The Virginian

This is a question we’ve addressed here before, but recent events make it more applicable than ever. A 44-year-old Russian woman named Elena Khusyaynova has been charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. ...

Okay. That all sounds good so far. But what did she actually do? Saying that she attempted to “sow discord in the U.S. political system and to undermine faith in our democratic institutions” is still a bit on the vague side. ...

Her responsibilities included:

• Paying expenditures for activists
• Purchasing advertisements on social media platforms
• Registration of domain names
• Purchasing proxy servers
• Promoting news postings on social networks

So they were attempting to blend in with American political activists and basically fire up the crowd, probably creating or promoting fake news. But there’s no mention of making campaign contributions (which is illegal for foreigners to do), tampering with voting machines or anything else that would qualify for a violation of most of the laws we usually associate with campaign rules. She’s pretty much doing all the same things American political activists do on a daily basis, aside from not being a citizen of the United States... The closest the Justice Department comes to specifying anything which sounds like criminal conduct is to say that she attempted to, “defraud the United States by impeding the lawful functions of government agencies in administering relevant federal requirements.” I’m not even sure what that means.

I present CNN's Ana Cabrera.

On Sunday night, Cabrera launched a premeditated, vicious, racist lie about President Trump, then proceeded to discuss the false story with a black guest, primed to analyze the fake news.

We'll slow down the replay in order to follow the ball, so you can see every handoff in the creation of fake news.

A few weeks ago, when Judge Brett Kavanaugh was facing 30-year-old, completely uncorroborated accusations of sexual assault based on recovered memories in order to block his Supreme Court appointment, Trump said, "It's a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of."

This statement was quoted by numerous news outlets, including CNN: "Trump says it's 'a very scary time for young men in America,'" Jeremy Diamond, Oct. 2.

Cabrera rewrote the president's quote, telling CNN viewers that Trump had said: "WHITE men have a lot to fear right now."

How did "white" get slipped in there?

If this were merely a mistake, there are lots of words in the English language that might have been inserted instead of "white." Why not "radial tire"? Why not "hangnail"? Why not the words "virtuoso" or "champagne"?

Dictionaries are heavy with all of the words that might have been inserted if this were an accident. How could the word "white" inadvertently get slipped into a Trump quote?




CNN intentionally told an ugly lie about the most incendiary issue roiling the nation: race. It wasn't a lie about Trump's position on tax policy, North Korea or school vouchers. The network deliberately pushed a racism narrative calculated to incite racial hatred that could get someone killed.

Like a professional jewel thief swiping a Cartier watch so deftly that the guard doesn't notice, Cabrera launched the lie during a segment that began: "People are talking about a string of recent incidents with racial undertones."

"People are talking about" is how opinion journalism masquerades as news. What topics aren't "people talking about"?

People are talking about CNN head Jeff Zucker's split from his wife after 21 years.

People are talking about Chris Cuomo's behavior at the CNN Christmas party.

People are talking about how Ana Cabrera got her job.

Cabrera then presented two stories about white people falsely accusing black people of doing things they hadn't done -- which was ironic, inasmuch as Cabrera was about to falsely accuse Trump of doing something he hadn't done.

After a brief word from a black guest, professor Marc Lamont Hill, who said our world is "still shot through with white supremacy," Cabrera told the lie about Trump:

"President Trump and his son, Don Jr., said this week, white men have a lot to fear right now."

(His son said no such thing either.)

Cabrera then ran a clip of "Saturday Night Live" comedian Michael Che's "take" on the nonexistent quote, in which he injected race into the president's remarks, calling Trump a "white dude."

Che: "Come on. Old, rich white dude telling us it's a scary time in America? That is pure comedy."

(The absence of a punchline was covered with, "That is pure comedy," meaning, "Please laugh now!")

At this point in the program, the lie about Trump transformed into actual presidential policy. Cabrera asked Hill, "Why do you think that is Trump's strategy?"

Hill went off on the fictional Trump quote, talking about the president's "racial tribalism." Again, this was about a Trump statement that had absolutely nothing to do with race -- until CNN made it so.

"It stokes white fear," Hill continued, "saying that it's a scary time to be a white man because you get accused of something that you didn't do" -- as CNN was accusing Trump of something he didn't do.

Goebbels would be proud!

If this were an error, it would have been quickly corrected before the first commercial break. It was not corrected because it's not a mistake; it's a political strategy. CNN invents fake news to push an ugly narrative about the president's "racial tribalism."

That's why an entire news segment was prepared around the fake quote, with an invited guest asked to comment on something Trump never said.

During the 20 years before the War on Poverty was funded, the portion of the nation living in poverty had dropped to 14.7% from 32.1%. Since 1966, the first year with a significant increase in antipoverty spending, the poverty rate reported by the Census Bureau has been virtually unchanged…

The potential sum of welfare benefits can reach $47,894 annually for single-parent households and $41,237 for two-parent households. Welfare benefits will be available to some households earning as much as $74,880 annually… A single mom has the most resources available to her family when she works full time at a wage of $8.25 to $12 an hour. Disturbingly, taking a pay increase to $18 an hour can leave her with about one-third fewer total resources (net income and government benefits). In order to make work “pay” again, she would need an hourly wage of $38 to mitigate the impact of lost benefits and higher taxes.

We recently came within a few hours of establishing a dangerous precedent that the hallowed U.S. Senate could destroy a nominee for high government service on hearsay reports of assault 36 years in his past, without requiring a shred of physical evidence, without a single witness, without one collaborating testimony, without a sole detail of where and when and how the alleged crime took place. Instead, a sympathetic media redefined right thinking and empathy as believability and, with it, credibility. The resulting fact-free “credibility,” of course, then equated to Kavanaugh’s guilt and the frenzied psychodramas to follow.

The Senate just about established a precedent that the motive of the accuser should not be questioned because it was a priori noble, at least if the ideology and sex of the accuser fit predetermined approved categories. In the most disturbing downturn of the entire Kavanaugh circus, the media and Senate Democrats lauded Christine Blasey Ford as courageous and brave for at first sending an anonymous letter with all sorts of unsubstantiated charges and quite misleading accusations—as if that act was any more ethical than at least coming forward to try to pursue her efforts to destroy Brett Kavanaugh.

Liberal fascism, sexism, and the Ruling Class on full display.

They always overplay their hand.

In general, free societies more often become unfree with a whimper, not a bang—and usually due to self-righteous pious movements that always claim the higher moral ground, and justify their extreme means by their self-sacrificing struggle for supposedly noble ends of social justice, equality, and fairness.

Media darlings, not media ogres, receive a veritable free pass to ignore constitutional norms. Champions of bipartisan consensus, “the people,” and the power of big government to do the “right” thing and advance social justice are the more dangerous to watch, not those championing the rights of the individual, and small and less intrusive government. Hillary Clinton, with a $1 billion war chest, a court media, and an array of highly paid pros, not the fly-by-night, improvised Trump campaign, was the expression of big media, big politics, big government, and big money eager to have one of their compliant own in the White House.

Philip II and his idea of Greek ecumenicalism, followed by his son Alexander and his “brotherhood of man,” ended the free Greek polis. The “healer” and consensus builder Augustus did away with the Roman Republic. Hitler claimed he was the good kind of socialist and only wished total power to redress the injustices of Versailles, and, besides, he was an environmentalist, vegetarian, non-smoker, animal lover, and opera buff to boot. Lenin promised an end to czarist oppression and asked only enough force to bring fairness for the little guy. Mao Zedong claimed he only wished to have the clout to end foreign contamination, landed oppression, and Mandarism and selflessly would do it all for the proverbial people. All of these revolutionaries believed in violating past norms of accepted lawful custom and practice to “save” the country.

Today’s most destructive totalitarians in Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, and Venezuela are adored by a toady press and are said to do their all for “the people.” Such revolutionaries do not oppose the power of the permanent administrative state, but seek to weaponize and collude with it.

The point is not that Trump is a saint, or that Obama, for example, a sinner. Rather, when the media become unctuous and complicit with those whom they are supposed to audit and cross-examine, then politicians and political movements—especially those voicing utopian bromides—grow ever more emboldened, empowered and occasionally quite dangerous. No mainstream media talking head has yet declared Trump a “God” or praised his pant creases. For all Trump’s bluster and ego, he has not reacted in kind promising, as some sort of deity, to reduce the planet’s temperature and lower its seas.

Try a thought experiment. What if Donald Trump tomorrow was caught ordering Attorney General Jeff Sessions to monitor the electronic footprints of Associated Press reporters, or to surveille CNN’s Jim Acosta and his grandparents?

What if Trump had just jailed a videomaker on trumped up charges of violating parole for making a left-wing internet video that he found an obstacle to his fabricated government version of a disaster overseas?

What exactly would the New York Times do if it were found out that George Soros and the Steyer brothers were being hounded by a right-wing version of Lois Lerner and a politicized ring at the IRS?

What would our media—92 percent negative in its current coverage of Trump—say if the Trump FBI, Justice Department, and CIA, were collectively actively working with the Trump 2020 campaign to monitor (as in the notion of “insurance”) rumors that a Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, or Elizabeth Warren was allegedly colluding with the Iranians, Chinese, or other foreign nationals to alter the upcoming election—or so they would allege?

Read the whole thing.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, it's now official: President Donald Trump is driving liberals crazy. The October 12 edition of Politico Magazine told us what we pretty much already knew. And if you were somehow unaware of this, liberal antics in the wake of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation should have enlightened you.

Democrat mobs banging on the doors of the Supreme Court or trying to pry them open with their bare hands are not the activity of people in a healthy mental state. Neither are forming insane mobs to scream at members of the Trump administration or Republican senators dining at restaurants in a crazed attempt to drive them out.

The fate of Khashoggi has at least provoked global outrage, but it’s for all the wrong reasons. We are told he was a liberal, Saudi progressive voice fighting for freedom and democracy, and a martyr who paid the ultimate price for telling the truth to power. This is not just wrong, but distracts us from understanding what the incident tells us about the internal power dynamics of a kingdom going through an unprecedented period of upheaval. It is also the story of how one man got entangled in a Saudi ruling family that operates like the Mafia. Once you join, it’s for life, and if you try to leave, you become disposable.

In truth, Khashoggi never had much time for western-style pluralistic democracy. In the 1970s he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence. He was a political Islamist until the end, recently praising the Muslim Brotherhood in the Washington Post. He championed the ‘moderate’ Islamist opposition in Syria, whose crimes against humanity are a matter of record. Khashoggi frequently sugarcoated his Islamist beliefs with constant references to freedom and democracy. But he never hid that he was in favour of a Muslim Brotherhood arc throughout the Middle East. His recurring plea to bin Salman in his columns was to embrace not western-style democracy, but the rise of political Islam which the Arab Spring had inadvertently given rise to. For Khashoggi, secularism was the enemy.

Read the whole thing.

Global cooling, global warming, climate change, have all been predicted with various levels of alarm for 50 years.  When global temperatures stopped dropping and began to rise the alarmists switched scenarios.  The one thing they didn’t change was the assumption that industrial civilization must somehow be destroying the whole planet.

If you are old enough you may recall that Newsweek, Time, Life, National Geographic all predicted that global cooling would kill billions.  University of California professor Kenneth Watt predicted a new Ice Age as the earth cooled by 11 degrees by the year 2000. What caused this prediction?  Simple, the temperature record showed global temperatures generally declining from about 1940 to 1970.  

In 1971 Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich predicted that “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.”  This did not come to pass, and today the predictions are exactly reversed.

Today he’s warning that Global Warming will lead to cannibalism.

In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) predicted that, by 2010, 50 million “climate refugees” would be frantically fleeing the Caribbean and the Pacific islands. In 1989, the AP reported that “UN Official Predicts Disaster, Says Greenhouse Effect Could Wipe Some Nations Off Map.” The UNEP predicted “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”  It’s now 2018.

The Pentagon got in on the act, in 2003 predicting that in 10 years (2013) California would be flooded with inland seas, parts of the Netherlands “unlivable,” polar ice all but gone in the summers, and surging temperatures would result in resource wars and all sorts of other horrors. The Pentagon report claimed there was “general agreement in the scientific community” that the scenarios would come to pass.

James Hansen headed NASA’s Goddard and is one of the best known “climatologists” in the world.  In 1988 he predicted – among other things - that NY City’s West Side Highway would be under water, tape would cover the city’s windows because of high winds and crime would rise because of the heat.  In 1986, Hansen also predicted in congressional testimony that the Earth would be some two degrees warmer within 20 years.  It’s not.

Princeton professor and lead UN IPCC author Michael Oppenheimer, in 1990 predicted that within 5 years the heartlands of North America would be desolated by drought, the Platte River of Nebraska would be dry and Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.  Perhaps Mexico should build a wall.

Al Gore, the BBC and the UN all predicted that the North and South poles would be ice free before now.   They’re not.  

Predictions of man-cause disaster are not exclusively related to climate.  

There’s the Population Bomb.  When environmentalists said that we were destroying the Earth, they meant it directly and literally. The biggest problem was the very existence of humans, the fact that there were just too darned many of us. We were going to keep growing unchecked, and we were going to swarm the surface of the Earth like locusts, destroying everything in our path until we eventually used it all up.

There were going to be an inconceivable seven billion people on Earth by the year 2000, and there was just no way we could support them all.  It took us a bit longer, until 2012, to reach a global population of seven billion—who are better off than the population of Earth has ever been.

Mass starvation.  Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, in a 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness predcited that by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.  On reality, obesity has created a shortage of men and women fit enough to join the military.

Resource depletion.  Not only were we going to run out of food, we’re supposed to run out of pretty much everything else such as nickel and copper, and above all we were running out of oil.  Remember “Peak Oil?”