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.
Apologies in advance for making you consider something uttered by David French and Jennifer Rubin, but the two work for prominent news publications that unfortunately shape our national dialogue, so bear with me.
“DeSantis actually called Russia’s grotesque, aggressive invasion of a sovereign country a ‘territorial dispute.’ … Astonishing. Dangerous.”—French, New York Times columnist
“[DeSantis] has decided that if you can’t beat the pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party, then join them. He declared that Russia’s brutal and unjustified war of aggression against a sovereign Ukraine is actually ‘a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia…’”—Rubin, Washington Post columnist
The “territorial dispute” quote is from Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ recently released statement about the ongoing war in Ukraine (a place our elected leaders in Washington sometimes refer to as “Our Last Great Hope.”) What he said more fully is that “becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia” is not a “vital interest” to the United States.
That’s a view shared by anyone who thinks yet another foreign war without clear and substantial strategic benefit to America is not something we should busy ourselves with. (It’s not like we have any pressing problems here!) But French, Rubin and the rest of the national media really hate that view. It’s “pro-Putin”! It’s “astonishing” and “dangerous”!
DeSantis should say it one more time for the people in the back. The war is literally a dispute over territory. Russian leadership claims Ukraine as its own and the Kremlin’s settlement offers are based almost solely on territory concessions (with some details related to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).
“I believe that Russians and Ukrainians are one people … one nation, in fact,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in 2019. In some parts of Ukraine, even Ukrainians claim that. “Many In Eastern Ukraine Want To Join Russia,” read a NPR headline in 2017.
The Washington Post last year found at least 15 percent of residents of Ukraine’s Donbas region said they wanted to join Russia. Maybe, just maybe, this has something to do with Russia and Ukraine being literally part of the same nation for more than half a century.
I know that’s not very sexy for the nerds in the media who prefer to think of the war like a Marvel movie where a corny villain can be overpowered by a united and freedom-loving Justice League, but that’s not the case.
Democracy is at stake!
*Cue Max Boot solemnly removing his little hat in reverence.*
It turns out that discussing the conflict doesn’t first require the speakers to confess their love for Ukraine and hatred for Putin while shedding a tear. It’s not the romantic affair that Rubin, French, et al. want it to be.
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.
After the death of George Floyd, leaders in Democratic cities across the country, who were alternately scared and desperate to virtue signal, refused to take action while the ensuing riots and looting did billions of dollars in damage to city centers across the U.S. And amid many callous and inept responses to the crisis, Seattle is a leading contender for the locality that handled things the worst.
Today, the city agreed to settle a lawsuit in federal district court that alleged the city violated the civil rights of several business owners after it ordered police to withdraw from a section of its Capitol Hill neighborhood and let protesters set up their own lawless “autonomous zone.” The area became alternately known as either the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) or Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP). This left business owners in the areas completely abandoned as law and order broke down — without a police presence, there was rampant violence, drug markets, and literal armed warlords patrolling the streets.
The settlement comes after a federal judge levied major sanctions on the city for apparently deleting thousands of text messages involving, among others, the city’s former mayor and police chief relating to their handling of the autonomous zone. The notion that city officials had something to hide here is certainly at odds with the rhetoric during the month the city abandoned the business owners in the CHAZ.
Former Mayor Jenny Durkan went on CNN and said what was happening in the CHAZ was “a block party atmosphere.” “We could have the summer of love,” she said. When Trump lambasted the city for abandoning law and order, this resulted in a defensive Twitter spat between Durkan and the former president, and Gov. Jay Inslee told Trump to “stay out of Washington state’s business.”
Not that there was ever any doubt, but with Seattle settling this lawsuit it’s now impossible to argue that city officials weren’t encouraging violence and guilty of abdicating their most basic responsibility to keep citizens safe. Or is it? If you’re wondering who would be so desperate to cling to a political narrative they would insist letting anarchists take control of your city wasn’t so bad, well, here’s today’s Seattle Times write-up featuring an epic “challenge accepted” moment:
While CHOP was mostly peaceful, there were instances of vandalism and sporadic outbreaks of violence, including fights, an attempt to torch the abandoned police precinct and at least four shootings that claimed two lives of two teenagers, including a 16-year-old boy whose death led the city to end the protest.
That’s right, other than the fights, shootings, multiple homicides, and an attempt to burn a police station to the ground, it was “mostly peaceful,” says the local newspaper. Who among us wouldn’t mistake what was going on here for a “summer of love”?
The media’s suspicious coalescing around the phrase “mostly peaceful” to describe the Floyd protests in the summer of 2020 was always transparently dishonest. The CNN chyron declaring the protests in Kenosha “mostly peaceful” as the city was in flames in the background is now iconic.
However, it is truly astonishing that two years later a major newspaper is still clinging to this phrase like some talisman they hope will ward off holding their local leaders responsible for, among many other crimes, facilitating the deaths of two young black men.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
As much as leftists should be hated for agitating racial conflict and violence, there’s something kind of sad, in a pathetic way, in witnessing the disillusionment of true believers finding out they’ve been conned by the very movement they helped push forward.
Such has been the case in recent weeks, between Rihanna’s “sellout” half-time performance at the Super Bowl and the muted response (i.e. no deadly rioting) to the death of Tyre Nichols, leaving some of the Black Lives Matter faithful with heavy hearts.
The Washington Post’s resident race hustler Karen Attiah on Monday bemoaned Rihanna’s “selling out” by performing at the Super Bowl. The ungrateful immigrant singer had said in 2019 that she turned down a previous invitation from the NFL because, “For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn’t be a sellout. I couldn’t be an enabler.” She was presumably referring to the league’s punishment of Colin Kaepernick and others who protested by kneeling during the national anthem on game days.
“With Rihanna’s performance and her silence on the issues she claims to have stood for, the true winner of the night was the NFL,” wrote Attiah. “She has shown them, and all racist institutions, that if they can withstand Black protest and outrage for a few years, put on some cool shows and donate to charities, then everything will be hunky-dory…”
Charles Blow wrote similarly in The New York Times last month after a national story about a young black man who died in police custody, following his attempt to flee arrest. Arrests were made of the officers involved, all of them black, and they’ve been charged with the death of Tyre Nichols. This is formerly known as “the judicial process,” but because Nichols’ death didn’t result in another round of calls for reparations and the eternal subjugation of whites, Blow was miffed.
“It was more snuff porn with Black victims, in a country becoming desensitized to the violence because of its sheer volume,” he wrote. “America — and the world — had the realization that police violence was a problem, and then it simply walked away before the work was done and the war was won. … What fell away were the evanescent allies, poll-chasing politicians and cooped-up Covid kids who had used the protests as an opportunity to congregate.”
Wait a second. You mean to tell me the 2020 summer of horror was a manufactured hysteria for political purposes and that once its goal was achieved — the unseating of Donald Trump as president — it all seemed to disappear? No way!
Cold reality is finally setting in. Santa isn’t real after all.
Blow and Attiah might be the last people in America to realize that BLM as a national entity is nothing but a scam — even in the literal sense of the word, as endless stories have come out since 2020 exposing the group’s leaders as frauds and money embezzlers using innocent donations to enrich themselves with expensive homes and private jet travel.
And celebrities like Rihanna who promoted the notion that black athletes, who are paid millions of dollars, are also victims of white supremacy aren’t serious and should never have been taken seriously. Is the NFL in any way noticeably different today than it was in 2020? Of course not. But Democrats have the bulk of the power in Washington, so that put Rihanna and others in a much better mood.
It’s too bad Blow and Attiah had to find out this way.
Anonymous sources were once rarely used in journalism. They would only be cited when trying to preserve someone’s physical safety or report on the most sensitive national security matters, and there was an expectation that such unusual sourcing be reviewed by editors and carefully corroborated whenever possible.
Now anonymous sourcing has become the norm in reporting and is frequently used as a political weapon to disseminate Democrats’ talking points and smear their enemies. The illicit use of anonymous sources to launch libel against Democrats’ enemies ballooned after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, and the tactic was used to develop the Russia-collusion hoax and multiple other smears.
The most recent example may be the Chinese spy balloon news cycle. When word reached the public that Red China spent days hovering over the United States collecting sensitive information, public outrage ensued. Dozens of legislators and governors and Trump demanded President Joe Biden shoot down the balloon as soon as possible.
The Biden administration refused, claiming that neutralizing the airborne threat could cause harm to civilians. This initial claim aired in corporate media, sourced to an anonymous “official” who offered no evidence, that “the balloon did not pose a military or physical threat” to the United States. This decision, once again, drew ire from Americans.
Once the administration finally did shoot down the balloon over the Atlantic, the Biden administration pointed fingers. An unnamed official at the Department of Defense allegedly told reporters at an off-camera press briefing on Feb. 4 that Chinese balloons like this one “transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration.”
That admission kicked off a corporate media frenzy. The press took the Pentagon’s word for it and accused Republicans of a “double standard.” Those who called for the end of the balloon, the press claimed, were hypocrites and Trump even more so because he “failed” to shoot down the spy equipment while in office.
Less than one day later, Trump and several high-level Trump national security officials who would have been briefed about a security breach during their tenure went on the record, with their names behind their statements, to deny any knowledge of Chinese spy balloons surveilling the United States under their watch. https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/109812699029727017/embed
“I don’t ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States,” Mark Esper, who was defense secretary from 2019 to 2020, told CNN.
Christopher Miller, who was acting defense secretary from 2020 to 2021, admitted “the first time I ever heard of anything like this was this weekend.”
“Had not a clue,” Miller said. “If something like that had happened, that’s like a national security threat.”
“I certainly never became aware that there was a three-bus-sized floating device coming across our country for five days, either as CIA director or secretary of state. [And] I’ve talked to others who are on my teams — they don’t know anything about it either,” said Mike Pompeo, who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency and secretary of state under Trump.
Robert O’Brien, another former Trump national security advisor, said, “Unequivocally, I have never been briefed on the issue.” Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe outright stated the Biden administration’s anonymously sourced claim was “not true.”
Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe reiterates his statement that there were not 3 Chinese spy balloon incidents under Trump:
Even former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has a history of fabricating intel and smears about Trump, said the Biden administration’s conveniently timed revelation was news to him.
“I don’t know of any balloon flights by any power over the United States during my tenure, and I’d never heard of any of that occurring before I joined in 2018,” Bolton told Fox News. “I haven’t heard of anything that occurred after I left either.”
Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, “clarified” two days after the Pentagon’s initial accusation that “we did not detect those threats” at the time Trump was in office. The Narrative™ that Trump failed to shoot down Chinese spy balloons had already made its way onto the pages and TV screens of millions by the time the Biden administration decided to walk back its smears against the previous administration filtered through an anonymous source to compliant media outlets.
On Feb. 7, days after Trump staff denied on the record and one day after the Pentagon claimed Red China’s repeat airborne espionage was only discovered retrospectively, corporate media still insisted spy balloons were “spotted on several occasions during President Donald Trump’s administration, including three instances where they traveled near sensitive US military facilities and training areas.”
The source? “People familiar with the matter” who worked under Trump. The people making these claims were conveniently not named, giving them cover to make any accusations they liked and media to air them with no accountability for either entity.
The Smear Operation Playbook
Classic journalism ethics state anonymous sourcing should be rare because the “public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources’ reliability.” Yet the practice of relying on unnamed information suppliers to communicate breaking news has become commonplace, especially when fronting smears against Democrats’ opponents. As a matter of fact, anonymously sourcing what later prove to be complete lies is often rewarded by the journalism industry today.
The most notable example of anonymous sourcing as a weapon was the Russia hoax. That is a years-long coup led by Democrats and intelligence agencies with the eager help of the corporate media to disqualify Trump from the White House and prevent his presidency from being effective. The Russia hoax also resulted in failed impeachments. It’s fair to say it never could have been pulled off without outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and more using unnamed sources to discredit their political enemies.
The Trump years were rife with media manipulation involving anonymous sources. In one dramatic episode, the media claimed to prove that Donald Trump Jr. was sent an email by Wikileaks giving him early access to leaked emails from top Democrats. Not only was the report untrue — CNN never saw the source email to Donald Trump Jr. and instead relied on the word of two anonymous sources who got the date on the email wrong — but the botched CNN report dramatically exposed how anonymous sources can lead to misinformation.
CNN’s faulty reporting was immediately “confirmed” by MSNBC and CBS. Of course, confirming erroneous reporting is an impossibility unless all three news outlets were relying on the same sources, confident that their anonymity would create the false impression that multiple sources could verify the story. In this case, the sources appear to have come from the office of Rep. Adam Schiff, a known liar and key perpetrator of the Russiagate hoax. This issue of multiple news outlets citing the same anonymous source has happened more than once, and it continues to be a problem.
But that failure was just the tip of the iceberg. During the Trump years, the media also claimed Trump’s national security adviser illicitly reached out to Russia’s government before Trump took office; that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was linked to the Russian Direct Investment Fund; that Trump attorney Michael Cohen confessed that Trump “directed” him to lie about contacting a Russian official; that Russia offered members of the Taliban bounties in exchange for killing American soldiers and Trump knew about it; that Trump pressured the Georgia secretary of state’s office to “find the fraud”; and many, many more complete fabrications relying on sources who hid their smears behind anonymity.
All of these claims were unvetted, untrue, and should have never been published. Instead, some were showered with praise and status. Others were barely corrected long after the coverage served its political purpose.
Real reporting requires due diligence. Corporate media, desperate to aid Democrats in their conquest of any Americans who disagree with them, have become pipelines of government information manipulation, especially from intelligence agencies. As a result, anonymous sources are easily duplicated and repackaged as “independent confirmation,” and so-called “news” sites are plagued with unverified intelligence and information — or, worse, allegations they verifiably know are untrue.
And they are happy about it. In 2019, then-New York Times Public Editor Liz Spayd denounced her employer for being “too timid in its decisions not to publish the material it had” quickly about Trump’s nonexistent connection with Russia.
“The idea that you only publish once every piece of information is in and fully vetted is a false construct,” she wrote. “If you know the FBI is investigating, say, a presidential candidate, using significant resources and with explosive consequences, that should be enough to write.”
Her call to normalize the unprofessionalism of partisan actors in newsrooms received amplification from fellow journos. The ubiquitous use and elevation of this unethical practice may have been popularized during the rise of Trump, but it has far outlived his presidency, something that independent media have routinely observed for years.
Today’s media complex relies on readers to keep trusting what it says, regardless of its extremely tainted records. The press doesn’t deserve that kind of benefit of the doubt.
Americans are still unclear on how many Chinese aircraft have compromised U.S. airspace and who let them. What they shouldn’t be unclear about is that the corrupt, untrustworthy, and democracy-threatening corporate media use anonymous sources to advance disinformation operations and push political narratives that often have no relationship to the truth.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Instead of uniting Americans around the threat of China’s military provocations, the spy balloon episode produced a fog of misinformation and partisan finger-pointing.
If there was any doubt that we are engaged in some sort of cold war or contest for global superiority with China, the emergence of the CCP surveillance balloon over the United States should eliminate that. There’s no question China is being intentionally provocative.
And why wouldn’t it? The CCP is paying close attention. Chinese leaders have correctly assessed America is so politically and culturally dysfunctional that blatant acts of provocation can be done with impunity because blatant acts of hostility will just become more fodder for our domestic political disputes.
Our lack of national unity has been a national security problem for a long time, but as far as China’s concerned, it became abundantly clear just how bad a problem it was in 2020. The media and those otherwise responsible for “fortifying” our elections decided we weren’t allowed to say Covid came from Wuhan and started banning people from social media for saying the virus leaked from a Chinese lab. Regardless of the fact that China’s irresponsible behavior was to blame for the deaths of millions of Americans, it became an important domestic political priority to convert a global plague into baseless accusations of racism so it could be used as a cudgel in a presidential election.
Similarly, when the local media first noticed the surveillance balloon over the northern states, there was clearly a scramble by the Defense Department — which by all appearances was aware of the balloon and could have shot it down over the Aleutian Islands but let it continue, hoping civilians wouldn’t notice — to avoid having to explain why it was forced into doing something reactive as a result of public outcry. And since the president is responsible for national security matters, this made him look like he wasn’t doing his job, either.
What could be done so the DOD could avoid having to explain any failures here to avoid public doubt and fear? And what could Biden, who already looks tremendously weak on foreign policy after the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal and his failure to preempt the Russian invasion of Ukraine, do to minimize domestic political blowback?
The answer was obvious: Just go to the well for this one and blame Trump. Of course, that strategy depends on having a wholly credulous media that innately trust conflicted and compromised government officials who care more about political fallout than the safety and security of their country. So naturally, the accusation that the Trump administration looked the other way while several other Chinese spy balloons transited the U.S. was all over the media last week before anyone asked any real questions about whether this was fair or accurate.
After days of top Trump officials, including Trump’s CIA head Mike Pompeo and the former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, publicly denying the story, we’re now getting a situation so absurd it demands the mixing of metaphors: a backhanded walkback.
Monday morning, CNN was up with the story, “Chinese spy balloons under Trump not discovered until after Biden took office.” If you’re inclined to believe the national security apparatus under Trump would have been a little more aggressive in confronting China’s provocations, as most realists are, now the blame has shifted so as to portray the Trump administration as too incompetent to even notice what was going on.
There remains a possibility that this version of events is true. But the way this issue was dealt with by immediately pointing the finger at the previous administration, and then admitting the accusations that made it to the press were devoid of important context, is infuriating, less than reassuring, and difficult to believe.
As for how politics might enter into this transparently insulting and unserious media narrative, it’s probably worth noting that the aforementioned CNN story was written by Natasha Bertrand, a reporter so credulous that she earned the nickname “Fusion Natasha” because she wrote so many inaccurate stories about Trump-Russia collusion that appeared to be fed to her by Fusion GPS, the dodgy opposition research firm behind the so-called “dossier,” as well as other dishonest partisan sources.
Bertrand also holds a special place in President Biden’s heart for her, well, “politically helpful” journalism on Hunter Biden’s laptop. When the New York Post broke that story in October of 2020, Bertrand, then at Politico, wrote up the now-infamous story “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” The article was cited by Joe Biden himself on the presidential debate stage while he was brazenly lying about his knowledge of his son’s corruption, and the broader media used her article to dismiss the need to look into the scandal. Of course, even some of the “former intel officials” Bertrand cited now admit they knew all along the laptop was real and declared it was Russian disinformation anyway.
To bring this full circle, it’s probably worth noting that some of the most damning allegations of Hunter Biden’s corruption involve him being financially compromised by the CCP and President Biden’s personal role in those deals.
“..some of the most damning allegations of Hunter Biden’s corruption involve him being financially compromised by the CCP and President Biden’s personal role in those deals.“
Suffice to say, the situation we’re in where we have a Chinese spy balloon floating over the United States and we’re unable to trust the information we’re getting from our inept government and the corrupt media that enable it is a horrible one to be in. The end result of their excuse-making and blame-shifting is that a great many people feel more confused and less safe than when they first learned of the balloon.
National security threats can’t be used to play political games, yet that’s all we’ve seen for several years. The baseless accusations of Russia collusion under Trump were leveraged for domestic partisan political gain at the expense of actively poisoning our relationship with a hostile nuclear power with which we’re now mixed up in a war in Eastern Europe. And now we can’t bring ourselves to even speak forthrightly about the national security threat posed by communist China because it would have bad electoral ramifications for the same bad actors that regularly instigate domestic political tumult and sleepwalked into the war in Ukraine.
These bad-faith attempts of the Biden administration and the media — for once “collusion” is the right word — to examine every serious foreign policy development through a self-interested political lens have simply got to stop. Uniting Americans and the world at large around the threat China presents militarily and economically needs to be a much higher priority. And that’s simply impossible so long as China can exploit the fact that its every provocation will trigger a blizzard of dubious and divisive information coming straight from our government and sympathetic partisans in the press.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
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.
Even though the Arizona governor’s race has been called in favor of Katie Hobbs, Hobbs’ opponent Kari Lake has not conceded and vote counting and vote correcting are still happening. As has been reported (in mainly conservative media), many voters were turned away on Election Day because of broken printers or given provisional ballots that wouldn’t be counted. Furthermore, many ballots were not counted because of a non-matching signature or some mistake in filling out the ballot. This means voters are being contacted about their ballot being rejected and given a chance to correct or “cure” it. The window for doing this just ended on Nov. 17.
Considering how laughably convoluted this process is, along with its many vulnerabilities to fraud and error, it’s more than understandable to see why Lake, someone projected to win big and who faced a meek candidate who refused to debate her or even do much campaigning, refuses to give up. The glacially slow counting, the numerous malfunctioning printers and ballot machines, and the recent history of gross irregularities from the previous election all give ample reason for suspicion. There’s also the added wrinkle of Hobbs refusing to recuse herself from the role of supervising the election — somehow this didn’t constitute a conflict of interest.
And yet, for all this, the corporate media are blasting Lake for daring to challenge the election result, living up to her reputation as a dirty, rotten “election denier.” Here’s just a small sampling of headlines: “Election denier Kari Lake refuses to concede Arizona governor race she lost” in The Guardian, “Katie Hobbs elected Arizona’s 5th female governor, defeating election denier Kari Lake” in the Arizona Republic, “Kari Lake Is Denying Her Election Loss” in New York Magazine, and “Democrat Katie Hobbs defeats election denier Kari Lake for Arizona governor, AP projects” in Yahoo News.
As David Harsanyi has argued, this charge of election denier — that is, a person who questions and/or challenges elections — is a ridiculous criticism that stigmatizes perfectly rational behavior in a democracy. Furthermore, it’s a label that applies far more to Democrats despite being exclusively directed at Republicans. This insult (coupled with “the big lie”) became popular in 2020 after Donald Trump and many of his supporters claimed the presidential election was stolen.
It’s no secret that the left continues to call its opponents election deniers because it has been an effective tool to silence dissent. It casts people like Trump and Lake as unhinged losers who are ready to smash the whole system because they didn’t win. Thus, to give even the slightest credence to their objections is tantamount to undermining “Our Democracy.” And if anyone thinks that is an exaggeration, they should know that hundreds of Jan. 6 protesters have been thrown in prison and denied bail because they were “election deniers” who ostensibly posed a threat to the country.
However, the more successful it is to slander people as “election deniers,” the more destructive it becomes. First, it is an accusation that immediately groups the accused with every crackpot imaginable. Even though Lake has plenty of reasons to question her election, she is nonetheless associated with the QAnon Shaman and other disturbed crackpots who had their own theories about fraudulent elections and the deep state. This in turn pushes away her supporters and other conservatives who want to be taken seriously.
If the claim that an election is rigged is false, it should be easy enough for the left to simply prove it instead of delaying vote counting. But even if they can, the guilt-by-association still does more harm to conservatives who will start fighting one another instead of working together on getting accurate election results. This can be seen as Lake and her team toil away at curing votes and rooting out errors while her fellow Republicans have given up and have instead complained about candidate quality and messaging.
This attempt to move on not only demoralizes all efforts to challenge elections, but it also leads to faulty analysis. It’s completely useless to criticize the direction and composition of the GOP and its leadership when so many elections might very well be rigged. If Democratic candidates are stuffing ballot boxes and throwing out Republican ballots with impunity, it doesn’t matter who’s running for office, what they say, or even who’s voting. At the very minimum, Democrats’ relentless demands for mail-in ballots and remote voting, which are particularly susceptible to fraud, are a major threat to the integrity of our elections.
Second, and more importantly, the election denier accusation increasingly removes all recourse for justice. If an election is fraudulent, laws were broken, and large swaths of the electorate are effectively disenfranchised, there is nowhere they can turn because the well has been poisoned. As was shown in 2020, no judge, not even the U.S. Supreme Court, will dare hear the case and examine the evidence, and few conservative writers or pundits will bother talking about it. Rather, they will demand proof, knowing quite well that no amount of evidence will change their mind or any election outcome. Over time, it becomes an unprovable claim that guarantees political anathema to the conservative who makes it.
While Lake might not be able to overturn the result of her election, she should be commended for trying. Far from threatening the legitimacy of the election, she is breathing life into it, giving a voice to people who rightly want answers and accountability. Rather than being election deniers, they should be recognized as election defenders, putting their faith in the voters and the American political system.
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.
Since a civil war is about to break out and destroy the modern Republican Party — fingers crossed — let me tell you what grinds my gears.
Young NatCons, many of whom I know and like, seem to be under the impression that they’ve stumbled upon some fresh, electrifying governing philosophy. Really, they’re peddling ideas that already failed to take hold 30 years ago when the environment was far more socially conservative and there were far more working-class voters to draw on. If Americans want class-obsessed statists doling out family-busting welfare checks and whining about Wall Street hedge funds, there is already a party willing to scratch that itch. We don’t need two.
“National conservatism”— granted, still in an amorphous stage — offers a far too narrow agenda for any kind of enduring political consensus. It lacks idealism. It’s a movement tethered to the grievances of a shrinking demographic of rural and Rust-Belt workers with high school degrees at the expense of a growing demographic of college-educated suburbanites.
The “New Right” loves to mock “zombie Reaganism.” Well, the ’80s fusionist coalition, which stressed upward meritocratic mobility, free markets, federalism, patriotism, and autonomy from the soul-crushing federal bureaucracy, was by all historical measures more successful than the Buchananism that followed or Rockefellerism that preceded. Zombie Reaganism was a dramatic success not only in 1980 but also in 1994 and again in 2010 and 2014. The “shining city on a hill” might sound like corny boomerism, but it’s still infinitely more enticing than the bleak apocalypticism of Flight 93.
Too many conservatives misconstrued Donald Trump’s slim 2016 victory as a national realignment. It was a mirage. Trump, a uniquely positioned celebrity candidate, benefitted not only from Obama fatigue but, more than anything else, the cosmic unlikability of Hillary Clinton. Yes, the GOP needed an attitude adjustment, a stiffening of the spine. There is no denying Trump’s presidency achieved some positive results (most of them, incidentally, also on the “zombie Reaganism” front with deregulation and the judiciary), and he made inroads with working-class voters and Latinos. But Republicans have now blown three elections catering to largely incoherent NatCon populism.
There is no one reason or person culpable for the right’s failures in 2022, but there are certain types of candidates finding success. Ron DeSantis, Brain Kemp, and (in 2020) Glenn Youngkin can call out crony capitalism without sounding like Ralph Nader’s comms director. All of them have been highly critical of lawlessness of illegal immigration, but none of them come off like chauvinists. All of them supported heartbeat bills and election integrity laws, and above all, they are competent administrators of government.
The white-collar worker in Virginia or North Carolina, living in a multi-use neighborhood, probably isn’t as preoccupied with drag queen story hour or the intrigues of Big Tech or the Justice Department or Chinese tariffs — as important as those issues might be — as Josh Hawley seems to believe. The suburban voter might be more socially liberal these days, but they are still dispositional conservative. And one strongly suspects they would rather see public school reform, bigger retirement accounts, and lower property tax bills than a commissar regulating the internet or some protectionist policy killing economic dynamism.
Of course, the New Right would like to claim DeSantis as one of their own. Allie Beth Stuckey, like many on the “New Right,” maintains that the Florida governor’s impressive win tells us: “we’re done with the old, corporate tax cuts GOP. We want you to use all the power available to you to crush the entities crushing us.”
That’s a Twitter reality. In the real world, hundreds of thousands of people flock to Florida (and Texas and Arizona) to enjoy an inviting regulatory environment, low taxes, and relative freedom — not to watch the governor teach Disney a lesson. A politician who cuts taxes and opens schools and businesses, despite pressure from the federal government, isn’t “crushing” anyone, he is freeing them. A politician who insists that state-run elementary schools should teach kids math, science, and history rather than identitarianism, myths, and sexuality has a compelling story to tell parents.
DeSantis is also a politician. So he shows up at trendy NatCon conferences, in the same way he used to chase trendy Tea Party endorsements from Club For Growth and FreedomWorks. Despite the left’s claims, DeSantis doesn’t strike me as an ideologue, but rather a champion of normalcy. Maybe incumbents were successful in 2022 because people are sick of drama?
What about J.D. Vance, though, David? Different types of candidates appeal to different regions. No one is arguing that Zombie populism is without any traction. Before Vance, there was Rick Santorum, whose message also had a limited allure. Yes, Vance can win in Ohio. Mike DeWine, about the most milquetoast moderate imaginable, can also win in Ohio, and by a bigger margin. Does Vance win Arizona or Nevada? Probably not. Does Blake Masters win in Ohio? Probably. But Americans are moving to Henderson, Nevada, and Boise, Idaho, not Akron, Ohio.
In the meantime, the New Right’s intellectual movement is a Trojan horse for a bunch of corrosive authoritarian “post-liberal” ideas. If a malleable “common good” means jettisoning limiting principles, well, no thank you. Plenty of secular right-wingers like myself have been defending religious freedom on neutral, classical liberal grounds. Today, the New Right tells me those notions are dead. If that’s true, I wonder who will be left to defend them 10 years from now?
By the way, if you’re under the impression that the New Right think-tankers and technocrats who rail against “elites” and “libertarians” and romanticize lunch-pail unionism are going to send their kids to work in warehouses for minimum wage, I have news for you. That’s reserved for the plebs. It’s no surprise that Compact, the New Right magazine standing athwart the “libertine left and a libertarian right,” employs a Marxist editor or that so many anti-woke socialists feel comfortable allying with the New Right. That’s a Twitter realignment, however, not a real-world one.
Fortunately, it’s highly unlikely that the average Republican with a small business is as antagonistic to the notion of individual liberty as the average First Things editor. The average voter tends not to treat every loss as if it were the end of Rome. It’s bad out there. But people who tell you this is the worst era in history or that we’re facing insurmountable unique problems are just as hysterical as the people who tell you democracy is over. Most Americans realize politics is a grind. I’d love to live in a minarchist paradise, but I’m a realist. There are approximately 349,999 million people who think differently. That’s how it shakes out in a diverse, sprawling nation. A national party needs to broaden its message to convince — not just follow the whims — of as many voters as possible. NatCons are headed in the wrong direction.
My friends believe the Republican Party establishment is incompetent and cowardly. Maybe. Thankfully, we don’t have a binary choice. May both factions fail.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post, and numerous other publications. 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.
Of all the things that the occasionally interesting Kanye West has said over the course of the past week, the one that can’t ever be called sociopathic or pathological is what he said about George Floyd, patron saint of Hennepin County.
But of course, the historical revisionism of Floyd’s death is an enduring priority of the Democrat Party. They can’t justify their political violence without it. So that West more or less told the truth about Floyd has the corrupted national media (a.k.a. the Democrat Party) performing emergency clean-up for their cause.
Like almost everything West says in interviews, his remarks on Floyd on a show last weekend weren’t delivered with much precision. “They hit him with the fentanyl,” he said. “If you look, the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that. When he said ‘mama,’ mama is his girlfriend. They said he screamed for his mama. Mama was his girlfriend.”
The bulk of that is demonstrably true, but Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson falsely claimed this week — lie! lie! lie! — that, “None of that is true.”
A separate news article in the same paper said Kanye had made “false claims about the Black man’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police.”
An NBC News report also referred to West’s “false claims” related to Floyd.
Let’s take them one by one.
It’s a fact that Floyd had lethal levels of fentanyl in his blood. The medical examiner’s report said at the time of his death, there were 11 nanograms of the drug per milliliter. That report noted that “severe respiratory depression” — trouble with breathing — is a common symptom of fentanyl toxicity, and that fatal blood levels of the drug have been recorded at as low as 3 nanograms per milliliter. Floyd had nearly four times that.
Also present in his system were methamphetamine, other opiates, and morphine, which the report said, have the effect of “respiratory depression” as well.
West’s assertion that Derek Chauvin’s knee “wasn’t even on his neck like that,” is likely a reference to a line of defense put forward by Chauvin’s legal team. At trial, defense attorney Eric Nelson zoomed in on video from Floyd’s run-in with the police. Nelson suggested that the images showed Floyd’s neck was, at least for some period of time, not in direct contact with Chauvin’s knee, and that when it was, the applied pressure was justifiable for the circumstances. The jury didn’t buy the defense, but the medical examiner’s report said there were no injuries to Floyd’s neck nor to the cartilage of his larynx. There was no bleeding or bruising on his neck. There were, in fact, no injuries to any of his organs at all.
That Floyd referred to his girlfriend as “mama” is also just a fact. And we know that because his girlfriend and drug buddy, Courteney Ross, said so in court. I know that it’s more romantic and thus useful for the media to claim Floyd used his final gasps to call for his mother, but she died in 2018, two years before the incident.
What West didn’t say in the interview was that Floyd also had “severe” heart disease, with some of his arteries blocked by up to 90 percent. His heart was enlarged, and he suffered a history of hypertension. And that leads us to why the medical examiner declared Floyd to have died of “cardiopulmonary arrest,” triggered by the stress of contact with the police. And it’s no small point that the contact was made after the 6’4”, 223 lb. Floyd, hopped up on drugs, attempted to purchase a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit bill. When police showed up, he was panicked, delusional, and either unable or unwilling to cooperate with police. Maybe it was both.
In the end, the medical examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker, did determine Floyd’s death to formally be a “homicide,” though the term in his profession simply means another person was a factor. At trial, Baker said, “In my opinion, the law enforcement subdual, restraint, and the neck compression was just more than Mr. Floyd could take, by virtue of those heart conditions.” In other words, Floyd would have survived the incident if not for his severely compromised heart.
Guess who had no clue that this giant man had a sick and fragile heart before that fateful day? Precisely no one, least of all the police who were tasked with subduing his massive frame in his erratic condition.
Kanye West made no false claims against our lord and savior George Floyd. He told the truth, as sad as it may be.
CNN’s Dana Bash is trying to make the number of dangerous criminals pouring over the southern U.S. border sound far lower than it really is.
“Less than 1 percent of migrants encountered at the border have a criminal record,” Bash said while interviewing Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake on Sunday, claiming to cite Department of Homeland Security figures.
“I’m going to have to disagree with you on that figure you just put out,” Lake countered. “We don’t know what their background is. There’s a reason they’re trying to get in unnoticed; it’s because they have a criminal background.”
“We know that [DHS has] tracked down terrorists, they have tracked down people wanted for murder,” Lake continued. “We’ve got people with rape records, you name it, we’ve got hardened criminals.”
“Let me just tell you that this stat that I just cited comes from the Department of Homeland Security, less than 1 percent of migrants,” Bash doubled down.
DANA BASH: DHS says less than 1 percent of migrants encountered at the border have a criminal record
KARI LAKE: I have to disagree with you on that figure … we have murders coming in, we have people with rape records
To the half-listening viewer, “less than 1 percent” sounds like a small figure. But when you consider that border enforcement officials have encountered more than 2 million illegal aliens pouring over our southern border so far during fiscal year 2022 — with another month to go before the year concludes — that figure begins to tell a fuller story.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded 2,150,639 apprehensions on the U.S.-Mexico border between October 2021 and August 2022, the most on record and more than four times the total apprehensions recorded in 2020.
DHS is up to 2,000,000 migrant encounters in 2022. Their numbers show hundreds of violent criminals crossing every year and thousands of criminals overall. https://t.co/LRm7G8yZr3pic.twitter.com/TRu8dUnLGO
CBP’s Office of Field Operations, which operates at ports of entry, reported 15,558 encounters of noncitizens “who have been convicted of crime, whether in the United States or abroad, so long as the conviction is for conduct which is deemed criminal by the United States,” during fiscal year 2022 so far. Border Patrol, which operates along the border between entry ports, reported 10,778. Combined, that’s more than 25,000 convicted criminals — a whopping figure, far more alarming and newsworthy than the “less than 1 percent” talking point parroted by CNN. For Americans, who count immigration among their top three concerns headed into the midterm elections, tens of thousands of criminals pouring over the border is no small figure.
Of the more than 10,000 criminals apprehended by Border Patrol this fiscal year, more than 1,000 had prior convictions for “assault, battery, [or] domestic violence,” 60 had been convicted of homicide or manslaughter, and more than 2,000 were convicted of “illegal drug possession [or] trafficking.” More than 300 had been convicted of “sexual offenses” and nearly 800 of “burglary, robbery, larceny, theft, [or] fraud.”
Just two weeks ago, a Guatemalan national in the U.S. illegally was arrestedfor stabbing eight people on the Las Vegas Strip. An illegal immigrant from Mexico is accused of fatally shooting his partner, two of her children, and two neighbors last month in McGregor, Texas. Earlier last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced it had arrested an Ecuadorian man who had repeatedly entered the U.S. illegally and is accused of raping a 13-year-old girl in Ecuador. When a 10-year-old girl in Ohio made headlines for seeking an abortion after she was raped, her alleged rapist was revealed to be an illegal alien.
The significance of 25,000 convicted criminals crossing the southern border notwithstanding, merely looking at criminal records vastly undercounts the number of likely criminals the Biden administration is inviting to the border. Impunity rates in Mexico and Central American countries are ludicrously high, meaning the vast majority of people who commit crimes are never convicted.
As NBC News reported a year ago, “the think tank México Evalúa found that 94.8 percent of the cases reported in Mexico go unpunished.” Another group suggested that number was even higher, with only 1.3 percent of crimes in the country ever solved. The Associated Press cited one estimation that “as of 2020, almost nine of every 10 homicides in Mexico go unpunished.” Another group found that “Over a period of four years, prosecutors’ offices managed just 35 convictions nationally in a universe of more than 82,000 investigations of forced disappearance in Mexico.”
In Guatemala, the next most common country of citizenship among illegal immigrants encountered by Border Patrol, impunity rates are comparably high. Despite the efforts of a UN-backed commission targeting corruption and impunity, “94 percent of crimes went unpunished on average over the last decade in Guatemala,” according to the think tank InSight Crime. “In 2018 alone, the impunity rate was almost 98 percent.”
Those sky-high impunity rates suggest that the number of people arriving at the southern U.S. border who have committed crimes — which were likely never prosecuted by corrupt, backlogged law enforcement in their home countries — is far, far higher than the nice-sounding “less than 1 percent” figure rolling off of Bash’s tongue. Furthermore, any person who breaks into the United States illegally is automatically committing a crime by violating our immigration laws.
No matter how hard CNN and the rest of the corporate press try to spin the facts into a different story, they can’t deny this one: More criminals are illegally entering our country than ever before because illegal immigration is at an all-time high as a direct result of the Biden administration’s policies.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
In a recently published blog post, Twitter announced its plans to “protect” political discourse ahead of the upcoming U.S. midterm elections by reaffirming its commitment to its “Civic Integrity Policy.” Given Silicon Valley’s tendency to suppress conservative speech while emboldening leftist causes, it is all but certain this policy will be used exclusively for right-wing censorship. And considering the impracticality of introducing regulations prior to the 2022 midterms, the Republican Party must make regulating Big Tech a top priority in order to ensure the integrity of the 2024 presidential election.
According to Twitter, its Civic Integrity Policy “covers the most common types of harmful misleading information about elections and civic events” by flagging “misleading content” and, in some cases, outright suppressing content that contains “false or misleading claim[s].” But, with recent history as a guide, we can see that Twitter does not enforce this policy honestly.
In 2020, just weeks before the presidential election, Twitter suppressed discussion of Hunter Biden’s laptop. The company went so far as to prevent users from sharing the New York Post story exposing the scandal with one another, claiming that its circulation violated the company’s policy on spreading information obtained via hacking. Coincidentally, Twitter did nothing to stop the circulation of leaked copies of Donald Trump’s tax filings.
Why does this matter?
Twitter justified its suppression of speech that favored a Republican incumbent by falsely designating it as ill-begotten misinformation while simultaneously doing nothing to crack down on the likely illegally obtained information that damaged the same incumbent’s reputation among the electorate.
It just so happens that by suppressing negative stories about Joe Biden, Big Tech may have handed him the election as 82 percent of Biden voters in seven swing states were unaware of all of the scandals attached to him. Seventeen percent of these voters said that knowledge of these scandals before voting would have caused them to change their vote.
The company’s integrity policy was applied in ways that specifically targeted speech favorable to the Republican Party. By censoring this speech, Twitter played a direct role in Joe Biden’s ascension to the presidency.
Social media’s utility is largely the provision of a digital town square where people can share information with other people. So, ethically, ought companies that monetize user data obtained from speech-centric platforms not protect speech?
But more importantly, considering how often Big Tech platforms such as Twitter act on behalf of the federal government, they must be held accountable for violating the First Amendment rights of American users. Corporations that function as extensions of the government must be compelled to uphold the constitutional protections of American citizens.
In a July 2021 briefing, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki explicitly stated that the Biden administration intended to collaborate with Big Tech to “monitor misinformation more closely” and “proactively address the public’s questions without inadvertently giving a platform to health misinformation that can harm their audiences.” She also acknowledged that the White House intended to reign in counter-regime narratives by “bringing individuals and organizations together to address misinformation.” The White House was so effective at persuading Big Tech to crack down on narratives in opposition to its own that social media companies deplatformed journalists who were too effective at asking questions about Biden’s Covid strategy and Covid vaccine efficacy.
Agents of the government must be subject to the U.S. Constitution and prevented from infringing on the rights of American citizens. And despite what tech executives will say when testifying before Congress, these companies are politically motivated and serve the interests of the political left. Is there any question as to whether Big Tech plans to mobilize in favor of Democrats again in 2024?
It is far too late — and politically impossible — for congressional Republicans to introduce regulatory legislation that would reign in social media platforms like Twitter before the 2022 midterm elections. So, upon reclaiming control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the GOP must act to secure digital free speech ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @Mangold_Lenett.
Discontent with left-wing policy failures is triggering massive protests all over the world. Just don’t expect to read all about it in the New York Times.
If you skim the front pages of major corporate news outlets, you’ll find no mention of the economic protests raging in Spain, Morocco, Greece, and the United Kingdom.
According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which records protests worldwide, 11 countries are currently seeing protests of more than 1,000 people in response to the rising cost of living and other economic woes in 2022. As of July 5, Carnegie had recorded protests of more than 120,000 people in France, 100,000 in Spain, 10,000 in Greece, 10,000 in Kazakhstan, 10,000 in Sri Lanka, 10,000 in India, 5,000 in Iran, 5,000 in Peru, 1,000 people in Argentina, 1,000 in Morocco, and 1,000 in the U.K.
When vaccine passports were being implemented, protests took place around the world – but there was hardly any coverage from the media.
Due to the cost of living crisis, protests are happening around the world – but again, the media turns a blind eye.
Many of the French protesters took to the streets on May Day for salary increases and against President Emmanuel Macron’s increase of the retirement age. Fifty-four people were reportedly arrested in Paris after some demonstrations turned violent. France’s economy, Europe’s third-largest, shrank in the first quarter of 2022, and in June, inflation shot up 5.8 percent compared to last year. Protesters also held demonstrations in March, with some complaining they had lost 15 to 20 percent of their purchasing power. Meanwhile, France’s answer to inflation? Keep spending; the country is throwing $20.4 billion at the problem.
In Spain, with gas subsidies, direct grants, and an increase in the minimum wage, the socialist-leaning government has seen only rising inflation rates (10.2 percent), and the accompanying price hikes are driving thousands of people onto the streets to protest. The country is finding out the hard way what a 40 percent reliance on renewable energy will do to the labor market. With its high unemployment rate at 13.65 percent as of the first quarter of 2022, labor shortages are raising prices on staple grocery items to an almost 30-year high. Thousands of demonstrators protested in March for relief in the form of tax cuts.
Meanwhile, it’s no surprise that any supply issues, aggravated or initiated by the Russia-Ukraine war, would burden Greece’s weakened economy that only just emerged from a decade-long crisis in 2018 to be sent right back by Covid shutdowns in 2020. In April, thousands gathered at a labor union-organized rally outside parliament in protest of inflation, which followed a February demonstration where about 10,000 people showed up to protest electricity prices that had leaped 56 percent, fuel prices that had jumped 21.6 percent, and natural gas prices that had skyrocketed 156 percent in January.
In India, a country locked in a vicious cycle of going into debt to pay off interest of former debts, the increasing cost of living is racking the country. In March, an estimated 50 million workers participated in a two-day strike to protest the loss of jobs and income, with communist groups organizing rallies in May decrying the high rate of inflation.
The socialist government in Argentina that led the country to default seven times and produced the largest decline in the relative standard of living in the world since 1900 is trying to do something new. On Monday, Argentina’s new economy minister Silvina Batakis announced her plan to cut the fiscal deficit — a proposal more than a thousand Argentines are protesting.
Decades of government spending and faulty economic policies have led to Argentina’s inflation rate growing to 58 percent. Prices are liquid and through the roof, with iPhones costing six months’ rent and a two-hour plane ticket equaling the cost of a month’s college tuition. Batakis plans to hold Argentina to the terms of a $44 billion debt deal it made earlier this year with the International Monetary Fund. Thousands of Argentines meanwhile flocked to protest against the economic hardships felt by the country upon cutting spending and took up banners crying for Argentina’s separation from the IMF.
The United Kingdom is suffering from a high 9.1 percent inflation rate as of May, and many are tired of the government’s response. Brits flocked out in February to protest rising costs of living, with demonstrations held in at least 25 towns and cities and signs reading, “tax the rich” and “freeze prices not the poor.” The U.K.’s inflation rate was already at 5.4 percent in January of this year due in part to the 2020 Covid shutdowns, but it has since almost doubled, largely due to the EU’s sanctions on Russian oil. In June, thousands marched down central London in protest, wanting the government to boost its welfare response.
Still reeling from the worst drought it has had in 40 years, Morocco is seeing price spikes on even the most basic goods. Thousands of Moroccans joined protests in February to decry the increasing cost of living, with unions staging more demonstrations in April. The country has high unemployment rates and large public debt, along with a heavy reliance on imports.
Aside from a scant headline here and there, America’s most popular news providers, The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and NBC, did not cover these protests, despite the French and Spanish protests being 10 to 100 times larger than the protests these corporate media giants did report.
None of these four major outlets wrote a single line on the protests of more than 100,000 demonstrators in Spain, more than 10,000 in Greece, more than 1,000 in Morocco, and more than 1,000 in the U.K. The New York Times published one lone article on the strike in India, where an estimated 50 million people walked off the job. The Washington Post has two small articles on the Argentinian protests of more than 1,000 as inflation appears set to hit 70 percent, and it has reported once on the May Day protests in France where more than 120,000 people protested government pension reforms. NBC mentioned the May Day protests once in a world report. This is the entire 2022 coverage by these media giants of these countries’ protests over economic turmoil.
Of these 11 countries, only four made any major headlines. The corporate press oftentimes only highlights these economic protests when they get so loud they can no longer be ignored, as we saw with Kazakhstan’s kill order to quell protests and the Sri Lankans’ attack on their president’s home. Over the weekend, the biased media finally began covering the Sri Lanka protests that are over 10,000 people strong — but only because footage of demonstrators swarming the president’s residence by the thousands on Saturday went viral.
Corporate media won’t talk about the rest of these protests because the countries are struggling from economically disastrous policies akin to President Joe Biden’s. Any show of economic turmoil in EU member states could be traced back to EU sanctions on Russia or green energy failures, which would fly in the face of the corporate media’s agenda. Many of these countries have inflationary monetary policies.
The leftist media will tell you about Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, Iran, and Peru, however, but only to bolster its pro-Ukraine/anti-Russia narrative that denies the realities of war to promote Biden’s efforts to empty our pockets and replenish Ukraine’s.
In its treatment of the Kazakhstan protests, The Washington Post made sure to mention the country’s relationship with Russia. The Times’ articles on the Sri Lanka protests framed the economic downturns in terms of problems stemming from Russia’s invasion and ignored Sri Lanka’s Green Deal ban on chemical fertilizer that ultimately crashed its economy. Both CNN’s coverage of protests in Iran and NBC’s reports of those in Peru likewise stressed the Russia-Ukraine war as the cause for economic turmoil.
The media only highlight these world protests when they grow too big to ignore or when the facts can be skewed toward their preferring narratives. Cherry-picking which protests to highlight gives media cover to paint them as isolated incidents in non-Western countries instead of a worldwide trend showing the consequences of embracing left-wing policies. After all, Biden is making the same blunders in the United States, and corporate media can’t have Americans connecting those dots.
The U.S. labor market is in shambles. Inflation has skyrocketed to a 40-year high at 9.1 percent. The Biden administration is drawing down our emergency oil reserves, shipping it overseas to nations that can’t function on their “Green Energy” policies any more than we can. Irony alert: The oil will go through a European pipeline despite Biden citing climate conservation to shut down our own Keystone pipeline.
Discontent with these policy failures is triggering massive protests all over the world. Just don’t expect to read all about it in the New York Times.
Beth Whitehead is an intern at The Federalist and a journalism major at Patrick Henry College where she fondly excuses the excess amount of coffee she drinks as an occupational hazard.
Research for a new book out next week reveals an implicit bias present throughout the White House press corps: Reporters attending in-person briefings rank 12:1 Democrat to Republican.
“Every seat was filled for the first time in over a year as the social distancing rules resulting from the COVID pandemic were relaxed,” Fleischer wrote in an excerpt shared exclusively with The Federalist. “By a ratio of 12:1, the seats were occupied by Democrats!”
Fleischer drew upon research solicited by the D.C.-based investigative firm Delve, which combed through publicly available data.
“I guess the good news is that the ratio wasn’t 24:0, like it was during my encounters with students at Columbia Journalism School. It was only 12:1,” Fleischer wrote. “No matter how you cut it, the White House briefing room does not look, sound, or register to vote like America.”
Towson University tenured Professor Richard Vatz, who specializes in political persuasion and rhetoric, told The Federalist that Fleischer’s discovery “echoes findings over many decades.”
“In major media survey after major media survey [1962-1996, journalists of ‘national media,’ ‘Washington Press Corps,’ etc., were found to be overwhelmingly liberal, and in poll after poll they voted for Democrats,” Vatz said.
Vatz cited a 1982 survey from the State University of California at Los Angeles which polled 1,000 journalists across 50 daily newspapers and found that only 25 percent of those interviewed voted for then-President Ronald Reagan. More than a decade later, a 1995 joint study from the University of Colorado’s Media Studies Center and Cornell University’s Roper Center surveyed “Washington-based bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents” and found that 89 percent voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. Only 7 percent reported voting for George H.W. Bush, and 2 percent for Ross Perot. Half identified as Democrats, and only 4 percent Republican.
“America would be well served to have a robust press corps representing different outlets, considerations, and, most of all, questions for the president on down,” Curtis Houck, the managing editor of Newsbusters at the Media Research Center told The Federalist. “Having watched press briefings for the last six years, it’s no surprise that the White House press corps tilt left as, along with a built-in geographical bias living in a far-left city, they have zero perspective or belief that their mindset might be wrong and/or self-serving.”
Steve Krakauer, another media critic and author of the Fourth Watch newsletter, also told The Federalist that the media’s geographic bias embedded in the Acela Corridor is a key variable when evaluating press corps perspectives.
“On the face of it, political affiliations of these reporters don’t necessarily connect to problems with their coverage, or invalidate their coverage,” Krakauer said, while conceding the media has leaned left for decades. Krakauer argued, however, that the media’s left-wing bent has grown far worse over the past seven to eight years driven primarily by geographic bias and a visceral reaction to Donald Trump. The press, Krakauer said, has begun to allow personal perspectives to infect their reporting with the belief that, “well, there’s a higher mission here. Now we have to save democracy.”
“It’s changed not because affiliations have changed in that room but because of how they’ve allowed their biases and their points of view to seep into their coverage in ways that never did nearly as much in Ari’s time,” Krakauer said.
Vatz said the partisan makeup of the White House press corps unfairly skews what the media offers nationwide attention.
“The effect on media coverage is that certain topics in major media do not even get covered if they rebound to Republican advantage, and when pro-conservative-interest topics do get covered, they are spun negatively,” Vatz told The Federalist.
Vatz highlighted the corporate coverage of last week’s “star witness” before the House Committee on Jan. 6 who made a series of uncorroborated allegations related to Trump’s conduct the day of the Capitol riot. Trump, former White House aid Cassidy Hutchinson claimed based on third-hand hearsay, attempted to hijack the presidential limousine and drive himself to the Capitol by assaulting a Secret Service agent.
“ABC Evening News did not even mention,” Vatz said, “that the Secret Service had indicated that President Trump did not grab the steering wheel and lunge at agents in ‘The Beast,’” after agents told reporters they were prepared to go under oath refuting Hutchinson’s claims.
Vatz’s analysis was backed up by a report from Houck at the Media Research Center. Analyzing network coverage the morning after Hutchinson testified, Houck found, “ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS Mornings, and NBC’s Today spent four minutes and 42 seconds on Hutchinson’s claim, but only two minutes and 33 seconds on the pushback from her colleagues and the Secret Service, including offers from the latter to have the agents involved testify under oath that none of that was true.”
While Trump dealt with a hostile press corps that turned daily coronavirus press conferences into sparring matches over whether the term “Chinese coronavirus” was racist, President Joe Biden has enjoyed far friendlier treatment. Biden’s rare press conferences have been full of soft-ball questions from pre-selected reporters who’ve given the White House little grief for keeping the president away from the media. Data from the American Presidency Project show Biden is one of the least accessible presidents in modern American history, having conducted only 16 total press conferences since taking office last year, including nine alone and seven as joint affairs.
Trust in the media, meanwhile, has collapsed to a new low, according to Gallup. In its latest survey findings on institutional trust released on Tuesday, Gallup reported that just 16 percent of Americans trust “newspapers” with a 30-point gap between Republicans and Democrats. Thirty-five percent of Democrats said they maintained a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers, which is still a three percent drop from last year, while only 5 percent of Republicans said the same.
“As to what could make the field of reporters more diverse, it is very simple,” Vatz told The Federalist. “Pressure the president of each news organization to insist on disinterest coverage — there is some evidence that this is beginning at CNN, for example, but it could happen at the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere as well.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
The 2021-2022 school year is coming to a close. As usual, students, parents, teachers, and administrators are looking over the past year to see what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve.
This year, the educational establishment’s report card is even worse than usual. It has failed to address the learning losses due to unnecessary Covid lockdowns and inspired parental uproar over critical race theory and LGBT advocacy in the classroom. It has suffered a surprising electoral defeat in Virginia and a not-so-surprising legislative setback in Florida, as well as an unprecedented number of school board recall elections. Most damaging of all, close to 2 million students have abandoned government schooling for greener (not to mention safer) pastures.
Faced with such massive public losses, one might think a little self-reflection would be in order. Instead, the educrats, with the help of their friends in the legacy media, have decided to address these serious problems by gaslighting the American public.
Avoiding Accountability at All Costs
The most recent example of this deception comes from the continuing saga of the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) effort last fall to smear parents who complain at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists.” The now infamous letter and even more infamous Department of Justice memo that followed it represent the depths to which the educational establishment was willing to sink to protect itself from accountability to the families it theoretically serves.
A recently completed independent review exonerated the NSBA’s board from culpability in this fiasco, fixing the blame for “both the ‘origin and substance of the letter’” on former Interim Director and CEO Chip Slaven. The review also found that while unnamed members of the Biden administration “collaborated” with Slaven, it “did not find direct or indirect evidence suggesting the administration requested the letter.”
In an effort to “clear the record,” Slaven recorded an interview last week with Fox News Digital, where he whined about being “betrayed” and “completely backstabbed” by the organization that he led. He also admitted that he disagreed with the NSBA board’s futile efforts to walk back the language of the letter, claiming that “it drenched an already inflamed and out-of-control narrative with another helping of gasoline.”
Neither Slaven nor the NSBA’s announcement bothered to address the elephant in the room: that the
organization sees engaged parents and community members who attend school board meetings as potential threats that need to be watched and possibly prosecuted by federal authorities. When pressed about this during the interview, Slaven lamely defended the substance of the letter he penned by saying, “The word ‘parents’ is not in the letter anywhere,” despite the examples cited in the letter’s footnotes.
The NSBA has offered vague platitudes about “advocat[ing] for local control” and being “committed to parent engagement” as it pursues its “nonpartisan” goals. These attempts to rewrite history come as 25 state school boards have chosen“to withdraw membership, participation, or dues from NSBA.”
Meanwhile, an FBI whistleblower has claimed that “counterterrorism tools” were indeed used against parents in accordance with the DOJ’s memo. It remains unclear whether these efforts continue presently despite the NSBA’s repudiation of the letter and its alleged author.
Legacy Media Provide Covering Fire
Of course, the left-wing corporate media have gone all in to support educrats’ efforts to deceive the public into believing they remain the valiant heroes in this ongoing drama. Lately, they’ve decided to focus their attacks on a favorite target of the left: homeschooling families.
This is hardly surprising, as the number of these families at least doubled during the lockdowns of 2020-2021. What’s more, that number has been largely maintained despite schools re-opening in the fall of 2021.
On Mother’s Day, Keith Olbermann fired an opening salvo in this new campaign against educational choice when he tweeted that a homeschooling mom was “ruin[ing] the lives of five innocent children.” Not to be outdone, MSNBC columnist Anthea Butler initiated a preemptive strike against Kirk Cameron’s upcoming documentary “The Homeschool Awakening” by disingenuously linking homeschooling not just with conservative Christianity, but also with the “segregation academies” of the post-Brown v. Board of Education South.
After grudgingly admitting the recent increase in homeschooling “may [in part] be attributed to Black parents and other diverse groups” who might not otherwise dare to disagree with her leftist party line, Butler ended her hatchet job with a dire warning:
Homeschooling may have greater appeal now because of these debates and the desire for parents to play a big part in their children’s educational life. It may also arise out of pandemic concerns, but parents unfamiliar with the existing networks of homeschooling run the danger of being drawn into Christian conservative networks and theocratic teaching. [Cameron] says that people choosing homeschooling are having an awakening, but the public needs to awaken to the reality that public schools may disappear if people with his extreme beliefs have their way.
The left’s message to parents is loud and clear: Exercise your right to homeschool your kids and you are complicit in the cold-blooded murder of public schooling.
Institutional Suicide
In these efforts, Slaven, Olbermann, Butler, and their comrades studiously deflect from the simple truth: If American government-run schools are dying, it is not a case of murder, but of suicide.
The self-inflicted wounds keep coming despite all the warning signs of the past academic year. Last month, the school district in Kiel, Wis., accused three middle schoolers of sexual harassment for failing to refer to another student by her chosen pronouns. What parent wants to go through that as a consequence of sending his kids to public schools?
Meanwhile, in Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools is planning to adopt a policy to suspend or even expel students who “maliciously misgender” classmates. The vote, originally scheduled for May 26, has been suspiciously delayed until June 16, perhaps so the happy chaos of the last day of school will allow the board to avoid further public scrutiny and outrage.
As kids across the nation start their summer vacations, the battle for their minds and souls rages on. True to form, the educational establishment fights dirty, using cheap manipulation tactics to distract the public from its pursuit of ideological “business as usual.”
Robert Busek is a Catholic homeschooling father of six who has taught history and Western Civilization in both traditional and online classrooms for over twenty years. His essays have also been published in The American Conservative and The American Spectator. The views he expresses here are his own.
Leftists push their gender ideology on children, yet conservative parents complaining about Drag Queen Story Hour are blamed for starting a culture war.
Can the gaslighting on gender and sexual identitarianism from the left get any more absurd? The Washington Post last month ran a story about how a decision by the community center in McLean, Virginia to co-sponsor a “Drag Story Book Hour” for children during Pride Month has, in their awkward wording, “set off culture wars.”
The May election for three open seats at the community center has attracted nine candidates, including Katharine Gorka, a former Trump administration official who has criticized the diversity, inclusion, and equity policies that resulted in the drag event. WaPo reporter Antonio Olivo observed, with editorial flourish, that this is “an example of how nothing is safe from the nation’s raging culture wars.”
A suburban community center hosts a drag queen story hour (DQSH) for elementary school students, yet it’s conservatives who are the ones stoking the culture war by complaining about it? A Florida school board member last year chaperoned a group of elementary school children on a field trip to a gay bar and the state’s community centers promote DQSH, but it’s conservatives who are the dangerous extremists for supporting a Florida parental rights in education bill?
Drag queens do bizarre, borderline pornographic acts in front of children, but it’s conservatives who are responsible for miseducating and damaging American youth? Come on.
Anything but Innocent
DQSH, as Gorka recently told me, “is not, as the American Library Association dishonestly describes it, an effort to combat ‘marginalization and underrepresentation.’” Rather, as the DQSH website itself declares, it is “drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores” in order to “capture the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.”
That word “play” is a bit concerning, especially given the sexually explicit nature of DQSH, and the many allegations that this pedagogy equates to grooming. A drag performer at one DQSH event in D.C. last year sang shirtless with duct tape on her breasts, sported a thong, and pretended to have fake sperm over her mouth.
Another DQSH event in Portland, Oregon in 2019 showed photos of children “lounging atop of the costumed queens on the floor, grabbing at false breasts, and burying their faces in their bodies.” This is not exactly light-hearted, appropriate public entertainment, notes Gorka.
A Concerning National Phenomenon
It would be more accurate to say that DQSH events bring the culture war directly to America’s children, with an ideological gameplan expressly dedicated to sexualizing our nation’s youth and urging children to consider themselves gender dysphoric. The first DQSH event in the United States was held in San Francisco in 2015. Since then, the events have spread across the country.
As of 2020, the official DQSH website boasted almost 50 independently operated chapters across the United States, including in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. It is also supported by the American Library Association, whose extensive resource page includes information on how libraries can resist and censure people in local communities who object to these events.
Terrifyingly, the grooming charge is reality. In 2021, the former president of an organization that served as a sponsor for the Milwaukee Drag Queen Story Hour was charged with possessing child pornography depicting the sexual abuse of underage boys, including toddlers. In 2019, the Houston Public Library admitted a registered child sex offender to read to kids in a DQSH event. Allyn Walker, a transgender former assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University in Virginia, sought to defend people who are attracted to minors.
As I noted in a recent Federalist article, the media and schools aggressively promoting transgenderism have created a national crisis. There has been a dramatic, unprecedented surge in people identifying with sexual identities other than heterosexual.
As Abigail Shrier documents at length in her alarming book “Irreversible Damage,” the consequences for those who seek hormone treatment and/or sexual reassignment surgery are lifelong. DQSH marks an attempt to push the boundaries even further, not only for children entering puberty but to early elementary school and pre-K.
This truly is a national challenge. DQSH now reportedly has chapters in 29 different states, which means there is plenty of local political work to be done. As Gorka notes, “pornographic books such as ‘All Boys Aren’t Blue’ can be found in hundreds of school libraries across the country, thanks in part to the fact that The Young Adult Library Services Association (a division of the American Library Association) put the book at the top of its Teens’ Top 10 book list in 2021.”
Malevolent Gaslighting
This makes the left’s abusive and hyperbolic rhetoric on conservative resistance to DQSH and other grooming activities all the more insulting and infuriating. The Washington Post provocatively featured a political cartoon in April portraying Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as responsible for the deaths of trans children. Liberal media outlets are claiming that conservatives should be held responsible for the suicides of children struggling with dysphoria.
Yet who encouraged prepubescent children to think about myopic topics like gender dysphoria in the first place? I certainly never heard of such things when I was in grade school in the 1990s. Who told children that their gender and sexual identity were the most important thing about them, and that misidentifying or misgendering amounted to the worst possible offense? Who is making millions of dollars off lying to and emotionally damaging impressionable, easily-manipulated children?
The answer is those advocating DQSH and the many other ubiquitous forms of sexual and gender propaganda influencing millions of American youth. It is they who are deceiving — and often permanently damaging — an entire generation of Americans for the sake of their own ideological agenda, the normalizing of bizarre, pornographic behavior.
No, conservatives did not inflame the culture war over trans ideology and drag queens. But we sure would like to stop it.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.
Of all the hysterical leftist reactions to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter on Monday, MSNBC host Ari Melber’s was easily the most revealing.
“If you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don’t have to explain yourself,”he gravely intoned during his show Monday evening. “You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it ‘til after the election.”
You don’t say. This was in fact the way the left used social media to win the 2020 presidential election. They even admitted it openly in a stunning yet largely forgotten February 2021 article in Time magazine entitled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.”
“For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President,” wrote reporter Molly Ball. “Their work touched every aspect of the election.”
And they wanted credit for it, Ball continued, “even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
Their aim, they insisted, wasn’t to rig the election but to “fortify” it against then-President Donald Trump and his allies, whom they believed to be a threat to democracy itself.
“Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”
The final piece was critical, especially in the waning days of the campaign, when an October surprise in the form of Hunter Biden’s laptop threatened to derail his father’s candidacy and undo the organized left’s hard work.
The New York Post’s exclusive story dropped like a grenade less than a month before Election Day, providing “smoking-gun emails” showing that the younger Biden introduced his father “to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
The emails, the Post explained, were obtained from a computer dropped off and apparently forgotten at a repair shop in Delaware. Under the terms of the repair agreement, the store’s owner took possession of the laptop when it was deemed to be abandoned. Twitter and Facebook, though, determined without any evidence that the emails were actually “hacked materials” and thus distributed in violation of their terms of use agreements.
Facebook quickly acted to limit the reach of the story, while Twitter took the extraordinary step of locking the Post’s account and preventing other users from sharing its story or even pictures from it. Neither Hunter Biden nor the Joe Biden presidential campaign denied that the laptop was Hunter’s, and the younger Biden’s business partner, Tony Bobulinski, went on the record a few days later with documents that confirmed the Post’s reporting, which seemed to uncover an international bribery scheme.
It didn’t matter. Once 50 obviously partisan intelligence officials issued an evidence-free statement calling the laptop materials “Russian disinformation,” it was determined that they would be censored in both legacy and social media.
Of course, more than a year after Biden was safely elected, both The New York Times and Washington Post confirmed that the laptop was genuine, but the censorship did its job: A Media Research Center poll of swing state voters confirmed that 16 percent of Biden supporters would have changed their votes had they heard of the laptop story, including 4 percent who would have switched their vote to Trump. This obviously would have swung the entire election to Trump, but that would have been an unacceptable result for the leftist cabal intent on “fortifying” democracy by stacking the deck against him. In light of the Media Research Center’s findings, social media censorship was very possibly the most effective way they did it. And naturally they had to brag about it in Time.
“Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories, the viral force of social media and the involvement of foreign meddlers made disinformation a broader, deeper threat to the 2020 vote,” Ball reported. “Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago. She piloted a nameless, secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked disinformation online and tried to figure out how to combat it.”
She ultimately concluded that engaging with this supposedly “toxic content” or trying to debunk it was ineffective, so “the solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.”
This research armed liberal activists to pressure social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to far more aggressively and creatively enforce their rules, prompting a crackdown on “disinformation” that was in fact completely accurate. Because it was harmful to the effort to “save democracy” and defeat the “autocratic” Trump, it was censored.
“Democracy won in the end,” Ball concluded. “The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.”
This reveals the real threat of Musk’s Twitter takeover: If it is no longer possible to suppress factual information in the name of rescuing democracy from its alleged enemies, then those enemies (read: Republicans) might start winning more elections. And that is simply unacceptable.
Dan O’Donnell is a talk show host with News/Talk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, Wis. and 1310 WIBA in Madison, Wis., and a columnist for the John K. MacIver Institute.
If outfits like the Aspen Institute’s “Commission on Information Disorder,” along with Big Tech’s faceless “fact-checkers,” ever get a total monopoly on dictating reality, the result will be a 24/7 mix of falsehoods with the occasional limited hangout to cover up their lies. The icing on this fake cake is the use of conferences about disinformation, such as the recent stunt at the University of Chicago that served as cover for justifying political censorship. There former President Obama presented the perfect picture of psychological projection: a panel of propagandists accusing others of wrongthink.
The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, for example, sought to censor the reality of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal by announcing she didn’t find it “interesting.” See how that works? Truth depends upon how our elites personally feel about what should be true. But it gets much worse, because political censorship creates deep dysfunction in society. In fact, the surest way to kill a democracy is to practice political censorship under the guise of protecting society from disinformation.
Censorship causes disinformation. It’s the grandaddy of disinformation, not a solution to it. The sooner everyone recognizes this obvious fact, the better off we’ll be. Whenever a self-anointed elite sets up a Ministry of Truth, the link between censorship and disinformation becomes clear. Before long, they invent reality and punish anyone who expresses a different viewpoint.
So, it’s no small irony that those who claim to be protecting “democracy” from disinformation are the biggest promoters of disinformation and greatest destroyers of real democracy. Their dependence on censorship obstructs the circulation of facts. It prevents any worthwhile exchange of ideas.
Unchecked Censorship Isolates People
Consider what happens if a society is only permitted one propagandistic narrative while all other ideas and information are silenced. People start self-censoring to avoid social rejection. The result is a form of imposed mental isolation. Severely isolated people tend to lose touch with reality. The resulting conformity also perpetuates the censorship. This is unnatural and dangerous because human beings depend on others to verify what’s real. People weren’t able to verify reality in Nazi Germany, during Joseph Stalin’s Reign of Terror, or during Mao Zedong’s brutal Cultural Revolution. All were societies in the grip of mass hysteria because of ruthless censorship to protect a narrative.
As psychiatrist Joost Meerloo noted in his book “The Rape of the Mind,” no matter how well-meaning political censorship might be, it creates dangerous conformity of thought: “the presence of minority ideas, acceptable or not, is one of the ways in which we protect ourselves against the creeping growth of conformist majority thinking.”
The only way we can strengthen ourselves against such contagion is through real freedom of speech that allows fully open discussion and debate. However, if we’re confined by Big Tech to a relentless echo chamber and punished for expressing different thoughts, we’ll just keep getting more and more disinformation. In fact, we are now drowning in the distortions produced by “fact-checkers.” Take, for example, narratives that promote the gender confusion and sexualization of children. Public school teachers routinely post TikTok videos of themselves spewing forth their gender confusion. And if someone calls out Disney for its open grooming of children, Twitter suspends them.
If we never push back against such absurdities, we ultimately end up in a state of mass delusion, each of us a cell in a deluded hive mind, obedient to commands about what to say, how to act, and what to think. To get an idea of what that looks like in a population, check out this clip from North Korea:
Censorship-Invoked Social Contagion Is Real
One of the most telling incidents of censorship over the past year was YouTube and Twitter’s take-down of virologist and vaccine inventor Dr. Robert Malone, claiming he was “spreading misinformation”—i.e., spreading a second opinion—about Covid vaccines and treatments. But big tech saw an even bigger threat in Malone’s discussion of Mattias Desmet’s study of Mass Formation Psychosis (MFP) on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. This is a big reason Spotify was under pressure to de-platform Rogan entirely. Open discussion of such things would erode the illusions big media and big tech so doggedly prop up.
Malone explained how a propaganda-saturated population can end up in a state of mass hypnosis that renders people incapable of seeing reality. He described Desmet’s theory about how social isolation, a high level of discontent, and a strong sense of free-floating anxiety are keys to the development of this psychosis.
The anxiety is so painful that it causes people to cling, trancelike, to any narrative that seems to offer stability. Once all other views are censored, people become so invested in the narrative that they cannot consider any alternative views. They will even mob anyone who endangers the narrative. This phenomenon was prevalent in the German population under Nazism. Their obedience to the propaganda rendered them incapable of understanding any opposing narrative.
Mass psychosis should not sound farfetched. There’s nothing new about it. Hundreds of instances of mass hysteria are documented. In the 19th century, Scottish journalist Charles MacKay wrote up a whole catalog of them. In 2015 medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew co-authored a compendium of popular delusions or “mass sociogenic illness.”
Most past incidents of mass hysteria have been confined to geographic regions, such as the witch trials in 17th century Salem, Massachusetts. But with the internet accessible and addictive in the 2020s, the possibility of mass delusion on a global scale is upon us. Censorship—in the name of protecting “democracy” from disinformation—is the key to creating it.
Propagandists Guard Their Illusions Like Magicians
By definition, propaganda aims to psychologically affect people and change their attitudes. So, our social survival depends upon becoming aware of such phenomena. Building self-awareness about our vulnerability to crowd psychology would serve as a sort of psychological vaccine. Of course, elites do not want us even entertaining the possibility that we can be manipulated or vulnerable to social and psychological pressures. Propagandists are illusionists by nature. If their illusion falls apart, then the game is over for them. This is why they depend so heavily on the slur “conspiracy theorist” to distract us from the truth and from their use of censorship to cut us off from other ideas.
The late Nobel laureate Doris Lessing spoke against the dangers of social conformity and censorship in 1986. She noted there was a great body of knowledge that was continuing to be built about the laws of crowd psychology and social contagion. It was odd that we weren’t applying this knowledge to improve our lives. Lessing concluded that no government in the world would willingly help its citizens resist group pressures and learn to think independently. We have to do it ourselves. Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and it sure looks like the keepers of this secret knowledge use it as a means of social control.
No sane person would want to live inside the boxes that the censors who claim to be fighting disinformation are building around us. If we want to escape this Twilight Zone existence, we must destroy that canard and insist on real freedom of speech everywhere.
Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her essays have also appeared in the Washington Examiner, American Thinker, Public Discourse, Human Life Review, New Oxford Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, she focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. She has also raised three children, served as a public school substitute teacher, and homeschooled for several years as well. She has a B.A. in journalism and international relations from the University of Southern California and a Master’s degree in Russian and Soviet history, also from USC. Follow Stella on Twitter.
It is painfully obvious, as was predictable, that Joe Biden’s presidency is a dumpster fire. As demonstrated by the party’s destructive callousness towards children, the elderly, and the poor during their Covid lockdown frenzy, Democrats care about none of these real-world results of their policies. But they do care about polling, and Joe Biden’s is abysmal.
According to even heavily politicized polls, Biden is at least performing as badly as Donald Trump. Biden is between the third- and fifth-most ratings-underwater president ever in American history at this point in his first term.
Biden of course also has the advantage of a wildly favorable press and social media monopoly while Trump had the strong headwind of a wildly negative one. That factor obscured for a great many of American voters actions that easily demonstrated long before his election that Biden was unfit for the presidency.
Now that he’s president, however, and very publicly bungling essentially every major issue all the way up to U.S. national security, Biden’s weakness and incompetence have been impossible for the corrupt media to entirely cover up. Biden’s appalling withdrawal from Afghanistan may have been the first major blow to public confidence in his governing ability, and it’s been followed by blow after blow: the repercussions of ending U.S. energy independence, historic inflation caused by massive government spending, aggression by America’s foreign foes, a tacitly open border with human trafficking of historic proportions, not to mention fueling America’s legalized mass killings of unborn infants and forcing schools to inflict gender dysphoria on the children in their care.
So yes, the polls look bad. That’s why Democrat officials suddenly switched away from their Covid mania, lifting mask mandates in blue states, ending the daily falsified “body counts” on TVs and newspapers, and jumping immediately into European war hysteria. But that’s not been enough to turn those polls around. Historic indicators presently suggest a “red wave” in the upcoming midterms.
That brings us to The New York Times’s recent “limited hangout“: its highly suspicious, very late acknowledgment that, hey, that laptop containing evidence that Joe Biden is just as corrupt as his son Hunter Biden told Russian prostitutes — that laptop is real, and so is its data. Yes, the United States’s top foreign adversaries likely have blackmail material on the U.S. president, and likely paid him some very big bribes.
Oh, and yes Twitter and Facebook did use their global communications monopolies to rig the election for Joe Biden by hiding this information (and who knows what else).
Why would The New York Times do this — and Facebook and Twitter not ban this information release just like they did before? Well, one explanation is hierarchy reinforcement. As I wrote Monday, like forcing their “minions” to wear face masks, the ridiculously belated laptop confirmation also equals the ruling class “flexing their power to say things they won’t allow their political opponents to say.”
There’s another explanation, though. It’s that Joe Biden is no longer useful to the ruling class. After being used to win an election, he’s now making it impossible for them to credibly foist on Americans the idea that his party could win another one with him on their masthead. The donkey is showing through the lion skin, and so they need a new donkey.
So while it seems utterly legitimate to insist on accountability such as appointing a special counsel to investigate the Biden family’s apparent corruption, that also could relieve the Democrat Party of their greatest liability. They’d probably deeply appreciate that, in fact. Biden got the ruling class what they wanted, and they don’t need him any more. Getting rid of him now would in fact be highly convenient for maintaining their power.
There’s only one problem with that. Kamala isn’t at all going well for them either.
Enjoy that bed you made for yourselves, Democrats. I hope it’s at least as uncomfortable as that bed you’ve made for all the Americans whose long-term outlook is more suffering, thanks to Democrats’ criminal prioritization of power for themselves above all else.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
Last week, The New York Times quietly acknowledged that the emails recovered from the MacBook Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer store were authentic. The admission came nearly a year-and-a-half late, after the corrupt media — legacy and social — buried the scandal the New York Post broke just weeks before the November election.
Merely admitting the laptop is legitimate is not enough. Rather, by concurring in the authenticity of the laptop and the emails, the supposed standard-bearers of journalism have also implicitly acknowledged the validity of the scandals spawn by the porn-filled MacBook. And notwithstanding the salacious source of the documentary evidence of the scandals, the scandals are not about Hunter Biden: They are about now-President Biden.
Here are the eight Joe Biden scandals deserving further coverage.
1. Pay-to-Play in Ukraine
The most obvious scandal bared by the emails and text messages contained on Hunter’s laptop concerns the influence profiteering Joe Biden apparently participated in during his eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president, with Ukraine featuring heavily in the pay-to-play scheme.
The New York Times, in its likely “get ahead of the story,” coverage from last week, touched on the Ukrainian angle by noting Hunter’s connection to Burisma and then quoting emails recovered from the laptop indicating the younger Biden leveraged his dad’s position — then as vice president. But the Times’ surface coverage of the Burisma scandal doesn’t nearly suffice.
Surface it was: The Times made no mention of Hunter’s appointment to Burisma Holdings Board of Directors at a reported salary of $50,000 per month during his dad’s time as vice president. Hunter Biden had no experience in energy. So, a deep-dive on the entire Biden-Burisma connection is a first step.
2. China Gets in the Game
Ukraine is but a patch on the influence-peddling undertaken by Hunter on behalf of “the big guy,” as the younger Biden referred to his dad. China also played a large role in the family enterprise, as demonstrated by, again, passing coverage in November 2021. Then, the Times reported, in brief, that Hunter Biden’s joint global equity firm, the Bohai Harvest Equity Investment Fund, had helped coordinate the purchase by a Chinese mining company of the world’s largest cobalt source in the Congo.
That deal gave China control over a huge chunk of the world’s known cobalt supplies — an ingredient necessary to make electric car batteries. And the role of Hunter Biden’s company, Bohai, in the transaction again connects directly to Joe Biden, as Hunter reportedly launched that new joint enterprise with Chinese business partners less than two weeks after he traveled to China on Air Force Two with his then-vice president father.
In exploring this scandal, the press needs to push beyond the emails recovered from Hunter’s abandoned laptop, and do what Tucker Carlson did when the pay-to-play scandal first surfaced: talk to Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski. Bobulinski provides further proof that this scandal reaches the top of the Biden family.
3. Moscow, Kazakhstan, and More
While Ukraine and China likely hold the most significant revelations, once those threads are pulled, investigators should move on to Moscow, which according to a Senate report, holds another possible scandal. That report documents that Hunter also received a combined $3.5 million from the wife of the former Moscow mayor, a Kazakhstan investor, and several other individuals. After all, there is no reason to think that a person willing to let his son sell access to the vice president of the United States would close the money train to just a few countries.
4. Ukraine’s Firing of the Prosecutor Investigating Burisma
With the elite media now deigning coverage of Hunter’s laptop appropriate, the public knows the Burisma scandal was real and threatened to be spectacularly devastating to the elder Biden. That makes questions concerning then-Vice President Joe Biden’s demands that Ukraine fire the state prosecutor who was reportedly investigating Burisma ripe to revisit.
I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours.’ If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a b-tch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
While the Obama administration attempted to spin Biden’s push for the firing of Shokin, by claiming the international community had demanded Ukraine terminate the state prosecutor, a State Department official contradicted that claim during congressional testimony. George Kent, who worked on issues related to Ukraine at the State Department, reportedly told lawmakers it was the Obama administration that “spearheaded the efforts to have Shokin removed from his position as the top federal prosecutor in Ukraine.”
Biden needs to answer questions anew over his threats to withhold money from Ukraine unless the country removed the state prosecutor responsible for investigating Burisma. Democrats have impeached a president for less.
5. Obama-Biden Administration Ignoring Conflicts of Interest
Biden also needs to answer questions about his decision to ignore the clear conflicts of interest involved with him negotiating with the same countries Hunter was shaking down. Of course, since “the big guy” was in on the scam, bowing out over conflicts of interest is the lesser of the evils, but it is still worth investigating to assess how Biden handled the concerns raised by the Obama administration’s State Department.
Here, the testimony of the State Department official charged with issues related to Ukraine again proves significant. Kent told lawmakers that after learning Hunter sat on the board of Burisma, he raised concerns with the vice president’s office about the relationship.
“I raised my concerns that I had heard that Hunter Biden was on the board of a company owned by somebody that the U.S. Government had spent money trying to get tens of millions of dollars back and that could create the perception of a conflict of interest,” Kent testified before House members in October of 2019. “The message that I recall hearing back was that the vice president’s son Beau was dying of cancer and that there was no further bandwidth to deal with family-related issues at that time … That was the end of that conversation.”
The question for now-President Biden, then, is whether anyone in his office raised concerns about the clear conflicts-of-interest with him personally, and if so, why did Biden ignore the problem?
6. The Intelligence Community’s Briefing of Biden
Another scandal reaching President Biden concerns his interactions with the intelligence community after the FBI, and presumably the CIA and other such agencies, learned in December of 2019, that Hunter Biden believed Russians had stolen Hunter’s laptop, rendering the Bidens susceptible to blackmail.
Here, it is important to understand that there are two separate Hunter Biden laptops at issue. The most-discussed laptop was actually the second laptop. That laptop was the one Hunter had abandoned at the Delaware repair shop. Then, after the repair shop owner discovered concerning material on the MacBook, the store owner handed it to the FBI in December of 2019. The owner of the repair shop, however, had first made a copy of the hard drive, which resulted in The New York Post’s coverage in October 2020.
But there was another laptop — one Hunter believed Russians had stolen from him when he was binging on drugs with prostitutes in the summer of 2018 in Las Vegas. While the public did not learn about the existence of this earlier laptop until August of 2021, the FBI knew about it as early as December 2019, when they took possession of the second laptop Hunter had left at the repair store.
Among other material contained on the second laptop was a video of Biden recounting the circumstances of his first laptop disappearing with some Russians. Significantly, on that video Hunter Biden said his first laptop contained a ton of material leaving him susceptible to blackmail, since his father was “running for president” and Hunter talked “about it all the time.”
It is inconceivable that the FBI and the intelligence communities did not brief Biden on this discovery and the risk of blackmail, given that former FBI Director James Comey briefed Trump on the fake Steele dossier. On second thought, that is the initial question reporters should ask the president: “Did the FBI brief you, Mr. President, on the fact that Hunter believed Russians had stolen a laptop containing compromising information?”
From there, an inquiring press should investigate to ensure that Joe Biden did not direct the intelligence community to bury this national security risk to protect himself or his son.
7. Possible Collusion to Interfere in the 2020 Election
An honest press should also investigate whether now-President Biden or anyone connected to his then-presidential campaign pressured reporters, media outlets, or companies such as Twitter and Facebook to censor the Hunter Biden story. And what about the “fifty former intelligence officials” who publicly declared the laptop resembled a Russian disinformation campaign—something clearly untrue? Did Biden or his campaign coordinate with those individuals, several of whom had endorsed the Democratic candidate, in the release of the letter?
Given that polls show that 17 percent of Joe Biden voters would not have voted for him in 2020, if they had known about the Biden family scandals, the collective burying of the laptop scandal represents the most significant interference in elections ever seen in our country. So, “Did Biden or his campaign have anything to do with the decision to kill the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter’s MacBook?” And “What about the ‘fifty former intelligence officials?’”
From there the follow-ups flow quickly: “Who was involved in the push to silence the story and who were the executives or ‘journalists’ who bowed to the demands?” “Who coordinated with the intelligence officials?” “Were any threats or promises made?” “What were they?” “What did Joe Biden know?” “What about other Democrats and the Democratic National Committee?”
8. Joe Biden Is a ‘Lying Dog-Faced Pony Soldier’
The final Joe Biden scandal the press should push President Biden to answer concerns his lies to the American public. While there are too many to count, two merit further questioning.
First, the media should demand Biden answer for lying to the country when he seethed, “I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses. Period.” The evidence overwhelmingly shows that Biden not only knew of the family business deals but was part of them.
The second bold-faced fabrication from Biden came during his pre-election debate with Trump, when Trump raised “the laptop from hell.” When Trump asked Biden if he was saying the “laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?” the then-Democratic candidate replied, “That’s exactly what [I] was told.”
Unlikely. Biden also countered with this doozy, which again raises the question of whether Biden had a role in the intelligence officials’ statement:
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.
We can now add The New York Times to Giuliani. It remains to be seen, though, whether the Old Grey Lady and the other legacy outlets will report on the further scandals the laptop revealed—the ones that reach the president of the United States.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. 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.
On March 17, 2022, The New York Times stated it had verified the authenticity of a laptop and its data as belonging to the president’s son, Hunter Biden. This was the same laptop holding information that Twitter, Facebook, and other corporate media immediately suppressed when The New York Post, a right-leaning competitor of The New York Times, reported on it three weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
If they had known about one of the Biden family scandals, such as the Hunter Biden laptop information, 17 percent of Joe Biden’s voters wouldn’t have voted for him, found a 2020 post-election poll. This means big tech’s suppression of this story likely made enough difference to tip Joe Biden into his low-margin win in the Electoral College.
Back in October 2020, Twitter and Facebook immediately responded to The New York Post’s publication of information from Hunter Biden’s laptop by effectively banning it from their platforms that effectively monopolize public discussion. Twitter punished the Post for reporting the repeatedly authenticated laptop information by suspending its account for two weeks.
“What this means is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post’s reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate,”commented independent investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald.
Major National Security Implications
That laptop provides evidence Joe Biden was involved in Hunter Biden’s pay-for-play schemes with foreign oligarchs, an obvious national security risk. Some of these corrupt deals involved Ukraine, a notoriously corrupt country that is currently petitioning the Biden administration to engage militarily with Russia on their behalf.
Russia also has blackmail material on Hunter Biden, according to videos from his laptop, and the FBI knew about this as early as 2019, according to Federalist reporting: “This explosive revelation establishes that either Joe Biden lied to the American public, or the intelligence community lied to him,”wrote Federalist Senior Contributor Margot Cleveland in 2021.
Other Hunter Biden business deals involved China, the United States’ top security threat. Texts between business partners indicate Joe Biden was financially involved in Hunter Biden’s China deals, contrary to Joe Biden’s public claims.
China also has blackmail material on Hunter Biden and possibly on Joe Biden. All of this means major conflicts of interest for the president’s foreign policy at a time of significant global instability. It also was deliberately hidden from the voting public by collusion between big tech companies and the Democrat Party.
Hiding Democrats’ Dangerous Scandals
The same presidential administration that benefitted from Big Tech hiding damning true information is openly colluding with Big Tech to maintain and expand these information operations. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in July 2021, “We’re flagging posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Soon after, Psaki confirmed, “We’re in regular touch with social media platforms…about areas where we have concern.” You might call it a public-private partnership.
Democrats have demanded that the Biden administration create a task force to suppress “misinformation” and “disinformation.” What did corporate media and big tech call the laptop information they suppressed in 2020, only for The New York Times to confirm in 2022? That’s right: “Disinformation.” In fact, as Greenwald notes, intelligence operatives immediately enacted a real disinformation campaign against the New York Post reporting in 2020, pushing the false narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop was “disinformation.”
That’s called projection, and you should assume that’s one of the things going on every time the media runs some wild news cycle—such as accusing the Republican president of treasonous collusion with Russia when it’s actually the Democrat presidential candidate who did that.
Reinforcing the Power Hierarchy
This New York Times article, after all the lies and manipulations about the Hunter Biden laptop, is also a chilling public affirmation that the ruling class believes Americans are helpless to choose their own government. They’re even bold enough to confirm their power openly.
Just like requiring only the hired help and those under the thumb of government agencies to wear masks while their masters wine and dine mask-free, The New York Times openly revealing that corporate media including itself, Twitter, and Facebook lied and got away with it is a hierarchy flex. It’s a display of their power. They are saying, “We can lie to Americans and get away with it.”
They’re also flexing their power to say things they won’t allow their political opponents to say. Again, Covid is another clear example, as when Trump advisors such as Scott Atlas faced vicious media smears for pointing out facts that The New York Times finally acknowledged months later, such as that kids don’t need to wear masks and it’s perfectly safe for them to go to school. In the intervening time, children needlessly suffered, but The New York Times doesn’t care. They owned the rubes, and that matters more to them than truth or children’s suffering.
People this corrupt don’t deserve to have media platforms, control of the presidency, or any power of any kind. At the very least, those who use their power this cynically should be respected by absolutely no one.
Big Tech Is a Threat to Democracy
Big Tech is also clearly manipulating public discourse for highly partisan ends. Social media has become what the “big three” cable news networks were decades ago: falsely “nonpartisan” manipulators of elections. Like ABC, CBS, and NBC, Twitter and Facebook’s ability to control culture and politics through brain drips feeding lies into millions of Americans’ minds needs to end, yesterday. This is not a pissing contest. It’s about our continued existence as a nation.
Greenwald notes the corporate press and big tech “all ratified and spread a coordinated disinformation campaign in order to elect Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump.” That’s not a democracy, no matter how many slogans about that word propaganda outlets put out. It’s tyranny.
When elections are an elaborate charade and their outcomes are openly manipulated by giant special interests, we don’t have self-government, self-determination, democracy, constitutional government, representation, or any of the above. For those of us who love these things because we believe they are our God-given and precious rights and responsibilities, this is a dark reality to behold.
One might call this world the left wants to live in Chinese communism with American characteristics. Well, I don’t want to live in that world, and neither do at least 74 million other Americans. We’re not going to keep being abused by our own government quietly. And we’re not going to believe these liars, no matter what they say.
The top names on everyone’s mind when they hear the word “disinformation” ought to be The New York Times, Twitter, Facebook, The Atlantic, and all their corrupt, self-congratulating Aspen Institute friends. That’s something we can all work to help our neighbors see.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
The night of Feb. 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine sat at anchor in Havana, Cuba. A few minutes after 9 p.m., the nightly ritual of “Taps” from Fifer C. H. Newton’s bugle descended over the ship. Some half an hour later, the forward end of the ship rose suddenly above the water.
“Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion,”detailed author Tom Miller. “Within seconds, another eruption — this one deafening and massive — splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn’t battened down, and most that was, flying more than 200 feet into the air.”
The explosion, which killed more than 250 men on board, was quickly memorialized with cries of “Remember the Maine!” Without directly accusing Spain, which controlled Cuba at the time, a U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry decided a month later that the explosion was from a mine. (A U.S. Navy investigation decades later found it was likely an accidental coal bunker fire.)
Shortly afterward, the United States declared war on Spain, starting the Spanish-American War. One of the biggest warmongering forces in America, capitalizing on the Maine‘s explosion, was the press — a position American media pundits continue to hold as they work overtime to drag Americans into a war with Russia over Ukraine.
When you see talking heads uncritically parroting propagandist stories about Ukraine that turn out to be false, from the “Ghost of Kyiv” to that Snake Island story to old photos taken years ago, you should be asking why the corporate media is so willing to spread such fake news (while it censors conservatives for factual critiques of disproven Covid narratives, no less). It wouldn’t be the first time the press lied to pull Americans into war.
How Newspapermen Helped Start a War in Cuba
It was the so-called golden age of newspapers, after the influence of the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the “penny press” — newspapers you could buy at the street corner without a subscription. Competing magnates like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer fought for readers, and they did so by trying to produce the most sensational news possible.
As the story goes, in the year before the Maine exploded, Hearst had commissioned reporter Frederic Remington to go to Cuba, where Cuban revolutionaries were skirmishing with their Spanish colonizers. When Remington sent Hearst a wire to explain he was leaving Cuba because there was no war to cover, Hearst reportedly replied, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”
After the sinking of the Maine, headlines like“Spanish Treachery!” and “Destruction of the War Ship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy!” and“Invasion!” and “Who Destroyed the Maine? $50,000 Reward” splashed across front pages. The United States went to war in April, two months after the Maine perished.
The media’s eagerness to gin up a war mirrored the push for involvement from other voices in politics and culture. Some Americans had sympathy for Spanish-owned Cuba as fellow colonial revolutionaries, while others wanted to see U.S. influence and territory expand internationally.
Half a century prior, when the phrase “manifest destiny” was being coined, the United States had gone to war with Mexico over Texas but also ended the war with acquisitions of what is now California, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. By 1898, the United States had purchased Alaska from Russia and claimed several Pacific islands.
Many Americans saw a similar opportunity for territorial expansion in a fight with Spain over Cuba. Sure enough, the United States exited the Spanish-American War with new acquisitions from Guam to the Philippines to Puerto Rico.
While the warmongers weren’t limited to the press, they were certainly concentrated there. The State Department Office of the Historian writes: “Hearst and Pulitzer devoted more and more attention to the Cuban struggle for independence, at times accentuating the harshness of Spanish rule or the nobility of the revolutionaries, and occasionally printing rousing stories that proved to be false.” Sound familiar?
A Century of Dishonesty
“Remember the Maine!” may have been at the height of the yellow journalism era, but it was certainly not the last instance of dishonest reporting in favor of sensational warmongering. During the Spanish Civil War, which saw Nationalist revolutionaries clash with Republicans in the years directly preceding World War II, some Western outlets were criticized for covering the conflict sensationally. The New York Times devoted far more manpower to the war than papers at the time traditionally did, with “highly partisan” perspectives.
George Orwell, who fought alongside Republican forces, wrote in his memoir “Homage to Catalonia” that “for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.”
“I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened,” he recalled. “I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.’”
Newspaper propagandists’ willingness to cover wars in self-interested ways didn’t always run in the same direction, either. Orwell’s contemporary and fellow writer Ernest Hemingway had similar criticism for propagandist writers who downplayed the carnage of World War I, insisting it was “the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.”
Later in the 20th century, The New York Times’ Berlin bureau chief Guido Enderis was providing friendly coverage of Hitler’s Germany, according to writer Ashley Rindsberg’s book“The Gray Lady Winked.” Meanwhile, the paper’s Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty, Rindsberg noted, was downplaying Joseph Stalin’s role in the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine because “at the time, The New York Times was actively pushing for American recognition of the Soviet Union.” President Franklin Roosevelt obliged, recognizing the USSR in 1933.
A more recent example is that of The New York Times and other corporate media outlets reporting baseless stories about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq to gin up support for President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. A year afterward, the Times editors admitted their lopsided reporting on the matter in a lengthy editorial piece.
“We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been,” they wrote. “In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.”
“Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these [Iraqi] exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one,” the editors continued. With the rapid dissemination of sensational photos, videos, and information via social media today, there’s no indication the corporate press is any less immune to disinformation when it fits their narrative.
When you see corporate outlets rushing us into war in Europe with sensational stories and flat-out dishonest polling, think twice. The corrupt media has lied to drag Americans into war before, and none of their recent lies on other issues should incline you to think they won’t do it again.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
DirecTV announced in January the digital satellite service would no longer carry One America News Network (OAN), owned by Herring Networks. The decision prompted a lawsuit by OAN in response Tuesday, arguing that DirecTV’s refusal to carry OAN could shut it down entirely.
“We informed Herring Networks that, following a routine internal review, we do not plan to enter into a new contract when our current agreement expires,” the company told USA Today two months ago, without expanding on its definition of an “internal review.”
The decision to drop the channel by OAN’s largest distributor is expected to take OAN off DirecTV airwaves by the end of April and threatens the outlet’s ability to operate in a crowded media environment. It’s essentially canceling the network from cable. Six Republican attorneys general last week issued a letter asking DirecTV to reverse its decision to cancel OAN.
The move also signals a sharp escalation of the weaponizing private market power to silence political dissidents. Silicon Valley has already engaged in rampant censorship, complete with a routine purge of those who don’t propagate the party lines.
Former President Donald Trump, who was banned from Twitter and Facebook at the end of his presidency while the Kremlin remains active on both, condemned the corporate censorship on Monday after calling for a boycott of DirectTV last month if the company owned by AT&T follows through on its decision.
“Time Warner, the owner of Fake News CNN, has just announced that they will be terminating a very popular and wonderful news network (OAN),” Trump said in a statement. “Between heavily indebted Time Warner, and Radical Left comcast, which runs Xfinity, there is a virtual monopoly on news, thereby making what you hear from the LameStream Media largely FAKE, hence the name FAKE NEWS!”
Trump may have confused Time Warner and DirecTV. While DirecTV made its plans clear, no reporting as of this writing suggests Time Warner is planning to follow suit. Neither Time Warner nor representatives for OAN responded to The Federalist’s inquiries.
Corporate collusion to strip a network off the airwaves, beginning with DirecTV’s crusade against OAN, would set a dangerous precedent. The left’s strategy to ban its way to a monopoly on discourse includes opposition silencing and self-righteous fact-checking. Never mind strict standards of censoring disinformation would have kicked every leftist news network off air years ago from endless amplification of the Russian collusion hoax alone.
Today it’s OAN. Tomorrow it could be Newsmax, and eventually Fox News, a more likely predicament if the network didn’t make satellite distributors so much money.
But what’s behind DirecTV’s decision to target OAN? As of now, its rival conservative networks remain untouched.
The move ostensibly comes from sealed findings in the corporate powerhouse’s “internal review” of its relationship with OAN. A spokesperson told NPR in January rising programming costs was driving the decision. The review is likely a smokescreen for executives dissatisfied with the network’s narratives, especially its reporting on the 2020 election.
Three days after Election Day in 2020, AT&T, the majority owner of DirecTV, announced that William Kennard, an alum of both the Clinton and Obama administrations, would chair AT&T’s board of directors. Kennard is also listed as an executive board member of the global equity firm Staple Street Capital. In 2018, Staple Street Capital acquired Dominion Voting Systems, the electoral tabulation company that came under fire after the 2020 election.
Fox News and Newsmax retracted their networks’ reporting on Dominion Voting Systems in the aftermath of the 2020 contest. OAN has not.
Is DirecTV’s move to cancel OAN a business decision for the satellite provider? Or is it a political decision? Regardless, the cancellation of entire news networks by satellite providers is a new level of private censorship against non-leftist views.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
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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.
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.
The judge presiding over the highly anticipated Kyle Rittenhouse homicide trial recently criticized what he called a “vast amount” of “irresponsible and sloppy journalism” covering the events surrounding the case.
While speaking with potential jurors during the jury selection process on Monday, Kenosha County Circuit Court Judge Bruce Schroeder said that those selected for the task may need to disregard much of what they have heard in the media about the case.
“This case has become very political. It was involved in the politics of the last election year,”Schroeder said in the court session, adding, “To this day, you can go out and read things from all across the political spectrum about this case, most of which is written by people who know nothing.”
“The price we pay for having a free press is a lot of irresponsible and sloppy journalism,” he continued, adding that his charge “is not an attack on the media” but a reality check for potential jurors about the need for a fair and impartial trial.
Schroeder said that he has read some things about the case that have been “perfect,” but noted that most of the reporting has either been “sloppy” or “deliberately biased.”
“It can be frightening,” he added while urging jury candidates to abandon their presuppositions and focus solely on the evidence presented at trial. He reminded them that the right to a fair trial is an important right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
What’s the background?
The news comes only days after Schroeder ruled that the men Rittenhouse, 18, fatally shot or wounded on Aug. 25, 2020, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, can’t be referred to as “victims” by prosecutors — but can be called “rioters” and “looters.”
Rittenhouse — then 17 — allegedly took a gun to riots in the city in order to defend local businesses against looting and ransacking in the wake of a white police officer’s shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man. During the mayhem, Rittenhouse shot three men, killing two. Rittenhouse was charged with multiple felonies, including first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, attempted first-degree reckless homicide, and first-degree reckless endangering safety. If convicted, he could serve a mandatory life sentence in prison.
Rittenhouse’s defense team has insisted he was acting in self-defense, and videos of the shootings from that night appear to back up his claims. He later told reporters he doesn’t regret taking a gun to protests on the night of the shootings, saying he “would’ve died” if he hadn’t.
By Monday evening, 20 jurors had been selected, and now the trial is set to be heard.
Kenosha County, Wis., Circuit Court Judge Bruce Schroeder has a fanciful idea: That the trial he’s overseeing that includes murder charges against 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse can be removed from politics. He said so on Monday during jury selection. “We don’t want to fall into the trap,” he said, “that many in the media have, a large percentage of the media, and discuss this as a political trial or that there are bigger factors at stake in this trial.”
How naive. Of course this is a trial of political consequence and of course there are bigger factors at stake. The potential jurors know it, and that’s why during selection several of them expressed concern that their city or they personally might be the targets of rioting or harassment, regardless of the verdict the jury renders. All of the potential jurors are kept anonymous until after the trial is over but here’s a sample of what some of them said during selection:
—One said that no matter the verdict, “half the country will be up in arms about it.”
— Another said, “I’m more afraid of our community and the outsiders of our community that are coming in… It just brings us back to August (2020).” She also said she was “potentially” afraid of reliving riots depending on the verdict.
— A third said it was “scary” to be on a case like this one, specifically citing “riots” and wondering aloud, “Am I gonna get home safe?”
Those are legitimate concerns. We saw what happened earlier this year in Minneapolis, when businesses and restaurants boarded up their storefronts in anticipation of a possible acquittal of former police officer Derek Chauvin, who ultimately was convicted of killing George Floyd. If things don’t go a certain way in politically charged trials like that, despite evidence leading a deliberate jury to the opposite conclusion, well, that might very well mean more rioting, looting, arson, and violence. Potential jurors in the Rittenhouse trial received the message loud and clear that this isn’t just a murder trial. This is about the broader question of whether some types of political violence are acceptable, even necessary.
Rittenhouse is charged with the murder of two men and the attempted murder of a third. All relevant parties are white (sadly robbing the media of a beloved racially charged narrative) and it isn’t disputed that each of them had been chasing the teen and attempting to apprehend his weapon. All of it was in the context of several nights of destructive rioting in Kenosha, which resulted in a total of $50 million in damages to the city. The mayhem was sparked by the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man who was wanted for violating a restraining order stemming from claims he had sexually assaulted a woman. Blake is on video resisting his arrest and defying police orders by moving to enter his vehicle as they tried to apprehend him.
The city went up in flames and the national media to this day characterize the chaos as a “Black Lives Matter march” because they, along with leaders in the Democratic Party, believe all of it was justified.
Rittenhouse may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that’s not a crime and it’s not what he’s on trial for. He’s on trial for shooting men who pursued him and made moves to grab his gun, something that is seen on video, testified by at least one witness, and written out in the state’s own complaint against Rittenhouse.
A jury will inevitably render its verdict, but contrary to what the judge says, there’s no way around it— this is a political trial and that should scare the jurors.
To great public fanfare, Joe Biden has anointed Rachel Levine a “four-star admiral” in the Public Health Service (PHS). The public relations campaign in support of Levine has emphasized his status as the first transgender four-star “admiral” in the “eight U.S. uniformed services.” That PR campaign is misleading, and it is part of a dangerous effort to undermine the military. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) kicked off the propaganda campaign, leading with the “four-star transgender” meme: On October 19, it announced “the nation’s first openly transgender four-star officer across any of the eight uniformed services of the United States. (emphasis here and below is added). HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra reinforced the theme: “Admiral Levine’s historic appointment as the first openly transgender four-star officer is a giant step forward towards equality as a nation.” The U.S. surgeon general touted Levine as “first openly transgender four-star officer to serve in any of the uniformed services.”
The media parroted the party line. Here is The New York Times: “She [sic] is also the first openly transgender person to become a four-star officer in any of the nation’s eight uniformed services.” USA Today’s contribution was virtually indistinguishable: “Rachel Levine becomes first openly transgender 4-star officer across uniformed services.”Here’s The Washington Post: “Rachael Levine, openly transgendered health official sworn in as four-star admiral in Public Health Service.”
This roll-out and publicity barrage leave little doubt that Levine’s primary qualification for his instant promotion is his transgender status. What’s worse, it will damage U.S. military recruitment and morale, thus damaging U.S. national security.
Yes, the Public Health Service is one of the eight “uniformed services” but, notwithstanding the uniforms and its bureaucrats designated as “admirals,” it is not part of the “armed forces.” The U.S. armed forces are the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Space Force. The other two government departments in the category of “uniformed services” are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Officer Corps and the Public Health Services Commissioned Officer Corps. In addition to their Navy-like uniforms, these two also are headed by bureaucrats designated “admirals.”
Four-star is the highest rank in the U.S. military. Although nine five-star admirals and generals served in World War II, the five-star rank was retired upon the death of Gen. Omar Bradley in 1981, leaving four-star generals as the highest rank. The four-star designation calls to mind such historical and accomplished military men as Admiral William Halsey Jr., who commanded the Pacific Fleet in the fight-to-the-death against Japan (and was promoted to five-star rank only after the end of the war), and such notables as Gen. George Patton, recipient of two distinguished service crosses for heroism in battle and the American commander most feared by the Germans in World War II.
Even Patton was a “mere” three-star general when he commanded the Third Army in its drive through Europe into the heart of Germany, and was only awarded his fourth star less than a month before the war’s end. Thus, while maneuvering his Third Army to relieve Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, Patton would have been outranked by now-Admiral Levine.
In short, promotion to the four-star level normally indicates decades of military service, often in dangerous and life-threatening circumstances, and military achievements of the highest order. Levine does not remotely merit any comparison with these or any of the other accomplished four-star officers, whether admirals or generals.
The administration’s publicity campaign seeking to present Levine as an accomplished four-star admiral is a fraud, particularly coupled with the references to all the uniformed services, as if they are somehow comparable. Although now designated as an “admiral,” Levine commands no sailors, no submarines, and no ships. At least the admiral managing the NOAA has ships and aircraft to command.
Unlike Navy admirals, Levin did not become an admiral after decades of service, including overseas deployments, time away from family, and the hazards that accompany military service. Nor did he attend Annapolis or any other service academy, or even Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) or officer candidate school. He was never an ensign, lieutenant, commander, captain, or even a vice admiral.
Others have documented Levine’s failures in the public health arena. In view of that record, no one can even claim that he is the best person to head PHS out of the hundreds of thousands of physicians in the United States. That is why the PR campaign emphasized his purported gender status. There is no doubt that he is most famous for claiming to be a woman, after 33 years of marriage and fathering two children with a real woman.
Americans should consider the cumulative effect that this and similar boneheaded decisions have on military retention and morale and whether they are done by design. Consider for a moment the perspective of, for example, an Army major or Navy lieutenant commander with 10 to 15 years of service. Or perhaps consider a Marine gunnery sergeant or Army master sergeant with the same amount of service.
Let us assume that he is in one of the special operations units, such as the Army Special Forces, Recon Marines or SEALS, since they are still engaged in combat. Such an officer or NCO has worked extremely hard to receive each promotion. He has been at war for his entire adult life and probably has between 6 and 10 combat deployments, which amount to years away from his family. He may have been wounded, perhaps multiple times. At the bare minimum, he and his family have had to cope with horrendous personal and family stress, among other issues. Now he sees a man with no military experience summarily appointed to six grades above him to the rank of four-star admiral—the equivalent of General Patton, for Pete’s sake—purely as a political sop.
Does anyone in this administration conceive of the damage to morale that this can cause? Do they care? This tells American servicemen and women that their sacrifices are not appreciated, their service is not valued, and that they will not be treated with equal fairness.
Are we going to see a rash of resignations in reaction to this one incident? No. But it most assuredly is another blow at the foundation of the military, another effort to use it as a lab for social experimentation and to force political conformity upon those who remain.
This is part of the effort to purge the military of non-leftists and to seed the ranks with “woke,” politically conscious officers and NCOs who will hew to the “progressive” party line. It is part of the pattern that includes Biden’s purge of Trump appointees from the service academies’ boards, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s search for alleged“domestic terrorists” in the ranks, and Gen. Mark Milley’s focus on the“white rage” supposedly permeating the services. It is part of leftist ideology’s ever-growing danger to the U.S. military and therefore to the country.
John Lucas is a practicing attorney in Tennessee who has successfully argued before the U. S. Supreme Court. Before entering law school at the University of Texas, he served in the Army Special Forces as an enlisted man and then graduated from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in 1969. He is an Army Ranger and fought in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader. He is married with four children.
In 2014, Rolling Stone published a story about a female student named “Jackie” who claimed she was raped at a fraternity party at the University of Virginia.
“The 9,000-word story prompted a wave of outrage and revulsion,” said the Washington Post. The fraternity in question was graffitied within hours, protesters descended upon the campus in Charlottesville, Va., the university president suspended Greek life until the following year, and elected officials condemned the incident.
“University of Virginia Contends With Outrage Over Horrific Rape Reports,” Time Magazine headlined. CNN reported on the story and the university’s swift reaction to it, as did ABC News. The Huffington Post also picked up the story.
The story, we now know, later unraveled, leading to a retraction from Rolling Stone and massive defamation lawsuits. But not before the appalling tale of a helpless young woman being brutally assaulted on an educational campus shook Americans’ sensibilities. No one was disagreeing that, if true, the incident deserved horror, outrage, and efforts to try and keep such abuses from happening again.
The Story We Should All Be Up In Arms About
Just seven years later, a similarly harrowing tale has emerged just 100 or so miles away from U-Va., in Loudoun County, Va. An investigation from The Daily Wire earlier this month reported allegations from Loudoun County father Scott Smith that in May, “a boy allegedly wearing a skirt entered a girls’ bathroom at nearby Stone Bridge High School, where he sexually assaulted Smith’s ninth-grade daughter.”
“A boy was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio, related to an incident that day at that school,” according to Smith’s attorney.
But instead of receiving national outrage across the political and media landscape, the alleged incident was reportedly covered up by the Loudoun County School Board for months. In a June meeting, board members insisted they didn’t know of any such assaults. After showing up to a school board meeting in protest, Smith was arrested and smeared as a “domestic terrorist.”
Days after the Daily Wire investigation broke, another report alleged the school district had been failing to report sexual assault claims for years. Meanwhile, LCPS appears to have quietly transferred the alleged rapist to another school, where he has since been accused of another sexual assault of a female student.
Where Is The Outrage?
Where is the outrage? A search for “Scott Smith Loudoun” returns zero results on the Washington Post’s website, despite Loudoun County’s close proximity to the Post’s home city. On Tuesday, the Post finally published something on the story, but failed to mention Smith by name and initially failed to admit that the alleged attacker identified as “gender fluid.”
A search for “Scott Smith Loudoun” or “Loudoun sexual assault” returned no results from The New York Times on Wednesday. The extent to which CNN covered the story was to say “[Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn] Youngkin on Tuesday promised action following parental outrage over two recent alleged assaults in public schools in the state’s Loudoun County,” immediately after a paragraph of damage control for Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe’s statement that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Can you imagine if, instead of discovering holes in the U-Va. story, additional coverage had revealed that the school had been covering up other sexual assault allegations for years? Or, if the allegations in the Rolling Stone story had been true, can you imagine if U-Va. had quietly moved the rapists to another fraternity and tried to cover the whole thing up? Or tried to smear Jackie and her family as “domestic terrorists”?
The Loudoun County incident has all the ingredients of a horrifying scandal worthy of the front pages of every newspaper in the country. It should provoke our outrage, not as conservatives, but as caring and compassionate human souls whose sympathies are pricked by the horrors allegedly endured by an innocent 15-year-old girl.
If We Can’t Agree Rape Is Bad, What Can We Agree On?
Ensuring the safety of young girls — in their places of learning and elsewhere — should not be controversial. But the loudest voices on the left, the same ones who screamed “Me Too” from the rooftops of their Hollywood mansions, are too allegiant to the fringe demands of transgenderism to speak up. Many voices in the middle, even, seem too cowardly to come to the defense of young women like Smith’s daughter.
In a widening partisan divide, if we can’t agree that young girls being raped at school is an outrage, what can we agree on? Does the left hate conservatives with such vitriol that, once voices on the right speak up for a young girl’s right to bodily safety, that issue is suddenly anathema, tainted by the fingerprints of concerned parents slandered as domestic terrorists?
Plenty of other common-sense perspectives that any Democrat nominee would have supported up to a couple of years ago have suddenly become “radical” conservative positions too: funding police departments, not segregating kids in school based on race, having international borders, or allowing people to make their own medical decisions without government coercion. Any of these should have been enough to make Americans stop and wonder why the rules of the game are changing so drastically — and who is changing them.
But even for those who had yet to notice, the harrowing tale from Loudoun County Public Schools — and the subsequent shrug that legacy media, Democrats, and the Me Too crowd gave it — should settle that the biggest war in America right now isn’t between Republicans and Democrats, nor between blustering, blundering congressmen battling over whether to sell your children’s future for $3.5 trillion or $1 trillion.
The biggest war in America is between the allegiances we’ve always taken for granted — those of the family, church, and local community — and a conglomerate of forces that will stop at nothing to break them down. Sacrificing a 15-year-old girl’s right to basic safety at her school on the altar of fringe identity politics is just part of that fight.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
Biden, the 46th president, is America’s second Catholic President. The first was John F. Kennedy — when he became President in 1961. From the start of his campaign, Biden wanted everything to be about his faith. A favored campaign slogan for the Biden camp was the “battle for the soul of the nation.”
(Courtesy of Jason Jimenez)
It didn’t matter the media outlet. They all loved reporting on how Biden was a “deeply devout Catholic” and that his faith is a huge factor in “shaping his politics.” Even Speaker Pelosi publicly praises Biden’s faith and willingly admits that his Catholic faith has shaped his career and public policies. An article in The New York Times stated, “President Biden, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century, speaks of how his Catholic faith grounds his life and his policies.”
Interesting, isn’t it? How the media and every single big-time progressive politician have no problem mixing Biden’s faith with politics. But suppose you are a Christian who is pro-life and not in favor of the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage. In that case, the response you get from the Left is the complete opposite. How was Judge Amy Coney Barrett (also a deeply devout Catholic) treated during the Senate confirmation hearings? Senator Dianne Feinstein and her colleagues didn’tpraise Judge Barrett for her faith. Instead, Senator Feinstein expressed her concern about how Judge Barrett’s faith might influence her decisions by stating, “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.” But if the Left is so concerned about a person’s faith interfering with their public service, why isn’t the Left disparaging Biden from talking about how his faith shapes his public policies?
The main reason? Because President Biden is as much of a progressive as he is a Catholic. He is what I refer to as a “Progressive Catholic.” Don’t believe me? Listen to what he said in his book, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics, “I’m as much a cultural Catholic as I am a theological Catholic.” Biden continues, “My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world, comes straight from my religion. It’s not so much the Bible, the beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, the sacraments, or the prayers I learned. It’s the culture.”
Because Judge Barrett is a conservative Catholic and not a progressive, liberal Democrats are concerned about her “dogmatic” positions embedding on her judgment. Therefore, she must be censored at all costs. However, in President Biden’s case, he gets a pass because he’ll keep on advancing progressive policies like the Equality Act (which will eviscerate religious freedoms in America), government funding of abortion, and the Green New Deal.
It’s not a question of whether President Biden has a right to express his religious beliefs. He has that right under the Constitution. It’s really about charging the media for being inconsistent by not allowing conservatives to do the same.
Let’s hope the media will admit to their intolerance and learn to be more receptive to Americans who hold conservative viewpoints.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jason Jimenez is president of Stand Strong Ministries, a faculty member at Summit Ministries, and a best-selling author who specializes in apologetics and biblical worldview training. Check out www.standstrongministries.org.
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.
President Joe Biden’s administration apparently does not want to be caught off guard with tough questions by the media during its press briefings. According to the Daily Beast, Biden’s communications department has requested that reporters submit their questions to the White House staff in advance of press secretary Jen Psaki’s daily briefings, presumably to avoid being scrutinized by reporters with difficult questions.
The issue was reportedly discussed during a White House Correspondents Association meeting last Friday. Reporters are allegedly upset over the White House’s request, fearing it plays into the perception of coordination between the West Wing and media.
“That’s not really a free press at all,” one White House reporter said, according to the Daily Beast.
“While it’s a relief to see briefings return, particularly with a commitment to factual information, the press can’t really do its job in the briefing room if the White House is picking and choosing the questions they want,” the reporter added.
Indeed, WHCA leaders instructed to reporters to either “push back” against the requests or not comply altogether.
In contrast to the Trump administration, which jettisoned daily White House press briefings almost completely, Biden and his communications team promised to restore the daily briefings and have thus far delivered on that promise.
Biden’s administration claimed that asking reporters for their questions ahead of time is not an attempt to dodge questions, but rather to understand the pulse of reporting on any given day.
“Our goal is to make the daily briefing as useful and informative as possible for both reporters and the public,” a spokesperson told the Daily Beast. “Part of meeting that objective means regularly engaging with the reporters who will be in the briefing room to understand how the White House can be most helpful in getting them the information they need. That two-way conversation is an important part of keeping the American people updated about how government is serving them.”
Meanwhile, Eric Schultz, who served as a deputy press secretary in the Obama administration, claimed the Biden communication team’s request is fairly normal, allowing staff adequate time to prepare for the daily briefing.
“This is textbook communications work. The briefing becomes meaningless if the press secretary has to repeatedly punt questions, instead of coming equipped to discuss what journalists are reporting on,”Schultz told the Daily Beast. “In a non-COVID environment, this would happen in casual conversations throughout the day in lower and upper press. One of the few upsides to reporters hovering over your desk all day, is that you get a very quick sense of what they’re working on.”
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.
So much for peace on earth and goodwill to men. America’s legacy media elites used the Sunday before Christmas for extra Christian-bashing, with white evangelicals the preferred targets.
Writing in The New Yorker, Michael Luo complained that “white evangelical Protestants, once again, overwhelmingly supported President Trump in the election,” and that “churches, particularly conservative ones, fought lockdown orders and rebuffed public-health warnings.”
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof interviewed leftist pastor Jim Wallis, with the conversation quickly turning to accusations that “White evangelicalism has destroyed the ‘evangel.’” At The Dispatch, Time columnist David French concluded that much of the scorn white evangelical Christians receive is deserved. He says the world often “rejects Christians because Christians are cruel.”
Yeah, well, merry Christmas to you too.
To be sure, Christians should humbly accept correction if it is deserved, even when the word of reproof is delivered by pagans. But the above writers’ broad indictments against American evangelicals do not withstand scrutiny. Although each criticism has particular errors, they are united by two shared mistakes. The first is a failure to account for differences of denomination and devotion. Lumping Pentecostals, Presbyterians, and prosperity-gospel preachers together is sloppy, as is neglecting to distinguish between those who are committed churchgoers and those who are only nominally evangelical.
It might be said that these varieties of white evangelicals have in common an overwhelming political support for Donald Trump, but this retort only highlights the second error shared by these writers: the assumption that voting for Trump was necessarily immoral.
It is easy to pick out Trumpian words and deeds that are not compatible with the gospel. It is also easy to do the same with his Democratic opponents and their policies. Asserting that voting for Trump is a moral stain on evangelicals, without weighing the alternatives, presumes what is in question. This error is shared by each writer (and Kristof’s interview subject), but each finds some unique ways to express it.
Luo, for instance, unfavorably compares the response of today’s Christians to the pandemic with Christians’ response to past plagues. But although he is correct that reckless churches should be rebuked, he makes no effort to distinguish between the reckless and those cautiously meeting in person, or to value preserving the gathering of believers. Nor does he quantify how many churches are foregoing precautions, or show how many of these congregations fall under the “white evangelical” category.
He suggests that, to eliminate risk, Christians should forgo all in-person meeting, and he dismisses the religious liberty claims that have been raised against capricious government restrictions on churches. But if the casinos, strip clubs, and abortion clinics are getting better treatment than churches, then anti-Christian discrimination has replaced public health policy.
Furthermore, even from a secular public health perspective, eliminating church services would do more harm than good, as churchgoing seems to have been essential to helping many Americans make it through the difficulties of this year. We are physical beings, not disembodied minds who can live in the cloud indefinitely.
Meanwhile, Kristof and his interview subject Wallis presume that technocratic welfare-statism is the obvious way to care for the poor and oppressed, so they dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as bad Christians. This complacent assumption of moral and political rectitude precludes them from understanding those they condemn.
Thus, although Kristof recently wrote a column of questions about Christians and abortion, he seems to have ignored the manyresponsesexplaining its paramount importance as a political issue for conservative Christians. His indifference is particularly notable at Christmas, because Luke’s advent narrative emphasizes the humanity of both the unborn John the Baptist and of Jesus. And if the unborn are human, then Christians cannot support the party of abortion on demand.
Kristof and Wallis’s reflexive acceptance of the left’s shibboleths of the moment also leads to ridiculous anachronisms such as declaring Jesus a “person of color.” This conceptual colonization of first-century Israel by modern American racial concepts is odious and misleading—“person of color”makes no sense in that context.
It is, indeed, worse than the depictions of a blond, blue-eyed Jesus (are there many of those?) that Wallis complains about. Portrayals of Jesus and other biblical figures in local style and appearance have been a common, if inaccurate, artistic practice across centuries and cultures.
Race is also central to French’s condemnation of his fellow white evangelicals. In his telling, they are guilty of “some outright racism” but perhaps even more of being seduced by a “Christian nationalism” that “will always minimize America’s historic sins and the present legacy (and reality) of American racism.”French is, for instance, upset that more white evangelicals do not believe that racism is an “extremely” or “very serious” threat to “America and America’s future.”
But even if white evangelicals are wrong in their assessment of the depth and danger of America’s racial problems, this is not enough to condemn them as cruel. It is, in fact, precisely the sort of issue on which Christians may reasonably disagree.
Furthermore, the data French cites does not account for crucial factors such as whether respondents are regular churchgoers or merely culturally evangelical. In addition, French ignores education and class in his analysis, even though the study he relies on emphasizes the importance of these factors in understanding the politics of white evangelical subgroups.
French’s article, like the others, is mostly an impressionistic interpretation of white evangelicalism in America. By their reckoning, white evangelicals have become reckless plague-bearers with no regard for the poor and oppressed, and their cruelty rightly earns them the world’s opprobrium.
There may be some individuals who match this grim depiction, but as a general description of tens of millions of evangelicals, it is obviously untrue. Look around the country and evangelical churches are holding services with masks, distancing, and lots of hand sanitizer. Evangelicals, both individually and corporately, are caring for those in need in their communities and around the world, and treating people of all races with dignity and respect.
In this Christmas season, French, Kristof, and Luo should stop building evangelical strawmen to burn in effigy. Instead, they, like all of us, should contemplate and rejoice in the miracle of God become man to save His people from their sins.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Nathanael Blake is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist. He has a PhD in political theory. He lives in Missouri.
Rudy Giuliani (Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)
Rudy Giuliani and other lawyers representing President Donald Trump’s campaign outlined their case Thursday that the Nov. 3 presidential election was so deeply flawed in several key states that the results should be overturned in the president’s favor.
Giuliani said there was a pattern to the alleged irregularities in key states that suggested, he said, a “plan from a centralized place” to commit voter fraud in cities controlled by Democrats.
He said widespread adoption of vote-by-mail had allowed Democrats to take big-city corruption practices nationwide. “They picked the places where they could get away with it.”
Here are the key allegations the lawyers presented:
1. Observers were allegedly prevented from watching mail-in ballots being opened. Giuliani said that many mail-in ballots were opened without observers being able to check that they were properly signed, a key protection against fraud. Those votes, he said, were “null and void,” especially where the envelopes had been discarded, making recounts useless.
2. Allegedly unequal application of the law in Democratic counties. In Pennsylvania, whose state supreme court created new, relaxed voting rules before the election, Giuliani alleged that absentee voters in Democratic counties were allowed to “cure” defects in their ballots, while voters in Republican counties, which obeyed the state law as written, were not.
3. Voters allegedly arrived at the polls to discover other people had voted for them. Giuliani said that many provisional ballots cast in Pittsburgh were submitted by people who showed up to vote in person, only to be told that they had voted already. He alleged that Democrats had filled out absentee ballots for other people, hoping they would not show up.
4. Election officials were allegedly told not to look for defects in ballots, and to backdate ballots. Giuliani cited an affidavit from an official who swore she was told not to exclude absentee ballots for defects, and to backdate ballots so they would not appear to have been received after Election Day, to avoid a Supreme Court order to sequester those ballots.
5. Ballots casting votes for Joe Biden and no other candidates were allegedly run several times through machines. Giuliani said that there were 60 witnesses in Michigan who would attest to ballots being “produced” quickly and counted twice or thrice. He said that a minimum of 60,000 ballots, and a maximum of 100,000 ballots, were allegedly affected.
6. Absentee ballots were accepted in Wisconsin without being applied for first. Giuliani noted that Wisconsin state law was stricter regarding absentee ballots than most other states are, yet alleged that 60,000 absentee ballots were counted in the Milwaukee area, and 40,000 in the Madison area, without having been applied for properly by the voters who cast them.
7. There were allegedly “overvotes,” with some precincts allegedly recording more voters than residents, among other problems. Giuliani said there was an unusually large number of overvotes in precincts in Michigan and in Wisconsin, which he alleged was the reason that Republicans on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers had refused to certify the results there this week. He also alleged that there were some out-of-state voters in Georgia, and people who had cast votes twice there.
8. Voting machines and software are allegedly owned by companies with ties to the Venezuelan regime and to left-wing donor George Soros. Sidney Powell argued that U.S. votes were being counted overseas, and that Dominion voting machines and Smartmatic software were controlled by foreign interests, manipulating algorithms to change the results. Powell noted specifically that Smartmatic’s owners included two Venezuelan nationals, whom she alleged had ties to the regime of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. The legal team alleged that there were statistical anomalies, such as huge batches of votes for Biden, that could not be explained except as manipulation — which, they alleged, happened in the wee hours of the morning as vote-counting had stalled. (The companies have disputed these allegations vigorously.)
9. The Constitution provides a process for electing a president if the vote is corrupted. Jenna Ellis argued that the media, had usurped the power to declare the winner of the election. She made the point, citing Federalist No. 68, that the constitutional process of selecting a president had procedural safeguards against corruption and foreign influence.
Giuliani said that the campaign believed that enough votes were flawed — more than double the margins between Biden and Trump in key states — that the president had a path to victory.
Giuliani presented evidence in the form of sworn affidavits, citing two and noting that the campaign had many more from private individuals.
He noted that several lawsuits that had been dismissed had been filed by private individuals, not the campaign directly. He said lawsuits might be filed in Arizona, and that the campaign was also examining irregularities in New Mexico and Virginia, though he said he did not think there were enough disputed votes in the latter.
Giuliani also took on the media, arguing that they had provided misleading information and condoned threats against Trump’s legal team.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has appointed Richard Stengel, who advocates restrictions on free speech, to a key media post in his presidential transition team.
Richard Stengel is the Biden transition “Team Lead” for the US Agency for Global Media, the US government media empire that includes Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Stengel, an Obama administration alumnus, wrote last year in a Washington Post op-ed that US freedom of speech was too unfettered and that changes must be considered.
In the Postop-ed, “Why America needs a hate speech law,” Stengel argued:
[A]s a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier.
…
All speech is not equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m all for protecting “thought that we hate,” but not speech that incites hate.
As Breitbart News noted in May, Stengel, an MSNBC analyst, also defended restrictions on speech about the coronavirus:
The First Amendment doesn’t protect false speech about a virus or false speech that endangers the health of your users. And by the way, Facebook and Twitter have been taking things down, but they need to be even more vigilant about it, and Google needs to be even more vigilant about what they prioritize in their search results.
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley warned about Stengel’s appointment in a column Tuesday: “[I]t would be difficult to select a more anti-free speech figure to address government media policy, one has to assume that Biden will continue the onslaught against this core freedom as president.”
He noted that Biden himself had publicly advocated restrictions on speech during the campaign: “Biden called for greater speech controls on the Internet and denounced Twitter for allowing others to speak freely.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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 uniters, not dividers, into his administration.” Conservatives who fall for this “unity” schtick are hopelessly naive.
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 the other 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.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
One of the biggest stories in this election is how President Trump, whom leftists and their media allies have constantly called a “racist,” made great inroads with minorities. The left is clearly shocked. Rather than humbly spending some time on self-reflection, however, they are doubling down on identity politics by blaming minority Trump voters.
Since Election Day, leftists have been attacking minority Trump voters from two angles. First, they claim minorities who voted for Trump are “white” voters who shouldn’t be classified as minorities. This nonsense is nothing new. Prior to the election, Joe Biden famously said black voters who vote for Trump “ain’t black.”
Immediately after the election, this nonsense came up again courtesy of none other than Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the now-debunked 1619 Project. When it became clear that Trump would win Florida thanks to enthusiastic support from Latino voters, Hannah-Jones tweeted: “One day after this election is over I am going to write a piece about how Latino is a contrived ethnic category that artificially lumps white Cubans with Black Puerto Ricans and indigenous Guatemalans and helps explains [sic] why Latinos support Trump at the second highest rate.”
National Public Radio’s Gene Demby quickly endorsed Hannah-Jones’ assertions. In an NPR post-election segment, titled “Who is the White Vote?” Demby said:
It’s important that, you know, we think about the ways that there are many, many white Latinos. And because whiteness so thoroughly informs voting behavior, we should probably be asking better questions about Latino voters, like whether they identify as white or not. That might be more illuminating than simply whether someone refers to themselves as Latino in some ways.
No, Democrats Don’t Own Brown People
Here is the thought process behind these kinds of comments Only white people vote for Republicans. Since skin color trumps ethnicity, of course, light-skinned minorities would vote for a Republican candidate because of their “whiteness.” They shouldn’t be counted as minority voters at all.
This thought process is deeply flawed. Dividing the Latino community by skin color is possibly the most racist thing to do. Latino voters are unique, both as individuals and based on their diverse Latin American countries of origin, but it’s wrong to use colorism to explain Latino voters’ behaviors. Regardless of skin color, many Latino immigrants have suffered or watched their families suffer under socialist policies in their home countries. Many came to America to escape socialism, so naturally, they will not vote for Democrats, whose party enthusiastically embraces it.
Further, claiming skin color drives a voter’s behavior is an insult to minority voters’ intelligence. During Trump’s first term and prior to the pandemic lockdowns, both black and Hispanic unemployment rates were at historic lows. The black and Hispanic household median annual income increase (adjusted for inflation) more than doubled during Trump’s term compared to the Obama years. Minority voters, like any other voters, will naturally support the candidate whose policies have benefited them.
By the same token, minority voters will reject candidates whose policies might bring them harm. Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, explained to a puzzled NPR journalist why Biden lost Latino support in Texas. “For example, a lot of the Border Patrol law enforcement are heavily Latino in the Rio Grande Valley,” Garcia said. “So when you are talking about defunding the police, and you don’t stand up to those types of rhetoric, then it leaves an opening for Republicans to come in and take advantage of that.”
When will leftist pundits such as Hannah-Jones and Demby ever realize it is the radical policies and ideas they support that have driven away minority voters?
The Left Believes Minorities Have No Agency
Apparently, blaming minority Trump voters’ “whiteness” doesn’t go far enough for some on the left. Charles M. Blow, a New York Times columnist, complained that some minority Trump voters have Stockholm syndrome, a psychological response that occurs when abuse victims bond with their abusers.
In his most recent article, Blow listed statistic after statistic showing that “a larger percentage of every racial minority voted for Trump this year than in 2016,” including Trump doubling black women’s support from 4 percent in 2016 to 8 percent in 2020, and increasing black men’s vote from 13 percent in 2016 to 18 percent in 2020. “It is so unsettling to consider that many of our fellow countrymen and women are either racists or accommodate racists or acquiesce to racists,” Blow said, calling all Trump voters either racists or accomplices of racism.
There’s more. According to Blow, the number that really put him on his heels was “the percentage of L.G.B.T. people voting for Trump doubled from 2016, moving from 14 percent to 28 percent. In Georgia, the number was 33 percent.”
Although none of the statistics Blow presented even remotely support the title of his piece, “Exit Poll Points to the Power of White Patriarchy,” he found a way to blame white patriarchy and demean minority Trump voters in the end. According to Blow, Trump’s widening support across racial and gender groups “points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it. … Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.”
In the eyes of leftists such as Blow, nonwhite voters and non-straight voters who supported Trump are nobody but coattail riders who have neither personal agency nor the ability to make it on our own in the world. I had never read anything more racist, more divisive, and more insulting than this, and I am not the only one. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a human rights activist and a fellow at the Hoover Institute, tweeted: “This is the dumbest, most divisive drivel I’ve read in a long time. We should be talking about what unites us now. Not doubling down on ID-Politics. Shame on you!”
Minorites Had Good Reason to Vote for Trump
It is obvious that leftist pundits are dumbfounded by Trump’s widening support among minority voters in 2020. Since the 2016 election, rather than trying to understand half of the country who voted for Trump the first time, these talking heads turned toward nurturing their hatred of Trump and getting him out of office as their full-time jobs.
They thought that after repeating “Orange Man Bad” day after day for four years, the electorate would just follow their lead. They have no clue why someone they despised so much could have attracted even more minority votes this time around. Since they are unable to come up with any reasonable explanation, let me shed some light on the matter.
Minorities like me voted for Trump because we like his policies: lower taxes, fewer government regulations, and strong national security. American people, especially minorities, have seen real economic benefits during Trump’s first term. He stands up to socialism and promises, “America will never be a socialist country,” and his unconventional foreign policy approach has brought a historical breakthrough of peace in the Middle East.
We want a safe environment to raise our families. We don’t want to see our cities burned, our shops looted, and our statues toppled. We want good-paying jobs so we can enjoy the lifestyle we desire through our own hard work. We want all families, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to be able to choose the best school that matches their children’s educational needs. We want to continue to express ourselves without being censored or canceled.
We certainly don’t believe race and sex are the roots of nor the answer to every social ill. We are tired of identity politics, critical race theory, and cancel culture, all of which have sucked the fun out of life and shut down the exchange of ideas. We know our country has room for improvement, but it is not a racist nation. We take pride in being Americans and in all the progresses our nation has made, and we are tired of the left condemning our country’s founding and the American ideal.
As long as leftists continue to weaponize identity politics and dress us down as if we are mindless cattle, their candidates will continue to lose our support.
Helen Raleigh, CFA, is an American entrepreneur, writer, and speaker. She’s a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her writings appear in other national media, including The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. Helen’s new book, “Backlash: How Communist China’s Aggression Has Backfired,” is available for pre-order with a release date of October 20, 2020. Follow her on Twitter: @HRaleighspeaks.
Vice President-elect, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., left, stands with his son Hunter during a re-enactment of the Senate oath ceremony, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009, in the Old Senate Chamber on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Less than a week before Election Day, far-left NBC News created a decoy story to make it seem as though the increasingly credible scandal involving Joe and Hunter Biden has been debunked as a fake document.
As everyone now knows, the national political media are engaged in an active cover-up to protect Joe Biden from the exploding scandal surrounding his involvement in the shady business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden. The allegations against Biden are beyond credible and involve confirmed documents; two first-hand, on-the-record whistleblowers, and no denials from Joe or Hunter Biden.
What’s more, there is an active FBI investigation into Hunter’s business dealings, including money laundering.
Nevertheless, the media are so partisan and dishonest, they are not only ignoring a scandal that will certainly swamp a potential Biden administration; they are outright lying with the claim the scandal is all a hoax based on “Russian disinformation.”
And now, NBC News is deliberatelylooking to muddy the waters with a decoy story, a story based on something entirely different and meaningless, a story no one has even heard of, and it has been dressed up to look like a debunking of the scandal involving Hunter Biden’s laptop and the open FBI investigation of him.
The headline (sorry, I don’t link fake news) is…
How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge
The sub-hed is…
A 64-page document that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm.”
And this story has absolutely nothing to do with the credible allegations currently swirling around Joe and Hunter Biden. But as you can see, it has been positioned, angled, and headlined as a decoy to fool NBC News consumers into believing the allegations are all fake and have now been debunked.
What’s more, no one I know has ever even heard of this “64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump [and] appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm” called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.”
I sure as hell have never heard of it.
Breitbart News didn’t cover it, and way down deep in the story, NBC is forced to admit that a few obscure blog posts about the document were only shared 5,000 times across Facebook and Twitter, which is nothing.
So you can see what NBC News is doing here… “Debunking” a story that has nothing to do with the credible corruption allegations against Joe and Hunter Biden and dressing it up to look like it’s Game Over with that laptop full of incriminating emails and whistleblower Tony Bobulinski.
The story even opens in a way meant to conflate the two:
One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, a fake “intelligence” document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son and business in China.
The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm” called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.
Later, the story again deliberately conflates the two…
“The document and its spread have become part of a wider effort to smear Hunter Biden and weaken Joe Biden’s presidential campaign,” NBC writes. “An unverified leak of documents — including salacious pictures from what President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and a Delaware Apple repair store owner claimed to be Hunter Biden’s hard drive — were published in the New York Post[.]”
If that isn’t outrageously desperate and dishonest enough for you, the NBC News story does not even debunk the story it is claiming to debunk. It throws around a lot of chaff, but the only real claim here is that Typhoon Investigations, the firm that put the document together, is a fake “intelligence firm” and — LOL — uses “anonymous sourcing.”
One of the document’s authors stands by his work and is challenging anyone, including NBC, to present him with any facts he got wrong.
“To hear journalists [w]ho use anonymous sources all the time [act] morally superior is disgusting,” he tweeted Thursday. “Second, no one has written about the contents of the paper or found factual fault with anything in the report.”
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
Frank Luntz (Andrew Caballero – Reynolds / AFP / Getty)
A focus group of “undecided voters” convened by pollster Frank Luntz for the Los Angeles Times chose President Donald Trump overwhelmingly after watching the final debate of the presidential election on Thursday night.
Though many participants complained about Trump’s “personality” in general, many also felt he had been more “presidential” on the night. And many complained that Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden seemed vague and elusive in his answers.
Some voters expressed feelings of guilt in admitting they would vote for Trump, but said they simply could not trust Biden to do the job. One said that his age was a concern; another said that voting for Biden felt like voting for an “idea,” since he seemed unlikely to be running his own administration.
Another undecided voter said that he felt that Trump had shown, at least, what he could do over the past four years.
Luntz ended the discussion after asking participants whom they would choose, after watching the debate. Of the eight “undecided” voters he asked, seven chose Trump and one still seemed undecided.
A CNN poll of debate watchers gave the win to Biden by 14 points
That was considerably narrower than the margin in CNN’s poll of the first debate, which gave Biden a 32-point win.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
PORTLAND, OR – AUGUST 1: A protester burns an American flag in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in the early morning on August 1, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. Friday was the second night in a row without police intervention, following weeks of clashes between federal officers and …Nathan Howard/Getty Images
The far-left Washington Post blackmailed the country Thursday with a threat framed as analysis that says only a landslide victory for Joe Biden can save us from violence.
Because the Post piece is both fake news and irresponsible, I’m not going to compound those sins by linking it here. The Post’s tweet advertising the piece (which I also won’t link) sums up the threat perfectly: “The election will likely spark violence — and a constitutional crisis,” the tweet reads. “In every scenario except a Biden landslide, our simulation ended catastrophically.”
Only a Biden landslide can save America from a national catastrophe.
In other words…
That’s a nice country you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.
The Post’s bald-faced threat is couched in a piece of analysis that does not even attempt to be serious, especially in a country where, as I write this, countless Democrat-run cities are on fire thanks to Black Lives Matter and Antifa, two left-wing terrorists groups who operate as Brownshirts for the Democrat Party and media outlets like the Washington Post — who regularly encourage and protect these domestic terrorists.
Even more ludicrous, the Post’s threat is only made possibly by way of its cherry-picking of “experts.”
They make it all so official-sounding. I’ve emphasized the howlers:
President Trump has broken countless norms and ignored countless laws during his time in office, and while my colleagues and I at the Transition Integrity Project didn’t want to lie awake at night contemplating the ways the American experiment could fail, we realized that identifying the most serious risks to our democracy might be the best way to avert a November disaster. So we built a series of war games, sought out some of the most accomplished Republicans, Democrats, civil servants, media experts, pollsters and strategists around, and asked them to imagine what they’d do in a range of election and transition scenarios.
A landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power. Every other scenario we looked at involved street-level violence and political crisis.
I swear I’m not making that up. I know it sounds like something I’d make up, especially something as hilarious as a “Transition Integrity Project” operating from the same Washington Post hellhole that led the fake news propaganda jihad for the Russia Collusion Hoax coup plotters. But it’s all real. I swear. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
Anyway, the Transition Integrity Project’s war games (can you believe they used the term “war games?”) are staffed only with ringers. The “accomplished Republicans” are all — and I do mean all — bitter, half-witted, Trump haters: Michael Steele. Bill Kristol. Trey Grayson.
On the other side are only Biden loyalists: John Podesta. Donna Brazile. Jennifer Granholm.
Not even one disgruntled Bernie Bro.
Not even one.
So the Transition Integrity Project asked six people who f–king hate Donald Trump something about Donald Trump and the answer is not looking so good for Donald Trump.
Transition Integrity Project?
More like the Transition Rigged Project.
So even though Joe Biden’s supporters are right now — I mean right now as I write this — burning down a whole bunch of Democrat-run cities and Joe Biden has said almost nothing to stop them and PLENTY to encourage them, the Transition Rigged Project talked to six people who fucking hate Donald Trump and came to this bottom line [emphasis added]:
In every exercise, both teams sought to mobilize their supporters to take to the streets. Team Biden repeatedly called for peaceful protests, while Team Trump encouraged provocateurs to incite violence, then used the resulting chaos to justify sending federalized Guard units or active-duty military personnel into American cities to “restore order,” leading to still more violence. (The exercises underscored the tremendous power enjoyed by an incumbent president: Biden can call a news conference, but Trump can call in the 82nd Airborne.)
Yep, the 82nd Airborne, y’all.
Here’s something else the Transition Rigged Project war gamed:
In the “narrow Biden win” scenario, Trump refused to leave office and was ultimately escorted out by the Secret Service — but only after pardoning himself and his family and burning incriminating documents.
Let me tell you what’s happening here…
If Trump wins, the organized left, and you can bet that includes media outlets like the Washington Post, intend to declare war on us. On you and I.
Not political war.
War-war.
That’s what they’re doing now.
That’s what the Democrat Party’s and the media’s Brownshirts in Black Lives Matter and Antifa are doing right now in Kenosha and Rochester and Minneapolis and Portland and will do in any other place where an excuse can be found or manufactured.
The war is a hot war. If Trump wins re-election it’s going to get hotter.
The Washington Post is warning us — not just that there will be a war if Trump loses, but that we will be blamed for the war.
Hey, we warned you if you didn’t pay for protection your store would burn down.
Hey, we warned you if you didn’t vote for Joe Biden your store and your home and your car and your life would burn down.
This is not a drill.
This is a threat.
Take this threat seriously.
Prepare yourself.
Prepare yourself before it’s too late to prepare yourself.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 09: Billy Porter attends the 2020 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 09, 2020 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Cinderella star Billy Porter said that the United States of America “is in the mess we’re in because of whiteness.” Porter made his remarks in an interview with Vanity Fair promoting social justice messages from U.S. Congressmen like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the founders of Black Lives Matter.
“The reason why our country is in the mess we’re in is simply because of whiteness. White supremacy. White people choke-holding power and sucking the life out of humanity,” said Billy Porter in a recent Vanity Fairportfolio interview. The Little Show of Horrors actor made his remarks in response to being asked “what is one specific fact, news story, or aspect that you feel has not received enough attention?”
Porter also went on to attack President Donald Trump, saying “Orangina 45, that cancer that is in our White House, has been handed the power, without consequence, to have his hate metastasize all over the people.”
“Why are we not talking about figuring out how to remove this monster from the highest office in the land right now! ‘Cause we might not be alive come November. And this is not hyperbole,”added the American Horror Story actor.
The Pose star, who is the first openly gay black man to win the Emmy for lead actor in a drama series, was recently featured at the Democrat National Convention (DNC), in which he ended the first night of the event by singing a bizarre rendition of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.”
“The public lynching of George Floyd galvanized the people all over the world to rise up,” Porter told Vanity Fair. “It’s a wonder to see young people of all colors leading the charge.”
“And… white folks are mad now, so maybe something might get done,” he added.
Democrats have spent several days flogging the false “mailbox conspiracy” theory that President Donald Trump is deliberately crippling the U.S. Postal Service so that it cannot handle votes by mail in November — even forcing it to remove mailboxes.
The truth is that the mailboxes were removed because mailboxes are always being removed. At least 14,000 were removed during the Obama-Biden administration. Democrats are creating a new hysteria to cast Trump as a tyrant and motivate their conspiracy-theory-addled voters.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has enthusiastically inflamed this phony conspiracy theory — far more directly than Trump can be said to have “promoted” or “encouraged” the Kamala Harris “Birther” theory (which he declined to pursue).
The truth is far more mundane.
The U.S. Postal Service has been a problem for years, constantly losing money.
In 2009, the postmaster general proposed moving to five-day-per-week mail delivery to cut costs. President Barack Obama criticized the service that year for failing to keep up with private sector competitors. The Obama-Biden administration considered closing nearly 3,700 post office locations, and proposed cutting 12,000 postal jobs.
President Trump tried a different tack, demanding in 2018 that Amazon lower the prices it charged the U.S. Postal Service for delivering its packages to consumers.
One aspect of ongoing cost management is the removal of mailbox from areas where few people deposit mail. Kimberly Frum, a spokeswoman for the service, told The Hill (via the Blaze) that low-volume mailboxes are regularly removed to cut costs:
She said that low-volume mailboxes are a financial drag on the Postal Service, which lost more than $2 billion in the second quarter.
“It is a fluid process and figures can vary from day-to-day,” Frum said. “Historically, mail boxes have been removed for lack of use and installed in growth areas.”
“When a collection box consistently receives very small amounts of mail for months on end, it costs the Postal Service money in fuel and workhours for letter carriers to drive to the mailbox and collect the mail. Removing the box is simply good business sense in that respect. It is important to note that anyone with a residential or business mailbox can use it as a vehicle to send outgoing mail.”
(Update: Note that the photograph of “retired” mailboxes, above, is from 2009, during the first year of the Obama-Biden administration.)
The removal of mailboxes has been halted until after the election, to avoid further confusion (sown deliberately by Democrats and the media). But even with fewer mailboxes, the U.S. Postal Service can probably handle the delivery of ballots, Byron York argues in the Washington Examiner. It handles hundreds of millions of items daily.
The bottleneck is not necessarily the U.S. Postal Service, but rather the state and local election officials who set arbitrary deadlines for postmarking ballots, and who will have to sort out millions more additional mailed ballots than they are used to handling. In many states, they have never done anything like it before.
In New York’s Democratic primary, more than one out of every four vote-by-mail ballots was disqualified.In Clark County, Nevada, 223,000 mailed ballots were returned as undeliverable. That is not a postal problem; it is a government problem that cannot be fixed by November.
Democrats have targeted Postmaster General Louis DeJoy because he is a Republican donor. They ignore the fact that he “made a fortune in shipping and logistics” and that his “former company was a contractor of the Postal Service for many years,” York notes. DeJoy’s plan to save the U.S. Postal Service involves delivering all mail in the morning, to avoid the expense of overtime pay. It is currently being tested across the country. Democrats have turned that into a dark conspiracy to steal the election — or cast doubt on mail-in voting.
But given that the Obama-Biden administration itself removed thousands upon thousands of mailboxes, this is a conspiracy theory that — like the others — has gone bust, at least for those of us living in the real world.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
At the close of his program on Monday night, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson revealed The New York Times had a story in the work that would divulge the location of his home, which could potentially put him and his family in harm’s way.
“Last week, The New York Times began working on a story about where my family and I live,” he said. “As a matter of journalism, there is no conceivable justification for a story like that. The paper is not alleging we’ve done anything wrong, and we haven’t. We pay our taxes. We like our neighbors. We’ve never had a dispute with anyone. So why is The New York Times doing a story on the location of my family’s house? Well, you know why. To hurt us, to injure my wife and kids so that I will shut up and stop disagreeing with them.”
Carlson reminded viewers that nearly two years ago, another such incident occurred when he was residing in Washington, D.C. An angry mob showed up at his home, forcing his wife to hide while the angry mob aligned with Antifa vandalized his home. He said the same could occur if The New York Times followed through with the story.
“Editors there know exactly what will happen to my family when it does run,” Carlson continued. “I called them today, and I told them. But they didn’t care. They hate my politics. They want this show off the air. If one of my children gets hurt because of a story they wrote, they won’t consider it collateral damage. They know it’s the whole point of the exercise: To inflict pain on our family, to terrorize us, to control, we say. That’s the kind of people they are.”
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Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
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Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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