RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/when-journalists-become-speech-police/

Too many in the media now seek to neuter free expression in the name of saving it.

EXCERPTS

Call it Cooke’s First Law: Whatever the story, however complex its details, members of the American press will react by announcing who must be forbidden to speak going forward.

That is what too many journalists are now — not firefighters, not mediators, not conveyors of vital information, but zealous obscurantists staffing would-be censorship agencies. In comes the news, and, within minutes, out comes the latest justification for shutting everyone up. A mentally ill homeless man attacks Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer? That’s the Republican Party’s fault for running political ads against Pelosi — and it must stop. A disturbed man shoots up a gay club in Colorado Springs, Colo.? That’s the fault of Americans who object to drag shows for kindergartners — and they must be quiet. Elon Musk plans to moderate Twitter with a lighter hand? That will cause “havoc” and put lives at risk — and it must be prevented at all costs.

Worse still is the grotesque tendency for members of the press to cast their transparently self-serving determinations as raw scientific truths. It’s not the opinion of NBC, Axios, or the Washington Post that Twitter would be better left as is; it’s a fact — as determined by the “experts.” That these “experts” have been repeatedly proven to be full of it — remember when the entirely legitimate Hunter Biden laptop story was “a Russian disinformation campaign,” and therefore needed to be suppressed just before the election? — seems not to matter. Nor, indeed, does it seem to matter that a great many of our arbiters of truth are rank hypocrites and contemptible lunatics. The temptation to cast one’s preferences as fact is a remarkably strong one, and, for now at least, many modern journalists seem entirely incapable of resisting it.

How else might one explain the contemporary New York Times, which has gotten into the infuriating habit of simultaneously contributing to, and complaining about, America’s “speech problem”? Earlier this year, the Times’ editorial board complained that “Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.” This development, the editors concluded, was the inevitable product of “the political left and the right” being “caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture.”

Which . . . well, would that, by any chance, be the “condemnation and recrimination” of which the Times is routinely guilty itself?

https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/23/suspect-in-colorado-springs-shooting-claims-to-be-non-binary-uses-they-them-pronouns/

The suspect in last weekend’s Colorado Springs mass shooting at a gay nightclub isn’t exactly the right-wing Christian boogeyman legacy media immediately painted him as.

According to The New York Times on Tuesday, 22-year-old Anderson Aldrich claims to be “non-binary” and wants other people to refer to him with the plural pronouns “they” and “them.”

“The lawyers refer to their client as Mx. Anderson Aldrich,” reported the paper’s Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs.

Aldrich has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder and five counts of a bias-motivated crime causing bodily injury related to the shooting that left five people dead and at least another 25 injured on Saturday night.

Despite few details about the suspect emerging immediately after the shooting, left-wing talking heads placed blame on conservative media in a knee-jerk fashion. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, whose Monday night monologue included a condemnation of political violence paired with a reminder of the dangers surrounding transgender medical interventions for minors, became a primary target — despite the fact that these interventions have been shown to raise suicide risks, contrary to the left’s constant fearmongering.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/man-calling-voluntary-human-extinction-gets-glowing-new-york-times-profile

As the country celebrates family time on Thanksgiving, The New York Times on Wednesday profiled an environmental activist lobbying for “voluntary human extinction,” comparing the man’s personality to that of the “gentle” children’s host Mr. Rogers. 

The article is headlined “Earth Now Has 8 Billion Humans. This Man Wishes There Were None” and is written by climate reporter Cara Buckley. She highlighted Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement. Their goal is an Earth without people. 

“Beyond advocating for universal access to birth control and opposing what he calls reproductive fascism, or ‘the lack of freedom to not procreate,’ Mr. Knight says that despite our many achievements, humans are a net detriment to the Earth,” Buckley wrote.

In order to avoid confusion about the extinction agenda, “Mr. Knight added the word ‘voluntary’ decades ago to make it clear that adherents do not support mass murder or forced birth control, nor do they encourage suicide.” 

However, the Times journalist broached the negative connotations that could be connected with Voluntary Human Extinction’s goals.

https://reason.com/2022/11/21/sam-bankman-fried-journalism-funding-crypto-fraud-media/

The public is only beginning to understand the full extent of alleged crimes committed by Sam Bankman-Fried (better known as SBF), a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who lost billions of dollars after his exchange, FTX, was revealed to be little better than a Ponzi scheme. SBF’s net worth plunged from $10 billion to effectively nothing in the course of a few days. He has declared bankruptcy and was recently questioned by the police of the Bahamas, where he resides.

John Ray III, who was brought in to manage Enron following that company’s self-destruction in 2001, is now the CEO of FTX. In a court filing last week, he said he has never seen such “a complete failure of corporate control,” including at Enron.

“From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented,” he said in a court filing.

SBF engaged in extreme levels of deception to trick people into thinking FTX was worth more than it was. He effectively paid investors, employees, and vendors shares of the company—his token, FTT—and loaned out money to his quantitative investment firm, Alameda Research. It was an elaborate house of cards that apparently fooled investors, celebrity sponsors, and politicians: SBF interviewed former President Bill Clinton and and former Prime Minister Tony Blair at a crypto conference he hosted back in April.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2022/11/16/shocker-wapo-sheepishly-admits-the-fbi-found-no-nuclear-secrets-or-anything-else-in-mar-a-lago-raid-n1646445

There is nothing funnier than watching leftist Punchinellos beclown themselves over the latest “We’ve got Trump NOW!” hijinks.

Remember when the FBI raided Trump’s home supposedly looking for “nuclear secrets” a few months back? Guess how that turned out?

I’ll let the quislings at the Washinton Post spell it out:

Federal agents and prosecutors have come to believe former president Donald Trump’s motive for allegedly taking and keeping classified documents was largely his ego and a desire to hold on to the materials as trophies or mementos, according to people familiar with the matter.

In other words, Trump was keeping souvenirs, as everyone else does.

Funny how WaPo sat on that story until after the midterms, right?

But wait, there’s more!

That review has not found any apparent business advantage to the types of classified information in Trump’s possession, these people said. FBI interviews with witnesses so far, they said, also do not point to any nefarious effort by Trump to leverage, sell or use the government secrets. Instead, the former president seemed motivated by a more basic desire not to give up what he believed was his property, these people said.

The WaPo also found no evidence that Trump was looking to “leverage, sell or use the government secrets.”