Lies the MSM told you. You can't hate them enough.

Last night Newsom conjured an alternate reality, proving no falsehood is too outlandish for him to utter on live television.

Here are his 10 most delusional statements from the debate and the truth about life in Newsom's California. pic.twitter.com/W3aaXXKhvx

— Kevin Kiley (@KevinKileyCA) December 1, 2023

Matt Taibbi - Campaign 2024, Officially Chaos

 At this stage of the cycle three elections ago, on August 1, 2011, President Barack Obama signed a controversial debt deal and headed back on the trail, starting with a pair of birthday fundraisers in Chicago. Meanwhile, Michelle Bachmann left the stump in Iowa to return to Washington and vote against Obama’s deal, saying it “spends too much and doesn’t cut enough.” This was considered campaign excitement once. Boring is too mild a word for those mechanized non-dramas of yore.

A dozen years later, the campaign is pure chaos, Pompeii after the blast. In the annals of presidential races we haven’t experienced many days like yesterday, July 31, which ended with the futures of all major candidates appearing hopelessly clouded. Forget the national debt; there are now not-improbable scenarios in which the main issues in next year’s debates, which could easily involve both nominees in ankle monitors, are nuclear fallout and alien visitation. Our leaders, who once had the election process reduced to scripts more predictable than Everybody Loves Raymond, now seem to have no clue what will happen beyond the next few minutes.

Scott Adams exposes the Washington Poop

 

Top 10 Headlines the Media didn't tell you this week:

10. Lawsuit filed against the State of Massachusetts for publishing fraudulent COVID statistics, rigged death certificates for profit, and covered up COVID vaccine deaths.

9. Judge ordered the FDA to accelerate release of…

— TaraBull (@TaraBull808) May 19, 2023

Lies of omission

 

NAOMI WOLF: Dear conservatives, I'm sorry I believed so many media lies

 

There is no way to avoid this moment. The formal letter of apology. From me. To Conservatives and to those who “put America first” everywhere.

It’s tempting to sweep this confrontation with my own gullibility under the rug — to “move on” without ever acknowledging that I was duped, and that as a result I made mistakes in judgement, and that these mistakes, multiplied by the tens of thousands and millions on the part of people just like me, hurt millions of other people like you all, in existential ways.

...I believed a farrago of lies. And, as a result of these lies, and my credulity — and the credulity of people similarly situated to me - many conservatives’ reputations are being tarnished, on false bases....

“Patriots” or “insurgents” (depending on who you are) entering the Capitol can be part of a real event that is also exploited or manipulated by others. We don’t know yet if this is the case in relation to the events of Jan 6, or to what extent it may be the case. That is where a real investigation must come in.

But as someone who has studied history, and the theatrics of history, for decades, I was not at all surprised to see, on Mr Carlson’s security camera footage, the person who was to became the most memorable ‘face’ of the ‘insurrection’ (or the riot, or the Capitol breach) — escorted to the beating heart of the action, where his image could be memorialized by a battery of cameras forever.

...

Republicans, conservatives, I am sorry.

I also believed wholesale so much else that has since turned out not to be as I was told it was by NPR, MSNBC and The New York Times.

I believed that stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian propaganda. Dozens of former intel officials said so. Johns Hopkins University said so.

“Trump specifically cited a “laptop” that contained emails allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden”, said ‘CNN Fact-Check’, with plenty of double quote marks.

I believed this all — til it was debunked.

I believed that President Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia — until that assertion was dropped.

I believed that President Trump was a Russian asset, because the legacy media I read, said so.

I believed in the entire Steele dossier, until I didn’t, because it all fell apart..

Was there in fact an “infamous pee tape”? So many other bad things were being said about the man — why not?

I believed that Pres Trump instigated the riot at the Capitol — because I did not know that his admonition to his supporters to assemble “peacefully and patriotically” had been deleted from all of the news coverage that I read.

Because of lies such as these in legacy media — lies which I and millions of others believed — half of our nation’s electorate was smeared and delegitimized, and I myself was misled.

It damages our nation when legacy media put words in the mouths of Presidents and former Presidents, and call them traitors or criminals without evidence.

It damages our country when we cannot tell truth from lies. This is exactly what tyrants seek — an electorate that cannot know what is truth and what is falsehood.

Through lies, half of the electorate was denied a fair run for its preferred candidate.

I don’t like violence. I do believe our nation’s capitol must be treated as a sacred space.

I don’t like President Trump (Do I not? Who knows? I have been lied to about him so much for so long, I can‘t tell whether my instinctive aversion is simply the habituated residue of years of being on the receiving end of lies).

But I like the liars who are our current gatekeepers, even less.

The gatekeepers who lie to the public about the most consequential events of our time — and who thus damage our nation, distort our history, and deprive half of our citizenry of their right to speak, champion and choose, without being tarred as would-be violent traitors - deserve our disgust.

I am sorry the nation was damaged by so much untruth issued by those with whom I identified at the time.

I am sorry my former “tribe” is angry at a journalist for engaging in —- journalism.

I am sorry I believed so much nonsense.

Though it is no doubt too little, too late —

Conservatives, Republicans, MAGA:

I am so sorry.

VIRGINIAN PILOT: "NOTHING TO SEE HERE ... MOVE ALONG"

This is how the press covers up news that's inconvenient for Democrats.

JOURNALISTS: TOOLS OF SATAN OR JUST MENACES TO CIVILIZATION?

 “The Associated Press published a piece this week casting the confessional seal as sinister. That its reporters would even think to turn a prosaic defense of this venerable privilege into a scandal is a measure of our secularized times. Only until recently would anyone dare suggest that priests be coerced into revealing what they hear in confession. That cause over the years has been restricted to a handful of rabidly atheistic politicians. But now, apparently, the AP has joined it.”

Why the left keeps smearing its political rivals as Hitlers or Mussolinis

 

Want to be Hitler? You don’t have to hate Jews, invade Poland or grow a silly mustache. There’s only one thing you have to do: Win an election against the left, or even look like you might.

We’ve seen that for years, of course. Democrats have likened every GOP presidential candidate back to Tom Dewey to the Austrian corporal.

When the Tea Party movement — best known for leaving the sites of its protests cleaner than it found them, in stark contrast to lefty groups like Occupy or BLM — appeared on the scene, they were immediately likened to Hitler’s brownshirts.

To listen to the Democrats and the media (I repeat myself), the Trump administration was a Nazi reign of terror over America, though none of those critics wound up targeted by the Gestapo. (That fell to pro-life activists and Trump supporters under the Biden administration.)

It’s not just in America....

They’re doing it again in response to this week’s election in Italy, which elevated Giorgia Meloni to be Italy’s first female prime minister. She identifies as a mother, a Catholic and an Italian and says she wants what’s best for the Italian people, not what serves the agenda of the Western gentry class.

This makes her . . . well, not Hitler exactly, but since it’s Italy, Mussolini.

Read the whole thing.  

How to respond to "journalists" who promote iies

Watch: @KariLake Destroys A 'Journalist' In 90 Seconds... pic.twitter.com/XSDBKP8iSo

— Covid-1984 (@Spiro_Ghost) September 2, 2022

National news media and federal law enforcement are now as indistinguishable in America as in any autocratic country anywhere

 

Matt Tsaibbi's latest Substack column headlined "Sweeps Week on FBI TV!" shows just how far in the tank that the Corporate Media are as the propaganda arm of the Biden Regime. 

But this corruption has infected so much of the Ruling Class that you have to ask how deep we need to cut, how much needs to be excised, to restore the country to health?  

CNN Newsroom anchor Jim Acosta, famed for being the WWE version of a media tough guy during the Trump years, curled up like a kitten last weekend when interviewing Phil Mudd, onetime head of the FBI’s National Security Branch. Also a former CIA man, Mudd is now an Acosta colleague, a “senior intelligence analyst” on the CNN payroll.

“You know, there are real consequences,” said Acosta, “when people go out and trash the integrity of the FBI…”

It was less question than invitation, and Mudd jumped at it. The FBI man seethed that even if you’re upset about the raid of Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, if you think state police can deal with the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese, white collar crime, mortgage fraud and cyber-porn involving kids, you suck.

“If you say defund the FBI,” he went on, “let your kid be abused by an adult!”

“Yeah,” said Acosta. “It doesn’t add up.”

Mudd — who’s supposed to be both retired from law enforcement and a member of the media now — then went on about how difficult things are for FBI agents now that the unredacted warrant was out, releasing names and robbing agents of their birthright anonymity just as “our kids are going back to school.”

[snip]

We’re a week into one of the biggest stories of our time, and the feds and media have spent most every minute acting as an unembarrassed unified front. One after another, national security “analysts” lined up to give breathless, hyperbolic, and and eerily synchronized commentary about the Mar-a-Lago raid. If the message on day 1 was about how they “must have” probable cause of a crime, that was the word up and down the dial. If by the weekend it was “I’ve never seen this level of threat,” you heard that in more or less the same words from the likes of Mudd, McCabe, and others on multiple channels. What’s the public supposed to see, other than an American analog to China Central TV or Rossiya-1, when they tuned in to all this? 

Read the whole thing. 

 

MOST JOURNALISTS DON'T BELIEVE IN FAIR COVERAGE

Depressing Pew study. Majority of today's journalists don't believe both sides of any issue deserve coverage. Massive majority of the public disagrees.https://t.co/y8ZV5Zaxjp

— Jazz Shaw (@JazzShaw) July 14, 2022

pic.twitter.com/uiBI1Oa1fZ

— Jeff Garrett (@realjeffgarrett) March 7, 2022

War in Europe or war at home?

Good 👍 https://t.co/sPAiKlJHE8

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) February 24, 2022

Why They’re So Afraid of the Truckers

 

Someone once said that history does not repeat, but it rhymes.  We need to remember that the Communists in the USSR were brought down by the very workers they claimed to support.  It was all a lie.

 Here's what the Soviet communists were saying when the workers in Poland revolted.  Sound familiar?

Nonetheless we will still need to react—and by that I mean react concretely—to the stunts of hooligan elements now active in Poland, whom the government has not taken any measures to combat. . . . What’s going on there now is they’re defacing the monuments of our soldiers . . . they’re insulting the Soviet Union in every possible manner . . . In other words, they’re mocking us,” Soviet Politburo member Nikolai Tikhonov exclaimed during a September 1981 debate over how to respond to the strikes and headline-grabbing protests by the Polish union, Solidarity. 

Another Politburo member suggested using the media to smear the independent Polish union to win the public relations battle: “Both in ‘Pravda’ and in other newspapers we must organize statements of this sort.” 

Another warned that the workers’ revolt might spread—thus challenging the legitimacy of a system that appropriated the industrial worker’s hammer crossed with the agricultural worker’s scythe. “Solidarity has decided not to confine itself solely to Poland. It is attempting to impose its subversive ideas on neighboring states and to interfere in their internal affairs.” He added a smear familiar to today’s ears, “This is just what fascists do in creating brigades of stormtroopers.”...

Then, like now, academics and media were a tool of first resort to suppress and smear political opposition.

If you wonder why @joerogan has 13x the viewers of CNN, this is the reason: pic.twitter.com/KxvOZhnqav

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) January 4, 2022

This is why the Corporate Media are desperate to ignore the Waukesha killer

 

EXCLUSIVE: 'The old white ppl…knock dem TF out!' Waukesha suspect shared social media posts promoting violence towards white people and claiming black people were the 'true Hebrews'

• WARNING, GRAPHIC CONTENT 
• Darrell Brooks Jr., 39, is charged with five counts of first-degree intentional homicide and more charges are pending, prosecutors said Tuesday 
• Social media posts show the suspect was a staunch supporter of BLM and also encouraged 'knocking out white people'   
• 'so when we start bakk knokkin white people TF out ion wanna hear it...the old white ppl 2, KNOKK DEM TF OUT!! PERIOD,' he wrote in June 2020 
• Five of the six victims - all white - who died on Sunday were aged 52 to 82 and part of a Waukesha club known as the Dancing Grannies
• Victims of November 21 attack are Virginia Sorenson, 79, Leanna Owens, 71, Tamara Durand, 52, Jane Kulich, 52, and 82-year-old Wilhelm Hospel
• On Tuesday eight-year-old Jackson Sparks was named by relatives as the sixth victim, having died in hospital from his injuries
• Brooks was bailed out of jail on November 19 after posting a $1,000 cash bond on charges of battery, disorderly conduct, bail jumping and resisting an officer 

When Andrew Sullivan begins to agree with Conservative critics of the Press it's a Big Deal.

 

 

The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.

But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

And these mass deceptions have consequences. We are seeing this now in the Rittenhouse case — a gruesome story of a reckless teen with a rifle in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. The impression many got from much of the media was that a far-right vigilante, in the middle of race riots, had gone looking for trouble far from home and injured one man, and killed two, in a shooting spree.

Here’s the NYT on August 26, the morning after the killings: “The authorities were investigating whether the white teenager who was arrested … was part of a vigilante group. His social media accounts appeared to show an intense affinity for guns, law enforcement and President Trump.” Rittenhouse’s race is specified; the race of the men he killed and injured were not (they were also white).

Almost immediately, the complicated facts became unimportant. The far right viewed Rittenhouse as a hero — which he surely wasn’t. He had no business being there with an AR-15. The MSM and far left viewed him as a villain, appalled that he was being elevated, in Jamelle Bouie’s words, “as a symbol of self-defense.” (Another NYT article, painting Rittenhouse as a MAGA fanatic, did note at the very bottom of the page: “Supporters of Mr. Rittenhouse said he was being attacked by the mob and acted in legitimate self-defense.” So they did have a caveat.)

But notice how the narrative — embedded in a deeper one that the Blake shooting was just as clear-cut as the Floyd murder, that thousands of black men were being gunned down by cops every year, and that “white supremacy” was rampant in every cranny of America — effectively excluded the possibility that Rittenhouse was a naive, dangerous fool in the midst of indefensible mayhem, who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense. And so when, this week, one of Rittenhouse’s pursuers, Gaige Grosskreutz, admitted on the stand that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz pointed his pistol directly at Rittenhouse’s head a few feet away, it came as a shock.

Money quote from the defense lawyer: “It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him, with your gun (and your hands down) pointed at him, that he fired? Right?” To which Grosskreutz answered: “Correct.” Here’s how the NYT first described this a year ago, on August 26: “Video footage from the scene of the shooting appears to show Mr. Rittenhouse running and then firing his gun, striking a man in the head. He then flees and is chased by bystanders before tripping, falling to the ground and shooting another man.”

A day later, in another NYT piece (which I relied on at the time), here’s the account of video footage they embedded: “As Mr. Rittenhouse is running, he trips and falls to the ground. He fires four shots as three people rush toward him. One person appears to be hit in the chest and falls to the ground. Another, who is carrying a handgun [Grosskreutz], is hit in the arm and runs away.” Any sense of self-defense there? (And when you watch the full version of the same video on YouTube, you see that, for some reason, the NYT cut off the key moment showing Rittenhouse’s self-defense — the moment that proved so critical in court!)

I haven’t watched the whole trial. But if you watch for any length of time, you realize you’ve been led to believe a media narrative that was way off. (Independent journalists last year, like Jesse Singal, were more clear-eyed.) Because of that narrative whiplash, we may have more rioting and violence if he’s acquitted. The judge is already being targeted. I’m not defending Rittenhouse. And I understand news gathering is fallible. But there’s a media pattern here. And it reaches far wider than Rittenhouse.

We found out this week, for example, that a key figure in the emergence of the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko, has been indicted for lying to the FBI. He is also charged with asking a Clinton crony, Charles Dolan Jr: “Any thought, rumor, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump.”

The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian — touted across all media, including the Washington Post — has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors’ notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: “No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.

This doesn’t mean that Trump wasn’t eager for Russian help. But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the “corrections” have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.

Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty “white supremacy” narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate,” even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.

As Greenwald noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.

More recently, the MSM were telling us for months that inflation is a phantasm. We were told that the “2021 Inflation Scare is another in a series of false alarms going back several decades.” We were assured that “the numbers at least for now are on the side of those expecting the trend to subside and then stabilize at lower levels.” Any concern was “fearmongering politics.” And now we wake up to the highest inflation in 30 years, counter-balancing wage increases. Still, they tell us, all will be well.

We were told that vaccines would end the Covid pandemic. But they merely altered Covid to a manageable disease that you could still contract while vaccinated. We were told that the migrant surge at the border was just seasonal, and nothing out of the ordinary, even as 1.7 million migrants were illegally trying to get into the country in the last year. We were told that sending migrants back to their home countries was a wicked and unconscionable Trump tactic — even as the Biden administration swiftly copied it with Haitian immigrants — to much success. The cruelty is the point, eh?

We were — and still are! — being told by most of the media that critical race theory isn’t in high schools at all. Meanwhile, a tsunami of evidence is out there showing that it absolutely is — in every subject, and every class, as the central philosophy behind many states’ education policies.

We all get things wrong. What makes this more worrying is simply that all these false narratives just happen to favor the interests of the left and the Democratic party. And corrections, when they occur, take up a fraction of the space of the original falsehoods. These are not randos tweeting false rumors. They are the established press.

And at some point, you wonder: what narrative are they pushing now that is also bullshit? One comes to mind: the assurance that the insane amount of debt we have incurred this century is absolutely nothing to be concerned about because interest rates are super-low and borrowing more and more now is a no-brainer. But when inflation spikes and sets off a potential spiral in wages to catch up, will interest rates stay so quiescent? And if interest rates go up, how will we service the debt so easily?

I still rely on the MSM for so much. I still read the NYT first thing in the morning. I don’t want to feel as if everything I read is basically tilted through wish-fulfillment, narrative-proving, and ideology. But with this kind of record, how can I not?

We need facts and objectivity more than ever. Trump showed that. What we got in the MSM was an over-reaction, a reflexive overreach to make the news fit the broader political fight. This is humanly understandable. It is professionally unacceptable. And someone has got to stop it.

Cone of Silence

 It looks as if with the official departure of the US military from Kabul, a media cone of silence perpetuated by the National Establishment Media has descended over the whole ghastly mess, leaving a good many of us who have been following the chaotic and bloody disaster that it was with unanswered questions. Like – exactly how many Americans were left behind in Afghanistan? American citizens and employees of international and US-sponsored NGOs, or dual nationals home visiting relatives in the “Old Country” over the summer vay-cay? A couple of hundred? Or thousands? Independent military reporter Michael Yon and others across the indy blogosphere reported that American citizens – with their passports in hand – were turned away from entering the Kabul Airport by the US Army, and it is those people who are stranded in Afghanistan now. Well, maybe. Between the proverbial fog of war and the cone of silence – a great many questions remain.

Where, for instance – are the tearful and ecstatic airport reunions with their families, of Americans who did manage to get out of Kabul? You’d think that regional news stations would have a bumper crop of stories about local people who are coming home and have breathless tales of their escape to tell. Of course, according to Peter Grant, who posted a couple of days ago, escape lines are still being run, and a lot of people who got out of Afghanistan alive have damned good reason to keep quiet about who guided, sheltered, and assisted them. There are at least as many stories of American military and diplomatic staff sabotaging such efforts, which certainly would prove embarrassing to them, if names and offices are specifically mentioned.

No coverage of the troops – the Army, Air Force and Marines who deployed to Kabul – returning home, for the joyful reunion with their families and friends? No joyous reunions of spouses and children at the falling-out formation on the flight line or the parade deck. Military media lives for that stuff, as I would know from personal experience. But nothing since the last American aircraft officially departed on the 30th. Gee, that’s … curious. It’s as if they are all returning without any notice being taken at all, officially, or media-wise.

Where are the heart-rending stories of the Afghani refugees themselves – their hairbreadth escapes, their hopes and dreams and reasons for departing? They’re at military bases scattered here and there, including at Fort Mccoy. There are some pictures of the various camps and facilities in local media … but not much else. The cone of silence is well clamped down. It’s as if the Biden Administration just wants the whole debacle to go away.

Of course they do – it’s not as if any of those at the top who bear responsibility for the disaster want to hear another word, especially from interested veterans. The FICUS himself probably got an unavoidable earful from the families of the thirteen killed in the suicide bombing at the Abbey gate. I myself hope that Milley and Sec Def Austin are spat upon so often that they spend the rest of their lives treading water. Discuss as you wish.

"The Adults Are Back"

Don't worry about President Joe Biden!
🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳
China Joe and Hunter will continue to FLOURISH as long as The Big Guy does not phone the President of Ukraine or tweet something mean.

Speaker Pelosi House Impeachment Managers are covered with cobwebs. pic.twitter.com/zlqWZd0xtW

— ✯✯Gene McVay✯✯ (@GeneMcVay) September 6, 2021