RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harpers-mag-russiagate-steele-dossier-holman-jenkins-cockburn-clinton-trump-putin-11652827839?mod=opinion_major_pos18

Holman Jenkins, Jr. has for the past several years done an admirable but thankless job exposing the Russiagate fraud by focusing on the sleazy and now thoroughly discredited Steele dossier, which posited a conspiracy between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government. But when he writes about the cowardice of the “90% of the media and 100% of the foreign-policy class in Washington” that encouraged Russiagate to bloom and poison our politics (“What Did the Steele Dossier Hoax Cost America?” Business World, May 14), he should take a moment to credit the 10% that didn’t go along for the ride, even before the Steele dossier was published in January 2017 by BuzzFeed and its feckless editor, Ben Smith.

Andrew Cockburn’s cover story in the December 2016 issue of Harper’s Magazine blew the whistle loud and clear on the Clintons’ drive to blame Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory on Vladimir Putin instead of on Hillary and Bill Clinton themselves. So shocked were the Clintons and the establishment media by Mr. Trump’s dreadful triumph that they faulted a nasty foreigner from central casting, and some alleged hacker henchmen, rather than examining the corrupt personal conduct or the anti-working-class politics of America’s first couple of neoliberal con artistry. Not all liberals were in the bag, Mr. Jenkins.

John R. MacArthur

President and publisher Harper’s Magazine

New York

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/gutless-media-in-new-haven/

If you want to know what is happening in the Connecticut city that’s home to Yale University and its activist and intimidating law school, here’s some advice: Cross the Atlantic and read England’s Daily Mail, because the Nutmeg State local media — namely, the New Haven Register and the ABC affiliate, WTNH — refuse to cover the madness happening under their noses.

The madness is this, per the Daily Mail: Brats at the Yale Law School, the same ones who last March disrupted a free-speech panel featuring conservative lawyer Kristen Waggoner (a story you would not have read about at the Register or seen on WTNH — it was left to the New York Post and other non-New Haven outlets to cover the outrage), have now embarked on plotting “unrelenting daily confrontation” directed at conservative classmates, particularly those belonging to the school’s chapter of the Federalist Society. Torqued by the release of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that might kybosh Roe v. Wade, the jurisprudential darlings took to social media to demand targeting outrage and harm at real people:

In [Instagram posts], a number of liberal law students took aim at their conservative peers — in particular, members of the law school’s Federalist Society.

‘The members of YLS [Federalist Society] are conspirators in the Christo-fascist political takeover we all seem to be posting frantically about,’ first-year law student Shyamala Ramakrishna said in an Instagram posting.

‘So why are they still coming to our parties/laughing in the library/roaming these weirdly high school-esque halls with precious few social consequences and without unrelenting daily confrontation?’

Another first-year law student, Leah Fessler, who is planning on interning for federal Judge Lewis Liman this summer, wrote: ‘Democratic Institutions won’t save us. If you’re not ready to hold accountable the people and groups who at this very school produced the men who just took away women’s bodily autonomy, miss me with the commentary.’

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/ali-velshis-delusions-robert-spencer/

Ali Velshi is an anchor and correspondent for MSNBC, but he is much more than that as well. He is a made guy, an accepted member of one of today’s most powerful Mafia groups, the nation’s Leftist political elite class: Velshi is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Economic Club of New York, and a member of the Board of Directors of Seeds of Peace, an organization dedicated to combating an entire laundry list of sins the Left regularly claims to find among its opponents: “Racism, Sexism, Classism, Political Violence, Colonialism, Military Occupation, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia.” As such, Ali Velshi is a typical and indeed exemplary Leftist; not only does he hold the opinions that the Leftist establishment wants you to accept, but he is one of the principal missionaries charged with imparting these views to the masses. And he is just as deluded, hateful, and out of touch with reality as you’d expect.

As a practicing Muslim who has railed against “Islamophobia,” Velshi is also vociferously anti-Israel. On a May 2021 MSNBCbroadcast, Velshi ranted against the Jewish state, declaring that“idea that it’s even remotely controversial to call what Israel has imposed on Palestinians a form of apartheid is laughable.” In reality, of course, there is no substance whatsoever to this “apartheid” claim; it is an invention of the foes of Israel that is used to turn international public opinion against Israel, but it falls apart upon even the most superficial examination.

Apartheid was the system of racial segregation and discrimination in South Africa that lasted from 1948 into the 1990s. Black South Africans were excluded by law from operating businesses or living in certain areas, and public transportation and public services were segregated. Those who claim that Israel is an apartheid state note that Palestinians live in areas that are separate from the State of Israel, into which they can only pass for work through checkpoints where the wait is sometimes considerable.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/golden-showers-in-the-media/

Did you read the title? Did it strike you as oblique and lurid, reminiscent of the Steele dossier’s salacious allegations? “Good,” Joseph Pulitzer would say. The 19th-century businessman and Democratic Party mover-and-shaker was a pioneer of such news copy. His marquee newspaper, The New York World, was sensational, scandalous, salubrious, and graphically outrageous – filled with colorful exaggerations designed to stimulate an opera of emotion: “yellow journalism.” There’s an oft-repeated line in the media that “sex sells.” Pulitzer and his opposite number, William Randolph Hearst, invented the idea long ago. In doing so, their pages reached circulation exceeding a million people, in the 1890s at that. Yellow journalism begat a gilded lifestyle for Pulitzer, who became fabulously rich.

Now, 111 years since his death, Pulitzer’s legacy of yellow journalism lives on in the ‘Pulitzer Prizes,’ whose 2022 honorees were announced on Monday. With award-winning irony, the endowment of Pulitzer’s wealth – built atop decades of gutter-press reporting – is now used to honor what many call the most prestigious award in journalism, for reportage supposedly of the highest quality. If Pulitzer were alive today, his work would never win the prize now in his name. Nobody would ever dream of it. It’d be like giving the National Enquirer – a celebrity gossip tabloid that funneled Donald Trump’s hush money to Stormy Daniels – the Nobel Prize in Literature. As one British journalist wrote of Pulitzer, he “strove for primacy of the sewer.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/26/msnbc-host-frets-about-musk-taking-over-twitter-in-pathological-display-of-liberal-projection/

A video of MSNBC host Ari Melber on Monday fretting that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk could use Twitter to “secretly ban” or “turn down the reach” of a major party’s candidate has gone viral, and for good reason. Never has there been a more glaring and pathological example of liberal projection on display—and many conservatives are reacting with stunned disbelief.

The “Rubin Report’s” Dave Rubin tweeted, “This is exactly what the Machine\Left\Democrats have done to their opponents for years, you absolute [clown]@AriMelber. Enjoy the ride into irrelevance . . .”

“He’s merely reciting what Twitter did to conservatives. But he doesn’t realize it or convinced himself it didn’t happen,” wrote radio host Jason Rantz.

Former diplomat Richard Grenell, who served as Donald Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, tweeted: “Breaking: @AriMelber was born yesterday. Happy Belated Birthday, Ari.”

During the Monday evening episode of “The Beat with Ari Melber,” the host perfectly described what Twitter had become before Musk’s takeover—a mechanism for narrative control benefitting one political party.

Melber argued that as the owner of Twitter, Musk does not have to explain himself: “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!” he warned with wide-eyed horror. “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.”

The takeover of Twitter yesterday by free speech advocate Elon Musk may herald a significant change in global political debate, and provide a major platform for views challenging “woke” opinion.

Predictably many in the liberal establishment – who has enjoyed a near monopoly on mainstream media opinion – are outraged.

The Washington Post – owned by the super-rich Jeff Bezos – was so alarmed that Twitter now may become more balanced that the paper called for Biden to move against Musk in order “to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication.”

Below are four articles on Musk’s buyout, from The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and two from The New York Times.

As the Wall Street Journal notes:

Current management is correct that most regular social-media users don’t want a daily bath of Russian bots, jihadist propaganda, noxious harassment and so forth. Ditto for advertisers, who represent about 90% of the company’s revenue. Yet Silicon Valley’s tech lords have decided they want to be arbiters of speech on political topics like climate change and the origins of Covid.

Kyle Smith writes in The New York Post:

This whole thing apparently got started because Musk was willing to spend $44 billion to keep reading the Babylon Bee. It was five days after the right-leaning Bee got suspended from twitter for making a joke about the transgender (male-to-female) individual Rachel Levine, who is the assistant secretary for health and human services, that Musk sent his famous tweet asking, “Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to” the principle that “free speech is essential to a functioning democracy?” In a followup post, he noted, with uncharacteristic earnestness, “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.”

You could argue the Bee’s joke about Levine was nasty. So freaking what? The best comedy is nasty. Jokes are supposed to say the unsayable. If your idea of comedy is people saying the sayable, watch Stephen Colbert. Neither Colbert nor anyone else ever gets banned from anything for calling Republicans Nazis, by the way. Would you rather be called a Nazi, or . . . a man?