Trump, Fake News and the Mainstream Media

From Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept: a rundown of bogus stories that mainstream media outlets have run about Donald Trump. Those include:

• A CNN story about a supposed Congressional investigation of a link between Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci and a Russian investment fund.
• Another CNN story claiming that James Comey, in testimony before Congress, was going to contradict Trump’s claim that Comey assured the President he was not being investigated by the FBI.
• A Washington Post story, based on anonymous sources, that Russian hackers had hacked into the “U.S. electricity grid,” supposedly through a Vermont utility.
• Another Washington Post article about a supposed 213 million times that stories emanating from a Russian “disinformation campaign” had been viewed by American readers. The source was a shadowy group of self-appointed experts who had compiled a McCarthyite blacklist of sites that supposedly published Russian propaganda. The story had to be retracted.
• Liberal website Slate published an article claiming the discovery of a secret server used by the Trump Organization to communicate with a Russian bank.
• C-SPAN made a splash when it claimed that “RT programming” had interrupted its broadcasts. Since RT is owned by the Russian government, this played into the Russian narrative, but it was untrue.
• The leftist Guardian published a story asserting that WikiLeaks, and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, had “long had a close relationship with the Putin regime.”
• A bogus claim from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that Russian Military Intelligence had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers was hyped by multiple outlets.

Greenwald notes:

WHAT IS MOST notable about these episodes is that they all go in the same direction: hyping and exaggerating the threat posed by the Kremlin. All media outlets will make mistakes; that is to be expected. But when all of the “mistakes” are devoted to the same rhetorical theme, and when they all end up advancing the same narrative goal, it seems clear that they are not the byproduct of mere garden-variety journalistic mistakes.

Greenwald goes on to discuss business incentives to hype Russia, which are most certainly real.

What he does not give sufficient attention is ideological bias.

Donald Trump and Fake News

That the media have a bias against Trump is blatantly obvious. What is less commented on is that Trump’s attacks on the “lying media” may be self-fulfilling assertions.

The media, chafing under those charges, appear to be itching to get back at Trump by implicating him in some nefarious conspiracy with Russia. Journalistic standards go by the board.

There is a lot wrong with Donald Trump as president, but he has one huge political asset: he drives his political adversaries utterly bonkers. He has gone far in discrediting his mainstream media enemies. And not because people simply believe Trump when he calls them liars, but because during Trump’s presidency they have published a lot of lies.

Naima Lowe: Evergreen State College’s Incendiary Race Hustler

Hating Trump / Hating Liberals

From the American Thinker, with the provocative title “Some people hate Trump. More people hate liberals.”

The piece starts with a discussion of the Republican victory in the Georgia Congressional district that Democrats had hoped to pick up, and continues:

In Georgia’s 6th, reality once again intruded on liberals’ fantasies. They once again failed to grasp that some people may hate President Trump. But more people hate them. And unless they can grasp that fundamental point, 2018 will turn into another GOP victory.

The resentment of ordinary Georgia voters begins and ends with the $23 million that poured into the district from Democrat donors across the country – most prominently, from Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Handel’s money also came from out of state, but it didn’t come from people who look down their noses at Georgia voters and try to instruct them on what they should think.

That brings us to the national media. More than any other Democrat-allied group, the media promoted the narrative that Trump is so unpopular that a deep red congressional district was almost certainly going to flip.

Of course, the press professed to be neutral, and all those negative stories trying to wrap Trump around Handel’s neck were what people were really thinking.

One tweet last night sort of blows that nonsense out of the water:

This is priceless!#FakeNews #GA06 #Handel #Ossoff pic.twitter.com/Fn1E1KTqbt

— Pamela Moore (@Pamela_Moore13) June 21, 2017

After the initial glum reaction of pundits to Handel’s win came the excuses. It was the weather, it was the big GOP advantage in registration, it was early voting, it was Republican outsiders, it was history, it was counter-historical, Ossoff wasn’t liberal enough, no unions, blacks didn’t turn out, and the most common complaint from the left about ordinary voters...

The people refused to vote “their interests.”

All of those excuses fail to get to the crux of why the left keeps losing. Ordinary Americans simply don’t like leftists very much. And when Hollywood and Silicon Valley unite to tell them they are stupid, are ignorant, are racist, are homophobic, hate Muslims, and shouldn’t love America so much, what do they expect the reaction from ordinary people will be?

Republicans are not representatives of the people any more than Democrats are. But they speak the language of the ordinary voter and usually don’t put them down. The coastal elites who run the Democratic Party and liberal establishment cannot disguise their contempt for ordinary Americans. In Georgia’s 6th District, that smug, self-righteous sense of superiority played about as well as one might expect.

Until the Democrats can learn to mask their hatred of the hoi polloi, ordinary people will hate them more than they hate Trump and the Republicans.

Of course, it would be even better if the Democrats could not merely mask, but actually get over their hatred of the hoi polloi. But that’s not even in the cards. A smug sense of self-righteousness is part of their DNA.

The Privileged Anger of the Left

From Daniel Greenfield on Front Page Mag.

If you want to know who has privilege in a society and who doesn’t, follow the anger.

There are people in this country who can safely express their anger. And those who can’t. If you’re angry that Trump won, your anger is socially acceptable. If you were angry that Obama won, it wasn’t.

James Hodgkinson’s rage was socially acceptable. It continued to be socially acceptable until he crossed the line into murder. And he’s not alone. There’s Micah Xavier Johnson, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Dallas, and Gavin Long, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Baton Rouge. If you’re black and angry about the police, your anger is celebrated. If you’re white and angry about the Terror travel ban, the Paris Climate treaty, ObamaCare repeal or any leftist cause, you’re on the side of the angry angels.

But if you’re white and angry that your job is going to China or that you just missed being killed in a Muslim suicide bombing, your anger is unacceptable.

If you’re an angry leftist, your party leader, Tom Perez will scream and curse into a microphone, and your aspiring presidential candidate, Kirsten Gillibrand, will curse along, to channel the anger of the base. But if you’re an angry conservative, then Trump channeling your anger is “dangerous” because you aren’t allowed to be angry.

Not all anger is created equal. Some anger is privileged rage.

Good anger gets you a gig as a CNN commentator. Bad anger gets you hounded out of your job. Good anger isn’t described as anger at all. Instead it’s linguistically whitewashed as “passionate” or “courageous.” Bad anger however is “worrying” or “dangerous.” Angry left-wing protesters “call out,” angry right-wing protesters “threaten.” Good anger is left-wing. Bad anger is right-wing.

Socially acceptable displays of anger, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter riots to the anti-Trump marches to the furious campus protests, are invariably left-wing.

Left-wing anger over the elections of Bush and Trump was sanctified. Right-wing outrage over Obama’s victory was demonized. Now that left-wing anger led a Bernie Sanders volunteer to open fire at a Republican charity baseball practice outing. And the media reluctantly concedes that maybe both sides should moderate their rhetoric. Before listing examples that lean to the right like “Lock her up.”

Why were chants of “Lock her up” immoderate, but not Bush era cries of “Jail to the chief?” Why were Tea Party rallies “ominous” but the latest We Hate Trump march is “courageous?” Why is killing Trump on stage the hottest thing to hit Shakespeare while a rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask was hounded by everyone from the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri to the NAACP?

Not all anger is created equal. Anger, like everything else, is ideologically coded. Left-wing anger is good because its ideological foundations are good. Right-wing anger is bad because its ideology is bad.

It’s not the level of anger, its intensity or its threatening nature that makes it good or bad.

And that is why the left so easily slips into violence. All its ideological ends are good. Therefore its means, from mass starvation to gulags to riots and tyranny, must be good. If I slash your tires because of your Obama bumper sticker, I’m a monster. But if you key my car because of my Trump bumper sticker, you’re fighting racism and fascism. Your tactics might be in error, but your viewpoint isn’t.

There are no universal standards of behavior. Civility, like everything else, is ideologically limited.

Intersectionality frowns on expecting civil behavior from “oppressed” protesters. Asking that shrieking campus crybully not to scream threats in your face is “tone policing.” An African-American millionaire’s child at Yale is fighting for her “existence,” unlike the Pennsylvania coal miner, the Baltimore police officer and the Christian florist whose existences really are threatened.

Tone policing is how the anger of privileged leftists is protected while the frustration of their victims is suppressed. The existence of tone policing as a specific term to protect displays of left-wing anger shows the collapse of civility into anger privilege. Civility has been replaced by a political entitlement to anger.

The left prides itself on an unearned moral superiority (“When they go low, we go high”) reinforced by its own echo chamber even as it has become incapable of controlling its angry outbursts. The national tantrum after Trump’s victory has all but shut down the government, turned every media outlet into a non-stop feed of conspiracy theories and set off protests that quickly escalated into street violence.

But Trump Derangement Syndrome is a symptom of a problem with the left that existed before he was born. The left is an angry movement. It is animated by an outraged self-righteousness whose moral superiority doubles as dehumanization. And its machinery of culture glamorizes its anger. The media dresses up the seething rage so that the left never has to look at its inner Hodgkinson in the mirror.

The left is as angry as ever. Campus riots and assassinations of Republican politicians are nothing new. What is changing is that its opponents are beginning to match its anger. The left still clings to the same anger it had when it was a theoretical movement with plans, but little impact on the country. The outrage at the left is no longer ideological. There are millions of people whose health care was destroyed by ObamaCare, whose First Amendment rights were taken away, whose land was seized, whose children were turned against them and whose livelihoods were destroyed.

The angry left has gained a great deal of power. It has used that power to wreck lives. It is feverishly plotting to deprive nearly 63 million Americans of their vote by using its entrenched power in the government, the media and the non-profit sector. And it is too blinded by its own anger over the results of the election to realize the anger over its wholesale abuses of power and privileged tantrums.

But monopolies on anger only work in totalitarian states. In a free society, both sides are expected to control their anger and find terms on which to debate and settle issues. The left rejects civility and refuses to control its anger. The only settlement it will accept is absolute power. If an election doesn’t go its way, it will overturn the results. If someone offends it, he must be punished. Or there will be anger.

The angry left demands that everyone recognize the absolute righteousness of its anger as the basis for its power. This anger privilege, like tone policing, is often cast in terms of oppressed groups. But its anger isn’t in defiance of oppression, but in pursuit of oppression.

Anger privilege is used to silence opposition, to enforce illegal policies and to seize power. But the left’s monopolies on anger are cultural, not political. The entertainment industry and the media can enforce anger privilege norms through public shaming, but their smears can’t stop the consequences of the collapse of civility in public life. There are no monopolies on emotion.

When anger becomes the basis for political power, then it won’t stop with Howard Dean or Bernie Sanders. That’s what the left found out in the last election. Its phony pearl clutching was a reaction to the consequences of its destruction of civility. Its reaction to that show of anger by conservatives and independents was to escalate the conflict. Instead of being the opposition, the left became the “resistance.” Trump was simultaneously Hitler and a traitor. Republicans were evil beasts.

James Hodgkinson absorbed all this. The left fed his anger. And eventually he snapped.

Anger has to go somewhere.

The left likes to think that its anger is good anger because it’s angry over the plight of illegal aliens, Muslim terrorists, transgender bathrooms, the lack of abortion in South Carolina, the minimum wage at Taco Bell, budget cuts, tax cuts, police arrests, drone strikes and all the other ways in which reality differs from its utopia. But all that anger isn’t the road to a better world, but to hate and violence.

Millions of leftists, just like Hodgkinson, are told every day that Republicans are responsible for everything wrong with their lives, the country and the planet. Despite everything they do, all the petitions they sign, the marches they attend, the donations, the angry letters, the social media rants, Republicans continue to exist and even be elected to public office. Where does that anger go?

Either we have a political system based on existing laws and norms of civility. Or we have one based on coups and populist leftist anger. And there are already a whole bunch of those south of the border.

Leftist anger is a privileged bubble of entitlement that bursts every other election. Its choice is to try to understand the rest of the country or to intimidate, censor, oppress and eventually kill them.

James Hodgkinson took the latter course. His personal leftist revolution ended, as all leftist revolutions do, in blood and violence. The left can check its anger privilege and examine its entitlement.

Or his violence will be our future.

Evergreen State College: Left Wing Hell Hole

From Vice News on HBO:

WARNING: LANGUAGE



Two particularly good articles on the situation there are:

“The Appalling Protests at Evergreen State College” in The Weekly Standard. And . . .

“How a Campus Fight Drove 2 Left-Leaning Professors to Fox News” in the The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The latter article is particularly interesting, showing how a left-wing academic couple, who had the usual biases against Fox News, found that liberal outlets ignored their plight. According to the article:

Still, the two professors feel as if they made the right decision to take their concerns to Fox News. In the weeks since Mr. Weinstein appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Ms. Heying [Weinstein’s spouse], who has been monitoring her husband’s email, said he had received “hundreds and hundreds” of warm messages from people whom he and his wife might never have considered allies.

“Before May 26 I had the same knee-jerk reaction to Fox News that all of my liberal colleagues do,” said Ms. Heying. “I don’t feel that way anymore.”

Increasingly, leftists who retain some concern with academic rigor (and thus worry about affirmative action hiring and flaky curriculum) and with free speech find themselves allied with conservatives.

We’d love to argue with Weinstein about his leftist views on economics and politics. That’s what people in academia are supposed to do.

But right now, he is facing down fascists whose only argument is “shut up!”

Social Justice Warriors at Evergreen State College

Credible reports protestors w/ bats roaming campus for 2 days. People hit, won't report. @heathereheying students & I warned @GovInslee 5/25 pic.twitter.com/soH4djQigc

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) June 5, 2017

2011: Bernie Sanders Lauds Venezuela for Closing Income Gap

That’s right, he did so in a statement on his Senate website. The statement is still there as of this writing..

Sanders said:

These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who’s the banana republic now?

Yes, incomes are likely to be equal where everybody is poor. Except, of course, for the elite socialists whose incomes may not be huge, but who have privileged access to the scarce goods and services that ordinary citizens don’t.

That’s the dirty little secret of the socialists. They expect to be among those who get the good doctors under a single payer system of socialized medicine. They expect to get the desirable flats when government assigns people housing. They expect to have the connections and political clout to get the better consumer goods and services. While enjoying all of this, they expect to bask in the righteous feeling that social justice has been achieved.

Democratic Frustration

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Academic Intolerance at Duke

This isn’t new, but we could not pass up a good article on a Duke professor who dissented from the Divinity School’s “diversity” programs. For this he was called a racist and told he would have taken away many of the perqs of his position.

Duke University Divinity School professor Paul Griffiths is the latest faculty member to fall victim to the taboo against speaking out against “progressive” beliefs. His thoughtcrime: daring to say that a “racial equity” seminar would be a waste of time.

Back on February 6, Anathea Portier-Young, another professor in the Divinity School, sent around to the entire faculty an email. It encouraged one and all to attend a program she favored. “On behalf of the Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Standing Committee,” she wrote, “I strongly urge you to participate in the Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training planned for March 4 and 5.” Attending it, she continued, would prove to be “transformative, powerful, and life-changing.”

The Racial Equity Institute is one of those organizations that capitalizes on the “progressive” notion that the U.S. remains a very racist nation and cannot progress unless we “develop tools to challenge patterns of power and grow equity.” Its guiding idea is that “Racism is a fierce, ever-present, challenging force…and dismantling it requires an equally fierce, consistent, committed effort.”

Americans should be free to advance those ideas. But they should be equally free to challenge and reject them. Professor Griffiths has learned that professors on our college campuses exercise the latter freedom at their peril.

Shortly after receiving that email from Portier-Young, he wrote and fired off an email of his own. “I exhort you not to attend this training,” he wrote. “There’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty,” but the substance of the program would reflect “illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies.” And drawing a link to the Soviet Union, Griffiths observed that “(re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history.”

You can read both of the dueling emails here.

One professor says, “This will be good and you ought to attend,” while another says, “This will be a waste of time and you shouldn’t.” What’s the problem?

The problem, of course, is that leftist pieties about race (and other things) now hold privileged status, much as Marxist theory used to in the communist bloc. To paraphrase Orwell, “All speech is free, but some speech is more free than others.”

Professor Portier-Young was so incensed that she filed “harassment” charges against Griffiths with the Duke Office for Institutional Equity. Has our academic world fallen to the point where a professor who finds her ideas challenged would rather file a complaint than make a counter-argument? Sadly, yes.

Political Harassment: John Chisholm’s John Doe Investigation

Effluent

They Keep Coming: Another Campus Hate Crime Hoax

From the College Fix:

A note that used the n-word and threatened a black female student at St. Olaf College — sparking an intense protest that led to classes being shut down for a day as student demonstrators accused the school of institutional racism — “was not a genuine threat,” the school’s president said Wednesday.

President David Anderson said in an email to students that an investigation into the note identified a person of interest “who confessed to writing the note.”

“We’ve confirmed that this was not a genuine threat. We’re confident that there is no ongoing threat from this incident to individuals or the community as a whole,” he said.

In a second campuswide email sent later Wednesday, Anderson used stronger words to explain what happened: “The reason I said in my earlier note that this was not a genuine threat is that we learned from the author’s confession that the note was fabricated. It was apparently a strategy to draw attention to concerns about the campus climate.”

Anderson, citing federal student privacy laws, did not identify the person of interest nor use the term hate-crime hoax, but his announcements essentially confirm what some students have said privately to themselves ever since the chaos erupted at the rural Southern Minnesota campus earlier this month.

Around the same time Anderson made the announcement Wednesday, the black female student who initially told everyone she found the note on her car that used the n-word and threatened her announced on social media “I will be saying it was a hoax.”

The typewritten note had stated: “I am so glad that you are leaving soon. One less [n-word] that this school has to deal with. You have spoken up too much. You will change nothing. Shut up or I will shut you up.”

A Facebook screenshot obtained by The College Fix shows Samantha Wells, the student who reported the incident, wrote on Facebook on Wednesday that “it looks like something made its way back to me in the investigation.”

“I will be saying it was a hoax,” she continued. “I don’t care. There is nothing more that I can do. I just wanted to give y’all the heads up.”

In an email to The College Fix, Wells confirmed the post but said it’s since been deleted and that she has “nothing to admit.”

“It was a reaction to something said this morning and my wanting for all of this to end. I did not have to admit anything because there is nothing to admit,” she said.

She said the probe into her case has concluded, but that she couldn’t comment further because of legal reasons.

The April 29 incident in which Wells said she found the alleged note on the windshield of her car was the latest of a string of alleged racial incidents at the private, Lutheran college.

After receiving the note, Wells told Fox News 9 she “immediately shared the note on Facebook and with St. Olaf Public Safety,” saying “I knew I had to share it because it was another incident; it’s the third incident this week.”

Later that day, angry students blocked entrances to the college cafeteria and took over the student commons demanding redress for a string of alleged racial incidents on campus. Administrators canceled classes last Monday to allow demonstrators to air their grievances in a daylong sit-in.

Protesters also put up signs that included language such as “I’m sick of white tears” and “F*ck your white complacency.”

“The campus admins are allowing the commons area to become a bulletin board of complaints against white people. No action has been taken to remove the signs, and no students dare to touch them since there are newly-installed cameras everywhere,” a student who emailed The Fix said.

As the protest took on a life of its own, an email chain among students and scholars at the school shows Wells said she didn’t want the incident to be investigated.

The email thread, which had a subject line of TRACK DOWN RACIST BEHIND THREATS, includes college members discussing how St. Olaf could use its technology to find those behind the alleged racist incidents. As the chain of emails progressed, one student said she was speaking with Wells, who told her “she doesn’t want people tongo [sic] through computers to find the person who wrote the note to her. She does, however, want everything possible to be done for the others.”

The next email in the thread came from Wells.

“I would like to echo Krysta and say that I do not want my case to be investigated,” Wells wrote. “Not because I do not want to let this person go but because I am very stressed and I think that efforts could be utilized elsewhere. That said, I do want them to investigate both previous and possible later cases.”

Wells added she was stressed.

“Also, this message could have been printed off school grounds and could have been printed days, months, or years ago,” she wrote. “I mean heck, I printed off a form today for work (that I didn’t get to turn in whoops) right before I went to my car so I too could be a suspect but even I am not that extra.”

While the investigation into Wells’ case has concluded, Anderson, St. Olaf’s president, said investigations into the other alleged events are ongoing.

There have been nine reported incidents, six of which occurred in April, Anderson said in a recent interview with Minnesota Public Radio.

Anderson told students last month in an email that the racial incidents appear to be “the work of one or a small number of people.”

“This person uses the same modus operandi every time this happens; even the handwriting on the notes is similar from incident to incident,” he wrote.

The reported note in Wells’ case was typed.

Yes, they keep coming. Why?

Quite simply, there is a huge demand. There are lots of social justice warriors and bureaucrats with “diversity” or “inclusion” in their titles who need racist incidents to justify their jobs.

Add to that black students who, because of affirmative action, aren’t really up to the demands of a selective college. When they struggle, it’s easy to decide that “racism” is the problem, and if there were more diversity programs and more black professors things would be better.

And as these student struggle, they are easy prey for leftist faculty who find it easy to convince them that pursuit of racial grievances (and not studying for their classes, or working on their papers) is the way to achieve.

It’s a toxic situation, and it seems to be worst in hot-house liberal institutions. But that is poetic justice.

Ben Shapiro: Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings