RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2021/02/06/no-really-fox-fire-lou-dobbs/

“Lou Dobbs retweets attacks on Fox News. “Fox is Finished.” “Fox is in a race with itself to the bottom.”

Cashiering the most ardently pro-Trump host on American television makes no sense in that context. If anything, you would think they’d have wanted Dobbs to do an extra hour of “greatest president ever” propaganda every night — or even switch him over from Fox Business to MacCallum’s old slot on Fox News. Remember, Dobbs isn’t just a star of Trumpist media, he’s so tight with the former president that Trump reportedly would patch him through on speakerphone during White House meetings to offer his take. “John Kelly once told me that he learned to watch Lou Dobbs to understand what the president might think or say about a topic,” said WaPo reporter Josh Dawsey this morning.

You don’t shed a guy like that lightly. Even Fox Business staffers were surprised by his cancellation, according to the Post.

The universal suspicion is that Fox dropped the hammer in response to the defamation suit Smartmatic filed against Fox and Dobbs on Thursday, but that doesn’t fully add up. If Fox were in the process of dumping all of its anchors who’d entertained theories about Smartmatic’s machines being rigged, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo would be gone too. In reality, Bartiromo is getting a tryout in MacCallum’s former 7 p.m. slot on FNC and Pirro just launched a new show (about castles in America, of all things) on Fox’s streaming platform. Fox doesn’t seem poised to dump either of them; on the contrary, it’s giving them more work.

Plus, as a matter of basic PR, it would look exceptionally weak for Fox to flush Dobbs within 24 hours of Smartmatic’s suit being filed. As John said, it feels like an admission of wrongdoing in context: “The bad man did a little slander, fine, but we’ve gotten rid of him now so we shouldn’t have to pay.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-new-york-timess-internal-mob-takes-down-another-of-its-own/?utm_source=recirc-%5BSCREENSIZE%5D&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

Earlier this week, I wrote at length about the growing tide of illiberalism in the United States. This morning, I was forwarded an email sent out by the management team at the New York Times that illustrates precisely what I was talking about. For sake of clarity, I will quote the whole thing, starting with the preface:

———- Forwarded message ———
From: NYT Mail <*@nytimes.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 4:31 PM
Subject: A Note From Dean and Joe
To: All Company Employees <*@nytimes.com>

Colleagues,

We are writing to let you know that Donald McNeil Jr. will be leaving the company. Donald joined The Times in 1976 and has done much good reporting over four decades. But we feel that this is the right next step.

We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent. We are committed to building a news report and company that reflect our core values of integrity and respect, and will work with urgency to create clearer guidelines and enforcement about conduct in the workplace, including red-line issues on racist language.

Every person in leadership at The Times is dedicated to building a culture where each of our colleagues feels supported and respected. It’s vital that we get this right. To those of you who have reached out to us with your honest and sometimes painful feelings about this incident, we thank you.

Donald has offered a statement to his colleagues, which is below.

— Dean and Joe

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/05/msnbcs-nicolle-wallace-paints-trump-supporters-as-domestic-terrorists-points-out-that-americans-were-droned-during-gwot/

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace on Friday likened President Trump and millions of his supporters to domestic terrorists while fondly reminiscing about the days when American citizens overseas were killed by drone strikes during the global war on terror.

Wallace, who served the Bush White House as Communications Director in 2005 and 2006, made the comments during an MSNBC panel discussion about the impeachment trial of former president Trump.

Wallace described the widely held beliefs that the 2020 election was rigged and that draconian Covid restrictions are unnecessary, as “ideologies” that incite domestic terrorism.

“There is until the end of April a persistent threat of domestic extremism,” Wallace said. “Domestic terrorism carried out in the ideology of and around this belief that the election was fraudulent, that the Covid restrictions are unnecessary—all of those ideologies pushed by Donald Trump.”

Wallace brought up the Bush/Obama era policy of droning suspected terrorists overseas, which she described as “attacking terrorism at its root.”

https://www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/1008864?dkt_nbr=010104430ayz&section=us&keywords=dobbs-trump-voter-fraud&year=2021&month=02&date=05&id=1008864

Fox News has canceled ”Lou Dobbs Tonight,” the program hosted by one of the media’s most steadfast supporters of Donald Trump and the former president’s claims of voter fraud, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday. 

Dobbs’ program, which has been airing twice nightly at 5 and 7 p.m. ET on the Fox Business Network, will be replaced next week with ”Fox Business Tonight,” with rotating substitute hosts Jackie DeAngelis and David Asman, who filled in for Dobbs on Friday. This, according to a Fox rep who confirmed the news to the Times.

Dobbs, 75, remains under contract at Fox News, the newspaper said, but his future on the conservative news network is murky. 

The cancellation comes a day after a large voting software company, Smartmatic, filed a $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox News and three of its hosts — Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. The company said the hosts helped to spread lies about Smartmatic’s role in the presidential election, to the detriment of its reputation and its business.

Fox News has been in turmoil as long-time viewers have abandoned the channel since Election Day. Former President Donald Trump has attributed his election loss to Joe Biden to unfair coverage by Fox News as well as massive voter fraud.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/north_carolinas_lt_governor_shows_how_to_fight_back_against_a_corrupt_media.html

In 2018, Mark Robinson stood up before the city council in Greensboro, North Carolina, and gave an impassioned defense of the Second Amendment. That video went viral and led to him entering politics. Last year, Robinson became North Carolina’s Republican Lieutenant Governor. This year, when a local paper published a cartoon calling the entire North Carolina Republican party a KKK entity, Robinson (who is black) ferociously attacked the newspaper for its dishonesty and ignorance. He needs to give master classes in handling the media.

To get a sense of the man, I recommend that you take the four minutes to watch his defense of the Second Amendment in the face of the Greensboro city council’s plan to ban gun shows from coming to the city. It’s epic:

This man is not a shrinking violet. So, as I said, that speech was the springboard to a successful political career that saw Mark Robinson go from private citizen to North Carolina Lieutenant Governor in just two years.

On Tuesday, WRAL.com published a cartoon that showed the Republican party as the KKK party. The cartoon revolves around the North Carolina Board of Education’s plan to have “inclusive” social studies standards. In a word, the standards are “woke” – they are the usual anti-American stuff about America being a racist, imperialist, destructive, hate-filled, yadda, yadda, yadda country.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/crucifying-jordan-peterson-bruce-bawer/

Jordan Peterson was a relatively unknown clinical psychologist and University of Toronto professor until his brave 2016 challenge to a draconian Canadian law on transgender pronouns drew widespread attention. Millions watched his brilliant, wide-ranging YouTube lectures about life, truth, feelings, personality, and values. For a while there he seemed ubiquitous, giving interviews and lectures around the world and, in the process, becoming the planet’s most famous living public intellectual. He published a massive bestseller, 12 Rules for Life.

Then, suddenly, he disappeared. For the last two years he’s been in medical hell, experiencing torturous pain and being brought to the brink of death by a puzzling malady that took him, in search of answers, to hospitals, clinics, and rehab centers in Canada, the U.S., Russia, and Serbia. Meanwhile his wife was diagnosed with a rare and deadly cancer from which she now seems, miraculously, to have recovered. On top of everything else, he, his wife, and his deeply devoted adult daughter all contracted the COVID virus.

Emerging from this nightmare and prepared to step back onto the public stage, Peterson agreed to a major interview with Decca Aitkenhead for the Sunday Times of London. The story appeared on January 31; on the same day, Peterson posted on YouTube a recording of the nearly three-hour Zoom conversations that he and his daughter, Mikhaila, had with Aitkenhead. In the recording (which as of Wednesday had accumulated half a million hits), Peterson is friendly and forthcoming, but emotionally fragile as a consequence of his long torment; at one point he breaks into tears and has to step away from the microphone. Mikhaila, for her part, spends an hour and a half telling Aitkenhead the full story of Peterson’s illness, complete with vivid particulars. And Aitkenhead poses throughout as entirely sympathetic, sounding more like a compassionate social worker than a journalist.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/buyers_remorse_lets_blame_the_press.html

In his first week in office President Asterisk has done his old boss proud.  In just six days, lunch bucket Joe has signed 36 executive orders and put tens of thousands of jobs at risk.  He’s cancelled major construction projects like the Keystone XL pipeline and the border wall — resulting in lost jobs for the very unions who endorsed him.  He is reestablishing a moratorium on energy exploration on federal lands and rejoined the Paris Agreement on climate change.  These orders will cause further job losses in the energy sector and lost revenue in states that supported him.  If that were not enough, his relaxation of border control and immigration enforcement will result in an influx of illegal immigrants competing for the remaining jobs.  Luckily, Joe has also thoughtfully issued and order expanding food assistance programs.  Thousands of unemployed workers may need it.

Even though the Harris/Biden administration is in its infancy, it has already triggered a flood of complaints of “buyer’s remorse.”  It seems many who voted for Joe weren’t expecting this.  In the immortal words of Rahm Emanuel, “never let a good crisis go to waste.”  I say we help those with “buyer’s remorse” get over it.  We should give them a scapegoat.  Let’s blame the press.  It wasn’t the voter’s fault — they were misled.

Biden voters were victims of a four-year propaganda campaign to smear Donald Trump and drag the Democrat nominee  — any nominee — across the finish line, truth be damned.

Mark Twain once said, “If you don’t read the papers you’re uninformed.  If you do read the papers you’re misinformed.”  I submit that in this case, the voters have been subjected to both.  Evidence of legacy news media propaganda during the four years of the Trump administration are legion.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/rand_paul_pushes_back_against_stephanopoulos_narrative.html

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.  The latter tried to bully Paul into accepting the Democrat narrative that Joe Biden, a corrupt, debauched old man who periodically emerged from the basement to “campaign” for president, won more votes than any candidate in presidential history, including Obama, the first sort of Black president, and Hillary, the first genetically female presidential candidate.  Sen. Paul not only refused to be bullied, but he pushed back, exposing to viewers the fact that Stephanopoulos is not a journalist but is, instead, a Democrat party activist.

Stephanopoulos entered politics early, working for Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign when Stephanopoulos was in his mid-20s.  In 1992, he was back again working for Bill Clinton’s campaign, making his name as a spokesman for Clinton both during and after the election.  Beginning in 1996, Stephanopoulos left the White House for ABC, and he’s been there ever since.

Although technically a “journalist,” Stephanopoulos is famously partisan, routinely serving as an attack dog for the Democrat party.  He certainly showed that side of himself in the interview with Sen. Paul.

What Stephanopoulos hadn’t counted on is that Paul has an advantage compared to many of the elected officials, bureaucrats, and assorted famous people whom Stephanopoulos bullies…er, interviews on his show.  Paul is a principled man.  His values do not change depending on where he sees an advantage to himself.  That gives him a moral clarity that makes it impossible to bully him, as Stephanopoulos discovered to his cost.

In the clip that’s making the rounds on the internet, Stephanopoulos opened by demanding that Paul recite the current leftist catechism, which is that Slow Joe, AKA Basement Biden, won the election fair and square: “Ah, Sen. Paul.  Let me begin with a threshold question for you.  This election was not stolen.  Do you accept that fact?”