Insurrection and the decline of the American press 136

In Washington DC yesterday (Sunday, August 12, 2018) the masked fascists that call themselves “Antifa” marched through the streets shouting:

No border! No wall! No USA at all!

They are encouraged to violent insurgency by the media, and the media are stepping up their campaign.

A conservative opinion on these dire developments comes from Blabber Buzz:

At what point do outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN cross the line from being far-left sites who irrationally despise President Donald Trump to potentially inciting indiscriminate violence with truly despicable and dangerous words?

With one of its latest attacks on the President, The Washington Post shamefully reinforced that the point has long since been reached.

In an outrageous screed going after Trump titled The Path to Autocracy is all too familiar, the liberal propaganda sheet for the “Resistance” attached a photo of Hitler Youth gleefully burning books.

Hitler Youth burning books.

As irresponsible and disgraceful as that photo was, it paled in comparison to the words in the piece.

Fully understanding that multi-billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos may himself be biased against Trump and may not grasp – or choose to ignore — the escalating danger of such potentially violence-inciting pieces, there are still some well-respected “adults in the room” at the paper who most certainly do understand that threat.

Where are their voices? Why are they silent? Who has the courage and decency at that paper to say that these reprehensible connections of the President of the United States to Hitler, the Holocaust, and genocide must stop?

Not only are they obscenely insulting to the millions of Jews and others put to death by Hitler and his collection of Nazi psychopaths, but they are purposeful lies seeking to facilitate a desired political outcome for reasons of ideology. …

The Washington Post’s much-mocked tag-line – even by liberals – states: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

What could be “darker” than an American news organization working in concert with elements of the far-left to delegitimize, destabilize, and potentially bring down a constitutionally elected President of the United States?

Where are the voices of the leaders in the Democratic Party? Where are the voices of academics and historians?

Every single one of them knows this is falsely dangerous partisan trash masquerading as “news” or “opinion” and yet they all remain silent. …

Most do, but not every single one. Two academics, Alan Dershowitz (who says he “voted proudly for Hillary”!), and Jonathan Turley, are liberals who criticize the lengths the Democratic Party and its allies are going to, and even doing so on the Fox News shows of pro-Trump hosts.

Do they truly want to incite violence? Do they truly want people to take to the streets against Trump? Do they want a real revolution?

Are they prepared to accept responsibility for the injuries, deaths, and destruction of property that may come about because of their wretched insinuations and outright lies?

Yes, they do. Because they do not understand and cannot imagine what it means.

The Western Journal reports:

A Boston newspaper wants every newspaper in America to attack President Donald Trump in response to his criticism of the news media.

The Boston Globe on Friday began reaching out to newspapers across the country to publish editorials on Aug. 16 denouncing what it called a “dirty war against the free press”, according to a report in The Boston Globe itself.

“We are not the enemy of the people,” said Marjorie Pritchard, deputy managing editor for the editorial page of The Boston Globe.

As of Saturday, “We have more than 100 publications signed up, and I expect that number to grow in the coming days,” she said …

What did President Trump say that occasioned all this fake outrage?

“The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it’s TRUE,” he tweeted recently. “I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!”

Last weekend, at an Ohio rally where the crowd chanted “CNN sucks,” Trump delivered his critique of the media.

“Oftentimes I’m getting ready to do the fake news with CNN or MSNBC — MSNBC is so corrupt it’s so disgusting,” Trump said … “I would say they’re almost – they’re worst,” he said. “They’re really a fake news group of people.”

Those comments followed similar ones at an Aug. 2 rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

“What ever happened to the free press? What ever happened to honest reporting? They don’t report it. They only make up stories,” Trump said then.

Good questions. Thoroughly deserved accusations.

… Pritchard said the newspapers want Americans to see Trump’s comments as an attack on basic American rights.

“I hope it would educate readers to realize that an attack on the First Amendment is unacceptable,” she said. “We are a free and independent press, it is one of the most sacred principles enshrined in the Constitution.”

As if theLeft doesn’t want the Constitution changed or even abolished. As if it doesn’t particularly want the First Amendment changed or abolished. As if  it really was for free speech, rather than for the exclusive right to express its own opinion and the forcible silencing of all others’ as the Nazis were.  

And as if the Left’s toadying media weren’t actively encouraging the street marchers who shout for the total abolition of the United States.  

Needless to say, President Trump has not and would not attack the First Amendment. He accuses the Leftist press of  extreme partisanship, false reporting, and sustained hostility towards him personally. And of all that it is guilty.

He is right that most of the media lie. In order to harm him and if possible destroy his presidency, they spin scandals out of unimportant incidents, and bury important news that would throw a good light on him for his numerous achievements.

Since they are not reporting truthfully, they have made their work pointless,  and themselves redundant.

Who are the news fakers? 190

CNN is “fake news”, Trump said, and BuzzFeed “is a failing pile of garbage”.

Right!  President-elect Trump says it as it is. (That’s why he’s been elected president.)

Here’s the story as Cliff Kincaid tells it at GOPUSA, somewhat shortened:

On Tuesday, January 10, … the CIA used CNN to air unsubstantiated …

And completely false … 

… charges against [President-elect] Trump.

CNN didn’t delineate the bizarre sexual nature of those charges; that was left to a left-wing “news” organization by the name of BuzzFeed, which posted 35 pages of scurrilous lies and defamation.

Demonstrating the sad state of ethical standards at CNN, Wolf Blitzer hyped the story into “breaking news”, when the allegations had been circulating for months, and Jake Tapper was brought on the air, “joining me with a major story we’re following right now.” Blitzer emphasized, “We’re breaking this story.” It was the beginning of CNN regurgitating what President-elect Trump called “fake news”. 

What followed was a low point in Tapper’s career, as he willingly participated in a ginned-up controversy using anonymous sources to report on “information” about Trump that started falling apart shortly after CNN aired its “breaking news”.

“That’s right, Wolf, a CNN exclusive,” said Tapper, apparently unaware that he was recycling a document that had been passed around for months. It was CNN, which uses former CIA official Michael Morell as an on-air contributor, that ran with it. Morell has worked for Beacon Global Strategies, a firm founded by former Hillary Clinton aide Philippe Reines, since November 2013.

Trying to distance himself from the controversy, Morell went on CNN to refer to some of the information as “unverified” in the “private document”.

But the damage had already been done, and Morell knew it. CNN had manufactured a controversy over Trump yet again

Ironically, CNN is a “partner” in an effort known as the First Draft Coalition that is dedicated “to improving practices in the ethical sourcing, verification and reporting of stories that emerge online”.

Sure it is. It’s the ethical way. Same way Saudi Arabia heads a Human Rights agency of the UN.

“CNN has learned that the nation’s top intelligence officials gave information to President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama last week about claims of Russian efforts to compromise President-elect Trump,” said Tapper. “The information was provided as part of last week’s classified intelligence briefings regarding Russian efforts to undermine the 2016 U.S. elections.”

Trying to pump up the “claims”, Jim Sciutto, Chief National Security Correspondent for CNN, said, “To be clear, this has been an enormous team effort by my colleagues here and others at CNN.”

A team effort to verify what? It looks like they were handed a 35-page document from the CIA and decided to publicize it. They failed to reveal the details precisely because they could not verify the document.

Sciutto said, “Multiple U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN that classified documents on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election presented last week to President Obama and to President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claimed to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.” …

Later, Tapper said the charges were “uncorroborated as of now”, indicating that they might be confirmed by somebody at some time in the future. There was “no proof” of the claims but “confidence by intelligence officials that the Russians are claiming this”.  …

CNN was reporting “news”, since a two-page CIA summary of this dirt was attached to a classified CIA report on Russian hacking and election influence that was given to Trump … But it was “fake” in the sense that CNN had no way of knowing if the charges had been completely made up.

On this basis, the story could and should have turned against the Intelligence Community, with reporters asking why unverified information had been used against Trump and whether this was retaliation for his criticism [of the “Intelligence Community”]. But this course of action by CNN would make it impossible for CNN reporters to go back to these same sources for scurrilous information and false charges in the future. This fact makes it abundantly clear that the news organization was being used by anonymous sources in the Intelligence Community, most likely the CIA.

Since CNN likes anonymous sources, I will use one of my own. “This is a classic CIA blackmail operation where the CIA under Director John Brennan uses someone else’s dirt for the blackmail, and postures themselves as ‘innocent’ in presenting it to Trump,” one observer of the Intelligence Community told me. This is certainly the real story — that an intelligence agency run by Obama’s CIA director would use an American television network to attack the President-elect with scurrilous and unsubstantiated charges.

Is America a constitutional republic ruled by the people through their elected representatives? Or do the intelligence agencies rule America and try to blackmail our leaders?

The President-elect said it would be “a tremendous blot” on the record of the Intelligence Community if they did in fact release the document to the media. At another point, he said, “I think it was disgraceful, disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false” get released in that fashion to CNN and BuzzFeed.

CNN is “fake news”, Trump said, and BuzzFeed “is a failing pile of garbage”. 

The intelligence chiefs are being unintelligent. The media people who are continuing to malign and antagonize President-elect Trump are being foolish.

Thing is, “gentlemen” and “ladies” of the fourth estate, if you like your toadying you can keep your toadying – only change the object of it from crushed Clinton to triumphant Trump. It’s the smart thing to do. If you can’t change your nature, change your idol. Serve your own interest. Be nice where the power lies.

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Post Script: Republican Senator John McCain, who has great guts but little brain, has admitted it was he who gave the FBI the fake dossier that smeared Donald Trump.

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Post Post Script: Newsmax reports that Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer posted in Britain’s Moscow embassy in 1990, is the author of the controversial dossier on President-elect Donald Trump. Hnow runs the private Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. in London. He reportedly prepared the dossier on Trump at the request of Republicans running against him in the presidential primaries and later by the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was  obtained by a former British ambassador, who forwarded it to Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain last year, who passed it along to the FBI.  Steele, fearing anger over the matter by Russia, has fled his London home. Though he is no longer a British agent and compiled the dossier for his private company, the U.K. government was nonetheless concerned the matter could damage relations with the incoming administration, and British security services attempted to block news agencies from reporting Steele’s name.