Tag: media

ABC Anchor: Questioning Judge Jackson About Light Sentences For Child Porn Offenders Was “A Message To QAnon”

Yet another media talking head has claimed that Republicans probing into Biden Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s history of light sentences for child porn offenders is some kind of “message to QAnon.” 

As we noted last week, several lawmakers grilled Jackson over the issue, prompting her to state that the cases she has presided over are “difficult” and that judges have to look at “various aspects of the offence and impose a sentence that is sufficient but not greater than necessary”.

Discussing the matter Sunday, ABC Jon Karl suggested that GOP lawmakers were sending some kind of message to right wing conspiracy theorists by continuing the line of questioning.

Karl suggested that the questions in the Senate were “harsh and highly unusual” and wondered “could the sharp questioning backfire” on Republicans with midterm elections approaching.

Karl then asked former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile about the “focus on child pornography and pedophiles,” To which she simply replied “QAnon.”

Karl responded “it was a message to QAnon, wasn’t it?” further suggesting “these are not major cases, these were sentencing decisions.” 

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The Media Campaign to Protect Joe Biden Passes the Point of Absurdity

Burying the lede just a bit, the New York Times on March 16th published a long, spirited piece about the federal tax investigation of Hunter Biden. This is the 24th paragraph:

People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.

In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless media stooges, many starring in Matt Orfalea’s damning montage above (the Hunter half-laugh is classic, by the way). All cooperated with intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s abandoned laptop and his dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma as “Russian disinformation.” They tossed in terms thought up for them by spooks as if they were their own thoughts, using words like “obviously” and “classic” and “textbook” to describe “the playbook of Russian disinformation,” in what itself was and still is a wildly successful disinformation campaign, one begun well before the much-derided (and initially censored) New York Post exposé on the topic from October of 2020. 

Not to be petty, but — well, yes, let’s be petty, just a little, and point out that many of the people who were the most pompous about this story turned out to be the most wrong, including the conga line of Intercept editors and staffers who essentially knocked Glenn Greenwald all the way to Substack over the issue. There are more important things going on in the world, but for sheer bootlicking conformist excess and depraved journalist-on-journalist venom the “Russian disinformation” fiasco has no equal, and probably needs recording for posterity before it’s memory-holed via some creepy homage to Severance, or a next-gen algorithmic witch-hunt, or whatever other federally contracted monstrosities are being readied for deployment somewhere far up the anus of Silicon Valley.

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Opposition To Starting WWIII Doesn’t Make You Pro-Putin, It Just Means You’re Sane

While Florida Democrats have been running around the Sunshine State yelling “gay!” the rest of the Democrat Party has been busy yelling “Russia!” in the general direction of anything they don’t like. The 2016 election of Donald Trump? Must have been Russia! Hunter Biden’s damning laptop? Russia!

Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine in an attack that’s killed or displaced thousands of civilian innocents, Democrats are even more eager to accuse anyone they dislike of being a Russian plant. So that’s what they’ve resorted to instead of thoughtfully engaging arguments for why going to war with a nuclear power might not be the brightest idea.

It’s an obvious statement that shouldn’t need saying, but the willful distortion of common sense by manipulative media means not enough people are hearing it: Wanting to avoid World War III doesn’t mean you’re a Putin-lover, it just means you’re sane.

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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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