Tag: mainstream media

Biden Campaign Launches Taskforce to Combat Alleged “Cheap Fakes,” Urges Media Support

The Biden campaign is putting together a specialized task force that has been formed to counter what it considers manipulated portrayals of President Biden in online videos.

According to a staffer, who spoke with Politico, this initiative aims to “mitigate the risks” associated with these videos, which depict the president in various awkward or confusing situations.

Despite pushback on the Biden administration that the videos are actually accurate and have not been manipulated with AI, this move underscores a deepening concern within the Biden administration regarding the circulation of these clips on social media platforms, often highlighted as signs of the president’s deteriorating mental agility.

The issue gained traction following a press conference where White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre criticized the media for distributing footage showing Biden in an unflattering light. Jean-Pierre labeled one such video, which showed former President Barack Obama assisting a seemingly bewildered Biden off a stage, as a “deepfake” and a “cheap fake video done in bad faith.”

Further incidents adding to the controversy include Biden’s peculiar behavior during a G7 summit and a Juneteenth event. In one instance, he was seen wandering away from a group of world leaders and in another, appearing disoriented among dancing attendees.

The campaign’s approach has sparked criticism from various quarters, accusing it of attempting to censor and control the narrative surrounding the president’s public appearances. Social media reactions have been sharply divided, with some users mocking the campaign’s efforts to label these videos as “cheap fakes” and questioning the integrity of the mainstream media’s coverage of these events.

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MSNBC Host Takes Issue With The Term ‘Illegal’ To Describe Rapists And Killers

During a discussion about the sheer volume of illegal aliens who have raped and killed Americans since arriving in the country, an MSNBC host appeared more offended by the use of the term “illegal” than by the crimes themselves.

The discussion was taking place between former RNC chairman Michael Steele, who somehow has sidestepped into being an MSNBC co-host, and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.

The pair were talking about Donald Trump’s vow to instigate mass deportations, with the justification that many who have come to the country illegally are committing crimes.

The other co-host, Symone Sanders-Townsend, attempted to downplay that reality by quoting some study or other from three years ago.

After Sanders-Townsend insisted she was “just giving the numbers,” Roberts countered “Well, what do you tell the parents of those people, those young girls that are being killed? This is absurd. The preponderance of these folks, Michael, are male…”

Steele interjected and asked, “What is the difference between an illegal immigrant who, unfortunately, engages in that activity…” with Sanders-Townsend then interrupting and stating “we don’t like that, I want to be clear, we don’t use the term ‘illegal’ for undocumented indviduals.”

Steele then pathetically corrected himself, “yes, undocumented individuals,” while Roberts asserted “they’re illegal aliens.”

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Progressive Rep. Pramila Jayapal laughs at news coverage of migrant who raped NYC 13-year-old girl

Something funny, Congresswoman?

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) had herself a good chuckle during an MSNBC interview this week in which she mocked news coverage of the case of an Ecuadorian migrant accused of having bound, gagged and raped a 13-year-old girl in a Queens park.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus chairwoman scoffed at a Fox News chyron during a Tuesday appearance on “The Reidout” that touched on the appalling June 13 attack by Christian Geovanny Inga-Landi, 25, who admitted to cops he recorded his sick deeds.

“There’s a lot of fear-mongering,” Jayapal told host Joy Reid after hailing President Biden’s executive order to extend permanent residency status to migrant spouses of US citizens who have lived in the country for at least 10 years.

Reid then turned Jayapal’s attention to a sample of Tuesday’s media coverage.

“Here’s the three cable networks’ reporting of this,” the host said. “Our [MSNBC’s] banner said, ‘Soon: Biden announces legal protections for undocumented spouses of citizens.’ CNN’s banner said, ‘Biden announces new protections for some undocumented spouses.’”

“Here was Fox’s banner, ‘Migrant arrested for raping 13-year-old New York City girl,’” she added, inaccurately claiming that the cable news ratings leader did not cover the executive order on its Tuesday broadcasts.

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Scientific American’s Laura Helmuth Continues Campaign to Embarrass and Humiliate Herself

As we head into the weekend, a quick note that Scientific American’s Laura Helmuth remains one of the most ridiculous dunderheads in science writing, a journalism adjacent field of writing that many reporters refer to with derision as “scicomm.” Earlier this week, a reader sent me this post on Blue Sky, with Helmuth promoting an article falsely claiming there was evidence to support six-feet social distancing during COVID.

There isn’t. Former NIH Director Francis Collins and Tony Fauci have both testified to Congress that this evidence doesn’t exist.

Helmuth shoehorns this narrative into Scientific American by ignoring Tony Fauci’s congressional testimony that six feet social distancing was “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data” and then insisting it’s actually just a political fight between Fauci and Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican Congresswoman long known for making outlandish statements that often stretch the fabric of reality.

Just like Laura Helmuth.

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MSM Defames MAGA Michigan State Rep. – Media Caught Lying about 3AM Stripper Shootout

Rep. Neil Friske is one of the most conservative pro-Trump members of the Michigan House of Representatives, and last night was arrested for alleged assault in the state capital, Lansing.

Immediately the accusation was salacious: the mainstream media claimed that Rep. Friske fired gunshots at a stripper shortly before 3 A.M. after a dispute. The implication was that Rep. Friske met the woman at a south Lansing strip club, Deja Vu, and brought her home for sex, and then during a dispute started shooting at her and chased her down the road. This was what the media pushed through its disinformation networks.

But of course none of that is true.

Friske has told several sources that he was awoken at his home to a 3 A.M. robbery, saw an intruder, and started shooting. The robber was trying to take a briefcase as they fled, and the briefcase was left by the police on the lawn of his residence. Friske said it was likely the briefcase was simply left by police on the lawn. He was arrested and has been unable to make any public statement so far.

The media ran with a bogus, obviously-untrue story, because it hurt a conservative and they knew Friske was silenced by virtue of being in jail.

Friske is widely known in Lansing to never drink alcohol, and is known as a soft spoken, pleasant, and upstanding legislator. The idea that he would be drunkenly paying a hooker at 3 A.M. and then shooting her in the street is completely out of character.

Here are left-wing fake news disinformation outlets that are quietly changing their story: Detroit Free Press, MLive, Bridge Magazine, Detroit News.

But the damage was done. The smear has been made. The narrative has been set. Friske, unable to offer any other side to the story because he was being held without bail, has been unable to say anything while the media spun these lies against him.

The lies started with unreliable and dishonest MIRS News, which is a Capitol-focused blog whose audience is almost exclusively legislators, quoted anonymous sources as saying the Friske incident involved a stripper.

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MSM Very Belatedly Reports On Ukraine’s Brutal Military Recruitment Methods

A mere year ago, there was already ample evidence that Ukrainian recruitment officers were using brutal and desperate tactics to ensure a steady supply of young soldiers for the front lines in the fight against Russia. This is a trend which has only grown, as the tragic situation of masses of casualties persists, and also amid the Zelensky government’s refusal to even attempt to negotiate a peaceful end to the war.

But earlier in the conflict, any Western outlet or pundit who highlighted and condemned scenes of young men being beaten and harshly seized off Ukraine’a streets by military recruiters would have been dismissed as a ‘pro-Russian propagandist’. Yet now this trend has long been impossible to deny, and only very belatedly mainstream media sources are covering it. For example, on Sunday The Washington Post highlighted that Ukraine has resorted to releasing nearly 3,000 hardened criminals and convicts from prisons to serve in the military. The plan has immediately been met with pushback and controversy. “No one has trust in this, but we need it,” one military official involved in the policy told WaPo. However, the official admitted while describing the likelihood that this will cause disorder on the frontlines: “They’re all going to run like Forrest Gump.”

The report detailed that many of the newly released convicts were “jailed for dealing drugs, stealing phones and committing armed assaults and murders, among other serious crimes.“ However, Ukrainian Justice Minister Denis Malyuska was cited in the report as claiming “the motivation of our inmates is stronger than our ordinary soldiers,” and insisted that ultimately they “want to protect their country and they want to turn the page.” Washington Post isn’t the only outlet which has begrudgingly shifted from its fawning and overly idealist coverage of Ukraine’s armed forces and the dire battlefield situation, but BBC too has this week issued some devastating footage portraying the severe manpower crisis (and here’s a similar one from CNN days ago).

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The Problem with Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth. One hundred fifty-nine years ago, on June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Texas and declared that all slaves in the state were free. The following year, in 1866, residents of the town where Granger had issued the order celebrated the anniversary as “Jubilee Day.” Eventually, the name changed to Juneteenth, and in 1979, it became a Texas state holiday. Then, in 2021, President Joe Biden signed a bill designating Juneteenth as a federal holiday.

The West’s abolition of chattel slavery was one of the greatest victories for liberty in our civilization’s history. Using an anniversary like today to celebrate the achievement and reflect on why it was necessary in the first place—or how it could have come about better—should be a rare point of unity in today’s politically fractured America.

But in the years since Biden signed the so-called Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, the holiday has become increasingly co-opted by progressives in media, academia, and politics as a way to push for radical policies like collective reparations or the exclusion of white people from celebrations.

Because of that, most of the rhetoric we see from those promoting Juneteenth sidesteps the actual issue of slavery. They do so because adherents of modern progressivism do not actually believe in self-ownership, the antithesis of slavery.

Only libertarians have a consistent commitment to self-ownership. We believe that nobody has the right to another’s labor. Nobody can justly claim ownership over another’s body or the fruits of their labor. Progressives do not believe this.

Modern American progressivism can be defined by its commitment to what are called positive rights. Where negative rights entail an obligation not to do something, like murder or steal, positive rights refer to the supposed right to be provided with something, like education or healthcare. When backed by the force of law, positive rights produce a legal system where electing not to use your labor toward some specific end is tantamount to a rights violation—which, therefore, warrants the use of force to compel that labor involuntarily.

These days, the coercion underlying progressive programs is shifted from the service provider to the working professionals taxed to pay for them. The average American works the equivalent of thirty-eight days a year exclusively to fund government programs. For the top 1 percent of income earners, the average is sixty-five days. The only problem progressives have with this violent expropriation of wealth through taxation is that there’s not enough of it.

It is ironic that Americans are forced to work to fund a paid day off for federal employees to celebrate the end of involuntary labor. Much more absurd, however, is that much of our taxed income these days is—with the enthusiastic support of the progressive establishment—being sent to the Ukrainian government, which is quite literally enslaving young men and forcing them to fight against the Russians.

And, although it is not active at the moment, the House of Representatives recently passed a bill to automatically register young men for the draft with little to no pushback from progressives.

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A New Openness to the Reality of Vaccine Injury?

Normally, when you do a search on Google for “vaccine” of any variant of the word or phrase which includes the word, all you find is articles or websites that proclaim the wonders of vaccines—how these biologic drugs saved humanity from just about everything. You seldom find mention on Google of the downside of these drugs. In other words, the other side of the story.

Largely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and efforts by the U.S. government to influence search engine companies like Google and social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now X), YouTube and others to eliminate any information critical of vaccines and their harmful or potentially harmful effects, the Internet has been scrubbed of the other side of the story about these drugs.

There was a time not too long ago, for example, that if you did a search on Google for “vaccine reactions,” you would find a link to the website of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) within the first two or three pages of the search. If you did a search for “the vaccine reaction,” you would be led to the website of The Vaccine Reaction on the first page of the search. No more. For all practical purposes, sites such as these do not come up on most Google searches related to vaccines or vaccination. They’ve been scrubbed.

So you can imagine my surprise when I found the article by Apoorva Mandavilli in The New York Times last month titled “Thousands Believe Covid Vaccines Harmed Them. Is Anyone Listening?” In many ways, it was a landmark piece because it raised a significant degree of awareness within the general public that there is indeed another side of the story about vaccines—in this case, the COVID shots. It was certainly a far cry from Mandavilli’s odd piece in the Times last October titled “Feeling Terrible After Your Covid Shot? Then It’s Probably Working.”1 2

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Trump Blasts Media, Biden Camp As “Shameless Liars” For Claiming Videos Are Fake

In a speech in Wisconsin Tuesday, Donald Trump called out the Biden campaign and its media mouthpieces as “shameless liars” for suggesting that footage of him wandering around looking lost at the G7 summit and having to be led off a stage by Obama at a fundraiser were somehow faked.

“They have a candidate that has no clue, doesn’t know where he is, and all they can do is lie. Joe Biden is humiliating our country on the world stage” Trump told the crowd, adding “they say the videos of crooked Joe shuffling around are clean fakes,” referring to the recent footage.

Further speaking about Biden’s odd behaviour, Trump asserted “At the G7 in Europe, he had to be rescued by other world leaders, they had to pull him back, then he bizarrely put his face on the Pope’s forehead. What was that all about? That was weird.”

“Did you see the Pope? The Pope is like, ‘What’s happening?’ The Pope didn’t really know what was happening. He said this is strange,” Trump hilariously continued.

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How (and why) Bird Flu is About to Enter the “Mass Testing” Phase

The wall-to-wall coverage of Bird Flu is getting wallier-to-wallier with each passing week, to the point it’s almost hard to keep up with the waves of hot takes and chilling insights. But if you’re going to try, the best place to do it is right here, where I spend a good portion of my time reading very similar articles in very similar papers all about the danger of a pandemic they’re about to pretend is happening.

Not a dream of mine growing up, but life’s like that.

Anyway…bird flu.

In our last bird flu update, we pointed out that the “bird flu death” in Mexico was very likely no such thing, and that reporting it as such was right out of the Covid playbook.

Since then the head of Mexico’s Health Ministry has criticized the WHO for calling it a bird flu death at all.

But the big bird flu news is that former head of the US CDC Robert Redfield has gone hysterical, telling NewsNation:

I really do think it’s very likely that we will, at some time, it’s not a question of if, it’s more of a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic.”

This story was naturally picked up and spread everywhere, but Redfield is hardly alone in this hysterical panic-fueling nonsense.

Last week, The Conversation headlined:

An ounce of prevention: Now is the time to take action on H5N1 avian flu, because the stakes are enormous

USA Today echoes the tone:

Concerns grow as ‘gigantic’ bird flu outbreak runs rampant in US dairy herds

Apparently a new study has found something scary – Americans “have little to no pre-existing immunity to the H5N1 avian flu”. Frightening stuff.

Just a few hours ago the Daily Mail reported on yet another doctor doling out yet another dire warning. This time Dr Rick Bright, who told PBS that:

We’re being blindfolded in this battle right now, and I’m really concerned that the virus is winning the game and getting ahead of us.’

We’re flying blind and the disease is getting ahead of us! It’s running rampant and the stakes are enormous!

Even some channels that supposedly know better are spreading the fear.

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