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The inmates are in charge of the asylum.

Ex-NBC Disinformation Reporter Is the New CEO of the Onion

26th April 2024

Read it.

No, that headline is not satire. Ex-NBC disinformation reporter Ben Collins announced on his Twitter account on Thursday that he is the new CEO of The Onion. It’s a fitting end for both parties as they tailspin into the depths of bitter politics.

Before he was suspended by NBC for having an unprofessional obsession with Elon Musk, he was on the network’s disinformation and extremism beat, which was exclusively focused on the right side of the political spectrum. Collins’s shtick was to find the most outrageous things coming from the internet and pretend that they represented all conservatives. For example, he declared that Kanye West’s anti-Semitism was within the Republican Party’s Overton Window.

Does anybody even read The Onion any more?

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Seven Brand New Biden Gaffes ABC, CBS, NBC Are Hiding

26th April 2024

Read it.

You know, as they do.

The Biden gaffes keep coming and the Big Three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) keep ignoring them.

If Donald Trump or any Republican president was committing mistakes at the rate Biden is, you can bet network reporters and anchors would jam their broadcasts with their bloopers, but it’s not so for President Joe Biden.

In just the past week, he’s insulted Jews, middle-class Americans, and caused a minor international incident with his bumbling statements.

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WHAT? Threats Against Jews Disappear From Pro-Hamas Protest Coverage

24th April 2024

Newsbusters.

The evening network newscasts are barely into their second weeknight covering the violent, pro-Hamas protests outside Columbia University and throughout college campuses across the nation, and there is already a discernible shift in their coverage. Direct threats against Jewish students have all but disappeared from coverage.

Somebody got to the media, plain and simple. Just yesterday, newscasts were reporting on the young girl that stood in front of a group of Jewish counter protesters while holding a sign that read “Al Qassam’s next targets”. Today, those very real, tangible, and unresolved threats hung in the air as each of the networks reported nearly exclusively from the protesters’ perspective.

 

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Scientific American Claims It Is “Misinformation” That There Are Just Two Sexes

24th April 2024

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Scientific American has published a piece claiming that “misinformation,” such as the notion that there are only two sexes, is “being used against transgender people” and in order to target “gender-affirming medical care.”

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Hard to Believe: Google Spreads Climate Propaganda on Earth Day

24th April 2024

Newsbusters.

Leftist Google displayed its search engine bias yet again on “Earth Day” with a specialized logo and promotion of climate alarmist propaganda.

Users going to Google’s search engine on April 22 noticed a doodle specially designed for Earth Day. Clicking on the doodle brought up biased information on alleged “climate change progress” and “climate justice.” This aligns with Google’s previous history of censoring content that doesn’t support a climate hysteria narrative.

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The Times Weighs In

22nd April 2024

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Check out this headline from today’s New York Times, on the criminal trial that is under way in Manhattan: “Will a Mountain of Evidence Be Enough to Convict Trump?” I understand that readers of the Times tune in mainly to get their daily dose of Trump-hate, but is the Times even pretending to be a newspaper anymore?

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London Museum’s ‘LGBTQ Audio Guide’ Wrongly Claims British Monarch Was “Person Of Colour”

22nd April 2024

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The audio guide is being used in the Queen’s House in Greenwich, a publicly funded part of Royal Museums Greenwich.

A section of the guide references a large golden sculpture of Queen Charlotte, claiming: “Queen Charlotte, the nation’s first royal person of colour.”

The guide then states “Yep, you heard me. The insecure white boys writing history conveniently forget to mention that bit, because… well, structural racism.”

King George III’s wife was Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. She was whiter than Megan Markle, and Megan Markle has about as much ‘colour’ as Taylor Swift.

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Official Temperature Data Isn’t ‘Data’ At All

21st April 2024

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Even before our first surface stations report in 2009, The Heartland Institute led the way in reporting on problems with the surface temperature record.

We have highlighted how the surface station record did not correspond to the temperatures recorded by global satellites and weather balloons, two alternative temperature data sources whose data sets closely track each other. Heartland has repeatedly exposed instances in both the United States and abroad where official agencies tamper with past temperature data at pristine stations, adjusting it to appear cooler than what was actually recorded, while adjusting recent temperatures upward. We were all over the adjustments made by corrupt NOAA scientists in 2015 before the Paris climate treaty negotiations—mixing data from unbiased ocean buoys with heat-biased temperature measurements taken from ships’ engine water intake inlets, which made it appear the ocean was suddenly warming faster than before.

Also, first, foremost, and most forcefully, we independently documented the serious problems with the official surface temperature record arising from the fact that the vast majority of temperature stations are poorly sited. Stations fail NOAA’s own standards for quality, unbiased stations in reporting temperatures skewed by the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect.

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Amazon Is Filled With Garbage Ebooks. Here’s How They Get Made.

17th April 2024

Vox.

Take, for example, when tech journalist Kara Swisher’s Burn Book came out this February. A host of other books hit the Kindle store along with it. They all had bizarre, SEO-streamlined titles, like those new businesses that are named Plumbing Near Me to game the Google algorithm.

If you do stuff by algorithm, it can be gamed. God forbid you should actually, you know, have real people doing the work for you. (Ain’t Nobody Got Time For Dat.)

“I found ‘Kara Swisher: Silicon Valley’s Bulldog,’ and ‘Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist,’ and ‘Kara Swisher Biography: Unraveling the Life and Legacy,’ by a ‘guy’ who ‘wrote’ four biographies this month,” said Ben Smith when he interviewed Swisher for Semaforum.

Swisher was less than flattered by the biographies. “I wrote [Amazon CEO] Andy Jassy and I said, ‘You’re stealing my IP! What is going on?’” she told Smith. (Disclosure: Swisher works for Vox Media.)

And that’s the key. If it had been something by, say, Alex Jones, or Andrew Tate, would they be so upset? I think not. (Unmentioned: That Vox is a Voice of the Crust–one of the worst–and full of ‘garbage pseudo-journalism’.)

Note that Amazon was NOT ‘stealing her IP’. The books complained about were entirely different from Swisher’s book; you would think that a professional writer would spend the effort to learn the basics of copyright law. (Not to mention the fact that ‘intellectual property’ is to actual property as ‘gay marriage’ is to actual marriage.)

Here is almost certainly what was going on: “Kara Swisher book” started trending on the Kindle storefront as buzz built up for Swisher’s book. Keyword scrapers that exist for the sole purpose of finding such search terms delivered the phrase “Kara Swisher book” to the so-called biographer, who used a combination of AI and crimes-against-humanity-level cheap ghostwriters to generate a series of books they could plausibly title and sell using her name.

And, most importantly, dilute the impact of her book, which promotes the Woke agenda under the guise of being about tech.

All of this means that to buy the book you want — to buy Kara Swisher’s Burn Book instead of Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist — you have to know what you’re looking for and pay a modicum of attention to your purchase.

Who wants to do that? Especially in a marketplace like Amazon, where we are trained to buy quickly and thoughtlessly with a single click and where writers have been trained to send their wares without even thinking about it because where else are you going to sell an ebook.

In other words, Amazon has to step up and compensate (at great expense) for the fact that people are unwilling to act like adults and do some due diligence. These kids today….

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The Rise of Reverse Gaslighting

16th April 2024

The Spectator.

We live now in an age of reverse gaslighting.

Ordinary gaslighting — the term was popularized by the 1944 movie Gaslight — describes a process of psychological manipulation whose goal is to make ordinary people question their sanity.

Reverse gaslighting, by contrast, aims to convince us that insane realities are perfectly normal.

Perhaps we can call it ‘lightgassing’.

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“The Lies Are Just Unreal” – Ed Dowd Rages as ‘Govts & Media Continue Pretending Massive Health Crisis Not Going On’

15th April 2024

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Former Wall Street money manager Ed Dowd is still a skillful number cruncher. His recently updated and wildly popular book “Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021, 2022 and 2023” has been correctly documenting the huge numbers of deaths and injuries caused by the CV19 bioweapon vax.

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The NPR-Listening ‘Elite 1%’

15th April 2024

Larry Elder.

Consider this proposition: “Suppose that your favorite candidate loses a close election. However, people on the campaign know that they can win by cheating without being caught. Would you rather have your candidate win by cheating or lose by playing fair?” Just 7% of Americans said, “Win by cheating.” This is from a startling new Scott Rasmussen poll.

Rasmussen then put this question to those the pollster calls “the elite 1%.” They make over $150,000 per year, have a postgraduate degree, live in densely populated areas, and give President Joe Biden an 82% approval rating. Why poll this group? Rasmussen said: “A heavy concentration of them went to one of 12 elite schools. … [H]alf the policy positions in government, half the corporate board positions in America, are held by people who went to one of these dozen schools.”

Thirty-five percent of this group said they would rather their candidate win by cheating than lose by playing fair. It gets worse. Rasmussen put the question to a subset of this elite 1%, whom the pollster calls the “politically obsessed,” defined as those who talk about politics every day. Among this group, the number who would rather win by cheating jumps to 69%.

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‘White Silence Is Complicity’: NPR’s New CEO Sounded More Like an Activist Than a Journalist in 2020 Tweets

15th April 2024

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“I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property,” Maher wrote in a May 2020 social media post. “White silence is complicity. If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community,” she wrote one day later.

I don’t find it hard at all to be mad.

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News Orgs Urge Presidential Campaigns to Commit to Debates

14th April 2024

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Twelve news organizations on Sunday urged presumptive presidential nominees Joe Biden and Donald Trump to agree to debates, saying they were a “rich tradition” that have been part of every general election campaign since 1976.

Total bullshit. Nobody is going to be persuaded by listening to two politicians lie to the public for an hour or two. What the Narrative Merdia want is eyeballs, and that is why they want the debates, because their business model is based on getting eyeballs.

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Who Pays the Taxes?

14th April 2024

Power Line.

very well-informed person knows that upper-income taxpayers shoulder a disproportionate share of the nation’s fiscal burden. The problem is that most people aren’t well-informed.

“To the best of your knowledge,” asked a new poll, “how much do you think the top 1% of taxpayers by income account for in terms of share of total federal income taxes paid: 1%, 12%, 42%, or 64%?”

The correct answer, as of 2020, is 42%. But less than a quarter of those surveyed guessed right. Twenty-two percent (including more than a third of Democrats) thought the top 1% of taxpayers paid only 1% of income taxes, which is wildly off the mark. Twenty-five percent suggested it was 12% of revenue. Nineteen percent shrugged and said they weren’t sure.

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What Liberals Get Wrong About ‘White Rural Rage’ — Almost Everything

14th April 2024

Politico.

The ‘White Rural Rage’ narrative gets the research wrong. I know, because some of it is mine.

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Will NewsGuard Demote NPR’s Perfect Rating After Revelations of Liberal Bias?

13th April 2024

Newsbusters.

Hint: No.

On Tuesday, National Public Radio business editor Uri Berliner blew the whistle on the station’s “assembly line” of liberally biased reporting, which he said was being cranked out “one story after another” framed with the leftist worldview. The expose put NPR under the microscope and put a serious blemish on the organization. But the question now is: will that blemish finally force media-scoring agency NewsGuard to downgrade NPR’s perfect 100/100 rating?

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Latine Is the New Latinx

13th April 2024

Axios.

“Latine,” a gender-neutral way to describe or refer to people with Latino origins, is surging in popularity on university campuses, in museums, and among researchers and media.

You can’t tell the Woke jargon without a scorecard, and Voice of the Crust Axios is here to keep you up to date.

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‘Public’ Radio Isn’t Dedicated to the Masses

12th April 2024

RealClearPolitics.

Is National Public Radio fair and balanced? Do they care what you think?

NPR has a “public editor” to monitor listener complaints and concerns, but as we all know, the majority of their listeners are going to complain they’re not “progressive” enough. In 2021, Public Editor Kelly McBride appeared on Brian Stelter’s CNN podcast to praise NPR’s decision to allow their journalists to go to (leftist) public protests so they can “bring their full humanity to work with them.”

When Stelter asked about NPR’s critics, McBride dismissed any conservative complaints about a leftist tilt because they are not “genuinely interested in improving NPR.” McBride claimed her job was to coach NPR “to achieve its own internally stated goals. It doesn’t help to be magnifying disingenuous criticism.” To balance NPR is to harm NPR?

 

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REVEALED: Biden Team Pressures Snopes, USA Today Into More Favorable Spin

11th April 2024

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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ABC Disinformers: Alito Appointed by Trump, GOP Wants ‘Slavery Back’

10th April 2024

Newsbusters.

Disturbingly, The View was under the ABC News umbrella and was not classified as an entertainment show. They’ve also bragged about being held to the same standards as every other ABC journalist. They flouted this on Wednesday’s episode when moderator Whoopi Goldberg falsely asserted that Republicans were clamoring to bring back slavery, and co-host Joy Behar falsely claimed Justice Samuel Alito was appointed by former President Trump.

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All (and Only) Left-Wing Things Considered at NPR, 25-Year Veteran Reveals

10th April 2024

The Foundry.

National Public Radio is the left-wing propaganda factory you always thought it was.

That reality was exposed in an enlightening piece published by The Free Press on Tuesday. It was written by Uri Berliner, who has worked for NPR for 25 years.

What he described is a publicly funded news network that went from having a liberal bias to one that would make Pravda seem like it was evenhanded. NPR now plays the same tired notes again and again for an extremely narrow audience with little inclination to inject even a drop of ideological balance.

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Thought for the Day

9th April 2024

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Networks HIDE ‘Death To Israel And America’ Chants on American Soil

9th April 2024

Newsbusters.

“Death To Israel And America” chants broke out on Al-Quds Day, a day instituted by the Ayatollah Khomeini to protest against America and Israel. Had these protests happened throughout the Middle East, it is highly likely that they would’ve garnered significant airtime across the evening network newscasts. But the chants in question happened on American soil, and so there was no coverage whatsoever, despite White House condemnation of the chants.

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Texas Map Shows Where State Will Become Underwater From Sea Level Rise

9th April 2024

Newsweek.

Coastal areas along Texas’s stretch of the Gulf of Mexico could be vulnerable to being consumed by water as sea levels rise due to the effects of climate change, modeling suggests.

By the year 2100, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates there will be between 43 and 84 centimeters (1.4-2.8 feet) of sea level rise, but that an increase of 2 meters (6.6 feet) “cannot be ruled out.”

According to projections by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a sea level rise of around 3 feet would still see receding coastlines near Houston, Galveston and Port Isabel.

Note: Headline ‘will’; text ‘could be’, ‘suggests’, ‘estimates’, ‘projections’.

Call me when property prices in Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard start dropping.

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Thought for the Day

8th April 2024

Infographic: Where Trust In The News Is Highest & Lowest | Statista

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THUMB ON THE SCALE: AP Style Guide Tries to Exclude Climate Wrongthink From Journalism

7th April 2024

The Foundry.

Most news outlets rely on The Associated Press style guide—officially known as the AP Stylebook—as the arbiter for grammar, spelling, and terminology in news coverage. While AP puts forth its style guide as an impartial rubric for fair coverage, its rules often exclude conservative views from the outset.

Take AP’s latest round of updates, released Friday. The updates include guidance on how to avoid “stigmatizing” obese people, admonitions to avoid calling people “homeless” as it might be “dehumanizing,” and warnings to avoid the term “female” since “some people object to its use as a descriptor for women because it can be seen as emphasizing biology and reproductive capacity over gender identity.”

AP’s style guide prefers “anti-abortion” and “abortion-rights” as adjectives, urging journalists to avoid “pro-life,” “pro-choice,” and “pro-abortion.”

Yet one of the largest sections of the updated style guide involves “climate change,” a term that AP says “can be used interchangeably” with the term “climate crisis.”

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PRO-BIDEN FIREFIGHTING: Network Newscasts Deploy Identical Migrant Crime Talking Point

3rd April 2024

Newsbusters.

What are the odds that three network newscasts would spit out the same talking point on migrant crime while covering a Trump campaign event? It turns out the odds are pretty good if the media need to firefight for President Biden on immigration, as they did tonight.

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Rfk Jr. Rebuked for Calling Biden Bigger Threat to Democracy Than Trump

2nd April 2024

Washington Post.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeatedly advanced an argument Monday that President Biden poses a greater threat to democracy than Donald Trump, a comment that drew swift rebukes from several historians and experts.
Kennedy, speaking to CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday night, criticized the Biden administration’s push for social media companies to monitor their platforms for medical misinformation. Kennedy was temporarily banned by Instagram for spreading misinformation online about vaccines. Kennedy claimed Biden was “censoring me” and is “weaponizing federal agencies.”
He added that Trump — who has alarmed some experts with rhetoric and stances they have compared to authoritarian leaders, plotted a more extreme second term and inspired his supporters to fight the results of an election he continues to falsely claim was stolen — is not as significant a threat to democracy.

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Nashville Atrocity Anniversary Aftermath

31st March 2024

Read it.

On March 15, federal judge Aleta Trauger “ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to hand over documents to her for a private review in an ongoing Freedom of Information Act case that will decide if the public will see documents related to the Covenant School shooter’s motives.” The documents did not emerge before March 27, one year since Audrey Hale, 28, shot dead nine-year-olds Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs, along with Covenant headmaster Katherine Koonce, custodian Mike Hill and teacher Cynthia Peak.

On the anniversary of the mass murder, the Tennessee Star named all the victims and noted that the shooting “was carried out by Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who identified as transgender.” The Tennesseean named the victims “gunned down in a mass shooting,” but the shooter was not identified. The Associated Press story failed to name any victims or identify Audrey Hale, whose possible motive also escaped notice.

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Studio Mocks Christians to Promote Sydney Sweeney’s Nun Movie ‘Immaculate’

30th March 2024

Read it.

Imagine a movie studio promoting a film by amplifying Islamic outrage against it.

You can’t. It’s impossible.

The same holds for most major religions. Antisemitism is flaring on the far-Left, meaning a movie studio would be loathe to target that community at this point.

Christians? It’s fair game.

Always.

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Politico: White House Reporters Steal From Air Force One

29th March 2024

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White House reporters like to portray themselves as the guardians of democracy who hold the powerful accountable, but if a Thursday Politico report by Eli Stokols, Lauren Egan, and Ben Johnson is true, they are also a collection of thieves who steal things from Air Force One.

Theft is apparently so rampant aboard the presidential aircraft that the authors describe it as “shockingly common — a rite of passage where the thieves proudly discuss and display their stolen goods.”

They report that the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell, had to remind her colleagues that such behavior is not permitted and does not reflect well on the press corps.

Q; What’s the difference between a progressive and a criminal?

A: Opportunity.

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Jon Stewart, the Tribeca Trickster of Real Estate

29th March 2024

Newsbusters.

On March 25, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart uncorked a typical not-so-funny sermon about how Donald Trump overvaluing real-estate properties was not a “victimless crime.” Trump has been found liable for fraud despite no banker or financier ever claiming Trump victimized them.

Then the New York Post reported talk-show host Tim Pool tweeted that in 2014, Stewart sold his 6,280-square-foot Tribeca duplex to financier Parag Pande for $17.5 million. But according to 2013-2014 assessor records obtained by the Post, the property had an estimated market-value at only $1.882 million. The actual assessor valuation was even lower, at $847,174.

“Records also show that Stewart paid significantly lower property taxes, which were calculated based on that assessor valuation price,” the Post reported, “precisely what he called Trump out for doing in his Monday monologue.” In his original tenure at Comedy Central, Stewart was making an estimated $25-30 million dollars a year for his satirical labor.

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Eight Brand New Biden Gaffes ABC,CBS, NBC Have Buried

27th March 2024

Read it.

The gaffe machine that is President Joe Biden let out another howler on Tuesday and the Big Three networks dutifully ignored it.

During a press conference on the tragic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, Biden recalled he had passed over “many, many times commuting” from Delaware “either on a train or by car.” There’s just one problem. The bridge was constructed just for car use and never had any rail lines.

ABC, CBS, NBC overlooked Biden’s botch — just like they have done for much of his administration and career.

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MSNBC’s Wallace Throws Juvenile Meltdown Over McDaniel Polluting NBC’s ‘Sacred Airwaves’

27th March 2024

Newsbusters.

MSNBC’s Rich, White, Liberal, Wine Mom Story Hour (aka Deadline: White House) made sure Monday afternoon to add its voice to the shrieking, almost infantile-like meltdown across the liberal media over parent company NBC’s decision to hire former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel as a paid contributor.

Over three segments, host Nicolle Wallace melted down over McDaniel (or, to be honest, any Trump supporter) polluting our sacred airwaves.” By Tuesday afternoon, the outrage worked as Puck’s Dylan Byers first reported she’d be dropped from the company.

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L A Times Falsely Hypes a “Wild” 2023/2024 Rainy Season while Concealing NOAA Climate Science Data Establishing this Season as Completely Normal

23rd March 2024

Read it.

You know, as they do.

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Enemies of the People

23rd March 2024

Power Line.

When we started this site, exposing mainstream media bias was a big part of our mission. Using the then-new internet, we and many others held liberal outlets (i.e., virtually all of them) accountable in a way that hadn’t happened before. The effect of that effort was not that the liberal press became more accurate or more objective. Rather, they came out of the closet. For the most part, they no longer make any serious pretense of neutrality. Whether that is an improvement or not is debatable.

But, in any event, it no longer makes sense to criticize, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post for being biased. That would be like, if you were a soldier in World War II and a Panzer division was approaching, you were to say, “Those Germans are biased against us!” It isn’t a question of bias. They are just the enemy.

Donald Trump was perhaps the first major Republican politician to abandon the effort to curry favor with the press establishment. He famously denounced the fake news press (sometimes abbreviated to the press in general) as enemies of the people. The good news is, most Americans agree with him.

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The Greatest Scientific Fraud of All Time — Part XXXII (Sea Level Rise Edition)

22nd March 2024

Read it.

So don’t be surprised to learn that the sea level data, produced by NASA, have recently been altered — and of course, in a way to enhance the global warming scare narrative.

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Drone Video Reveals Massive NYC Migrant Tent City, Kept Under Wraps By Democrats & Media

21st March 2024

Read it.

Democrats in New York City and their allies in leftist corporate media are keeping a massive migrant shelter hidden from the public, located at a previously operational airfield in southern Brooklyn. This comes as the metro area has been flooded with upwards of 175,000 illegals in just a few short years.

According to a recent AFP News report, large white tents full of Central and South Americans, Africans, Chinese, and Russians are packed like cattle on one of the runways at Floyd Bennett Field. It’s hard to say how many migrants are in the tent city, but some figures put it at nearly 2,000.

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Baldness of the Woke

21st March 2024

John C. Wright.

To lie means to tell a plausible falsehood intended to deceive another. To gaslight means to tell an impossible falsehood, one which calls sanity itself into question. The term comes from a film of the same name, where a sneaking husband connives his trusting wife to dismiss the witness of her own eyes as hallucination. He blandly and baldly denies all; she doubts her senses.

Ironically, the bald-faced openness of the gaslighting is what makes it gaslighting. Absurdity is promoted with a straight face, or with earnest zeal. They know they are lying, we know they are lying, they know we know; when doubted, they raise their voices and double down, unleash floods of scorn and contempt, and accuse the doubter of their sins, but not his.

This last is called Ad Hominem Tu Quoque but should be called the Iron Law of Leftwing Projection. It is a law with no exceptions. We see jackasses accusing civil adults of being jackasses, idiots calling lettered adults idiots.

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Sowing the Wind: The New ‘Newspeak’

21st March 2024

Read it.

The presidential election is eight months away. Yet the campaign to preclude a second Trump administration is already in high gear. In the course of two weeks, the public was given a preview of the undemocratic, uncouth, racist dystopia MAGA America is doomed to become. Against the backdrop of the most virulent antisemitism sweeping the U.S. in the wake of Hamas’ savagery, the media has chosen to pillory “white nationalism” as the clear and present danger.

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The Media Are Planting Narrative Ahead Of SCOTUS Abortion Pill Hearing

20th March 2024

Newsbusters.

There will soon be another high-stakes Supreme Court hearing on abortion and the media have already chosen the narrative terrain on which they wish to engage the matter, framing the argument as over access to abortion pills.

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Clown Cars In Ohio

19th March 2024

Power Line.

This year’s Senate race in Ohio could be pivotal to who controls that body in 2025. Incumbent Sherrod Brown, while not unpopular, should be beatable by a strong candidate in increasingly-red Ohio. But here, as so often happens, the question is whether the GOP can come up with a good nominee.

The principal candidates in the Republican primary, which is tomorrow, are Trump-endorsed Bernie Moreno and state senator Matt Dolan. As of today, Moreno holds a nine-point lead in at least one poll.

Four days ago the Associated Press, presumably pursuant to its anti-MAGA mania, released a story accusing Moreno of having created a gay account on the Adult Friend Finder web site in 2008.

Funny how the Narrative media have no problem with fag-shaming people if Republican.

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Our Democracy

18th March 2024

ZMan does an eye-roll.

Joseph de Maistre famously observed, “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” We get a sense of that in the weekend media drama over Trump using the word “bloodbath” in a speech. He used the word in reference to what would happen to the auto industry under a second Biden term, but the media left out the part about the auto industry.

The result was a media frenzy based on the false claim that Trump was promising some sort of homicidal revenge if he did not win the election. One media pinhead after another went to their favorite platform to repeat the claim. In some cases, they did so on video platforms as the video of Trump giving the speech in which he used the word was playing in the corner of the screen with the sound muted. So much for the second half of that de Maistre quote about honest people perpetuating the crime.

It probably would have gone like so many other fake media narratives in that normal people without access to the megaphone would have spent days clarifying what was said but by that point the media would be onto the next lie. This time the world’s richest man noticed and posted about it on Twitter. Joe Scarborough deleted his post about it, but others kept up the lie. Nancy Pelosi made the rounds stammering through the claim that Trump is promising a homicidal rampage.

UPDATE: Fallout Continues Over Trump “Bloodbath” Media Hoax

 

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Trump Is Funny? Who Knew?

18th March 2024

Power Line.

For years, liberals have obtusely refused to acknowledge that part of Donald Trump’s appeal is his sense of humor. Often they have branded his comments as outrageous, when in truth they were intended as jokes, and understood as such by his audience. Now, for whatever reason, liberals are belatedly conceding the point. As in this Politico piece, which is, in its own unintentional way, funny.

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From Anxiety to Cancer, the Evidence Against Ultra-Processed Food Piles Up

18th March 2024

NPR.

Ultra-processed foods are abundant in our food supply. Among the most common are highly refined breads, fast food, sugary drinks, cereals, cookies, and other packaged snacks. They are often high in salt, sugar, fat and calories and low in fiber and micro-nutrients such as vitamins.

And that’s as much of a definition of ‘ultra-processed foods’ as you’re going to get in this article. No indication of what distinguishes ‘ultra-processed’ foods from mere ‘processed’ foods. I guess it’s like ‘ultra-right-wing’; you know it when progressive see it.

At a time when Americans consume more than half of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods, there is increasing evidence that eating too many of these foods can make us sick.

‘Evidence’? No, there isn’t. Here’s what they call ‘evidence’:

A study published in the British Medical Journal finds people who consume high amounts of these foods have an increased risk of anxiety, depression, obesity, metabolic syndrome, certain cancers including colorectal cancer and premature death.

The data come from more than 9 million people who participated in dozens of studies, which researchers analyzed as part of umbrella review.

Such ‘studies’ are merely statistical correlations … and, as any legitimate scientist will remind you, correlation doesn’t imply causation. Suspicious? Certainly–depending on the methodology of the study–which, as we are increasingly seeing, is often shoddy. But evidence? Not in the rigorous legal sense. None of which slows down the hammer of the people who want to ban stuff ‘for your own good’.

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The Liberal Arts Are a Right-Wing Plot!

17th March 2024

Power Line.

And pretty much always have been. (Western civilization? Sounds fascist to me….)

In its typically clueless way, The New Yorker is hot on the topic of whether the liberal arts—and especially classical education—have gone conservative. (The article is titled, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?”) Better break out the smelling salts.

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A New York Times Editorial And Its Trump Derangement Syndrome

17th March 2024

Newsbusters.

It never ceases to amaze watching the so-called “mainstream media” (aka the far left press) foam at the reality someone who is an outsider to the conventional politics of the day – aka in this case Donald Trump – is ascending to the presidency. Again.

This time around – again! – there is the redoubtable editorial board of the far left New York Times foaming and spewing over the fact that former President Trump has clinched the 2024 GOP nomination. It is Trump Derangement Syndrome at its finest.

Trump’s chief qualification for the Presidency is that all of the right people hate him.

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Reuters Ignores Biden, Fact Checks Babylon Bee

17th March 2024

Newsbusters.

The Babylon Bee lives rent-free in the minds of too many journalists.

How else do you describe constant fact checks on a site that churns out satirical news stories a la The Onion?

USA Today once fact-checked a Bee piece saying President Joe Biden sold Alaska to Russia. PolitiFact ran to the scene after a Bee article claimed, “ISIS Lays Down Arms After Katy Perry’s Impassioned Plea To ‘Like, Just Co-Exist’”

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SBF Considered ‘Coming Out as a Republican’ Amid FTX Collapse

17th March 2024

Bloomberg.

Because being a Republican is just so fashionable these days.

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