MEDIA Comments turned off

Special Counsel John Durham Discredits the Press The way back to sanity for America is for the media to rediscover its interest in truth. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Posted By on October 26th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/durham-discredits-the-press-fbi-investigation-media-lying-trump-falsified-evidence-collusion-leak-illegal-informant-11666729641?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

“The collapse in societal trust that some perceive is, first and last, a collapse in trust in the media that creates the environment in which elites either get away with their lies or don’t. This has been a hell of a moment for our major press institutions to be overrun by epistemological chaos, to be tangled up in a foolish quest for “post-objectivity” that predictably (as with Trumpism) delivers the opposite of the desired result precisely because it discredits the media. It’s a hell of a time, while almost everybody worth reading heads to Substack, for our remaining news-reporting elites to be hiding behind “without fear or favor” when it’s the opposite of how they do business.”

Only John Durham can say why he proceeded as he did. The 45-year veteran prosecutor was assigned to examine the FBI’s decisions related to the Trump collusion investigation. Aside from an early guilty plea from an FBI lawyer who falsified evidence, he pursued only two outside informants for allegedly lying to the agency.

Some on the right blame him for not going after FBI officials directly, though it’s not clear what these officials might be charged with. Incompetence is not a crime. Illegal leaks are a crime but notoriously hard to prove in court.

The dumbest journalism, though, reasons (without saying so) that Mr. Durham is a colossal failure because he was somehow assigned, or assigned himself, to fulfill the fantasies of Donald Trump. An adjective-overloaded piece by Margaret Carlson in the Washington Monthly dissolves into nothingness when you realize how completely she relies on this premise without betraying any awareness that she’s relying on it.

My own guess is Mr. Durham viewed his informant indictments as merited but orthogonal to his larger purpose. He was counting on civil society, i.e., the press, to lead a necessary conversation about the FBI’s role in 2016 and after.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

No, Professors, White Students Are NOT Inherently Racist Confronting the Left’s maze of linguistic distortions. by Rob Jenkins

Posted By on October 26th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/no-professors-white-students-are-not-inherently-racist/

One of the Left’s favorite tactics is to define or redefine a word to suit their purposes, then act as though that’s the only possible definition and the rest of us must simply go along.

Take “racism,” for example, or better yet “racist,” an epithet leftists love to hurl at anyone who disagrees with them or even at people they simply don’t like.

Indeed, Campus Reform and other conservative outlets have been reporting for years on university professors and administrators who insist that “all white people are racist.” The latest example comes to us from Dominican University in Illinois, which this fall will host a “White Accountability Group.”

There, white students will “explore how to recognize…white privilege [and] identify and interrupt internalized dominance”—because, you know, they’re all a bunch of racists.

But it’s true that all white people are racists ONLY if we accept the Left’s perverse definition. Otherwise, it’s pure nonsense.

Before we examine what leftists mean by “racism” and why they’re wrong, I’d like to look briefly at a few words they often use more or less interchangeably with “racism” but which don’t actually mean the same thing.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Netflix Obama Propaganda A close look at what Netflix is paying Barack and Michelle millions of dollars for. by John Stossel

Posted By on October 26th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/netflix-obama-propaganda/

Netflix is paying Barack and Michelle Obama millions of dollars to produce shows for them.

The latest Obama documentary series is “The G Word.” “G” for government.

As Netflix documentaries go, this one is remarkably stupid. It’s big-government propaganda.

Obama begins by claiming that he does his own income taxes, saying, “It’s actually easy.”

I think he’s joking, but it’s not clear.

“I’m amazing at them,” Obama continues hours later. “You can be, too, if you use the helpful tools found at IRS.gov.”

But that’s just silly. It’s so complex that millions of us pay to get help.

Obama’s series is hosted by silly comedian Adam Conover. Conover, correctly, calls himself “an idiot.”

He uses his time with the former president of the United States to make lame jokes and, at one point, to make sandwiches. He compliments Obama on how well he cuts the bread. It’s not funny.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Will We the People Step Up? The upcoming midterm elections will be a test of this ancient – and vital – question. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on October 26th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/will-we-the-people-step-up/

Ever since ancient Athens, every election in states where all citizens have the right to vote is a referendum on the question whether or not the masses have the capacity to govern themselves. Indeed, as one historian argued, political philosophy was invented 2400 years ago to demonstrate that the answer is “no.” Ordinary people without wealth, education, or “the splendor in the blood,” as Pindar called nobility, by nature are incapable of managing the state, which requires, to paraphrase Woodrow Wilson, the “hundred who are wise” to rule over the “thousands who are foolish.”

The upcoming midterm elections will similarly be a test of this ancient question, perhaps the most consequential since World War II. For at stake may be the survival of our Constitutional order and its protection of our unalienable rights and political freedom, which have been under assault for a century now.

The stakes of this election have been raised by the excesses of the wide leftward swing of the Democrats away from the Constitution’s divided powers, jeopardizing the autonomy of civil society, individual rights, fiscal sanity, and reality itself. Indeed, so egregious and just plain lunatic are some of the policies and ideas promoted by the Dems, that their party should not just lose control of Congress, but see its leftward drift definitively repudiated.

Most of us can catalogue the manifest failures of this administration and Congress. Trillions of dollars in fiat money––like this summer’s $740 billion so-called Inflation Reduction Act, part of the $4 trillion Biden has blown in just two years––are the accelerant of the current inflation bonfire, the worst in 40 years.

This damage, moreover, is the result of transparently stupid policies. One key indicator of economic health is cheap energy, but it has skyrocketed in large part because of the suicidal war against domestic oil and natural gas production that just two years ago had made the U.S. a net exporter of energy.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Covering for Fetterman May Cost Media a Senate Seat Like most liars, the media lied itself into a much worse situation. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 26th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/covering-for-fetterman-may-cost-media-a-senate-seat/

The media could have pushed for the truth after Lt. Gov Fetterman’s stroke, instead, it continued to favor the woke Frankenstein because he had all the left views.

As the campaign continued, it doubled down on the cover-ups because the media was now stuck with a candidate that it was beginning to realize was broken, but was now the standard bearer of its party.

Up until the debate, the cover-up continued. Anyone in the media who insisted on asking questions about Fetterman’s functionality was threatened and smeared.

Then the debate arrived and Fetterman’s performance made it clear that there was something wrong there.

Now the media has defaulted to praising his “courage” for running and attacking anyone who points out the obvious as “ableist”.

This follows the familiar media cover-up pattern.

It’s absolutely not true
Maybe it’s a little true, but conservatives are blowing it out of proportion
It’s absolutely true and we should all embrace it

Much like drag queens in schools and the Taliban overruning Afghanistan, we’re in phase 3 now. Fetterman is clearly disabled, but that means he’s just like FDR and we should admire him. Maybe that position might have been respectable if it had been the default one all along.

The media could have pushed for the truth after Lt. Gov Fetterman’s stroke, instead, it continued to favor the woke Frankenstein because he had all the left views.

As the campaign continued, it doubled down on the cover-ups because the media was now stuck with a candidate that it was beginning to realize was broken, but was now the standard bearer of its party.

Up until the debate, the cover-up continued. Anyone in the media who insisted on asking questions about Fetterman’s functionality was threatened and smeared.

Then the debate arrived and Fetterman’s performance made it clear that there was something wrong there.

Now the media has defaulted to praising his “courage” for running and attacking anyone who points out the obvious as “ableist”.

This follows the familiar media cover-up pattern.

It’s absolutely not true
Maybe it’s a little true, but conservatives are blowing it out of proportion
It’s absolutely true and we should all embrace it

Much like drag queens in schools and the Taliban overruning Afghanistan, we’re in phase 3 now.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Fake Science Fuels Climate Extremism David Barker

Posted By on October 26th, 2022

https://www.aier.org/article/fake-science-fuels-climate-extremism/

“Follow the science,” we are told, especially the junk science that climate alarmists invent.  I recently debunked a piece of junk climate science whose alarmism was featured in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN, CBS, and elsewhere. The junk science was produced by the Federal Reserve. Fed officials claimed that warming will cut economic growth by a third, but my simple statistical analysis showed their results were within the margin of error and that minor improvements and new data flip their result!  

Mainstream economics shows that warming will have minor economic effects compared to the economic growth we expect over the next century. That is a problem for the climate lobby, which unfortunately includes the Fed. Since economic growth will swamp the economic effects of global warming, the Fed set out, it seems, to prove that warming will reduce growth. The fact that Florida, on average 26 degrees warmer than Michigan, has grown faster didn’t faze them.

The Fed isn’t the only institution to fall into chicanery. The study was published in a peer-reviewed academic economics journal, given wide media coverage, and cited in a congressional report to justify the Green New Deal.  Bogus research makes big splashes. But when it is debunked, there isn’t a ripple.  

The best economic model, validated by a Nobel Prize for William Nordhaus, shows that if nothing is done to reduce emissions, warming will reduce world GDP by about three percent by the year 2100.  If global GDP continues to grow at the rate it has been growing, then the world in 2100 will be five times richer than it is today. A three-percent reduction in GDP would make us 4.8 times richer instead of 5.0 times. Not exactly catastrophic! Mainstream economics doesn’t deny climate change and accepts that some policies to mitigate it might pass a cost-benefit test. But it does not predict a climate apocalypse, even if we do nothing.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Progressives Have Descended Into Madness — And Are Dragging The Rest Of Us With Them Bob Maistros

Posted By on October 26th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/26/progressives-have-descended-into-madness-and-are-dragging-the-rest-of-us-with-them/

Demented

1 : mad, insane

2 : affected by or exhibiting cognitive dementia. Merriam-Webster

So America is really, truly, genuinely, actually, not kidding, experiencing a debate as to whether it is “ageism” or “ableism” to question the fitness for office of:

A soon-to-be octogenarian quasi-president who

habitually walks off podiums reaching out to shake hands with the air and then wanders around confused;
frequently interrupts himself mid-sentence when he lapses into incoherence;
regularly utters policy statements laden with global import that must be immediately walked back by White House staff; and
recently looked into the audience seeking a deceased politician – whose passing he was there to commemorate.

A candidate for United States Senate, the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body™, who

earlier this year suffered a massive, debilitating stroke yet refuses to release his medical records;
in his rare public appearances never fails to mangle multiple words, phrases and thoughts;
informed a liberal network reporter that he required a closed captioning device to comprehend her interview questions; and
required one in last night’s debate.

Puh-leeze. It is not discrimination in any way, shape, or form to expect that at a minimum, a president be sufficiently sentient to represent his nation with dignity on the world stage. Or a senator be capable of engaging intelligently with his colleagues, the public and the media without his spouse’s or technological intervention.

Rather, sophists’ attempt, on purely political grounds, to protect public figures who fall under the second definition of the term “demented” offered above is perhaps the most conclusive proof ever that the progressive movement has completely descended into the first.  And is slowly but surely dragging the rest of this once truly exceptional nation with it.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Myth of the Nonviolent Drug Offender Criminal-justice reformers should stop deluding themselves and the public that “mass decarceration” will be anything other than a bloodbath.Devon Kurtz

Posted By on October 26th, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/myth-of-the-nonviolent-drug-offender

Devon Kurtz is the director of public safety policy at the Cicero Institute. He also mentors people coming out of prison in his home state of Vermont.

After President Biden pardoned Americans convicted of federal marijuana possession last week, reform advocates praised his action as a “historic” step away from mass incarceration, while critics lamented it as another blow to public safety. The truth is somewhat less momentous: the pardons affect only about 6,500 people, none of whom is currently in prison, and drug crimes account for only a small portion of America’s prison population.

The extreme reactions on both sides are consistent with the public’s warped perceptions of the effects of drug enforcement on our criminal-justice system, which activists and the media have propagated through books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and documentaries like 13th. This component of the prison-reform narrative is disingenuous and distracts from the more pressing work of finding solutions to violent crime.

Of the approximately 145,000 people in federal prisons and 1,040,000 people in state prisons, less than 3.5 percent are incarcerated for a conviction related to drug possession. Even when one expands the scope beyond mere possession to all other types of drug offenses (many of which are associated with violent cartels and gangs), the proportion rises only to 18 percent.

The hard truth for criminal-justice reformers is that violent offenses are far more prevalent among America’s prisoners. At the state level—where nine in ten prisoners are incarcerated—almost 60 percent of inmates committed violent crimes. Roughly 143,000 people are imprisoned for convictions related to sexual assault and 155,000 for homicide, compared with 146,000 for all drug crimes combined. The idea that America’s “mass” incarceration is a result of drug crimes is absurd.

America’s incarceration “problem” relates directly to its violent-crime problem. The nation’s incarceration rate—roughly 639 per 100,000 people—is four to six times that of its high-income peers in Europe and Asia. Without context, that statistic is alarming, but when we consider that America’s homicide rate is 7.5 times higher than those same peer nations, our incarceration rate seems more justified.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Blue Vs. Red: 2022 Test Scores Show Devastating Toll Of School Shutdowns By Luke Rosiak

Posted By on October 26th, 2022

https://www.dailywire.com/news/blue-vs-red-2022-test-scores-show-devastating-toll-of-school-shutdowns

Academic proficiency plummeted in 2022 to among the lowest on record following the coronavirus school shutdowns, and children in Democrat-run states where teachers union demands led to extended school shutdowns bore the brunt, data released Monday from a national test known as the “nation’s report card” showed.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is administered to fourth and eighth graders every few years, allowing for a comparison of reading and math proficiency by state between 2019 — just before the pandemic — and 2022. The decline in math scores was the sharpest ever since the test began in 1990, and the average math scores were the lowest since 2005. The average eighth grade reading score was the lowest since 1998.

“Today’s NAEP results are the proverbial final nail in the coffin,” Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who won election in 2021 in a blue-leaning state largely because of fury over Democrats’ education policies, said Monday. “If this doesn’t wake you up, then you’re clearly trying to cover up your own bad decisions. In the business world, if this was your report card, there would be an immediate change in management. You would be fired. And I think that’s what voters did.”

He said leaders kept “schools shut for an unnecessary amount of time, forcing students to learn through a screen and telling them that’s a meaningful education,” and that coronavirus decisions followed decades of similarly bad education decisions.

The map at the top of this article shows how badly the number of fourth-graders who scored at least “basic” in reading fell compared to before the pandemic in each state. Basic is the lowest of the three tiers — basic, proficient, and advanced — and those who do not have even basic reading skills by fourth grade are at risk of serious problems when it comes to employment and higher education later in life.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

House midterms: Past the point of no return by Byron York,

Posted By on October 26th, 2022

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/house-midterms-past-the-point-of-no-return

The midterm elections are now two weeks away. Some political commentators have an interest in portraying them as one big, suspenseful, down-to-the-wire contest. Maybe some of those commentators are partisan. Maybe some just think it’s good for business. But the fact is, at this point, the midterm results, as far as the House of Representatives is concerned, are pretty much set in stone. Republicans are going to win. Democrats are going to lose. The Senate is moving in that direction, too. It might already be there.

“What’s about to happen is very obvious,” said one Republican deeply involved in midterm races. “Voters think the economy sucks. Voters think Joe Biden sucks. Therefore, voters think Democrats suck. End of discussion.”

Most people wouldn’t put it quite so bluntly. Or maybe they would. In any event, here is a quick, step-by-step synopsis of how things came to this point over the last 18 months:

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1) One party, the Democratic Party, controls the House, the Senate, and the White House.

2) The party’s margins of control in both the House and the Senate are so thin that even a narrow midterm loss would result in loss of the majority.

3) The opposition party has always been in a strong position to win because unpopular presidents like Biden, with an approval rating of 42.6% in the RealClearPolitics average of polls, always lose seats in the midterm elections.

4) Economic events, especially inflation, have unfolded in a way that favors the opposition party.