An opinion columnist for The Arizona Republic newspaper penned an article in which he claimed that an old photograph of coal miners covered in soot was racist because it reminded him of “offensive blackface”.
Despite his friends telling him, “It’s coal miners at a pub after work,”Thomas demanded to speak to a manager, before he told someone he describes as a “white restaurant owner” that he found the photograph “offensive” because he felt that it resembled blackface.
Thomas even directly admits that “the photograph shows coal miners’ faces covered in soot,” but then ludicrously asserts that “context” doesn’t matter, only his feelings being hurt matters.
He then goes on to spout a series of pretentious platitudes such as “in art, everyone sees something different” to justify forcing the bar to take down the photograph.
After claiming that he is discriminated against because of his skin color, Thomas asserts, “At the downtown Phoenix restaurant, my concern that the photograph of men in blackface was a threat to me and my face and voice were ignored….A business’ photograph of men with blackened faces culturally says to me, “Whites Only.” It says people like me are not welcome.”
This despite having already established that the photograph was of coal miners in a pub after work and was not white men engaging in “blackface”.
The article concludes with Thomas demanding that the photo “should be taken down….for the greater good.”
This entire farce once again underscores the soft tyranny that leftists are attempting to impose on the world, forcing other people to change their environmenMARt and bow to every demand simply because progressives claim their feelings are hurt.
As writer Andrew Doyle points out, the fictional character Godfrey Elfwick, a parody of a permanently offended social justice warrior, actually tweeted about being offended by the same photograph back in August, meaning leftists are now directly imitating comedic characters created to satirize them.
The New York Times also recently published an article claiming that Mary Poppins’ face being covered in soot (she appears in a famous scene with chimney sweeps) is also actually an example of blackface.
When leftists precisely ape the behavior of fictional characters created to ridicule their oversensitivity, how is it even possible to joke about their behavior anymore?
A former member of the U.S. Foreign Counter Intelligence community explains how the Roger Stone indictment demonstrates evidence of FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign, which could prove illegal evidence-gathering procedures in the Stone case.
Explained:
“The indictment of Roger Stone may help explain the insurance policy that Peter Strzok was talking to Lisa Page about in August of 2016. In the indictment, on page 17 section 35 titled “STONE’s False and Misleading Testimony About Communications with the Trump Campaign“, there is a very curious admission. It talks about insider knowledge of numerous communications in the Trump Campaign.
“In truth and in fact, and as described above, STONE spoke to multiple individuals involved in the Trump Campaign….“and“a. On multiple occasions, STONE told senior Trump Campaign officials…“.
This is important because it highlights the question, did the FBI or CIA use Stefan Halper or Joseph Mifsud to hack the Trump Campaign’s emails? Stefan Halper, who is widely reported by most news organizations as a spy/source for the CIA/FBI, emailed Carter Page, George Papadopoulus and Sam Clovis of the Trump Campaign. Sam Clovis even reported to Tucker Carlson in May of 2018 that he received emails from Stefan Halper with attachments in 2016. The indictment of Papadopoulus references numerous communications with the professor. Joseph Mifsud has been reported as the professor and as a possible British spy. Did these email communications have spy software attached and did Peter strzok’s August 1st 2016 trip to London involve him passing anything to Halper?”
Longtime President Trump political adviser Roger Stone reveals that he was the victim of a set-up meeting by a Russian using a fake Western name — but he did not fall for it.
More details are coming out about the Crossfire Hurricane plot to target members of President Trump’s team with fake Russian meetings in order to trigger surveillance measures. The FBI is facing massive criticism after the New York Times reported that the FBI launched a quiet investigation into the Trump-Russia hoax after James Comey’s firing.
“By way of example, as you know, back in June I sent this Committee a letter regarding a longtime FBI informant named Gennadiy Vasilievich Vostretsov who, under the alias“Henry Greenberg”, was sent to approach my client in May 2016 with claims of having access to information that could impact the election,” writes Stone’s attorney Grant Smith in a letter to Rep. Devin Nunes.
“Mr. Stone not only immediately and forcefully declined to participate in anything this FBI informant was proposing, but never saw or spoke to the informant again. Mr. Stone believes it highly likely that Mr. Vostretsov/Greenberg’s status as an FBI informant was not “former”, and that Vostretsov/Greenberg was, in fact, actively working on behalf of the FBI at the time of their meeting, acting upon a calculated effort to entrap Mr. Stone and, further, to infiltrate and compromise the Trump effort. Notably, Vostretsov was admitted to the country nine separate times on an FBI Informant’s visa,” Smith writes on Stone’s behalf.
Stone is demanding that the full transcript of his interview with the House Intelligence Committee be released to the public to prove once and for all that Stone did not collude with the Russians during the 2016 presidential election.
The Republican strategist also accuses Democrat California congressman and presidential aspirant Eric Swalwell of lying to create the narrative that Stone changed his testimony.
“Congressman Eric Swalwell told MSNBC that I lied to the House Intelligence Committee and that I ‘amended’ my testimony three times. This is categorically false,”Stone said in a statement provided to Big League Politics.
Hot on the heels of demonizing fourteen-year-old Catholic school students at the March for Life, the rabid press is hungry for more. New York Times reporter Dan Levin put out a call for survivors of Christian schooling to contact him with their tales of woe. “I’m a New York Times reporter writing about#exposechristianschools. Are you in your 20s or younger who went to a Christian school? I’d like to hear about your experience and its impact on your life. Please DM me.”
This was met with much skepticism and blowback from multiple sources.
Levin, sensing he had given away his punchline, pinned the following codicil to his timeline, insisting he intends to include positive stories too.
I write about American youth, and the hashtag #exposechristianchools, which I didn’t create, went viral in recent days. I’m writing about the response to it and want to hear about all experiences, including positive stories/impact about your time in school. Plz DM me.
Forgive us if we don’t believe you, Dan. It’s just that the recent smear job of the students at Covington Catholic High Schoolpreceded by the smearing of Brett Kavanaugh’s Catholic high school have left us all a little edgy.
And if there’s one thing people are learning about this young generation, it’s that they are liberal. Even leftist. Flirting with socialist. In Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, more than 80 percent of voters under 30 years old voted for Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist so outside the mainstream of his party that he’s not even a member.
Levin’s desire to only speak to people under thirty couldn’t possibly have anything to do with getting the negative results he wants to print, could it? If he spoke with Generation X, I have a strong feeling he would get very different responses. But while we are on the subject of exposing Christian schools, why not go all the way? Let’s expose exactly what Christian schools have done to this country.
According to the last national study of public schools versus private schools in 2006, private Christian students outperformed public school students — by a lot. Perhaps that’s why the comparison survey hasn’t been repeated. According to the National Assessment of Educational Process:
In grades 4 and 8 for both reading and mathematics, students in private schools achieved at higher levels than students in public schools. The average difference in school means ranged from almost 8 points for grade 4 mathematics, to about 18 points for grade 8 reading.
The only private Christian schools that scored the same or lower than public schools were non-Catholic conservative Christian schools. Catholic and Lutheran schools outperformed public schools consistently and bigly.
American University is hosting a seminar next month to teach faculty how to assess writing without judging its quality. In the seminar’s own words: “grading ain’t just grading.” They will learn how to engage students “with how judgements [sic] are formed and how those judgements [sic] use a set of White racial habits of language, no matter who the reader is.”
Sentence structure and grammatical rules are now a symbol of white supremacy. This is what parents who pay thousands of extra dollars to send their kids to Christian schools are paying to avoid. We are also paying to avoid the social programming, including teaching kindergarteners about anal sex and junior high-schoolers how to properly masturbate. Public schools waste so much time training children to learn an infinite number of pronouns to call the gender-confused that there is no time for learning basics like math and science. In Christian schools, learning about the 57 genders is not on the docket at all. It is a constant, non-stop drilling of reading, writing, and arithmetic (with PE, science, history, foreign language, technology, art, music, and religion squeezed in).
A 2002 congressional study of child sex abuse in public schools found that children were abused at a rate one hundred times higher than the Catholic Church scandal. CBS News reported
Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft looked into the problem, and the first thing that came to her mind when Education Week reported on the study were the daily headlines about the Catholic Church. “[T]hink the Catholic Church has a problem?” she said. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”…[T]he federal report said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state’s entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000.
Perhaps an effort to #ExposePublicSchools should be made.
I am a graduate of Christian schooling. I started in kindergarten and went all the way through the beginning of my junior year, when I transferred to a public school. When I got to public school, I was shocked to learn I needed to be placed in honors classes. I was an average student in the private school, but in public school, I was at the head of the class because I had already learned what my fellow juniors were studying.
My experience in private school can only be described as idyllic. It was a Dutch Christian Reformed school filled with sincere, underpaid, but loving faculty in the suburbs of Chicago. My fifth-grade teacher was one of the most influential people I ever encountered. I had troubles with mean girls for a few years, and Mrs. W was always there to let me stay inside at recess with her and work on writing or drawing. She is the one who told me I had a talent for writing. I kept my folder with all of my fifth-grade writing, decorated with her hopeful words, that I still look at from time to time. It is because of her encouragement that I believed I could write. I’ve been doing it professionally now for over a decade, including writing books.
Christian schooling gave me an appreciation for life, freedom, charity, and volunteerism. I don’t remember what history we studied and I don’t remember much of the minutiae of the work (except one extremely detailed and extensive leaf identification project for science that took up an entire summer of riding all over town with my friends on our bikes to collect weird and different leaves). But I do remember the overwhelming lesson that we were taught every day. Do unto others as you would have done unto you.It’s why I don’t respond in kind when people rudely insult my beliefs to my face by assuming I have Trump Derangement Syndrome, just like they do. It’s why I don’t scream at strangers wearing Bernie shirts. I was taught to smile and say nothing, just like Nick Sandmann.
That’s what Christian schooling is all about. The academics are excellent, but they are secondary. The highest goal of Christian education is to know God and make Him known. To value children with character, kindness, and tolerance over test scores. And oddly enough, when you put God first and care for one another’s souls as the highest priority, the grades go up.
But the most important thing about Christian schools is the freedom they give parents to choose what kind of education their children are given. Our Constitution gives us the right to religious freedom and that includes having our children taught by Christians and not godless, secular government agents. We have the right to association, which by definition means the right to not associate with the kind of programming happening in the public school system. We have the right to pursue happiness, too, which does not come in a one-size-fits-all sardine can of educational standards that are seriously flawed and failing everywhere you look.
For my family, I chose homeschooling and then Catholic school, where they get to hear the beauty of God’s word every day and meditate on whatever is pure, lovely, praiseworthy, and excellent. If your happiness lies in public school, then by all means, pursue it. But let’s agree to leave each other alone to be free to choose what’s right for our individual families. Because if you start messing with our religious freedom, it’s going to get ugly.
By all means, let’s #ExposeChristianSchools. The public schools might learn something.
Allows members to justify their vile, racist abuse as “tough love”
Paul Joseph Watson | Infowars.com – JANUARY 24, 2019
The New York Times is running defense for the Black Israelites, the anti-Semitic hate group that abused the Covington High School students.
In an article entitled Hebrew Israelites See Divine Intervention in Lincoln Memorial Confrontation, the paper completely ignores the fact that the group called the Covington kids “white crackers,” “faggots,”incest kids” while also labeling them future school shooters and telling an African-American student that they would harvest his organs.
Instead, the piece, written by John Eligon, presents a sympathetic picture of the group, allowing one of its members to characterize what they do as “tough love”.
In reality, in addition to the racist and homophobic slurs the group was caught on camera hurling at children, members are known to hold overtly disgusting views.
Even the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center lists the organization as a hate group, warning that members “believe that Jews are devilish impostors and … openly condemn whites as evil personified, deserving only death or slavery.”
Despite the odious nature of the group, the NY Times piece gives them a cultural cache by noting that they were “name-checked by Kendrick Lamar in a rap called “Yah”.
The article also serves as a platform for the group to justify their actions, with several members quoted at length without being challenged.
One wonders whether a white supremacist group would have been treated with such kid gloves.
National Journal editor Josh Kraushaar denounced the article in a series of tweets, arguing that “the Black Israelites get a more sympathetic hearing than the Covington High students.”
“*Some say* they’re a hate group, but they’re also name-checked by a rapper. let’s call the whole thing off,” joked Kraushaar.
The virulently anti-Christian mainstream press was back at work Wednesday, trashing Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, for teaching at a Christian school that holds the standard belief that marriage should be held between a man and a woman.
“Karen Pence, the second lady of the United States, returned to teaching art this week, accepting a part-time position at a private Christian school that does not allow gay students and requires employees to affirm that marriage should only be between a man and a woman,”the former paper of record said, scorning the second lady.
Traditional marriage is not one of those religious liberties protected by the First Amendment by which the social justice warriors in the mainstream press can abide.
“How can this happen in America in 2019?” asked Washington Post editor and Politico writer Lois Romano on Twitter, attaching the hit piece on Pence.
However, in the name of “diversity,” which is now, and always will be, America’s greatest strength, the leftist press is willing to let the non-social-justice-friendly customs of Islam slide, which is exactly what they did when they wrote about freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) attending her sex-segregated mosque.
“The symbolic importance of her new role was only starting to sink in as Ms. Tlaib walked into the women’s entrance of her family’s mosque on Friday for afternoon prayers,”the Times wrote in a glowing piece about Tlaib.
“Inside, Ms. Tlaib joined her mother and other women to form a single line at the front of the room. For the first time, an American almost certainly on her way to Congress stood shoulder to shoulder with her Muslim sisters and bowed toward Mecca,” it continued.
The Times and the rest of the social justice media simply glossed over the fact that, “in America in 2019,” to use Romano’s terms, Muslim women can’t even use the same entrance as Muslim men at the local mosque. This practice is among many Islamic customs that aren’t social justice friendly. But the press sweeps those under the rug, because… diversity!
An honest press would would be just as appalled at this obviously-sexist Islamic custom as they are at the fact that some Christians don’t believe in gay marriage, which they call homophobic on a regular basis.
But we do not have an honest press in the country – only a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. So Tlaib gets a pass, and Pence gets bashed.
It’s no secret that since his election in 2016, powerful elements in the US political and media establishment have been running a non-stop campaign to remove Trump from the White House. Lately, the stakes have been raised.
Spearheading the media effort to defenestrate Trump are the New York Times and Washington Post. Both have been prominent purveyors of the “Russiagate” narrative over the past two years, claiming that Republican candidate colluded with Russian state intelligence, or at least was a beneficiary of alleged Russian interference, to win the presidency against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Congressional investigations and a probe by a Special Counsel Robert Mueller, along with relentless media innuendo, have failed to produce any evidence to support the Russiagate narrative.
Now, the anti-Trump media in alliance with the Democratic leadership, the foreign policy establishment and senior ranks of the state intelligence agencies appear to have come up with a new angle on President Trump – he is a national security risk.
Ingeniously, the latest media effort lessens the burden of proof required against Trump. No longer has it to be proven that he deliberately collaborated with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump could have done it “unwittingly,” the media are now claiming, because he is a buffoon and reckless. But the upshot, for them, is he’s still a national security risk. The only conclusion, therefore, is that he should be removed from office. In short, a coup.
Over the past couple of weeks, the supposed media bastions have been full of it against Trump. An op-ed in the New York Times on January 5 by David Leonhardt could not have made more plain the absolute disdain. “He is demonstrably unfit for office. What are we waiting for?”
Follow-up editorials and reports have piled on the pressure. The Times reported how the Federal Bureau of Investigation – the state’s internal security agency – opened a counterintelligence file on Trump back in 2017 out of concern that he was “working for Russia against US interests.”
That unprecedented move was prompted partly because of Trump’s comments during the election campaign in 2016 when he jokingly called on Russia to release Hillary Clinton’s incriminating emails. Never mind the fact that Russian hackers were not the culprits for Clinton’s email breach.
Then the Washington Post reported former US officials were concerned about what they said was Trump’s “extraordinary lengths” to keep secret his private conversations with Russia’s Putin when the pair met on the sidelines of conferences or during their one-on-one summit in Helsinki last July.
The Post claimed that Trump confiscated the notes of his interpreter after one meeting with Putin, allegedly admonishing the aide to not tell other officials in the administration about the notes being sequestered. The inference is Trump was allegedly in cahoots with the Kremlin.
This week, in response to the media speculation, Trump was obliged to strenuously deny such claims, saying: “I have never worked for Russia… it’s a big fat hoax.”
What’s going on here is a staggering abuse of power by the US’ top internal state intelligence agency to fatally undermine a sitting president based on the flimsiest of pretexts. Moreover, the nation’s most prominent news media outlets – supposedly the Fourth Estate defenders of democracy – are complacently giving their assent, indeed encouragement, to this abuse of power.
The Times in the above report admitted, in a buried one-line disclaimer, that there was no evidence linking Trump to Russia.
Nevertheless, the media campaign doubled down to paint Trump as a national security risk.
The Times reported on January 14 about deep “concerns” among Pentagon officials over Trump’s repeated threats to withdraw the US from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The reporting portrays Trump as incompetent, ignorant of policy details and habitually rude to American allies. His capricious temper tantrums could result in the US walking away from NATO at any time, the newspaper contends.
Such a move would collapse the transatlantic partnership between the US and Europe which has “deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years,” claimed the Times.
The paper quotes US Admiral James Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander of NATO, calling Trump’s withdrawal whims “a geopolitical mistake of epic proportion.”
“Even discussing the idea of leaving NATO — let alone actually doing so — would be the gift of the century for Putin,” added Stavridis.
The Times goes on to divulge the media campaign coordination when it editorialized: “Now, the president’s repeatedly stated desire to withdraw from NATO is raising new worries among national security officials amid growing concern about Mr Trump’s efforts to keep his meetings with Mr Putin secret from even his own aides, and an FBI investigation into the administration’s Russia ties.”
Still another Times report this week reinforced the theme of Trump being a national security risk when it claimed that the president’s Middle East policy of pulling troops out of Syria was “losing leverage” in the region. It again quoted Pentagon officials “voicing deepening fears” that Trump and his hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton “could precipitate a conflict with Iran”.
That’s a bit hard to stomach: the Pentagon being presented as a voice of sanity and peace, keeping vigilance over a wrecking-ball president and his administration.
But the New York Times, Washington Post and other anti-Trump corporate media have long been extolling the military generals who were formerly in the administration as “the adults in the room.”
Generals H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser, John Kelly, Trump’s ex-chief of staff, and James Mattis, the former defense secretary until he was elbowed out last month by the president, were continually valorized in the US media as being a constraining force on Trump’s infantile and impetuous behavior.
The absence of “the adults” seems to have prompted the US media to intensify their efforts to delegitimize Trump’s presidency.
A new House of Representatives controlled by the Democratic Party has also invigorated calls for impeachment of Trump over a range of unsubstantiated accusations, Russian collusion being prime among them. But any impeachment process promises to be long and uncertain of success, according to several US legal and political authorities.
Such a tactic is fraught with risk of failing, no doubt due to the lack of evidence against Trump’s alleged wrongdoing. A failed impeachment effort could backfire politically, increase his popularity, and return him to the White House in 2020.
Given the uncertainty of impeaching Trump, his political enemies, including large sections of the media establishment, seem to be opting for the tactic of characterizing him as a danger to national security, primarily regarding Russia. Trump doesn’t have to be a proven agent of the Kremlin – a preposterous idea. Repeated portrayal of him as an incompetent unwitting president is calculated to be sufficient grounds for his ouster.
When the Washington Post editorial board urges a state of emergency to be invoked because of “Russian meddling in US elections”, then the national mood is being fomented to accept a coup against Trump. The media’s fawning over the Pentagon and state intelligence agencies as some kind of virtuous bastion of democracy is a sinister signal for a military-police state.
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“Steve’s remarks are beneath the dignity of the Party of Lincoln and the United States of America.”
By Katherine Rodriguez
House Republican leaders voted Monday to remove Rep. Steve King (R-IA) from all of his assigned committees after the Iowa Republican came under fire for his comments about white nationalism in a New York Times interview.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)announced Monday that the Republican Steering Committee voted not to give King any committee assignments in the current session of Congress.
McCarthy, in his statement announcing the decision, called King’s comments “beneath the dignity of the Party of Lincoln and the United States of America.”
“Steve’s remarks are beneath the dignity of the Party of Lincoln and the United States of America. His comments call into question whether he will treat all Americans equally, without regard for race and ethnicity,” McCarthy said in a statement.
“House Republicans are clear: We are all in this together, as fellow citizens equal before God and the law. As Congressman King’s fellow citizens, let us hope and pray earnestly that this action will lead to greater reflection and ultimately change on his part,” McCarthy added.
In the previous session of Congress, King had served on the House Agriculture, Judiciary, and Small Business committees. He also chaired the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice and was on his way to becoming a ranking member of that committee in the current session before the Steering Committee’s vote.
The Iowa Republican decried the committee’s decision as a “political decision that ignores the truth,” adding that the committee misinterpreted his remarks:
King faced pushback on Thursday after he told the Times that he raised questions about why the terms “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” are considered offensive.
His comments caused an uproar, prompting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to call his remarks “unworthy” of the office he holds.
“If he doesn’t understand why ‘white supremacy’ is offensive, he should find another line of work,” McConnell said.
King released a statement clarifying his comments soon after the Times article went live, stating that the Times‘ assumption that he was “an advocate for white nationalism” was incorrect.
King also “condemned” people who support bigotry and rejected “those labels and the evil ideology that they define.
Russiagate disciples are squealing with joy after the New York Times wrote about the FBI apparently probing if Trump was secretly working for the Russians. In fact, the article states there is no evidence to support the theory.
In what appears to be a last-ditch Russiagate Hail Mary, the New York Times breathlessly reported on Friday – of course, citing people ‘familiar with the investigation’ – that the FBI began looking into whether the president was a covert Kremlin agent, after Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. According to the Times, “agents and senior FBI officials had grown suspicious of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign,” but were reluctant to launch a formal probe into the matter. This all changed, the Times tells us, after Comey got the boot.
The investigation was quickly handed over to special counsel Robert Mueller, who continues to lead a probe into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election and collusion with Trump’s presidential campaign.
According to the Times, counterintelligence investigators “had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security.”Agents were also tasked with determining whether Trump “knowingly work[ed] for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.”
The decision to secretly investigate the president for possibly threatening national security triggered a “vigorous debate” within the Justice Department. The FBI, however, apparently felt vindicated after Trump remarked that Comey’s firing had helped relieve Russia-related political pressure.
Among Russiagate’s devout faithful, the report was treated as an earth-shattering revelation that reinforced their core dogma – i.e., that Donald Trump is a Kremlin agent installed in the White House by Vladimir Putin to destroy democracy.
Unfortunately, even the Times begrudgingly admitted – albeit buried in the ninth paragraph – that “no evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.”
Indeed, Twitter was swamped with indignant comments accusing the paper of cooking up a massive nothingburger. One observant netizen pointed out that in October 2016, the New York Times even ran a headline that stated unequivocally: “Investigating Donald Trump, the FBI sees no clear links to Russia.”
Trump himself took to Twitter to mock the report.
“Wow, just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired Lyin’ James Comey, a total sleaze!” he wrote.
The White House said in a statement that the notion that Trump was in bed with Russia makes little sense, given the administration’s hardline policies directed at Moscow. “Unlike President Obama, who let Russia and other foreign adversaries push America around, President Trump has actually been tough on Russia.”
The report also raises questions about whether Comey was being entirely truthful when he testified to Congress in December that Trump wasn’t among the “four Americans” targeted by the FBI counterintelligence probe into Russian meddling.
As one political pundit observed, the Times’ story raises more questions about the FBI than it does about Trump and his still unproven ties to Russia.
“Is NYT story about Trump, or about FBI malfeasance?” Fox News contributor Byron York asked in a tweet.
The co-founders of cybersecurity firm New Knowledge warned Americans in November to “remain vigilant” in the face of “Russian efforts” to meddle in US elections. This month, they have been exposed for doing just that themselves.
Ryan Fox and Jonathan Morgan, who run the New Knowledge cybersecurity company which claims to “monitor disinformation” online, penned a foreboding op-ed in the New York Times on November 6, about “the Russians” and their nefarious efforts to influence American elections.
At the time, it struck me that Fox and Morgan’s reasoning seemed a little far-fetched. For example, one of the pieces of evidence presented to prove that Russia had targeted American elections was that lots of people had posted links to RT’s content online. Hardly a smoking gun worthy of a Times oped.
The New Knowledge guys even authored a Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russia’s alleged efforts to mess with American democracy. They called it a “propaganda war against American citizens.” Impressive stuff. They must be really good at their job, right?
This week, however, we learned that New Knowledge was running its own disinformation campaign (or “propaganda war against Americans,”you could say), complete with fake Russian bots designed to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore as a Russia-preferred candidate when he was running for the US senate in Alabama in 2017.
The scheme was exposed by the New York Times — the paper that just over a month earlier published that aforementioned oped, in which Fox and Morgan pontificated about Russian interference online.
New Knowledge created a mini-army of fake Russian bots and fake Facebook groups. The accounts, which had Russian names, were made to follow Moore. An internal company memo boasted that New Knowledge had “orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.”
Moore lost the race by 1.5 percent. To be fair, accusations published by the Washington Post that he pursued underage girls back in the 1980s may have had something to do with it as well, but that’s a different story.
Of course, New Knowledge and even the New York Times, which blew the lid of the operation, are trying to spin this as some kind of “small experiment” during which they “imitated Russian tactics” online to see how they worked. Just for research, of course. They have also both claimed that the scheme, dubbed ‘Project Birmingham’ had almost no effect on the outcome of the race.
The money for the so-called research project came from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, who contributed $750,000 to American Engagement Technologies (AET), which then spent $100,000 on the New Knowledge experiment. After the scheme was exposed, Hoffman offered a public apology, saying he didn’t know exactly how the money had been used and admitting that the tactics were “highly disturbing.”
ALSO ON RT.COMLinkedIn billionaire ‘sorry’ for funding ‘Russian bot’ disinformation campaign against Roy MooreIf people like Fox and Morgan actually cared about so-called Russian meddling or the integrity of American elections, they would not have run the deceptive campaign against Moore, no matter how undesirable he was as a candidate. Their sneaky and deceitful methods are in total contrast to the public profile they have cultivated for themselves as a firm fighting the good fight for the public good. But is it really that much of a surprise?
You would think that a newspaper like the New York Times would have cottoned on to the fact that guys like Fox and Morgan, with their histories in the US military and intelligence agencies, have clear agendas and are not exactly squeaky clean or the most credible sources of information when it comes to anything to do with Russia. But that kind of insight or circumspection might be too much to ask for in the age of Russiagate.
Facebook removed Morgan’s account on Saturday for “engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior”around the Alabama election. Three days after publishing its initial article on the scandal (the one in which it played down the effects of New Knowledge’s disinfo campaign), the New York Times published a follow-up piece about the Facebook removal, in which it admitted that the controversy would be a “stinging embarrassment”for the social media researcher, noting that he had been a “leading voice” against supposed Russian disinformation campaigns.
In Fox and Morgan’s original NYT oped, they warned of the ubiquitous “Russia-linked social media accounts” and estimated that “at least hundreds of thousands, and perhaps even millions” of US citizens had engaged with them online. One must now wonder, were they including their own fake Russian bots in that count, or were they leaving those ones out?
It’s nearly two years into the Trump presidency and still we have no solid evidence that the Russian “collusion” theory is anything more than a fantasy concocted by Democrats desperate to provide a more palatable reason for Hillary Clinton’s loss than the fact that she simply ran a bad campaign.
In fact, at this point, we actually have more solid and irrefutable evidence of election meddling from the likes of dodgy American and British companies like Cambridge Analytica and New Knowledge than we do of any meddling orchestrated by Russia.
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