As reports of political violence against Conservatives appear to be on the rise, the mainstream media this week tried to quell concerns that leftist protesters were participating in mob-like tactics. That’s not a good look for the Democrat party.
CNN reporter Brooke Baldwin led the charge by going as far as to ask a guest not to “use the ‘mob’ word here.”
Check out this compilation of liberal media outlets rejecting the “mob” label.
(RIGHT SCOOP) This is a great segment from Mark Levin’s show last night where he interviews both Joe Concha and Mollie Hemingway on the very apparent media bias and smears during the Kavanaugh allegations.
The media are working overtime not just to prevent the eminently qualified Brett Kavanaugh from being confirmed to the Supreme Court, but to destroy his life as well. One of their avenues is to make it impossible for him to coach girls’ basketball in the future.
USA Today’s Erik Brady wrote:
The U.S. Senate may yet confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, but he should stay off basketball courts for now when kids are around…
The nation is deeply divided. Sometimes it feels like we don’t agree on anything anymore. But credibly accused sex offenders should not coach youth basketball, girls or boys, without deeper investigation. Can’t we all agree on that?
The article, which was illustrated with a picture of Kavanaugh and one of the girls’ basketball teams he coaches, has since been dramatically revised. Apparently editors at USA Today realized that calling a human being a pedophile with precisely zero actual evidence of any sexual impropriety was indefensible.
“This is disgraceful,” wrote Jedediah Bila. “The man was accused of atrocities with no evidence, no corroboration, no proof. He’s undergone 6 FBI investigations in his life. Maybe wait to criminalize someone till you have damn good reason? I’m utterly disgusted.”….
…Stelter argued that the press is being targeted as part of a “hate movement” spearheaded by the president, who regularly decries the news media as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people.”
“He has been wonderful for the industry,” said Koppel, who currently serves as a CBS contributor.
“But that means what?” responded Stelter, a staunch critic of the Trump. “If ratings are up, that means what?”
“It means you can’t do without Donald Trump,” Koppel replied. “You would be lost without Donald Trump.”
“Ted, you know that’s not true,” Stelter said.
“CNN’s ratings would be in the toilet without Donald Trump,” Koppel declared.
“You know that’s not true; you’re playing for laughs,” Stelter said. “You’ve lived through enough presidencies to know there will be more presidents.”
After some back-and-forth over what CNN’s ratings would look like if Trump hadn’t won the presidency, Stelter said he didn’t accept the notion that broadcast networks were benefiting from money generated from the additional eyeballs Trump brings to the table.
“I reject the premise that these networks are making so much money off of Trump and thus, we benefit from it,” Stelter said.
Koppel joked that discussing CNN’s ratings was “a sensitive subject” for Stelter, and pivoted instead to MSNBC.
“Tell me for a moment if you will — let’s get away from CNN; sensitive subject,” he said to laughter from the audience. “Let’s go to MSNBC. Is there a moment of the day when they’re not focusing on Donald Trump, or some intimately related subject?”…
Comedian Trevor Noah asks “how many once-in-a-lifetime events is it gonna take… for everyone to admit that maybe man-made climate change is real”?
Excuse me, Trevor, sneaking “man-made” into the sentence doesn’t make it true. The earth is warming, and man probably plays some part, but the earth was warming before factories and cars were even built.
The Washington Post ran the headline, “Irma and Harvey should kill any doubt that climate change is real.” But that’s absurd.
Of course climate change is real. Climate CHANGES. Always has, always will. For the past 300 years, since what’s called the “little ice age,” the globe has warmed about 3 degrees.
We humans are just not that important. Even if the Paris accord were honored by everyone, (it wouldn’t be) its PROPONENTS admit it would only have slowed warming by maybe… 2 degrees… over a century.
It does us no good to scream “man-made” every time there’s a terrible hurricane.
I wanted to UPDATE this post (the above video and description) a couple ways, with the most recent storm examined in light of history, as well as an older post making similar points.
Hurricane Florence hit as a Category 1… even though we were told this was going to be a Cat 4 or 5 disaster! REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE mentions the “missed by that much” by saying,
“’Hurricane’ Florence is passing over Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina right now, with peak wind speed in the eyewall of 60 MPH and a storm surge of just over three feet.”
Let’s play a game… North Carolina REALLY WAS hit by a category 4 hurricane in 1954:
Hurricane Florence could inflict the hardest hurricane punch North Carolina has seen in more than 60 years, with rain and wind of more than 130 mph (209 kph). North Carolina has been hit by only one other Category 4 storm since reliable record keeping began in the 1850s. That was Hurricane Hazel in 1954.
[….]
Hazel’s winds were clocked at 150 mph (240 kph) at the North Carolina coast and kept roaring inland. They were only slightly diminished by the time the storm reached Raleigh, 150 miles (240 kilometers) inland. Nineteen people died in North Carolina. The storm destroyed an estimated 15,000 buildings.
So what is the deal? We are told hurricanes and tornadoes increasing are a result of climate change. As the earth gets warmer, the weather get’s worse. Right? that is the line… EXCEPT, the weather is getting better? Does that mean then, following the logic of climate alarmists, warming is good?
POWERLINE joined the historical fun yesterday with the following:
As has already been noted here in the latest Green Weenie Award, the climatistas are all spun up to say that Hurricane Florence proves that catastrophic climate change is upon us and that we need to hand over our car keys to Al Gore right now. If you pay attention to extreme weather trends, you’ll know that the period between Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and last year saw no hurricanes making landfall on the continental U.S. (Sandy was a tropical storm by the time it made landfall in 2012), but that hiatus didn’t mean anything. Weather only means something when it fits the narrative.
Check out this chart, from Roger Pielke Jr, of long term hurricane landfalls on the eastern seaboard (“MH” means “major hurricanes”):
Tucker Carlson has DR. SPENCER on to discuss the politics involved in hurricanes (the experiment by Bill Nye “the science guy” being shown false can be found here at WATTS UP WITH THAT):
…weather, especially tornadoes and hurricanes have lessened over the years. In other words, if Michael Grunwald (the author of the Time article) says weird weather is a indicator, an evidence for, that warming weather is something we should be fearful of and act on, what is normalizing weather and no warming suppose to indicate… OTHER THAN the whole premise of the article in a major magazine is undermined.
The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as “proof” of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way.
Warmist claims of a severe increase in hurricane activity go back to 2005 and Hurricane Katrina. The cover of Al Gore’s 2009 book, “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis,” even features a satellite image of the globe with four major hurricanes superimposed.
Yet the evidence to the contrary was there all along. Back in 2005 I and others reviewed the entire hurricane record, which goes back over a century, and found no increase of any kind. Yes, we sometimes get bad storms — but no more frequently now than in the past. The advocates simply ignored that evidence — then repeated their false claims after Hurricane Sandy last year.
And the media play along. For example, it somehow wasn’t front-page news that committed believers in man-made global warming recently admitted there’s been no surface global warming for well over a decade and maybe none for decades more. Nor did we see warmists conceding that their explanation is essentially a confession that the previous warming may not have been man-made at all.
That admission came in a new paper by prominent warmists in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics. They not only conceded that average global surface temperatures stopped warming a full 15 years ago, but that this “pause” could extend into the 2030s.
But keep in mind, our total Co2 (carbon) emissions is no laughing matter:
Even the IPCC and British Meteorological Office now recognize that average global temperatures haven’t budged in almost 17 years. Little evidence suggests that sea level rise, storms, droughts, polar ice and temperatures or other weather and climate events and trends display any statistically significant difference from what Earth and mankind have experienced over the last 100-plus years…
Besides the Global Warming crowd blaming everything on it (even the violence in the “arab spring“!), its failed predictions about no ice in the north-pole, no more snow in europe, islands drowning, polar bear numbers, and the like… Al Gore’s claims about Hurricanes is [again], laughable, to wit: when you even lose Jeraldo Rivera, your leftist stance may be very laughable:
Al Gore was recently taken to task for exaggerating claims involving the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. The latest weather news makes his misrepresentations look all the more ridiculous.
For the first time since 2002, this year there will be no hurricane activity before September 1.
Reports indicate this is only the 25th time in 161 years that has happened.
The first hurricane of the season has formed on or after September 1 only 25 times in the past 161 years. Since the satellite era began in the mid-1960s, there have only been five years without a hurricane by August 31. The last time a hurricane failed to form before September 1 was in 2002 when Hurricane Gustav formed on September 11.
It would be foolish to make fun of anything involving such potentially dangerous storms and it’s also possible we could still see many late developing storms. However, given all the misleading information passed off on the topic by Gore, his allies and a fawning media, hopefully any lack of serious storm activity won’t be buried by the media for political reasons.
NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center keeps a daily count of cumulative number of tornadoes in the U.S. each year, and recent years have had an unusually low number of tornadoes.
As of October 3, the cumulative total for 2018 is 759; the previous lowest number of tornadoes for this date was 761. The SPC has records extending back 65 years.
Eight tornadoes hit the United States last month, tying the record for the fewest tornadoes in March, according to preliminary data from the Storm Prediction Center.
The last time there were so few tornadoes in March was in 1969, said Greg Carbin, a meteorologist with the prediction center in Norman, Okla. Accurate tornado records began in 1950.
A typical March sees about 80 twisters in the United States, the National Climatic Data Center said.
The only notable outbreak of tornadoes this March was last week, when several twisters formed in Oklahoma and Arkansas, killing one person in Tulsa. That’s the only tornado death this year.
Overall, it’s been a rather quiet year so far for tornadoes, with just 30 hitting the United States. Again, 1969 is the only year that was calmer, when 16 twisters were reported in January, February and March, Carbin said…..
….Figure 1 [top] shows all tornadoes above EF1. (See here, why EF1’s are excluded.) The 10-Year Trend is significantly below the level consistently seen up to 1991, although the high totals in 2011 have inevitably caused a small upwards blip.
We see a similar pattern with the stronger EF3+ tornadoes.
I do not claim to know what will happen to tornado numbers in coming years. And anyone who does is lying.
Does “global warming” cause tornadoes? No. Thunderstorms do. The harder question may be, “Will climate change influence tornado occurrence?” The best answer is: We don’t know….
Mark Steyn filled in for Rush on Friday, and I caught this interview that discusses just how bad the media has gotten in regard to anything Republican. Joe’s article can be found at THE HILL.
An extended excerpt from Joe Concha’s article:
The examples of misleading tales are apparent for all to see, mostly on the anti-Kavanaugh side.
For example, MSNBC goes heavy with a story affirming the allegations from Ford’s classmate based on a Facebook post. The classmate later admitted to not even knowing Ford or hearing a story firsthand. The national news outlet covered this without, apparently, any reasonable vetting.
“I did not know her personally but I remember her. This incident did happen,” Ford schoolmate Christina King Miranda wrote. “Many of us heard a buzz about it indirectly with few specific details. However, Christine’s vivid recollection should be more than enough for us to truly, deeply know that the accusation is true.”
This was enough for MSNBC and other outlets to run with the story.
Third-party tale? She didn’t know Ford directly? Screw it. Let’s go with it anyway.
It’s gossip treated as gospel.
MSNBC would later in a subsequent tweet note that King Miranda had removed the post without deleting the initial tweet, which was retweeted nearly 900 times.
The follow-up tweet was retweeted less than 100 times, or nine times fewer, for those keeping score at home.
“That it happened or not, I have no idea,” King Miranda told NPR on Friday. “I can’t say that it did or didn’t.”
“I had no idea that I would now have to go to the specifics and defend it before 50 cable channels and have my face spread all over MSNBC news and Twitter,” she later added.
Meanwhile, CNN anchor Jim Scuitto tweets out an incomplete claim about how and where Ford could potentially be interviewed, publicly or privately or in Washington, D.C., or California, where she lives. The tweet’s omission is egregious enough that committee chairman Sen. Charles Grassley’s (R-Iowa) office is forced to respond to.
“The offer to #ChristinaBlaseyFord is blunt: testify in public six days from now while under death threats or your allegation will be ignored in the confirmation of a SCOTUS nominee. That is quite a choice,” Scuitto wrote in a tweet that is retweeted more than 7,600 times and liked 17,000 times.
“This is not close to the offer to #ChristinaBlaseyFord,” replied Grassley’s office to Scuitto, a former Obama State Department official. “Chairman Grassley offered an open or closed hearing, reached out to discuss timing that would work for Dr. Ford, has even offered to send staff to California. This deserves a correction.”
More than 20 hours later, Sciutto sends a second tweet clarifying his original tweet. That is retweeted just 134 times and liked just 320 times.
[….]
Washington Post bureau chief Philip Rucker also was lambasted for a story involving a photo showing a ritual that Kavanaugh’s fraternity at Yale participated in back in 1985 involving a flag woven together by women’s underwear.
[….]
[….]
One small problem: The photo doesn’t have Kavanaugh in it….
This is all POWERLINE, but soo important for the “Mantra Busting” that …. here ya go:
…This is what is going on: Some “scientists”–read anti-Trump Democratic Party activists–constructed a theoretical baseline of how many deaths would be expected to occur in Puerto Rico during the months after Hurricane Maria. They then compared this baseline to the actual number of deaths, and voila! The actual number was higher than their hypothetical guess by 3,000. So all of those deaths–whether caused by cancer, car accidents, or whatever–are attributed to the hurricane. These activists have not made any attempt to count the actual number of hurricane-related deaths.
No one would use such a foolish methodology except for political reasons. This is more fake news propagated by anti-Trump activists. The fake news media, like CNN, have attacked President Trump for disputing the “scientists” who came up with the 3,000 number. Sadly, some Republicans have joined them, probably because they are ignorant about what is actually going on here.
For what it is worth, Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017, and Puerto Rico’s death rate declined in 2017, after years of increases:
(click to enlarge)
So, following the logic of the Left and the #NeverTrumpers, MORE hurricanes should hit Puerto Rico. Just sayin’ — I love the holes dug by these early reactors to the MSM. Some article to preserve:
…Excess mortality studies have been used to measure everything from the life expectancy of smokers to “temperature-related stress” in the Netherlands. The problem is that such studies are inherently reliant on conjecture. There can be other problems as well, namely politics, as I learned a decade ago while poking holes in an excess mortality study in Iraq published by the Lancet.
An article in the British medical journal estimated some 650,000 “excess” Iraqi deaths in the 40 months following the U.S. invasion. This figure was seven times higher than the toll based on body counts. It was based on field surveys supposedly done by a former health official in Saddam Hussein’s government and was authored by outspoken critics of the Iraq war — and of George W. Bush. It was also timed to come out just before the 2006 midterm elections.
To some neutral observers, the controversy underscored the importance of actually documenting wartime casualties. I don’t know how much Donald Trump knows about this topic. But he apparently is aware that “excess mortality” is not how U.S. authorities have previously tallied storm deaths. The National Hurricane Center, for example, estimated that 1,833 people died in Hurricane Katrina, most from drowning.
In Puerto Rico, there were myriad problems getting accurate data, the biggest being that electricity was knocked out for so long. This inhibited the reporting ability of island health officials. It also led to deprivations that killed health-impaired residents months after the hurricane season ended. In that environment, excess mortality studies made sense. Inevitably, they would be imprecise, and perhaps just wrong. The first such study, by researchers at Penn State University, estimated the number of deaths at 1,085 – when the government in San Juan was still listing the official toll as 64. Days later, the New York Times, using island death certificates, produced an estimate of 1,052.
Harvard went next. Its study, trumpeted uncritically around the world, had problems. For one thing, its range of 793 to 8,498 excess deaths was unhelpful. So the media settled on the median figure, 4,645, which was little more than a guess. The bigger problem is that the methodology was a mish-mash. Harvard’s researchers compared actual deaths in 2016 to estimates based on interviews – polling surveys – in 2017. “The big thing is the methodology is so completely different, you don’t now what you’re dealing with,” said University of Texas biostatistics professor Donald Berry. “What you end up with is garbage.”
That’s the background when the governor of Puerto Rico tapped George Washington University’s school of public health to do another excess mortality survey. Like all such studies, it’s based on assumptions and guesswork – in this case assumptions complicated by the outward migration of tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans to the mainland after the hurricane. That said, I know of no evidence that would undermine its estimate of 2,975 excess deaths…
The difference between survey results and demonstrable realities was also pointed out by the author of Hillbilly Elegy: “In a recent Gallup poll, Southerners and Midwesterners reported the highest rates of church attendance in the country. Yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South.”
Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2018), 23-25 (added references).
As Twitchy reported, the media went wild last week when a report from Harvard University estimated that nearly 5,000 people in Puerto Rico had died from Hurricane Maria.
The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog, though, took a look at how Harvard, whose researchers admitted they conducted “a quick study on a limited budget,” came up with that number and found that the methodology was ridiculously flawed:
In effect, the researchers took one number — 15 deaths identified from a survey of 3,299 households — and extrapolated that to come up with 4,645 deaths across the island. That number came with a very large caveat, clearly identified in the report, but few news media accounts bothered to explain the nuances….
…It turns out there is no list of names. There is no accounting of what causes of death were attributable to the aftermath of the devastating storm. In fact, having now scanned the George Washington University report at the heart of this all, I have an itching feeling they missed a big statistical point.
The bottom line is that the researchers developed a model and made a projected estimate of the number of deaths to be expected on the island during the six months following the storm, based on previous year’s death numbers. They then factored in the fact that a full 8 percent of the population, 280,000 people roughly, left the island following the storm.
With that population change factored in, the “expected” number of deaths was about 3,000 fewer than the 16,000 deaths which were recorded September through February. Those 3,000 “excess” deaths above the projection are the one’s being attributed to the effects of the storm. I’m rounding because their report admits the projection is not exact. The chart I included above notes the higher death rate per 10,000 people.
There are not 3,000 death certificates noting hurricane-related causes (loss of electricity, stress, poor transportation response) and the authors chide the local medical community for not being sufficiently exact in filling out their death certificates. So they are left with models and projections and estimates, which have translated into MSM-accepted Truth.
Here’s my question, the itch not addressed in the report, that I saw: Who left? Who departed following the storm? Would the elderly, infirm and impoverished have been the ones to decamp to the mainland? Or would they have been the one’s left behind? Doesn’t the shift in the baseline also at least in part explain this? The death rate really only jumped dramatically when you reduce the baseline population…
Facebook on Friday issued an apology to PragerU for “mistakenly” removing several videosand limiting the reach of others. (DAILY CALLER)
Confronting The Left’s Agenda To Silence Conservative Voices – The dire lesson of the Freedom Center’s recent victory over censorship. (FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE)
Michael Ledeen is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center and Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
We’re rightly upset at the censorship of the big social media platforms, and our morale wasn’t improved when something north of three hundred newspapers wrote editorials in virtual unison, or when Mastercard, in cahoots with the Southern Poverty Law Center, attempted to shut down our Center. Thankfully, we won and they lost. But the efforts to silence conservative spokesmen seem to be intensifying, which makes strategic political sense to me. If you can’t win an argument on the merits, then either discredit or silence your opponents.
The Left has lost most of the substantive arguments—from health care to taxation, from foreign policy to defense spending–and their best political chance is to silence the opposition. This campaign rages throughout the society, from social media to the educational system, from publishers to movie makers.
There is seemingly no limit to their zeal in silencing their opponents, even to changing our Constitutional system. Did you know that the Democratic Party is on record against the First Amendment? Officially, publicly, and, in the United States Senate, unanimously. They tried to rewrite it in 2014, and introduced a Constitutional Amendment that would have enabled federal and state governments to prohibit various kinds of political spending, broadcasting or publishing.
This remarkable measure, which flew in the face of the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, had no chance of being approved by the requisite majorities in Congress and the states. It was, therefore, a purely political maneuver, laying down a marker for voters and opinion-makers. Still, the numbers are astonishing: 49 Senators voted for it, and not one—not a single one—voted to preserve the First Amendment.
It gets worse. Outraged by the Democratic stance against freedom of speech and press, Senator Ted Cruz introduced his own amendment, which consisted of the First Amendment itself. Once again, the numbers were remarkable. Not a single Democrat voted for it, either in committee or in the full Senate……
Instagram Makes Free Speech Disappear – Company owned by Navy SEALs banned for criticizing NFL kneelers. (FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE)
The post in question read, “This sums it up, Veteran’s defend our freedom and keep us safe. Meanwhile overpaid turds throw a leather ball around in an overpriced stadium and shit on all the men and women who have been killed defending our country.”
Project War Path co-owner Tej Gill, a Navy SEAL veteran, told Breibart “players kneeling really hits home with me and my teammates, I think it’s disgusting, an insult to all veterans, Americans, and especially families of veterans that have been killed and wounded during war.”
The same post on Twitter was not removed but Instagram took it down. As Gill explained to Breitbart, “I tried to reinstate my account, the form I filled out said my account was permanently suspended for hate speech. I have not heard anything back from Instagram since.”
Gill cited “a very aggressive censorship operation that is being conducted by Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the mainstream media.” Instagram, as it happens is owned by Facebook, which purchased the upstart in 2012 and turned it into a profit center……
CENSORED! How Online Media Companies Are Suppressing Conservative Speech (NEWSBUSTERS)
Executive Summary (Full Special Report can be found here.)
Like it or not, social media is the communication form of the future — not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Just Facebook and Twitter combined reach 1.8 billion people. More than two-thirds of all Americans (68 percent) use Facebook. YouTube is pushing out TV as the most popular place to watch video. Google is the No. 1 search engine in both the U.S. and the world.
War is being declared on the conservative movement in this space and conservatives are losing — badly. If the right is silenced, billions of people will be cut off from conservative ideas and conservative media.
It’s the new battleground of media bias. But it’s worse. That bias is not a war of ideas. It’s a war against ideas. It’s a clear effort to censor the conservative worldview from the public conversation.
The Media Research Center has undertaken an extensive study of the problem at major tech companies — Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube — and the results are far more troubling than most conservatives realize. Here are some of the key findings:
TWITTER LEADS IN CENSORSHIP: Project Veritas recently had caught Twitter staffers admitting on hidden camera that they had been censoring conservatives through a technique known as shadow banning, where users think their content is getting seen widely, but it’s not. The staffers had justified it by claiming the accounts had been automated if they had words such as “America” and “God.” In 2016, Twitter had attempted to manipulate election-related tweets using the hashtags “#PodestaEmails” and “#DNCLeak.” The site also restricts pro-life ads from Live Action and even Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), but allows Planned Parenthood advertisements.
FACEBOOK’S TRENDING FEED HAS BEEN HIDING CONSERVATIVE TOPICS: A 2016 Gizmodo story had warned of Facebook’s bias. It had detailed claims by former employees that Facebook’s news curators had been instructed to hide conservative content from the “trending” section, which supposedly only features news users find compelling. Topics that had been blacklisted included Mitt Romney, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and Rand Paul. On the other hand, the term “Black Lives Matter” had also been placed into the trending section even though it was not actually trending. Facebook had also banned at least one far right European organization but had not released information on any specific statements made by the group that warranted the ban.
GOOGLE SEARCH AIDS DEMOCRATS: Google and YouTube’s corporate chairman Eric Schmidt had assisted Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The company’s search engine had deployed a similar bias in favor of Democrats. One study had found 2016 campaign searches were biased in favor of Hillary Clinton. Even the liberal website Slate had revealed the search engine’s results had favored both Clinton and Democratic candidates. Google also had fired engineer James Damore for criticizing the company’s “Ideological Echo Chamber.” The company had claimed he had been fired for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.” Damore is suing Google, saying it mistreats whites, males and conservatives.
YOUTUBE IS SHUTTING DOWN CONSERVATIVE VIDEOS: Google’s YouTube site had created its own problems with conservative content. YouTube moderators must take their cues from the rest of Google – from shutting down entire conservative channels “by mistake” to removing videos that promote right-wing political views. YouTube’s special Creators for Change section is devoted to people using their “voices for social change” and even highlights the work of a 9/11 truther. The site’s very own YouTube page and Twitter account celebrate progressive attitudes, including uploading videos about “inspiring” gay and trans people and sharing the platform’s support for DACA.
TECH FIRMS ARE RELYING ON GROUPS THAT HATE CONSERVATIVES: Top tech firms like Google, YouTube and Twitter partner with leftist groups attempting to censor conservatives. These include the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Both groups claim to combat “hate,” but treat standard conservative beliefs in faith and family as examples of that hatred. George Soros-funded ProPublica is using information from both radical leftist organizations to attack conservative groups such as Jihad Watch and ACT for America, bullying PayPal and other services to shut down their funding sources. The SPLC’s “anti-LGBT” list had also been used to prevent organizations from partnering with AmazonSmile to raise funds.
LIBERAL TWITTER ADVISORS OUTNUMBER CONSERVATIVES 12-TO-1: Twelve of the 25 U.S. members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council – which helps guide its policies – are liberal, and only one is conservative. Anti-conservative groups like GLAAD and the ADL are part of the board. There is no well-known conservative group represented.
TECH COMPANIES RELY ON ANTI-CONSERVATIVE FACT-CHECKERS: Facebook and Google both had partnered with fact-checking organizations in order to combat “fake news.” Facebook’s short-lived disputed flagger program had allowed Snopes, PolitiFact and ABC News to discern what is and is not real news. Google’s fact-checkers had accused conservative sources of making claims that did not appear in their articles and disproportionately “fact-checked” conservative sources. On Facebook, a satire site, the Babylon Bee, had been flagged by Snopes for its article clearly mocking CNN for its bias. YouTube also had announced a partnership with Wikipedia in order to debunk videos deemed to be conspiracy theories, even though Wikipedia has been criticized for its liberal bias.
[…..]
Fighting Political Desegregation With A Digital First Amendment – Political segregation must end just as racial segregation did. (FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE)
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism
The United States has 325 million people. Facebook has 2.2 billion active users. Google is even bigger. Even a smaller company like Twitter tops the population of the United States with 335 million active users. And not even China has a bigger population than that of the biggest internet companies.
The scale of the internet dwarfs any individual nation-state and obtaining many of the traditional benefits of the nation-state, political freedom, engagement, economic opportunities, requires access through the corporate monopolies that act as the gatekeepers of their own virtual nation states.
Google, Facebook and Amazon aren’t governments, but they have a larger virtual citizenry than any government, and they control access to the marketplace of ideas, determining what ideas billions of people can express, whether they can conduct financial transactions or even exist. Technopolies have a vast sphere of control without having to offer their users any of the personal freedoms of governments.
The virtual state of the internet grew to be controlled by a handful of corporations based out of bicoastal cities, almost universally to the political left of ordinary Americans.
8.8% of tech industry founders voted for Trump, compared to 46% of voters or 56% of the country. 63% of tech bosses are Democrats while only 14% are Republicans. A majority of Americans support the death penalty. A majority of tech bosses oppose it. More Americans want to decrease immigration than increase it. But a majority of tech bosses want to increase immigration levels instead.
The tools of political participation and engagement, the means by which politicians, political activists and the public interact, are in the hands of leftists. And they’re using them for political segregation.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the left blamed social media for its defeat. Campaigns were launched to scour opposition media from social media under the guise of fighting ‘fake news’, conservative organizations and activists were banned from social media and dropped by payment processors after pressure campaigns by left-wing activists denouncing them as ‘hate groups’…….
The first hour of Thursdays show where Mark Levin discusses the false media reports that Donald Trump violated campaign finance laws. A good dealing with the topic.
Former CIA chief Hayden warns against impeaching Trump (“One-third of America will believe it was a soft coup’)
….“If President Trump is somehow forced to leave office before the end of his first term […] one-third of America will believe it was a soft coup,” added Mr. Hayden, a career intelligence official who retired in 2009 after leading the CIA under former President Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
An outspoken critic of the president, Mr. Hayden warned against impeachment in light of prosecutors securing convictions this week against Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former personal attorney and election campaign chairman, respectively….
RED STATE does a BANG-UP job in the following list:
…A comparison of the carnage at the very highest levels of the FBI and the DOJ to the complete lack of evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump following over two years of investigations should tell Robert Mueller that it’s time to extricate himself, as gracefully as possible, from this fraud. He needs to admit defeat in his attempt to undo the results of a fair election.
Seamus Bruner of The Epoch Times has just put together a list of 25 DOJ and FBI officials who have resigned in the last year. Some of them, Rachel Brand for example, have left to take positions in the private sector. Mike Kortan has said he was planning to retire anyway. But many on this list have been fired, or forced out (largely in disgrace) or demoted, because of the Trump/Russia investigation.
Joel McElvain, assistant branch director of the civil division (resigned)
*Status Unclear
As I look at this list, I know it includes only a fraction of those who have risked their careers and their reputations because they simply couldn’t bear to see Donald Trump in the White House.
Before this is over, others will be added to the list. Perhaps even Rod Rosenstein. And there will likely be former top-level Obama officials caught in the net as well. Perjurers John Brennan and James Clapper come to mind.
In addition to the men and women who have been working against Trump in the DOJ and the FBI, there were/are employees in the State Department and the CIA, holdovers from the Obama administration, who are complicit.
The mainstream media has played a huge role in perpetuating this hoax. They have breathlessly distorted events to influence public opinion. Instead of reporting the news, they have worked overtime to shape it.
For an example of how the mainstream media has aided and abetted the left’s attempt to impeach Trump, we need to look no further than their outrage over the revocation of John Brennan’s security clearance….
Even contention in the ranks of the upper echelon of SPOOKS is starting to maske it’s way to the public as people “cover their asses”
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Sunday that he thinks former CIA Director John Brennan‘s rhetoric is becoming an issue “in and of itself.”
“John and his rhetoric have become an issue in and of itself,” Clapper said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “John is subtle like a freight train and he’s gonna say what’s on his mind.”
Clapper’s comments came in response to an op-ed penned by Brennan in The New York Times this week, in which he wrote that President Trumpcolluded with Russia during the 2016 election.
Clapper said he empathized with Brennan, but voiced concerns for Brennan’s fiery rhetoric toward Trump and his administration.
“I think that the common denominator among all of us [in the intelligence community] that have been speaking up … is genuine concern about the jeopardy and threats to our institutions,” Clapper said.
Brennan’s claims drew criticism from some in the intelligence community who said the timing was suspect.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) on Thursday took aim at Brennan for “purport[ing] to know, as fact, that the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign power.”
“If his statement is based on intelligence he has seen since leaving office, it constitutes an intelligence breach. If he has some other personal knowledge of or evidence of collusion, it should be disclosed to the special counsel, not The New York Times,” Burr said……..
WOW — how far Podhoretz has fallen. When Mika Brezinski (on the Left) notes John Podhoretz Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS)… if she see’s it it MUST be bad!
Trust me, I wish Trump was as clear as Newt, but with Trump we get the whole package, like with our spouse, friends, children, etc (Via RIGHTSCOOP).
I start out the following audio with a reminder of what Obama ACTUALLY DID in regard to the press. Trump has done none of this. But because a bombastic personality has said the press is the enemy of the American people (words), this is wrong when the same press compares Trump to the Third Reich, Hitler, NAZIs, fascists, bigoted, racist, etc., etc., THIS… this is somehow okay. Dumb.
All this does is fortify the idea that the media is far-left in their “news” AND “editorial;” positions. So every paper that puts forward an editorial YOU KNOW is a mouthpiece for the Democrats.
THE FEDERALIST notes the “non-scandal” of Obama’s war with the free-press:
…Yet many professionals who supposedly deplore the authoritarian nature of an administration that doesn’t answer CNN’s questions were generally quiet when Obama spied on reporters. The Obama DOJ spied on the Associated Press in an attempt to crack down on internal leaks. The DOJ tapped around 20 different phone lines—including cell phone and home lines—that snared at least 100 staffers who worked for the outlet. The Justice Department spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, looking at his personal emails and tracking his movements.
Color me skeptical, but somehow I doubt similar Trump efforts would be framed as a “rare peek into a Justice Department leak probe,” as if we were pulling the curtains back on a fashion show. It would be, rightly, depicted as an assault on democracy.
Then again, spying was also never really given the scandal treatment during the Obama years. As Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan became aware of an operation of illegal spying of a legislative branch staffer over torture files and misled the media about it. Did the president know? Shrug. The story hardly made a dent. Likewise, Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, admitted he misled Congress about spying on American citizens. No scandal.
Today both these people are on TV chumming around with serious journalists who allow them to continue to make reckless, unsubstantiated political statements all the time. It isn’t Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” who asks Clapper tough questions, it’s Meghan McCain on “The View.”
There was unprecedented politicization of the government under Obama — most of it, I imagine, excused for being part of a good cause. The NLRB. The Justice Department. The IRS. The Office of Special Counsel, which reviews whistleblower allegations, foundthat IRS employees urged callers to vote for Obama, wore pro-Obama swag, and campaigned for Democrats in conversations with taxpayers — all of it illegal.
But far more seriously, IRS leadership, specifically Lois Lerner, aggressively targeted conservative groups before elections. The IRS admitted as much in an apology letter. Lerner was held in contempt by Congress for refusing to comply with investigators’ demands. She never answered questions for this genuine attack on democracy…..
FLASHBACK
The above UPDATE is with thanks to GayPatriot and Bruce’s Twitter page. Are people exaggerating the similarities? The only difference is the responsibility level… Nixon showed he was a man. Obama? Not so much.
The above audio is Hugh reading from the following article in the New Yorker Magazine:
The Obama Justice Department has seized the phone records of numbers that are associated with White House staffers and, apparently, with Fox News reporters, according to a document filed in the case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, on October 13, 2011. Kim is a former State Department contractor accused of violating the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking classified information to James Rosen, a Fox News reporter. Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who is prosecuting the case, has seized records associated with two phone numbers at the White House, at least five numbers associated with Fox News, and one that has the same area code and exchange as Rosen’s personal-cell-phone number (the last four numbers are redacted).
In all, Machen has seized records associated with over thirty different phone numbers. In the filing that included the new information, the last four digits of each telephone line targeted by the Obama Administration are redacted. Two of the numbers begin with area code 202 and the exchange 456, which, according to current and former Administration officials, are used exclusively by the White House. (The phone number for the White House switchboard is (202) 456-1414.)
At least five other numbers targeted by the government include the area code 202 and the exchange 824. The phone number for the Fox News Washington bureau, which is publicly available, is (202) 824-0001. Rosen’s work phone number at Fox News begins with the same area code and exchange.
William Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney, told The New Yorker this afternoon, “Because that information is sealed, I can’t confirm the owner or subscriber for any of those records.” Asked if the phone numbers of any reporters had been targeted in the Kim investigation, Miller said he could not comment.
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that, as part of the investigation of the Kim leak, Obama’s Department of Justice seized e-mails from Rosen’s personal Gmail account. In the search warrant for that request, the government described Rosen as “an aider, and abettor, and / or co-conspirator” in violating the Espionage Act, noting that the crime can be punished by ten years in prison. Rosen was not indicted in the case, but the suggestion in a government document that a reporter could be guilty of espionage for engaging in routine reporting is unprecedented and has alarmed many journalists and civil libertarians….
Washington Blogdoes a bang-up job in showing how many liberals are saying that Obama’s “buck stops here” makes his admin waaayy worse than Nixon’s:
In the wake of the twin scandals of the IRS targeting conservative groups and the Department of Justice spying on AP reporters, the comparisons between Obama and Nixon are everywhere.
But what do experts say?
Former New York Times general counsel James Goodale – who represented the paper during its Pentagon Papers fight with the Nixon administration – said in an interview yesterday that Obama is worse than Nixon when it comes to press freedoms. And see this.
Former constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald noted last year:
We supposedly learned important lessons from the abuses of power of the Nixon administration, and then of the Bush administration: namely, that we don’t trust government officials to exercise power in the dark, with no judicial oversight, with no obligation to prove their accusations. Yet now we hear exactly this same mentality issuing from Obama, his officials and defenders to justify a far more extreme power than either Nixon or Bush dreamed of asserting: he’s only killing The Bad Citizens, so there’s no reason to object!
The painful fact is that Barack Obama is the president that Nixon always wanted to be.
Four decades ago, Nixon was halted in his determined effort to create an “imperial presidency” with unilateral powers and privileges. In 2013, Obama wields those very same powers openly and without serious opposition. The success of Obama in acquiring the long-denied powers of Nixon is one of his most remarkable, if ignoble, accomplishments. Consider a few examples:
I will bullet point Jonathan Turley’s points that you can read his expanded thoughts on for yourself:
Warrantless surveillance
Unilateral military action
Kill lists
Attacking whistle-blowers
…More…
Nixon’s “Enemies List” is famous, and the former head of the National Security Agency’s global digital data gathering program says that Obama also has an enemies list … which has been used to take down a wide variety of people, including the head of the CIA. The Washington Post’s Ed Rogers notes:
Obama doesn’t need a traditional Nixonian enemies list. In the digital age, with the Obama machine’s much-celebrated technological capabilities, the president can sort his enemies by keywords.
You’ve heard about the AP spying scandal, and the head of the Department of Justice implies that the government has spied on many other reporters.
(They want “total thought,” “same-page” thinking.) Because CNN is so fair and balanced we should do away with Fox News. No, not making that up, that really is his rationale.
