’t weighed in on how refreshing that answer was. Perhaps he missed it.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
Imagine if someone had said these words in October:
“In the midst of everything COVID, people were sort of putting down that cause of death as COVID … It is important to go back and do this accounting to see if COVID was actually the cause of death.”
It would have taken five minutes for Snopes and PolitiFact to cancel this person entirely. They would have been branded a conspiracy theorist, a blackguard, a scoundrel. If they had any platform, it would be taken away posthaste. You could even make a case there would be Facebook and Twitter censorship involved — this being COVID-19 misinformation, after all.
But those words were spoken Friday by University of California San Francisco professor of medicine Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert. She was speaking to San Francisco’s KPIX-TV regarding the announcement that Santa Clara County, California, had revised its official COVID-19 death toll downward by 22 percent.
According to KPIX, the announcement was made after the county “refined its approach in reporting the data.”
Santa Clara County — home to San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley — is the sixth-largest among California’s 58 counties in terms of population, with 1,927,470 residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau data compiled by Cubit.
This isn’t minor, in other words.
Before refining its approach, the county had recorded 2,201 COVID deaths. Now, that’s been reduced to 1,696.
“It is important to go back and do this accounting to see if COVID was actually the cause of death,” Gandhi said, according to KPIX.
“I think that transparent communication is an upside, I mean, in the sense that it’s true that if we did this across the nation, it would bring our death rate lower. A downside of that, could be that people will say, ‘Well, it wasn’t as serious as you said.’”
Gandhi added she thought this was going to encourage coronavirus vaccine holdouts to get vaccinated.
“Because a lot of people have kind of said, ‘I’ve heard people are dying anyway of COVID, what’s the point?’ And it is very important to say, ‘No, did they die of COVID or were they in the hospital for something else and they died of that?’” Gandhi said. “That helps people say, ‘Oh, the risk of breakthrough infection is so low I want to go ahead and get vaccinated.’ So I think it’s very good for vaccine hesitancy.”
Santa Clara County wasn’t the only county in California to reassess its data, either. According to KGO-TV, Alameda County revised its numbers downward in early June, saying it had an over-count of COVID deaths greater than 400 individuals. On June 4, the number of deaths in the Bay Area county attributed to COVID-19 dropped from 1,634 to 1,223. Alameda County, home to Oakland and Berkeley, is the seventh-largest in the state in terms of population with 1,656,754 residents.
“According to the Health Department, the 25% decrease was made to comply with the state’s definition of a COVID-19 death, which requires COVID-19 to be a direct or contributing factor or a situation in which it can’t be ruled out,” KGO reported.
“Alameda County previously included any person who died while infected with the virus in the total COVID-19 deaths for the County,” wrote Neetu Balram with the Alameda County Health Department in a news release dated June 4.
By way of example, Balram wrote:
“Using the older definition of COVID-19 deaths, a resident who had COVID-19 but died due to another cause, like a car accident, this person would be included in the total number of reported COVID-19 deaths for Alameda County. Under the updated definition of COVID-19 deaths, this person would not be included in the total because COVID-19 was not a contributing factor in the death.”
At the time, another doctor at the University of California San Francisco, epidemiologist Dr. George Rutherford, told KGO he was “betting it’s very specific to Alameda County, which had a lot of cases early on and had to do a lot of on-the-fly definitions and systems and now they are being brought into alignment.”
Gandhi apparently didn’t think that was the case after Santa Clara reported its revised total. KPIX reported that “Gandhi believes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may soon ask all counties to do the same as Alameda and Santa Clara Counties and that the nation could also see a drop in its COVID-19 death toll.”
This is what voices — mostly conservative voices — have been saying for over a year. Even raising the issue, however, got one branded as a conspiracy theorist.
Take the state of Washington. In May 2020, during a media briefing, Dr. Katie Hutchinson of the Washington State Department of Health announced that some people who obviously hadn’t died of COVID were being included in the state’s death totals.
“We currently do have some deaths that are being reported that are clearly from other causes,” Hutchinson said. “We have about five deaths — less than five deaths — that we know of that are related to obvious other causes. In this case, they are from gunshot wounds.”
If there were five deaths that they could identify as just being from gunshot wounds — out of 1,078 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the state at the time — that still doesn’t speak well of the state’s reporting mechanisms. That means, as the conservative think tank Freedom Foundation pointed out at the time, there were likely individuals who died of other causes more anodyne than a gunshot wound who were being counted among COVID deaths.
Yet, Washington Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee blasted anyone who questioned whether there was over-counting going on.
“The problem is you got some people out there who are fanning these conspiracy claims from the planet Pluto,” Inslee said, according to KOMO-TV. “And it’s just disgusting what they’re trying to say of all these crazy deep-state malarkey. Who are kinda suggests that this not a problem in our state. I find that hard to accept with the number of dead in our state. So, that’s a problem. And I hope it gets resolved.”
This is such “deep-state malarkey” that jurisdictions now revising their COVID death toll downward include [checks notes] two famously liberal Bay Area counties in California, one home to Berkeley and the other the center of Silicon Valley. These stories were out there if you looked — individuals who died of gunshot wounds or motorcycle accidents that were counted as COVID victims. If you raised questions, however, you were branded a conspiracy theorist.
Even now, Gandhi seems to lament the fact Santa Clara County’s deaths have been revised downward: “A downside of that, could be that people will say, ‘Well, it wasn’t as serious as you said,’” she told KPIX.
Why would that be your reaction? And, perhaps more importantly, why would nobody with a brain be surprised to hear the same reaction from editors, politicians and members of the medical and scientific communities?
After a year of lockdowns based on an unholy alliance among untruthful media, scientists with zero sense and a power-hungry left, we’re left with the conclusion that big numbers drove public policy in a direction all of these entities wanted — in an election year when the left was tarring the sitting president with blame for all things COVID.
While the numbers weren’t ginned up to create a crisis that didn’t exist, it’s not as if politicians and scientists acted with alacrity to fix obvious deficiencies in reporting COVID deaths, either. Santa Clara and Alameda Counties are emblematic of how wrong some jurisdictions got it.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
A.F. Branco coffee table book “Keep America Laughing (at the left)” ORDER HERE
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Trump was right and the media was wrong again, that it’s true COVID may have come from a lab in Wuhan China.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco 92021.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Source: AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee
In another Very Florida story, a woman with a colorful criminal history has spent the last year collecting media accolades and a half-million dollars in donations by accusing the Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, of fudging the state’s COVID numbers.
Rebekah Jones, website designer (not “scientist,” as the media insistently claim), falsely accused DeSantis of doing what Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York actually was doing with the COVID numbers. From the extensive media coverage, I figured maybe the DeSantis administration was taking advantage of gray areas to make the state’s record look as good as possible. Not as bad as what Cuomo was doing, but something.
Nope! This whole story was the fantasy of a crazed stalker, as explained in detail by Christina Pushaw in Human Events and Charles Cook in National Review.
I forgot my own admonition that you can’t believe anything the media say.
The canonization of Rebekah Jones is only the latest example of the press latching onto any lunatic who attacks a Republican. Remember Bill Burkett? (CBS’s deranged source for the fake Bush Air National Guard story.) Jamie Leigh Jones? (Falsely claimed she was gang-raped in Iraq by Halliburton employees.) How about media star and Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Avenatti? (He was going to vanquish Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh with Stormy Daniels and Julie Swetnick, until his criminal past caught up with him.)
Contrary to Jones’ allegations, she could not have been asked to falsify Florida COVID numbers, for the simple reason that she didn’t generate the numbers. She designed and updated the state’s website using data given to her by actual epidemiologists, but had no role in the collection of the information and no earthly idea what it should be.
— use the Florida emergency notification system to send out a deranged message pushing her personal conspiracy theory — something she staunchly denies despite overwhelming forensic evidence; and
— defame an accomplished black woman scientist as “the most corrupt, lying, incompetent and ignorant person that could be ever be (sic) put in charge.” (In this one instance, the media decided to give a pass to someone insulting a black person.)
As is probably true of many esteemed scientists, Jones had an illegitimate child in her junior year of college and, in 2016, as a graduate student at Louisiana State University, was charged with two counts of battery on a police officer.
But it wasn’t until she got to Florida that Jones really hit her stride. In 2017, then in her late 20s and an instructor at Florida State University, the married Jones had an affair with a student, Garrett Sweeterman.
She then penned a graphic 342-page essay on their relationship — written while she was married to the world’s most tolerant husband. Hello, honey! I’m home. I’ll be in the study for the next two hours working on that Penthouse Letter about my extramarital affair.
Jones has claimed that Sweeterman is the father of her 2-year-old child, but two days before he was to provide his DNA, her paternity suit against him was dismissed. (Only the hard-hearted would suggest she is a loon trying to entrap the kid into marriage because she prefers him to her husband.)
The manifesto reads like something a nitwit 13-year-old girl would write, giving a play-by-play description of their sexual encounters, followed by Sweeterman’s repeated attempts to break up with her, which she calls his “mind games.” Anyone reading her manifesto can see that her great love affair was nothing but a booty call for him.
In short order, Jones was stalking Sweeterman, destroying his property and posting naked photos of him online — as well as sending revenge porn to his mother and employer. Despite Sweeterman’s restraining order against her, in addition to a court order directing her to stay away from campus, Jones would show up unannounced at his classes, just to “talk.” (They always just want to “talk.”)
In Jones’ own telling, by October 2017, Sweeterman was repeatedly texting her things like, “I can’t see you … I don’t feel right about any of it. … YOU’RE MARRIED. You have a family.”
His mother blocked Jones’ texts. His sister replied to one of her texts, saying, “I don’t know who the f– you are or what the f– you want but you better stay the f- away from my family. Delete my number and delete my families number you f-ing bitch.”
After all this, Jones showed up at one of Sweeterman’s classes and they screamed at each other; then she drove to his house that night, he came out and they screamed at each other again. Sweeterman walked away from her and got in his car, saying, “I’m leaving.” She hopped into the passenger seat. He went back inside. His roommates came out and told her to leave.
Still sitting in his car, Jones asks herself: “Was I supposed to leave? Was that the end of our conversation? Was that the end of us?”
Jones’ ongoing hysterics resulted in criminal charges against her for vandalizing Sweeterman’s car, robbery and stalking. She was fired by the university, jailed at least three times and committed to a mental institution.
The smearing of DeSantis would be outrageous even if Jones were a rational human with an impeccable past, but she is not. DeSantis steered Florida through the pandemic with 30% fewer COVID deaths than New York, despite having a larger population and a lot more old people.
But journalists couldn’t be bothered to bring up Cuomo’s killing old people and cooking the books because they were too busy talking about his lats. Instead, our watchdog media attacked the governor with the best record on COVID, who was being stalked by a crazy woman.
Many on the like Tlaib of the Squad and the MS Media are screaming at Israel to ceasefire while Hamas continues to fire rockets at their populated cities.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
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Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas responded to MSNBC host Joy Reid’s racist remarks against him by questioning why the network permitted her to get away with it and saying that comments of the like were leading Hispanics to turn their back on the Democratic Party.
On Tuesday, Reid discussed the Texas senator with guests Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California and NAACP legal counsel Janai Nelson, and made a reference to the movie “Django Unchained” — comparing Cruz to a traitorous house slave in the film for not supporting the For the People Act, which aims at altering voting processes across the country.
Cruz’s rebuttal was swift, calling out the host of the MSNBC segment “The Reid Out” for “using overt racial slurs” to make assumptions concerning how Hispanic-Americans should vote.
“I appreciate MSNBC lecturing me on how people of ‘my race’ are supposed to vote,” Cruz tweeted on Wednesday. “This arrogant condescension is a big reason Hispanic voters are moving right in large numbers.
“Also, why is MSNBC ok with their hosts using overt racial slurs (‘Stephen from Django’)?”
Cruz called the For the People Act, officially known as House Resolution 1, “Jim Crow 2.0” — a reference to President Joe Biden’s remarks about Georgia’s new voting law, which the president called “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.”
“Jim Crow laws were bigoted, racist, and disenfranchised millions of people,”Cruz said in a Tuesday tweet. “Those laws were drafted by Democrats and implemented by Democrats to keep Democrats in power. Today, Democrats are doing it again. The Corrupt Politicians Act is Jim Crow 2.0.”
Reid was highly critical of Cruz and the GOP after his comment, alleging that the Republican Party was attempting voter suppression in his state of Texas.
“Ted Cruz says a lot of stupid things,” Reid said Tuesday. “He does a lot of stupid things. But I personally — as a person of color, as a black person — am beyond offended that he would dare use the word ‘Jim Crow’ when his party is literally a ‘Jim Crow’ party at this point, trying to suppress the votes of people, including in his home state.”
She later called Cruz “Stephen from Django Unchained.”
Reid continued with attacks on the Texas senator, saying that he “could give a d**n about Jim Crow,” and that he has “never raised once concern ever in his entire life … about Jim Crow or racism or discrimination.”
WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that some viewers will find offensive.
Reid suggested Cruz was a traitor to Hispanics and defended HR 1, saying that if it fails to pass, America may never see free and fair elections again.
Republicans, however, have said that the act threatens election integrity and the rights of states.
“The legislation would strip states of their constitutional authority to run elections and allow the federal government to decree what’s best,” Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said in a Fox News Op-Ed.
“It would ban voter ID laws, which maintain the integrity of elections in my state and a majority of others … To put it simply: states don’t need Washington, D.C., to strip them of their authority and impose burdensome requirements to fix problems that do not exist,” Moore said.
Reid has made racist comments about Republicans in the past. She has made an “Uncle Tom” reference, alluding to the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel, about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom she called “Uncle Clarence.” She has also called Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina the token black person in the Republican Party.
Democrats, through their media, are using race to tear America apart for political gain and power.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
After the pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Twitter blue-checks, politicians, and elite corporate journalists wailed and rent their garments in outrage. But they weren’t really outraged.
Yes, the breach of the capitol was appalling and disturbing. Most people didn’t see it coming and were understandably shocked when images of MAGA bros fighting capitol police began popping up on social media (although the authorities should have been better prepared, most of all D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who had earlier rejected offers of additional law enforcement.) There’s no question the protesters who decided to riot should be prosecuted, as all rioters everywhere should be.
But elite outrage is not really about what happened at the capitol—about the “sacred citadel of our democracy being defiled”and so on. The outrage, like almost all expressions of righteous indignation from our elites in the Trump era, is performative. It is in service of a larger purpose that has nothing to do with the peaceful transfer of power and everything to do with the wielding of power.
Specifically, it’s about punishing supporters of President Trump. If the pro-Trump mob can be depicted as “terrorists”and “traitors,” then there’s almost nothing we shouldn’t do to silence them. Right? Rick Klein, the political director at ABC News, said the quiet part out loud on Thursday when he mused (in a now-deleted tweet) that getting rid of Trump is “the easy part” and the more difficult task will be “cleansing the movement he commands.”
That’s not the kind of language you use when you’re in the business of reporting the news. It’s the kind of language you use when you’re in the business of social control.
A lot of people on the right have noted the supposed hypocrisy of media elites like Klein, but it’s not really hypocrisy because Klein and his comrades don’t really have a problem with violent mobs storming into buildings and smashing windows, so long as they agree with the mob’s agenda. That’s why corporate media was so tolerant of much larger and more dangerous mobs destroying American cities for months on end last year. When Black Lives Matter rioters stormed city halls and police stations, burned down churches, and ransacked shopping districts in major U.S. cities, killing dozens and destroying livelihoods, the media offered support for the rioters’ cause, which they invoked time and again to justify their criminal acts.
That’s why CNN’s Chris Cuomo said, “Please, show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful.”That’s why his colleague, Don Lemon, compared the riots to the Boston Tea Party, saying, “This is how our country started.”
That’s why Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued“the whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable.” That’s why incoming Vice President Kamala Harris urged her supporters to contribute to a fund to pay bail for militant anarchists who set fire to Minneapolis. That’s why reporters at MSNBC and CNN described fiery, riotous scenes as “mostly peaceful protests”—sometimes while buildings and cars burned in the background.
As my colleague Tristan Justice recently chronicled, this default posture of support for the riots was pervasive in the media. GQ, Slate, Mother Jones, Time Magazine, Vox, The New York Times, NPR—all of them ran news stories, analyses, and columns justifying the violence, praising the rioters, and mulling over the deeper meaning of it all.Condemnations were few and attenuated.
They won’t do that about the pro-Trump rioters at the capitol. In his monologue Wednesday night, Tucker Carlson made the good point that we have to find a way through our political divisions and this moment of crisis. Above all, we have to learn to live together.
There’s no option to peacefully divide and go our separate ways, so if we want to fix this, he said, we need to try to understand why Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was shot and killed in the capitol, was there in the first place. What was she doing there?
Our elites—in the media, in corporate America, in politics—have no interest in that question. They don’t want to understand people like Babbitt because they don’t actually want to share a republic with them.To paraphrase Rick Klein of ABC News, they want to cleanse the country of Trump supporters, period.
It won’t be easy. Trump’s supporters aren’t just going to disappear because Anderson Cooper thinks they’re gross. Plenty of media people, along with plenty of Democratic leaders, spent Wednesday and Thursday arguing that Trump gave the protesters the idea to storm the capitol, that he egged them on and incited them.
But the media, which sowed the wind all year long with loose talk about riots, did far more to bring down the whirlwind on Wednesday than Trump did. When you argue for months and months that there’s nothing wrong with rioting or mob action or fighting with the police, and that we have to try to understand the rioters and their complaints, don’t be surprised if a certain segment of the population takes you at your word.
None of this is to excuse or defend the people who stormed the capitol. Like the mobs that stormed through American cities this spring and summer, they should have been stopped—by force, if necessary. Turns out Sen. Tom Cotton was right all along.
But it is to say that both groups were motivated by strongly held beliefs that, in their minds, justified rioting. In the case of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, it was the belief that America is in the throes of white supremacy and systemic racism, and that police kill disproportionate numbers of black people. In the case of the pro-Trump mob at the capitol, it was the belief that the election was stolen, rigged, fraudulent, and that no one would listen to them or take them seriously.
I happen to think both these sets of claims, on the BLM side and the Trump side, are misguided and wrong. But not our media elites.They are squarely on the side of the BLM mob and against the pro-Trump mob, and they have zero interest in trying to understand why all those people showed up at the Capitol on a Wednesday in January.
They do, however, have a keen interest in cracking down on the wrong kind of mob. Their outrage isn’t just a performance or a pose. It’s also a mask hiding something worse than hypocrisy: anticipation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.
Even before the horrible year that was 2020, New Year’s Eve celebrations have long been filled with the near-certain expectation that things will definitely get better. Generally speaking, it’s a fine sentiment. Optimism is good; hope is good; and striving to improve the future from where we are today led us from the cave to the fields, across vast oceans, and into the limitless of outer space.
But nothing magical happens when the calendar year flips over. There’s no unexplained scientific phenomenon that shifts the incalculable number of atoms in our known universe into undaunted forces for good simply because we’ve reached the conclusion of this year’s cycle through the Gregorian calendar. Instead, history tells us things can always get worse.
After the stock market crashed in 1929, the Great Depression didn’t reach its darkest days until 1933. The 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria was followed by the invasion of Poland in 1939, then the steamrolling of France and near-defeat of Britain in 1940.
Yet while there’s no iron-clad guarantee that 2021 will be great, every one of us can contribute to the effort to make a redemptive year a reality.
No government action will make 2021 better than what we just went through in 2020. As with most positive change, any meaningful, lasting shifts in the trajectory of our towns and our nation will stem from individuals choosing to do good.
World events of a grand nature will remain outside our ability to master. Pandemics, wildfires, and — unless you live in one of a handful of swing states — presidential elections involving more than 158 million votes are things almost entirely beyond our control. Yet, even in the worst of times, we can control how we interact with our fellow Americans, and a shift in the right direction in this regard is one of the simplest — albeit difficult — steps we can take.
It’s within the grasp of each of us, as individuals, to decide if what we both consume and contribute is life-affirming or malevolent, restorative or toxic. In our workplaces, online using social media, with our families, and interacting with total strangers, we are responsible for how we live amongst one another.
In our current rancorous political environment, we’ll have a chance at a better year if we realize most genuine conversations or debates aren’t best served in a tit-for-tat on Facebook or Twitter but in person over coffee, lunch, or a drink after work. This doesn’t mean surrendering our principles or allowing ourselves to be walked over. It does, however, require we prudently recognize whose minds are open to change, and those who refuse to be unconvinced of what they believe; which arguments may bear fruitful discussion, and those that will only lead to more frustration and anger this country can do without.
Regardless of one’s faith, there is wisdom in the instructions given in the Bible’s 2 Timothy:
Again I say, don’t get involved in foolish, ignorant arguments that only start fights. A servant of the Lord must not quarrel but must be kind to everyone, be able to teach, and be patient with difficult people. (2 Timothy 2:23)
As the author of the epistle to Timothy later notes, being honest doesn’t mean being needlessly hurtful or tactless, and he reminds us to “Gently instruct those who oppose the truth.” There’s an Aristotelian golden mean between failing to state a necessary truth and being an overly blunt jerk about it.
Similar valuable cautions are given in Titus 3:2 not to slander, to “avoid quarreling,” and to “show true humility to everyone.” Later in the chapter, we’re also reminded it may be best to walk away from those who continue to engage in foolish controversies:
If people are causing divisions among you, give a first and second warning. After that, have nothing more to do with them. (Titus 3:10)
Admittedly, it’s hard to do, especially in a climate that often mistakenly views the last person who responded in a Facebook fight as “the winner” or politeness as a sign of “weakness.” Even so, it’s one of the few ways to lower the temperature to the point where authentic, amiable exchanges and healthy debates are possible. We’ll be a better nation in 2021 if Americans take time to ask and reflect, “Will this truly make things better?” before acting.
Furthermore, giving 2021 a fighting chance will involve constantly “checking one’s priors” at the door. Or, as Jordan Peterson has phrased it, we’d do well to “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something that you don’t.”
As more Americans limit their media consumption to voices and opinions they already agree with, ideological and philosophical blind spots pose an increasingly higher risk. Yet rarely are things as simple as either the “left” or “right” (antiquated terms to begin with) being absolutely correct or absolutely wrong.
Taking in the views of only a small territory of the political spectrum is one of the contributing factors that led us to a place, never more evident than in 2020, where one half of the country can’t even stand being in line next to the other half — six feet apart, no less. We don’t have to agree, but we have to be able to at least relate to where those we disagree with are coming from. This begins with the humility to acknowledge we may be wrong about something, or, at least, not as correct as we think we are.
“Genuine conversation is exploration, articulation, and strategizing,” Peterson writes, “When you’re involved in a genuine conversation, you’re listening.” This may also require mingling outside a safe, “bubbled,” friend group, especially if that group is comprised of similarly like-minded folks.
It means not assuming to know the totality of someone’s beliefs and values based on their stance on a single issue. It means being OK with someone thinking, even acting, in a way we personally disagree with (as long as it doesn’t directly infringe on anyone’s rights to life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness). A tolerance of true intellectual diversity will be a key factor in helping 2021 rebound after the past year.
In what could be the most important New Year’s resolution we make, by exercising humility, patience, and grace, we can each take responsibility in helping make 2021 the year we all need it to be, one individual choice at a time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joshua Lawson is managing editor of The Federalist. He is a graduate of Queen’s University as well as Hillsdale College where he received a master’s degree in American politics and political philosophy. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaMLawson.
The only thing worse than listening to a screaming toddler is seeing his smug, tear-stained but smiling face after his parent gives in to his irreverent outburst and rewards him for his tantrum. That’s all I could think about as I walked the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, Saturday night after several news outlets called the presidential race for Joe Biden.
A hopeful energy pulsed through State Street, the bustling pedestrian mall of restaurants and storefronts bookended by the university and the Capitol. I walked past business after business boarded up tight in anticipation of a fiery post-election purge, but instead, front doors were propped open on the uncharacteristically warm November night as groups of friends chattered and shopped and drank in merriment. No sirens or chanting interrupted my pleasant patio dinner date.
I breathed easier than I would have under different circumstances, I’ll admit. Had the media called the race differently, I likely wouldn’t have left the apartment and I certainly wouldn’t have neared downtown. Underneath that peaceful veneer, however, remains the gross reality that things are calm only because the snotty toddler got his way.
Unity Is a Joke
These are the infantile adults that were told “no” in 2016 by the half of the country they most despised and spent the next four years screaming that everything was unfair and that those who disagreed with them were racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes. Instead of biting and hitting, they looted and vandalized, and the equally childish media covered for them.
They promised to “impeach the motherf-cker,” canceled dissenters, and maligned anyone who wanted to “Make America Great Again.” They smeared mask rebels and churchgoers as grandma-killers and squawked in our faces that boys are girls, silence is violence, and all women are inherently trustworthy, straight white men be damned.Only now that they think they’ve won do they have any interest in faux “unity.”
In a recent editorial, the Washington Examiner posited, “Biden has a historic opportunity to heal the country’s wounds, and if he wants an admired legacy, he will start now to fulfill the promise of his Delaware speech and bring uniter’s, not dividers, into his administration.” Conservatives who fall for this “unity” schtick are hopelessly naïve.
While things might be quiet now, all hell is sure to break loose again the moment things don’t go in the way of the tantrum-throwers. This is because the wrong side won — or at least the fact that they believe they did proves the point. The toddlers got what they wanted. Their abhorrent behavior was reinforced with their most prized reward: the end of the Trump presidency.
Now rather than watching the thugs tear down and set ablaze our livelihoods, we’re stuck looking at their smug faces instead. It was always going to be one or the other: Elect us and we’ll destroy the country, or elect Trump and we’ll destroy your property.
For this reason, the relative peace in our cities now is a bad omen. This cultural calm is a reminder that, like the short-sighted parent capitulating to her toddler, the electorate traded long-term stability for short-term quiet. We didn’t bring an end to the fearmongering and the incivility; we put the uncivil fearmongers in power, and they have sinister plans for their political opponents.
Political Religion Makes All of Life a Holy War
This all goes back to the infantilization of the left, and it’s not surprising. There’s a reason shop-owners were afraid of spurned Biden supporters but relaxed when they remembered the frustrated Trumpsters had no intention of acting out.
When Trump supporters heard the unwelcome news that Biden would ostensibly be the president-elect, they were bummed. Some were mad, others were suspicious, and others felt defeated and discouraged — but they dutifully returned to their daily grinds, clocking in for work, caring for their families, and carrying on their commitments to their churches. That’s because, for so many on the right, politics is an add-on. Family and faith, however imperfectly, inform civic values, but politics is no replacement for those superior institutions.
For many on the left, that isn’t the case. For those who have chosen to worship at the feet of progressivism as religion, this election was life or death because it was central to everything else.
For a population who has pushed off marriage, disposed of its children, abandoned church, and relinquished its independence to the nanny state and its individualism to identity politics, to lose an election is to lose it all. All battles therefore become moral, meaning victory by any means necessary — including stealing and destroying and sometimes even killing — is justified.
Don’t Let the Leftist Toddlers Get Their Way
That leaves us quite a divided America. How can we ever hope for unity when one side holds theother hostage? Give us what we want, or else. That’s no way to start a mutually beneficial negotiation.
So conservatives are left with a choice. Will we continue caving in to the boisterous toddler until it becomes an unruly and insufferable adult? Or will stand our ground and endure the tantrums until the left tuckers itself out on its own fickle rhetoric and runs its own cities into the soil? Don’t relish the present quiet; realize what it stands for.
Presidents come and go, and if Trump does finally lose re-election after all the legal battles run their course, so be it. The worst thing for our country isn’t a Biden presidency. It’s giving the leftist toddlers what they want.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
For as difficult as the past year has been, from politics to the pandemic, it has at least helped to illuminate and clarify certain things about the state of our country.
Above all, 2020 has illuminated and clarified the relationship between America’s elites—in government, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, corporate America and the corporate press—and everyone else. In short, our elites believe, contra Thomas Jefferson, that most people were born with saddles on their backs while a favored few were born booted and spurred to ride them, legitimately.
The rigors and suffering of the coronavirus pandemic demonstrated the perseverance, resilience, and generosity of the American people, but also exposed—sometimes in mind-boggling detail—the greed, hypocrisy, and indifference of our elites.
We like to think we live in a country where everyone, rich and poor alike, is equal before the law. But we know now, thanks to the exigencies and emergencies of 2020, that isn’t true—or at least it’s only true sometimes, when the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to weigh in and enforce equal treatment.
But left unchecked, as many of our leaders were over the past year, we all know what they will do. In no particular order, then, here are the five big things we learned about America and its elites in 2020.
1. Democrats Don’t Care About Science—Or Religious Liberty
This year we learned Democrats aren’t the “party of science,” and in fact don’t care about science at all—especially if it gets in the way of their policy agenda or the exercise of emergency powers.
How else do you explain the actions of Democratic governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo and California’s Gavin Newsom? They both tried to ban indoor religious gatherings based the unscientific belief that people are more likely to contract COVID-19 in a church than in a liquor store or a Lowe’s. In both cases, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such restrictions were unconstitutional because they singled out houses of worship for unequal treatment.
Lost in the media coverage of these and similar cases was the disturbing fact that these governors weren’t basing their pandemic-related restrictions on science or data. When a Los Angeles judge earlier this month struck down an outdoor dining ban issued by county health officials, he noted that the county hadn’t presented any scientific evidence justifying the ban or even done a basic cost-benefit analysis on the effects of shutting down more than 30,000 restaurants.
“It’s not rational to make a decision without doing everything you’re supposed to do, and you haven’t,” the judge said. “You’re imposing restrictions but there’s no reason to believe it will help with ICU capacity.” In all these cases, science had nothing to do with the attempted shutdown. Power and prejudice did.
2. Lockdowns For Thee But Not For Me
Speaking of Newsom, he became the poster boy for elite hypocrisy when he was photographed at a fancy Napa Valley restaurant with a bunch of wealthy and powerful friends right after imposing harsh pandemic-related lockdowns on much of the state.
He wasn’t alone. All over the country, elected officials—almost all of them Democrats—were spotted flouting their own pandemic rules and restrictions. My colleague Tristan Justice catalogued some of the most high-profile instances.
There was Austin Mayor Steve Adler telling residents to stay home—and threatening them with more restrictive measures if they didn’t comply—while he was vacationing in a Mexican resort town.
There was Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, who boarded a flight for Houston to visit his daughter for Thanksgiving right after telling residents to “avoid travel if you can.”
There was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, mask-less, visiting a shut-down hair salon in San Francisco, and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot doing the same thing—then getting caught mask-less in the streets with a bullhorn at a rally celebrating Joe Biden’s victory. Her excuse (they all have excuses) was that the “crowd was gathered whether I was there or not.”
On and on, all over the country. The mayors of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, D.C., all of them Democrats, all of them caught flouting their own lockdown orders.
We can conclude two things from this. The first is that our ruling elites, despite their grave intonations and warnings, don’t really believe the coronavirus is very dangerous or that their lockdown orders are necessary—at least not for them. The second is that they hate you and think you’re stupid.
3. Lockdown Elites Don’t Care If Small Businesses Die
The elites’ hypocrisy went beyond their personal behavior. It also affected the pandemic policies they supported and imposed. Especially in blue states and cities, elected officials opted for pandemic restrictions that disproportionately harmed small businesses and working families, while giving generous carve-outs and exemptions to special interests.
Nothing illustrated this better than a viral video by a distraught restaurant owner in Los Angeles, who was justifiably upset over an outdoor dining ban that shuttered all bars and restaurants but exempted the film and television industry. Angela Marsden, owner of the Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill in Los Angeles, had spent tens of thousands of dollars to create an outdoor dining space that complied with Centers for Disease Control and county health guidelines in an attempt to save her business, only to have the rules changed on her without warning.
The real slap in the face, though, was an outdoor dining area for a television production set up not 50 feet from her restaurant. The two dining spaces were nearly identical. The only difference is that she, a small business owner, wasn’t powerful or important enough to get an exemption.
4. Silicon Valley Wants You to Shut Up
Another disturbing revelation in 2020 was that Big Tech doesn’t care about free speech or the free exchange of ideas, and will, given the right circumstances, censor what you can read and share on their platforms according to criteria they invent out of thin air.
We saw this over and over again, not only with COVID-19 commentary and reporting but with coverage of the presidential election and the many instances of fraud and illegal electioneering that were documented in the days and weeks after the vote. Twitter and Facebook in particular were aggressive in their censorship of any opinions or information that challenged their chosen narratives about the pandemic and the election.
Again, science and data and verifiable facts didn’t factor into these decisions. Experts like former White House advisor Scott Atlas were censored by Twitter for sharing studies that showed the ineffectiveness of masks. Amazon did the same thing to former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson’s booklet on the ineffectiveness of masks.
Most infamously, Twitter and Facebook conspiredwith corporate media before the election to impose a blackout on coverage of the Hunter Biden scandal, including an unprecedented move by Twitter to suspend The New York Post’s account for breaking the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails. This was done rather straightforwardly to shield voters from the Biden family’s corruption. After the election, the FBI confirmed that it is in fact investigating Hunter Biden.
5. Elites Are Okay With Chaos and Violence From the Left
Another glaring instance of elite hypocrisy in 2020 was the reaction to riots and looting in American cities throughout the spring and summer. Because Democrats and corporate media agreed with the ideology and politics driving this violence, and approved of groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM) that were fomenting it, they excused it. Over and over, reporters and commentators characterized violent riots and urban unrest as “mostly peaceful protests,”sometimes even while showing images of burning buildings and mayhem in the streets.
By contrast, peaceful and orderly protests of pandemic lockdown orders in the spring were reported as dangerous and threatening, not because they were actually dangerous or threatening but because the protesters were mostly conservatives and Republicans who thought governors and mayors were overstepping their authority. At the same time, these same outlets downplayed or simply refused to report on the many instances of violence, including shootings, perpetrated by Antifa rioters and BLM demonstrators across the country.
We learned from all this that the left is prepared to burn down cities to seize power, and will make excuses for rioters and looters as long as it serves their political and ideological agenda.
That’s of a piece with everything else we’ve learned about our elites in 2020. They don’t really care about the things they claim to care about. They don’t care about science or data or even keeping us safe during a pandemic. They don’t care about small businesses or working families or getting kids back to school. They don’t care about free speech or the free exercise of religion or anything else that hinders their power—and they certainly don’t care about you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Mollie Hemingway: When People Claim The Election Was Rigged, They Include Big Tech And Big Media
Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway said on Fox News Thursday that allegations of a rigged election include big tech and big media conspiring to elect Joe Biden in addition to charges of voter fraud.
“We hear about the rigging of the election,” Hemingway said, “but partly what they mean is the meddling on the part of big media and big tech to affect the outcome of the election.”
Hemingway continued, pointing out that when major revelations about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, began to surface implicating the former vice president in corrupt and potentially criminal overseas business activity, the stories were suppressed online by Silicon Valley tech giants and delegitimized by legacy media.
“When the New York Post broke the story about these emails,” Hemingway said, referencing the paper’s reporting from an abandoned Delaware laptop expanding the web of Biden’s scandals, “even though they were verified and people who were recipients of these emails verified they were real, the media suppressed that story.”
In October, the New York Post published a series of exposes revealing that Joe Biden stood to rake in millions from Chinese communist leaders, lied repeatedly when denying conversations about his son’s business, and leveraged his high-powered position to benefit the family. A Biden family business partner-turned whistleblower even came forward to corroborate details of the New York Post’s reporting.
The Post’s journalism that made Democrats look bad got the nation’s oldest paper locked out of its Twitter account for two weeks after the platform blocked users from sharing its blockbuster reporting.
Hemingway also pointed out that this week’s news that Hunter Biden is under a federal investigation had already been reported, revealed days before the election.
“We actually also knew that there was an FBI investigation into Hunter Biden before the election except that the media suppressed it,” Hemingway said, depriving the American people of being fully informed when casting their ballots to hand over the country to Joe Biden.
“This meddling on the part of big media and big tech, which banned people from even talking about this on Facebook and Twitter, is a very serious problem and a huge threat to the republic,” Hemingway said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tristan Justice is a staff writer at The Federalist focusing on the 2020 presidential campaigns. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
“Largely unnoticed,” purposely ignored, or actively suppressed? The Daily Beast’s reporting team on Hunter Biden’s legal woes sound somewhat surprised that the FBI’s money-laundering probe didn’t get noticed before the election:
The Justice Department’s announcement on Wednesday that it was investigating Hunter Biden, for what he deemed to be “tax affairs,” took root several years ago with a much broader inquiry that includedpossible money laundering, according to a report by CNN.
That inquiry reportedly fizzled, leading instead to a probe on tax matters that is now being led by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware. But evidence of the larger probe was apparent in the markings on a series of documents that were made public—but went largely unnoticed—in the days leading up to the November election, according to two individuals familiar with the matter.
The word “unnoticed” is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. Not only did it get noticed, it got reported by Sinclair TV’s James Rosen a few days before the election. A large number of online outlets — mostly conservative — picked up on Rosen’s report about the FBI’s criminal probe of Hunter Biden, including us. Rosen reported that Tony Bobulinski had cooperated in the probe, and that its focus was money laundering:
A U.S. Justice Department official has confirmed to Sinclair Broadcast Group that a 2019 FBI investigation into Hunter Biden, son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, is still active.
The 2019 criminal investigation looks into Hunter and his associates on allegations of money-laundering.
Sinclair investigative reporter James Rosen spoke with a central witness in these allegations, who suggested that former vice president Joe Biden knew more than he has acknowledged about his son’s overseas dealings.
That witness was Bobulinski, who went public about Hunter’s business dealings after the Biden campaign tried sloughing him off as a malcontent business partner. Rosen himself addressed this last night:
This didn’t go “largely unnoticed.” It was widely noticed, everywhere except in the mainstream media. Why? It started with the New York Post exposé of Hunter’s laptop, which Biden’s team claimed was Russian disinformation and social media platforms actively suppressed:
MacIsaac also said he copied the contents of one of the laptops for Giuliani. And, sure enough, those contents quickly made their way to conservative media personalities and outlets. Giuliani and others, including Steve Bannon, appeared on network television, stirring conspiracy theories and pushing unsubstantiated claims about Hunter’s overseas business dealings.
One of the main outlets pushing emails and pictures from the hard drive was the New York Post. And for one of its stories, the paper published what appeared to be federal law enforcement documents given to MacIsaac in return for his handing over the Biden laptops.
One of those documents—from the FBI— included a case number that had the code associated with an ongoing federal money laundering investigation in Delaware, according to several law enforcement officials who reviewed the document. Another document—one with a grand jury subpoena number—appeared to show the initials of two assistant U.S. attorneys linked to the Wilmington, Delaware, office.
Gee — you mean if media outlets had actually checked the details, they might have found a real story about corruption around Joe Biden? As in, acting like real journalistic organizations and speaking truth to power? The deuce you say. The excuse in this article for failing to report on this — even with Rosen’s report already made public — was that law enforcement wouldn’t comment and the Biden team stonewalled the Daily Beast. But the documents themselves apparently left that very big clue two months ago that they’re reporting …. now.
[Update: That’s too harsh in regard to the Daily Beast, actually. They did try to follow up. That puts them head and shoulders above other media outlets … like, for instance …]
As Glenn Greenwald says — memories …
It’s not just media outlets that should get the heat, either. Twitter and Facebook actively suppressed the New York Post article — and the New York Post itself — for days.Democrats called it Russian disinformation, and both Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey nearly twisted their ankles in a rush to suppress it. Now, and only after Hunter Biden issued a press release acknowledging the accuracy of Rosen’s reporting, have all of these “institutions” suddenly cured their myopia.
The clear conclusion is that the national media didn’t want to report anything detrimental to Joe Biden, no matter how accurate it might have been. Now that the election is over, they’ll tell their readers and viewers that the story went “largely unnoticed” [see update above as to TDB, which did at least notice it] as a passive-voice dodge to avoid responsibility for their active decision to ignore and in some cases suppress it. It’s an utter disgrace.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
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