Tag: media

Who’s the Weak Link? The New York Times Strikes Again

I love getting The New York Times daily summary of the news. It makes for great hilarity.

Here’s today’s example:

Top News
Lebanon Emerges as Weak Link in U.S.-Iran Deal to End War

The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, once seen as a secondary front to the American-Israeli war on Iran, has become one of the main obstacles to ending it.

It’s not Lebanon that’s the weak link here – it’s Israel.

Israel is the attacker. The aggressor. The country that wants to scupper the MOU between the USA and Iran. Everyone knows this – except the NYT, apparently.

I like too how the NYT describes it as the “American-Israeli war on Iran.” At the very least, it should be Israeli-American war of aggression against Iran.

And when was Lebanon a “secondary front” to the USA? America has no desire to seize land and water in southern Lebanon. That goal is entirely Israel’s, as is its fight against Hezbollah, which is responding to Israeli aggression.

The Iran War has been a huge loser (to put it in Trumpian terms) for the U.S., and only Israel seeks to prolong it. Again, who’s the weak link in the U.S.-Iran deal to end the war?

I’ve been playing with Trumpian language to describe the Iran War and its outcome. As Trump might say, it’s been a defeat for America the likes of which we’ve never seen before. No other defeat comes close.

I think Trump finally understands that. The question is, will “weak link” Israel let him withdraw or will the war become even more catastrophic?

Keep reading

Joy Reid Claims “Nobody Black I Know Is Really Excited About the 4th of July” — Calls Independence Day a Celebration of “Slaveholders”

Former MSNBC host and professional race-baiter Joy Reid is once again vomiting anti-American bile just weeks before the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary of Independence on July 4, 2026.

In a cozy chat with fellow ex-MSNBC castoff Alex Wagner, about Juneteenth and the nation’s founding, Reid argued that the Fourth of July should not be viewed as a unifying national holiday because many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves.

According to Reid, the holiday commemorates “slaveholders who freed themselves from having to pay taxes to the Crown for their slave empire.”

Reid added that Juneteenth is the real Independence Day for Black Americans.

Reid: Apologies to my dear spicy White friends, because I know that my White brothers and sisters do love the 4th of July—it’s Independence Day. Everybody’s barbecuing; it’s a thing.

I can promise you, Black folks, we will take that day off. We will barbecue because we’re off. But Black people—nobody Black I know is really excited about the 4th of July, because it is what Frederick Douglass said it is. It is the celebration of slaveholders who freed themselves from having to pay taxes to the Crown for their slave empire. And that is what it is.

Keep reading

News Outlet Caves to Democratic Senate Candidate, Kills Poll That Makes Her Look Bad

The already-dramatic Democratic primary contest in Michigan just got a new plot twist.

A poll run on behalf of a news outlet ended up getting killed from coverage after complaints from the third-place candidate’s campaign, according to Politico.

And one of the nation’s best-known pollsters has gone public with his contempt for the decision.

Washington Beltway-based Politico reported Wednesday that state Sen. Mallory McMorrow’s campaign raised serious questions about the poll’s results with Michigan Information & Research Service, a news outlet that covers the state’s lawmakers in Lansing.

It’s understandable that any campaign might object to a poll that shows its candidates with single-digit support — and the poll in question had McMorrow at only 6 percent.

The race’s two leaders, meanwhile, were “Dr.” Abdul El-Sayed — a far-left progressive endorsed by socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and a candidate who has made potentially questionable claims to being a physician — and U.S. Rep. Haley Stephens, a more establishment pick who has been endorsed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

El-Sayed had 42 percent support, according to the poll. Stevens had 33 percent.

With the Aug. 4 state primary date fast approaching, the McMorrow team hit back hard.

According to Politico, the campaign approached Michigan Information & Research Service with serious questions about the poll’s findings — beyond the dismal showing of the candidate herself — the only Caucasian among the three serious contenders.

For instance, Politico reported, the poll found zero percent of black voters saying they were undecided. Stevens, a black woman, dominated in that demographic with 69 percent, according to the poll, while El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants, brought in 31 percent.

It also found Stevens with only 5 percent support in Oakland County, her home base, according to Politico.

Kyle Melinn, a news editor with Michigan Information & Research Service, told Politico the news outlet abandoned coverage of the poll after hearing from McMorrow’s campaign.

However, he said he first talked to other pollsters about concerns about the poll’s findings. He said they agreed there was a problem.

MIRS didn’t run with the poll, Melinn told Politico, “because I didn’t feel comfortable with it.”

The pollster behind the survey, Steve Mitchell of Mitchell Research & Communications, told Politico that McMorrow’s campaign put “intense pressure” on MIRS not to run with the poll.

“The poll, in the eyes of the McMorrow campaign, understated their support,” Mitchell, whose firm Mitchell Research & Communications conducted and paid for the poll, told Politico. “And they put intense pressure on MIRS, and therefore MIRS decided that they weren’t going to run the survey. That’s their decision, and I support their decision.”

One potential area of concern was the method used to solicit responses. According to Politico, the poll relied on the technique known as “text to web,” in which potential respondents are contacted by text. If they are participating in the survey, they go to a link included in the text to fill out their answers.

According to Politico, McMorrow’s campaign said that it opened the door to text recipients abusing the link, either by participating in the poll numerous times or passing the link on to others who aren’t part of the initial polling survey. That could have polluted the results.

However, Nate Silver, founder of the polling website FiveThirtyEight and a national voice when it comes to political polling, published a post on the social media platform X Wednesday, excoriating the MIRS decision.

Keep reading

How Many Ways Can You Avoid Reporting That Cops Killed a Baby?

“One-Year-Old Boy Killed After Officer Fires at Vehicle in Mississippi,” said the New York Times headline (6/16/26). So, a “one-year-old boy”—what most people would call a baby—was “killed after” a police officer fired at a vehicle, but there’s no verb you could use to connect those two things?

The Times subhed continued that pacifying work:

It is not entirely clear what led up to the shooting, but the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation said that police officers were responding to a shoplifting call.

“Ohh, shoplifting…!” we’re evidently supposed to say, before turning the page; that might make the baby murder make sense. I don’t need to say that baby was Black.

There will be more coverage of this heartbreaking, infuriating news about cops in Senatobia, Mississippi, called to the five-alarm crisis of someone purportedly shoplifting diapers, opening fire into a car whose driver “allegedly drove toward them.”

But in the meantime, please think hard about reporting that tells you to calm down, that suggests that, just maybe, nothing wrong happened at all. As ABC News (6/18/26) put it in a piece on how the “officer involved in shooting outside Walmart that killed 1-year-old boy” has been placed on leave: “One-year-old Kohen Wiley was killed, according to the family’s attorney.”

So maybe he’s not dead? Or he died from something other than the gun of the “involved officer”? Caution in reporting is valuable, but when it’s mainly deployed to protect the inflicters of state violence (FAIR.org, 7/11/16), you have to ask if it’s really a principle at all.

Keep reading

NY Times Says Christian MLB Players Wearing Bible Verses Will Cause Mass ‘Abuse’ Of Gay People

During a Friday pride night game, several San Francisco Giants pitchers wrote Bible verses on their gay-ified hats. One player made clear there was “no hate at all. It’s just what I stand for, and what I stand on: I believe in God.” The same player added that the rainbow is a symbol of God’s covenant and promise and that he’s ultimately thankful to live in a country where free expression and speech are protected.

But apparently writing a Bible verse on his baseball cap will actually cause gay people to be abused and even incite gays to kill themselves — so says The New York Times’ subsidiary, The Athletic.

Grant Brisbee said the Bible verse inscriptions on the hat were “tone-deaf” and “made the night about ‘us versus them.’”

Brisbee then made the fantastical claim that, apparently, writing a Bible verse on your ball cap will cause gay people to suffer actual harm.

“Without the support of their community at large, LGBTQIA+ individuals are much more likely to be told that they are without value,” Brisbee wrote. “They are likelier to be abused, to self-harm, to get kicked out of their homes, to be bullied, to be assaulted. They are at risk because of a society that still doesn’t always accept them, even after decades of progress.”

There is legitimately zero evidence that baseball players writing Bible inscriptions on their hats will cause any harm, abuse, or the assault of gay persons (or anyone for that matter).

What Brisbee is arguing is that if a player expresses religious beliefs that diverge from the left-wing LGBTQ orthodoxy, then real people could be harmed. At that point the argument is that Christianity causes violence and therefore Christianity is bad unless of course you practice your faith in a way that Brisbee deems fit (he waxes poetic about how the right type of Christianity apparently demands affirming the sexual preferences of others). His argument also becomes: if fans don’t enthusiastically celebrate pride night, they’re contributing to suffering. If someone doesn’t affirm the mental illness of a man thinking he’s a woman, they’re creating a dangerous environment.

Keep reading

Israel And Hezbollah Trade Fire In Southern Lebanon, Deaths On Both Sides, Israeli Media Goes After Trump, Vance Cancels Swiss Iranian Negotiation Trip As Violence Rages, Iran Says Deal In Jeopardy

Hezbollah fired missiles into Northern Israel yesterday, which were intercepted by Israeli missile systems. Israeli leadership responded angrily to the U.S.-Iran peace deal as the IDF continued operations in Southern Lebanon. Multiple Israeli soldiers were killed south of Beirut as Israeli forces continue to consolidate positions and go after Shia proxy army targets in the south. The IDF continues to be challenged by FPV drones, which are effective against armor and infantry in southern Lebanon.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz rages on Israeli TV:

“Nobody can tell us what to do, and we’ve proven it. The entire first line of Lebanese villages has been destroyed.  We are destroying all the houses. The residents will never see them standing before their eyes again.

“In Lebanon, the 200,000 residents who lived in the “security zone” are not returning.  Not one of them is returning.

“We are fighting there. We do not need al-Julani. Al-Julani, the terrorist in a suit, does not need to come and help us. We know Syria well. He is not going to help us in Lebanon. He should stay in Syria, not interfere with us, and not make us interfere with him.

“Do you know what really hurts the jihadists? Maybe it hurts them when you kill them personally, but they don’t care as much about that.  What really hurts them is when you take territory from them and destroy their homes—and that’s what we did.

“You remember the raids? They would go in and come out.  We go in, destroy, and do not leave. That’s what we’re doing now in Lebanon

“The IDF must be on the other side of the border, beyond the border, defending the State of Israel against jihadist organizations in Lebanon, in Syria, and in Gaza. We will not move from the “security zones”—not in Syria, not in Gaza, and not in Lebanon.

“Why are we on the other side in Syria?  Because we need to be there to protect ourselves against what we see in Syria.

“We are already in more than 60% of Gaza, and all of it is destroyed. It is destroyed above ground and underground. That is the difference in the approach we introduced.”

Keep reading

Joe Biden Brags About Killing Oil Industry During Appearance on ‘Jay Leno’s Garage’

Joe Biden bragged about killing the oil industry during an appearance on ‘Jay Leno’s Garage.’

In January 2025, in one of his last acts as president, Joe Biden permanently banned offshore drilling across 625 million acres of US ocean.

This is after Biden blocked oil drilling on 10 million acres in Alaska in 2023.

Joe Biden also canceled the Keystone XL pipeline his first day in office.

President Trump overturned Biden’s ban on Arctic drilling, but he is facing legal hurdles.

Biden boasted about his unprecedented power grab and attack on domestic drilling as he flew down the highway in a vintage car.

“The other thing I was able to do, I made sure there could be no oil drilling off the East Coast, the West Coast and 150 miles off the Gulf of Mexico [unintelligible] too,” Biden said to Jay Leno.

There’s nothing more elitist than two multimillionaires who own vintage gas guzzlers laughing about killing the oil industry.

Keep reading

Al Gore Hit with Major Reality Check After Making this Wild Boast About ‘Climate Change’ During Interview Touting His Infamous Propaganda Film 

Former Vice-President Al Gore emerged out of hiding to tout his so-called ‘prescience’ regarding global warming and it quickly backfired.

On Wednesday, Gore sat down with ABC ‘News’ to reflect on the 20th anniversary of his environmental propaganda film “An Inconvenient Truth” and the current state of the planet.

As TGP readers know, Gore made a series of wild predictions about global warming in the film and in public that have not come to fruition. These included announcing in 2006 that the Arctic sea ice would completely disappear in ten years.

It’s now 2026, and plenty of Arctic ice remains.

But Gore remains unencumbered by facts. During the interview, Gore boasted that the scientists were “dead right” regarding all of the predictions about the warming of the planet.

This caused the interviewer to inquire what was wrong with his ‘documentary.’

“If scientists were dead right, why has so much been made about this documentary and what was wrong?” the interviewer asked.

“Uh, well, they cherry-picked a few little…About how many years the Arctic is ice-free, the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro,” Gore replied. “The main elements the scientific community has confirmed are right.”

Keep reading

Israeli Desperation Leading to Enormous Sums for Lobbying, Media Manipulation

Things aren’t going so well these days for Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. While his partner President Trump is working actively to end the war with Iran by inking a memorandum of understanding to halt the fighting, American public opinion of Israel continues to plummet. That is no surprise — Israel’s war on Gaza has now killed over 73,000 Palestinians (at least), the Gaza Strip is largely rubble, and Israel has moved to do the same in south Lebanon.

Netanyahu blames the loss of support on TikTok and social media writ large (not his government’s own policies) and is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to pursue media management and pro-Israel advocacy in the U.S. On a parallel track, Israel is seeking unprecedented integration with the U.S. military and its intelligence agencies — which would mean co-production on weapons, technology and sharing of sensitive intel. Experts say this is why Israel has been insisting it doesn’t “need” the 10-year agreement that provides Israel $3.8 billion annually in military aid. This would shift that aid to the places that don’t require the same oversight and overt American buy-in.

My colleagues Ben Freeman and Nick Cleveland-Stout, who form up the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, have been digging away at these Israel efforts on myriad fronts. Ben has been writing about the integration legislation on both the military and intel sides, now making their way through Congress. Nick has been sifting through Foreign Agent Registration Act and other public efforts to expose the millions that have been going to former Trump campaign guy Brad Parscale to push pro-Israel messaging through conservative media platforms, text campaigns, manipulating ChatGPT, and more.

Both talk to me this week about how all of these efforts have ramped up as Israel is more keenly aware that it has lost the thread with the American people and that powerful lobbying forces like AIPAC are not enough.

Keep reading

Israeli foreign agent took over The Charlie Kirk Show days after his killing

The Charlie Kirk Show is now distributed by a federally registered agent of Israel tasked with seeding American media with Zionist propaganda. It is part of a whopping $46 million dollar annual contract between the Israeli government and Brad Parscale, the former chief of staff for Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. This may be the largest lobbying contract in the history of foreign influence operations in the US.

On September 10, 2025, Kirk was assassinated during the first stop on his American Comeback Tour at Utah Valley State University. Eight days later, Parscale registered as a foreign agent of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, assuming responsibility for a propaganda blitz “tailored to Gen Z audiences across platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, podcasts, and other relevant digital and broadcast outlets.”

The deal meant that the Charlie Kirk Show, which had been distributed by the Salem Media Network since 2020, was placed under the control of a foreign agent for Israel, with Parscale assuming a role as Salem’s Chief Strategy Officer. According to the terms of the contract, Parscale’s Clock Tower would “integrate its pro-Israel messaging into Salem Media Network properties.”

According to a December 2025 report by Radio Ink, The Charlie Kirk Show “will continue as a podcast on the Salem Podcast Network, as Salem Media ‘will maintain its close professional and personal relationship with Turning Point USA.’”

“Salem has been so gracious through this process and even encouraged us to continue broadcasting the show on the Salem Radio Network,” said Andrew Kolvet, the TPUSA spokesman and host of The Charlie Kirk Show.

Since Kirk’s killing, his successors have done their best to bury his vehement opposition to war on Iran, as well as his public fits of disgust with Netanyahu and his army of lobbyists in the US. Kirk’s widow and replacement as TPUSA CEO, Erika Kirk, now insists that she and her husband never wavered in their support for Israel. She has also been unwilling to state what her late husband would have thought about the war the US and Israel waged on Iran this year.

“My husband isn’t here to say whether or not we should be at war with Iran,” Erika Kirk said in response to a question at a May 2026 TPUSA event. “I would love for him to be here right now and tell us if we should or should not.”

Keep reading