Tag: mainstream media

U.S. Media Decries Brutal Russia Invasion of Ukraine—Yet an Intrepid Reporter Finds that the Russians Were Welcomed as Liberators in the Southern Ukrainian City of Henichesk along the Sea of Azov

Last week I was embedded with the Russian army and visited two towns in southeastern Ukraine. The first town was called Henichesk, a port city along the Sea of Azov in Kherson Oblast (province) of southern Ukraine, bordering on Crimea.

The Russian army, patrolling the city, went with us—the embedded journalists—for protection. But actually the protection was not really needed; the people in Henichesk, at least the majority with whom I spoke, were very happy that the Russian army was there.

The people that I spoke to all said the same thing: They felt protected from the criminal gangs, with their Nazi ideology, who raged the towns. They in turn hoped that Ukraine will prosper again.

Since the coup d’état of 2014, the economy of Ukraine has become very bad, according to many citizens in Henichesk.

I could see that people were standing in line to get money from ATM machines outside the banks, money which was barely there.

At the market, the food was scarce. The Russian army is providing humanitarian aid, which they do in every village and town, liberated from these criminal gangs. This is how many Ukrainians call them.

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Fascist Fitness: MSNBC Compares Physically Fit Men to Nazis

MSNBC’s “fascist fitness” column was written by far-left academic Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor and researcher on extremism at American University. Miller-Idriss used the column to compare men who are into physical fitness and mixed martial arts to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis while expressing worry that those who are strong physically and possess a masculine self-image will reject the teachings of the left. She even claims that they may eventually be responsible for violence in the streets and that governments and other organizations need to plan on cracking down.

Miller-Idriss expressed great concern with at-home fitness routines popularized during COVID lockdowns, claiming that “the far-right has taken advantage of pandemic at-home fitness trends to expand its decade-plus radicalization of physical mixed martial arts (MMA) and combat sports spaces.”

Appearing unhappy that people remained able to communicate during COVID lockdowns, Miller-Idriss claimed that “fascist fitness” groups on Telegram took advantage of the downtime, luring young men in with promises of bulging biceps before ultimately inviting them to “closed chat groups where far-right content is shared.”

Even more alarming to Miller-Idriss than young men spending time at the gym, or with a set of dumbbells at home, is the idea of mixed martial arts training, which says she remembers reading about in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Miller-Idriss says that those interested in MMA are training for the “coming race war” and warned that if young men join MMA gyms, they may be able to share their political thoughts with other physically strong young men, leading to more of what she claims to be right-wing radicalization.

Even worse, says Miller-Idriss, is that the practice of MMA resembles hand-to-hand combat and when combined with other forms of physical fitness and thoughts that she doesn’t approve of, it could make for “a dangerous and powerful cocktail of radicalization.”

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Did the White House Get Caught Colluding with Fact Checkers Again?

It will come as no surprise to conservatives or anyone willing to think critically and fairly that the Biden White House enjoys a cozier relationship with the mainstream media than the Trump administration did. Fawning coverage of the White House’s new cat that distracted attention from Biden’s crises is a great case in point. The way in which mainstream outlets go after Biden’s critics is another example, and one that we at Townhall have experienced and watched unfold in real-time — as we reported. 

But thanks to a late-breaking story from POLITICO on Wednesday, it looks like there are even more symbiotic relationships at play between the White House press shop and supposedly independent fact-checkers or unbiased mainstream outlets.

Here’s what Alex Thompson and Max Tani reported:

Over the past month, the White House’s press shop has repeatedly promoted stories from The New York Times’ fact-checker, LINDA QIU.

Biden cited a Qiu piece himself earlier this month when he addressed House Democrats in Philadelphia. “Headline fact checker in the New York Times: “Republicans Wrongly Blame Biden for Rising Gas Prices,” he said, reading the headline of the piece. “And it goes on to explain why gas prices are so high.”

Many members of the president’s press team have also become Qiu content boosters in recent weeks.

On March 10, deputy press secretary ANDREW BATES tweeted out the same Qiu fact check on why “Republicans Wrongly Blame Biden for Rising Gas Prices,” adding a touch of his own commentary. “The only way to be straight with readers is to include this context,” Bates noted.

Press secretary JEN PSAKI shared the same piece, noting “FACT CHECK on GOP.” 

On Monday, Bates shared another story by Qiu. “@nytimes Fact Check: ‘Attacks on Judge Jackson’s Record on Child Sexual Abuse Cases Are Misleading’ Hawley and Blackburn ‘have taken the judge’s remarks and sentencing decisions out of context, distorting her record,’” he tweeted.

POLITICO does note that “Not all of Qiu’s fact checks have been heralded by the White House,” as seen in her piece: “Biden’s Inaccurate Claims in Defending Afghanistan Withdrawal,” but that was last August, apparently before Qiu decided to play nice with the White House and go from supposedly independent fact-checker to a Biden clean-up crew member.

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A Brief History of Pundits Encouraging Nuclear War

There is an active, influential, and well-paid minority of pundits and politicians in America who apparently believe that escalating conflict between nuclear powers—and even nuclear war itself—is not really that big a deal. 

These, of course, are the sorts of people who fancy themselves “the adults in the room,” while people who proceed with prudence, caution, and regard for the rule of law are to be regarded as traitors, cowards, or Russian agents. 

Consider, for example, Sean Hannity’s March 2 suggestion that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—which really means the United States—should attack a Russian tank column with “some of [NATO’s] fighter jets, or maybe they can use some drone strikes and take out the whole damn convoy.” For Hannity, this would not count as escalation because NATO could elect to not tell the Russians who carried out the attack, and then Moscow “won’t know who to hit back.” 

Meanwhile, support for a “no-fly zone” has been one of the more dangerous avenues to escalation, since a no-fly zone would be a de facto declaration of war on Russia. Sen. Roger Wicker, for example, has said the US should “seriously consider” a no-fly zone. Florida congresswoman Maria Salazar supports a no-fly zone for the very profound reason that “freedom isn’t free.” (Fortunately, most members of Congress appear to recognize that a no-fly zone would mean World War III.) 

And then there are the pundits who have outright treated the gravity of nuclear war with a lot of hand-waving. NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, in an apparent reference to nuclear war, implied the US should risk everything in order to destroy a Russian convoy.

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Misinformation, disinformation, and the 1619 Project

Earlier this year, Joe Biden asked social media companies to engage in more censorship in an effort to divert attention from the wholesale failure of his administration to “shut down the virus.” In a televised speech, he said “I make a special appeal to social media companies and media outlets: please deal with the misinformation and disinformation that’s on your shows. It has to stop.”

More recently, CNN denounced “misinformation” that blamed high gas prices and inflation on the Biden administration. Media outlets have accused Joe Rogan of “spreading disinformation” about Covid-19 and the vaccine because… he dared to ask scientific experts questions on these topics. Other examples of ideas that the legacy media has alternately labelled as “misinformation” and “disinformation” include assertions that Covid-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China; the idea that there was some orchestrated manipulation of procedures to favor Biden in the 2020 election; that Hunter Biden’s laptop offered evidence that the Biden family had been enriched by various forms of international corruption; and that powerful NGOs and world governments are leveraging the pandemic to facilitate a “Great Reset” of the global economy. The campaign to ban these claims – most which are demonstrably true – indicates not a dangerous spread of “disinformation,” but a dangerous weaponization of the concept of disinformation in order to insulate the institutional left from criticism and opposition.

It is no accident that virtually every claim that is consistently labelled as disinformation is one that threatens the policy agenda of the Democratic party (or parts of their agenda that they are too embarrassed to state publicly). “Disinformation” is no longer a concept used to separate truth from falsehood. In the past few years, it has been rhetorically intensified to circumvent the question of truth entirely. It is a means to annex the public’s role in assessing the validity of reporting, placing this authority solely in the hands of “experts” who have the exclusive right to say what is “true.” Understanding the differences between “misinformation” and “disinformation” and observing the ways these concepts are arbitrarily applied is crucial to grasping how our media and other institutions undermine genuine public deliberation—a prerequisite for any functioning democracy.

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CNN Masturbator Toobin Says Kiddie Porn Laws Are TOO STRICT

Amid the questioning of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dubious record of light sentencing for child porn offenders, CNN brought on an ‘expert’ in Chief Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin who declared that he thinks the laws are too harsh.

Toobin, who was infamously temporarily suspended for masturbating on a Zoom call, appeared on the network Tuesday to discuss the matter, and concluded that the line of questioning on pedophilia by Republicans is part of an appeal to right wing conspiracy theorists.

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