Thursday’s bombshell report by Special Counsel Robert Hur concluded that “President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” And though the material concerned “issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods,” and presented “serious risks to national security,” Hur recommended against charging Biden in his 380-plus-page report, saying it would be “difficult to convince a jury” to convict such “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Hur’s damning assessment of Biden’s degenerative mental state launched a media frenzy concerning his fitness for office, prompting the president to angrily condemn the report for including what he called “extraneous” matters in a hastily arranged press conference Thursday evening.
Coming on the heels of Biden claiming he had recently conversed with two long-dead foreign leaders, Hur’s conclusion that the president suffered from a “significantly limited” memory as early as 2017 should lead the country — and the Cabinet — to consider Biden’s fitness for president. But the focus on the passages related to Biden’s mental infirmities has distracted from another huge takeaway from the report: the vast amount of top-secret and classified material Biden had removed, stored in unsecured locations, and communicated to the ghostwriter of his memoirs.
Following the FBI’s surprise raid on Mar-a-Lago, headlines blared that former President Trump had retained “more than 300 classified documents” after leaving the White House. In contrast, when news broke that Biden’s attorneys had alerted the National Archives to the discovery of classified documents in a closet at a Washington, D.C., think tank, the accomplice media repeated claims by Biden’s attorney that “’a small number of documents with classified markings’ were discovered as Biden’s personal attorneys were clearing out the offices of the Penn Biden Center.”
A Biden lawyer would later report finding a few additional classified documents at the President’s Delaware home, prompting the FBI to conduct a 12-plus-hour search of the residence. After the search, Biden’s attorney issued a statement acknowledging the “DOJ took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials.” The DOJ also seized “for further view personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years,” Biden’s personal attorney announced at the time.
We now know, though, that the “six items” and the “personally handwritten notes” consisted of hundreds of top secret or classified documents, including notebooks filled with Joe Biden’s summary of classified briefings. A quick count from the special counsel’s appendix reveals the government recovered more than 300 pages of top-secret and classified documents. The FBI also seized a hard drive, but the appendix lacks any details on its contents.
The top-secret and classified documents, as well as many others marked confidential, were discovered at the Penn Biden Center, the University of Delaware, and Biden’s Delaware home, including in his garage. According to the special counsel report, the material included notes from classified briefings that discussed “U.S. intelligence sources, methods … capabilities,” and activities, as well as the activities of foreign intelligence services. Other notes discussed “U.S. military programs and capabilities, foreign military programs and capabilities,” and “plans and capabilities of foreign terrorist organizations.”
The quantity and significance of the recovered material far exceed what Biden’s lawyers and their media accomplices had led Americans to believe — that it was but a few documents inadvertently retained. The special counsel’s report also reveals that Biden knew about at least some of the classified documents as early as 2017, when he told the ghostwriter of his book about discovering them.
Yet when asked about Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Biden asked rhetorically how “anyone could be that irresponsible.”
“What data was in there that may compromise sources and methods?” Biden added about the materials Trump retained.
Hur also tried to distinguish Trump’s situation from Biden’s, noting that Trump retained the documents after being asked for them to be returned and then allegedly had them moved. According to Hur’s report, though, Biden knew he had the classified documents as early as 2017 and didn’t try to return them.
Further, as the House Oversight Committee revealed last year, the then-White House Counsel Dana Remus had tasked Joe Biden’s former vice-presidential assistant, Kathy Chung, with retrieving boxes from the Penn Biden Center as early as May 2022. That was a full six months before Biden’s attorney would acknowledge the discovery of the classified documents.
James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told The Federalist that this fact and the House’s investigation “unravel the White House’s and President Biden’s personal attorney’s narrative of events.” And even though “Joe Biden willfully retained classified documents for years in unsecure locations and intentionally disclosed them,” he “faces no consequences for his actions.”
“Americans expect equal justice under the law and are dismayed the Justice Department continues to allow Joe Biden to live above it,” Comer added.
This is all true. But there may well be something Americans expect even more and something they refuse to allow Biden to deprive them of — a mentally cognizant commander in chief.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—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. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
After the much-anticipated “bipartisan” Ukraine and border bill finally dropped on Sunday, it took little time to confirm that all 370 pages are worse than intelligent observers predicted. The $118 billion boondoggle is dead on arrival in the House. For Democrats and their accomplice media, however, the legislation and House Republicans’ response to it are going exactly as planned.
Not only did national disgrace Sen. Mitch McConnell (feat. useful idiot James Lankford) work tirelessly with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on this bill to keep America’s borders open, give out amnesty Oprah-style, and write more blank checks to Ukraine and Hamas sympathizers in the Middle East, they also helped the corrupt corporate media run a propaganda operation against House Republicans and the rest of the GOP. Worse, they’re deliberately running it during an election year to boost Joe Biden on the border issue — which the near-dead incumbent has aided and abetted, and voters say is top of mind next to Bidenomics.
The Republican-majority House predictably isn’t going for the bill. Why would they? It would allow nearly 2 million illegal aliens into the country in one year — as long as the numbers stay below 5,000 entries per day for seven consecutive days, or below 8,500 border encounters in a single day — before triggering “emergency authority” for the Department of Homeland Security and closing the border. Even then there are exceptions.
Worse, if Biden decides it’s in the “national interest” to beckon some more Democrat representation padding and likely future voters across the Rio Grande, he can unilaterally suspend the border closure for 45 days per year. There’s more where that came from.
If GOP members of Congress had taken the bait, Democrats would have come out on top, having
convinced their political foes not only to continue funding a no-win forever war in Eastern Europe but also to keep letting illegal aliens into the country virtually unrestricted. Bonus: A codified open border could hamstring “the fixer” Donald Trump if he wins the general election later this year, zapping his political power to rehabilitate U.S. security and sovereignty.
Yet even without the House conceding to the bill, Democrats win anyway. Now Biden and his accomplice media can simply blame Republicans for not solving the crisis this administration caused. That’s exactly what’s happening, starting with Biden pointing fingers at Republicans:
Working with my administration, the United States Senate has done the hard work it takes to reach a bipartisan agreement. Now, House Republicans have to decide. Do they want to solve the problem? Or do they want to keep playing politics with the border?
Biden’s media lapdogs dutifully advanced the narrative, which they’d already been spinning before the text of the bill was even released.
“GOP Blames Biden for Border Crisis That GOP Refuses to Solve,” blared one Daily Beast headline. “Republicans are yelling about a crisis at the border. But they’re also unwilling to do anything to address it for fear that it’d give Joe Biden a political win,” the subheading continued, taking its talking points straight from the president and Senate Democrats like Chris Murphy.
“Why Republicans Don’t Want To Solve the Border Problem — But do want to make deals to cut taxes,” read another headline in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer by Jonathan Chait.
“Republicans Who Screamed About A Crisis On The Border Now Oppose A Plan To Fix It,” said HuffPost, claiming Republicans oppose the border bill not because it’s nightmarish but because they want to hurt Biden. “Border Patrol Supports ‘Strong’ Immigration Deal. Republicans Don’t Care,” wrote Rolling Stone.
Vanity Fair claimed, “Republicans Don’t Want to Lose Their Favorite 2024 Talking Point,” with Bloomberg opting for a simple, “House Republicans Don’t Want to Fix the Border.”
Cable television has been as bad. A host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” said the “bipartisan border deal is doomed to fail … because Republicans have turned on it.” The “Today” show framed the gridlock as Republicans “threaten[ing] to block the border bill they negotiated,” as if McConnell and his sidekick colluding with Democrats behind closed doors amounts to a good-faith bipartisan negotiation.
This run-of-the-mill propaganda is to be expected from the corporate media, but it’s just so brazen considering Republicans’ efforts to secure the border earlier in Biden’s term and Democrats’ subsequent refusal to cooperate.
We’re all old enough to remember less than a year ago when the House passed a stronger border bill that would have restarted Trump-era border wall construction, required aliens to remain in Mexico while waiting out their usually fraudulent asylum claims, restricted asylum eligibility to legal ports of entry, enacted harsher punishments for overstaying expired visas, kept Title 42-esque “expulsion authority” in place, and supplied border authorities with additional grant funding. Senate Democrats wouldn’t lift a finger.
But sure. It’s Republicans “playing politics.”
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.
If you pick me, that’ll be the end of politics, and you won’t have to deal with politics anymore. You won’t have to deal with contested elections, you won’t have to deal with contests or divisions when it comes to power, you’ll have a strongman leader and I’ll just do what I want. And won’t that be a lot simpler? That’s what he’s offering. That strongman model is what the Republican base is enthused about.
Funny, because this also happens to be what Maddow is enthused about. It’s what the officials taking leading presidential candidates off ballots are enthused about. So is Joe Biden, who gives angry speeches demonizing opposition voters and demanding one-party rule. Everyone wants his own dictator. Every president wants to be one. Politics can turn normally rational people into raging authoritarians.
The thing about wanna-be dictators, though, is that they have no real way of pulling it off. Don’t get me wrong: the consequences of an imperial presidency are bad enough. But there will be no military coups in America. There will be no Hitler. No political riot is going to overthrow “democracy.” That’s all paranoia. The reality is much more mundane. It’s what we have now — a slow-motion, tedious corrosion of basic standards.
And both sides aren’t equally at fault. The things progressives detest most about our system—a deliberative Senate, federalism, counter-majoritarian institutions, various inconvenient liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, for starters—compel Trump to deal with “politics.”
Here, for instance, is something I think most Democrats probably know but would never say: If a President Trump blatantly exceeded his constitutional authority, it is highly likely that “conservative” justices would stop him. Yet every time the court renders a decision undercutting the political agenda of the GOP, which is often, the media acts like it’s some big surprise. It’s not. And Trump, for all his bluster last term, didn’t ignore the courts.
Now, if Biden blatantly exceeded his executive authority, as he already often does, what are the chances that a “liberal” majority court would bless his actions? When you have no limiting principles, it all comes down to justifying the morality of the underlying issue. Considering the modern left’s collective superiority complex, that is never a difficult task.
We don’t really need to theorize about how this works, either. Many left-wing politicians and intellectuals — self-styled defenders of “democracy” — not only implore Biden to ignore courts, they press him to declare national emergencies empowering the president to run virtually the entire economy through a massive administrative state. If Trump threatened to take similar power, the media would be convulsing with horror.
Indeed, the contemporary left isn’t working to delegitimize the court because it harbors ethical concerns (the people leading the charge are corrupt), it’s because they want to circumvent a court that still occasionally limits state power and preserves American “democracy.”
Won’t that be a lot simpler? Maybe if Trump wins in 2024, he’ll figure out that the Federalist Society’s principled jurists make no political sense for him and nominate lightweight partisans like Sonia Sotomayor to uphold whatever crackpot theory he wants. Why not?
When the Supreme Court upheld the Civil Rights Act, eliminating racist preferences in schools, Biden said, “We cannot let this decision be the last word. I want to emphasize: We cannot let this decision be the last word.” That is something of a mantra for him.
A few years ago, Biden admitted he didn’t have the constitutional authority to extend (Trump’s) eviction moratorium. An extension would not “pass constitutional muster,” he said. The president, the administration noted, had “not only kicked the tires, he has double, triple, quadruple checked.”
It was illegal, and Biden did it anyway. Congressional Democrats, tasked to protect the interests of their institution, cheered him on. The same goes for the obviously unconstitutional student loan bailout Biden keeps proposing. High-ranking Democrats, in fact, demand that Biden ignores the Constitution and separation of powers.
If Biden feels like he can dismiss SCOTUS on student loans, or anything else, why shouldn’t Texas ignore SCOTUS on protecting its borders? Maybe Texas should think about taking up the Biden method, which would entail erecting a new, slightly different fence every time the court shoots down the idea.
All of it is reminiscent of Barack Obama telling Americans he couldn’t pass the DREAM Act because he was not a “king” or an “emperor,” and then doing it anyway. Indeed, the premise of the Obama presidency was the circumvention of “politics,” summed up neatly in the illiberal notion of political “unity.”
Once Obama lost control of Congress in 2010, he not only acted like a person who didn’t “have to deal with politics anymore,” he became the first president in memory to openly champion working around the law-making branch of government. “If Congress won’t act, I will,” he liked to say. People cheered.
Since then, every time Democrats can’t get their way, we are inundated with stories about how the system isn’t working correctly, rather than stories about how the contemporary left is destroying the system to fix the problem.
Now, I’m not naïve. Most voters couldn’t care less about these idealistic arguments. I don’t know “what time it is,” apparently. That said, protecting the system is not only a high-minded pursuit, but also the most practical way to preserve your own policy achievements and freedoms.
But you can’t expect the opposition to play by rules when you refuse to honor them. You can’t lecture everyone about accepting elections when you won’t. And you can’t keep acting like you’re saving “democracy” when you’re murdering it.
I mean, you can. It seems like the more norm-busting degradation of the system you promise, the more popular you become these days. But that does not bode well for our future.
Would you support a law protecting healthy minors from life-altering injections and amputations, side effects of which may include infertility, cancer, sexual dysfunction, and heart trouble?
Would you support a law that makes it a crime for a doctor to give “gender-affirming care” to minors whose gender dysphoria places them at a heightened risk of suicide?
If the average voter were asked each of these two questions, it’s not hard to deduce that the wording of question No. 2 is far more likely to garner “no” answers, regardless of the false assumptions the question relies on. We see the same reality at work in polling: The way you ask someone a question greatly influences the answer. Its why lawyers aren’t allowed to “lead the witness” during direct examination.
For example, when PBS commissioned a poll in 2021 asking about restricting transgender surgeries for children, pollsters used this euphemistic language: “Do you support or oppose legislation that would prohibit gender transition-related medical care for minors?”
Unsurprisingly, they got 66 percent of respondents to say “oppose,” with only 28 percent admitting support. Who doesn’t want kids to get “medical care”?
Conversely, when the conservative group Convention of States Action asked respondents the following year, “Do you believe underage minors should be required to wait until they are adults to use puberty blockers and undergo permanent sex change procedures?” an overwhelming 79 percent said yes.
There are doubtless other factors contributing to the polling discrepancy (though it’s worth noting both survey samples included more Democrats than Republicans). But the more than 50-point spread between the polls has something to do with the question language. Researchers have tested the idea that ballot language affects voters’ decisions and come to the same obvious conclusion. Democrat officials and activists are aware of this too — and use it to their advantage when writing the language voters see on their ballots.
‘Prejudicial, Partial, and Inaccurate’
For example, parents rights group Protect Kids California is suing the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, for dishonestly crafting the title and summary of their proposed ballot initiative to benefit Democrats’ policy preferences. The summary provided by Protect Kids California for its own ballot initiative says it will:
(1) repeal the California law that permits [male] students to compete in female’s sports and students to be in females’ locker rooms and bathrooms; (2) prohibit schools from deceiving parents about their student’s gender identity crisis and stop them from secretly transitioning a child; and (3) stop sex change operations and chemical castrations on minors.
I might quibble with the phrase “sex change” — since it’s metaphysically impossible to change a person’s sex — but overall, the summary is pretty clear. The actual text of the proposed statute is similar, with provisions like, “Health care providers are not permitted to provide sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures on a patient under the age of 18 years,” and “any sex-segregated facility, including, but not limited to, a bathroom or locker room, on the campus of a school shall be segregated based on biological sex.”
Bonta took it upon himself to title the initiative the “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth Initiative.” The summary created by his office says the initiative, in part, “Prohibits gender-affirming health care for transgender patients under 18, even if parents consent or treatment is medically recommended,” and that it “Requires schools to notify parents whenever a student under 18 asks to be treated as a gender differing from school records without exception for student safety.” According to California law, the attorney general’s dishonest title and summary must appear on every page of the petition.
Protect Kids California is suing Bonta over his obvious attempt to prejudice voters and run interference against the ballot initiative. The group contends his “title and summary is prejudicial, partial and inaccurate.”
How to Get Away with (Making People Vote for) Murder
Sometimes the dishonest framing is in the proposed measure itself, rather than the summary. In Ohio last year, for example, pro-abortion activists behind Issue 1 carefully crafted the benign-sounding amendment to cloak its drastic ramifications.
“Every individual has the right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to contraception; fertility treatment; continuing one’s own pregnancy; miscarriage care; and abortion,” the amendment text stated, brushing over the fact that it made no exception for minors and threw open the door to transgender surgeries for kids as a kind of “reproductive decision.”
Furthermore, the text used a common Democrat trick to ensure the amendment would allow abortions throughout all nine months of pregnancy. It winked at allowing abortion restrictions after “fetal viability,” but kneecapped any such restrictions by making exceptions “if in the professional judgment of the pregnant patient’s treating physician it is necessary to protect the pregnant patient’s life or health.” It sounds nice to the voter who skims the page for the first time at the polling station on his lunch break, but it really allows any doctor to prescribe an abortion for any reasons that can be couched as “health”-related — presumably including a woman’s mental distress at being pregnant.
Define the Terms, Control the Discourse
Language is an all-important tool, and Democrats often use it to manipulate and take advantage of Americans who don’t have hours to spend sifting through media lies to figure out the truth. Dishonest terms like “gender-affirming care” sound positive and invite sympathy, even though the procedures described by the term are neither medical “care” nor “affirming” of a person’s real sex.
And — just like media blackouts (see: Hunter Biden laptop) or partnerships between election offices and left-wing dark-money groups — deceptive ballot initiative language is one of the many methods Democrats use to rig elections before the first vote is even cast.
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_etreynolds.
A short item this week on the news site Semafor had an interesting way of describing the existing dynamic between the national news media and Joe Biden’s angry reelection campaign. It said Biden’s team has“begun organizing a series of off-the-record trips for top political reporters and editors” to meet up at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, for the purpose of “background briefings on campaign strategy.”
I’d like to think that the person who authored the article is just hopelessly naive, but it’s Ben Smith, who has been running in these circles for what feels like three lifetimes. So, he certainly knows that contrary to his depiction, these aren’t boring scenes where curious reporters show up to get a rundown of Biden’s campaign schedule and themes. That’s not what happens.
What happens is the nation’s most influential media outlets send representatives to a Democrat candidate’s facilities — in this case, Biden’s campaign headquarters — to coordinate what their coming “news coverage” should look like, according to the Democrat’s needs and preferences. Thusly, Smith wrote that in these recent meetings, “Campaign officials have chafed at some of the coverage of former President Donald Trump, feeling that outlets are too focused on his legal troubles and haven’t paid enough attention to some of his incendiary recent statements on the campaign trail.” In other words, CNN and MSNBC are about to start showing a lot more clips from Trump rallies wherein he says something that’s supposed to offend the audience. And if it doesn’t, no problem. Jake Tapper and Joe Scarborough will be on hand to helpfully explain why it should. Over and over and over again.
We’ve already seen a version of this play out in recent days. Not even a month ago, in perfect unison, the media reupped their Trump-is-Hitler routine.
Associated Press, Dec. 18: “Senate border security talks grind on as Trump invokes Nazi-era ‘blood’ rhetoric against immigrants.”
The Washington Post, Dec. 18: “That language has caused alarm among some civil rights advocates and immigrant groups, who have compared it to the writings of Adolf Hitler.”
The New York Times, Dec. 17: “In New Hampshire on Saturday, he told the crowd that immigrants were ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ a comment that previously drew condemnation because of echoes to [sic] language used by white supremacists and Adolf Hitler.”
Reuters, Dec. 16: “Donald Trump, the Republican presidential frontrunner, said on Saturday that undocumented immigrants were ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ repeating language that has previously drawn criticism as xenophobic and echoing of Nazi rhetoric.”
Unable to help themselves, Biden campaign officials then rushed to Politico to brag that it was all their idea. That article explicitly quoted Biden’s campaign communications director claiming that Trump is “going to echo the rhetoric of Hitler and Mussolini, and we’re going to make sure that people understand just how serious that is every single time.” (The “rhetoric” in question was Trump’s perfectly innocuous mantra that the unmanageable hordes of impoverished migrants unlawfully dumping themselves over the southern border are “poisoning” the country by chipping away at its social and legal fabric.)
It’s never a hard sell for a Democrat to get the media to pick up its preferred storyline. Biden slurs through those “Trump is a threat to democracy!” speeches with mind-numbing repetition, and the accomplice media take the cue.
“A second Trump term ‘poses a threat to the existence of America as we know it,’ says The Atlantic’s top editor”— CNN.com, Dec. 5.
“IF TRUMP WINS: The staff of The Atlantic on the threat a second term poses to American democracy”— The Atlantic, Dec. 4.
“Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First”— The New York Times, Dec. 4.
“A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending”— The Washington Post, Nov. 30.
So, no, these gatherings with Democrat media aren’t dry informational sessions. They’re all-hands meetings for reporters to receive instruction as to how the next week, month, and season should go. If the Biden campaign wants more hype over whatever it is Trump is saying at his rallies, trust that it will be done.
One of the most unintentionally hilarious quotes from the media of 2023 appeared in Thursday’s edition of the Politico Playbook newsletter.
“The first reaction was shock,” an anonymous Washington Post reporter said, referring to a recent round of forced buyouts for nearly 250 staff writers and editors at the paper. “The Washington Post had done so well — was so profitable in the years of Trump, of Covid, and was owned by one of the richest people in the world … We’re talking about a ‘baby and the bath water,’ sort of ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ approach that left people really confused.”
Shorter version:Life was pretty great at the Post when we could run non-stop hysterical coverage of Donald Trump and an uncontrollable virus that scared everyone just in time for the election! Plus, we had a billionaire backer who gave it all his blessing! Those were the days…
To be sure, nobody should celebrate when a person loses their income. And that’s why I’m just as sorry for all of them as they would be for me if I lost my job. (It’s okay to laugh.)
It turns out that fomenting racial divisions, hyping up a worrisome pandemic, and perpetuating the Russia-collusion fake out was just a short-term business strategy. Who could’ve known?!
Now the Post is trying to recapture the magic with ridiculous stories like the one this week headlined, “Trump reprises dehumanizing language on undocumented immigrants, warns of ‘invasion.’” It had all the greatest hits.
Think of the children!: “During a campaign event in Reno, Nev.,” the article said, “the clear polling leader in the Republican race blamed President Biden for what he portrayed as a dangerous incursion on the homeland — although many migrants detained at the southern border are parents and children seeking protection, and studies show that undocumented immigrants are less likely than U.S. citizens to commit crimes.”
That’s a classic. Rather than acknowledge that, at minimum, Americans say in large majorities that the open Southern border is a serious problem that Biden and Democrats refuse to address, the Post, just as before, is fixated on reminding its readers that ackshully, many of the world’s destitute dumping themselves into our care are women and children, so have a heart, will ya?
Trump is Hitler!: Trump “accused them in a speech and in a social media post of ‘poisoning the blood’ of the country,” the story continued. “That language has caused alarm among some civil rights advocates and immigrant groups, who have compared it to the writings of Adolf Hitler.”
If at first you don’t succeed, heil, heil again. Perhaps there’s still some mileage in the Nazi charge. Biden’s campaign instructions for the media suggest there is.
The tried and true “claimed without evidence”!:“He is the first former U.S. president to be indicted on criminal charges and has been indicted in four cases,” the Post said. “Trump has denied wrongdoing and alleged without evidence that his four indictments and 91 charges are politically motivated.”
What made the Trump-era “claimed without evidence” so annoying before is that it was always used in reference to an expression of opinion, for which evidence isn’t needed to hold. That’s why it’s an opinion. But to use the grating, childish line in reference to a matter literally involving a political opposition’s prosecution of a former president for the supposed crimes of exercising his First Amendment rights and retaining government documents — which every president before him has done — is truly a work of art. Trump doesn’t need “evidence.” There’s extensively documented proof that it’s politically motivated. It’s on video!
It seems The Washington Post doesn’t have the income coming in anymore. Maybe a few more articles like that will do the trick.
The FBI interviewed a priest and choir director affiliated with a Catholic church in Richmond as part of an agency probe of “radical-traditional Catholics” as “potential domestic terrorists,” according to a new congressional report out Monday.
The interim staff report from the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed the FBI under President Joe Biden “abused its counterterrorism tools to target Catholic Americans” and “relied on at least one undercover agent to develop its assessment.”
“The FBI even proposed developing sources among the Catholic clergy and church leadership,” House investigators wrote.
The violent rise in antisemitism from supporters of Hamas terrorists’ fight against Israel, meanwhile, has escaped the same “domestic terrorism” treatment that President Joe Biden’s administration applied to traditional Catholics, as well as to parents who protested Covid lockdowns and inappropriate content in their kids’ schools. (A separate interim staff report from the Weaponization Committee in March found the Biden administration had “no legitimate basis” for investigating parents as terrorists.)
The White House was asked in October if the administration that directed counterterrorism resources toward concerned parents at school board meetings would apply the same “domestic terrorist” label to terrorist sympathizers who cheer violence against Jews.
“The people in this country making violent antisemitic threats. Are they domestic terrorists?” inquired Fox News’ Peter Doocy at a White House press briefing.
“I don’t know that we’re classifying people as domestic terrorists for that,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby. “I mean, that’s really a question better left to law enforcement. I’m not aware that there’s been such a characterization of that.”
Since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel that killed upwards of 1,200 civilians, violent and explicitly antisemitic demonstrators showing solidarity with Hamas have terrorized Jewish Americans. In late October, Jewish students at a Manhattan science and art school were compelled to take shelter at a campus library as anti-Israel protesters stormed the building. Demonstrators in Times Square even presented Swastikas at a rally celebrating the massacre of Jews.
Jewish students at Cooper Union College have been locked inside the library for their own safety as a mob of anti Israeli protesters block the doors.
Anyone could easily predict what the FBI protocol would be had recent anti-Israel demonstrations been full of right-wingers waving Confederate flags. The federal intelligence agency kicked into high gear six years ago to prosecute those involved in Charlottesville’s “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, even raiding an organizer’s Discord chats.
After carrying a Confederate flag through the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a 53-year-old man was sentenced to three years in prison. The presence of a few Confederate banners at the rally that day earned endless headlines in nearly every major publication.
And eight years after the Confederate banner was taken down at the South Carolina state house, the Palestinian flag is now being raised over one town in Massachusetts.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. 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. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Career Democrat and ABC host George Stephanopoulos completely emasculated Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma this weekend on his Sunday show. Right at the beginning of the interview, Stephanopoulos advanced a flurry of disinformation and lies, to which Lankford, who purports to be a conservative senator of the burgundy-red state of Oklahoma, bowed down in complete supplication:
Stephanopoulos: Your party’s leading candidate for president was on the stump yesterday repeating lies about the 2020 election. He’s called those convicted in the Jan. 6 insurrection hostages. He faces 91 separate felony counts himself. He’s raised the prospect of executing the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and terminating parts of the Constitution. In the face of all that and more, are you prepared to support Donald Trump if he’s your party’s nominee?
Oh, for crying out loud. What an absolutely preposterous line of questioning. Any Republican elected official with a room-temperature IQ and even a modicum of self-respect would be livid at the propaganda and lies and immediately push back. But not Lankford. Here’s how he responded:
Lankford: Yes, we haven’t had a single vote yet, George. This is still weeks and weeks away from our first votes that are happening actually in Iowa, then New Hampshire and South Carolina. And there are a lot of people that are going to make that decision. That’s not going to be me making that decision, that’s going to be the American people that actually make that decision.
Stephanopoulos pressed him, and Lankford remained impotent in the face of the questioning. In fact, he was so bad throughout the interview, he even quoted Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s controversial homeland security secretary, as a role model on immigration enforcement. The entire state of Oklahoma looked worse as it went on.
Now, Lankford is more than welcome to stay out of the Republican primary or endorse whomever he thinks is the best candidate, but what he should not feel free to do is allow the corrupt media and other Democrats to destroy the country through propaganda and lies. Americans are absolutely desperate for even the tiniest bit of Republican backbone and leadership, not mealy-mouthed kowtowing to the press.
When you claim to be a conservative senator of a state so Republican that two out of every three voters in 2020 voted for Trump, and a lifelong Democrat operative in the media asks you a completely loaded agitprop question, you should hit it out of the park. Like so:
“First off, George, your audience should know that you just regurgitated back a diatribe of lies, mistruths, and Democrat propaganda. I’m not surprised, given your professional background and track record of maliciously pushing the false and dangerous Russia-collusion scam for so many years during and after the 2016 election, but I can’t allow your lies to go uncorrected.
“Second, the public is also wising up to the fact that what the corporate media have spun to them about Jan. 6 hasn’t exactly been the complete truth. Yes, we know your line that this was the worst moment in the history of the world, requiring our FBI to do nothing other than arrest people who were anywhere near the event. Well, that, and arrest pro-lifers who are praying and parents who are attending school board meetings.
“But most Americans know that we have not gotten good answers about why Nancy Pelosi turned down security provisions ahead of what intelligence suggested would be a very contentious day, or what exactly was being done by the federal informants and federal agents who were present for the day’s events. They’re extremely worried about how left-wing rioters and criminals seem to be able to do whatever they want with very few repercussions, even when they’re attacking the Supreme Court, federal courthouses, the White House, churches, homes, and police precincts. And now with the release of some of the videotapes from that day, we see that most of the activity that day was not in any way what was hyped up and presented by the Democrats’ Jan. 6 show trial.
“Finally, the Biden administration is at this moment doing everything in its power to put their leading political opponent in prison. They raided Mar-a-Lago, George. When other countries do things like this, when Putin does stuff like this, we say that means they don’t have free and fair elections. It seems the Democrats’ main strategy this election cycle is to attempt to put effective Republicans in prison, to bankrupt them, and to prevent them from speaking out about what is being done to destroy this country. I’ll note this isn’t working with the American people, as Trump now leads widely in almost all polls against Biden, a strong renunciation of what’s going on.
“So I ask you, George, are you prepared to start focusing on the major policy issues facing the country, or will you continue to push lies and propaganda to help put your political opponents in prison?”
You know, something like that.
To state the obvious here, using small words so that even the absolutely feckless and embarrassingly lame Senate Republicans can understand, praising Mayorkas, failing to correct lies about Republicans, and mumbling about how you’ll vote Republican if you are forced to is not a way to win elections. Yes, I’m sure it’s what Mitch McConnell told Lankford to go out and do, but it yields nothing but failure. The people of Oklahoma deserve an actual man to represent them, not whatever it is they’re getting in Lankford.
You win elections by saying truthful things, not being sad and scared like Lankford and most other Republican senators are. He should be lambasting Stephanopoulos for not covering the major issues facing the country in an even remotely evenhanded or honest way.
That’s how you go from being a party full of absolute losers who are on their back heels constantly to one that makes people want to vote for you.
Corporate media have gotten every single major story of the last decade wrong, in big and little ways. Whether it’s the 2016 election, the Russia-collusion scam, the threats posed by Covid and response to the same, the effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s life and family, accurate discussion of the Biden family business, immigration, abortion, crime, racism, guns, hate crime hoaxes, the economy, inflation, education, the relationship between the sexes, the radical trans agenda, or a thousand other stories, the media haven’t just been bad. They have been absolutely irredeemably awful.
A record-high percentage of Americans (39 percent) have literally no — as in none, zilch, nada — trust in corporate media to “report the news in a full, fair and accurate way,” according to Gallup. Another large percentage (29 percent) has “not very much” trust in the media to get the story right. Only 11 percent of Republicans trust the media, compared to nearly 60 percent of Democrats. The gap between the parties is because corporate media overwhelmingly shape news and information to support Democrats and their policy goals.
If The Washington Post were doing journalism instead of propaganda, its reporter who covers the news media might be focused nonstop on the fact that trust in the media is extremely low. But Paul Farhi thinks there are more important problems. Namely, he’s worried that some unwashed masses might be practicing their First Amendment right to do journalism without a license.
“Someone invented the phrase ‘citizen journalism’ a few years ago to describe amateurs doing the work of pros. Yes, it occasionally works, but probably no more often than ‘citizen cop,’ ‘citizen attorney’ or ‘citizen soldier,’” he wrote on social media.
First off, and definitely most importantly, someone needs to take Farhi aside and gently explain to him the meaning of “citizen soldier.” Our armed services were created around the idea of a broad swath of citizens working together to defend the nation’s values. The notion is fundamental to Western civilization and has routinely been shown to achieve better results than armies made up of professionals.
Even now, “citizen soldier” is how military reserve and National Guard members throughout the country think of themselves. In fact, the National Guard’s publication is called “Citizen-Soldier.” There is no need for Farhi to disparage these citizen soldiers or the many successful citizen-soldier armies throughout time and history.
Heck, while we’re at it, let’s go ahead and note that it was a “citizen attorney” with an eighth-grade education who wrote a handwritten appeal to the United States Supreme Court in the case that found that the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires states to provide attorneys for criminal defendants who are impoverished. But of the three groups he mentions, attorneys are the best for his case for professionalism on account of the intense education top lawyers receive.
But journalism? Journalism needs credentialing? Really? Farhi has been on this kick about the need to keep the lower castes out of journalism for a while now. Seven years ago he wrote, “Is there any other profession in which more people think they can do the job better than the pros than journalism? Medicine? Teaching?”
Again, one of these things is not like the others. There is a reason why people generally respect surgeons and don’t try to do their jobs. And there is a reason why people have taken to reporting real news and information since those at corporate media outlets such as The Washington Post are so bad at doing actual journalism.
The Washington Post, we might recall, launched the Russia-collusion scam by having one of its longtime journalists launder an information operation against the American people. The criminal leak against the Trump administration remains one of the great uninvestigated and unsolved crimes of recent memory. That the Post gleefully and willingly took part in an information operation against the country is reprehensible. The paper perpetuated the Russia-collusion hoax with hundreds of stories based on anonymous sources from the intelligence bureaucracy. This scam was no minor thing. It was the lie that Donald Trump was a traitor who had stolen the 2016 presidential election by colluding with Russia. It caused massive amounts of damage to the republic.
Farhi, for his part, seemed to think that many things in the invented “Steele dossier” were true. Falling for a completely false and unsubstantiated claim from fellow Russia hoax outlet McClatchy, Farhi wrote, “If this is accurate, put another check mark next to the Steele Dossier.” Another? ANOTHER? Way to showcase the bare minimum of skepticism and do real professional journalism there, guy.
After finding out the absolutely jaw-dropping news that the Steele dossier was an information operation, bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, Farhi wrote, “Most surprising thing abt Clinton’s involvemnt w/Steele Dossier (aside from paying for it) is why her campaign didn’t make more of it.” Citizen journalists knew enough to be even more suspicious about the quality of the shoddy product after realizing its provenance, but not the “professionals” at The Washington Post! In fact, Farhi seemed to be bitterly clinging to the Russia-collusion scam as of a month ago, even after the Post begrudgingly corrected some of its fake news on the matter.
One citizen on social media replied to Farhi’s smug arrogance about the superiority of professional journalists, “The media’s track record in the last 5 years is like a prostitute’s track record on being a virgin.” A bit too kind, but the point is made.
As one of the exceedingly few “professionals” — to use Farhi’s parlance — to do actual journalism on this story and thereby debunk the information operation the Post pushed relentlessly for years, I have nothing but respect for the many “citizen journalists” who did the work corporate media refused to do. I frequently relied on them and their detailed research in the Herculean task of taking on the Post, The New York Times, CNN, and every other media outlet that participated in the intelligence agencies’ information operation against Americans.
In addition to the many articles the full-time professional team at The Federalist researched, reported, and published, we also published many articles from some of these citizen journalists who researched details far better than the entire “professional” journalism class combined.
The Federalist and citizen journalists may not have the corporate sponsorship that Farhi and his cohorts have, but we are wealthy in something few if any at The Washington Post have: a desire to find the truth and share it with others.
Pure Propaganda
The same goes for another information operation run by The Washington Post. In 2018, that paper ran the effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s family and life by publishing an absolutely disgusting and unsubstantiated series of stories alleging he was secretly a serial gang rapist roaming the streets of suburban Maryland. This was a redo of a playbook The Washington Post and other Democrats had used in 1991 in an attempt to derail Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ nomination.
While the Post carefully edited out exonerating details, shaded information to help the Democrat operation, and amplified some of the flimsiest claims on record, The Federalist got to work reporting the real story. We were aided in this effort by tips from community members who were aghast at what The Washington Post was willing to do in pursuit of its political goals. Some of them gave us information they said they tried to share with The Washington Post but were shut down over.
Farhi, for his part, wrote a tendentious article asserting that the obvious collusion between Democrats in and out of the media was a “conspiracy theory.” Quoting — and I’m not joking here — Jane Mayer (yes, really, Jane Mayer), he said there was absolutely no coordinated effort to run the smear operation everyone witnessed against Kavanaugh. (For an alternate fact-based and fact-filled perspective, feel free to read the best-selling book I co-authored with Carrie Severino on the matter.)
A few years later, when The Washington Post was brutally deriding Sen. Tom Cotton for suggesting the U.S. government should look into the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a potential source of the Covid-19 pandemic (the Post called it a “debunked conspiracy theory”), The Federalist was publishing citizen experts who were arguing that maybe the paper owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos didn’t have the story right.
At every step of the way, the Post didn’t do journalism so much as uncritically regurgitate claims from “experts,” about the pandemic and the response to it. Because we at The Federalist published truthful information and hosted debates from citizen experts about the proper response to a global pandemic, we were throttled by the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Those who misled the public as The Washington Post did on the Wuhan Institute of Virology were rewarded with awards and algorithmic amplification.
The “professionals” of The Washington Post continue to republish every unsubstantiated claim coming out of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. For example, a disinformation group called “Center for Countering Digital Hate,” which attempts to get governments and Big Tech to shut down political speech it dislikes, is routinely quoted by the “professionals” over at The Washington Post. So are many other groups that work to censor political speech. Few “citizen journalists” are as gullible as the average Washington Post reporter when it comes to such mindless participation in disinformation operations.
Real Journalism
We could go on and on and on. Who did better on the stories involving Jussie Smollett, Covington’s Nick Sandmann (for which the Post settled a $250 million defamation lawsuit), or the Biden family business? No, citizen journalists probably wouldn’t describe Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as an “austere religious scholar,” as The Washington Post did.
The Washington Post and other media outlets aren’t “failing” to get the story right. They are doing exactly what they set out to do: frame news and information in a way that advantages their political allies.
They have massive corporate backing and establishment support in their efforts. Stop thinking that they’re salvageable. That was silly thinking decades ago. By now, it’s suicidal. Start shunning them for their propaganda and thinking instead about how to support and amplify journalism that cares about the truth.
A federal appeals court Friday temporarily paused a lower court’s order limiting executive branch officials’ communications with social media companies about controversial online posts. Biden administration lawyers had asked the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans to stay the preliminary injunction issued on July 4 by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty. Doughty himself had rejected a request to put his order on hold pending appeal.
Friday’s brief 5th Circuit order put Doughty’s order on hold “until further orders of the court.” It called for arguments in the case to be scheduled on an expedited basis.
Filed last year, the lawsuit claimed the administration, in effect, censored free speech by discussing possible regulatory action the government could take while pressuring companies to remove what it deemed misinformation. COVID-19 vaccines, legal issues involving President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and election fraud allegations were among the topics spotlighted in the lawsuit.
Critics of the administration say the White House specifically sought to silence conservative voices.
Doughty, nominated to the federal bench by former President Donald Trump, issued an Independence Day order and accompanying reasons that covered more than 160 pages. He said the plaintiffs were likely to win their ongoing lawsuit. His injunction blocked the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI and multiple other government agencies and administration officials from “encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
Administration lawyers said the order was overly broad and vague, raising questions about what officials can say in conversations with social media companies or in public statements. They said Doughty’s order posed a threat of “grave” public harm by chilling executive branch efforts to combat online misinformation.
Doughty rejected the administration’s request for a stay on Monday, writing: “Defendants argue that the injunction should be stayed because it might interfere with the Government’s ability to continue working with social-media companies to censor Americans’ core political speech on the basis of viewpoint. In other words, the Government seeks a stay of the injunction so that it can continue violating the First Amendment.”
In its request that the 5th Circuit issue a stay, administration lawyers said there has been no evidence of threats by the administration. “The district court identified no evidence suggesting that a threat accompanied any request for the removal of content. Indeed, the order denying the stay — presumably highlighting the ostensibly strongest evidence — referred to ‘a series of public media statements,’” the administration said.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
An everlasting truism of the political left is that when they hold an indefensible position, they pretend everything is more complicated than it actually is, and, therefore, it’s your fault for failing to understand the complexities of the world. So shut up and just let them do what they need to do!
You think crime is addressed with more policing and criminal prosecutions? How naive! It’s not so simple! This is an issue that requires time and new solutions!
There is no truer example of that reality than the way they talk about “racism.” The Supreme Court just ruled that it’s unconstitutional for institutions in higher education to discriminate against an applicant based on his race. What has been congenially known as “affirmative action” is, by definition, racial unfairness.
Knowing full well that defending the kind of discrimination America erased 50 years ago is untenable, the left has once again attempted to take a very simple concept and distort it beyond recognition so that, hopefully, everyone will be too confused to even argue about it.
Washington Post contributor Theodore Johnson wrote Tuesday that the Court’s decision didn’t eliminate yet another form of toxic discrimination but exacerbated existing racial tensions by reinforcing the idea of a supposed “model minority” — ethnic minorities who assimilate to the broader (white) population. The Court’s “portrayal of Asian Americans as model assimilators is neither a compliment, nor is it proof that structural racism is an artifact of the past,” Johnson wrote. “It serves only to exploit one minority group, to condemn others and to argue against accounting for a people’s history.”
Wow, the ruling did all that? Here I am thinking it’s a good thing that schools can no longer deny access to an applicant because he’s not a specific race. Little did we all know that, actually, the ruling perpetuated a myth for the purpose of pitting Asians against blacks in some type of Cold War.
Thanks for the lesson, Theodore!
It’s garbage. Racism means one thing — the belief that a person’s value is contingent upon his skin color. What it doesn’t mean is, “Anything that I think denies me advantages because now I’m expected to follow the same guidelines as everyone else and, by the way, model minorities are a construct of white supremacy, and the very idea advances my argument.”
Overcomplicating and distorting the very basic, straightforward concept of racism is how we all ended up paraplegics from contorting ourselves trying to understand “equity,” “unconscious bias,” and every other convoluted new term cooked up by the left.
It’s now racist to even expect that it’s enough to say racism is bad. Now you have to dwell on it, consume it, and ultimately accept that the only way to truly absolve yourself of racism is to do whatever people like Johnson say.
But no matter what they say, the word for that isn’t “racism.” It’s submission.
Hunter Biden’s high-priced attorneys again tried to turn the president’s son into a victim by portraying IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley as a partisan leaker and a criminal — but on Monday, Shapley responded. Shapley’s counter was a devasting blow to Hunter Biden’s legal strategy and also represented a shot across the bow of the Biden-friendly Washington Post.
On Friday, Winston and Strawn attorney Abbe David Lowell dispatched a 10-page missive to Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, regarding what Lowell called the Republican House’s “obsession with attacking the Biden family.” While the letter complained of the House’s supposed abandonment of congressional protocol and rules of conduct, Hunter Biden’s attorneys’ real focus was Shapley, whom they painted as a partisan hack, not a whistleblower — and a criminal to boot.
The June 30 letter from Hunter’s attorneys strongly implied Shapley was responsible for leaking information to The Washington Post that served as the basis for an Oct. 6, 2022 article authored by Devlin Barrett and Perry Stein. The article claimed that “federal agents investigating President Biden’s son Hunter have gathered what they believe is sufficient evidence to charge him with tax crimes and a false statement related to a gun purchase…” Biden’s lawyers then challenged the House to ask the whistleblowers if they had leaked information to the Post.
Shapley didn’t wait for the House to ask, instead submitting an affidavit to the House Ways and Means Committee on Monday in which he unequivocally swore he “was not the source for the October 6, 2022, Washington Post article.” Shapley further attested that he had never “had any contact with Barrett or Stein,” the authors of the article. He also stated under oath that he “never leaked confidential taxpayer information.”
The whistleblower then expressly authorized “the Washington Post and/or journalists Devlin Barrett, Perry Stein, or any other Washington Post reporter to release any communications directly or indirectly to or from me,” agreeing “to waive any purported journalistic privilege and/or confidentiality that would have arisen had I been a source for the Washington Post.”
At the same time, Shapley’s lawyers wrote to Washington Post authors Barrett and Stein, noting that “Biden family attorneys have falsely accused SSA Shapley of illegally leaking to you for your story, ‘Federal agents see chargeable tax, gun-purchase case against Hunter Biden.’”
“As you know, SSA Shapley was not a source for you on that story, or any other story for that matter,” the letter continued. “SSA Shapley has never communicated with either of you, either on or off the record.”
Then, after stressing that Shapley had waived any confidentiality that would have arisen, the whistleblower’s lawyers asked them “to correct Mr. Biden’s attorneys and clear SSA Shapley’s good name of these false and retaliatory charges.”
The Federalist asked both Barrett and Stein whether Shapley was a source for their article, but the reporters did not respond to the inquiries. Whether they will respond to Shapley’s entreat remains to be seen.
What is clear, however, is that Hunter Biden’s attorneys don’t care whether Shapley was the source. They are being paid to defend Hunter Biden, and beyond cutting a sweetheart deal with Joe Biden’s DOJ, that means attacking everyone else. With Shapley and his testimony representing the most serious threat to the Biden family, the attacks on the IRS whistleblower are likely to continue.
While there is little that can be done to stop Hunter Biden’s lawyers from smearing Shapley, congressional oversight committees should ensure the Biden administration’s DOJ isn’t providing an assist. A recent New York Times article suggests Hunter Biden’s attorneys are attempting to inveigle the DOJ in the attack on Shapley.
“Hunter Biden’s lawyers have told the Justice Department that Mr. Shapley has broken federal laws that keep grand jury material secret,” The New York Times reported last week. In his Monday affidavit, Shapley also refuted this point, saying he never knowingly released grand jury material. But that might not matter to a Justice Department that answers to Hunter’s father.
Thankfully, Shapley and the other whistleblowers have a strong advocate in Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who seems two steps ahead of everything the DOJ and other Biden apologists pull. It is unfortunate, though, that the left-wing press that once championed whistleblowers seems intent now to serve as scribes for Hunter Biden’s attorneys. If the Post reporters remain silent, we’ll know they intend to keep things that way.
This article has been updated since publication.
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.
The shameless corporate media are so desperate for a narrative about LGBT victimhood, they’re pretending threats of violence from angry pro-“pride” perpetrators are instead threats against them. The latest examples are pure propaganda from The Hill and The Washington Post on Monday, which led with scaremongering — “bomb threats over Pride items” — while completely burying the lede: The bomb threats against culturally embroiled retail giant Target came from pro-LGBT activists.
“Target stores in at least five states receive bomb threats over Pride items,” read The Hill’s headline — the only part most people see.
The few readers who actually bothered to click the link were met with this deceptive framing in the first paragraph: “Target stores in at least five U.S. states had to be evacuated over the weekend after receiving bomb threats, the latest example of backlash the U.S.-based retail chain has received for its Pride month merchandise.”
Not until paragraph six, however, did the author reveal that these bomb threats that were emailed to news outlets in multiple states “accused the retail chain of betraying the LGBTQ+ community.”
The Washington Post ran an almost identical headline, burying the real news a full eight paragraphs down and leading instead with: “Target stores in at least five states were evacuated this weekend after receiving bomb threats. Though no explosives were discovered, the incidents tie into the backlash over the retail chain’s Pride Month merchandise.”
This media horsepucky is the latest attempt to push a fake narrative about conservative extremists assaulting the pro-trans department store. That’s why the outlets used words like “latest example,” “backlash,” and “for its Pride month merchandise.” As far as we know, the bomb threats had nothing to do with rainbow merchandise, nor were they related to any other “examples” of “backlash,” such as peaceful conservative boycotts. Instead, they appear to be a direct result of LGBT lunatics not getting their way. The framing is intentional.
This lede-burying exercise from The Hill is just the next page from the same “pride month” playbook the left has been running since May. Before the calendar even flipped to June, Target unveiled its aggressive rainbow merchandise, complete with pro-trans items for children and “tuck-friendly” swimwear. In no time, the company had moved many of its rainbow displays to the back of the store, citing nonspecific “threats.” When Target failed to produce any evidence for these allegations, its plummeting stock suggested the real “threat” was to its bottom line.
That didn’t stop media propagandists from parroting Target’s unsubstantiated claims. PBS, for instance, declared without evidence that Target had endured “intense backlash from some customers including violent confrontations with its workers.” NPR editorialized that the outrage resulted in “threats against employees” — a claim Target didn’t even make in its vague statement.
“Bomb threats” are a new low. But pro-transgender activists, especially those occupying America’s newsrooms, habitually spin their own victimization as victimhood.
For example, when radical LGBT ideologues manipulate impressionable children, activist “journalists” frame concerned parents as “transphobic” and dangerous. When lawmakers take compassionate steps to protect these minors from the clutches of predatory adults or seek to eradicate porn from taxpayer-funded schools, corporate media frame their noble efforts as attacks on “trans rights” and “book bans.” When conservatives plead for dysphoric girls to get mental health help instead of mastectomies, the propaganda press employs emotional blackmail by claiming these girls will commit suicide if they’re prevented from amputating their healthy body parts. When a deranged transgender shooter murders six Christians in cold blood, media activists frame the shooter as the victim.
Public opinion about transgender radicalism is rapidly changing. Based on a Gallup poll out just this week, a majority of Americans (55 percent) believe it’s “morally wrong to change one’s gender.” That’s up four points from 2021, despite poll results also showing more Americans now know a transgender-identifying person. Furthermore, nearly 70 percent of respondents said athletes should only be allowed to play on teams that match their sex, up a full seven points from 2021.
As the cultural tide turns, “pride” activists, with the help of their media allies, have shown they’ll do whatever it takes to maintain their clutch on the narrative — including spinning their own bomb threats against themselves.
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.
Headlines recently proclaimed that eight of Trump’s “fake” electors accepted immunity deals. Of course, in reporting the news, the corporate outlets all missed the real story — that the electors’ testimony failed to incriminate anyone, including Trump, and that the county prosecutors engaged in massive misconduct. Equally appalling, however, was the corrupt media’s continued peddling of the “fake electors” narrative.
There were no “fake” electors. There were contingent Republican electors named consistent with legal precedent to preserve the still ongoing legal challenges to the validity of Georgia’s certified vote.
Nor was appointing an alternative slate of electors some cockamamie plan devised by Trump lawyers. On the contrary, Trump’s election lawyers and the contingent electors followed the precise approach Democrats successfully used when the date Congress established for certifying an election came before the legal challenges John F. Kennedy had brought in Hawaii were decided. And that approach allowed Kennedy to be certified the winner of Hawaii’s three electoral votes on Jan. 6, 1961, even though the Aloha State had originally certified Richard Nixon the victor.
The Hawaii scenario in 1960 mirrors in every material respect the facts on the ground in Georgia on Dec. 14, 2020 — the date both the Democrat and Republican presidential electors met and cast their 16 electoral votes for Joe Biden and Donald Trump respectively.
Here’s What Happened in Hawaii Six-0
Election day in 1960 fell on Nov. 8 and pitted Kennedy, a Democrat, against Republican Richard Nixon. The outcome remained unknown for some time, with a total of 93 electoral votes from eight different states undecided in the days following the election. Hawaii was one of those states.
By Dec. 9 of that year, Kennedy had accumulated enough electoral votes to win the White House, but Hawaii’s winner was still in question. While the presidency did not depend on Hawaii’s three electoral votes, Democrats there had challenged the initial returns that gave Nixon a 141-vote edge, or 0.08 percent margin of victory.
Based on the original count in favor of Nixon, the acting governor of Hawaii, Republican James Kealoha, certified the Republican electors on Nov. 28, 1960. On Dec. 13, over the objections of the state attorney general, state circuit court Judge Ronald Jamieson ordered a recount. Then, on Dec. 19, both the Nixon and Kennedy electors met, “cast their votes for President and Vice President, and certified their own meeting and votes.”
In casting their electoral ballots for Kennedy, the three Hawaiian Democrats certified they were the “duly and legally qualified and appointed” electors for president and vice president for the state of Hawaii and that they had been “certified (as such) by the Executive.” The Hawaii electors further attested: “We hereby certify that the lists of all the votes of the state of Hawaii given for President, and of all the votes given for Vice President, are contained herein.”
Two of the three Democrat electors were retired federal judges, William Heen and Delbert Metzger, and Heen personally mailed the Democrat electoral votes to Congress on Dec. 20. In fact, the envelope containing the certificates, further attested: “We hereby certify that the lists of all the votes of the state of Hawaii given for president … are contained herein.”
Ten days later, on Dec. 30, 1960, Judge Jamieson held that Kennedy had won the election. In so holding, Jamieson stressed the importance of the Democrat electors having met on Dec. 19, as prescribed by the Electoral Count Act, to cast their ballots in favor of Kennedy. That step allowed the Hawaii governor to then certify Kennedy as the winner of Hawaii’s three electoral votes and, in turn, Congress to count Hawaii’s electoral votes in favor of Kennedy.
The Peach State Repeat
The Georgia situation in 2020 mirrored the events of 60 years ago in Hawaii.
Election day in 2020 fell on Nov. 3, although by then many ballots had already been cast, given the adoption of mass mail-in and early voting. Trump held a lead in Georgia until the morning of Friday, Nov. 6, when Biden overtook the incumbent. With the margin remaining tight, on Nov. 11, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced a statewide audit.
Following the audit, Biden remained in the lead by approximately 12,000 votes, leading Raffensperger to certify the election results on Friday, Nov. 20, 2020. Republic Gov. Brian Kemp signed the certification the same day. Then on Nov. 21, Trump requested a recount, as allowed under Georgia law given the closeness of the count.
On Dec. 4, 2020, then-President Trump and Republican elector David Shafer filed suit in a Fulton County state court against Raffensperger, arguing tens of thousands of votes counted in the presidential election had been cast in violation of Georgia law. While Trump’s lawsuit was still pending, on Dec. 7, 2020, based on the recount, Raffensperger recertified Biden as the winner of Georgia’s 16 electoral votes by a margin of 11,779.
Trump and Shafer’s Fulton County lawsuit contesting the election results remained pending on Dec. 14, 2020, the date the presidential electors were required by federal law to meet. Thus, while the Democrat electors met and cast their ballots for Joe Biden, the Republican electors met separately and cast their 16 votes for Trump.
At that time, Shafer made clear the Trump electors had met and cast their votes to ensure Trump’s legal battle in court remained viable. Nonetheless, following Biden’s election, Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis targeted the Republican electors as part of her criminal special purpose grand jury investigation.
While the grand jury has since issued a report and been disbanded, Willis agreed to grant immunity to eight of the electors, likely to push them to implicate the other electors. However, their lawyer confirmed in a court filing that none of the electors implicated anyone in criminal activity.
Since then, Shafer’s attorneys, Holly Pierson and Craig Gillen, wrote Willis a detailed letter reviewing the Hawaii precedent. The attorneys noted they had made three prior written requests to meet “to discuss the factual and legal issues” relevant to Shafer’s role as a contingent Trump elector but had “not yet received any response to those requests.”
The 11-page, single-spaced letter then proceeded to detail both the Hawaii precedent for Shafer’s actions following the 2020 election and the legal advice the Republican elector received that “he and the other contingent presidential electors should meet at the state capitol building on December 14, 2020, and perform the duties of a presidential elector to preserve potential remedies in the event Trump et al. v. Raffensperger, et al. was successful.”
In addition to detailing the Hawaii precedent from 1960, Shafer’s lawyers highlighted the fact that in contesting the 2000 election, lawyers for then-Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore cited that very precedent to support his position that two elector slates could be appointed. In fact, Democrat Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii suggested the 2000 Florida electoral dispute be resolved based on that Hawaii precedent too. And three Supreme Court justices in Bush v. Gore cited the Hawaii precedent as a basis for allowing the Florida recount to proceed.
As the letter and Hawaii precedent make clear, Shafer and the other Trump electors not only did nothing wrong, but they acted prudentially to ensure that if the state court lawsuit resolved in the president’s favor, Georgia’s electoral votes would be properly counted on Jan. 6, 2020.
Here we see one of the only differences between Trump’s legal challenge and Kennedy’s: The Hawaii state court promptly resolved the merits of Kennedy’s legal challenge, while in violation of the Georgia Election Code that requires lawsuits contesting elections to be heard within 20 days, the Fulton County court delayed assigning a judge to hear Trump’s election dispute and then delayed the first scheduled hearing until Jan. 8, 2021 — two days after Congress certified Biden the winner of the 2020 election.
Now you know the rest of the story. There were no fake electors. The question now is whether Willis will charge Shafer and others with fake crimes.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The White House blocked the New York Post from covering a Monday public event with President Joe Biden, according to the paper, a sign the president’s team is increasingly sensitive to coverage of the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and could be cracking down on media access after the launch of his reelection campaign.
The Post, which first revealed the existence of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in October of 2020, said the White House rejected its request to attend Biden’s press event discussing airline policies with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The decision comes as federal prosecutors are wrapping up a tax investigation into Hunter Biden, which could result in criminal charges in the coming days.
Photos from the event show there were about 20 empty media seats, undermining the explanation from the White House press office for the decision to block the Post.
“We are unable to accommodate your credential request to attend the Investing in Airline Accountability Remarks on 5/8,” the White House press office told the Post. “The remarks will be live-streamed and can be viewed at WH.gov. Thank you for understanding. We will let you know if a credential becomes available.”
Biden—who has held the fewest press availabilities of any president in two decades—in February blew up at a Post reporter after the reporter asked during a similar media event about the first family’s financial dealings with China. “Give me a break, man,” Biden said, ignoring the question. “You can come to my office and ask a question when you have more polite people with you.”
Steven Nelson, the Post reporter who was denied access, told the Washington Free Beacon that Biden’s staff are “setting an anti-press freedom precedent by prescreening journalists allowed to attend large indoor events. These spaces were open to all reporters on White House grounds in the past.”
He noted that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre promised last July to end a much-criticized COVID-era screening process that gave Biden’s press office control over which reporters were allowed to attend presidential remarks. Reporters accused the White House of arbitrarily enforcing the policy, saying it was “done without any transparent process into how reporters are selected to cover these events” in a letter last June.
“The White House Correspondents’ Association also has called on the administration to restore large indoor spaces to their historical status as open to all,” added Nelson. “If the Biden White House continues to discriminate against large outlets such as the New York Post, future administrations can do the same to other newspapers. It should end now.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House Correspondents’ Association also did not respond to a request for comment.
Update 5:34 p.m.: This piece has been updated since publication.
By describing woke ideologies and their fruits at face value, conservatives felled the left’s self-conferred monopoly on how, when, and where the term could be used.
The Associated Press Stylebook, a once-respected linguistic guide for journalists, conceded the definition of the word “woke” to conservatives on Thursday, in an update instructing writers to “use quotes around the slang term.”
“Woke” was originally popularized by left-wing proponents of identity politics to flatteringly refer to their own “enlightenment or awakening about issues of racial and other forms of social justice,” as the AP explains. Conservatives have used it to describe those same people and their ideas.
Those ideas more often than not, demand revolutionary social changes that prejudge people based on their secondary physical characteristics. If, like the vast majority of America until about five seconds ago, you think such identarian prejudices are a bad thing, you might use the word “woke” in a less than fawning manner. Apparently, the AP’s staff can’t handle that.
AP’s concession of the word is hilariously thin-skinned, but it’s also a rare win for conservatives in the war of words. Just by describing woke behavior as such, we’ve held a bit of ground against the unhinged language police who are mad that the right is using their terminology against them. Unintentionally, it seems we’ve ended up with command of the word altogether, if left-wing outlets like the AP are henceforth refusing to use it.
While there are times individual ideologies require a more specific description — queer theory, or socialism, for example — “woke” is a completely fair and often helpful term to use when speaking generally about the coalition of people on the left who want to see meritocracy replaced by identity politics. As my colleague Samuel Mangold-Lenett noted recently in these pages, “what other slogany-sounding word really works as a catch-all for what leftism has become?”
“They lost complete control of the English language,” he added, “and the word they used to indicate their radicalism to one another is being used to expose that radicalism to the rest of the world.”
The apparatus of left-wing media outlets, cultural celebrities, and tech platforms that drives our modern discourse has a majority share in defining the language we use. From headlines to search engines to literal dictionaries, activists manipulate the tools of debate. In any debate, the first step is defining your terms — if your definitions are off, you’ve already lost.
That’s why it’s incumbent upon conservatives to be intentional, honest, and straightforward with the words we use. That includes defending the legitimacy of disfavored-but-accurate terms (like “woke,” or “woman”) and refusing to use inaccurate language.
Take the nonsense phrase “gender-affirming care,” for example. The diction dictators have effectively standardized the term, to the point where even people who disapprove of such procedures will glibly repeat it. But nothing about the phrase is tethered to reality.
The whole idea that people have “genders” beyond their natural sex is pseudo-science crafted to further an ideology. Procedures that attempt to inhibit or reverse the physical realities of a person’s sex are not “affirming” that sex, but actively rejecting it. And deformative surgeries that involve amputating healthy body parts and creating Frankenstein-esque “penises” and “vaginas” with scraps of carved-up skin are certainly not “care.”
To use the phrase “gender-affirming care” is to give up the entire argument before it’s even begun. Or, as George Orwell put it, such nonsense terms “construct your thoughts for you,” and “perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”
The same goes for using improper pronouns to describe sexually confused people: calling a man “she” or a woman “he.” Doing so indulges a delusion. Having physical reality on your side does little good if you concede it away by the very words you use.
Concurrent with the effort to mainstream invented euphemisms such as “gender-affirming care” is an effort to cannibalize established English vocabulary. Other victims of the AP Stylebook’s recent crusades include “riot,” “mistress,” “crazy,” and “pro-life.” Proper grammar is also a victim, with the redefinition of the plural pronoun “they” to refer to individuals who are in denial of their natural sex.
Tech monopolies such as Google instruct their employees to avoid terms like “man hours” and “blacklist.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has nixed “criminal” and “foreigner.” From journalism to medicine, terms such as “mother” and “woman” are replaced by dehumanizing lingo like “birthing parent” and “person who menstruates.” Merriam-Webster has redefined “anti-vaxxer,” “sexual preference,” and “assault rifle” to further the editors’ ideological ends.
By describing woke ideologies and their fruits at face value, conservatives felled the left’s self-conferred monopoly on how, when, and where the term could be used. But the same people policing the word “woke” are appointing themselves the arbiters of the rest of the English language, too.
For those of us who prefer our words to reflect reality, there is nothing to be gained by good-naturedly going along with linguistic charades. On the other hand, there is the entire discourse to be lost.
“The worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them,” George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell protested not just sloppy use of language, but intentional misuse of language for political purposes.
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” he said. “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
Politicians and dishonest media propagandists today use inaccurate language to frame narratives and foster a leftist perspective. Inadvertently, even well-meaning audiences sometimes internalize this language and end up propagating the very ideas and framing they fundamentally reject. Don’t let that be you.
In every debate, it’s vital to start by defining your terms. If conservatives want to counter the radical left’s agenda, we have to begin by using words that accurately reflect what we mean — not words that actively mean the opposite. Here are just 10.
1. ‘Mainstream Media’
The public communication cartel headed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, and MSNBC does not represent mainstream Americans. Earlier this year, Axios (another culprit of heavy-handed political spin) reported that 56 percent of Americans believe “Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”
Big Media has engaged in deception through false and misleading “reporting” on Georgia’s election laws, the trespass and unrest at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and more. Embracing “Russiagate” and the allegations of the Steele dossier against President Trump was one indicator of crumbling credibility. The cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 presidential election was another.
Even more recently, CBS’s “60 Minutes” invented a scandal about Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, while giving minuscule coverage to New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s cover-up of COVID-19 nursing home deaths his policies caused.
Leftist propaganda outlets who are running cover for Democrats and spreading inaccurate opposition research on conservatives don’t deserve to be called mainstream. Instead, use “Big Media,” “corporate media,” or — as DeSantis says — “smear merchants.”
2. ‘Gender,’ When You Mean ‘Sex’
Words have gender; people are one sex or another. For Latin and in many of the languages that have grown out of it, gender is a linguistic term indicating which word endings a term should possess. Gender is either feminine, masculine, or neuter. The phrase “la boulangerie,” for example, is French for “the bakery,” and its gender is feminine.
Male and female, on the other hand, refer to sex. Sex is a biological category that reflects a person’s physical characteristics and reproductive systems, and also manifests in certain broad behavioral differences that distinguish men and women.
3. ‘Sex-Reassignment Surgery’
Further, sex is not assigned, at birth or ever. If it is not “assigned,” it cannot be reassigned. Surgical procedures that remove or conceal the outward appearance of a woman or man’s reproductive organs, are most accurately described as genital mutilation or amputation.
4. ‘Democracy,’ When You Mean ‘Republic’
A democracy is direct rule by the supreme will of the people: the highest law is that of the loudest mob. Derived from the Greek “demos” (people) and “kratia” (power), democracy involves no higher law than popular consensus, and subjects the majority will to no checks and balances but itself.
In Book VIII of “The Republic,” Plato lists democracy as the social structure directly followed by tyranny. Democracy, Plato theorized, “comes into being when the poor, winning the victory, put to death some of the other party, drive out others, and grant the rest of the citizens an equal share in both citizenship and offices.” He continued, “that is the constitution of democracy alike whether it is established by force of arms or by terrorism.”
The American system was established as a constitutional republic. The highest law of the land is the U.S. Constitution, to which all public servants are (or should be) accountable. Additional laws are made by elected representatives of the people. Further, the American system is a federal republic, meaning power is divided between federal, state, and local governments, all of whom serve as the guarantors of the people’s sovereignty and rights.
5. ‘Abortion Doctors’ and ‘Abortion Clinics’
Doctors protect life; they don’t willfully take it. The Hippocratic Oath, written by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and long respected as a noble description of a doctor’s vocation, includes a commitment to “not give to a woman an abortive remedy.” Doctors are also obligated to, as far as it is in their power, “do no harm.” (This phrase is commonly attributed to the Hippocratic Oath, but actually comes from another work of Hippocrates, his book, “Of the Epidemics.”)
Similarly, clinics are medical facilities where people receive help and care. We do not call the room in which a prisoner on death row is executed a “clinic,” and neither should we use the term to describe the place where preborn babies are killed and dismembered. Call abortionists and abortion facilities what they are.
6. ‘Antidiscrimination’
Often, “antidiscrimination” policies actually refer to legal preferences based on sex, race, socioeconomic status, or some other category. The Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, for example, released an “Antiracist Agenda For Medicine” earlier this month that would provide “preferential care based on race” for black and Latino patients.
In another example of discrimination under the name of its opposite, Yale University unlawfully discriminated against white and Asian students, according to a two-year Department of Justice investigation. Instead of using the leftist buzzword “antidiscrimination” to describe these policies, call them legalized preferences, or simply the discrimination they are.
7. ‘Undocumented Immigrant’
“Undocumented” is the term used by people who don’t want to call breaking immigration laws “illegal.” However, most illegal immigrants have identification documents from their home governments. Further, 16 states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Washington — as well as Washington, D.C., issue drivers licenses to illegal aliens, giving them U.S. documents as well.
8. ‘Equity’ Or ‘Equality,’ When You Mean The Other
Equity and equality sound similar, but have widely different implications today. Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary defines “equality” as “The same degree of dignity or claims; as the equality of men in the scale of being … an equality of rights.” The Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal” recognizes this equal value and dignity in personhood of each human being.
Equity has traditionally been a common legal term, referring to civil remedies; it can also mean the “impartial distribution of justice.” But in the jargon of identity politics, equity describes a policy that “recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.” See the above entry for “antidiscrimination” for an example of how equity-driven policies usually work.
9. ‘Cisgender’
Cisgender is an unnecessary word and assumes that sex is a result of human choice. A cisgender man is a man; a cisgender woman is a woman. Only added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015, “cisgender” was invented to represent the opposite of “transgender” in the 1990s.
10. ‘Pro-Choice’
“Pro-choice” is a euphemism to get around having to call yourself pro-abortion. But just as we don’t use “pro-choice” to describe supporting a person’s decision to murder another, we shouldn’t use it here. Abortion denies giving the unborn baby the choice to live; in that sense, it is violently anti-choice.
“This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases,” Orwell continued, “can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them.” Sloppy, inaccurate phrases will “construct your thoughts for you,” he says, and “perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”
Don’t let corrupt media and politicians design your words and supplant your meaning. To win the culture debate, you better first define your terms.
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.
Like just about anything else that undermines the Democrats’ preferred narratives, the Getty Images photo that revealed that President Joe Biden’s responses to questions at his joint press conference with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol earlier this week were scripted went mostly unreported throughout the corporate press. And, compared to the damage done by the out-of-control spending and woke policies at home and incoherent foreign policy abroad pursued by Biden, perhaps it isn’t earth-shaking that he needs cheat sheets on those rare occasions when his handlers allow him to field live questions from the press.
We’ve already seen plenty of evidence that the 80-year-old commander-in-chief requires printed cards with detailed instructions to navigate public events. He spent most of the 2020 presidential campaign doing virtual events; the press and public were given little or no access to him. That’s continued since he entered the White House.
Starting from his first meeting with his first formal press conference in March 2021, he has been carrying such cards with him in such settings. In March 2022, he was caught holding a card with answers to possible questions about the war in Ukraine. And in both a June 2022 event with wind industry executives and then a November 2022 summit in Indonesia, the cameras were able to see the cue cards he carried that told him precisely what to do, with phrases like “You enter,” “You take your seat,” “You thank participants,” and “You depart.” And to the consternation of his handlers, sometimes he reads the stage instructions aloud.
But this week’s cheat sheet goes beyond the usual embarrassment about an octogenarian president who is unable to perform without a script and often incapable of following the instructions he’s given.
It’s one thing for the White House staff to tell the president what to do or even to supply him with answers to possible questions that he can’t be relied upon to remember without a script in front of him. It’s quite another when members of the White House press corps are actively colluding in the charade. And that is what the photo of his presser cheat sheet revealed.
The card labeled “Question #1” in the “Reporter Q & A” showed a picture of Los Angeles Times White House correspondent Courtney Subramanian (followed by the phonetic guide to pronouncing her name) and then the text of a question about semiconductor manufacturing.
Biden duly called upon Subramanian, who then did ask a question about semiconductors, though not the exact same question that was on his card. In any event, Biden followed the script and gave her the answer to the question he thought he was getting rather than the one she posed.
It’s generally no secret what questions reporters are liable to ask, since most follow the dictates of the news cycle. And while the tradition of White House pressers has generally called for senior reporters for major outlets to be given priority to ask questions, other presidents have been comfortable enough in public to be able to choose for themselves and to be able to answer without scripts or notes.
A New Low for the Press
But the question this incident poses is far more serious than the fact that Biden can’t maneuver through a public event without minute instructions.
The card shows that Subramanian is submitting her questions in advance of the presser. And it is likely that others who are called upon are required to do the same. That means that even when his staff allows Biden to face the press in live events — and he has held fewer press conferences than any president in the last 30 years — what we are seeing is something along the lines of a Kabuki play and not anything that previous generations would have recognized as an actual opportunity for the press to get real answers about the issues of the day.
This is appalling not just because it shows Biden is incapable of behaving as all of his predecessors have done and submit regularly to unscripted grilling from an often-adversarial press corps. Given his age and his inability to get through public appearances without all manners of gaffes and evidence of confusion, what the cheat sheets demonstrate is that the corporate media considers itself obligated to assist the White House in a deceitful show aimed at demonstrating Biden is capable of governing, when that is not the case.
That goes beyond the unwillingness of virtually any member of the current White House press corps other than Fox News’ Peter Doocy to pose tough questions. It means they have abandoned even the pretense that they are there to hold the administration accountable and are instead merely the media auxiliaries of the Democratic Party.
Even more than just this disinterest in basic journalistic ethics, this kind of cooperation shows the lengths to which some reporters and their bosses are willing to go to cover up Biden’s incapacity to serve.
Part of a Pattern
The willingness of the press to go into the tank for Democrats is nothing new.
Last fall, legacy media journalists covered up the extent of Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman’s incapacity in the wake of a massive stroke. Their lies were only revealed when, in the sole debate of that race, Fetterman demonstrated that, even with electronic aids, he had trouble comprehending questions and answering them in a coherent fashion. His recent return to the Senate after spending several weeks in a hospital to be treated for severe depression showed that there was little improvement, but even now the corporate media treat any mention of his problems as evidence of bad manners or prejudice against the disabled rather than a justified concern about a senator who cannot fulfill his duties.
Biden’s announcement of his intention to run for re-election next year puts this problem in clear focus. It’s impossible for citizens to judge whether it is wise to elect a man already clearly in decline to serve until he is 86 when the people whose job it is to tell the truth about the government are reduced to supporting actors in a show aimed at covering up the truth.
This transcends the longstanding problem of liberal media bias. Like the press’s conniving to spread the Russia-collusion hoax and their assistance in the silencing of the Hunter Biden laptop story, playing along with the Biden show is clear evidence of corruption. It means it is impossible to believe anything that reporters who play this game write or say. It also means that, in the absence of objective medical tests that are made public and which the White House has shown no interest in conducting, no serious person can possibly accept the assurances about Biden’s mental acuity that we are being asked to believe.
Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.
The terms “far left” and “far right” have historically been used by social scientists to refer to communists and fascists, respectively. Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler epitomize the labels. But in today’s polarized society, the mainstream media — which is left-of-center — is dubbing Tucker Carlson “far right.” Which means he allegedly has more in common with Nazis than conservatives.
This is a bastardization of the terms.
During the French Revolution, the National Assembly organized to write a new constitution. Those who wanted the king to hold power sat to the right of the president of the assembly; those who wanted a revolution sat to the left. Hence, the terms right and left refer to traditionalists and radicals.
Today, these terms have lost their meaning. The lead story in today’s New York Times is: “Fox News Ousts Carlson, a Voice Of the Far Right.” What did Carlson do to merit this invidious tag? The news story says he took “far-right positions on issues like border policy and race relations.”
Carlson believes that people who break the law by crashing our border and entering the country illegally should be prosecuted. The surveys show so do most Americans.
Carlson also believes that critical race theory, which teaches that every white person is a racist, is irresponsible. The surveys show most Americans agree with him. In other words, according to the New York Times, most Americans are Nazi-like creatures.
Most fair-minded observers would say that Carlson is to the right of center the way Don Lemon is to the left of center. Accordingly, if The New York Times were fair, it would brand Lemon “far left.” But that is not what they called him recently: He is called a “fiery political commentator.”
This could also be said of Carlson, but that is not what they say about him. He is an extremist.
The New York Times is not alone in its biased reporting.
We did a study earlier this week about how the media are responding to the ousters of Carlson and Lemon. We found over 200 examples of Carlson being called “far right,” but only a few instances of Lemon being called “far left.” PBS, NBC and MSNBC referred to Carlson as “far right” but none referred to Lemon as “far left.”
No media outlet we checked was more unprofessional than The New York Times. It recently had a news story on Dong Yuyu, the “longtime writer and editor at a top Chinese Communist Party newspaper.” If anyone merits being called “far left” it would be him. But, no, he is said to have written “liberal-leaning commentaries.”
In other words, Communist Party leaders are not even “liberals,” never mind “left-wingers” — and they most certainly are not “far-left wingers.” They just “lean” to the liberal side.
To top things off, The New York Times issued an obituary on Harry Belafonte; the entertainer died at age 96. In a lengthy account, the only reference to his politics was that as a noble civil rights crusader. The paper lied.
Belafonte loved Stalin. According to Ronald Radosh, who spent his academic life writing about communists, Belafonte was an “unreconstructed Stalinist.” Mr. “Calypso” was very upset with whites who discriminated against Blacks in the United States, yet he never had anything bad to say about Fidel Castro’s oppressive communist regime.
Worse, Belafonte went to the wall defending, Mengistu Haile Mariam, in Ethiopia, the communist who instituted the “Red Terror.”
None of this was reported by The New York Times. According to “the newspaper of record,” Belafonte, like Dong, was a liberal, not a communist. But Tucker is akin to the Nazis. Got that?
Dr. Bill Donohue is president and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. A former Heritage Foundation Bradley Resident Scholar, he has authored 10 books on civil liberties, social issues and religion. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University. Read Bill Donohue’s Reports — More Here.
One of the most understated yet important aspects of Tucker Carlson’s tenure at Fox News was his unique ability to bridge a seemingly unbridgeable generational divide. Whether he was exploring more complicated topics via long-form documentaries, interviewing the world’s wealthiest man, or simply telling the Republican Party to get its act together, people of all ages tuned in. Grandparents and grandkids alike genuinely love him.
And perhaps this, in part, is why he was able to so easily mainstream the thoughts, theories, and brands of pseudonymous Twitter users who historically have been relegated to the dark corners of the internet with the rest of the weirdos. If a voice has utility, he gives it a platform; people trust him to discern who is worth listening to.
Tucker routinely used his platform to amplify people like Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok), which undeniably helped her gain traction and expose more people to the insanity of leftism. And to be sure, this was great, but people would likely be able to understand that sort of thing for themselves, even if they hadn’t encountered LibsofTikTok. We instinctively know when something is out of sync with the natural law and metaphysically disordered, as leftism inherently is.
Arguably some of his finest moments as a communicator were when he embraced the more esoteric, if you will, thoughts being grappled with in the nuanced essays of people like Peachy Keenan and translated them into modern English so the masses, who likely don’t have time to ponder these things on a regular basis, can also participate in the intellectual exercise.
Take, for instance, Tucker’s opening monologue from three weeks ago, in which he described the state of New York as existing in a state of anarcho-tyranny. He explained how this is a framework of “state-sponsored anarchy accompanied by political tyranny” and described how Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump and general apathy toward crime embodies it. Anarcho-tyranny, being introduced into the lexicon of paleoconservatives several decades ago, is not a term many people would be familiar with despite being uncomfortably familiar with the concept. Nevertheless, Tucker brought them up to speed.
Or take an example from July 2021, when he read a tweet thread from Darryl Cooper (MartyrMade) providing great insight and clarity as to why conservatives remain skeptical about the outcome of the 2020 election and no longer have faith in institutions like the corporate media or national intelligence apparatus.
But he didn’t only highlight academics. Sometimes he highlighted skeptics for the sake of highlighting skepticism and to prove to us that the “experts” are idiots — as was the case in this past fall’s “The End of Men.” The documentary takes the food and health industries to task and explores the, frankly, dual existential crisis of plummeting male fertility and lack of nutritional sustenance. The documentary features a man by the name of “Raw Egg Nationalist” — a sworn enemy of soy globalism and an advocate for maximizing nutritional intake by slonking raw eggs — and another individual who goes by “Benjamin Braddock” and who believes the key to boosting testosterone is exposing his crotch to redlight.
Similar to how Rush Limbaugh mainstreamed Michael Anton’s “Flight 93” essay by reading it in its entirety on air, Tucker made a lot more voices — who really ought to be heard — and a lot more content accessible by providing a platform that wouldn’t otherwise have been available purely because of unsavory optics.
The conservative movement needs someone like Tucker, who is willing to push the limit and unwilling to pull his punches.
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 @smlenett.
To support their left-wing agenda, corporate media occasionally allow members of the conservative movement or Republican Party to appear for a few moments on camera to give an illusion of balance. These select few are always significantly outnumbered by the legion of left-wing activists who dominate these programs and have to really use their time smartly and effectively to fight the propaganda and agenda-pushing that dominate our press.
In the case of Brendan Buck, the corporate media are engaged in a deliberate disinformation operation against the public. They have mislabeled him as someone representative of Republican voters when, in fact, he parrots some of the most preposterous Democrat talking points and ignores obvious facts to push back against those talking points.
Buck trades on the fact that he was a longtime top aide to former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Like many of the old-guard GOP establishment operatives, he has had to deal with the widespread voter rejection of the Romney-Ryan era he helped craft. For him, this has included joining with left-wing critiques of those who supplanted the former GOP leaders. It is not surprising, therefore, that Democrat activist Chuck Todd frequently uses Buck on his Sunday morning news panel for NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The panel this past week also included Democrat activist and NBC host Symone Sanders-Townsend; Valerie Jarrett’s daughter Laura, who is a legal analyst at NBC; and an anchor from the left-wing PBS “NewsHour.” Buck was ostensibly supposed to balance out those three and the hard-core partisan Todd.
Instead, he allowed every single left-wing talking point to pass by without even a slight reproach. In some cases, he joined in enthusiastically.
For example, Todd led a subliterate discussion about Tennessee on Sunday. In the real world, the situation was that a trans-identified shooter in Nashville murdered three Christian children and three of their caregivers. Left-wing activists, including three elected Democrats, responded by orchestrating a takeover of the legislature in an attempt to restrict self-defense rights. The manner in which they led this takeover of the legislative assembly included violations of rules for which they were removed from committees and, in two cases, the legislative body. Many in the propaganda press have willfully lied about these facts to push a left-wing narrative.
So, in Chuck Todd’s world, this story meant there were “loud echoes from our recent past in the south and in the ’60s,” and it “felt like a whole bunch of people who just don’t deal with dissent.” He allowed Sanders-Townsend to falsely claim, “What is happening in Tennessee, and frankly across the South, is in fact Jim Crow.” She even said the potential pardon of a man convicted in a self-defense shooting of a Black Lives Matter demonstrator “is an assault.”
Now, I’m no fancy-pants Republican media strategist, like Buck’s bio claims he is. I don’t have a single day, much less decades, of experience in Republican messaging, as Buck has. And I certainly don’t get paid the big bucks to fight four left-wing activists on NBC while posing publicly as the representative of the majority of the country that is not represented by those activists. But I know literally any Republican on Earth could have done a better job than Brendan Buck did in this circumstance.
He said, and I quote, “Yeah. Well, this is again a situation where there’s no infrastructure. There’s nobody calling the shots. We are being defined as extreme, and it’s why Republicans are on the run in just about everywhere across the country.”
By the way, he said “again,” because earlier in the program he had joined with his left-wing buddies as they spouted falsehoods about which party’s abortion views are, in fact, extreme.
Are you kidding me? Now, do I expect Todd or Sanders-Townsend or any other Democrat activist to push a narrative of Republicans being extreme and on the run? Of course, I do. But why is Brendan Buck, Paul Ryan’s longtime aide, pushing this falsehood?
Just a cursory review of the most recent news shows this is simply not true. The Associated Press wrote just last week in an article headlined “North Carolina state lawmaker switches parties, gives GOP supermajority,” that, “A Democrat in the North Carolina state House switched to the Republican Party on Wednesday, giving the GOP veto-proof control in both chambers of the legislature and handing Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper a setback in trying to block hardline conservative policies in his final two years in office.”
Buck may agree with his super-duper best friend Todd that Republicans are just so extreme for supporting safe streets, biological reality, protection of children, sane foreign policy, constitutional order, and the like, but outside the confines of that NBC studio, there’s a very different world he should probably think about visiting. A world with Republicans, for one thing, but also a world where Democrats are forced to flee the party that Buck thinks everyone is running to:
Cotham, a former teacher and assistant principal who had served in the House for nearly 10 years through 2016 before returning in January, announced her decision at a news conference at North Carolina Republican Party headquarters. ‘I will not be controlled by anyone,’ Cotham said as she announced she would switch her party registration to the GOP. She said the Democratic Party is no longer a big tent party and tries to bully its members. She said that she was considered a ‘spy’ and a ‘traitor’ and that the turning point was when she was criticized for using the American flag and praying-hands emoji on social media and on her vehicles.
The range of topics corporate media are eagerly dishonest about is reaching a level that is a serious threat to the republic. In service of a Democrat agenda, they lie with alarming frequency about nearly everything — including crime, abortion, radical gender ideology, racism, taxes, foreign policy, gun rights, civil liberties, free speech issues, freedom of religion, the right to protest, due process, dueling standards of justice, and other important issues.
Those lies affect political and policy outcomes with devastating effects on the American people.
The GOP establishment from the past may be having a temper tantrum about how unpopular the views of the Romney-Ryan era are, but they need to have that tantrum on their own time, not during these limited opportunities to push back against the vile lies of the corporate media.
Democrats and their media organs have enough tools for disinformation. There is no need for Brendan Buck to be one of them.
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
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:
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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