Tom Bevan at RealClearPolitics shared on Twitter a local horror story from the Chicago area. His fifth grader came home from school with a vocabulary assignment in science class. The words included &#8220;transgender,&#8221; cisgender,&#8221; &#8220;nonbinary&#8221; and &#8220;consent.&#8221;
The last word carries the most irony — because the educational elite in this country isn&#8217;t interested in the consent of the governed. Resistance to LGBT indoctrination in our public grade schools is not recognized as part of a democratic, governing process. Just like the cause of critical race theory, the parents are not simply irrelevant; they are seen as an impediment to essential progress.
The other words sound ridiculous in a science class. They are at war with science. They are at war with common sense. And they are at war with religious Americans who feel that God made the human race male and female, not some unscientific blur.
The LGBT lobby does not believe in democracy or debate. They believe that all dissent is &#8220;hate speech,&#8221; and any opposition to their treacherous goals leads to youth suicide and emotional torture. They fight dirty, always assuming the worst of their opponents and always engaging in character assassination.
They can count on their staunchest allies for support — for Hollywood&#8217;s cultural shapers and the &#8220;news&#8221; media. You can see it right now in the way journalists have mangled and maligned a bill in Florida to prevent teachers from pushing their gender-bending ideology on children in kindergarten through the third grade.
Failing to push transgenderism on a 5-year-old is presented as &#8220;horrific.&#8221; To the left, an abortion at nine months isn&#8217;t horrific, but failing to suggest to children that they might be gender-fluid is a tragedy.
&#8220;CBS Evening News&#8221; argued that the school should be a &#8220;safe place&#8221; for LGBT children, insisting that their homes are often &#8220;unsafe&#8221; (i.e., places of dissent). It&#8217;s Orwellian to define a &#8220;safe place&#8221; as a school where it&#8217;s safe to lead children down a dark path to the left&#8217;s gender deconstructionism.
On ABC&#8217;s &#8220;The View,&#8221; Sara Haines suggested opponents are unhinged and ignorant, and that teachers are &#8220;first responders&#8221; for kids from abusive homes — as in parents who disagree with the left.
ABC&#8217;s &#8220;World News Tonight&#8221; insisted LGBT education is to help children who may feel bullied or ostracized. But their actual goal is to bully the people with traditional values and have them feel ostracized.
Notice that no one says that parents can&#8217;t teach their young children at home about the birds and the bees, or, in this case, how birds can be bees if that&#8217;s how they want to identify themselves. It&#8217;s mandatory that all children in schools be taught one ideology.
I know that when I was a student, I would have been a nightmare for an indoctrinator. I would have fiercely spoken up with opposing arguments. This makes it seem obvious why the LGBT lobby thinks it&#8217;s so important to push their garbage on grade-school children, before they can offer the withering critique this deserves.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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Classroom

GRAHAM: The Autocracy Of The Gender Benders

Education

LGBTQ

Transgender

Something caught my ear in the car, listening to a radio simulcast of the Feb. 21 &#8220;PBS NewsHour.&#8221; Anchor Judy Woodruff dryly reported that &#8220;Canadian police have arrested more than 190 protesters and issued 389 charges in connection with the so-called Freedom Convoy.&#8221;
The &#8220;so-called Freedom Convoy.&#8221; It&#8217;s a journalistic term, the use of which can be interpreted as distancing themselves from something that&#8217;s not true. After 9/11, we heard about the &#8220;so-called War on Terror.&#8221; Democrats hated that term. Dan Rather used to get out the 10-foot pole and report on &#8220;the Republican political lobbying group that calls itself, quote, the &#8216;Christian Coalition.'&#8221; This could be described as &#8220;so-called journalism.&#8221;
So, I decided to put this term &#8220;so-called Freedom Convoy&#8221; into the Nexis news database to see how often it cropped up on television. The answer was quite a lot. It began as soon as the protests began on Jan. 29.
CNN&#8217;s Jim Acosta was barking: &#8220;Canadian officials say they were sickened to see protesters dancing on that country&#8217;s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This all began as the so-called Freedom Convoy of truckers who drove across the country for several days before arriving in Ottawa yesterday&#8230;&#8221;
If Acosta thinks it&#8217;s a disreputable protest, then it&#8217;s probably about &#8220;freedom.&#8221; This is the same operative who fought with White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany in June of 2020, suggesting Trump rallies were COVID-19 superspreaders. When she suggested the media were incoherent, that they didn&#8217;t feel Black Lives Matter protests were unhealthy, he lamely shot back: &#8220;But these are protesters protesting against injustice, against racism and police brutality. This is a rally, a political rally.&#8221;
Liberal protests are for justice, so they weren&#8217;t superspreaders. It&#8217;s &#8220;science.&#8221;
CNN really hated the Canadian protesters. On Feb. 8 at midnight, anchor John Vause wasn&#8217;t holding back. &#8220;Freedom from truth, freedom from civility, freedom from reality. Canada&#8217;s so-called Freedom Convoy. The truckers&#8217; protest over all pandemic restrictions galvanizes far-right groups worldwide.&#8221;
It turns out that CNN hated the Canadian protests so much that I found the term &#8220;so-called Freedom Convoy&#8221; used in 62 different hours of CNN coverage. There were 12 of them on Feb. 12 alone, in half the hours of that day.
Let&#8217;s stipulate that CNN offers pretty much its entire day of transcripts for the database, and plenty of these were in the overnight hours, when the news is more international.
Every other liberal network used this term, too, but much less. MSNBC only used it four times in the Nexis sample (but they put fewer hours into the system). ABC used it on six programs, CBS on five, NBC on four, and PBS only two.
On MSNBC&#8217;s &#8220;Deadline White House,&#8221; substitute host Alicia Menendez warned of &#8220;the so-called Freedom Convoy, crippling the U.S. and Canadian economy, raising security alarms about copycat protests. So why is the U.S. right wing cheering them on?&#8221;
Now try to imagine the sometimes-violent rioting and looting in the summer of 2020, which the networks described with positive terms, like &#8220;racial reckoning.&#8221; Would anyone ever refer to &#8220;so-called Black Lives Matter protests&#8221;?
I searched CNN for &#8220;so-called Black Lives Matter,&#8221; and there was one record. It was live coverage of the 2020 Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, Aug. 26. It wasn&#8217;t an interview, just an open mic. Jack Brewer of Black Voices for Trump was saying the media &#8220;ignore the so-called Black Lives Matter organization that openly, on their website, called for the destruction of the nuclear family.&#8221;
On this protest story, CNN sounded a bit like White Voices for Trudeau.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Protesters

GRAHAM: Allergic To The ‘So-Called Freedom Convoy’

Freedom Convoy

Legacy Media

One of the memorable scenes in the 1993 movie &#8220;Dave&#8221; involved the president and first lady walking their dog in front of the cameras and promptly dumping him on staff when they walked into the White House. Having a pet is an easy way to get positive press that &#8220;humanizes&#8221; any politician, so almost every president does it — and milks it.
For example, there was Socks the cat, who came in with the Clintons in 1993. Then the Clintons added Buddy the dog at the end of 1997, weeks before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. Hillary Clinton came out with a children&#8217;s book in 1998 titled &#8220;Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids&#8217; Letters to the First Pets.&#8221; But when they left office in 2001, the Clintons took Buddy to New York, and Socks got left behind with Clinton aide Betty Currie.
This promotional wave happened all over again on the last Friday in January, when the Bidens announced they were bringing a cat named Willow to the White House. All three networks announced the news. NBC offered several syrupy stories from Kelly O&#8217;Donnell, their senior White House correspondent. She was a stenographer to pet power.
It&#8217;s a little embarrassing that ABC gave this happy &#8220;cat&#8217;s out of the bag&#8221; story 45 seconds on &#8220;Good Morning America,&#8221; which Geoffrey Dickens of NewsBusters reports was twice as much time as the 23 seconds ABC&#8217;s morning and evening newscasts devoted to the torture and genocide of the Uighur Muslims in Communist China. Because apparently, genocide doesn&#8217;t go with toast and jam — or with Disney sucking up to China.
Maybe it would be rude to combine genocide and pets. But that&#8217;s what MSNBC did to former President Donald Trump in 2018. The media savaged Trump for refusing the pet pattern, especially when he called someone a &#8220;dog.&#8221;
On his show &#8220;The 11th Hour,&#8221; disgraced ex-NBC anchor Brian Williams noted, &#8220;We launched an extensive web search that took us at least a few minutes and could only find one photo in all the land of Donald Trump with a dog.&#8221; Williams wondered if this was because Trump was a &#8220;germaphobe.&#8221;
Washington Post reporter Philip Rucker added, &#8220;He&#8217;s actually the first president in more than 100 years who has not had a dog as a pet in the White House.&#8221; Then he said Trump using the word &#8220;dog&#8221; as an insult is &#8220;deadly serious&#8221; in &#8220;dehumanizing his enemies&#8221; because &#8220;there&#8217;s a long history of authoritarian leaders who have used these animalistic slurs as insults to dehumanize individuals or groups of people. During the Holocaust, the Nazis would call Jews rats.&#8221;
Get a dog &#8230; or you might be a Nazi.
By contrast, Willow the cat drew gushes on &#8220;The 11th Hour&#8221; from usually scowling fill-in host Mehdi Hasan. &#8220;Forget SCOTUS. The hashtag #COTUS has been trending all day after the first cat finally made her White House debut. Willow is a 2-year-old gray and white Tabby named after the first lady&#8217;s hometown of Willow Grove, Pennsylvania,&#8221; he said. Hasan noted press secretary Jen Psaki was asked if we&#8217;ll be seeing Willow in the briefing room, and she tweeted, &#8220;She has a standing invitation. It would be purrrfect.&#8221; He touted, &#8220;Comedy gold there from the press secretary.&#8221;
Presidents should feel free to bring a pet to the White House — or resist the syrupy stories and abstain. But even on the lightest topics, the liberal media can ably demonstrate the clunkiest partisan double standard of light and dark, of cloying sugar and ranting acid.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Joe Biden

GRAHAM: The ‘Purrrfect’ Press Pandering Over Biden’s New Cat

Media Bias

CNN anchor Brianna Keilar is hosting a temporary program pompously titled &#8220;Democracy In Peril.&#8221; On Jan. 18, Keilar huffed: &#8220;We can&#8217;t discuss the tsunami of disinformation, jeopardizing American democracy, without talking about the mothership, Fox.&#8221;
On the very same day, NPR Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg aired a story claiming that Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch was callously ignoring requests from Chief Justice John Roberts to wear a mask during oral arguments in deference to diabetes-suffering colleague Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Fox News reporter Shannon Bream, using a different source, appeared on &#8220;Special Report with Bret Baier&#8221; and announced it was not true that Roberts made any such request, or that Sotomayor expressed anything to Gorsuch on this matter.
In his &#8220;Reliable Sources&#8221; newsletter, CNN&#8217;s Brian Stelter wrote, &#8220;NPR&#8217;s incredibly well-sourced Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg published a scoop on Tuesday about Justice Sonia Sotomayor attending SCOTUS conferences remotely because Justice Neil Gorsuch keeps refusing to wear a mask. She cited multiple sources. Later in the day, Fox&#8217;s Shannon Bream cited her own source and disputed NPR&#8217;s story. In essence, Bream was absolving Gorsuch &#8230; CNN&#8217;s Ariane de Vogue, meantime, matched key parts of NPR&#8217;s reporting.&#8221;
Sadly for NPR and CNN, statements came out from the court that exposed this story as fake news. First, Gorsuch and Sotomayor issued a statement saying, &#8220;Reporting that Justice Sotomayor asked Justice Gorsuch to wear a mask surprised us. It is false.&#8221; NPR and Totenberg legalistically insisted they never reported an argument between these justices. Then Roberts added his denial that directly contradicted NPR&#8217;s story: &#8220;I did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other Justice to wear a mask on the bench.&#8221;
NPR&#8217;s anonymously sourced information had devolved into misinformation, and Fox News had reported the truth. But NPR&#8217;s David Gura (a former MSNBC weekend host) doubled down, tweeting he was &#8220;surprised at how many Supreme Court correspondents I admire are passing along a statement from two justices that is at best false without any context whatsoever.&#8221;
NPR lamely defended itself by claiming, &#8220;The NPR report said the chief justice&#8217;s ask to the justices had come &#8216;in some form.&#8217; NPR stands by its reporting.&#8221; So, they&#8217;re suggesting Roberts is dishonestly denying whatever &#8220;form&#8221; they nebulously claim.
But if CNN wants to debate who has engaged in a &#8220;tsunami of disinformation,&#8221; they could always look at all the liberal media outlets and leftist Twitterati who piled on Totenberg&#8217;s discredited reporting. Drew Holden assembled one of his typically long Twitter threads of all of the aggressive media pickups of the NPR report.
On MSNBC, Democrat hack Brian Fallon said that based on Totenberg&#8217;s &#8220;terrific reporting,&#8221; he thought, &#8220;what a mean-spirited, almost ghoulish person Gorsuch is.&#8221; Joy Reid fussed Gorsuch &#8220;could not be bothered to extend a lifesaving courtesy to his co-worker.&#8221; Eddie Glaude tweeted, &#8220;These people are monsters.&#8221;
After her story crashed and burned, Totenberg came back to NPR and noted, &#8220;Sotomayor and Gorsuch issued a statement saying that she did not ask him to wear a mask. NPR&#8217;s report did not say that she did. And the chief justice issued a statement saying that he, quote, &#8216;did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other justice to wear a mask on the bench.'&#8221; She didn&#8217;t note to NPR listeners that Roberts directly denied what NPR claimed.
For conservatives, this fiasco underlines that Totenberg&#8217;s long taxpayer-funded career has been a partisan exercise in kissing liberal rings (especially her very public friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg) and raining fire on conservative judges with investigative attacks. You have to guess that Clarence Thomas was laughing heartily behind his mask.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Supreme Court

GRAHAM: NPR’s Fake News From The Supreme Court

National Public Radio (NPR)

One of the most frustrating things about &#8220;fact-checkers&#8221; is how they leap on conservative rhetoric against Democrats as &#8220;false&#8221; or &#8220;missing context&#8221; but give Democrats a pass to say the wildest, nastiest things about conservatives.
For example, PolitiFact pounced on Georgia Sen. David Perdue as a &#8220;Pants on Fire&#8221; liar for calling his opponent Sen. Jon Ossoff a &#8220;socialist.&#8221; They gave Donald Trump a &#8220;Pants on Fire&#8221; rating for calling Ossoff and his fellow Georgia Democrat Sen. Raphael Warnock &#8220;radical&#8221; and &#8220;the most extreme far-left candidates in the history of our country.&#8221;
But President Joe Biden can go to Atlanta and suggest that anyone who opposes the Democrat &#8220;voting rights&#8221; bill has taken the side of George Wallace, Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis, and &#8230; crickets.
Sometimes the exaggerations aren&#8217;t character assassination. On the Jan. 6 anniversary, Vice President Kamala Harris compared 1/6 to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Fact-checkers said nothing &#8230; except Snopes.com threw a &#8220;Mostly False&#8221; at conservative radio host Todd Starnes for saying Harris said 1/6 was &#8220;worse&#8221; than 9/11. Matthew Dowd actually said that in 2021 — and the fact-checkers yawned.
Here&#8217;s a brief rundown of the top fact-checkers on Biden&#8217;s Atlanta speech: PolitiFact? Nothing. FactCheck.org? Nothing. AP Fact Check? Nothing. Reuters? Nothing. CNN&#8217;s Daniel Dale team? Nothing. Snopes? Nothing. Lead Stories? Nothing.
Lead Stories did offer a UFO check this month, that &#8220;Biden, Harris Did NOT Visit Area 51 By Plane On January 8, 2022.&#8221;
The exception to this depressing rule is Washington Post &#8220;Fact Checker&#8221; head Glenn Kessler. He did not throw &#8220;Pinocchios&#8221; at Biden&#8217;s Bull Connor garbage. But he did apply the maximum &#8220;Four Pinocchios&#8221; rating to another passage in the Atlanta speech, when Biden claimed he was so &#8220;damn old&#8221; he&#8217;d been arrested for civil-rights protesting. Kessler pointed out that Biden has a history of claiming he&#8217;s been arrested, including in South Africa while he was trying to see Nelson Mandela, when there&#8217;s no proof Biden&#8217;s been arrested for anything.
Kessler concluded, &#8220;The primary source for this story is Biden — and we&#8217;ve learned over the years that he is not always a reliable source.&#8221; But remember, Kessler has no running Biden lie-counter like he did for Trump, and he won&#8217;t write a book about all of Biden&#8217;s lies, like he did for Trump. This is because he works for the Biden-backing Washington Post.
The Post fact-checker also recently exemplified the tendency to preemptively scream &#8220;Missing Context&#8221; when Republicans mock Democrats. Last March, Kessler threw two Pinocchios at Sen. Tom Cotton for predicting that Charleston mass shooter Dylann Roof would get a $1,400 relief check from the Democrats&#8217; COVID &#8220;relief&#8221; package. Now we&#8217;ve learned Boston Marathon terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev received that relief check, so Kessler publicly (and partially) walked back his attack on Cotton. But he kept a single Pinocchio for bad context.
There were no Pinocchios at all in an article titled &#8220;The Senate battle over whether election laws signify a new &#8216;Jim Crow.'&#8221; Kessler quoted Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer claiming, &#8220;The heirs of Jim Crow are weakening the foundations of our democracy,&#8221; and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell calling this rhetoric &#8220;nonsensical.&#8221; Overall, it was a useful review of state voting laws. But despite calling it &#8220;rhetorical overkill,&#8221; there were zero Pinocchios for Schumer.
No one expects liberal &#8220;fact-checkers&#8221; to mark it as a broken promise that when Biden was proclaimed winner of the 2020 election, he claimed it was &#8220;a time to heal in America,&#8221; a time to &#8220;marshal the forces of decency.&#8221; Liberals are staunchly in favor of smash-mouth, our-way-or-you&#8217;re-racist politicking. Being decent or factual doesn&#8217;t matter — only winning does.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

GRAHAM: No Fact-Checking For Biden’s Atlanta Smears

Atlanta

Fact Check

Voting Bill

There&#8217;s something remarkably phony on the front page of every Washington Post proclaiming their motto, &#8220;Democracy Dies in Darkness.&#8221; A new investigative report from Reuters found that the Post&#8217;s owners at Amazon are partners in a propaganda project with Communist China.
Reuters began by revealing that Amazon knuckled under and banned reader reviews on its Chinese website so no one could critique a collection of speeches by Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. This was &#8220;part of a deeper, decade-long effort by the company to win favor in Beijing to protect and grow its business in one of the world&#8217;s largest marketplaces.&#8221;
When it comes to China, democracy dies in dollar signs?
Amazon partnered with China&#8217;s propaganda makers to create a selling portal on the company&#8217;s U.S. site, Amazon.com, a project that came to be known as China Books. The key operative on this project is Jay Carney, the former press secretary for Barack Obama and Joe Biden who is now the global head of Amazon&#8217;s lobbying and public policy operations. To gain access to the Chinese boodle, they&#8217;ll put communist propaganda on global display.
According to Chinese government reports, during a 2018 trip to Beijing, Carney promised an alternate member of the Communist Party central committee that Amazon would make &#8220;every effort&#8221; to promote China Books and make it &#8220;bigger and stronger.&#8221; Naturally, Carney wouldn&#8217;t offer any comment to the Reuters expose.
The books in this project sound ridiculous. Take the paperback titled &#8220;Incredible Xinjiang: Stories of Passion and Heritage&#8221; by the &#8220;Xinhua News Agency Team.&#8221; Xinjiang province is where China interns a million ethnic Uyghurs in concentration camps. But the book touts a local online comedy show in Xinjiang where an actor plays a local &#8220;country bumpkin&#8221; and insists ethnicity is &#8220;not a problem&#8221; there. This echoes the lying communist denial that there is any mistreatment of minorities.
Then there are books that hail China&#8217;s battle against COVID-19, which began in Wuhan. One is titled &#8220;Stories of Courage and Determination: Wuhan in Coronavirus Lockdown&#8221; by &#8220;The Editorial Board.&#8221; Reuters reports another book on this pandemic theme begins with commentary from Xi: &#8220;Our success to date has once again demonstrated the strengths of CPC (the Communist Party of China) leadership and Chinese socialism.&#8221;
The Amazon-owned Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com) also did Beijing&#8217;s bidding by removing harsh user comments on the documentary &#8220;Amazing China,&#8221; which praises the country&#8217;s accomplishments since Xi became dictator (&#8220;president&#8221;) in 2013. The film is still rated low — a 2.3 out of 10 — but archived screenshots showed that some negative reviews disappeared.
In response to Reuters questions, Amazon said it &#8220;complies with all applicable laws and regulations, wherever we operate, and China is no exception.&#8221; It added, &#8220;as a bookseller, we believe that providing access to the written word and diverse perspectives is important. That includes books that some may find objectionable.&#8221;
Oh, come on! In America, Amazon has banned the sale of conservative books on the wrong side of the LGBT censors, such as &#8220;When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment&#8221; by Ryan Anderson, but it sells preposterous Communist Chinese propaganda because it proclaims &#8220;diverse perspectives&#8221; are important.
As we&#8217;re about to see in dazzling Technicolor display during the 2022 Olympics, so-called woke corporations will overlook a lot of human rights abuses in China to gain access to its enormous market. Media companies that genuflect to Chinese tyranny should take down their brave mottos or proclamations that they&#8217;re warriors for democracy and transparency and resistance &#8230; starting with The Washington Post.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Amazon

GRAHAM: Amazon Supports Democracy Dying In Darkness

Communist China

Washington Post

Beatles fans of all ages can flock to Disney Plus for a new documentary called &#8220;Get Back&#8221; that reassembles footage of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr creating music as the band begins to dissolve. NPR used the occasion for guilt-trip clickbait: &#8220;How did we get stuck with the idea that four white guys make a rock band?&#8221;
NPR music critic Ann Powers uncorked a long, unforgiving treatise on how it doesn&#8217;t matter that the Beatles were progressive and loved black music because they were still somehow part of making rock music white and exclusionary: &#8220;Rock&#8217;s defining narrative still stands alongside others that reflect the historic segregation of Anglo-American social spheres.&#8221;
The Beatles and the Rolling Stones wouldn&#8217;t play segregated venues and paid tribute to black musicians who inspired them. But Powers wrote, &#8220;As they became rock&#8217;s norm, they allowed white fans to enjoy what the late great music writer Greg Tate identified as a pasteurized form of Black culture.&#8221; Tate called it &#8220;everything but the burden.&#8221;
They &#8220;allowed white fans&#8221; to eat a Velveeta cheese version of black music. So much of this racialized criticism thrives on a vivid imagination of &#8220;allowance&#8221; and thievery.
Powers writes that black musician Questlove&#8217;s documentary on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, compared with the new Beatles documentary, &#8220;felt like a newly uncovered landmark in the recentered cultural world emerging in step with the Movement for Black Lives. The other, wonderfully intimate and revealing as it is, reasserts familiar hierarchies.&#8221;
NPR is reasserting its familiar ideology. This is where many readers would check out after a few hectoring paragraphs. Can&#8217;t you just love the Beatles without feeling like you&#8217;re reinforcing an &#8220;informally segregated sphere&#8221;?
This is not how people listen to music any more than people only limit themselves to one ethnicity of food. The alleged racism here is about definitions: what is rock; what is pop; what is rhythm and blues. This artificially sets up the genre of rock to be a white, male preserve because many of its stars are white men.
But the &#8220;familiar hierarchy&#8221; of white people also loved the Motown sound and embraced its virtuoso black performers and innovators such as Stevie Wonder. You can love rock, jazz, country and classical. You can have them all on your playlist.
Powers wants to pretend we&#8217;re still living in 1965. She cited an &#8220;infamous&#8221; cover story in Time magazine on &#8220;The Sound of the Sixties&#8221; that proclaimed, &#8220;The Beatles made rock&#8217;n&#8217;roll fun again &#8230; The Beatles also made it all right to be white again.&#8221;
Time&#8217;s writer wasn&#8217;t spewing racism. Powers left out the next sentence, which suggests whites are culturally inferior, quoting French critic Frank Tenot: &#8220;Since the downfall of the Viennese waltz, nothing in popular music, and particularly dance, has known any success unless associated with one or another of the rhythmic discoveries of the Negro.&#8221;
NPR&#8217;s point here is to keep white men perennially confessional about their &#8220;privilege.&#8221; Powers started with rock buddies McCartney and Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters being &#8220;band guys,&#8221; then added that term was problematic. &#8220;In 2021 it&#8217;s as common for women, trans and nonbinary people to jump into rock&#8217;s timestream as it is for men. Yet something continues to infuse the rock mythos with the sweaty-socks scent of conventional, if boyish, masculinity. Whiteness, too.&#8221;
What&#8217;s exhausting here is taxpayers still have to fork over their money to NPR to &#8220;infuse the news mythos&#8221; with the arrogant odor of cultural guilt-tripping. &#8220;Public radio&#8221; is at war with half the &#8220;public&#8221; it supposedly informs. It&#8217;s long past time to pull the funding plug.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

The Beatles

GRAHAM: NPR Finds Racism In The Beatles

Music

Despite the triumph of President Joe Biden&#8217;s inauguration, liberal celebrities didn&#8217;t get much happier in 2021.
It began with Donald Trump refusing to concede that he lost the presidential election. A year ago, one actor engaged in violent fantasies over this stubborn resistance to the facts. &#8220;Who arrests Trump if he refuses to concede? Who drags him out? Pepper spray? Cuffs?&#8221; This sounds like an action movie.
But then it turned threatening: &#8220;A knee on his neck, cutting off his oxygen? Does he wheeze &#8216;I can&#8217;t breathe'(?) Just whale away on him like a pinata? Rodney King style? The thug who has destroyed the country. What does he deserve?&#8221;
Which actor wanted to suffocate and beat Trump senseless? Why, Alec Baldwin, the accidental film-set killer. This is the same Hollywood hothead who fantasized about killing Dick Cheney with the corpse of Osama bin Laden. Somehow all of this rage never came up in his violins-and-handkerchiefs interview with friendly George Stephanopoulos on ABC.
Twitter provides a lot of this left-wing excess. Anyone opposing abortion is a monster. Take author Stephen King, for example, who tweeted in September, &#8220;The Taliban would love the Texas abortion law.&#8221; There&#8217;s also the typical Cher tweet screeching about &#8220;barefoot and pregnant women, at the mercy of tyrants&#8221; — but all in capital letters because Cher loves the primal-scream tone.
Sometimes this nonsense pops up in the celebrity bubble of late-night TV. Actor Bradley Whitford insisted on Stephen Colbert&#8217;s show on CBS that Congress needed to pass H.R. 1, the bill that would ban voter ID requirements and other anti-fraud measures. &#8220;Without that, you know, I&#8217;ll see you in the internment camp,&#8221; he told Colbert. He wasn&#8217;t kidding. &#8220;Negotiating with a party that worships an insurrectionist feels really close, to me, to negotiating with terrorists.&#8221;
These leftists despise Fox News. Screenwriter and director Aaron Sorkin said, &#8220;There is something lethal that&#8217;s wrong with Fox News,&#8221; as opposed to CNN or MSNBC or The New York Times. &#8220;I recognize there might be a liberal tone to it, but they don&#8217;t lie. They don&#8217;t make things up.&#8221; Dan Rather didn&#8217;t lie? New York Times reporter Jayson Blair didn&#8217;t make things up?
Rock singer David Crosby really ranted in an interview with The Daily Beast. &#8220;Rupert Murdoch should be taken out and shot. The people on Fox are doing great harm to the human race,&#8221; he said.
Celebrities were thrilled that Biden would bring unity and sanity and civility to politics — because they&#8217;re absolutely incapable of doing so.
Some celebrities switched from anger to what sounded like a drug-induced euphoria. Michael Moore offered a factually deprived summary of the Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco under Biden: &#8220;I&#8217;m still flabbergasted that he pulled this off with such grace and precision and safety.&#8221; This mysteriously ignored the 13 U.S. service members killed by a suicide bomber outside the Kabul airport, and the errant drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 civilians, including an aid worker and seven children.
In a year of increasingly shameless robberies of businesses in big cities, multimillionaire &#8220;Sex and the City&#8221; actress (and losing political candidate) Cynthia Nixon was upset they were locking up the laundry detergent at CVS drugstores. &#8220;I can&#8217;t imagine thinking that the way to solve the problem of people stealing basic necessities out of desperation is to prosecute them,&#8221; she tweeted.
So, it&#8217;s unreasonable (or not compassionate) to treat robbery as a crime. Perhaps victimized merchants would suggest solving this shameful wealth inequality by volunteering Nixon&#8217;s address for a thorough housecleaning.
It&#8217;s celebrity freakouts such as these that underline America&#8217;s rich and famous actors could be nominated for the award &#8220;Most Likely to Sound Out of Touch.&#8221;
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Hollywood

GRAHAM: The Year In Liberal Celebrity Freakouts

Brian Williams, dismissed as &#8220;NBC Nightly News&#8221; anchor in 2015 for serial embellishment and lying, has decided to walk away from his MSNBC show &#8220;The 11th Hour.&#8221; CNN&#8217;s Brian Stelter, from a competing network, previewed the last show: &#8220;There&#8217;s no word on what the Thursday finale will entail, but here&#8217;s hoping for a sendoff befitting his position.&#8221;
Williams should be sent off with a lump of coal.
Stelter wasn&#8217;t quite as bad as one of his favorite Sunday-show guests, journalism professor and former Baltimore Sun reporter David Zurawik. &#8220;I have separation anxiety about Brian Williams leaving at 11:00 because it means so much. We&#8217;re losing big stars in this medium and I don&#8217;t know what the impact is.&#8221; He also included Chris Cuomo and Rachel Maddow in this lickspittle sendoff.
Separation anxiety? This is not a case of &#8220;sometimes when we touch, the honesty&#8217;s too much.&#8221;
In case anyone forgot, Williams uncorked a series of tall tales that caused him to resemble Jon Lovitz&#8217;s &#8220;Saturday Night Live&#8221; character Tommy Flanagan, the Pathological Liar, who said he was married to actress Morgan Fairchild and added, &#8220;Yeah, that&#8217;s the ticket!&#8221;
Williams claimed Secret Service agents helped him meet and shake hands with Pope John Paul II at Catholic University in 1979. He claimed he was present at the Brandenburg Gate in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, although the only American broadcaster on the scene was his NBC predecessor, Tom Brokaw.
The worst exaggeration of his exploits was in war zones, imagining himself in great peril. He claimed he was on a Chinook helicopter hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq, at one point comparing his experience to &#8220;&#8216;Black Hawk Down&#8217; meets &#8216;Saving Private Ryan.'&#8221; He also claimed that he not only flew into Iraq in 2003 with Navy SEAL Team 6 but they later sent him gifts and souvenirs from the raid carried out to kill Osama bin Laden.
The conventional wisdom in 2015 revolved around whether Williams could remain in journalism at all after this debacle. Then NBC picked him up, dusted him off and put him on MSNBC, first as a &#8220;breaking news&#8221; specialist and then on the &#8220;11th Hour&#8221; show, which then doubled from 30 to 60 minutes.
Williams, like everyone else on MSNBC, spends his on-air hours ripping on Republicans, like deriding Sen. Ted Cruz in May as &#8220;Kremlin Cruz.&#8221; But he&#8217;s most vividly remembered as one of the most embarrassing Obama-polishers in the press. Twice in 2008, he handed a glowing magazine cover story to his hero, Barack Obama, and asked him to comment on how wonderful he felt about it.
During that year&#8217;s Republican convention, Williams asked Michelle Obama, &#8220;What of the attacks has busted through to you? What makes you angriest at John McCain, the Republicans? What&#8217;s being said about your husband that you want to shout from the mountaintops is not true?&#8221;
When Obama won the presidency the first time, Williams announced: &#8220;This nation woke up this morning changed. As one columnist put it, America matured in 2008 by choosing Barack Obama.&#8221;
All of this underlines Williams fell to the floor in his obsequiousness toward the Obamas. But he was shameless enough to mock others as up someone&#8217;s intestine in June. &#8220;If (Texas Gov. Greg) Abbott wants to, say, run for president, he must be more further ensconced in a particular area of Trump&#8217;s anatomy than even (Gov.) Ron DeSantis of Florida. And that won&#8217;t be easy.&#8221;
The Republican half of America will have no anxiety whatsoever over Williams separating from his MSNBC safe space.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Brian Williams

GRAHAM: Just Go Away, Brian Williams

Rachel Maddow is one of America&#8217;s most popular proponents of socialism. Government is never big enough for Maddow. Bernie Sanders has a friend in Maddow. But when the subject is abortion, you will not find a more enthusiastic libertarian.
After the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Nov. 30 on Mississippi&#8217;s law banning the termination of unborn children after 15 weeks, Maddow championed lawyer Julie Rikelman for the Center for Reproductive Rights for arguing this is &#8220;about American women being forced by the government to give birth against their will.&#8221; She added: &#8220;This is what the supposed small-government conservative movement has brought us, right?&#8221;
Maddow complained about &#8220;this very big government idea, the idea that the government will decide whether or not you get an abortion. The government will decide whether or not you stay pregnant. The government will decide whether or not you give birth. It&#8217;s not your choice. The government gets to decide it.&#8221;
This MSNBC host has one central issue when overweening government can be demonized. She has one issue where, suddenly, precedents must never be overturned, where she claims judges are acting like legislators and that Brett Kavanaugh now represents &#8220;a little mini-Congress with robes on.&#8221;
The Left very eagerly finds a &#8220;liberty interest&#8221; in the Constitution for the premature death of the unwanted &#8220;fetus,&#8221; for their lust to &#8220;terminate a pregnancy.&#8221; In general, they find &#8220;liberty&#8221; arguments in American courts or legislatures to be incredibly cynical capitalist excuses. But not when it comes to enjoying sex without consequences. Any woman who can&#8217;t get an abortion after 15 weeks is now victimized and &#8220;devastated.&#8221;
Maddow touted the headline on a Washington Post staff editorial: &#8220;Gutting Roe would devastate millions of Americans and the court itself.&#8221; Using the word &#8220;gutting&#8221; to describe the people procuring the literal evisceration of the most vulnerable human beings is pretty sick stuff.
But the Post couldn&#8217;t stop ignoring the fetus in their editorializing. They concluded any &#8220;gutting&#8221; of the Roe v. Wade precedent would result in &#8220;deep and immediate harm to millions.&#8221;
Nowhere in the Maddow/Post moral calculus of immediate harm are the tens of millions of unborn children who have been gutted and devastated and poured into dumpsters and sewers since the court decided Roe in 1973. There is only a right to choose, and never a life to lose. They celebrate something called &#8220;International Safe Abortion Day.&#8221; They&#8217;ve poked their own eyes out and called themselves the visionaries.
The legitimacy of the court is now endangered, they argue, as if legitimacy and libertinism are linked. Maddow touted the liberal justices saying, &#8220;Hey, if you do this, this will be the end of the court as we know it.&#8221;
Maddow spoke next to a graphic of capitalized letters quoting Justice Stephen Breyer about the court looking like politicians: &#8220;THAT&#8217;S WHAT KILLS US AS AN AMERICAN INSTITUTION.&#8221; Right above those words on screen is a poster claiming &#8220;Abortion Is Essential.&#8221;
The headline on MSNBC&#8217;s video page is &#8220;Supreme Court faces credibility crisis as anti-abortion justices set to fulfill purpose.&#8221; We&#8217;re told, &#8220;Rachel Maddow explains why the anti-abortion justices on the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade would confirm what many people already think about the court being compromised by politics.&#8221;
But saying that &#8220;many people think&#8221; overturning Roe ruins the public standing of the Supreme Court is &#8230; politics. Nobody should pretend that &#8220;The Rachel Maddow Show&#8221; isn&#8217;t a soapbox for politics. The &#8220;credibility crisis&#8221; should be assigned to the liberal media, which only speaks of credibility and legitimacy and landmark decisions when they win.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Rachel Maddow

GRAHAM: Rachel Maddow, Libertarian On One Issue

Abortion

Roe v. Wade's Long And Brutal Legacy

As we learn more about the senseless SUV attack on the crowd attending a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, some liberal media outlets are energetically attempting to spin away from the suspect Darrell Brooks and his left-wing politics on social media.
That&#8217;s funny. With Kyle Rittenhouse, they quickly dug into his social media activity. The Washington Post warned last summer &#8220;the 17-year-old shadowed local law enforcement, filling his social media feeds with posts declaring that &#8216;Blue Lives Matter&#8217; and photos of himself posing with guns.&#8221; For Brooks, the Post lamely mentioned Brooks wrote under the name MathBoi Fly and that &#8220;after multiple legal battles,&#8221; he &#8220;started turning the life he lived in the streets into music.&#8221;
In their Thanksgiving edition, USA Today&#8217;s front page explored the politics of &#8220;vehicle ramming.&#8221; But they shifted the scrutiny back to people who resent &#8220;Black Lives Matter&#8221; protests, especially the protesters that block roads and threaten drivers and passengers with violence.
Reporter Dennis Wagner wrote: &#8220;Weaponizing of vehicles is a practice sometimes used by terrorists abroad. But the wanton attacks have also surged in the United States. The increase began after the police murder of George Floyd prompted Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which in turn prompted angry or fearful motorists to run over protesters.&#8221;
This framing makes it sound like protesters are &#8220;peaceful&#8221; and not &#8220;angry&#8221; and pose no threat. Wagner added, &#8220;A Boston Globe survey identified at least 139 incidents in which vehicles ran into crowds of demonstrators since Floyd&#8217;s death in May 2020. Fewer than half resulted in criminal charges.&#8221;
Really? The original Globe story appeared on Halloween by reporter Jess Bidgood, who sounds more like an opinion writer. She began with the usual sympathetic figure: a man who was paralyzed after falling off an interstate overpass while blocking drivers in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Bidgood was outraged no one was arrested, despite admitting that the red pickup involved felt threatened as &#8220;protesters banged on its hood and threw things at the vehicle as it moved in.&#8221;
Bidgood wrote, &#8220;A Globe review of the recent incidents found there have been scores of people hit, dozens of injuries, at least three deaths, but precious little justice, much less sympathy, for the demonstrators injured, killed, or just plain terrified. Yet Oklahoma and 15 other states have considered bills protecting drivers, not protesters, as these ramming incidents have proliferated.&#8221;
In the minds of the Globe, driving into a road-blocking protest makes you guilty until proven innocent. &#8220;Given the choice between defending the safety of pedestrians protesting a police murder and the drivers of the vehicles running them down, prosecutors and lawmakers here have reserved their concern for the drivers.&#8221; You&#8217;re &#8220;running them down&#8221; if you attempt to escape.
In fact, Bidgood compared the drivers to Bull Connor and the violent racists who beat John Lewis and other civil rights protesters. &#8220;To those on the short end of this cold calculus, it feels like siding, during the 1960s civil rights protests, with Bull Connor&#8217;s firehoses over the Black children of Birmingham. Or with the cops with clubs over the brave, battered souls who traversed Selma&#8217;s Edmund Pettus Bridge.&#8221;
This article is littered with reckless smears like this. But this article is linked in Bidgood&#8217;s pinned tweet. She&#8217;s very proud of this.
The Globe&#8217;s ramming-incident numbers were accumulated in part with the help of &#8220;The Armed Conflict Location &amp; Event Data Project,&#8221; which sounds objective. But this ACLED group has also delighted the liberal media with the data that &#8220;the vast majority of Black Lives Matter protests — more than 93% — have been peaceful.&#8221;
Consumer beware: These studies are ideologically loaded.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Waukesha

GRAHAM: The Politics Of Weaponized Car Attacks

MSNBC host Joy Reid is the only minority host on her network from noon to midnight, so it&#8217;s only natural she would be most expected to lecture on the evils of whiteness, especially white maleness. It can even happen on her social media accounts.
On Nov. 16, Reid took to TikTok to compare the Kyle Rittenhouse trial to the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh three years ago.
&#8220;This Kyle Rittenhouse trial. It reminded a lot of people of something — something, can&#8217;t remember what it was,&#8221; she said. &#8220;Oh. The Brett Kavanaugh hearings, in which Brett Kavanaugh, who had been accused by a high school friend of committing sexual abuse of her, cried his way through the hearings&#8221; to make the Supreme Court.
No &#8220;independent&#8221; fact-checker will object, but Kavanaugh didn&#8217;t &#8220;cry his way through&#8221; confirmation hearings. In fact, Kavanaugh teared up during his opening statement as he described his 10-year-old daughter Liza&#8217;s reaction to Christine Blasey Ford&#8217;s allegations. &#8220;We should pray for the woman,&#8221; Kavanaugh says his daughter responded. &#8220;That&#8217;s a lot of wisdom from a 10-year-old.&#8221; He also choked up when describing the impact of the charges on his family.
But who needs context when you&#8217;re &#8220;owning&#8221; the white male conservatives?
Reid continued: &#8220;And his tears turned out to be more powerful than the tears of Christine Blasey Ford, which were the tears of an alleged victim.&#8221; Strongly underline &#8220;alleged.&#8221; Ford could never locate a time and place where she and Kavanaugh had ever met as teenagers.
This is where this attempted connection to Rittenhouse collapses. Kavanaugh hadn&#8217;t shot anyone during a riot. They couldn&#8217;t prove that he had done anything like raping girls as a teenage boy, despite multiple accusers with exotic stories.
Rittenhouse scrunched up his face and lost his composure when describing how he shot and killed two men. And if he hadn&#8217;t cried? Then he&#8217;d be trashed by Reid as a sociopath.
Reid&#8217;s rant continued: &#8220;But in America, there&#8217;s a thing about both white vigilantism and white tears, particularly male white tears. Really, white tears in general because that&#8217;s what Karens are, right? They Karen-out, and as soon as they get caught, they bring waterworks. White men can get away with that, too, and it has the same effect.&#8221;
No one&#8217;s going to find Joy Reid mocking a &#8220;Karen-out&#8221; when Hillary Clinton teared up on the campaign trail in 2008, or when she teared up in a Benghazi hearing in 2013. The networks touted that as a masterful performance.
&#8220;The indignation. And then, the tears in her eyes,&#8221; ABC anchor Diane Sawyer announced before trumpeting: &#8220;It was a valedictory that showed her indignation and emotion as she ends this tenure on the public stage.&#8221; It was a &#8220;riveting encounter.&#8221;
For her part, Reid is best remembered for exclaiming how Clinton was just about the most qualified contender ever in 2016: &#8220;My God, since the Founding Fathers, has anyone tried to run for president with more on their resume?&#8221;
This is how Reid concluded on the white male tears: &#8220;Even as the right tries to politicize the idea that masculinity is being robbed from American men by multiculturalism and wokeism, they still want to be able to have their tears.&#8221;
The common thread is the Left’s cynical accusation that these incidents of white male crying or choking up on television were insincerely staged for personal gain or political effect. What Reid was cynically offering was an early basket of sour grapes that the Left failed to destroy either Kavanaugh or Rittenhouse.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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Tim Graham