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President Trump has given three interviews in mid-March. More on those below.
Americans clearly miss him and his clear-cut, sensible policies. Joe Biden’s administration is reversing many of them. Remember the manufacturing plants that were going to stay in the United States? Ford has now reneged and is going back to its original plan of moving one of its plants from Ohio to Mexico:
https://twitter.com/toddstarnes/status/1372399456629493760
In other news, it took more than two months for the media, led by the original source, the Washington Post, to retract the story about Trump’s phone conversation with Georgia’s secretary of state about the election. WaPo finally retracted their false quotes attributed to the former president on Tuesday, March 16:
RedState has an excellent article about this further example of fake news (emphases mine below):
The alleged contents of this conversation had been part of the national conversation ever since January 9 when Washington Post reporter Amy Gardner published a story claiming, based on a single anonymous source, that President Trump had attempted to pressure Ms. Watson into creating evidence of fraud where all right-thinking people know that all voting in Georgia, especially in Fulton County, was totally on the up-and-up. The story blew up. It slid neatly into the Pantheon of Evil Acts By Trump worshiped by the left, the media, and NeverTrump. Through the miracle of journalisming, something we lay folks can’t be expected to understand, the anonymously sourced story was quickly and independently confirmed by NBC, ABC, USA Today, PBS, and CNN.
When President Trump was impeached after leaving office for giving a speech on the National Mall on January 6, this unsourced, though now multiply “corroborated,” allegation found its way into the “impeachment brief” submitted by the House “impeachment managers,” see page 10 if you care to wade through this dross. And, they, relying upon that integrity and sense of fair play for which progressives are famous, even used it in their impeachment arguments …
One final note. If the Daily Caller or Free Beacon or even the Washington Examiner had pulled a bullsh** stunt like this, they would be out of business (read The Washington Post Doesn’t Deserve to Exist After Making up Trump Quotes to Own the Orange Man). Facebook and Twitter would have de-platformed them by now (read Based on Brian Stelter’s Own Arguments, CNN and Washington Post Should Be Deplatformed). They would be ritually sacrificing staffers to try to keep advertisers from fleeing, and they would still fail. The Washington Post and Amy Gardner will simply move ahead. They will continue to sling wild conspiracy theories based on uncorroborated single sources, and they will continue to be treated as though they are serious newsgathering organizations.
Trump quickly compiled quotes from all the journalists condemning WaPo — including one from Glenn Greenwald, not a fan of his by any stretch of the imagination. When clicking that Telegram link, click on ‘Context’ to view in its entirety. It is easier just to visit his website’s announcement with all the quotes.
On Saturday, March 20, at Mar-a-Lago, he made reference to Joe Biden’s tripping on the airplane stairs and quickly added that he himself won the election by more than 75 million votes:
That Trump won is very likely to be true. On March 19, Howie Carr interviewed Jonathan Allen, one of the authors of Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won The Presidency. At the 8 minute point of the interview, Allen tells Carr that Trump lost within 43,000+ votes in three states. Peter Navarro, who wrote three reports for Trump on the 2020 election results, maintained that only six counties needed recounts, yet the swampy advisers around Trump said not to pursue the matter. After all, they have careers to preserve.
Former Democrat — now proud Republican — Georgia state congressman Vernon Jones was a guest of President Trump’s at Mar-a-Lago twice in one week:
On Monday, March 22, Harris Faulkner of Fox News interviewed Trump. They discussed the border situation and Biden’s reversal of his policies:
Trump is clearly concerned about the Second Amendment (guns), packing the Supreme Court and the weakness of Mitch McConnell, now the Senate Minority Leader.
There was also this:
On Tuesday, March 23, Trump gave an interview to Greg Kelly of Newsmax, wherein he discussed the ‘gross incompetence’ of the border situation, Operation WarpSpeed and more:
Biden’s fall also came up for discussion. Trump said he had ‘expected it’:
James O’Keefe of Project Veritas was Trump’s guest at Mar-a-Lago on March 23:
Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-North Carolina), elected in 2020, was Trump’s guest the following day:
https://twitter.com/beingrealmac/status/1374595540651012097
And, finally, on Thursday, March 25, Laura Ingraham of Fox News interviewed him. This interview, which is 26 minutes long, is excellent. It covers the recent policy changes that have happened since Biden took office, including his first press conference that day, and ends with a discussion about Trump’s social media plans. Trump seems less sure about a new social media platform, saying that it would be rather complicated and that he enjoys his current communication streams on his website and Telegram.
The former president says he has been relaxing, yet keeping busy. It certainly looks like it.
On Wednesday, January 17, 2017, President Donald Trump announced his first ever Fake News Awards.
He did not announce them by voice, but RSBN did a great job going through every item:
On Monday, January 15, Politico quoted ‘experts’ — including Republicans — who said that Fake News Awards could violate White House and ethics rules.
That’s rich. Big Media are violating ethics rules every day by reporting falsehoods lies.
The president’s tweet appeared later than scheduled. The Washington Post was quick to pounce before …
… and after …
But, once again, Fakey winner WaPo was wrong.
The GOP (Republican Party) page crashed from all the traffic:
This generated a greater American buzz than big-ticket award ceremonies:
https://twitter.com/thebradfordfile/status/953820574257745920
Gateway Pundit reported (emphases mine):
Internet giants Google, Twitter and AOL publish the most popular trending subjects. And Wednesday night the most popular subject on all three sites was Trump’s Fake News Awards.
Even the trendy celeb news site TMZ covered it:
President Donald Trump came through on presenting “The Fakies” … his 2017 Fake News Awards. He teased it up as “The Most Dishonest and Corrupt Media Awards of the Year” … and here are the HUGE winners (losers?) in his words. No shocker, CNN took the most trophies.
The tweet below has a screenshot of the winners, as posted on Legal Insurrection:
The GOP rightly introduced the results — including sources — with this:
2017 was a year of unrelenting bias, unfair news coverage, and even downright fake news. Studies have shown that over 90% of the media’s coverage of President Trump is negative.
That is true.
Paul Krugman discredited
How wrong could Paul Krugman be? This is what happens when personal bias obliterates objectivity:
Donald J Thump — of Thump: The First Bundred Days — tweeted:
https://twitter.com/POTUSThump/status/953818108501876737
Here’s a page from the book, for children — and adults — alike:
https://twitter.com/colink228/status/953379431363461120
Nothing for CNN’s Acosta
CNN’s Jim Acosta did not receive a Fakey:
https://twitter.com/citizenpress76/status/953817523664969728
He was told to leave after a press briefing in the Oval Office the other day in front of President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.
Of course, Acosta paints himself to be a victim:
That was far from his first offence against Trump and his administration, which dates back to the post-election transition period in 2016.
Regarding this incident and Acosta’s history, The Conservative Treehouse sums it up perfectly:
CNN Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta has a history of rude journalistic behavior and disrespect that has never before been allowed in the White House.
… the CNN journalist exhibited a level of disrespectful behavior that should lead to his White House press credentials being revoked permanently.
In a lesser offence, last year, Acosta insisted that CNN reports the truth:
This is how Big Media see themselves:
How public sees media
This is the most accurate description summing up the media:
Praying Medic has a good take on Big Media stories from the past year, starting at No. 12:
Someone replied with this item about MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow:
https://twitter.com/StrikklyRealDea/status/953777711037607936
Fake news remembered
Many of us remember not only the fake news but also the omissions from the news cycle in 2016:
https://twitter.com/Dangerous_Troll/status/953446573710614528
Fake news can cost lives.
What will it take for these ridiculously overpaid so-and-sos to stop it?
Earlier this week, I posted about an anti-Christmas message from 2014 that the Washington Post recycled this year.
There is more news about WaPo to tell.
A WaPo reader is upset
Jean-Marie Simon, who has read WaPo for 20 years, gave the paper information about her Christmas flight on United. Simon had bought a first-class ticket — seat 1A — only to find that she had been bumped by congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas).
The Daily Mail has the full story with photos and Simon’s relevant Facebook posts. It is not surprising that WaPo did not want to cover it. What is surprising is that Simon, a schoolteacher, thought they would do so (Facebook post courtesy of Reddit):
Here’s another — albeit facetious — view of the situation. Courtesy of 8chan:
One wonders if Simon will continue to read WaPo after this.
Perhaps this incident red-pilled her.
The Post
In other WaPo news, a movie — The Post — made its debut before Christmas. The New York Post gave it three out of four stars.
This film documents how WaPo increased its national prominence as a newspaper.
The story is about the Pentagon Papers, which was a huge exposé in 1971 about how Lyndon Johnson’s administration lied about the Vietnam War. Daniel Ellsberg was the Edward Snowden of his day. He had worked on the papers, a study officially called United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense.
Ellsberg and a friend, Anthony Russo, photocopied the pages in 1969 and approached a few political luminaries to see if they would be interested in disclosing it. Henry Kissinger, who was Richard Nixon’s national security adviser at the time, declined. So did two Democrat legislators.
In 1971, Ellsberg approached a reporter at the New York Times, giving him 43 volumes the following month. These were not published until June 13 that year. The excerpts were dubbed The Pentagon Papers.
The Nixon administration quickly tried — but failed — to stop the NYT from publishing another excerpt on June 14. Although one would have thought Nixon — a Republican — would have relished this as Johnson was a Democrat, Henry Kissinger told him that allowing the excerpts to continue would be dangerous, as nothing would prevent newspapers from publishing dirty laundry from his administration.
Oh, the irony — think Watergate, which WaPo broke with daily coverage from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Furthermore, the Nixon administration argued that Ellsberg and his friend Russo were guilty of a felony because they were circulating classified documents.
Attorney General John Mitchell and Nixon obtained a federal injunction forcing the NYT to stop publication after three articles. The NYT appealed and the case New York Times Co. v. United States (403 U.S. 713) quickly ended up in the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Ellsberg had given other portions of the study to WaPo reporter Ben Bagdikian, who took them to the paper’s legendary editor, Ben Bradlee. WaPo began publishing the excerpts on June 18.
Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist asked WaPo to stop publishing, but WaPo refused. Rehnquist tried — but failed — to get an injunction issued in US district court.
Ultimately, the NYT won the case in the Supreme Court on June 30, 1971. Fifteen other newspapers began publishing parts of the Pentagon Papers. In 1973, all charges against Ellsberg and Russo were dismissed — because of theft and bribery by the Nixon administration with regard to the case.
The Post shows how WaPo decided to publish the Pentagon Papers with all the drama involved.
The film also shows the male-dominated world of Katharine Graham, the only female publisher of a notable newspaper at the time. She was WaPo‘s publisher from 1969 to 1979. She then became chairman of the board and CEO before relinquishing the latter position in 1993. She continued to serve as chairman of the board until her death in 2001 at the age of 84.
Graham wisely put investigative reporting front and centre in a successful effort to ensure the NYT would not grab all the big Washington stories, such as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.
The New York Post‘s review says that, when this film was made, a female occupant of the White House was envisioned for 2017.
So much for that.
The present occupant makes much out of fake news, predominant in today’s WaPo and the NYT.
Philip Graham
Katharine Meyer Graham rose to the top at WaPo because she succeeded her husband Philip. Also of note is that her father, Eugene Meyer, bought the paper in a bankruptcy auction in 1933. Philip Graham succeeded his father-in-law as publisher in 1946.
Philip Graham (1915-1963) was an interesting character with a lot of Deep State connections. Spartacus Educational has a well-researched entry on him. Do read it all, including the footnotes. A summary with excerpts follows.
He was born in a small town in South Dakota. His parents relocated to Florida during his childhood. Graham ended up attending Harvard Law School and edited the Harvard Law Review.
He married Katharine Meyer in 1940, during which time he was a law clerk for the famous Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Graham joined the Army Air Corps in 1942. He worked for the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), William Donovan. In 1944:
Graham was recruited into the “Special Branch, a super-secret part of Intelligence, run by Colonel Al McCormick”. He later worked under General George Kenney, commander of the Allied Air Forces in the Southwest Pacific. Graham was sent to China where he worked with John K. Singlaub, Ray S. Cline, Richard Helms, E. Howard Hunt, Mitchell WerBell, Jake Esterline, Paul Helliwell, Robert Emmett Johnson and Lucien Conein. Others working in China at that time included Tommy Corcoran, Whiting Willauer and William Pawley.
From this, we can see that he was incredibly well-connected to power.
After the war, as the publisher for WaPo, he expanded his network further with a group of men known as the Georgetown Set. They included:
Frank Wisner, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Joseph Alsop, Stewart Alsop, Tracy Barnes, Thomas Braden, David Bruce, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen, Cord Meyer, James Angleton, William Averill Harriman, John McCloy, Felix Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper, James Reston, Allen W. Dulles and Paul Nitze.
Whilst this is showing my age, I grew up hearing and reading a lot of those names.
It is likely that Graham already knew some of those men from the war. Allen Dulles, to name but one, ran the New York OSS office.
Dulles headed the CIA during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. Richard Bissell worked with him. Cord Meyer was in the CIA. Meyer was involved with Project, or Operation, Mockingbird, which used big media outlets to drive a government narrative:
According to Katherine Graham, her husband worked overtime at the Post during the Bay of Pigs operation to protect the reputations of his friends who had organized the ill-fated venture.
By the time of the 1960 presidential campaign, Graham did what he could to get Lyndon Johnson in the vice presidential slot for John Kennedy:
Graham met Lyndon B. Johnson in 1953. Graham believed that one day Johnson would make a good president. Graham told Johnson that his main problem was that he was perceived in Washington as someone under the control of the Texas oil and gas industry. Graham added that his attitude towards civil rights was also hurting him with liberals in the North. He was advised to go a “bit beyond (Richard) Russell and yet far short of (Hubert) Humphrey”.
Graham was a supporter of the Democratic Party and did what he could to get Johnson the nomination in 1960. When John F. Kennedy defeated Johnson he sent Clark Clifford to ask Stuart Symington to be his running-mate. Symington accepted the post but said: “I bet you a hundred dollars that no matter what he says, Jack will not make me his running mate. He will have to pick Lyndon”.
In the background Graham and Joseph Alsop were attempting to persuade John F. Kennedy to appoint Lyndon B. Johnson instead. Despite the objection of Robert Kennedy and other leading advisers, Kennedy decided to replace Symington with Johnson.
Once Kennedy was in the White House, Graham succeeded in persuading him to appoint his (Graham’s) buddies to administration positions: Douglas Dillon as Secretary of the Treasury, Arthur Schlesinger (former OSS) as a presidential adviser and David Bruce as ambassador to London.
Graham was able to expand the Washington Post Company by purchasing a radio and a television station as well as Newsweek and two prominent art magazines:
The main person involved in arranging Graham’s takeover of other media companies was Fritz Beebe. He ran the law firm Cravath, Swaine, & Moore. This was the company owned by Al McCormick, who Graham met during the war. Averell Harriman was another one involved in these negotiations.
Behind the scenes, things were less rosy, Even before Eugene Meyer died in 1959, a rift was growing between Philip and Katharine — Kay, to her friends. Graham’s mental state was not very good, either. Meyer wondered whether he should turn the company over to his son-in-law:
The Post publisher took a mistress, Robin Webb, whom he set up in a large house in Washington and a farm outside of the city. A heavy drinker who reportedly had manic-depressive tendencies, Graham, in some respects, was his own worst enemy, stridently abusive to his wife, both privately and publicly.
Katharine Graham’s biographer, Deborah Davis, posited that Graham was beginning to bother the CIA. After his second nervous breakdown he talked openly about how troubling he found Operation Mockingbird in terms of manipulating journalists:
He said it to the CIA… He turned against the newsmen and politicians whose code was mutual trust and, strangely, silence. The word was that Phil Graham could not be trusted. Graham was actually under surveillance by somebody. Davis has noted that one of Graham’s assistants “recorded his mutterings on scraps of paper.”
Others suggest that Graham had been damaged from undergoing CIA and other psychiatric treatments involving mind-altering drugs.
Graham told one of his close friends, WaPo attorney Edward Bennett Williams, that he wanted a divorce and planned on rewriting his will to leave everything — including the Washington Post Company — to his mistress instead of to Kay.
Williams was able to delay a divorce, but Graham rewrote his will three times in the spring of 1963. The last version omitted Kay altogether.
Then, Graham addressed a newspaper publishers convention in Arizona in a tirade about the CIA and Washington:
even to the point of exposing his friend John Kennedy’s affair with Mary Meyer, the wife of a top CIA official, Cord Meyer (no relation to Katharine Graham).
Katharine heard about it and flew to Phoenix:
and snatched up her husband who was captured after a struggle, put in a straitjacket and sedated. He was then flown to an exclusive mental clinic in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Md.
On the morning of Aug. 3, 1963, Katharine Graham reportedly told friends that Philip was “better” and coming home.
Suicides
That day in 1963, Philip Graham killed himself at home while Katharine was napping upstairs. The New York Post gives us this detail that other media outlets often suppress. He:
committed suicide at age 48 by shooting himself with a 28-gauge shotgun in 1963, days after being released from a psychiatric hospital following six weeks of treatment.
As he was not of sound mind when he died, his will was declared invalid. As he died intestate, Katharine assumed control of the Washington Post Company.
On December 20, 2017, one of the Grahams’ sons, William, 69, also committed suicide. He did not work at WaPo. He was a lawyer and law professor at UCLA. In later life, he turned to philanthropy. He died at his home in Los Angeles.
WaPo reported:
The cause was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, said his brother Donald E. Graham, a former Post publisher and chief executive.
Like Philip, William also left behind a wife and grown children. I hope they find comfort in the months ahead.
William did not live to see the national release of The Post.
The Washington Post — motto ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ — tweeted this Christmas message:
The article is from 2014! Yet, WaPo persists three years later.
Raphael Lataster is a lecturer in religious studies at the University of Sydney. ‘Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn’t add up.’ is a most shallow article. Excerpts follow:
Did a man called Jesus of Nazareth walk the earth? Discussions over whether the figure known as the “Historical Jesus” actually existed primarily reflect disagreements among atheists. Believers, who uphold the implausible and more easily-dismissed “Christ of Faith” (the divine Jesus who walked on water), ought not to get involved …
The first problem we encounter when trying to discover more about the Historical Jesus is the lack of early sources. The earliest sources only reference the clearly fictional Christ of Faith. These early sources, compiled decades after the alleged events, all stem from Christian authors eager to promote Christianity – which gives us reason to question them. The authors of the Gospels fail to name themselves, describe their qualifications, or show any criticism with their foundational sources – which they also fail to identify. Filled with mythical and non-historical information, and heavily edited over time, the Gospels certainly should not convince critics to trust even the more mundane claims made therein …
Also important are the sources we don’t have. There are no existing eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus. All we have are later descriptions of Jesus’ life events by non-eyewitnesses, most of whom are obviously biased. Little can be gleaned from the few non-Biblical and non-Christian sources, with only Roman scholar Josephus and historian Tacitus having any reasonable claim to be writing about Jesus within 100 years of his life. And even those sparse accounts are shrouded in controversy, with disagreements over what parts have obviously been changed by Christian scribes (the manuscripts were preserved by Christians), the fact that both these authors were born after Jesus died (they would thus have probably received this information from Christians), and the oddity that centuries go by before Christian apologists start referencing them …
Given the poor state of the existing sources, and the atrocious methods used by mainstream Biblical historians, the matter will likely never be resolved. In sum, there are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus’ historical existence – if not to think it outright improbable.
WaPo published the article on December 18, 2014. On December 24, Raphael Lataster’s former professor, John Dickson, wrote a rebuttal for Australia’s ABC. Dickson is an Honorary Fellow of the Department of Ancient History, Macquarie University, and he teaches a unit called ‘Historical Jesus to Written Gospels’ for Sydney University’s Department of Jewish Studies.
‘It’s Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas … Mythicism’s in the Air’ is worthwhile reading. Excerpts follow (emphases mine):
You can almost set your clock by it. Another article appears arguing Jesus never lived – so Christmas must be upon us.
This time, however, I was particularly interested, not because Raphael Lataster’s piece in The Conversation had anything new to say but because it was written by a young man who just three years ago sat in my Sydney University class on “Historical Jesus to Written Gospels.”
I baulked at writing a reply until, amazingly, his article was picked up by the Washington Post of all places. Such is the appetite for the extraordinary!
Lataster has also written a book entitled There Was No Jesus, There is No God, a rather unsubtle contribution to the growing “new atheist” genre. And he is on his way to completing his PhD at Sydney University – notably in religious philosophy, not in history …
But my concern is not with atheism, religious philosophy, or even Christian apologetics. It is with history. As his former lecturer, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that Raphael’s 1000 words on Jesus would not receive a pass mark in any history class I can imagine, even if it were meant to be a mere “personal reflection” on contemporary Jesus scholarship. Lataster is a better student than his piece suggests …
First, Lataster has offered an academic contrivance, as he seeks to give respectability to what is known as “mythicism” – the view that Jesus started out as a purely celestial figure revealed in dreams and visions to prophetic figures like the apostle Paul and only later written into history-sounding texts like the Gospels …
“Mythicists” are the historical equivalent of the anti-vaccination crowd in medical science. They are controversial enough to get media attention. They have just enough doctors, or doctors in training, among them to establish a kind of “plausible deniability.” But anyone who dips into the thousands of secular monographs and journal articles on the historical Jesus will quickly discover that mythicists are regarded by 99.9% of the scholarly community as complete “outliers,” the fringe of the fringe …
Secondly, no student – let alone an aspiring scholar – could get away with suggesting that Christians “ought not to get involved” in the study of the historical Jesus. This is intellectual bigotry and has no place in academia, or journalism. I would likewise fail any Christian student who suggested that atheists should not research Jesus because they have an agenda. Nobody in the vast field of historical Jesus scholarship operates with such an us-and-them mentality …
Thirdly, Raphael’s claim that the letters of Paul “overwhelmingly support the ‘celestial Jesus’ theory” is an indefensible exaggeration. It would have been valid to point out that a case for a mythical Jesus in Paul’s letters has recently been offered by atheist apologist and historian Richard Carrier. But one cannot talk of “overwhelming support” for this idea …
Lataster surely knows what every historical Jesus course makes plain: Paul’s evidence for the historical figure of Jesus is widely regarded as particularly early and significant. His letters weren’t written to defend a historical personage, and yet Paul refers in passing to Jesus as “born of a woman,” being a descendant of King David “according to the flesh,” having Twelve apostles, eating a final meal, being betrayed, and being crucified and buried. There is a mountain of data standing in the way of any claim of “overwhelming support” for the celestial Jesus theory.
Fourthly, there are numerous idiosyncratic statements throughout Lataster’s article which he passes off as accepted insights of historical study. For example, the claim that the Gospels are all “anonymous” is no more accurate than insisting that a modern biography is anonymous on the grounds that the biographer’s name appears only on the front and back cover of the book not in the body of the work. Of course, the Gospel writers did not begin by writing, “I, Mark, now want to write about Jesus of Nazareth …” But wherever we have a surviving front or back page of a Gospel manuscript, we find a superscript indicating the biographer’s name, and there is absolute uniformity of that name: euaggelion kata Markon, euaggelion kata Lukan and so on.
Finally, Raphael Lataster reveals that his real interest is in sceptical apologetics rather than ancient history when he opines, “There are no existing eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus. All we have are later descriptions of Jesus’ life events by non-eyewitnesses.” Leaving aside the question of whether there are eyewitness accounts in the New Testament – many think there are – such a statement overlooks the fact that virtually everything we know from ancient history comes to us from sources that are neither “contemporary” with events, nor written by eyewitnesses. What we know of Emperor Tiberius, for instance, comes mainly from the Roman chronicler Tacitus, who writes some 80 years after the emperor’s death. This is typical of ancient history, and it poses no dilemma to the contemporary scholar because it is clear that authors such as Tacitus, like the Gospel writers, employed earlier sources within their works.
… In any case, to suggest that the Gospels are somehow dodgy because they are not contemporaneous accounts of Jesus indicates a basic unfamiliarity with the discipline of history. And it underlines the impropriety of a student in religious philosophy, whatever his faith perspective, assuming the mantle of academic historian. Anyone may express an opinion, of course, but opinion should not be offered under the guise of expertise …
There is just an urgent need for all of us to be more cautious before making (or accepting) grandiose claims like, “there are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus’ historical existence – if not to think it outright improbable.” Fail.
Thank you, Dr Dickson.
I found the WaPo tweet to Lataster’s article at the beginning of Imperator_Rex’s Christmas message, excerpted below:
1. The irony? Progressive liberals like to advertize their atheism and ridicule religion, but they’re actually some of the most religious people in history.
2. They have simply replaced worship of an external God with a new object of worship: themselves. Self-worship is the core of their perverse religiosity.
3. This makes them extremely gullible to con artists and evil people, who exploit the narcissism of liberal progressives while they serve their malign (criminal) self-interests …
5. If you know the right language and words to use, liberal progressives will give you a leave pass EVERY TIME. They will let you get away with anything, so long as you keep their narcissistic supply going.
Imperator_Rex then goes into a discussion about Obama and Obama worshippers.
19. Their extremely religious cult followers – such as the nauseating people who wrote the WaPo article at the start of this thread – were willing accomplices.
21. They rail against God and His believers, without realizing that they are the most extreme zealots around. In their arrogance they fail to understand that we have been warned about their type for millennia.
22. ‘If there arises among you a prophet or a dreamer of dreams..saying, ‘Let us go after other gods and let us serve them,’ you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams’ – Deuteronomy 12:29
23. ‘Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many’.
– Matthew 24:4-5
24. Whether you are religious or not, believe or not, Jesus’ powerful words resonate down the millennia. As does his request for us to commit to the way of the truth, the way & the light.
25. On this special day, let us reject the false song of the liberal progressives. The song that aims to persuade us to give power to evil men and women, as well as to anaesthetize us with sweet sounding lies.
26. We MUST face down our enemies. They will not go away. We live in a perpetual war between good and evil, light and dark, truth and lies. Whether we like it or not.
27. There will always be evil and bad people who seek to cover us in darkness for their malign ends. And their useful idiots, as this shameful WaPo piece proves.
‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’. Indeed it does, WaPo, indeed it does. The stark irony of this motto is inescapable.
30. And let us pray for the eventual defeat of America’s greatest enemies, as well as their cult members and propagandists. We are almost there – they are doomed – but we must remain vigilant.
Jesus & his disciples – the first Christians – would expect no less.
The end.
Just so.
I will have more about the Washington Post soon.
James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has struck again, this time with two undercover videos about the Washington Post.
It seems WaPo management took as long as the New York Times did a few months ago to catch on to the sting:
This video came out on Monday, November 27:
The description reads:
In newly released undercover video, Washington Post National Security Correspondent Dan Lamothe and Director of Product Joey Marburger speak to the paper’s hidden agenda. Evidently, covering Trump the way they do is good business, even though it’s fake news.
Dan Lamothe told two Project Veritas reporters that he thinks the paper goes ‘over the top’ sometimes in its reporting, particularly when it’s about President Donald Trump. However, he said he thought that the New York Times and CNN are much worse in their coverage.
Lamothe, probably not a Trump fan, draws a distinction between the news side of the paper and the editorial side. He said the editorial board is like a ‘god’ in that it is trying to ‘educate’ the reader to adopt a certain point of view. He thinks the editorial side blows Trump out of proportion:
Woah, I work for that place?
He says that everyone at WaPo is obsessed with Trump, especially his tweets. He laments that such an obsession:
draws the oxygen out of the room.
and:
They definitely don’t like Trump…
Also:
I can’t tell you how many times we get an email at work: ‘Oh did you see what (Trump) just tweeted? What are we gonna do about it?
Joey Marburger’s position as Director of Product involves the non-print aspect of the paper. He told the Project Veritas reporter that he talks to owner Jeff Bezos ‘all the time’.
One of Marburger’s assignments was to work closely with Bezos in finding a slogan for the newspaper. Whereas Lamothe finds the slogan ‘Democracy dies in darkness’ over the top, Marburger says that Bezos thought of it himself. When it came time to choose one of three slogans, Bezos decided on ‘Democracy dies in darkness’. Marburger confirms that Bezos is referring to Trump.
At the end of the video, James O’Keefe pointed out that, like other Big Media outlets, the thing to look at is what WaPo does not report. He says:
Democracy can also die in silence.
Lamothe reacted on Twitter:
The next Project Veritas video appeared on Wednesday, November 29. It features an interview with National Security Reporter Adam Entous, who is the main correspondent on the notional Trump-Russia collusion story:
The last part of the video features Melissa McCullough, Director of Newsroom Operations. She cannot stand Trump. The description reads:
In this all new Project Veritas video, two Washington Post employees are caught on hidden camera expressing their biases and acknowledging that the Trump-Russia collusion. O’Keefe also takes a swing at The Washington Post, saying “The media wants me to kneel down and apologize. I will not.”
The theme of this video is:
Entous says there is no solid evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians to win in 2016, which is the same thing as CNN’s John Bonifield — and Van Jones, who worked in the Obama administration — say.
Entous tells Project Veritas that the Russia narrative is a:
f*cking crap shoot, f*cking black box … maybe it doesn’t exist at all.
Also:
Our reporting has not taken us to a place where I would be able to say with any confidence that the result of it is going to be the president being guilty of being in cahoots with the Russians.
McCullough just says a few anti-Trump things then concludes:
I shouldn’t be saying these things because we don’t… We’re not supposed to really talk about that kind of stuff.
So, the WaPo presents news stories but if one only read the op-ed pages, the slant would be really biased:
On November 27, the day the first video dropped, Project Veritas’s offices were vandalised:
O’Keefe has written a book about what his undercover reporters have revealed:
On Tuesday, December 6, O’Keefe won an Impact award:
He also gave a speech:
O’Keefe said that people are afraid to speak up because they do not want to have their reputations — and careers — ruined.
The pressure from media and other elites is designed to intimidate citizen journalists like O’Keefe and whistleblowers.
Thank goodness there are gutsy people like them to tell the truth, especially at great personal risk.
Yesterday, I wrote about how wrong the Left, including the media, are about relief efforts by America’s FEMA and military in Puerto Rico.
The media are falling over themselves trying to make Maria Donald Trump’s Katrina.
Here is an update on media misinformation about what is currently happening on the devastated island.
USNS Comfort
Yesterday’s post had an item about the US Navy ship Comfort. Hillary Clinton stuck her oar in on Twitter complaining it hadn’t been sent yet.
Afterwards, the Comfort received permission to sail.
As one will discover below, that had nothing to do with Hillary, but the Washington Post made out as if her tweet persuaded President Donald Trump to send the ship.
This is what WaPo reporter Dan Lamothe tweeted:
In reality, because there wasn’t a Puerto Rican port able to receive the Comfort, she could not start her journey.
Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse explains more about Comfort and preparing her (emphases mine below):
The USNS Comfort is a 900′ (length) x 100′ (width) hospital. It was built by modifying a 1970’s era oil tanker (old hull design – non bulbous bow), and it weighs approximately 67,000 tons. It’s essentially still an old oil tanker in water placement design; meaning it needs a port to receive it on arrival.
Additionally, it takes approximately five days to activate Comfort into service. Fueling, supplying, and the engineering to prepare for ocean passage of a massive vessel is a lengthy process. She also needs personnel to arrive and stage etc. All said, the logistics and engineering takes five days prep time.
Sundance, whose Twitter account is The Last Refuge, rightly took on Dan Lamothe over this misinformation (emphases in the original below):
When CTH challenged the WaPo author, Dan Lamothe, about this factual “spin-up” time, and how Comfort was ordered to prepare PRIOR to Clinton’s tweeting about it, Lamothe admits Clinton didn’t have anything to do with Comfort’s activation.
Here is some of the exchange:
Which received this reply from others reading the thread:
https://twitter.com/SurburbanCowboy/status/913080612000481281
It is sad: WaPo shamelessly peddling such a load of old cobblers (nonsense).
As Sundance explains (emphases mine):
USNS Comfort’s activation was put on hold (“stand down”) because: A) there was no port that survived the storm in a capacity able to receive her; and B) the governor of Puerto Rico requested she not be sent …
Puerto Rico is an island. The first job is to get the ports open. Every single aspect of relief and recovery is dependent on getting all ports operational. Nothing matters more.
That is exactly what FEMA, Homeland Security (coast guard), and the U.S. Navy understood even before the hurricane hit the island. All assets were staged to ensure the first job was to get the ports open.
The relief lag, and any supply deficiency, is specifically related to the time it took (and takes) to open the ports.
FEMA
That conveniently brings me to FEMA.
Brock Long, the FEMA administrator, gave a brief interview to Fox News. The reporter challenges him about petrol distribution on the island. He explains all the efforts going on to make that possible. In some places, petrol is available, but Governor Rossello has rightly rationed it to 10 gallons per person. The reporter doesn’t seem to get it, thinking there is no petrol, so why not lift the Jones Act, which was done for Florida after Hurricane Irma. Brock Long tells her that the petrol is there, it just needs to get distributed once roads are clear — and electricity is restored in order to operate the pumps:
Sundance had a good column on this, excerpted below. He points out another issue, which is that drivers have not shown up to transport petrol and basic necessities:
The lifting of the “Jones Act” to allow any flagged ocean carrier to deliver supplies is not needed because the ports are backlogged with ample supplies and fuel while the Puerto Rican government does nothing to transport them.
Neither FEMA, nor the DoD, can be expected to take the place of municipal authorities; yet that is exactly what it appears the Puerto Rican government expects.
FUBAR.
If you want to see proof of this, CBS News correspondent David Begnaud shows full containers just waiting to be unloaded and transported. He also talks about the clear absence of lorries and drivers. No one knows if they cannot get to work or if, as Sundance says, they expect FEMA and the military to transport them. This is worth watching:
Thomas P Bossert, President Trump’s assistant for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, gave this update yesterday:
Puerto Rico’s governor is going to have to see where his men are to help deliver fuel and supplies.
Geraldo Rivera
Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera has been sent to Puerto Rico to cover news there as well as find his family members.
Part of this video shows him finding his Aunt Ellie. A tree fell through her house. She is unharmed, fortunately, and Geraldo — as he has been known for decades — later helped clear the tree:
He says in the video that families are worried about their loved ones. With the phone masts down, there is no way they can contact them.
Rivera said elsewhere that he is pledging $10 million of his own money to the Maria relief and rebuilding efforts.
Although his video above is good, it should be noted that Geraldo gives a positive version of events when he appears on Fox and Friends and a negative one when he appears later in the day on Shepard Smith’s show.
Two different audiences, two different versions of events.
Looting
Looting started in some areas of Puerto Rico as soon as Maria left the island.
Spare a prayer for this man who manages a supermarket that got looted — and for his boss, the owner.
Don’t think that these are hungry young men. They were very energetic when breaking in — and destroying the whole store, which is now flooded. These young criminals stole alcohol, cigarettes and meat. They broke into cash registers. They broke the shop’s industrial lift. Everything will have to be replaced.
Even the CNN guy had to back off asking whether we shouldn’t have sympathy for these vandals. The manager politely stated that they looted for personal benefit:
https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/913223288595402752
While we pray for all of Puerto Rico, please pray especially for this store manager and the store’s owner as well as others whose livelihoods have been seriously harmed or destroyed by looting.
More tomorrow, specifically on the precarious state of Puerto Rico’s infrastructure.
Fallout from President Donald Trump’s Phoenix rally and Charlottesville continues.
Katie Pavlich of Townhall.com told a Fox News panel after the August 22 rally that Trump thought it was important to defend his statements about Charlottesville and to express his disgust at the media and others on the Left who are smearing his supporters. Start at the 2:40 mark:
On August 23, the Washington Post had a reply to Trump and his supporters in the form of an editorial from a satanist. The Revd Franklin Graham rightly called the events of Charlottesville on August 12 ‘satanic’. The satanist’s editorial takes issue with that — of course — and puts the blame on Christians.
The Daily Wire has a good analysis of the story and says that WaPo is attempting to create an anti-Christian narrative. That is probably true. It is dangerous:
Every time you start to believe The Washington Post cannot go any further off the leftwing rails, along comes another sweetheart of lunacy. Seven days ago, WaPo published an editorial justifying violence against Trump supporters. If you thought that was some pretty far out stuff, a few days later we were served up with an editorial that openly called for banning conservative speech on campus.
Crazy, right?
Nutso, right?
What is going on here? Why is one of the leading establishment news outlets in the country offering its imprimatur to dangerous lunatics advocating in favor of political violence and fascistic speech-killing policies?
Come on. Don’t be cute. We all know why. This is WaPo’s way of slowly but surely legitimizing these ideas, and both of these un-American ideas, silencing the Right through the use of force, are ideas the mainstream Left have secretly longed for for decades. When you boil the Left down to its essence, what you get are violent tyrants all-too eager to control and organize society at the point of a gun.
The truth is, as the Daily Wire points out, that Christians abolished the slave trade in the UK and the US:
Although it is simply a fact that Christians practicing Christian beliefs, that Christians who properly interpreted scripture became the heart and soul of the American abolitionist movement, it is also true that it was through the words and actions of devout Christian William Wilberforce that, after thousands and thousands of years of slavery, civilization’s eyes were finally opened to the basic idea that slavery is an evil, a concept no one had ever considered previously.
When a prominent national newspaper like the Washington Post gives space to a satanist to smear Christians, you know something is very wrong with American intelligentsia. Because of WaPo‘s influence, this narrative could run and run among ignorant, albeit well educated, people. What a sad moment.
Someone should try to get space in WaPo to write about where slavery still exists today and under what faith. It certainly isn’t Christianity.
Churchmouse Campanologist 