RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s note: Author Alex Berenson first posted this essay on Twitter, but given its length, he decided to run it as a single piece of commentary on his website, AlexBerenson. In a note to readers, he writes: “‘Blue-checks’ is Twitter slang for people with verified accounts, who are often prominent reporters. As is sometimes pointed out, I also have a blue check, though I am no longer part of the media establishment.”

I’ve thought a bit about why the media blue-checks hate me so (and, let’s be honest, they do hate me so). I’m nobody, really; I don’t have a prime time news show or a syndicated column; I have all of 103,000 followers on Twitter. But I am a particular burr for three reasons:

I’m a class traitor. Not just because I worked for The New York Times for 10 years and wrote lots of hardball pieces about companies (not to mention our failures in Iraq) that make me tough to dismiss as a right-wing nutter, much as they’d like to try.

No, I’m a class traitor in another, arguably more important way, too; the media/academic left tries to cudgel its opponents with an attitude of mocking scorn and intellectual superiority. The president has been a useful foil for them in this (as they have been for him).

https://www.foxnews.com/media/amazon-alex-berenson-coronavirus-booklet-censorship-claims

Amazon is selling former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson’s booklet on coronavirus after initially claiming it didn’t meet the online retailer’s guidelines – as help rolled in from the likes of journalist Glenn Greenwald and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who considered the move blatant censorship.

“Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1,” which included an introduction and a section on death counts and estimates, was expected to hit Jeff Bezos’ Amazon on Thursday but Berenson said he woke up to an alarming email.

“They said, ‘we’re rejecting this,’” Berenson told Fox News. “It didn’t say, ‘you can appeal,’ it didn’t say, ‘here is who you should email if you have a question.’ It just said, ‘This is rejected.’”

Berenson responded by launching a protest on Twitter, calling the move “outrageous censorship from a company that gained hugely from lockdown” as millions are forced to shop online.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/what-is-fact-checking-without-facts/

On the New York Times’ disgrace

‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

How quaint seems this trenchant observation by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the greatest progressive thinkers of the 20th century’s latter half. Not because of the patriarchal pronoun presumptions of the aging white cis male; I refer to Senator Moynihan’s very assumption that there are facts. That there is an objective reality on which we can all agree, even if we disagree about what it means. And equally important, that there is a way of getting to facts, a common language of reason that enables us to investigate, communicate, and explicate.

Senator Moynihan would not recognize that paragon of 21st century progressivism, the New York Times.

On Thursday, with its snowflakes in meltdown, the Times issued an apology. What triggered the staff? Was it an earthquake, perhaps? A mass-casualty attack? An assassination? A cinnamon rugelach shortage at Zabar’s? No, this unspeakable atrocity was an op-ed . . . by a conservative Republican senator . . . and a combat veteran from, you guessed it, the South!

Oh, let’s not be too hard on them. It took a full day of mau-mauing before the Times said “Uncle” — or whatever non-binary relation we use to convey surrender these days. The Upper West Side can rest assured there’ll be no more Tom Cotton screeds to churn bile through the avocado toast — they can go back to the thoughtful essayists of Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran. No more unnerving mentions of federal statutes like . . . dare I utter it . . . the Insurrection Act that have been on the books for two centuries. Fear not, the Gray Lady’s opinion pages will now get back to the laws that aren’t on the books — for example, did you know that “without legal protection, a pedophile cannot risk seeking treatment or disclosing his status to anyone for support”? (And hey, hey, hey, what’s with the his?)

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/06/04/networks-ignore-rosenstein-testimony-after-years-pushing-russia-collusion-story-n491954

If you watched the news yesterday, you probably missed former acting attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who testified before Congress about his role in the Russia collusion investigation. That’s because the major news networks didn’t cover it. Where coverage of the Russia investigation was wall-to-wall, day after day saturation, the examination of how that investigation got it so spectacularly wrong hasn’t evinced much interest from the press.

As Joseph Wulfsohn of Fox News reports, there appeared to be a studied indifference to Rosenstein’s testimony from the media.

The hearing, which went from late morning to early afternoon, did not receive any live coverage from CNN nor MSNBC, who hyped the Russia collusion narrative for years before Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that there was no collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the 2016 election. Both CNN and MSNBC offered a live-stream of the hearing on their websites.

All three broadcast networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, also avoided the hearing in their evening programs. They did, however, manage to squeeze in the scathing late-breaking remarks that emerged from former Defense Secretary Gen. Jim Mattis, who denounced President Trump divisiveness in a piece published in The Atlantic just 30 minutes before the evening programs aired on the East Coast.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/02/media-falsely-claimed-violent-riots-were-peaceful-and-that-tear-gas-was-used-against-rioters/

The entire narrative the media glommed onto in lockstep was that Trump was a monster who tear-gassed peaceful protesters to do something meaningless. None of that was true.

Following days of violent riots and looting in cities across the country, Washington, D.C., announced a 7 p.m. curfew on Monday night. About the same time, President Donald Trump addressed the nation from the Rose Garden. Afterward, he walked through Lafayette Park to St. John’s Episcopal Church, which rioters had set on fire the night before. Standing before the church sign, which reads “All are welcome,” President Trump, who previously said he’d be paying his respects to a very special place, held up a Bible.

The speech announcing the country would return to rule of law and protection of civil liberties, the walk through a park that the night before had been given over to rioters, and the visit to the vandalized historic church where every president has worshiped since James Madison, were reassuring to many in the country.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/03/the-media-are-lying-to-you-about-everything-including-the-riots/

The media lied about the Russia collusion hoax, about the Mueller probe, about impeachment, about the coronavirus—and now they’re lying about the riots.

It seems no great event or upheaval in our national life can pass now without the media lying to our faces about it.

They lied about the Trump campaign colluding with Russia in 2016. They lied about the Mueller probe and Brett Kavanaugh and former national security adviser Mike Flynn. They lied about Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president and the impeachment farce that ensued. They lied about the coronavirus and the lockdowns and the White House response. And now they’re lying about the riots.

In recent days we’ve heard a steady drumbeat of lies, distortions, and disingenuousness from the mainstream media about almost every aspect of the unrest now gripping American cities. The deceit is almost too pervasive and amorphous to describe, but I’m going to try anyway.

Over the weekend we were told, for example, that the looting and violence was being instigated not by left-wing anarchists and antifa groups but by the media’s favorite villains: white supremacists. CNN, whose Atlanta offices were vandalized Friday, went on and on—without a shred of evidence to back it up—about how white supremacists might be infiltrating the protests and stirring up trouble. The New York Times, in a report that even quoted a senior police official in New York City saying outside anarchist groups were coordinating mayhem before the protests began, nevertheless veered into a long aside about how far-right “accelerationists” were hoping the unrest would bring about a long-sought second civil war.

By Monday, no one was talking about the white supremacist agitators anymore. The media had moved on to better, more plausible lies.

Here’s Matthew Yglesias of Vox, disingenuously comparing the rioters and looters to pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. His snarky tweet is meant to suggest Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton is a hypocrite for supporting the Hong Kong protesters but calling for the restoration of order at home.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/this-is-easy-dont-excuse-defend-or-encourage-rioters/

The Left’s privileged commentators don’t have to worry about losing their homes or businesses.

Why do they keep doing it? Decade after decade, generation after generation, progressives keep making the same, elemental mistake: They downplay, excuse, and in extreme cases even encourage urban rioters.

We’ve been down this road before, and it’s a straight stretch of highway with no twists whatsoever. It would take a moral moron to get lost on it, and yet somehow progressives keep managing to do so. This isn’t hard. The people of Minneapolis are right to be angry about the savage death of George Floyd, but rioting will not bring him back or honor his memory, and the riots will make everything even worse. The Democrats and the media should be shouting as loudly as they can: Stop what you’re doing, you’re hurting your cause.

The person closest to Floyd — the deceased man’s girlfriend, Courteney Ross — made exactly this point: “Waking up this morning to see Minneapolis on fire would be something that would devastate” Floyd, Ross told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “He loved the city. He came here [from Houston] and stayed here for the people and the opportunities.” She added that people should “know that I understand their frustration” but “I want people to protest in a peaceful way.”

Yet all over the media, progressives are in effect rubbishing these wishes. They support the riots, starting by downplaying the nightmare in Minneapolis as a series of mere “protests” (no, those are what Martin Luther King Jr. engineered — and they worked). Once you’ve reconceived destruction as mere expression, you’ve mentally prepared yourself to take the side of the destroyers.