Tag: CNN

American Civil War 2: US media will have only itself to blame if all hell breaks loose

By Robert Bridge

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For the first time in years, the drumbeat of civil war has become audible across the United States. The nation looks destined to repeat history thanks to a media that is no longer able to objectively perform its job.

The predominantly left-leaning US media has just entered its third consecutive year of open warfare against President Donald Trump. This non-stop assault risks aggravating political passions to the point where ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ snowballs into something completely beyond our ability to control. Like full-blown Civil War.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post, one of most prominent serial producers of partisan agitation, publishedan article entitled, ‘In America, talk turns to something unspoken for 150 years: Civil War’. The piece, which deftly places Democrats above the fray, opens with the following whiff of grapeshot:

“With the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III reportedly nearly complete, impeachment talk in the air and the 2020 presidential election ramping up … there’s talk of violence, mayhem and, increasingly, civil war,” the Bezos-owned paper forewarned.

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With a level of audacity and self-righteousness that has become a trademark of the Left, not once did the article float the possibility that just maybe the mainstream media is complicit in the ongoing deterioration of political discourse, or that the Democrats are just as much to blame as the Republicans for the political fallout that now presents a grave risk to the Republic.

As many knowledgeable Americans will openly admit, battle lines have been drawn across the political and cultural frontier. This division is perhaps most conspicuous on social media, where friends and family who disagree with our political worldview get the ‘nuke option’ and are effortlessly vanquished (‘unfriended’) with the push of a button. This is a worrying development. The real danger will come when Americans from both sides of the political divide stop talking and start erecting electronic barriers around their political belief systems. Not even family members are spared from the tumult; just because people share the same bloodline does not automatically mean they share the same political views. America, though still green behind the ears, may understand that fact better than many other countries.

The United States has taken part in its fair share of military conflicts over the years, but its deadliest war to date has been the one that pitted Americans against each other. The so-called Civil War (1861-1865), waged between the North and South over the question of Southern secession from the Union, resulted in the death of some 620,000 soldiers from the Union and Confederate armies (and possibly as high as 850,000, according to other estimates).

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Trump or Clinton, Brexit or Remain, Maduro or Guaido? They are both worse! (by Slavoj Zizek)Trump or Clinton, Brexit or Remain, Maduro or Guaido? They are both worse! (by Slavoj Zizek)

Put another way, more Americans died in the Civil War than in all of the country’s other conflicts combined. For a country that has been at war for much of its existence that is a sobering fact.

With that historical footnote in mind, the mainstream media should better appreciate its responsibility for presenting an objective and balanced depiction of modern events. Yet nothing today would suggest that is the case. One need only look at the way it has blotched recent politically charged events – like the Covington High School and Jussie Smollett scandals, not to mention the ‘Russia collusion’ hoax – to say that something is seriously out of whack inside of the Fourth Estate. The muzzled mainstream media has simply lost its mind over Donald Trump and can no longer perform its duties with any discernible amount of objectivity.

Indeed, the US leader continues to serve as a piñata for the agenda-driven media, which takes daily swings at him and his administration – and despite the fact that his popularity remains very high among voters. Only on the fringes of the media world, in the far away land of Fox News and Breitbart, will the reader find level-headed reports on the American president. This is not to suggest, of course, that Trump is beyond criticism. Not at all. There is a lot not to like about the 45th president. At the same time, however, to assume that Trump and his administration is the root of all evil, as the media would lead us to believe, is not only ridiculous, it is outright dangerous.

With no loss of irony, a good example of the media bias against Trump can be found in the very Post article that frets over the outbreak of another Civil War. While everyone knows that it takes two to tango, you would never guess that by reading this piece. In the sheltered world of the Liberal-dominated media, ‘tango’ is a solo event where the political right is portrayed as engaged in a dance with itself, while the political left watches – innocuously, of course – from the sidelines.

Michael Cohen, for example, Trump’s turncoat personal lawyer who committed perjury by lying to Congress, was quoted high in the article as saying, “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

Now that is certainly rich. Ever since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, Washington has been consumed by the Mueller investigation, and amid mindless chatter that Trump is an illegitimate president slated for impeachment. In other words, the last thing that can be said about the Democrats is that they facilitated a “peaceful transition of power.” In fact, they have hobbled Trump and his administration ever since he entered the Oval Office.

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Hate in the heartland: America is stumbling towards disaster one virulent tweet at a timeHate in the heartland: America is stumbling towards disaster one virulent tweet at a time

Another pro-Liberal voice dragged into the Civil War story was Robert Reich, who served on Barack Obama‘s economic transition advisory board. The Post linked to an article Reich wrote last year where he posited the fictional scenario where an impeachment resolution against the president is enacted, thus kicking off mass civil strife on the direct command of dear leader.

“Trump claims it’s the work of the ‘deep state’”, according to Reich’s febrile imagination. “Sean Hannity of Fox News demands that every honest patriot take to the streets. Right-wing social media call for war. As insurrection spreads, Mr. Trump commands the armed forces to side with the ‘patriots.’”

“The way Mr. Trump and his defenders are behaving, it’s not absurd to imagine serious social unrest,” Reich continued. “That’s how low he’s taken us.”

Now that is some world-class chutzpah. In fact, it is the same self-righteous, ingratiating tone that weaves itself throughout the Post article. In keeping with the mainstream media’s non-stop narrative, Trump and the Republicans are blamed for everything that has gone wrong in the country, while the Democrats come off as little angels trying to piece the fractured country back together.

As already mentioned, Donald Trump is certainly not above criticism. Far from it. But for the mainstream media to place all of the blame for the current political malaise at the Republican’s door is about as responsible as lighting up a cigarette inside of a Chinese fireworks factory. The US media has an unmistakable agenda, and that is to make damn sure Trump is not reelected to another term in 2020. To that end, it has shown a devious willingness to betray all journalistic ethics and standards, which has the effect of increasing the political temperature to boiling point. It then points the finger of blame at the political right for the accumulated pile of pent-up tensions, which are ready to ignite at the first spark.

If the mainstream media continues to slavishly serve just one political master over another, it will only have itself to blame for what comes next. Its prejudiced and agenda-based reporting is a disgrace and really nothing short of a bona fide national security threat.

@Robert_Bridge

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WATCH: ISIS Bride Who Wants To Return To U.S. Is Asked About Her Tweet Urging People To Slaughter Americans

Kashmiri protesters seen with the ISIS flag.

“…it was an ideology that really was just a phase.”

By James Barrett

The mainstream media has done its part in trying to promote the efforts of Hoda Muthana, the American-born daughter of a former Yemen diplomat who embraced radical Islam, urged the murder of innocent people while living in the States, journeyed to Syria in 2014 to fight alongside the barbaric terrorist group, and now wants to return to United States. Her biggest obstacle now is that both the Obama and Trump administrations determined that she isn’t even a citizen of the United States.

In an interview with NBC’s Richard Engel two weeks ago that has gotten more attention online this week after being highlighted by NewsBusters’ Curtis Houck, Muthana was asked why people should believe that she has actually renounced radicalism, particularly because of some of the tweets she posted. Muthana laughed and responded dismissively, “I know that, but it was an ideology that really was just a phase.”

“There’s one tweet in particular where you talk about calling on Americans to do drive-by shootings, to rent a truck to drive over people, spilling their blood — and you say Memorial Day, Veterans Day, go out and do it,” Engel said, speaking with Muthana inside her tent in a section of a Syrian refugee camp reserved for foreign ISIS families.

“Again, my lawyer told me not to speak about these things,” she responded.

Here’s a clip of the moment tweeted out by Houck:

As MRC reported in February, the media has covered Muthana in an overtly sympathetic way. In an interview with ABC News in February, the ISIS bride said she believes she deserves to be let back in the country and might just need some “therapy” as her “punishment.”

“Maybe therapy lessons,” she said in response to being asked about a just punishment for her joining a terrorist group. “Maybe a process that will ensure us we will never do this again.”

In another interview, CBS foreign correspondent Holly Williams made clear that she sympathized with Muthana, especially in light of Trump announcing via Twitter that he’d directed the State Department to deny her request because she “is not a U.S. citizen.” As evidence that Muthana did have a passport, Williams, incredibly, cited Muthana declaring proudly through her Twitter account (handle: “Umm Jihad”) that she’d thrown her passport into a “bonfire.”

CBS also gave Muthana’s lawyer, Hassan Shibly — whom Williams failed to tell the audience worked for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has been accused of having ties to terrorists — a chance to make the case for his client. But Williams failed to fully explain the debate surrounding Muthana’s claim, which involves her father’s former role as a diplomat for Yemen and the timing of her birth.

The Daily Wire’s Josh Hammer provides more context for the case:

The legal dispute begins with Muthana’s father’s diplomatic status — or lack thereof — at the time of Muthana’s birth. The U.S. government’s legal position is that the government’s records show that Muthana’s father held diplomatic status until February 6, 1995 — which is after Muthana’s birthdate of October 28, 1994. The government’s position is that this means Muthana herself was not a U.S. citizen at birth. But the details of Muthana’s birth are made more complex by the specific actions of her father around that time: Only months prior to her birth, he stepped down from his position at the Yemeni United Nations mission, thereby relinquishing his diplomatic immunity while still remaining in the U.S. on a diplomatic visa.

The legal dispute only gets murkier from there. Muthana was granted a passport in 2004, despite initial reluctance from the U.S. government. Her passport was renewed in 2014, shortly before she sauntered off to Istanbul in 2014 en route to her ultimate destination: The then-ascendant nearby Islamic State “caliphate.” While carousing with her motley crew of 7th-century lusting, genocidal, mass murderous, sex enslaving jihadists, Muthana decided to symbolically burn her physical U.S. passport.

Related: HAMMER: Let The ‘ISIS Bride’ Come Back And Then Try Her For Treason

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CNN, Democratic Party accused of conspiring against Sanders with ‘stacked’ audience at Q&A event

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CNN and the Democratic Party have been accused of trying to sabotage Bernie Sanders after the network masked the political affiliations of audience members who pelted the senator with questions during a town hall event.

The Vermont senator found himself bogged down in complicated policy issues – and apologies – after fielding questions from audience members whose political loyalties and possible ulterior motives were obscured by CNN. The eyebrow-raising oversight was first spotted by Paste Magazine, which accused CNN, in concert with the Democratic Party, of “stacking” the audience against Sanders by not being upfront about who was tasked with asking the senator questions.

For example, a young woman identified by CNN as a student at American University suggested that Sanders had turned a blind eye to his campaign’s alleged sexist behavior during the 2016 primaries, and asked what the democratic socialist would do to make women feel more included in his 2020 presidential bid. Curiously, the network failed to disclose that the student also happens to be an intern at a major DC lobbying firm – an odd coincidence considering her question was adapted from a Sanders-bashing talking point popular among corporate-friendly Democrats.

CNN was similarly tight-lipped about the backgrounds of other audience members selected to interrogate Sanders.

One audience member labeled as a “George Washington student” was later revealed to be an intern for a Democratic fundraising organization, the Katz Watson Group, and was previously a campaign fellow for ‘Hillary Clinton for America’.

Town hall moderator Wolf Blitzer introduced another audience member as a mother of two who is “active in the Maryland Democrat Party.” It turns out the innocuous mom was actually the chair of her county’s Democratic Central Committee.

CNN conceded that it should have been more transparent about its question-askers.

“Though we said at the beginning of the Town Hall that the audience was made up of Democrats and Independents, we should have more fully identified any political affiliations,” the network said in a statement.

Edward Hall, an economist and co-founder of the Occupy Wall Street movement, told RT that CNN’s deceptive identification practices were “par for the course” and part of a “long-running disease” in US politics, which uses in-fighting to protect corporate interests.

This isn’t the first time that CNN has given Sanders a raw deal. In one notable example, the network was taken to task for declaring Clinton the Democratic candidate even though, at the time, she lacked the required number of pledged delegates to clinch the nomination. Emails published by WikiLeaks famously revealed that CNN contributor Donna Brazile passed town hall debate questions to Hillary Clinton during her 2016 primary against the Vermont lawmaker.

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In America, talk turns to something unspoken for 150 years: Civil war…

By  Greg Jaffe and Jenna Johnson

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At a moment when the country has never seemed angrier, two political commentators from opposite sides of the divide concurred last week on one point, nearly unthinkable until recently: The country is on the verge of “civil war.”

First came former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, a Fox News regular and ally of President Trump. “We are in a civil war,” he said. “The suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over. . . . It’s going to be total war.”

The next day, Nicolle Wallace, a former Republican operative turned MSNBC commentator and Trump critic, played a clip of diGenova’s commentary on her show and agreed with him – although she placed the blame squarely on the president.

Trump, she said, “greenlit a war in this country around race. And if you think about the most dangerous thing he’s done, that might be it.”

With the report by special counsel Robert Mueller reportedly nearly complete, impeachment talk in the air and the 2020 presidential election ramping up, fears that once existed only in fiction or the fevered dreams of conspiracy theorists have become a regular part of the political debate. These days, there’s talk of violence, mayhem and, increasingly, civil war.

A tumultuous couple of weeks in American politics seem to have raised the rhetorical flourishes to a new level and also brought a troubling question to the surface: At what point does all the alarmist talk of civil war actually increase the prospect of violence, riots or domestic terrorism?

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Speaking to conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, diGenova summed up his best advice to friends: “I vote, and I buy guns. And that’s what you should do.”

He was a bit more measured a few days later in an interview with The Washington Post, saying that the United States is in a “civil war of discourse . . . a civil war of conduct,” triggered mostly by liberals and the media’s coverage of the Trump presidency. The former U.S. attorney said he owns guns mostly to make a statement, and not because he fears political insurrection at the hands of his fellow Americans.

The rampant talk of civil war may be hyperbolic, but it does have origins in a real crumbling confidence in the country’s democratic institutions and its paralyzed federal government. With Congress largely deadlocked, governance on the most controversial issues has been left to the Supreme Court or has come through executive or emergency actions, such as Trump’s border wall effort.

Then there’s the persistent worry about the 202o elections. “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and personal lawyer, told a congressional committee Wednesday.

On that score, Cohen’s not the only one who is concerned. As far back as 2016, Trump declined to say whether he would concede if he lost to Hillary Clinton, prompting former president Barack Obama to warn that Trump was undermining American democracy. “That is dangerous,” Obama said.

The moment was top of mind for Joshua Geltzer, a former senior Obama administration Justice Department official, when he wrote a recent editorial for CNN urging the country to prepare for the possibility that Trump might not “leave the Oval Office peacefully” if he loses in 2020.

“If he even hints at contesting the election result in 2020 . . . he’d be doing so not as an outsider but as a leader with the vast resources of the U.S. government potentially at his disposal,” Geltzer, now a professor at Georgetown Law School, wrote in his piece in late February.

Geltzer urged both major parties to require their electoral college voters to pledge to respect the outcome of the election, and suggested that it might be necessary to ask the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to reaffirm their loyalty to the Constitution over Trump.

“These are dire thoughts,” Geltzer wrote, “but we live in uncertain and worrying times.”

His speculation drew immediate reaction from the right. Former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin tweeted a link to an article that called Geltzer’s warnings “rampant crazy.” News Punch, a far-right site that traffics in conspiracy theories, blared: “Obama Official Urges Civil War Against Trump Administration.”

Said Geltzer: “I don’t think I was being paranoid, but, boy, did I inspire paranoia on the other side.”

The concerns about a civil war, though, extend beyond the pundit class to a sizable segment of the population. An October 2017 poll from the company that makes the game Cards Against Humanity found that 31 percent of Americans believed a civil war was “likely” in the next decade.

More than 40 percent of Democrats described such a conflict as “likely,” compared with about 25 percent of Republicans. The company partnered with Survey Sampling International to conduct the nationally representative poll.

Some historians have sounded a similar alarm. “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” Victor Davis Hanson, a historian with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, asked last summer in an essay in National Review. Hanson prophesied that the United States “was nearing a point comparable to 1860,” about a year before the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina.

Around the same time Hanson was writing, Robert Reich, a former secretary of labor who is now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, imagined his own new American civil war, in which demands for Trump’s impeachment lead to calls from Fox News commentators for “every honest patriot to take to the streets.”

“The way Mr. Trump and his defenders are behaving, it’s not absurd to imagine serious social unrest,” Reich wrote in the Baltimore Sun. “That’s how low he’s taken us.”

Reich got some unlikely support last week from Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. “I think that 2019 is going to be the most vitriolic year in American politics since the Civil War, and I include Vietnam in that,” Bannon said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

All the doom, gloom and divisiveness have caught the attention of experts who evaluate the strength of governments around the world. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, a measure widely cited by political scientists, demoted the United States from “full democracy” to “flawed democracy” in January 2017, citing a big drop in Americans’ trust for their political institutions.

Similarly, Freedom House, which monitors freedom and democracy around the world, warned in 2018 that the past year has “brought further, faster erosion of American’s own democratic standards than at any other time in memory.”

Those warnings about the state of America’s democratic institutions concern political scientists who study civil wars, which usually take root in countries with high levels of corruption, low trust in institutions and poor governance.

Barbara Walter, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, said her first instinct was to dismiss any talk of civil war in the United States. “But the U.S. is starting to show that it is moving in that direction,” she said. “Countries with bad governance are the ones that experience these wars.”

James Fearon, who researches political violence at Stanford University, called the pundits’ warnings “basically absurd.” But he noted that political polarization and the possibility of a potentially serious constitutional crisis in the near future does “marginally increase the still very low odds” of a stalemate that might require “some kind of action by the military leadership.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” he added, “but I guess it’s not entirely out of the question.”

Less clear in the near term is what kind of effect the inflammatory civil war rhetoric has on a democracy that’s already on edge. There’s some evidence that such heated words could cause people to become more moderate. A 2014 study found that when hard-line Israeli Jews were shown extreme videos promoting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as essential to Israeli pride, a strong army or national unity, they took a more dovish position.

“Extreme rhetoric can lead some people to pull back from the brink,” said Boaz Hameiri, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author on the study. But that only happens when people already believe a “more moderate version of the extreme views” and find the more extreme message shocking, he said.

In such cases, people recognize the absurdity of their position, worry it reflects badly on them and reconsider it, he said.

If the extreme messages become a normal part of the political debate, the moderating effect goes away, the study found.

Violence is most likely to occur, Hameiri added, when political leaders use “dehumanizing language” to describe their opponents.

Most experts worried that the talk of conflict here, armed or otherwise, was serving to raise the prospects of unrest and diminish trust in America’s already beleaguered institutions.

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The latest warnings of civil war from diGenova drew an exasperated response from VoteVets, a liberal veterans advocacy group whose members have fought in actual civil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Amazing we have to say this but: 1. We are NOT in civil war. 2. Do NOT buy guns (or any weapons) to use against your fellow Americans,” Jon Soltz, the group’s chairman, tweeted in response to diGenova. “Trust us, we have seen war.”

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Sanders on Green New Deal: Doesn’t Go Too Far — ‘The Future of the Planet Is at Stake!’

By Pam Key

Friday on ABC’s “The View,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) Green New Deal does not go too far.

Co-host Sunny Hostin asked, “Does the Green New Deal go too far?”

Sanders said, “No. You cannot go too far on the issue of climate change. The future of the planet is at stake, OK?”

He added, “We have, according to the best scientists in the world, we have 12 years to begin substantially cutting carbon emissions before there will be irreparable damage to the planet. I talked to some folks who were in Paradise, CA, remember the terrible, terrible fire that wiped out the whole community?”

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REPORT: House Democrats To Open Official Probe Into Trump’s Attacks On ‘Fake News’ Media

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By Joseph Curl

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter,” said the president of the United States — 200 years ago (Thomas Jefferson).

Said Ulysses S. Grant in 1868: “Throughout the war, and from my candidacy for my present office in 1868 to the close of the last presidential campaign, I have been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history.”

And Harry S. Truman said in 1955: “Presidents and the members of their Cabinets and their staff members have been slandered and misrepresented since George Washington … when the press is friendly to an administration the opposition has been lied about and treated to the excrescence [sic] of paid prostitutes of the mind.”

Yes, we also had to look up “excrescence,” which it turns out is “a distinct outgrowth on a human or animal body or on a plant, especially one that is the result of disease or abnormality.”

Now that’s cold.

So President Trump’s battle with the American press is nothing new. Far from it. But the reaction from Congress is new — and decidedly more dangerous.

House Democrats reportedly are planning to open an official investigation into alleged abuses of power by President Trump for attacking the media, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Topics for the inquiry will include Trump’s public humiliation of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his attacks on actions by the liberal Ninth Circuit Court and his abuse of reporters as ‘dishonest’ and ‘enemies of the people,'” a source told Bloomberg News this week.

The Judiciary Committee led by Democrat Jerrold Nadler of New York will announce the probe in days, the official said. There are plans to hold public hearings with witnesses, but it’s not immediately clear who will be summoned. A spokesman for Nadler said he had no immediate comment.

Presidents have wide leeway to use their bully pulpit to attack foes and get their way. But the effort comes amid a broader push by Democrats now controlling the House to investigate actions of the president and his administration.

The official said there are questions about whether Trump, through some of his actions, is going too far and undermining the rule of law, a reference to established and defined limits on the arbitrary exercise of power.

The unnamed official said, “Trump’s attacks on the news media, singling them out for abuse and ridicule, potentially threatens freedom of the press, and also could serve to intimidate other journalists.”

Trump, for his part, has repeatedly made clear that he is attacking the “fake news” media, not the media as a whole. “With all of the success that our Country is having, including the just released jobs numbers which are off the charts, the Fake News & totally dishonest Media concerning me and my presidency has never been worse,” Trump said last January. “Many have become crazed lunatics who have given up on the TRUTH!”

The latest move by Democrats to officially investigate Trump’s criticism is simply an attempt to tie up his agenda with hopes of winning back the White House in 2020. Still, every American should be concerned when the legislative body of the U.S. government uses its power to probe the executive over criticizing the news media.

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