RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/26/media-gaslighting-cant-hide-fact-trump-campaign-was-spied-on/

After a year of alarming revelations, the media are still more interested in proving the Trump campaign treasonously colluded with Russia than wrestling with the fact that the FBI spied on a presidential campaign.

On Saturday night, heavily redacted copies of the FBI’s application to wiretap Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page were released. The portion of the 412-page document that was not redacted supported the claims of Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as well as those made by the majority of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The senators and the representatives had issued reports alleging that the FBI used an unverified Clinton campaign document to secure a wiretap against an American citizen, that the application for the wiretap used circular reporting and lacked verification for its central claims, and that it made materially false claims related to the source’s credibility.

President Trump tweeted triumphantly and hyperbolically about what the documents showed regarding the FBI’s behavior toward his campaign. Whatever you think about Trump’s reaction to the release of the FISA application, the media reaction to the story was disingenuous and even more hyperbolic than the president’s tweets. After a year of continuous and alarming revelations, the media are still more interested in proving the Trump campaign treasonously colluded with Russia than wrestling with the fact that the FBI spied on a presidential campaign, and used dubious partisan political research to justify their surveillance.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270841/greatest-hysteria-american-history-dennis-prager

You and I are living through the greatest mass hysteria in American history. For many Americans, the McCarthy era held that dubious distinction, but what is happening now is incomparably worse.

For one thing, any hysteria that existed then was directed against the greatest evil in the world at the time: communism. Then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee notwithstanding, there really were Americans in important positions who supported communist regimes enslaving their populations and committing mass murder. McCarthy was on to something.

In contrast, the country is choking on hysteria over the extremely unlikely possibility — for which there is still no evidence — that Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 presidential election, and the absurdity that President Trump works for Russian President Vladimir Putin.​

For another, the mainstream media did not support McCarthy. Most in the media were highly critical of McCarthy. Today, the mainstream media are not the voices of caution. They are the creators of the hysteria. There have been conspiracy theories throughout American history (e.g. Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t kill President John F. Kennedy alone; the moon landing never happened). But this is the first time the media have created and promoted a conspiracy. Not surprisingly, they have dropped any pretense of objective reporting in the process.

And while some Americans were unfairly labeled communists during the McCarthy era, countless Democratic politicians and leaders in news and entertainment have called members of the Trump administration and the tens of millions of Americans who support the president fascists, white supremacists, haters, xenophobes and even Nazis.​

In the case of Mariia Butina, the lengths to which derangement is driving the left.

Another sign of the left is losing its mind and overplaying its hand in the Trump-Russia saga is the sudden obsession and fulmination over a Russian woman named Mariia Butina.

“Republicans Have an Alger Hiss Problem Named Mariia,” exclaims the title of a Politico piece getting a lot of play in the press. It states:

Alleged Russian spy Mariia Butina was arrested just a few days short of the 70th anniversary of the last major accusation of Russian infiltration in America’s political system: when on August 3, 1948, Time editor and ex-communist Whittaker Chambers publicly accused former high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss of being a Soviet agent.

Rattled Democrats, including President Harry Truman, handled the fallout poorly, hesitating to distance themselves from Hiss and unwittingly feeding a conservative narrative that they were soft on communism.

Republicans are now having their own Alger Hiss moment.

The author maintains that Butina’s alleged efforts to ingratiate herself with conservative organizations and the GOP speaks to “how intertwined Russia and the Republican Party are becoming, and whether the Republican Party is willing and able to disentangle itself.” (A noteworthy aside: this Politico piece could use an update in light of Reuters’ exclusive report that Butina in 2015 had met with “wider high-level contacts in Washington than previously known,” including actual government officials from the Obama administration.)

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3768/Compared-to-What.aspx

Good thing I got back from vacation in time for the really important news, the story Drudge, Breitbart, WaPo and NYT are all on the same page about this morning — or, at least, are all putting forth the same Page One about. The Michael Cohen tape. Big Story. Stop the whatever they’re called.
I have a question. It’s the same question I had last week about Trump and Putin in Helsinki. This question is one of the most important ones to ask about any such “news” blasted out by the news media, those special operators of the psychological battlefield, which they drive into every particle of collective American brain with exploding headlines and siren soundbytes. The Michael Cohen tape is the single most important thing for all of us to think about right now …. compared to what?
Compared to nothing, which is the media m.o. Last month was all Stormy Daniels, all the time. (Who?) Last week, it was “treason!” “impeachable offenses!!” “crimes!!!” committed by Trump at his press conference with Putin in Helsinki. Compared to what?
I don’t ask the question lightly. The truly brilliant anti-communist writer Josef Mackiewicz was a biologist by training. (By the way, so is Bukovsky.) “One of my professors,” he wrote in his 1962 book, The Triumph of Provocation, reissued by Yale University Press in 2009, “used to say that only a comparitive science is an exact science; only by comparisons can objective knowledge be gained. All my life I have tried to use this maxim as a guide, since it seems to me to be the only correct method in the assessment of all the truth that is accessible to man.”
We postmoderns feed on a poor diet of “all the news that’s fit to print.” Imagine, instead, assessing all the truth that is accessible to man.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/fake-hate-texas-waiter-made-up-story-about-racist-note-media-fooled-again/

Last week the mainstream media went all in on an unverified story about a waiter in Texas who got a “racist note” from a mean and nasty racist patron who wrote “We don’t tip terrorist” on the top of his bill.

The Washington Post, Newsweek, ABC, BBC, USA Today, CBS, New York Post, Huffington Post, The Root, and many other local, national, and international media outlets ran with a sketchy story, even though the exact same type of hoax has been tried before.

Most — if not all — of the reports were written without the smallest degree of skepticism, even though the MSM should be savvy enough by now to be wary of such stories because the odds are pretty good that they are going to turn out to be fake hate.

But the dream narrative of the establishment media is to show racist white people trying to victimize minorities and so such stories are always “too good to check,” as they say, and so the fake story went viral.

Here’s a sample from Newsweek, where they laid it on so thick readers were probably reaching for the Kleenex box by the end:

Texas restaurant is standing behind its waiter after a customer refused to leave him a tip and instead left behind a message calling him a “terrorist.”

Khalil Cavil shared a photo on Sunday of the customer’s nasty note—“We don’t tip terrorist”—and his name circled on the top of the $108 bill at Saltgrass Steak House. The customers did not leave a tip.

“At the moment I didn’t know what to think nor what to say, I was sick to my stomach,” the 20-year-old waiter wrote on Facebook. “Although, this is nothing new, it is still something that will test your faith.”

Cavil is working at the steakhouse in Odessa, Texas, as he gets ready to head to Dallas Baptist University later this year, the Odessa American reported. He wrote that he chose not to get angry but instead “decided to let this encourage” him and “fuel me to change the world.”

“I have decided to let this encourage me, and fuel me to change the world the only way I know how. So to all the haters out there, keep talking, your [sic] only helping me step into my destiny!” he added.

CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/denver-post-runs-letter-to-the-editor-comparing-trump-to-soviet-spies-demanding-his-execution/

On Saturday, the newspaper of record in Colorado published a letter to the editor demanding the execution of President Donald Trump. The paper’s opinion editor insisted that was not the author’s intent, but the letter speaks for itself.

“If it walks like a traitor, and talks like a traitor, and acts like a traitor … it is a traitor,” Lakewood resident Suzanne Gagnon wrote in a letter to the editor published by The Denver Post on Saturday. Gagnon did not hesitate to suggest what should be done with “traitors” like Trump.

“Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed on a basis of far less evidence than is had on Trump and many in his administration,” she wrote. “Besides being in agreement with the actions recommended in the editorial of July 19, I believe there are many more actions that can and should be taken against Trump to keep him from destroying the U.S.”

Execution is the historic punishment for traitors, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were Soviet spies convicted and executed for espionage. While the Rosenbergs’ children argue that their father did not deserve the death penalty and that their mother was wrongly convicted, there is a broad consensus among historians that both were guilty, but their trial was marred by clear judicial and legal improprieties. Many historians argue they should not have been executed. In the words of Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, they were “guilty — and framed.”

It is possible that Suzanne Gagnon’s sentence about the Rosenbergs could be read as a call to not have them executed, but in the context of her declaration of Trump as a traitor and her ominous suggestion that “many more actions … can and should be taken against Trump to keep him from destroying the U.S.,” it seems far more likely she was indeed calling for Trump’s execution.

The Denver Post defended publishing the letter to the editor, however, arguing that Gagnon did not call for Trump’s execution.

“We would never run a letter suggesting that the president of the United States be executed,” Megan Schrader, editor of the editorial page, told the Washington Free Beacon. “Upon reviewing this letter, I don’t think that was the letter writer’s intent.”

“She wrote to be critical of an editorial I wrote lauding Sen. Cory Gardner’s efforts to impose sanctions on Russia and supportive of another editorial we had run that suggested actions Congress could take to respond to the Helsinki press conference,” Schrader argued. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/oops_alleged_russian_spy_maria_butina_met_with_obama_officials_in_2015.html

Desperate Trump-haters, searching for something – anything! – to show that the Trump administration is in bed with Vladimir Putin seized on the news a week ago that a young Russian named Maria Butina had been indicted for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), or, in the words of the DOJ, for “conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation within the United States without prior notification to the Attorney General.”

Here at last was a face – and a red-headed female one, to boot – to attach to the charges of treason being thrown around by the likes of John Brennan.

So intense was the fever that their dream had come true that, as Bre Payton reported in The Federalist:

In the wake of Donald Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday, members of the media mistook a Trump administration staffer for a Russian spy.

Emily Singer, a senior political reporter for Mic, tweeted out a photo from inside the White House and claimed that Maria Butina, who was charged Monday for conspiring against the U.S. as a secret Russian agent, was among a gaggle of staffers inside the Oval Office. She later realized her mistake and deleted the tweet, but only after it went viral.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/facebook-google-twitter-refuse-to-say-if-china-or-n-korea-tried-to-meddle-in-2016-election/

In a heated House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday investigating charges of anti-conservative bias by Facebook, Google, and Twitter, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) queried representatives of those platforms about whether they have found any evidence that countries other than Russia — namely China and N. Korea — had attempted to interfere in U.S. elections in 2016. The individuals representing the Big Three social media platforms couldn’t — or wouldn’t — say.

Gohmert asked, “You have been asked specifically about Russian use of your platforms. But did you ever find any indication of use of your platform utilized by the Chinese, North Korea, or any other foreign country, intelligence, or agency of that country?”

Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook, attempted to evade the question. “I would note, congressman, that we are not in N. Korea or China,” she said, adding that Facebook has a “robust” security team.

Gohmert tried asking his question again. “We have foreign governments, intelligence agencies in this country. It seems to me you were each a little bit vague about ‘Oh yes, we found hundreds,’ or whatever, I’m asking specifically: were any of those other countries besides Russia that were using your platform inappropriately? It should be a yes or no.”

“I don’t have the details,” Bickert replied. “I know we definitely work to detect and repel attacks — ”

“I know that,” Gohmert interrupted, “but were any of them foreign entities other than Russia?”

“I can certainly follow up with you on that,” she said.