Anti-Trump “assassination porn” on magazine covers, Rebel Media via YouTube, February 6, 2017
Archive for February 6, 2017
Anti-Trump “assassination porn” on magazine covers
February 6, 2017Raymond Ibrahim: How Trump Can Help Persecuted Christians and Protect Americans with One Move
February 6, 2017
During a recent interview on CBN, President Trump was asked if he thinks America should prioritize persecuted Christians as refugees. He responded:
Yes. Yes, they’ve been horribly treated. If you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, or at least very, very tough, to get into the United States. If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair — everybody was persecuted, in all fairness — but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair. So we are going to help them.
Trump’s response is far different from that given by Barrack Hussein Obama back in November 2015. Then, as president, he described the idea of giving preference to Christian refugees as “shameful”: “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion,” he had added.
While Obama was making such lofty admonishments, his administration was quietly discriminating against Mideast Christians in a myriad of ways — including, as Trump pointed out above, by very obviously favoring Muslim refugees over Christian ones. Indeed, despite the U.S. government’s own acknowledgement that ISIS was committing genocide against Syrian Christians — and not against fellow Sunni Muslims — the Obama administration took in 5,435 Muslims, almost all of whom were Sunni, but only 28 Christians. Considering that Christians are 10 percent of Syria’s population, to be merely on an equal ratio with Muslims entering America, at least 500 Christians should’ve been granted asylum, not 28.
But questions of equal numbers aside, the idea of prioritizing Christian refugees over Muslims (which I argued for back in 2015) is not only more humane; it brings benefits to America as well.
Consider:
Unlike Muslims, Christian minorities are being singled out and persecuted simply because of their despised religious identity. From a humanitarian point of view — and humanitarianism is the reason being cited for accepting millions of refugees — Christians should receive top priority simply because they are the most persecuted group in the Middle East. Even before the Islamic State was formed, Christians were, and continue to be, targeted by Muslims in general — Muslim individuals, Muslim mobs, and Muslim regimes, from Muslim countries of all races (Arab, African, Asian) — and for the same reason: Christians are infidel number one. (See Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians for hundreds of anecdotes before the rise of ISIS as well as the Muslim doctrines that create such hate for Christians.)
Conversely, Muslim refugees — as opposed to the many ISIS and other jihadi sympathizers posing as “refugees” — are not fleeing religious persecution (as mentioned, 99% of Muslim refugees accepted into the U.S. are, like ISIS, Sunnis), but chaos created by the violent and supremacist teachings of their own religion. Hence why when large numbers of Muslims enter Western nations — in Germany, Sweden, France, the UK — tension, crimes, rapes, and terrorism soar.
Indeed, what more proof is needed than the fact that so-called Muslim “refugees” are throwing Christians overboard during their boat voyages across the Mediterranean to Europe? Or that Muslim majority refugee centers in Europe are essentially microcosms of Muslim majority nations: there, Christian minorities continue to be persecuted. One report found that 88% of the 231 Christian refugees interviewed in Germany have suffered religiously motivated persecution in the form of insults, death threats, and sexual assaults. Some were pressured to convert to Islam. “I really didn’t know that after coming to Germany I would be harassed because of my faith in the very same way as back in Iran,” one Christian refugee said.
Is persecuting religious minorities the behavior of people who are in need of refugee status in America? Or is this behavior yet another reminder that it is non-Muslims from the Middle East who are truly in need of sanctuary?
The U.S. should further prioritize Christian refugees because U.S. foreign policies are directly responsible for exacerbating their persecution. Christians did not flee from Bashar Assad’s Syria, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. Their systematic persecution—to the point of genocide — began only after the U.S. interfered in those nations under the pretext of “democracy.” All that these policies did is unleash the jihadi forces that the dictators had long kept suppressed. Now the Islamic State is deeply embedded in precisely all three nations, enslaving, raping, and slaughtering Christians and other minorities.
Surely if U.S. policies were responsible for unleashing the full-blown jihad on Christians, the least humanitarian America can do is prioritize Christians as refugees? In fact, and as Trump pointed out during his CBN interview, it’s the opposite: according to one report, from May 1 to May 23 alone, 499 Syrian refugees were received into the U.S, 99% of them Sunnis. Zero Christians were admitted.
Questions of fairness and humanitarianism aside, there are also benefits in absorbing Mideast Christians refugees instead of Muslims. Christians are easily assimilated in Western societies, due to the shared Christian heritage and outlook, and regularly become productive members of society. Muslims follow a completely different blueprint, Islamic law, or Sharia — which calls for constant hostility (jihad) against all non-Muslims, and advocates any number of distinctly anti-Western practices (misogyny, sex slavery, death for “blasphemers” and “apostates,” etc.). Hence it’s no surprise that many Muslim asylum seekers are anti-Western at heart — or, as a German police union chief once said, Muslim migrants “despise our country and laugh at our justice.”
Mideast Christians also bring trustworthy language and cultural skills. They understand the Middle Eastern — including Islamic — mindset and can help the U.S. understand it. And unlike Muslims, Christians have no “conflicting loyalty” issues: Islamic law forbids Muslims from befriending or aiding “infidels” against fellow Muslims (click here to see some of the treachery this leads to in the U.S. and here to see the treachery Christians have suffered from their longtime Muslim neighbors and “friends”). No such threat exists among Mideast Christians. They, too, render unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s — not to mention they have no loyalty to the Islamic ideologies that made their lives a living hell in the Middle East, the Islamic ideologies that are also responsible for jihadi terror in America. Thus a win-win: the U.S. and Mideast Christians complement each other, if only in that they share the same foe.
All the above reasons — from those that offer humanitarian relief to the true victims of persecution and genocide, to those that offer stability and benefits to the United States — are unassailable in their logic.
President Trump understands this — even if most liberals and lying media don’t.
Leading German Philosopher: ‘If you Oppose mass Immigration You’re Extremely Backwards’
February 6, 2017Leading German Philosopher: ‘If you Oppose mass Immigration You’re Extremely Backwards’ Gatestone EU, Willem Cornax, February 6, 2017
Markus Gabriel is a German philosopher, recently dubbed the “young god of philosophy“. He starts his interview with the Dutch website Brainwash.nl by saying:
“The problem of the refugee crisis is not the refugees. It’s us. (…) The idea of a million Muslims coming to Europe sounds terrible for someone with the mindframe from the 16th century.”
The mass influx of refugees should not be questioned because it “is based on Enlightenment.” Government documented refugees are not a threat to someone with a 21st Century mind frame. Why? Let Gabriel tell you:
“…this shouldn’t be threatening for a very simple reason. These people have rights. These rights are laid down in various constitutions (treaties) and if you deny these people the rights that they have you are thereby undermining European values.”
As for Merkel inviting refugees to come in:
“It is not that Angela Merkel is so nice and moral and lets all the refugees in to help poor people because the Germans were evil in the past and now we should be nicer. (…) She is just doing her job.”
That is the Nuremberg Defense. Nazi officials used it at the Nuremberg trials to deflect (personal) moral responsibility for committed atrocities.
Surely there are better arguments to comfort victims of terrorism, rape, sexual assault, abuse, murder, harassment, theft, burglary by people documented as refugees. Luckily, Gabriel himself provides an argument to soften the pain:
“The fear of the other is the fear of ourselves. The fear that we Europeans do not trust our European values. Our European values are universal and that is the biggest achievement of modernity, Universalism. And that Universalism is threatened, or so we think. But the threat to universalism comes from within. It doesn’t come from the outside.”
Winston Churchill: Anti-German Hate Group Leader?
February 6, 2017Winston Churchill: Anti-German Hate Group Leader?, Jihad Watch,
(Hmmm. I wonder what analogy Mr. Spencer may be drawing. — DM)
Imagine if this were 1930, and the Southern Poverty Law Center existed, and it issued a lavishly illustrated, apparently meticulously documented report on critics of the Nazis, dubbing them “anti-German hate group leaders.” There were profiles of Winston Churchill, Edgar Mowrer, and other early critics of Hitler, noting when they had made false claims about Hitler (false, that is, according to the Nazis) and charging them with “hate” and “anti-German bias.”
Imagine then that the mainstream media, whenever it quoted Churchill, Mowrer, or the others, described them as “anti-German,” and noted that the Southern Poverty Law Center said that they were hate group leaders. It would call them “rabble rousers” and “wide boys” and “demogogues.” Quotes from Goebbels and Göring would also invariably be included, calmly explaining the truth of the matters at hand and patiently answering questions about what a shame it was that they had to deal with the likes of Churchill. This kind of coverage would be universal: critics of Nazism were never described in the mainstream media in anything but pejorative terms. Whenever they got mainstream media attention, they were challenged to respond to charges that they were “anti-German” and “spreading hate.” Their views were more often presented by the SPLC and others who dubbed them “anti-German” than by themselves. The leading authorities the media consulted about Hitler and Nazism were favorable to both, and opposed only to excessive violence by the Brownshirts, which they stressed was inconsistent with the spirit of Nazism, and had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Meanwhile, the critics were constantly vilified, ridiculed and mocked, and likened to the Ku Klux Klan and other genuinely hateful groups. People wrote that they wanted to attack them physically, and that it would be legitimate to do so.
Imagine that this situation prevailed, without any cracks in the edifice, for five years. Ten years. Fifteen years. Imagine that it prevailed as Hitler came to power, as he began persecuting the Jews, as he began his rearmament of Germany, as he bullied weak Western leaders, who were anxious to appease him anyway, into allowing him to take Austria and Czechoslovakia, and finally as he invaded Poland and the Western powers finally decided to fight back.
Imagine then that every step that Britain, France, and ultimately the Soviet Union and the United States took to defend themselves against Hitler and the Nazis was decried by the mainstream media and a huge segment of the American public as “anti-German” and a manifestation of hatred and bigotry. Every step FDR took to prosecute the war was denounced and even voided by federal court orders; he was derided as a fool, a criminal, an authoritarian ruler, and there were open calls not only for his impeachment, but for a coup to remove him from power, and even numerous calls for his assassination.
In that scenario, which side do you think would have won the war?
France: Le Pen Launches Presidential Campaign
February 6, 2017France: Le Pen Launches Presidential Campaign, Gatestone Institute, Soeren Kern, February 6, 2017
(Please see also, European Conservative Parties Are Not ‘Far Right’. — DM)
“The question is simple and cruel: will our children live in a free, independent, democratic country?” — Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front party.
“Economic globalization, which rejects any limits, has weakened the immune system of the nation by dispossessing it of its constituent elements: borders, national currency, the authority of its laws in conducting economic affairs, and thus allowing another world to be born and grow: Islamic fundamentalism.” — Marine Le Pen.
“Islamic fundamentalism instrumentalizes the principle of religious freedom in an attempt to impose patterns of thought that are clearly the opposite of ours. We do not want to live under the yoke or threat of Islamic fundamentalism.” — Marine Le Pen.
“Globalism is based, as we see, on the negation of the values on which France was built and on the principles in which the immense majority of French people still recognize themselves: the pre-eminence of the person and therefore its sacred character, individual freedom and therefore individual consent, national feeling and therefore national solidarity, equality of persons and therefore the refusal of situations of submission.” — Marine Le Pen.
“Those who come to France are to accept France, not to transform it to the image of their country of origin. If they want to live at home, they should have stayed at home.” — Marine Le Pen.
“In terms of terrorism, we do not intend to ask the French to get used to living with this horror. We will eradicate it here and abroad.” — Marine Le Pen.
“Everyone agrees that the European Union is a failure. It did not deliver on any of its promises, particularly on prosperity and security…. That is why, if elected, I will announce a referendum within six months on remaining or exiting the European Union…” — Marine Le Pen.
“The old left-right debates have outlived their usefulness…. This divide is no longer between the left and the right, but between patriots and globalists.” — Marine Le Pen.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of the anti-establishment National Front party, has officially launched her campaign to become the next president of France.
Speaking at a rally attended by thousands of her supporters in Lyon on February 5, Le Pen launched a two-pronged attack on globalization and radical Islam. She promised French voters a referendum on remaining in the European Union, and also to deport Muslims who are deemed a security risk to France.
National Front party leader Marine Le Pen, speaking at a rally in Lyon, France on February 5, 2016. (Image source: Public Senat video screenshot)
Le Pen’s political platform is contained in a manifesto of 144 promises regarding immigration and global trade.
Polls show that Le Pen — who said the election of U.S. President Donald J. Trump “shows that people are taking their future back” — is one of the most popular politicians in France.
A February 2 Ifop-Fiducial poll for Paris Match, iTELE and Sud-Radio showed Le Pen with 24.5% of the vote, compared to 20% for François Fillon of the center-right Republicans party. In December 2016, Fillon, who has become engulfed in a corruption scandal, held a three-point lead over Le Pen.
The poll also showed the independent centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron with 20% of the vote, the Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon with 17%, and the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon with 9.5%.
The first round of the election will be held April 23. If no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, a runoff will be held on May 7.
Following is an abridged translation of key parts of Le Pen’s speech:
In all respects, this presidential election is unlike previous ones. Its outcome will determine the future of France as a free nation and our existence as a people.
After decades of errors and cowardice, we are at a crossroads. I say it with gravity: the choice we will have to make in this election is a choice of civilization.
The question is simple and cruel: will our children live in a free, independent, democratic country? Will they still be able to refer to our system of values? Will they have the same way of life as we did and our parents before us?
Will our children, and the children of our children, still have a job, a decent wage, the possibility of building up a patrimony, becoming an owner, starting a family in a safe environment, being properly cared for, to grow old with dignity?
Will our children have the same rights as us?
Will they live according to our cultural references, our values of civilization, our style of living, and even they will speak our French language, which is disintegrating under the blows of political leaders who squander this national treasure — for example, by choosing a slogan in English to promote the candidacy of Paris to host the 2024 Olympic Games?
Will they have the right to claim French culture when certain candidates for the presidential election, puffed up by their own empty-headedness, explain that it does not exist?
I ask this important question because, unlike our adversaries, I am interested not only in the material heritage of the French, but I also want to defend our immaterial capital. This immaterial capital is priceless because this heritage is irreplaceable. In fact, I am defending the load-bearing walls of our society.
Our leaders have chosen deregulated globalization. They wanted a happy outcome, but the result is frightful.
Globalization develops at two levels: from below with massive immigration and global social dumping; and from above with the financialization of the economy.
Globalization, which became a fact with the multiplication of exchanges, has become an ideology. Economic globalization, which rejects any limits, has weakened the immune system of the nation by dispossessing it of its constituent elements: borders, national currency, the authority of its laws in conducting economic affairs, and thus allowing another world to be born and grow: Islamic fundamentalism.
The latter has grown up within a deleterious communitarianism, itself a child of mass immigration, suffered year after year by our country.
We have thus fulfilled our first political act, which is to name the enemy.
These two globalisms, today, give a leg up to:
- Economic and financial globalism, of which the European Union, the financiers and the domesticated political class are its zealous servants;
- Jihadist globalism, which undermines our vital interests abroad, but which also takes root in our national territory, in certain neighborhoods, in certain places, in certain weak minds.
Both work towards the disappearance of our nation, that is to say, of France as we live it, as we love it, which is why the French have a feeling of dispossession.
These two ideologies want to subjugate our country.
One in the name of globalized finance, that is to say, the ideology of all commerce, the other in the name of a radicalized Islam, that is to say, the ideology of the whole of religion.
Faced with these two totalitarianisms that threaten our liberties and our country, we must demonstrate lucidity, determination and unity.
Economic globalism kills by asphyxia — slow, progressive, but certain.
Islamic fundamentalism attacks us by the calculated harassment of republican resistance, by incessant demands, by demands for accommodation, none of which, for us, can be reasonable and therefore conceivable.
Nor let us forget that Islamic fundamentalism is barbaric, that it manifests itself every day in the world by killing, massacring, using in particular the vile and cowardly weapon of terrorism or mass murder.
As in all ideological wars, we find useful idiots and more or less conscious accomplices who, through cowardice, blindness or greed, facilitate these undertakings for the establishment of this barbarous ideology, the enemy of France.
To advance, the advocates of these two globalist ideologies give the illusion of relying on our principles; in reality, they falsely invoke freedom to set up their totalitarianism: it is the freedom of the fox in the chicken coop.
The first, economic and financial globalism, invokes freedom of trade, freedom of movement, freedom of establishment; all those who venture to reveal their failures are accused of ignorance, accused of some ideological drift, and are struck down with moral reproach.
Economic and financial globalism is based on a pseudo economic expertise that never yields, not even to the evidence of its economic failure and the social devastation that it provokes. The objective is to reduce man to his role as consumer or producer.
Countries are no longer nations united by matters of the heart, but by markets, spaces where the commodification of everything and every human being is conceivable, possible, accepted and even organized.
People are no more than populations. Borders are erased, as with Schengen, to make of our countries station concourses where everyone is free to come and stay and to participate in the leveling of the social protections, the reduction of wages and the dilution of culture into the smallest common denominator.
With the globalists, cultures of peoples, that is, what makes the world’s diversity, are destined to be erased in order to facilitate the commercialization of standard products and to facilitate hyper profits at the cost of ecological depletion of the planet or child labor of the Third World.
This world where economics is an end in itself and man, a simple tool in its service, plunges us into an ephemeral era, in short, an artificial and deeply dehumanized world.
The rights of people, their social situation, their well-being, the environment in which they live, become the variable of adjustment of the interests of large groups and castes.
For them, the nation is a non-tariff barrier. In their eyes, the country is an open geographical space where the only requirement is to “live together,” that is to say, not to interfere with each other.
I want to denounce this powerful alliance between the promotion of savage globalization on the one hand, and the culpable inaction, even in the face of uncontrolled immigration and its direct consequence, the establishment of Islamic fundamentalism.
If economic globalism advances with the shield of free trade, the second of these globalisms, Islamic fundamentalism, instrumentalizes the principle of religious freedom in an attempt to impose patterns of thought that are clearly the opposite of ours.
The carelessness and weakness of our leaders have been a growth hormone to this ideology that tried to sow death in the Louvre two days ago.
We do not want to live under the yoke or threat of Islamic fundamentalism.
It tries to impose upon us pell-mell:
- The prohibition of mixing in public places,
- The integral veil or not,
- Prayer halls in companies, street prayers, cathedral mosques,
- The submission of woman by prohibiting the skirt, work or bistro.
No Frenchman, no Republican, no woman attached to dignity and liberty can accept it.
Behind these two ideologies is inexorably the enslavement of people: An enslavement, at first mental, which is effected by disaffiliation, by isolation, by dissolution of traditional bonds.
Economic globalism professes individualism, and radical Islamism communitarianism.
Globalism is based, as we see, on the negation of the values on which France was built and on the principles in which the immense majority of French people still recognize themselves: the pre-eminence of the person and therefore its sacred character, individual freedom and therefore individual consent, national feeling and therefore national solidarity, equality of persons and therefore the refusal of situations of submission.
These principles for which we are fighting are affirmed in our national motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” which itself proceeds from a secularization of principles stemming from our Christian heritage.
But these two globalist ideologies do not only attack our nation. Both of them attack our Republic by questioning its indivisibility.
The answer is not technical but regal, which is why we call for the moral rearmament of the country and a surge of national energy. We call for resistance and reconquest.
There is nothing for us more beautiful than France. There is nothing for us greater than France. There is nothing for us more useful to the world than France!
I say to the French who are watching or listening to us: the fate of France is in your hands!
The Revolution of Patriotism
France is a millennial country with a history and a culture. France is an act of love. This love has a name: patriotism. It is what makes our hearts beat in unison when the Marseillaise sounds or when our national colors beat the wind of history.
It is what unites the French left and right, from the cradle to the cane, from the factory to the office. It is what pits our vision against that of the globalists.
We believe it is time to revitalize national sentiment, to live it on a daily basis, to teach our children all that makes and has made their country, to teach them to love their compatriots, to be proud of their history, to be confident in the forces of France.
When one aspires to settle in a country, one does not begin by violating its laws. We do not begin by claiming rights. To all, and especially to people of all origins and all faiths that we have welcomed into our country, I repeat: there are no and there will be no other laws and values in France than those that are French.
On this subject there will be no retreat and no compromise.
Those who come to France are to accept France, not to transform it to the image of their country of origin. If they want to live at home, they should have stayed at home.
We will strictly apply the rules of secularism in a country whose tragic history has learned to guard against the wars of religion. We will extend the rules of secularism to public spaces and we will inscribe them in labor laws. We will respond to those who see with concern the rise of religious demands and the rise of conflicts in the workplace.
We no longer want the state to allow the spread of the hatred of France. We want a France that transmits and a France that is transmitted!
The Revolution of Liberty
The first liberty is security. You may ask how to improve security when for thirty years all governments have failed? Our method is simple: we will apply the law!
As Cardinal de Richelieu said, “to make a law and not enforce it is to authorize the thing that one wishes to defend against.”
We will re-establish the rule of law, that is, enforce Republican law in those places where it has been lost, where our rulers obviously lack the courage and willpower. We are going to put an end to the impunity of criminals, the no-go zones, the dictatorships of kingpins in certain districts, drug and weapons trafficking, burglaries, burned cars.
We will stress the certainty of prosecution, the certainty of sanction, the certainty of punishment, the certainty that delinquent aliens are automatically deported.
I say to the mothers who listen to me, support me: Do not accept that our children live in fear, in this daily violence of which they are the first victims, sometimes at the cost of their young lives.
In order to fulfill their mission, so important to this country, we will give back to our security forces the human and material resources as well as the necessary support and instructions.
We shall rearm them, including morally, with the establishment of the presumption of self-defense.
We will open suitable prison places, conclude agreements with countries of origin so that foreign offenders will serve their prison sentences in their country of origin, increase the means of justice and organize a response to criminals that can be summarized in two words: zero tolerance.
In terms of terrorism, we do not intend to ask the French to get used to living with this horror. We will eradicate it here and abroad.
Since we are at war with Islamic fundamentalism, we will apply to the enemies of France the legal devices of the state of war.
We will give ourselves the necessary technical and human means and will create the conditions and cooperation necessary for intelligence on the national territory as well as outside.
Foreigners with an “S” file [Fiche “S” or Sûreté de l’État (state security)] will be deported. Binationals with “S” files will be deprived of their French nationality and sent back to their country of origin. Frenchmen with “S” files will be prosecuted for aiding the enemy.
Places of Islamic preaching will be closed and the sowers of hatred condemned and expelled. The legal windows of Islamism, especially on the Internet, will be extinguished.
Finally, this revolution of liberty is that of our collective liberties, for state sovereignty, that is to say, for a free people to decide for themselves. This struggle for sovereignty is first, principal, essential, cardinal — it conditions everything else.
Without sovereignty, no protection is possible, no action is possible. Without sovereignty, a promise becomes a false promise.
My political opponents claim to control borders, to prevent immigration, to fight against unfair competition. They are lying to you. By refusing to free themselves from the straitjacket of the European Union, which is the decision-maker on these subjects, they refrain from any even minor inflection.
Worse, by staying in the euro, they are plaguing our economy, maintaining mass unemployment and giving the European Union the means of pressure to impose its inept views, its millions of migrants.
Everyone agrees that the European Union is a failure. It did not deliver on any of its promises, particularly on prosperity and security and, worse, it has put us under guardianship and kept us on a short leash.
Who could be satisfied with doing nothing against a system which enchains us, which does not work, and worse, whose dysfunctions ruins us?
That is why, if elected, I will announce a referendum within six months on remaining or exiting the European Union, and I will immediately engage with our European partners — many of whom aspire as we do to sovereignty — a renegotiation with this tyrannical Europeanist system which is no longer a project, but a parenthesis in history and I hope one day a bad memory.
The objective will be to find within six months a compromise that will allow us to recover our four sovereignties: monetary, economic, legislative and territorial.
If the European Union does not submit, then I will ask the French to vote in the referendum to resign from this nightmare and become free again.
In the same spirit, because we believe that France is great only when it makes its voice heard in favor of independence and world balance, we will leave the integrated command of NATO. We will re-examine our diplomacy with regard to our national interests and will give the means of our internal and foreign policy by the reconstruction of our military potential.
My commitment is to put France back in order in five years. In practice this concerns all sectors of our lives:
- Putting our economy back in order
- Putting our schools back in order
- Putting our justice back in order
- Putting our diplomacy back in order
- Putting our security back in order
- Putting our solidarity back in order
We open our arms to all those who share with us the love of France and wish to engage our country on the path of national recovery.
The old left-right debates have outlived their usefulness. Primaries have shown that debates about secularism or immigration, as well as globalization or generalized deregulation, constitute a fundamental and transversal divide. This divide is no longer between the left and the right, but between patriots and globalists.
The collapse of traditional parties and the systematic disappearance of almost all of their leaders shows that a great political re-composition has begun.
Other peoples have shown the way.
The British have chosen freedom with the Brexit. The Italians have shown their disapproval in the referendum on the Constitution. The Greeks are thinking about leaving the Euro. The Americans have chosen their national interest.
This awakening of the peoples is historical. It marks the end of a cycle. The wind of history has turned. It will bring us to the top and, with us, our country: France. Long live the people! Long live the Republic! Long live France!
Trump’s Got a Big Job Reining In Voter Fraud
February 6, 2017Trump’s Got a Big Job Reining In Voter Fraud, American Thinker, Michael Kimmitt, February 6, 2017
President Trump’s assertion that millions of illegal votes were cast in the November election has elicited howls of protest from offended national reporters and pundits who demanded proof. Instead of recoiling, the President doubled down with an executive order to find out just how much voter fraud exists.
It is hard to fathom how anyone, especially those inquiring minds of the Washington press corps, legitimately would be so uninterested in finding the truth. Despite insisting that the President provide evidence of voter fraud, he is being assailed even more vehemently by the Democrat pols, late-night talk show hosts and reporters when he offers to do just that.
A 2014 report based on an investigation conducted by a consortium of 28 universities found that 6.4 percent of the 20 million adult non-citizens in the U.S. had voted in our elections. The study also concluded that, “Non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress.” That would translate into 1,280,000 illegal votes being recorded, of which an estimated 81 percent, or more than a million, would have gone to Hillary Clinton. But instead of being shocked and dismayed that this level of criminality may be underway, most in the press gloated that Mr. Trump had overstated the voter abuse.
Questionnaires used by the consortium however, revealed a significant number of non-citizens who admitted to voting in our Presidential elections – leading the researchers to conclude this group alone could have cast between a low of 38,000 to a high of 2.8 million illegal votes. We don’t know the extent of the abuse because there has been no attempt to find out, and the liberal press will go to great lengths to keep it that way.
To bolster its case that election fraud is statistically insignificant, the press points to the very few criminal convictions that have been secured by state or federal authorities. But do any of us believe that only those who are ticketed had sped down our highways on a holiday weekend? And state troopers actually make some effort to curtail traffic violations. The Justice Department, however, has been blithely indifferent to preventing possible election fraud.
Obvious but unreported is the fact the Democratic Party pushes an open borders agenda specifically to increase its voter base and rails against “vote suppression” whenever anyone points out that these same illegal immigrants might be participating in and distorting our elections. Fraud long has been an ugly element of American politics, and it has been almost exclusively the dominion of Democrats.
From the reckless corruption of the Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall thugs in New York during the mid-1800s through the heavy-handed precinct politics favored by Mayor Richard J. Daley and his successors in Chicago during much of the 20th century, to the wide-spread graft of today, the Democratic Party has virtually sole claim to the mechanisms of election corruption.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), of which former President Barack Obama has had a close working association and heavy funding for his campaign coffers, has a 40-year rap sheet of widespread voter registration fraud. Untold thousands who went to their just rewards years ago are resurrected on each election day to cast one more ballot for their favorite Democrat pol, while an estimated 2.8 million are registered to vote in more than one state and often do.
In a recent interview, former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Claude Arnold described the ease with which illegal immigrants can obtain falsified government documents in California. “In every neighborhood where there is a significant illegal alien population, there are at least several document vendors that provide this service,” Arnold explained. “Typically people buy what we refer to as a three-pack – either a counterfeit resident alien or work authorization card, a counterfeit California drivers license and a counterfeit Social Security card.”
Securing an illicit voter registration card at this point is no problem because the veracity of the documents is seldom confirmed by election officials in the state. “I have worked in six locations across the United States,” Arnold said. “I’ve probably arrested more than 1,000 illegal aliens in my career, and I routinely encounter people in possession of voter registration cards and many admit to having voted.”
It is no coincidence the 18 states plus the District of Columbia that demand no form of identification are those that normally support Democratic Party candidates. California, Illinois, New York, and New Mexico have disproportionately large numbers of immigrants and little effort is made to ensure which are legally entitled to vote. State officials in these jurisdictions actively avoid finding out what is going on.
Officials in these states advance the predictably patronizing notion that members of minority groups are somehow less capable than Caucasians of securing any of the many legitimate forms of identification, and therefore are disproportionately turned away from the polls. Despite the fact that study after study prove this to be untrue and minority voter turnout essentially is unaffected by ID requirements, the left plods on with these foolish assertions.
Mississippi, a state with strict photo ID requirements, now has the nation’s best ratio of black-voter turnout to white-voter turnout, and is one of several Southern states in which voter-registration is higher among blacks than whites. So which state has the greatest racial disparity? It happens to be none other than Massachusetts, which requires not one shred of identification to cast a ballot.
Many nations (Germany, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, France, Belgium, South Africa, etc.) require identification to vote. Americans want the same. A 2012 Pew Research Center poll found 77% of all respondents favored photo IDs. Fox News and Washington Post polls produced similar results. About 65% of African-American and Hispanics citizens also support voter IDs.
Democrat bosses cling desperately to the threadbare canard that any request for photo identification is demeaning and racist. And yet to board a commercial airliner, acquire a business license, purchase a six-pack of beer, open a bank account or cash a check, secure a library card, apply for welfare or other social services, purchase a gun, rent a car and so much more require photo IDs.
Our people have a right to expect that only U.S. citizens of voting age are allow to vote – and just once in each election cycle. Each state should be required to put in place measures to protect the integrity of our elections.
More than half a century after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed to strip away Jim Crow laws that corrupted the election process in many states. It is time for the federal government to take similarly decisive steps to require states to certify federal voting standards are uniformly and strictly applied.
Raheel Raza Hopes To Be The Muslim Extremists Hate Most
February 6, 2017Raheel Raza Hopes To Be The Muslim Extremists Hate Most, Investigative Project on Terrorism, Abigail R. Esman, February 6, 2017
Just a month into 2017 and America’s hot-button issues are already clear: women, radical Islam, and the civil rights of Muslims in the West. The Trump presidential campaign, fraught as it was with controversy over his comments about women, sexual harassment, immigration and Muslims, has been followed, in his presidency, by protests, political debates, executive orders, and above all, confusion.
Sorting out that confusion requires profound understanding of the issues. And the irony here is that few people understand them better than do Muslim women – particularly the Muslim women who stand up against radical Islam and who denounce the abuse and oppression of women in Muslim countries. They, best of all, know what it means to be the victim of sharia laws that deny them even the most basic of human rights. They, best of all, recognize the portions of the Quran that can be – and are – manipulated by extremists to suit their needs. They, too, best recognize those areas of their faith that must be modernized, that need to be reformed, to suit modern understanding of basic human rights, human dignity, democracy, and justice.
Yet these are the people who also are most virulently attacked. Muslim fundamentalists accuse them of not being “really” Muslim. They are called apostates, and their lives and families threatened. Some non-Muslims accuse them of lying, of being part of an underground “stealth jihad” conspiracy aimed at Islamizing the West. Their work takes selflessness, determination, and extraordinary courage.
Among those leading that fight is writer-activist Raheel Raza, a Pakistani-born Canadian and author of Their Jihad, Not My Jihad: A Muslim Canadian Woman Speaks Out. As a human rights leader, she has spoken out loudly against gender inequality in Muslim families, called for a ban on the hijab and burqa in Canada, and condemned groups that support the introduction of sharia law in the West. In 2012, she founded Muslims Facing Tomorrow, an organization with a core mission “to reclaim Islam for, as the word itself means, securing Peace for all people, and to oppose extremism, fanaticism and violence in the name of religion” while supporting Enlightenment ideals of free speech and democracy.
Most notably, she participated in Paula Kwestin’s award-winning documentary “Honor Diaries.” Described as a “movement to expose women’s rights in the Middle East,” the film exposes hard truths about honor violence and the oppression of women in the Muslim world. In a discussion with other female Muslim leaders in the film, Raza minced no words: “We need systematic change in the Muslim world.”
The Investigative Project interviewed Raza about her views, her courage, her work, and her vision for both Muslims and the West in the years ahead.
(This transcript was edited lightly for style and clarity.)
Abigail R. Esman What made you first feel you needed to speak out as a Muslim woman on the issues you now champion?
Raheel Raza: While I was growing up in Pakistan, I lived in a culture that considered women should be seen and not heard. There was also an honor based environment where everything was about “what others will say.” I rebelled against this and gender discrimination at a young age (for which I was always in trouble). I left Pakistan when I was very young to embrace the West for its values of gender equality, freedom of expression and a liberal democracy. I found my voice and have never stopped speaking out for those who do not have a voice.
ARE: What was the initial response like? Did it cause you to doubt what you were doing?
RR: The initial response was more against my gender, i.e. how can a Muslim woman speak out? Not against the content because deep down people know that I am speaking from within my faith and also addressing a compelling issue that affects Muslim majority society in a deep way. I never doubted what I am doing because the intention is to reform the way Muslims interpret and implement the faith.
ARE: When and why did you create Muslims Facing Tomorrow? Do you feel you are meeting your objectives?
RR: We launched Muslims Facing Tomorrow in 2012 with an intent and vision to be an alternate narrative to the voices of extremists. We are about ideas, as it is a violent ideology that we have to defeat. We are slowly but surely meeting our objectives because the world is hearing our voice to understand that there are Muslims who are the largest victims of radical Jihad and that we are concerned citizens who are speaking out.
ARE: Have you faced threats from radical Muslims for your work? If so, how have you handled them?
RR: Yes, of course – how else would I know that they are listening? I am the proud recipient of a fatwa, death threat and hostile emails. I am also listed as number six on the website of the world’s most hated Muslims, and I plan to become number one.
ARE: “Honor Diaries” was an extremely important project – but a controversial and difficult one. What made you want to get involved?
RR: I have always been committed to women’s rights and have worked on this my entire adult life. Three years ago I was approached by the producer of “Honor Diaries” about the idea of having ‘voices from within’ – Muslim women speaking on the issue. I agreed, with one condition: that this would not be scripted because for too long we (Muslim women) have been scripted, so they agreed, and [the] rest is history.
ARE: Do you feel the film has been successful in influencing change?
RR: “Honor Diaries” has been very successful in implementing and influencing change because it is more than a film. It’s a movement which has picked up traction globally. In Canada we sent copies of the film to each Member of Parliament and as a result, we have Bill S-7, which is a bill about zero tolerance for barbaric cultural practices. Similarly in [the] UK, a law was passed making female genital mutilation and forced/underage marriage a criminal offence. I gave testimony in the Swedish Parliament about Honor Based Violence and also addressed the UK House of Lords as a result of which there is a bill which is being tabled. We screened “Honor Diaries” at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, so overall it has won awards and was the first documentary to openly address these issues.
Now of course there are many others, which gives us hope. “Honor Diaries” also empowered the victims of honor-based violence to speak out because they felt the solidarity, so we have activists on the ground all over the globe who are working on these critical issues.
The movement has now become even more important because it has led to a yearly event called CWFF — the Censored Women’s Film Festival — in which Honor Diaries hosts films by not-yet-known film makers on taboo topics that have had pushback.
ARE: More recently, many of your fellow modern Muslim activists [such as and Shireen Qudosi and Asra Nomani] supported Donald Trump for president. You, I gather, did not. What would you say to them?
RR: In a way I do support Mr. Trump, although he is brash with his words. However when I look at eight years of the Obama administration, nothing was done to defeat a radical jihadist ideology. In fact Mr. Obama could not even articulate the words! So the radicals felt empowered and grew in numbers and action as we have seen with the slew of terrorist attacks last year. Mr. Trump (for all his faults) has addressed the issue head on and has also put out feelers to say that he will dialogue and sit with reform minded Muslims around the table to find solutions. This has yet to happen but I am hopeful that change will come to this global threat.
ARE: You had at one time called for a stop on immigration to Canada from countries with high terror rates. Now President Trump has issued his executive order in the U.S. against specific countries, but also not including other, obvious sponsors of terrorism like Saudi Arabia. What are your thoughts on this move?
RR: President Trump is implementing his election promises so no surprise here. I had suggested a temporary moratorium in Canada from countries that fund and promote terrorism because the safety and security of my country is paramount to the future of my children and grand children.
On not including some countries, I can’t comment on the inner workings of the U.S. political system as I am not American but we should wait and watch where this goes.
ARE: Still, the work you do is not easy, and often misunderstood. What keeps you going?
RR: Activism is never easy – you go against the flow and the status quo. It’s doubly challenging if you happen to be a woman. I do this work for the future of the next generation. This is for a better world for my children and grandchildren. In a way I am very spiritual and I believe that each one of us is answerable to the creator about what we did when the world was burning. I can sleep at night knowing I am doing my part. The backlash against me is a very small drop in the ocean of work that has to be done, so I continue despite the challenges.
PM Netanyahu Meets British PM May – YouTube
February 6, 2017
To Fix Counterterrorism, End Obama’s ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ Strategy
February 6, 2017To Fix Counterterrorism, End Obama’s ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ Strategy, PJ Media, Andrew C. McCarthy, February 5, 2017
(Please see also, Trump Seeks to End Obama’s ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ Scam. — DM)
Last June, the jihadist terrorist Omar Mateen opened fire at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 and wounding several other revelers. It quickly became clear that Mateen was yet another “known wolf” – the term popularized by my friend and colleague Patrick Poole to describe the frequent phenomenon of terrorists who manage to plot and strike against the West notwithstanding that their patent radicalism has put them on the radar screen of law-enforcement and intelligence agents.
I have long argued that the cause of this phenomenon is the restrictions on common sense placed on our agents by political correctness, which essentially blind them to the well-known but rarely acknowledged progression from Islamic scripture to sharia-supremacist ideology (what we call “radical Islam”), to enclaves populated by adherents and sympathizers of this ideology, and inevitably to jihadist terror. This iteration of political correctness has been the backbone of Obama administration counterterrorism strategy, known as “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE). Shortly after the Orlando attack, I delivered a speech at the Westminster Institute – entitled, “Defenseless in the Face of Our Enemies” – in which I addressed CVE. The new Trump administration is in the process of formulating its own counterterrorism strategy. Below, for what it may be worth, is the portion of my speech that addressed CVE:
Of the nearly 36,000 people who work for the FBI, fewer than 14,000 are investigative agents. National security is a crucial part of the Bureau’s portfolio, but the FBI is statutorily the lead investigative agency in virtually every category of criminal offense in federal law. At most, there are a couple thousand agents assigned full-time to counterterrorism. Those numbers are multiplied somewhat by joint federal-state efforts — the Joint Terrorism Task Forces in several metropolitan areas across the nation. Even so, because the Bureau is an intelligence agency as well as a law-enforcement agency, there are over a thousand terrorism investigations ongoing at any one time. The FBI director indicates that there is activity that must be monitored in all 50 states. Unless there are flashing neon signs of imminent attack, the small number of investigators can only spend so much time on any one suspect.
Of course, that time can be maximized, or wasted, depending on whether investigators know what they’re looking for . . . and whether they are permitted to look for it.
Clearly, the FBI spent a lot of time on Mateen. It sent confidential informants to interact with him, conducted physical surveillance, covertly monitored some of his phone calls, and interviewed him face-to-face three separate times. It concluded that his bark was bad, but his bite was non-existent. Honoring guidelines imposed on terrorism investigations, the FBI closed its case. That is, in addition to concluding that no charges should be filed, the Bureau further decided that additional monitoring of Mateen was not warranted.
In retrospect, this seems reckless. But the FBI is not incompetent, far from it. The agency knew Mateen was worth a heavy investigative investment. The problem is that the FBI answers to the Washington political class. The bipartisan Beltway has long ruled that advocacy of radical Islam is protected by the Constitution. It has long instructed its investigators, preposterously, that seditious beliefs and agitation are immune, not just from prosecution, but even from mere inquiry.
What passes for Obama’s national-security strategy, known as “Countering Violent Extremism,” exacerbates this problem. CVE delusionally forbids the conclusion that radical Islamic ideology has any causative effect on terrorist plotting. The FBI is in the impossible position of trying to conduct investigations that follow the facts wherever they lead, while fearing that such investigations — by illuminating the logical progression from Islamic scripture to sharia supremacism to jihadist terror — will enrage its political masters.
Understand: Nothing in the Constitution mandates this suicidal betrayal of national security. It flows from Washington’s lunatic concoction of an imaginary Islam — a belief system the sole tenets of which are peace and anti-terrorism. President Obama and the counsel he keeps (many of whom are connected to insidious Islamist organizations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood) insist this “anti-terrorist” “Religion of Peace” is the only viable interpretation of Islam. We are not just to believe, we are pressured to endorse, the fantasy that sharia supremacism is a “false Islam.” Its palpable mainstream status in the Middle East and elsewhere is not to be spoken of.
The FBI is bound by guidelines promulgated by the Justice Department, most of which have been in place since the administration of President George W. Bush. They impose a caveat on every investigation:
These Guidelines do not authorize investigating or collecting or maintaining information on United States persons solely for the purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment or the lawful exercise of other rights secured by the Constitution or laws of the United States.
On its face, this admonition should not be problematic. It instructs that agents may not investigate for the sole purpose of monitoring activities protected by federal law. Consequently, if agents have other legitimate purposes for investigating — such as preventing terrorist attacks or probing terrorism conspiracies — the Justice Department guidance is no bar to conducting an investigation in which a mosque or a protest rally may foreseeably come under scrutiny.
Political dissent and the exercise of religion are protected by the First Amendment. But this is a protection against being prosecuted merely for one’s words or religious observance. It is not a shield against investigation for criminal activities that are motivated by religious or political belief.
Not only may one be investigated and prosecuted for criminal offenses that are motivated by one’s beliefs or speech; it has long been the law that evidence of one’s beliefs and speech, which is often highly relevant to proving criminal intent, may be admitted in a prosecution for such offenses.
Simply stated, if you are a Muslim who believes sharia law must be imposed on society, and you tell people that Allah commands the commission of violent jihad to impose sharia, that belief and statement are admissible evidence if you are charged with bombing or terrorism conspiracy crimes. You are not being prosecuted for what you believe or what you said; you are being prosecuted for the crimes. The beliefs and statements are evidence of your state of mind — just as they are in all kinds of criminal cases beyond terrorism.
That being the case, there is nothing inherently wrong with, much less constitutionally offensive about, the concept that radical religious or political beliefs should trigger investigations. That is especially the case if those beliefs are conveyed by aggressive language, or by association with other radicals or mosques known to endorse jihadism.
Here’s an important principle we must get right: It cannot be that evidence an investigator may use to prove guilt of terrorism offenses is somehow insulated from an investigator’s suspicions about potential terrorism offenses. The goal of counterterrorism is supposed to be the prevention of jihadist attacks, not the hope that there may be a living terrorist or two still around to be indicted and tried only after Americans have been murdered.
In law enforcement, however, what matters most is not what the law allows investigators to do. It is what the investigators’ superiors allow them to do.
That brings us to “Countering Violent Extremism.” In essence, CVE holds that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, or even with Islamist ideology that reviles the United States. President Obama has conclusively proclaimed: “Muslim American communities have categorically condemned terrorism” — end of discussion . . . as if that were an incontestable proposition or one that told the whole story.
Thus, the administration narrative continues, the real threat to our security is not Muslim terrorist plots against us but our provocation of Muslims. By the Obama administration’s lights, our national-defense measures following the 9/11 attacks have conveyed the misimpression that America is at war with Islam.
Remember, we’re in Fantasy Land, so we’re not supposed to pause at this point to ask: What, then, prompted the 9/11 attacks in the first place? What prompted the increasingly audacious series of attacks from the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center to the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole — all during those sensitive, Islamophilic Clinton years when, we’re to believe, jihadists didn’t think America was “at war with Islam”?
Instead of asking such impertinent questions, we are simply to accept the president’s say-so that the key to our security is to “partner” with the leadership in Muslim communities — much of which just happens to be tied to or heavily influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood.
In a major 2007–08 prosecution (the Holy Land Foundation case), the Justice Department proved that the Brotherhood financed the Hamas terrorist organization to the tune of millions of dollars. That same Muslim Brotherhood is the main subject of my 2010 book, The Grand Jihad. The title is lifted from an internal Brotherhood memo seized by the FBI and presented at the Holy Land trial — a memo in which Brotherhood honchos stationed in the United States explained that their mission here is a “grand jihad” to “eliminate and destroy Western Civilization from within” — by “sabotage.”
Under CVE, we are to let our Islamist “partners” train the police, and let them be our eyes and ears in Muslim communities. Because we all share the same interests, you see, we should rest assured that these Islamist leaders will alert us if there is any cause for concern.
Makes perfect sense, right?
If it is possible, the practice of CVE is even more of a national-security disaster than the theory. This is probably best documented by my friend Stephen Coughlin in a recent and essential book: Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.
Apart from being an exceptional lawyer, Steve is a trained military intelligence officer who has studied our enemies’ threat doctrine, Islamic supremacism. Again, to be precise, it may be best to call it “sharia supremacism” because it reflects the classic sharia-based Islam that is mainstream in the Middle East. Catastrophic Failure is about how the United States government has systematically stifled the study of this doctrine since before 9/11. CVE is the paragon illustration of how the Obama administration has exacerbated this catastrophic failure — a failure that I have branded “willful blindness” since first encountering it as a prosecutor two decades ago.
As Coughlin demonstrates, CVE is no secret. For example, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties — which is every bit as radical as the infamous Civil Rights Division in the Obama Justice Department — has worked with the National Counterterrorism Center to develop government-agency training programs that “bring together best [CVE] practices.”
One product of this effort is a handy two-page instruction document of CVE “Do’s and Don’ts.” The “Don’ts” tell agents to avoid, among other things, “ventur[ing] too deep into the weeds of religious doctrine and history” or examining the “role of Islam in majority Muslim nations.” The guidance further admonishes:
Don’t use training that equates radical thought, religious expression, freedom to protest, or other constitutionally protected activity, with criminal activity. One can have radical thoughts/ideas, including disliking the U.S. government, without being violent; for example, trainers who equate the desire for Sharia law with criminal activity violate basic tenets of the First Amendment.
As we’ve already observed, this interpretation of the First Amendment is patent rubbish. Again, there is no free-speech protection against having one’s words examined for intelligence or investigative purposes. Free-expression principles protect Americans against laws that subject speech to penalty or prosecution — a protection, by the way, that the Obama administration seeks to deny to speech unflattering to Islam, under a UN resolution it jointly sponsored with several Islamic nations.
In sum, Obama’s CVE strategy expressly instructs our investigators to consider only violent or criminal conduct. They are told to ignore radical ideology, particularly if it has the patina of “religious expression.” They are directed to turn a deaf ear to anti-Americanism and the desire to impose sharia, which just happens to be the principal objective of all violent jihadists, and of the Obama administration’s oft-time consultants, the Muslim Brotherhood.
Our agents, furthermore, are cautioned to avoid doing anything that smacks of subjecting particular groups to heightened scrutiny. After all, that might imply that terrorism committed by Muslims has some connection to Islam — specifically, to the undeniable, unambiguous commands to violent jihad found in Muslim scripture.
Obviously, this CVE guidance is exactly what our investigators follow when they consciously avoid scrutinizing jihadist social-media postings by visa applicants from Muslim-majority countries — such as Tashfeen Malik. She was the Pakistani immigrant who joined her jihadist husband, Syed Farook, in carrying out last December’s mass-murder attack in San Bernardino (in which 14 people were killed and dozens wounded).
There is nothing secret about CVE. Willful blindness is right there in black and white.
16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won
February 6, 201716 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won, The Federalist, Daniel Payne, February 6, 2017
Since at least Donald Trump’s election, our media have been in the grip of an astonishing, self-inflicted crisis. Despite Trump’s constant railing against the American press, there is no greater enemy of the American media than the American media. They did this to themselves.
We are in the midst of an epidemic of fake news. There is no better word to describe it than “epidemic,” insofar as it fits the epidemiological model from the Centers for Disease Control: this phenomenon occurs when “an agent and susceptible hosts are present in adequate numbers, and the agent can be effectively conveyed from a source to the susceptible hosts.”
The “agent” in this case is hysteria over Trump’s presidency, and the “susceptible hosts” are a slipshod, reckless, and breathtakingly gullible media class that spread the hysteria around like—well, like a virus.
It is difficult to adequately sum up the breadth of this epidemic, chiefly because it keeps growing: day after day, even hour after hour, the media continue to broadcast, spread, promulgate, publicize, and promote fake news on an industrial scale. It has become a regular part of our news cycle, not distinct from or extraneous to it but a part of it, embedded within the news apparatus as a spoke is embedded in a bicycle wheel.
Whenever you turn on a news station, visit a news website, or check in on a journalist or media personality on Twitter or Facebook, there is an excellent chance you will be exposed to fake news. It is rapidly becoming an accepted part of the way the American media are run.
How we will get out of this is anyone’s guess. We might not get out of it, not so long as Trump is president of these United States. We may be up for four—maybe eight!—long years of authentic fake news media hysteria. It is worth cataloging at least a small sampling of the hysteria so far. Only when we fully assess the extent of the media’s collapse into ignominious ineptitude can we truly begin to reckon with it.
Since Trump’s election, here’s just a small sampling of fake news that our media and our journalist class have propagated.
Early November: Spike in Transgender Suicide Rates
After Trump’s electoral victory on November 8, rumors began circulating that multiple transgender teenagers had killed themselves in response to the election results. There was no basis to these rumors. Nobody was able to confirm them at the time, and nobody has been able to confirm in the three months since Trump was elected.
Nevertheless, the claim spread far and wide: Guardian writer and editor-at-large of Out Zach Stafford tweeted the rumor, which was retweeted more than 13,000 times before he deleted it. He later posted a tweet explaining why he deleted his original viral tweet; his explanatory tweet was shared a total of seven times. Meanwhile, PinkNews writer Dominic Preston wrote a report on the rumors, which garnered more than 12,000 shares on Facebook.
At Mic, Matthew Rodriguez wrote about the unsubstantiated allegations. His article was shared more than 55,000 times on Facebook. Urban legend debunker website Snopes wrote a report on the rumors and listed them as “unconfirmed” (rather than “false”). Snopes’s sources were two Facebook posts, since deleted, that offered no helpful information regarding the location, identity, or circumstances of any of the suicides. The Snopes report was shared 19,000 times.
At Reason, writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown searched multiple online databases to try to determine the identities or even the existence of the allegedly suicidal youth. She found nothing. As she put it: “[T]eenagers in 2016 don’t just die without anyone who knew them so much as mentioning their death online for days afterward.”
She is right. Just the same, the stories hyping this idea garnered at least nearly 100,000 shares on Facebook alone, contributing to the fear and hysteria surrounding Trump’s win.
November 22: The Tri-State Election Hacking Conspiracy Theory
On November 22, Gabriel Sherman posted a bombshell report at New YorkMagazine claiming that “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” were demanding a recount in three separate states because of “persuasive evidence that [the election] results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.” The evidence? Apparently, “in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots.”
The story went stratospherically viral. It was shared more than 145,000 times on Facebook alone. Sherman shared it on his Twitter feed several times, and people retweeted his links to the story nearly 9,000 times. Politico’s Eric Geller shared the story on Twitter as well. His tweet was retweeted just under 8,000 times. Dustin Volz from Reuters shared the link; he was retweeted nearly 2,000 times. MSNBC’s Joy Reid shared the story and was retweeted more than 4,000 times. New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman also shared the story and was retweeted about 1,600 times.
It wasn’t until the next day, November 23, that someone threw a little water on the fire. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver explained that it was “demographics, not hacking” that explained the curious voting numbers. “Anyone making allegations of a possible massive electoral hack should provide proof,” he wrote, “and we can’t find any.” Additionally, Silver pointed out that the New York Magazine article had misrepresented the argument of one of the computer scientists in question.
At that point, however, the damage had already been done: Sherman, along with his credulous tweeters and retweeters, had done a great deal to delegitimize the election results. Nobody was even listening to Silver, anyway: his post was shared a mere 380 times on Facebook, or about one-quarter of 1 percent as much as Sherman’s. This is how fake news works: the fake story always goes viral, while nobody reads or even hears about the correction.
December 1: The 27-Cent Foreclosure
At Politico on December 1, Lorraine Wellert published a shocking essay claiming that Trump’s pick for secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, had overseen a company that “foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman after a 27-cent payment error.” According to Wellert: “After confusion over insurance coverage, a OneWest subsidiary sent [Ossie] Lofton a bill for $423.30. She sent a check for $423. The bank sent another bill, for 30 cents. Lofton, 90, sent a check for three cents. In November 2014, the bank foreclosed.”
The story received widespread coverage, being shared nearly 17,000 times on Facebook. The New York Times’s Steven Rattner shared it on Twitter (1,300 retweets), as did NBC News’s Brad Jaffy (1,200 retweets), the AP’s David Beard (1,900 retweets) and many others.
The problem? The central scandalous claims of Wellert’s article were simply untrue. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ted Frank pointed out, the woman in question was never foreclosed on, and never lost her home. Moreover, “It wasn’t Mnuchin’s bank that brought the suit.”
Politico eventually corrected these serious and glaring errors. But the damage was done: the story had been repeated by numerous media outlets including Huffington Post (shared 25,000 times on Facebook), the New York Post, Vanity Fair, and many others.
January 20: Nancy Sinatra’s Complaints about the Inaugural Ball
On the day of Trump’s inauguration, CNN claimed Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” with the fact that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance would be to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” The problem? Nancy Sinatra had never said any such thing. CNN later updated the article without explaining the mistake they had made.
January 20: The Nonexistent Climate Change Website ‘Purge’
Also on the day of the inauguration, New York Times writer Coral Davenport published an article on the Times’s website whose headline claimed that the Trump administration had “purged” any “climate change references” from the White House website. Within the article, Davenport acknowledged that the “purge” (or what she also called “online deletions”) was “not unexpected” but rather part of a routine turnover of digital authority between administrations.
To call this action a “purge” was thus at the height of intellectual dishonesty: Davenport was styling the whole thing as a kind of digital book-burn rather than a routine part of American government. But of course that was almost surely the point. The inflammatory headline was probably the only thing that most people read of the article, doubtlessly leading many readers (the article was shared nearly 50,000 times on Facebook) to believe something that simply wasn’t true.
January 20: The Great MLK Jr. Bust Controversy
On January 20, Time reporter Zeke Miller wrote that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the White House. This caused a flurry of controversy on social media until Miller issued a correction. As Time put it, Miller had apparently not even asked anyone in the White House if the bust had been removed. He simply assumed it had been because “he had looked for it and had not seen it.”
January 20: Betsy DeVos, Grizzly Fighter
During her confirmation hearing, education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos was asked whether schools should be able to have guns on their campuses. As NBC News reported, DeVos felt it was “best left to locales and states to decide.” She pointed out that one school in Wyoming had a fence around it to protect the students from wildlife. “I would imagine,” she said, “that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.”
This was an utterly noncontroversial stance to take. DeVos was simply pointing out that different states and localities have different needs, and attempting to mandate a nationwide one-size-fits-all policy for every American school is imprudent.
How did the media run with it? By lying through their teeth. “Betsy DeVos Says Guns Should Be Allowed in Schools. They Might Be Needed to Shoot Grizzlies” (Slate). “Betsy DeVos: Schools May Need Guns to Fight Off Bears” (The Daily Beast). “Citing grizzlies, education nominee says states should determine school gun policies” (CNN). “Betsy DeVos says guns in schools may be necessary to protect students from grizzly bears” (ThinkProgress.) “Betsy DeVos says guns shouldn’t be banned in schools … because grizzly bears” (Vox). “Betsy DeVos tells Senate hearing she supports guns in schools because of grizzly bears” (The Week). “Trump’s Education Pick Cites ‘Potential Grizzlies’ As A Reason To Have Guns In Schools” (BuzzFeed).
The intellectual dishonesty at play here is hard to overstate. DeVos never said or even intimated that every American school or even very many of them might need to shoot bears. She merely used one school as an example of the necessity of federalism and as-local-as-possible control of the education system.
Rather than report accurately on her stance, these media outlets created a fake news event to smear a reasonable woman’s perfectly reasonable opinion.
January 26: The ‘Resignations’ At the State Department
On January 26, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin published what seemed to be a bombshell report declaring that “the State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.” This resignation, according to Rogin, was “part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” These resignations happened “suddenly” and “unexpectedly.” He styled it as a shocking shake-up of administrative protocol in the State Department, a kind of ad-hoc protest of the Trump administration.
The story immediately went sky-high viral. It was shared nearly 60,000 times on Facebook. Rogin himself tweeted the story out and was retweeted a staggering 11,000 times. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum had it retweeted nearly 2,000 times; journalists and writers from Wired, The Guardian, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, ABC, Foreign Policy, and other publications tweeted the story out in shock.
There was just one problem: the story was more a load of bunk. As Vox pointed out, the headline of the piece was highly misleading: “the word ‘management’ strongly implied that all of America’s top diplomats were resigning, which was not the case.” (The Post later changed the word “management” to “administrative” without noting the change, although it left the “management” language intact in the article itself).
More importantly, Mark Toner, the acting spokesman for the State Department, put out a press release noting that “As is standard with every transition, the outgoing administration, in coordination with the incoming one, requested all politically appointed officers submit letters of resignation.” According to CNN, the officials were actually asked to leave by the Trump administration rather than stay on for the customary transitional few months. The entire premise of Rogin’s article was essentially nonexistent.
As always, the correction received far less attention than the fake news itself: Vox’s article, for instance, was shared around 9,500 times on Facebook, less than one-sixth the rate of Rogin’s piece. To this day, Rogin’s piece remains uncorrected regarding its faulty presumptions.
January 27: The Photoshopped Hands Affair
On January 27, Observer writer Dana Schwartz tweeted out a screenshot of Trump that, in her eyes, proved President Trump had “photoshopped his hands bigger” for a White House photograph. Her tweet immediately went viral, being shared upwards of 25,000 times. A similar tweet by Disney animator Joaquin Baldwin was shared nearly 9,000 times as well.
The conspiracy theory was eventually debunked, but not before it had been shared thousands upon thousands of times. Meanwhile, Schwartz tweeted that she did “not know for sure whether or not the hands were shopped.” Her correction tweet was shared a grand total of…11 times.
January 29: The Reuters Account Hoax
Following the Quebec City mosque massacre, the Daily Beast published a story that purported to identify the two shooters who had perpetrated the crime. The problem? The story’s source was a Reuters parody account on Twitter. Incredibly, nobody at the Daily Beast thought to check the source to any appreciable degree.
January 31: The White House-SCOTUS Twitter Mistake
Leading up to Trump announcing his first Supreme Court nomination, CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jeff Zeleny announced that the White House was “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest.” He pointed to a pair of recently created “identical Twitter pages” for a theoretical justices Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, the two likeliest nominees for the court vacancy.
Zeleny’s sneering tweet—clearly meant to cast the Trump administration in an unflattering, circus-like light—was shared more than 1,100 times on Twitter. About 30 minutes later, however, he tweeted: “The Twitter accounts…were not set up by the White House, I’ve been told.” As always, the admission of mistake was shared far less than the original fake news: Zeleny’s correction was retweeted a paltry 159 times.
January 31: The Big Travel Ban Lie
On January 31, a Fox affiliate station out of Detroit reported that “A local business owner who flew to Iraq to bring his mother back home to the US for medical treatment said she was blocked from returning home under President Trump’s ban on immigration and travel from seven predominately Muslim nations. He said that while she was waiting for approval to fly home, she died from an illness.”
Like most other sensational news incidents, this one took off, big-time: it was shared countless times on Facebook, not just from the original article itself (123,000 shares) but via secondary reporting outlets such as the Huffington Post (nearly 9,000 shares). Credulous reporters and media personalities shared the story on Twitter to the tune of thousands and thousands of retweets, including: Christopher Hooks, Gideon Resnick, Daniel Dale, Sarah Silverman, Blake Hounshell, Brian Beutler, Garance Franke-Ruta, Keith Olbermann (he got 3,600 retweets on that one!), Matthew Yglesias, and Farhad Manjoo.
The story spread so far because it gratified all the biases of the liberal media elite: it proved that Trump’s “Muslim ban” was an evil, racist Hitler-esque mother-killer of an executive order.
There was just one problem: it was a lie. The man had lied about when his mother died. The Fox affiliate hadn’t bothered to do the necessary research to confirm or disprove the man’s account. The news station quietly corrected the story after giving rise to such wild, industrial-scale hysteria.
February 1: POTUS Threatens to Invade Mexico
On February 1, Yahoo News published an Associated Press report about a phone call President Trump shared with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto. The report strongly implied that President Trump was considering “send[ing] U.S. troops” to curb Mexico’s “bad hombre” problem, although it acknowledged that the Mexican government disagreed with that interpretation. The White House later re-affirmed that Trump did not have any plan to “invade Mexico.”
Nevertheless, Jon Passantino, the deputy news director of BuzzFeed, shared this story on Twitter with the exclamation “WOW.” He was retweeted 2,700 times. Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, also shared the story, declaring: “I’m sorry, did our president just threaten to invade Mexico today??” Favreau was retweeted more than 8,000 times.
Meanwhile, the Yahoo News AP post was shared more than 17,000 times on Facebook; Time’s post of the misleading report was shared more than 66,000 times; ABC News posted the story and it was shared more than 20,000 times. On Twitter, the report—with the false implication that Trump’s comment was serious—was shared by media types such as ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum, the BBC’s Anthony Lurcher, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, Politico’s Shane Goldmacher, comedian Michael Ian Black, and many others.
February 2: Easing the Russian Sanctions
Last week, NBC News national correspondent Peter Alexander tweeted out the following: “BREAKING: US Treasury Dept easing Obama admin sanctions to allow companies to do transactions with Russia’s FSB, successor org to KGB.” His tweet immediately went viral, as it implied that the Trump administration was cozying up to Russia.
A short while later, Alexander posted another tweet: “Source familiar [with] sanctions says it’s a technical fix, planned under Obama, to avoid unintended consequences of cybersanctions.” As of this writing, Alexander’s fake news tweet has approximately 6,500 retweets; his clarifying tweet has fewer than 250.
At CNBC, Jacob Pramuk styled the change this way: “Trump administration modifies sanctions against Russian intelligence service.” The article makes it clear that, per Alexander’s source, “the change was a technical fix that was planned under Obama.” Nonetheless, the impetus was placed on the Trump adminsitration. CBS News wrote the story up in the same way. So did the New York Daily News.
In the end, unable to pin this (rather unremarkable) policy tweak on the Trump administration, the media have mostly moved on. As the Chicago Tribune put it, the whole affair was yet again an example of how “in the hyperactive Age of Trump, something that initially appeared to be a major change in policy turned into a nothing-burger.”
February 2: Renaming Black History Month
At the start of February, which is Black History Month in the United States, Trump proclaimed the month “National African American History Month.” Many outlets tried to spin the story in a bizarre way: TMZ claimed that a “senior administration official” said that Trump believed the term “black” to be outdated. “Every U.S. president since 1976 has designated February as Black History Month,” wrote TMZ. BET wrote the same thing.
The problem? It’s just not true. President Obama, for example, declared February “National African American History Month” as well. TMZ quickly updated their piece to fix their embarrassing error.
February 2: The House of Representatives’ Gun Control Measures
On February 2, the Associated Press touched off a political and media firestorm by tweeting: “BREAKING: House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership.” The AP was retweeted a staggering 12,000 times.
The headlines that followed were legion: “House votes to rescind Obama gun background check rule” (Kyle Cheney, Politico); “House GOP aims to scrap Obama rule on gun background checks” (CNBC); “House scraps background check regulation” (Yahoo News); “House rolls back Obama gun background check rule” (CNN); “House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership” (Washington Post).
Some headlines were more specific about the actual House vote but no less misleading; “House votes to end rule that prevents people with mental illness from buying guns” (the Independent); “Congress ends background checks for some gun buyers with mental illness” (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette); “House Votes to Overturn Obama Rule Restricting Gun Sales to the Severely Mentally Ill” (NPR).
The hysteria was far-reaching and frenetic. As you might have guessed, all of it was baseless. The House was actually voting to repeal a narrowly tailored rule from the Obama era. This rule mandated that the names of certain individuals who receive Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income and who use a representative to help manage these benefits due to a mental impairment be forwarded to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
If that sounds confusing, it essentially means that if someone who receives SSDI or SSI needs a third party to manage these benefits due to some sort of mental handicap, then—under the Obama rule—they may have been barred from purchasing a firearm. (It is thus incredibly misleading to suggest that the rule applied in some specific way to the “severely mentally ill.”)
As National Review’s Charlie Cooke pointed out, the Obama rule was opposed by the American Association of People With Disabilities; the ACLU; the Arc of the United States; the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network; the Consortium of Citizens With Disabilities; the National Coalition of Mental Health Recovery; and many, many other disability advocacy organizations and networks.
The media hysteria surrounding the repeal of this rule—the wildly misleading and deceitful headlines, the confused outrage over a vote that nobody understood—was a public disservice.
As Cooke wrote: “It is a rare day indeed on which the NRA, the GOP, the ACLU, and America’s mental health groups find themselves in agreement on a question of public policy, but when it happens it should at the very least prompt Americans to ask, ‘Why?’ That so many mainstream outlets tried to cheat them of the opportunity does not bode well for the future.”
Maybe It’s Time to Stop Reading Fake News
Surely more incidents have happened since Trump was elected; doubtlessly there are many more to come. To be sure, some of these incidents are larger and more shameful than others, and some are smaller and more mundane.
But all of them, taken as a group, raise a pressing and important question: why is this happening? Why are our media so regularly and so profoundly debasing and beclowning themselves, lying to the public and sullying our national discourse—sometimes on a daily basis? How has it come to this point?
Perhaps the answer is: “We’ve let it.” The media will not stop behaving in so reckless a manner unless and until we demand they stop.
That being said, there are two possible outcomes to this fake news crisis: our media can get better, or they can get worse. If they get better, we might actually see our press begin to hold the Trump administration (and government in general) genuinely accountable for its many admitted faults. If they refuse to fix these serial problems of gullibility, credulity, outrage, and outright lying, then we will be in for a rough four years, if not more.
No one single person can fix this problem. It has to be a cultural change, a kind of shifting of priorities industry-wide. Journalists, media types, reporters, you have two choices: you can fix these problems, or you can watch your profession go down in flames.
Most of us are hoping devoutly for the former. But not even a month into the presidency of Donald J. Trump, the outlook is dim.
anneinpt
artaxes
danmillerinpanama
davidking1530
Peter Hofman
Joseph Wouk
Peter
Louisiana Steve
WarSclerotic 
Recent Comments