At Monday’s White House Press briefing, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, disgusted with the flurry of questions from reporters that ignored violence around the country and instead focused on the Confederate flag, finally had had enough. Concluding the briefing, she said levelly:
<blockquote>Finally, I’d end with this: I was asked probably twelve questions about the Confederate flag. This president’s focused on action. I’m a little dismayed that I didn’t receive one question on the deaths that we got in this country this weekend. I didn’t receive one question about New York City shootings doubling for the third straight week and over the last seven days, shootings skyrocket by 142%. Not one question.
I didn’t receive one question about five children who were killed. And I’ll leave you with this remark by a dad; it broke my heart. A dad of an eight-year-old lost in Atlanta this weekend: “They say Black Lives Matter? You killed a child; she didn’t do nothing to nobody,” was his quote. We need to be focused on securing our streets; making sure no lives were lost, because all black lives matter. That of David Dorn and that of this eight-year-old girl.</blockquote>
McEnany wasn’t making anything up about the number of relentless questions regarding the Confederate flag. Here are some of the questions that were fired at her:
1. Why is the president so supportive of flying the Confederate flag?
2. Does he believe NASCAR should fly the Confederate flag and why don’t they fly it here?
3. What is the president’s position? Does he think NASCAR made a mistake by banning the Confederate flag?
4. Let’s drill down on the Confederate flag. Does he think it was a mistake for NASCAR to ban it?
5. Does he think NASCAR’s ratings are down because they banned the Confederate flag?
6. Does he think his supporters should not take the flag to Trump rallies?
7. Has he considered banning the Confederate flag from Trump rallies?
8. You were saying we were taking the tweet out of context, but this is what he (Trump) tweeted: “Has Bubba Wallace apologized to all of those great NASCAR drivers &amp; officials who came to his aid, stood by his die, &amp; were wiling to sacrifice everything for him, only to find out that the whole thing was just another hoax? That &amp; flag decision has caused lowest ratings ever.” How are we misinterpreting that?
9. On the Confederate part, why would the president not praise NASCAR for removing the Confederate flag, particularly given the history of that flag, the symbol that it has for African-Americans, and also what it represents in terms of just the treasonous acts and the insurrection against the republic?
10. What exactly does the president see as positive or uniting about the Confederate flag?
11. You’ve said there’s no opinion on the Confederate flag. Why can’t this White House unambiguously state whether or not it supports displays of he Confederate flag?
12. And what about making a statement on the Confederate flag? Are we capable of doing that?
Video below:
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uW_71idNVhA" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers with the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Holds Briefing

WATCH: McEnany Rips Press For Ignoring Murders: ‘I Didn’t Receive One Question On The Deaths That We Got In This Country This Weekend’

Confederate Flag

Kayleigh McEnany

Media

Murder

After President Donald Trump delivered a forceful defense of American principles and ideals at Mount Rushmore ahead of the Fourth of July weekend, mainstream media outlets have characterized the president’s speech as divisive.
Under the headline “At Mount Rushmore, Trump Digs Deeper Into Nation’s Divisions,” The Associated Press reports that the president “dug deeper into America’s divisions by accusing protesters who have pushed for racial justice of engaging in a ‘merciless campaign to wipe out our history.’”
<blockquote>The president, in remarks Friday night at the South Dakota landmark, offered a discordant tone to an electorate battered by a pandemic and seared by the recent high-profile killings of Black people. He zeroed in on the desecration by some demonstrators of monuments and statues across the country that honor those who have benefited from slavery, including some past presidents.</blockquote>
As The Daily Wire has previously reported, far-left activists <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/rioters-in-california-tear-down-statue-of-ulysses-s-grant-he-defeated-the-confederacy-devastated-kkk">have been</a> <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/boston-weighs-removing-replica-emancipation-memorial-of-lincoln-freed-slave-slaves-paid-for-the-original-memorial">targeting</a> <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/portland-leftists-topple-george-washington-statue-burn-american-flag-on-it-twice">statues</a> of the nation’s founders and American heroes, including President George Washington, President Abraham Lincoln, and President Ulysses S. Grant, the former Union general who played a key role in helping Lincoln win the Civil War.
Covering the Mount Rushmore speech in a purportedly straight news story, The New York Times published the headline “Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message,” and accused Trump of turning his Fourth of July address into an effort to “mount a full-on culture war against a straw-man version of the left that he portrayed as inciting mayhem and moving the country toward totalitarianism.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Breaking News: President Trump delivered a dark and divisive speech at Mount Rushmore, leaning into the culture wars and barely mentioning the pandemic.<a href="https://t.co/03WOgau4Zx">https://t.co/03WOgau4Zx</a>
— The New York Times (@nytimes) <a href="https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1279262749265199104?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 4, 2020</a></blockquote>
<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-mount-rushmore-fireworks/2020/07/03/af2e84f6-bd25-11ea-bdaf-a129f921026f_story.html">The Washington Post</a> described the president’s speech as “dark,” and accused him of trying to “exploit the nation’s racial and social divisions.”
<blockquote>At the foot of Mount Rushmore’s granite monument to his presidential forebears, President Trump on Friday delivered a dark speech ahead of Independence Day in which he sought to exploit the nation’s racial and social divisions and rally supporters around a law-and-order message that has become a cornerstone of his reelection campaign.
Trump focused most of his address before a crowd of several thousand in South Dakota on what he described as a grave threat to the nation from liberals and angry mobs — a “left-wing cultural revolution” that aims to rewrite U.S. history and erase its heritage amid the racial justice protests that have roiled cities for weeks.</blockquote>
As <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-at-mount-rushmore-left-wing-cultural-revolution-is-designed-to-overthrow-the-american-revolution">The Daily Wire</a> previously reported, Trump’s speech featured, in part, an unapologetic defense of the presidents carved into Mount Rushmore, describing them as “American giants” whose “deeds unleashed the greatest leap in human advancement the world has ever known.”
Trump also called on Americans to defend America from those who seek to destroy the country’s values, describing it as time “to speak up loudly and strongly and powerfully, and defend the integrity of our country.”
<blockquote>We will never let them rip America’s heroes from our monuments, or from our hearts. By tearing down Washington and Jefferson, these radicals would tear down the very heritage for which men gave their lives to win the Civil War; they would erase the memory that inspired those soldiers to go to their deaths, singing these words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic: “As He died to make men Holy, let us die to make men free, while God is marching on.”
They would tear down the principles that propelled the abolition of slavery in America and, ultimately, around the world, ending an evil institution that had plagued humanity for thousands and thousands of years. Our opponents would tear apart the very documents that Martin Luther King used to express his dream, and the ideas that were the foundation of the righteous movement for Civil Rights. They would tear down the beliefs, culture, and identity that have made America the most vibrant and tolerant society in the history of the Earth.
My fellow Americans, it is time to speak up loudly and strongly and powerfully, and defend the integrity of our country&#8230;
It is time for our politicians to summon the bravery and determination of our American ancestors. It is time. It is time to plant our flag and protect the greatest of this nation, for citizens of every race, in every city, and every part of this glorious land. For the sake of our honor, for the sake of our children, for the sake of our union, we must protect and preserve our history, our heritage, and our great heroes.
Here tonight, before the eyes of our forefathers, Americans declare again, as we did 244 years ago, that we will not be tyrannized, we will not be demeaned, and we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people. It will not happen.</blockquote>
Toward the end of the speech, the president unveiled an executive order to start a National Garden to American heroes. 

According to a White House press release, the garden may feature people such as “the Founding Fathers, those who fought for the abolition of slavery or participated in the underground railroad, heroes of the United States Armed Forces, recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor or Presidential Medal of Freedom, scientists and inventors, entrepreneurs, civil rights leaders, missionaries and religious leaders, pioneers and explorers, police officers and firefighters killed or injured in the line of duty, labor leaders, advocates for the poor and disadvantaged, opponents of national socialism or international socialism, former Presidents of the United States and other elected officials, judges and justices, astronauts, authors, intellectuals, artists, and teachers. None will have lived perfect lives, but all will be worth honoring, remembering, and studying.”
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers with the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

President Trump Speaks During Fourth Of July Celebrations At Mount Rushmore

Media Outlets Describe Trump’s Rushmore Speech As ‘Dark’ And ‘Divisive’

4th of July

Donald Trump

Mount Rushmore

Liberals are beginning to swagger around as if the 2020 election is already over. Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post exclaimed that President Donald Trump&#8217;s reelection campaign is &#8220;beginning to look like the Titanic.&#8221; Joe Biden should be preparing his inauguration remarks.
One reason for this arrogance is the absolutely punishing media coverage of Trump. The coronavirus pandemic did what some might have thought was impossible: made Trump coverage even more negative. Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center found that from March 4 (when Joe Biden had basically wrapped up the Democratic nomination) through May 31, Trump coverage on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts was 94% negative. In May, it was 99.5% negative, an all-time low.
There were 474 evaluative comments about President Trump during this period, and 445 were negative. By contrast, there were only 85 evaluations of Biden, and 51 were negative (61%). They were nine times more negative about Trump.
This sounds a lot like the warp and woof of the 2016 campaign coverage, during which Trump drew the lion&#8217;s share of media attention and it was overwhelmingly negative, while Hillary Clinton seemed like an afterthought. Even in the last three months of the campaign, Trump was evaluated four times as much as Clinton.
The Democrats thought that made her a shoo-in. It didn&#8217;t turn out that way.
Here&#8217;s the problem for them. Anyone who has spent time with these networks knows they have a throbbing, swelling urge to destroy Trump politically. They can&#8217;t possibly be considered &#8220;referees&#8221; of presidential campaigns. One reason they&#8217;ve been so angry about the fate of &#8220;democracy&#8221; is they can&#8217;t stand it when voters ignore their incessant advice.
Jonah Goldberg recently wrote a column in which he argued Trump must think his voters are idiots since he proclaims he is running against the media instead of Biden. Obviously, the media aren&#8217;t on the ballot. But Biden&#8217;s attacks on the president cannot possibly match the media&#8217;s 24/7 aggression and firepower. They are not some irrelevant bystanders, especially now that Biden is campaigning from a cold computer screen.
Their protective coverage of Lovable Grandpa Joe is just as transparent. Noyes reported that ABC, CBS and NBC could barely muster three minutes of airtime on how Biden told black voters, &#8220;If you have a problem figuring out whether you&#8217;re for me or Trump, then you ain&#8217;t black.&#8221; NBC gave it a few seconds. ABC and CBS both rushed to &#8220;balance&#8221; the story with negative Trump news. CBS showed Biden was leading among black voters, 90% to 3%.
When it broke that Biden, in his last days as vice president, joined a list of other Obama officials requesting the &#8220;unmasking&#8221; of an American who turned out to be incoming Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn — which led to a smear about the former Army major general being a Russian pawn — the story drew merely 62 seconds of coverage: 55 seconds on ABC, 7 seconds on CBS and none on NBC. Voters who rely on these cynics for &#8220;news&#8221; wouldn&#8217;t even understand the Big Picture: that Team Obama improperly spied on the Trump campaign and was still trying to ruin Trump&#8217;s presidency during the transition.
Biden&#8217;s TV interviews are littered with please-trash-Trump questions, such as this beaut from MSNBC&#8217;s Brian Williams: &#8220;What is President Trump&#8217;s level of culpability — what&#8217;s his level of responsibility, say, toward the illness and fatalities we&#8217;re witnessing every few minutes these days?&#8221;
This sums up the tone of the latest evening news: How many Americans has Trump killed? They hope their nightly onslaughts demoralize Trump voters and energize Biden backers. But to many Americans, this is not journalism. It&#8217;s badly disguised campaign advertising.
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.

Trump

GRAHAM: The Media’s Broadcast Brutality Against Trump

2020 Election

Joe Biden

Media Bias

A spokesperson for the Louisville Metro Police Department made a public apology late Friday evening after reviewing a viral video that appears to show a police officer firing pepper balls at Wave-3 journalist Kaitlin Rust, who was covering the local protest live on-air.
“I want to apologize,” spokesperson Jessie Halladay told the <a href="https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/2020/05/29/louisville-protests-officer-fires-pellets-tv-reporter-video/5288734002/">Courier-Journal</a>. “It’s not something that should have occurred if she was singled out as a reporter, and that is what the video looks like occurred. It’s a little difficult to determine, in the midst of all of this, who that officer is.”
“We will be taking a look at the video again after this situation is resolved, and if we need to do any investigation for discipline, we will do that,” said Halladay. 

In the viral video, Rust can be seen covering the protest, while she’s followed by her cameraman, when a police officer appears to step in her general direction and fire the first pepper ball.
<blockquote>RUST: Right now we’re behind the line.
ANCHOR ONE: Okay, well you keep going. Go where you gotta go. That’s fine with us, we’ve got plenty of time here. 
RUST: *Shouts*
ANCHOR TWO: Are you okay?
RUST: I’m getting shot! I’m getting — 
ANCHOR TWO: Katie, are you okay?
RUST: Rubber bullets! Rubber bullets! It’s okay! It’s those pepper bullets, it’s those pepper bullets. 
ANCHOR TWO: Who are they aiming that at?
RUST: Like at us. Directly at us!</blockquote>
Within seconds of Rust proclaiming that the officer is shooting pepper balls at the news crew, the officer fires another one toward the camera, blurring the screen. As of Saturday afternoon, the video has over 17 million views on Twitter.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
This just happened on live tv. Wow, what a douche bag. <a href="https://t.co/dQKheEcCvb">pic.twitter.com/dQKheEcCvb</a>
— Christopher Bishop (@ChrisBishopL1C4) <a href="https://twitter.com/ChrisBishopL1C4/status/1266546753182056453?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 30, </a>
2020</blockquote>
As <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/7-shot-in-louisville-amid-protests-over-killing-of-breonna-taylor">The Daily Wire</a> previously reported, protests erupted in Louisville this week in response to the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor, an emergency technician who was shot and killed in March after Narcotics Detectives broke down her door while carrying out a search warrant. The protests overlap with national outrage, demonstrations, and riots over the death of George Floyd earlier this week.
<a href="https://apnews.com/4c1b5ac970cfc1e22ed6fcc54f25fb6b">The Associated Press</a> reports that Taylor’s boyfriend fired a single shot into the ground as a warning to potential intruders, and Taylor was shot eight times in response. “Somebody kicked in the door and shot my girlfriend,” Taylor’s boyfriend told 9-1-1 dispatchers in a frantic call after the incident, reports the news agency. No drugs were recovered from the scene, and murder charges brought against Taylor’s boyfriend for shooting an officer during the situation have since been dropped.
Greg Fischer, the Mayor of Louisville, has since instituted a curfew in the city as &#8220;peaceful protests&#8221; have turned &#8220;into violence and terrorism and looting,&#8221; reports <a href="https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/metro-government/2020/05/30/mayor-fischer-sets-breonna-taylor-protest-curfew-calls-national-guard/5290690002/">the Courier-Journa</a>l. About 350 members of the Kentucky National Guard have been called in and will reportedly help maintain the peace on Saturday evening.
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Protests Continue In Louisville Over Deaths In Recent Police Shootings

Louisville PD Apologizes After Officer Appears To Fire Pepper Balls At On-Air News Crew

Breonna Taylor

George Floyd

News

Police

Protest

Riots

When COVID-19 began impacting the United States, a vocal minority of conservatives began making statements that wound up being betrayed by the truth. For example, a recurring sentiment had been that the virus was nothing more than &#8220;a bad flu.&#8221; Many compared it to H1N1, the swine flu.
In the 2009-2010 swine flu outbreak, approximately 12,000 Americans died in a year. In the current outbreak, over 80,000 Americans have died in 10 weeks. Some would argue the numbers are overstated, but none will venture to guess how many are overstated. Even assuming a 50% overstatement, in 10 weeks, COVID-19 has killed many more people than the swine flu did in a year.
Some conservatives pushed back on these conspiracists, and they were joined by the American press corps. If the left did the same, these same reporters would surely push back, too.
On MSNBC last week, Brian Williams interviewed the Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. Bottoms publicly disagreed with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp&#8217;s decision to reopen the state. Williams, while getting Bottoms to acknowledge the reopening had not gone as badly as she expected, said, &#8220;There&#8217;s a robust conversation going on about the quality of the numbers we&#8217;re all getting out of the state of Georgia.&#8221;
That robust conversation is a conversation of progressive activists who, as Republican states in the south reopen, are ignoring the data just as much as some on the right did at the beginning of the pandemic. Reporters who robustly pushed back against conservative &#8220;data truthers&#8221; have largely kept silent or amplified progressive data truthers.
There have been some issues in Georgia with its data. But each has had credible explanations backed not just by politicians but also by the hospitals and epidemiologists doing the data entry. The great conspiracy of late had been a 231-count spike in cases that disappeared. It turned out those were not positive COVID-19 cases but the results of antibody tests that had to be removed from the data. Much of the national press played up the spike, downplayed the reduction or suggested sinister motives.
The same has happened in Florida. Rebekah Jones had been the manager of Florida&#8217;s geographic information system used to geographically display the spread of the virus in Florida. On May 18, the state fired Jones for insubordination. Her bosses, including several epidemiologists, took issue with the data Jones was entering. She purportedly ignored them. Much of the national press claimed Jones was a scientist. Actually, she has degrees in journalism and geography and was the manager of the Florida Department of Public Health&#8217;s geographic information system program. Contrary to media reports that Jones singlehandedly programmed all the information, she managed a team.
The facts of Jones&#8217; dismissal did not matter. The press decided to portray her as a martyr to accuse Florida&#8217;s Republican governor of covering up or fabricating data on the virus. Actually, Florida has a larger population than New York and far less cases and deaths. After a press conference where Gov. Ron DeSantis defended himself and blasted reports on Jones&#8217; departure, a Washington Post reporter tweeted that DeSantis was bragging about his state&#8217;s death rate. DeSantis could not win.
Of course, we should have known much of the press is interested not in truth but in helping Democrats. Eager to play up Christine Blasey Ford&#8217;s accusations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh, many of the same members of the press have dismissed Tara Reade&#8217;s more recent and more corroborated allegations against Joe Biden. The New York Times began gaslighting its readers, claiming the #BelieveAllWomen hashtag on social media had actually been a right-wing stunt.
On CNN, Chris Cuomo has nightly blasted the President, Republicans and anyone who defends them, while giving softball interviews to his brother, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who incompetently handled the viral spread in New York. If he were a Republican, you would know of his incompetence. Instead, he is sainted by a press that demands we believe them; just pay no attention to their ever-shifting standards for belief and credibility. Journalists only care about that if Fox News deviates from media orthodoxy.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Fake News

ERICKSON: #BelieveAllJournalists

Coronavirus

COVID-19

lockdown

Recently, the bottomless memory of the internet unearthed an old routine from comedian Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” Since this was from back in the Obama era, leftist TV comics felt confident enough to take a very occasional swing at their own side. This routine had Jon Stewart looking at the famous picture of then-Vice President Joe Biden creepily nuzzling a very uncomfortable looking red-haired girl. Stewart tries to wash his eyes out and screams in agony as the image won’t go away.
Stewart then interviews Samantha Bee, now almost famous for slinging unfunny four letter words in the direction of the White House. Here, Bee plays a reporter who’s just come from interviewing the Vice President and still has his handprints on her breasts and backside. Yet she’s tremendously excited because, “The Vice President shook my hand! Can you believe it!”
Now, this was before what we now know to be the completely hypocritical #MeToo Charade. It was still legal in most states to laugh at the grotesque stuff some men get up to in trying to scratch the itch that bedevils us all. Still, it’s pretty clear from this that leftists like Stewart and Bee knew who Biden was – and knew also that the press would continue to be thrilled by his presence no matter how sleazily he behaved.
But Biden’s not just sleazy. He’s also corrupt and mentally compromised – and leftists know that too. They’ve covered his lies and his plagiarism in the past. Even George Stephanopoulos pressed him recently when he lied and said he knew nothing about the investigation into Michael Flynn. Biden corrected himself, but didn’t think to add what came out a few days later: he’d actually asked to unmask Flynn himself.
As for the failing of his mental faculties – go on YouTube and find virtually any video of Biden speaking a year or two ago. The difference is amazing. As I noted on my podcast many months ago, he is deteriorating in front of us.
Why then does the press continue to front for him? They abandoned the #MeToo Charade to protect him. They continue to dismiss Obamagate though the Attorney General has called the Democrat Russian collusion hoax “a grave injustice… unprecedented in American history.&#8221; And really, the non-sequiturs that come out of Biden’s mouth should make even a Democrat mouthpiece like Chuck Todd turn ashen. 
There are those on the Left who are willing to accept anything if it will get Donald Trump out of the White House. But clearly, there is a huge contingent on the Left who feel that Biden’s emptiness is a feature rather than a bug. His role is to appear to be what Democrats used to be so that Democrats can use him as cover to smuggle in the socialism they now represent. He’s a ventriloquist’s dummy who looks like a centrist Democrat but will speak with the voice of the far Left.
Bernie Sanders was asked recently if his socialist supporters will bet behind Joe. He said – with a smile reminiscent of a canary-eating cat – “Joe and his staff… are gonna reach out to our supporters and come up with an agenda…” that supports their cause.
More to the point, Nancy Pelosi is flagrantly pushing a three trillion-dollar bailout plan that shifts one trillion dollars to the states. The agenda is to move taxes paid by wisely run states like Texas and Florida to poorly run states like New York, California, and New Jersey.
These blue states not only carry huge tax burdens – New York is number one, while Illinois, New Jersey, and California are numbers eight, nine, and ten – their services stink. New York’s infrastructure is the 44th best, New Jersey’s is 43rd. Low tax Texas has the best infrastructure and no tax Florida is number eight.
Where does all the blue state tax money go? Public sector pensions and endless Medicaid. In short, Pelosi wants to use taxes from capitalist states to prevent socialist states from devolving into Venezuela as they deserve.
All this will be pushed through with Joe Biden looking Bidenesque and saying nothing anyone can comprehend. That’s the plan anyway. Biden may be creepy. He may be corrupt. He may be unable to express a coherent thought. Never mind. Bernie and Nancy will do the talking for him.
[Editor’s Note: A previous version of this op-ed contained an alleged quote from Joe Biden, “I’m going to beat Joe Biden.” That quote has recently come into dispute, and as such, we have removed it from the text.]
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

KLAVAN: Biden Is A Ventriloquist’s Dummy – And The Press Knows It

Democratic Party

President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that he was considering attending the upcoming SpaceX rocket launch, which will feature the first NASA-manned mission to space on a privately built ship. In the brief remarks, the president also encouraged reporters to join him on the trip, joking that he’d like to put some of them on the rocket.
“I’m thinking about going, that will be next week, to the rocket launch. I hope you’re all going to join me,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn on Thursday afternoon. “I’d like to put you on the rocket, and get rid of you for a while.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
President Trump tells media he&#8217;s thinking about going to the SpaceX rocket launch next week:
&#8220;I hope you&#8217;re all gonna join me. I&#8217;d like to put you in the rocket and get rid of you for a while.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/rvTK2yZnKh">pic.twitter.com/rvTK2yZnKh</a>
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) <a href="https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1263547564483379201?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 21, 2020</a></blockquote>
The launch, which is scheduled for Wednesday, May 27 at 4:33pm Eastern Standard Time, has also drawn buzz from Vice President Mike Pence, who <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/nasas-human-spaceflight-chief-resigns-ahead-of-upcoming-launch">commended</a> the mission for ushering in “the trailblazers of a new era” of space exploration while meeting with the National Space Council on Tuesday.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who has received widespread attention for his role at Tesla and his recent critiques of government lockdowns, has been hyping the launch on Twitter. On Thursday afternoon, Musk retweeted a video from SpaceX showing Falcon 9, the rocket, and Crew Dragon, the human capsule, going vertical on the launch pad in Florida.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon are vertical on the launch pad <a href="https://t.co/2nw9h0jxde">pic.twitter.com/2nw9h0jxde</a>
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) <a href="https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1263565023915343873?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 21, 2020</a></blockquote>
The Washington Post recently <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/16/spacex-biggest-challenge/?arc404=true">described</a> the historic nature of the mission, not only for its potential implications for the future of private space flight, but also because of the gamble Musk took to get the company to its current form over the last eighteen years.
<blockquote>The company was never supposed to succeed. Even its founder gave it odds few gamblers would take — 1 in 10.
But Elon Musk decided to go all in anyway, investing some $100 million of his own money, over the protest of his friends, family and the basic logic that said a private entrepreneur with no experience in spaceflight shouldn’t start a rocket company.</blockquote>
As <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-lists-seven-california-properties-for-sale?%3Futm_source=twitter&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_campaign=dwtwitter">The Daily Wire</a> previously reported, during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Musk said that he abandoned his plans to build a dream house, in part, to fulfill part of the company’s mission to help people live on other planets.
“Does it really make sense for me to spend time designing and building a house?” remarked Musk. “Or should I be allocating that time to getting us to Mars? I should probably do the latter.”
“You can only do so many things,” said Musk. “Allocating time to building a house, even if it was a really great house, still is not a good use of time relative to developing the rockets necessary to get us to Mars and helping solve sustainable energy.”
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

us-politics-trump-departure

Trump Tells Reporters He May Attend SpaceX Launch, Jokes: ‘I’d Like To Put You On The Rocket’

Elon Musk

NASA

SpaceX

The 2020 Associated Press Stylebook is being published soon, and the AP is not humble about what it represents. &#8220;The style of The Associated Press is the gold standard for news writing,&#8221; they boast, and the book offers a sturdy path to the AP&#8217;s &#8220;famous&#8221; brand of &#8220;clarity and professionalism.&#8221;
In recent years, conservatives have seen the AP&#8217;s Stylebook squad tilt perilously to the left, forgoing clarity for politically correct muddiness. In 2017, they scrapped the &#8220;gender binary,&#8221; since male and female divisions are just too insensitive. &#8220;Not all people fall under one of two categories for sex or gender, according to leading medical organizations, so avoid references to both, either or opposite sexes or genders as a way to encompass all people.&#8221;
On May 8, they took their torches to the term &#8220;mistress&#8221; as hopelessly outdated. &#8220;We now say not to use the archaic and sexist term &#8216;mistress&#8217; for a woman in a long-term sexual relationship with, and financially supported by, a man who is married to someone else. Instead, use an alternative like companion or lover on first reference. Provide details later.”
Notice the AP&#8217;s linguistic leap to banish any troublesome moral aspersions on a woman for cheating with a married man. It&#8217;s &#8220;archaic&#8221; to lament breaking God&#8217;s commandments, but then, the AP would probably scold you for using your archaic Bible to describe God as a &#8220;he.&#8221;
Their assumption about sexism is that the cheating husband doesn&#8217;t get such a discouraging term. They forget terms like &#8220;womanizer,&#8221; or in the case of financial support, a &#8220;kept man.&#8221; But there are plenty of descriptors without gender — paramour, philanderer, cheater or just sinner.
In the real world, much more callous or loaded words are used, from &#8220;trollop&#8221; to &#8220;side piece.&#8221; You can&#8217;t say &#8220;whore&#8221; or &#8220;prostitute&#8221; because the left prefers the term &#8220;sex worker.&#8221; It&#8217;s as desperate as calling a smoker a &#8220;cigarette enthusiast.&#8221;
Using the word &#8220;lover&#8221; is too positive. Cheating men and women are certainly not demonstrating &#8220;love&#8221; to the spouses and children betrayed. &#8220;Love&#8221; should mean something more grounded and permanent than two hours in the back seat of a car or a motel room or under the president&#8217;s desk.
Some reporters prefer the term &#8220;romantically involved,&#8221; which connotes &#8220;romance&#8221; in betraying your marital vows. Adultery quite often leads to divorce and family breakdown, which means this kind of furtive &#8220;love&#8221; drags down the entire society.
A weasel word like &#8220;companion&#8221; is the opposite of the AP&#8217;s supposed clarity. Many &#8220;companions&#8221; aren&#8217;t sexual at all. One facetious Facebook commenter told the AP: &#8220;This is awesome. I&#8217;d never introduce my mistress to my wife, but I feel like she might be more accepting if I call her my companion.&#8221;
These guardians of style often reach for euphemisms when they feel like terms are dehumanizing. So, they joined the politically correct lobbies in demanding an end to the term &#8220;illegal immigrant,&#8221; and they lecture, &#8220;Avoid the dehumanizing collective noun &#8216;the homeless,&#8217; instead using constructions like homeless people, people without housing or people without homes.&#8221;
You can place them squarely on the left when they don&#8217;t mind socially distancing from unborn babies with the dehumanizing term &#8220;fetus,&#8221; which they teach is &#8220;preferred in many cases, including almost all scientific and medical uses,&#8221; not to mention the legislative uses.
The Stylebook cops may describe themselves as seeking &#8220;nonjudgmental&#8221; terms, but declaring things &#8220;archaic&#8221; or &#8220;sexist&#8221; is quite obviously judgmental. They seek to overthrow a dated orthodoxy only to impose a new one, which is just as rigid. They might interject that it&#8217;s &#8220;rigidly compassionate.&#8221; But &#8220;clarity&#8221; in writing is nowhere to be found.
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.

Journalists.

GRAHAM: AP Says Ditch The ‘Mistress’

Associated Press

The left&#8217;s position on the nation&#8217;s proper response to the pandemic, though shrouded in the language of compassion, is incoherent and morally repugnant virtue signaling.
Since this calamity began, many national Democratic leaders, the left-wing media and various never-Trumpers have been more interested in smearing President Donald Trump — no change there — than helping to solve the myriad problems caused by the coronavirus.
They wanted it both ways. President Trump was doing too much, and he wasn&#8217;t doing enough. Before the outbreak, numerous Democrats were downplaying the virus and condemning Trump as a racist for his China and Europe travel bans. Later they blamed Trump for not taking the virus seriously, when in fact, they were taking it less seriously than he was. But being a progressive means never having to say you&#8217;re sorry — and that yesterday&#8217;s inconsistent positions are deemed wiped from our collective memory.
From the beginning, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, along with their medical team, were conducting daily press briefings to inform an anxious nation about the virus and the federal and state governments&#8217; efforts to slow the spread, organizing the distribution of medical equipment to hotspots and pushing legislation to provide relief for individuals and businesses devastated by the outbreak.
The media used those briefings to humiliate Trump rather than illicit facts to inform viewers. For example, New York Magazine&#8217;s Olivia Nuzzi asked Trump, &#8220;If an American President loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be reelected?&#8221;
Editorial after editorial excoriated Trump for every imaginable sin and certainly every death — while exempting Democratic governors from any accountability for wildly disproportionate cases and deaths in their states. They view everything through a partisan prism, and no crisis is too severe to be exploited for political gain.
Trump, they said, was only interested in manipulating the crisis to enhance his reelection efforts. He jumped the gun in expressing his hope to reopen our economy on Easter. He wasn&#8217;t listening to the medical experts. He didn&#8217;t care about Americans dying. He was practicing medicine without a license.
Unfortunately for these critics, President Trump was deferring to the medical experts, who repeatedly denied that he was ignoring them.
Considering themselves the sole exemplars of compassion, progressives insist that their views are the only morally acceptable ones, that all who oppose them are immoral and that so long as they have &#8220;good&#8221; intentions, neither their motives nor their policies can be questioned — even if they are inconsistent or cause major harm.
Democratic leaders get away with indefensible, one-dimensional thinking, free from scrutiny by an equally one-dimensional media. Their statements are often childishly shallow — and yet no one challenges them.
Take putative Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who tweeted Wednesday evening, &#8220;I&#8217;ve said it before, and I&#8217;ll say it again: No one is expendable. No life is worth losing to add one more point to the Dow.&#8221;
While this may strike unthinking people as a compassionate declaration, it is a cheap shot at Trump, other leaders trying to facilitate the reopening of our economy and Americans yearning to be free again — and to return to work. Biden is simply expressing his party&#8217;s position: You must choose between those at risk from the virus and reopening the economy. There are no competing interests to balance. Your concern for those unemployed, devastated, isolated, depressed and with other medical problems that are ignored because of the virus is illegitimate.
What&#8217;s particularly offensive is Biden&#8217;s reducing our concern for those financially devastated to a class-warfare soundbite (&#8220;to add one more point to the Dow&#8221;) — as if having a heart for the unemployed is promoting the rich. That doesn&#8217;t even make sense, but it doesn&#8217;t have to as long as it serves the narrative that Republicans are heartless.
Similarly, the never-Trump group The Lincoln Project produced an ad called &#8220;Mourning in America&#8221; in which Trump is blamed not just for the Americans who died because he &#8220;ignored&#8221; the virus but for the economic devastation it caused. That&#8217;s convenient. These faux conservatives have absorbed the ideas and tactics of their progressive soulmates — virtue signaling, the shameless advocacy of mutually contradictory positions and consuming hatred for Donald J. Trump.
You know that Trump haters from both sides of the aisle have lost any semblance of fairness when their biases compel them to direct their energies toward destroying Trump rather than seeking solutions for our common problems.
We should all be working together to reopen the economy while trying to prevent new flare-ups, which happens to be precisely what President Trump and his task force are doing.
Talk is cheap, and finger-pointing is easy, but real-world problems sometimes don&#8217;t lend themselves to easy fixes. There are no perfect solutions here — there is no way to avoid death and financial destruction, only to mitigate both.
I trust that reasonable people — hopefully still a majority — will demand accountability from their leaders but not hold them to impossible standards. While people often look to government during times of crisis, we must understand that there&#8217;s only so much that government can do and sometimes it can also get in the way. It&#8217;s time that state governments show a little faith in the American people and respect their prerogative to return to their lives while still exercising responsible behavior to protect themselves and their neighbors. We will get through this.
David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His latest book is &#8220;Guilty by Reason of Insanity: Why the Democrats Must Not Win.&#8221; Follow him on Twitter @davidlimbaugh and his website at www.davidlimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

LIMBAUGH: Trump’s Critics Can’t Have It Both Ways

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, when confronted on Wednesday about remarks she made during the initial days of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, reminded the media that numerous media organizations downplayed the outbreak during the early days of its spread.
Reuters reporter Jeff Mason asked McEnany, “In a previous life, before you were press secretary, you worked for the campaign and you made a comment, I believe on Fox, in which you said President Trump will not allow the coronavirus to come to this country. Given what has happened since then, obviously, would you like to take that back?”
“I guess I would turn the question back on the media and ask similar questions,” McEnany responded. “Does Vox want to take back that they proclaimed that the coronavirus would not be a deadly pandemic? Does The Washington Post want to take back that they told Americans to get a grip, the flu is bigger than the coronavirus? Does The Washington Post likewise want to take back that our brains are causing us to exaggerate the threat of the coronavirus? Does The New York Times want to take back that fear of the virus maybe spreading faster of than the virus itself? Does NPR want to take back that the flu was a much bigger threat than the coronavirus? And finally once again The Washington Post, would they like to take back that the government should not respond aggressively to the coronavirus?”
“I’ll leave you with those questions and maybe you’ll have some answers in a few days,” McEnany concluded. “Thank you very much.”
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany torches Vox, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and NPR for downplaying the severity of the coronavirus during the early days of the pandemic. <a href="https://t.co/3qQgvuXrYE">pic.twitter.com/3qQgvuXrYE</a>
&mdash; Nathan Brand (@NathanBrandWA) <a href="https://twitter.com/NathanBrandWA/status/1258144088353697792?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 6, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
TRANSCRIPT:
<blockquote>REPORTER: “In a previous life, before you were press secretary, you worked for the campaign and you made a comment, I believe on Fox, in which you said President Trump will not allow the coronavirus to come to this country. Given what has happened since then, obviously, would you like to take that back?”
PRESS SECRETARY: “Well first, let me note, I was asked a question on Fox Business about the president’s travel restrictions. I noted what was the intent behind those travel restrictions, which is we will not see the coronavirus come here, we will not see terrorism come here, referring to an earlier set of travel restrictions.”
“I guess I would turn the question back on the media and ask similar questions. Does Vox want to take back that they proclaimed that the coronavirus would not be a deadly pandemic? Does The Washington Post want to take back that they told Americans to get a grip, the flu is bigger than the coronavirus? Does The Washington Post likewise want to take back that our brains are causing us to exaggerate the threat of the coronavirus? Does The New York Times want to take back that fear of the virus maybe spreading faster of than the virus itself? Does NPR want to take back that the flu was a much bigger threat than the coronavirus? And finally once again The Washington Post, would they like to take back that the government should not respond aggressively to the coronavirus?”
“I’ll leave you with those questions and maybe you’ll have some answers in a few days. Thank you very much.”</blockquote>
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Holds Briefing With Media At White House

Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Reminds Media How They Downplayed Coronavirus Outbreak

Left-wing reporters took remarks that President Donald Trump made on Sunday night out of context and made it appear as though Trump believes he is treated worse than former President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated in office, when Trump was specifically talking about the media&#8217;s coverage of his presidency.
Trump made the remarks during a Fox News virtual town hall event that was being held at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in response to the following question: &#8220;Why do you use descriptive words that can be classified as bullying, and why do you not directly answer the questions asked by the press, but instead speak of past successes and generally ramble?&#8221;
Trump responded:
<blockquote>Good, I think I like that question, I&#8217;m not sure, but I think I like that question. I appreciate it, I appreciate the prayers too, very have much. Look, I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen. The closest would be that gentleman right up there. They always said Lincoln, nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse. You&#8217;re there, you see those press conferences. They come at me with questions that are disgraceful, to be honest, disgraceful. Their manner of presentation and their words. And I feel if I was kind to them, I would be walked off the stage. I mean, they come at you with the most horrible, horrendous, biased questions. And you see it. 94 to 95 percent of the press is hostile&#8230;
We have tremendous support, but the media might as well be in the Democrat Party. And why? I don&#8217;t know. &#8230; All of the things we have done and yet we have a very hostile press, and you understand, maybe you are not going to say it or admit it and maybe you shouldn&#8217;t, but nobody has seen anything like this. I appreciate the question, and I very much appreciate the sentiment behind the question. But I&#8217;m standing up there and instead of asking me a normal question, the level of anger and hatred, I&#8217;ll look at them as say, “What’s your problem? What is your problem?”</blockquote>
PBS writer Yamiche Alcindor, who has a history of making <a href="https://freebeacon.com/uncategorized/msnbc-panel-falsely-claims-heroic-neighbor-didnt-end-texas-shooters-rampage/">false claims</a> and has often showed her <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/left-wing-reporter-suggests-trump-made-family-sick-because-he-didnt-have-a-mask-on-trump-dismantles-her-claims">bias</a> against the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/partisan-pbs-reporter-suggests-black-surgeon-general-made-racially-offensive-remark-he-shuts-her-down">administration</a>, responded by writing, &#8220;Video of President Trump, sitting at the feet of the Lincoln Memorial, saying is he being treated worse than President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated after freeing enslaved people across America.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Video of President Trump, sitting at the feet of the Lincoln Memorial, saying is he being treated worse than President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated after freeing enslaved people across America. <a href="https://t.co/PHBVFHpCox">https://t.co/PHBVFHpCox</a>
&mdash; Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) <a href="https://twitter.com/Yamiche/status/1257103652432601089?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 4, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Left-wing activist Brian Tyler Cohen tweeted: &#8220;Trump, sitting at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, claims he&#8217;s been treated &#8216;worse&#8217; than Lincoln, who was shot in the head and killed while in office.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Trump, sitting at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, claims he&#39;s been treated &quot;worse&quot; than Lincoln, who was shot in the head and killed while in office.
&mdash; Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) <a href="https://twitter.com/briantylercohen/status/1257101013019852804?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 4, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Left-wing CNN commentator Keith Boykin responded: &#8220;Lincoln was assassinated, but that’s nothing compared to Trump having to answer questions from reporters.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Trump: “They always said Lincoln. Nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.”
Lincoln was assassinated, but that’s nothing compared to Trump having to answer questions from reporters.
&#8211; <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TrumpTownHall?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#TrumpTownHall</a> at the Lincoln Memorial
 <a href="https://t.co/UFq0SNX1zq">pic.twitter.com/UFq0SNX1zq</a>
&mdash; Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) <a href="https://twitter.com/keithboykin/status/1257102003160973312?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 4, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Others quickly called out the misleading claims, which failed to note that Trump was specifically talking about press coverage.
Federalist reporter Emily Jashinsky responded to Alcindor by writing: &#8220;This is such a stupid hair to have to split, but he was specifically talking about his treatment from the press, not the public in general. Watch the clip. A lot of misleading tweets on this.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
This is such a stupid hair to have to split, but he was specifically talking about his treatment from the press, not the public in general. Watch the clip. A lot of misleading tweets on this.
Why make these unfair stretches when you have enough weird claims to work with anyway? <a href="https://t.co/VklrzFvjI0">https://t.co/VklrzFvjI0</a>
&mdash; Emily Jashinsky (@emilyjashinsky) <a href="https://twitter.com/emilyjashinsky/status/1257107754868768770?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 4, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Breitbart Editor Joel Pollak responded to left-wing CNN reporter Oliver Darcy&#8217;s tweet, which did not include the context of Trump&#8217;s remarks in the text of the tweet: &#8220;In terms of MEDIA COVERAGE. You know it, and your tweet proves it.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
In terms of MEDIA COVERAGE.
You know it, and your tweet proves it. <a href="https://t.co/q4c1R7FRNU">https://t.co/q4c1R7FRNU</a>
&mdash; Joel B. Pollak (@joelpollak) <a href="https://twitter.com/joelpollak/status/1257112393395527680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 4, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Seattle-based conservative radio host Jason Rantz responded: &#8220;Trump is talking about treatment from the press. He&#8217;s right.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Trump is talking about treatment from the press. He&#39;s right. <a href="https://t.co/cqzZjdImJa">https://t.co/cqzZjdImJa</a> <a href="https://t.co/2S3yAWvt7n">pic.twitter.com/2S3yAWvt7n</a>
&mdash; (((Jason Rantz))) on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) <a href="https://twitter.com/jasonrantz/status/1257104617214599170?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 4, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
National Review Senior Writer Dan McLaughlin responded: &#8220;A little misleading, since he says worse *by the press* but even there&#8230;no. True, Lincoln had the NY Times like Trump has Fox News, plus Lincoln owned a newspaper in Illinois. But even adjusting for all that: no.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
A little misleading, since he says worse *by the press* but even there&#8230;no. True, Lincoln had the NY Times like Trump has Fox News, plus Lincoln owned a newspaper in Illinois. But even adjusting for all that: no. <a href="https://t.co/h3hpFo5Be4">https://t.co/h3hpFo5Be4</a>
&mdash; Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) <a href="https://twitter.com/baseballcrank/status/1257102753345802240?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 4, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

President Trump holds a Virtual Town Hall

Leftists Leave Context Out Of Trump’s Remark On Lincoln And Distort What He Said

New White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany ripped left-wing ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl on Friday during her first press conference as press secretary.
&#8220;Kayleigh &#8230; when the president fired Michael Flynn, he said he was doing so because he had lied to the vice president and he had lied to the FBI,&#8221; Karl said. &#8220;So given all that you’ve just said, isn’t it still true, doesn’t the president still believe that Michael Flynn lied to Vice President Pence and lied to the FBI?&#8221;
Karl&#8217;s question comes after bombshell documents were unsealed this week that reportedly showed that FBI agents had discussed whether they were going to use their interview with Flynn to &#8220;get him to lie&#8221; so they could &#8220;prosecute him or get him fired.&#8221;
&#8220;Well, first let me address that. Vice President Pence is on the record about this,&#8221; McEnany responded. &#8220;He said he’s inclined to believe that Flynn did not intentionally mislead him, and I guess I would turn the question on you and just ask, does it trouble you that the FBI said, &#8216;We got to get Flynn to lie?&#8217; Doesn’t that trouble you as a journalist? And not only that, as an American citizen?&#8221;
Pence <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pence-inclined-to-believe-flynn">said</a> this week regarding the Flynn situation that he was &#8220;inclined, more than ever, to believe that what he communicated to me during the transition leading to our inauguration &#8212; that was unintentional and not that he was not attempting to misrepresent facts.”
&#8220;Well, it’s certainly something worth reporting. It’s not my job to say whether or not it’s troubling, but the bottom line is the President said point blank that Flynn lied to the FBI and to the vice president, and I’m just asking a very direct question,&#8221; Karl responded. &#8220;Does he still believe that Michael Flynn lied to the FBI and lied to the vice president?&#8221;
&#8220;And again, I’d point you to the vice president’s statement that he’s inclined to believe that Flynn did not intentionally mislead him, and I’m asking back that all of you in your coverage endeavor to report what is a very scary story when the FBI is saying, &#8216;Let us get someone to lie,&#8217;” McEnany responded. &#8220;I’ve seen very scant coverage of that. It’s a story worth reporting and a story that I hope the American people, if you haven’t heard it yet, are getting to hear for the very first time.&#8221;
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Video &#8212; <a href="https://twitter.com/PressSec?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@PressSec</a> McEnany with a shrewd, smart move by turning the Flynn question around on ABC&#39;s Jonathan Karl: &quot;Does it trouble you that the FBI said we&#39;ve got to get Flynn to lie? Does that trouble you as journalist and not only that, but as an American citizen?&quot; <a href="https://t.co/lsMeSZfDiy">pic.twitter.com/lsMeSZfDiy</a>
&mdash; Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) <a href="https://twitter.com/CurtisHouck/status/1256292856332980226?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 1, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
On Wednesday, documents were unsealed that showed that the FBI had discussed using their interview with Flynn to &#8220;get him to lie&#8221; and &#8220;get him fired.&#8221;
Unsealed handwritten notes from the day of the January 24, 2017, interview show that an unidentified person with the FBI wrote: “What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”
Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/michael-flynn-fbi-handwritten-notes-get-him-lie-fired">reported</a>:
<blockquote>The handwritten notes — belonging to former FBI general counsel James A. Baker, Fox News is told — indicated that agents planned to get Flynn “to admit to breaking the Logan Act” and catch him in a lie. The Logan Act is an obscure statute that has never been used in a criminal prosecution; enacted in 1799, it was intended to prevent individuals from falsely claiming to represent the United States abroad.
The bombshell documents strongly suggested the agents weren’t focused on investigating his contacts with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, but instead were trying to get him removed. President Obama had personally warned the Trump administration against hiring Flynn, and made clear he was “not a fan.” Obama fired Flynn as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014.</blockquote>
On Thursday, more documents were unsealed from January 4, 2017, that showed that the FBI was preparing the close the investigation into Flynn because they didn&#8217;t have anything on him at which point former FBI agent Peter Stzrok, who was later fired from the FBI over biased anti-Trump text messages, intervened to keep the case open.
Fox News Editor Gregg Re <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/strzok-stopped-bureau-from-ending-flynn-probe-despite-lack-of-derogatory-evidence-unsealed-documents-reveal">reported</a>:
<blockquote>Yet, on that same day — Jan. 4, 2017 — Strzok instructed the FBI case manager handling CROSSFIRE RAZOR [the FBI&#8217;s code name for Flynn] to keep the investigation open. “Hey don’t close RAZOR,” Strzok texted an unidentified individual.
Strzok informed the FBI case manager that the FBI’s 7th floor was involved, referring to FBI leadership — and that they still “need to decide what to do with him [with respect to] the [REDACTED].”
It’s currently unknown why Strzok directed the FBI case manager to keep the Flynn investigation open. However, the timing of emails between Strzok and ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page seem to suggest that they used the Logan Act to keep CROSSFIRE RAZOR alive; Strzok forwarded a 14-page research paper on the Logan Act the same day.</blockquote>
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

US-politics-media

Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Rips ABC News Reporter During First Press Briefing

ABC News

White House

The White House on Monday canceled its daily Coronavirus Task Force briefing after President Trump lashed out at the media for what he called &#8220;hostile questions.&#8221;
While the White House said in its announced schedule on Sunday that a briefing would be held Monday at 5 p.m. EDT, multiple correspondents said the briefing has been canceled.
&#8220;After the President said this weekend that his virus briefings were &#8216;Not worth the time &amp; effort,&#8217; the White House canceled today&#8217;s Coronavirus news conference,&#8221; one reporter wrote on Twitter.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
After the President said this weekend that his virus briefings were &quot;Not worth the time &amp; effort,&quot; the White House canceled today&#39;s Coronavirus news conference <a href="https://t.co/gXXI5HG50E">https://t.co/gXXI5HG50E</a>
&mdash; Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) <a href="https://twitter.com/jamiedupree/status/1254804430223966208?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 27, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Kayleigh McEnany, the newly appointed White House press secretary, told reporters that there would be no briefing, The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/us/coronavirus-updates.html?smid=tw-nytimes&amp;smtyp=cur#link-3b78c26">New York Times</a> reported, but added that the briefings may rsume later in the week.
Over the weekend, Trump blasted the briefings, writing on Twitter: &#8220;What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, &amp; then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, &amp; the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time &amp; effort!&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, &amp; then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, &amp; the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time &amp; effort!
&mdash; Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1254168730898173953?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 25, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
And on Monday, before the White House announced the daily briefing would be canceled, Trump tweeted: &#8220;There has never been, in the history of our Country, a more vicious or hostile Lamestream Media than there is right now, even in the midst of a National Emergency, the Invisible Enemy!&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
There has never been, in the history of our Country, a more vicious or hostile Lamestream Media than there is right now, even in the midst of a National Emergency, the Invisible Enemy!
&mdash; Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1254767509460234243?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 27, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
On Thursday, Trump was roundly mocked for supposedly suggesting the possibility of injecting disinfectant into patients to fight the coronavirus. He didn&#8217;t say that, instead saying only: &#8220;And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets on the lungs and it does a tremendous number, so it will be interesting to check that. So that you&#8217;re going to have to use medical doctors. But it sounds, it sounds interesting to me. So we&#8217;ll see.&#8221;
His comments came after Bill Bryan, head of the science and technology directorate at the Department of Homeland Security, discussed the findings of the federal government&#8217;s study on sunlight, humidity and temperature &#8212; as well as disinfectants&#8217; &#8212; effect on the coronavirus.
&#8220;We&#8217;re also testing disinfectants readily available. We&#8217;ve tested bleach, we&#8217;ve tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus, specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids. And I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes; isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds, and that&#8217;s with no manipulation, no rubbing — just spraying it on and letting it go. You rub it and it goes away even faster. We&#8217;re also looking at other disinfectants, specifically looking at the COVID-19 virus in saliva,&#8221; Bryan said.
On Friday, a White House official ordered a CNN reporter to swap her front-row seat with another reporter at the back of the briefing just before Trump appeared for his daily press conference with the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
The reporter, CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins, refused to swap seats, as did the other reporter. The official then said the Secret Service would get involved.
The seating chart in the briefing room is set by the White House Correspondents&#8217; Association (WHCA), currently headed up by ABC&#8217;s Jonathan Karl, another reporter Trump doesn&#8217;t like.
Chris Johnson, a reporter with the Washington Blade, sent out a print pool report to other reporters detailing what happened.
&#8220;Earlier today before the briefing, a White House official instructed the print pooler to take CNN’s seat in the briefing room because the seating would be swapped for the briefing. Given the seating assignment is under the jurisdiction of the White House Correspondents’ Association, not the White House, pooler refused to move. The White House official then informed the print pooler swapping wasn’t an option and the Secret Service was involved. Again, pooler refused to move, citing guidance from the WHCA. The briefing proceeded with both CNN and print pooler sitting in their respective assigned seats,&#8221; Johnson wrote.
Friday&#8217;s briefing marked the first time Trump had held the briefing and then left without taking questions.
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a subscriber.

White House Coronavirus Task Force Holds Daily Briefing At The White House

White House Cancels This Week’s Coronavirus Briefings After Trump Rips Media Coverage

President Donald Trump announced Saturday that he would be canceling &#8212; or, at least, limiting &#8212; his daily coronavirus briefings after a week of brutal clashes with mainstream reporters, a dustup with CNN, and an incident that saw members of the media wrongly portray a question, asked by Trump himself, as a suggestion that Americans should inject themselves with bleach or other disinfectants.
In a tweet Saturday night, Trump lashed out at members of the media who, he claims, have rendered the daily briefings pointless with their confrontational attitudes.
&#8220;What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, &amp; then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately,&#8221; Trump complained on Twitter. &#8220;They get record ratings, &amp; the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time &amp; effort!&#8221;
Friday was Trump&#8217;s shortest presser of the coronavirus pandemic &#8212; a mere 25-minute briefing with no question and answer period. The president clearly cut the briefing short after finding himself under a deluge of criticism for allegedly suggesting that Americans inject themselves with bleach or other chemical disinfectants to fight the virus &#8212; a &#8220;suggestion&#8221; that was either a question about complex UV and disinfectant treatments on which the president had been counseled, or a &#8220;sarcastic&#8221; remark to a reporter, as the president later claimed.
Either way, the suggestion, which went viral, caused a media frenzy, with outlets reporting on an increase of calls to poison control (which was, apparently, unrelated, and part of a long-term trend completely unrelated to the president) and issuing dire warnings against drinking Clorox.
The incident clearly troubled Trump, who called time on the press conferences after, <a href="https://www.axios.com/trump-daily-coronavirus-briefings-809becf3-9913-4b71-9f92-1930ad1d29b0.html">Axios says</a>, consulting with &#8220;three or four&#8221; White House officials who pressed Trump to either shorten or end the briefings altogether.
&#8220;They&#8217;ve told him he&#8217;s overexposed and these appearances are part of the reason polls aren&#8217;t looking good for him right now against Joe Biden,&#8221; the outlet reported Saturday. &#8220;Another source close to the deliberations said there simply isn&#8217;t enough new material to justify Trump appearing before the press every day.&#8221;
&#8220;Seniors are scared,&#8221; a source told Axios, referring to senior White House advisors. &#8220;And the spectacle of him fighting with the press isn&#8217;t what people want to see.&#8221;
Instead, reporters will likely receive a short briefing from experts &#8212; perhaps daily, or perhaps several times per week &#8212; and Trump&#8217;s appearances will be sporadic and unannounced, and limited to announcing victories. It&#8217;s also possible that the briefings could tighten up, instead of being &#8220;freewheeling,&#8221; <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/24/politics/white-house-briefings-coronavirus/index.html">as CNN describes them,</a> lasting for minutes rather than for hours.
No final decision has been made, White House sources cautioned Axios, and Trump likes the briefings &#8212; he&#8217;s often spoken about how he&#8217;s now getting &#8220;Bachelor-like&#8221; ratings on Twitter and elsewhere &#8212; but Axios does say that the White House was considering ending the daily briefings even before Thursday&#8217;s incident as a way of demonstrating to the country that things are getting back to normal, that life in the White House is &#8220;slowing down,&#8221; and that a daily medical and technological briefing are no longer necessary.
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">subscriber</a>.

trump press conference

Trump Ends Daily Coronavirus Briefings After Media Clashes: ‘Not Worth The Time And Effort’

Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired a segment on Friday night that showed how a lot of the rhetoric being used by the mainstream media and Democratic Party matches the propaganda that the communist Chinese government is using to deflect blame over the coronavirus outbreak.
Carlson began the segment by reporting on what he says U.S. government officials have told him about the coronavirus outbreak that originated in China, and by also documenting how China has repeatedly changed its story about what happened.
Later in the segment, Carlson said, &#8220;As of today, says someone in a position to know, there is &#8216;Almost unanimous agreement in the American intelligence gathering agencies that the virus currently destroying much of the world emerged from a lab in Wuhan.&#8217; Almost unanimous. That is a phrase almost never used to describe any conclusion coming out of the Intel Community.&#8221;
&#8220;Government officials in this country have believed that for some time now,&#8221; Carlson continued. &#8220;They’ve been unable to interest our media or our epidemiologists in writing about it. In recent weeks analysts from the CIA, the NSA, and others have reached staff at The New York Times about the origins of this virus, but the newspaper has still not reported their findings. At the same time, and this may be directly related, China has been waging an unremitting propaganda war on the subject. Chinese officials have tried to squelch all conversations about who might be responsible for this pandemic by inflaming the political sensitivities and race guilt of American elites.&#8221;
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Tucker Carlson blasts China for their coronavirus cover up. <a href="https://t.co/yfBtxui2dv">pic.twitter.com/yfBtxui2dv</a>
&mdash; (((Jason Rantz))) on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) <a href="https://twitter.com/jasonrantz/status/1251308588355555330?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 18, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
TRANSCRIPT:
<blockquote>We brought you fresh reporting last night on the question of where the deadly coronavirus pandemic came from. Tonight, we have more. We spent much of the day speaking to highly informed officials in the U.S. Government as well as seasoned specialists on China, and here’s the picture that emerged from those conversations.
First, many in the intelligence world with experience in China suspected right away that the story the Chinese government was telling about this virus was almost certainly a lie.
The first indication of that was the torrent of obvious nonsense coming from official sources in Beijing. Now initially, Chinese sources, you may remember this, claimed the virus had jumped from an obscure scaly animal called a &#8220;Pangolin,” which was sold in the Wuhan wet market, but that explanation didn’t make any sense. Wet markets are seafood markets. Pangolins are mammals. So, for that matter, are bats. So in the face of skepticism at this explanation, the Chinese then blamed Italian armed forces personnel, who it turns out had been near Wuhan a few months before for the military world games – that&#8217;s an international sporting event. The Italians must have brought the virus to China, the Chinese said.
When the Italian government complained about that, the Chinese shifted the blame to the U.S. military. The American armed services and western tourists must have infected Wuhan, the Chinese said. Meanwhile, as they were saying this, behind-the-scenes Chinese officials were working frantically to destroy relevant evidence of where it actually came from. Doctors and journalists in Wuhan who raised uncomfortable questions about the virus disappeared. Some of them may have been murdered. At one point in January, scientists in Shanghai succeeded in sequencing the DNA from the virus. The information they gathered from that could’ve been crucial to researchers around the world who were trying to understand the virus and develop vaccines against it. In other words, the rest of us.
But the Chinese government ordered that viral sample destroyed and the lab notes from that shredded. The scientists themselves were disciplined for daring to conduct this research, and their lab was shut down. The Chinese government then quarantined the entire city of Wuhan, up to 5 million people fled. But apparently, relatively few of them were allowed to travel to Beijing, the Chinese capital. Instead, they flew to western cities around the world. Now, to most in the United States, reactions to a crisis like this seem grotesque, really unimaginable. But to mandarin speakers who follow China carefully and have for a long time, these were highly familiar moves.
The first reflex of the Chinese government is always to lie in order to hide failure and avoid embarrassment. In 2003, for example, the Chinese government lied about the initial outbreak of SARS, another Coronavirus. In July 2011, two passenger trains traveling in opposite directions smashed into each other at high speed outside the Chinese city of Wenzhou. The trains collided on a railroad bridge. Four calls derailed and tumbled to the ground below. Within hours, authorities arrived with backhoes, they pushed the passenger cars into a pit, and began covering them with dirt. By some accounts there were still survivors inside at that time, inside the passenger cars. In their initial statements, Chinese officials claimed that a lightning strike had caused that crash. They later conceded under pressure that it was sloppiness and shoddy construction that were to blame. Chinese media meanwhile were ordered to ignore the crash entirely except for “positive news” or &#8230; news issued by authorities.
This was the template for China’s official response to the Wuhan virus. From the early days of the outbreak, Chinese diplomats around the world insisted there was no chance whatsoever the virus had come from a lab. They sometimes insisted this even when no one had asked them, as if they were reading from a script. It soon became very obvious what was going on. English-language academic journals had raised for years questions about the safety standards in Wuhan bio research labs. An article in “Nature” for example from 2017 noted that “Some scientists outside China worry about pathogens escaping from the facility.” Classified State Department cables a year later than voiced the same concerns. Chinese scientists themselves publicly discussed working with extremely dangerous pathogens in Wuhan.
As of today, says someone in a position to know, there is “Almost unanimous agreement in the American intelligence gathering agencies that the virus currently destroying much of the world emerged from a lab in Wuhan.” Almost unanimous. That is a phrase almost never used to describe any conclusion coming out of the Intel Community. Government officials in this country have believed that for some time now. They’ve been unable to interest our media or our epidemiologists in writing about it. In recent weeks analysts from the CIA, the NSA and others have reached staff at “The New York Times” about the origins of this virus, but the newspaper has still not reported their findings. At the same time, and this may be directly related, China has been waging an unremitting propaganda war on the subject. Chinese officials have tried to squelch all conversations about who might be responsible for this pandemic by inflaming the political sensitivities and race guilt of American elites. Watch this clip from early last month as a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry tries to dictate how American press outlets describe the virus.
&#8230;
Among the many ironies in what you just heard, even now, even today, the disease is widely referred to in China as the Wuhan virus. Our news outlets, meanwhile, almost always call it COVID-19. That term does not translate to Chinese. COVID-19 is the name devised by the World Health Organization back in January under influence from Chinese leaders who were anxious to deflect responsibility for it. Once they succeeded in removing any hint of origin from the name of the virus, the Chinese government launched a campaign to tar anyone who mentioned Wuhan as a dangerous racist. “Racism is not the right tool to cover your own incompetence” lectured Chinese state media when President Trump refer to the Wuhan virus. American media parroted that line almost precisely, as no doubt Chinese expected they would.
&#8230;
Fools. But not a major victory for the Chinese government. Media outlets are relatively easy to corrupt, given the relatively low level sophistication of the people who work there. The Chinese government have bolder aims than that. The Chinese instructed their employees and assets in the United States to exert influence on elected officials. For example, according to an informed U.S. government official, “Beijing has instructed diplomats in their consulate in San Francisco to work with American state and local officials, and members of Congress to push back against anyone who gets too far out on blaming China for this.” That is what they are doing, apparently it’s working. Here’s Connecticut senator Chris Murphy on CNN earlier this week.
&#8230;
Other members of Congress voiced similar views, often in eerily similar language. Barbara Lee of California, long considered a strongly pro-China voice, tweeted this to the president, “Diseases don’t have nationalities. China isn’t to blame for you fumbling this crisis.” On March 12, congresswoman Judy Chu of Los Angeles wrote this, “China didn’t unleash anything. A virus spread as viruses do. Blaming China and insisting on calling this the Wuhan virus, even though every medical expert said not to, is putting people’s lives in danger. Stop politicizing this and put people first.&#8221; Just week before Judy Chu wrote that on March 6, a man called [inaudible] who runs the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles met with the Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti about the American response to Coronavirus. He tweeted about it that day. He said this, “Looking forward to working closely with the city of Los Angeles to address this common public health challenge and develop closer ties between our cities and peoples.”
Now, we have no idea what they talked about in that meeting that day. It would be interesting to know. We reached out today to a number of California lawmakers with a history of closeness to China, including Dianne Feinstein, who once employed a Chinese spy, to see if they have spoken to Chinese officials recently. None of them responded to our calls. But it’s not just happening in California. According to a study and a story reported by National Review, the head of the state Senate in Wisconsin recently received multiple emails from the Chinese consulate general in Chicago. She asked him to propose a resolution praising China for its handling of the Wuhan virus outbreak.
The entire story of how the government of China successfully shaped our understanding of this pandemic of the virus, as well as our response to it, may take years to tell. In fact, it may never fully be told at all. We promise to do our best on the show. But it is clear how China sees this pandemic. China doesn’t see this simply or even primarily as a public health disaster in which thousands are dying. China sees this as part of a larger geopolitical struggle for control of the world. Most Americans still don’t perceive that or understand the profound gravity of the stakes involved.</blockquote>

Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson Shows How Media And Democrats Appear To Be Parroting Chinese Propaganda

China

Wuhan Virus

The liberal Columbia Journalism Review has published a lengthy special report from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism on the values and practices of online conservative news sites. Three professors, Anthony Nadler, A.J. Bauer and Magda Konieczna, interviewed 22 journalists at 14 websites, and their overall picture of the conservative media is straightforward. Among their findings about conservative journalists are the following:
— They espouse journalistic ideals such as accuracy and fairness, if not objectivity.
— They express an interest in engaging the broader public, not just conservatives.
— They&#8217;re dedicated to reporting stories they felt were &#8220;consistently underreported&#8221; by liberal darlings and institutions.
— Many feel &#8220;conservative journalism as a whole is treated unfairly by the mainstream press.&#8221;
Some feel conservative media is &#8220;marginalizing conservative perspectives critical of Trump&#8217;s honesty and character.&#8221; That&#8217;s not surprising, given that the trio of professors interviewed &#8220;conservatives&#8221; at The Washington Post and at The Bulwark, a red-hot never-Trump outpost. They reported, &#8220;Asked what makes for an ideal conservative journalist, Bulwark senior editor Jim Swift joked &#8230; &#8216;the ideal conservative reporter or journalist usually just leaves conservative media as soon as they possibly can,'&#8221; since it&#8217;s not lucrative.
Surely, one could be both a conservative journalist and a critic of Trump&#8217;s &#8220;honesty and character.&#8221; It&#8217;s just that sites like The Bulwark are harshly critical of most conservatives and end up sounding much more like Vox than Fox. They sent freelancer Molly Jong-Fast to the Conservative Political Action Conference. The &#8220;highlight of the hellscape,&#8221; she proclaimed, &#8220;was seeing Laura Ingraham attempt a comedy set. Laura said that Democrats want post-birth abortions and made a number of extremely unfunny jokes about Jim Acosta.&#8221;
Feeling CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta&#8217;s pain is not a &#8220;conservative media&#8221; norm.
This was the saddest finding of the study: &#8220;Many participants said they see few other conservative outlets as high-quality news sources. They described their own publication&#8217;s commitment to accuracy, thoroughness, or fairly representing fact as an exception within the field of conservative news.&#8221;
The point was demonstrated by Ethan Barton, managing editor of the Daily Caller News Foundation, who bragged, &#8220;Within conservative media, I would say our big thing is that we&#8217;re far more in-depth and measured — and I know this is obviously my biased opinion — and reliable than other conservative outlets.&#8221;
That&#8217;s not going to win friends and influence people for the Daily Caller. This is not what you find in major media. You don&#8217;t often see The Washington Post saying to interviewers, &#8220;The New York Times is far less reliable and deep-thinking than we are.&#8221;
These professors should be welcomed for finding the conservative media to be worth academic attention. But they seem to be dismissing the overwhelming bias that provides so much energy and loyalty to conservative outlets. Nadler and Bauer have seriously argued, &#8220;there has been little social-scientific corroboration of liberal media bias.&#8221; That&#8217;s like arguing social science has failed since 1996 to establish that Fox News leans to the right.
Like many liberals, the three professors assume media outlets from &#8220;television networks such as NBC and CNN to prestige publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post and digital upstarts like Vox or BuzzFeed&#8221; can be identified as &#8220;mainstream,&#8221; &#8220;nonpartisan&#8221; and &#8220;general interest.&#8221; It doesn&#8217;t matter how valiantly these &#8220;nonpartisan&#8221; outlets identify themselves as being the ones to vanquish Team Trump in the defense of grand concepts like endangered truth and dying democracy.
&#8220;Nonpartisan&#8221; journalism for the &#8220;general interest&#8221; sounds great, but that&#8217;s not what any of these overtly partisan and liberal outlets provide. Our media are divided between conservative and liberal, right and left, not conservative and &#8220;nonpartisan general interest.&#8221; That ship has sailed, and it sunk.
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.

Journalists

GRAHAM: Academe Assesses The Conservative Media

academia

Conservative media

Journalism

During the Republican primaries of 2015, I played a funny supercut of Donald Trump on my podcast. I had misjudged Trump then, fearing his flaws too much and appreciating his talents too little. The supercut put together all the times and tones in which he had said the word “China,” and backed it up with a jazzy bass. I found it hilarious.
Well, it was hilarious. But Trump was right about China. Right that its behavior was unprincipled and dangerous. Right that our trade imbalance with them represented a power imbalance that they could abuse. He was right about China when the Democrats and their press were distracting the country’s attention with trivial Russian trolling. And he was right to engage them even though the Wall Street Journal types screamed like a girl in a horror movie over how his “trade war” might affect their portfolios.
Do you remember Trump’s inaugural address when he spoke about the “American carnage” of closed factories and unemployment that was already causing an epidemic of deaths by despair? He was right about that, too. Right that it required attention when every Democrat and his pet journalist said it was “dark” to mention it. Right that it could be fixed when Barack Obama said it couldn’t. And right that it was a matter of policy when conservatives said he was interfering with the magic of global capitalism and, anyway, those lazy, oxycontin-chugging crackers kind of deserved it.
He was right that globalism could not thrive without a strong self-defending nation state, because nations are not just economic structures, they are also moral entities and some (like China) are wicked and some (like us) are good and deserve favor.
He was right that borders must be secured when blithering leftists were ready to virtue signal the west to death and high-minded right wingers like myself were shrugging off a slow-motion invasion, trusting to some imagined protective magic in our creed.
He was also right that the American news media has become corrupt and fake and needs to be regularly savaged until they are shamed into reforming and playing fair with the public. The Left, of course, loves it this way, though it destroys any chance of American dialogue. The Right underplayed the problem and was resigned to long-term death-by-culture.
The current pandemic has only underscored how very right Trump was: it was unleashed by China, exacerbated by globalism and weak borders, and has been endlessly darkened by the lies of a Republican-hating press.
Trump has not always been articulate in his rightness, and often it has been instinctive rightness rather than philosophical, which has made it easy to dismiss. But he has been right so often and about so much that it is time to confer on him what no one but his most mindless followers have conferred on him yet: the benefit of the doubt.
Which brings me to the current situation.
The idea that Trump ignored warnings or that Trump reacted late or that Trump over-reacted and carelessly destroyed our economy: these are all the whiny assertions of irresponsible children.
We are always being warned about everything. Pandemics, pulse bombs, earthquakes. We have business to take care of. We prepare where we can. Trump reacted quickly given the misinformation we were getting from China and WHO. He stopped travel from China when Joe Biden and the rest of the Left called him names for it. Even the governors who hate him admit he has responded to their calls.
And as for over-reacting and uncaringly dumping the economy&#8230; What inside info have you got that he’s not seeing? Does anyone with an ounce more sense than the hate-filled half-wits at CNN or the New York Times – does any sensible person believe that Trump doesn’t care about the economy? His political fortunes depend on it for one thing. And he’s rightly proud of his skill at fixing things, the economy above all.
The president has had an unprecedented and unknowable threat on his hands. He is following experts and feeling his way – just like every leader on earth. If social isolation leads to a low death toll, and the economy bounces back as quickly as he hopes, will the Twitter Jeremiahs line up outside the White House to apologize? Will they say: “Hey. Wow. That really worked, Mr. President. We doubted you every step of the way but, doggone it, as it turns out, you did a good job.”
Who will be the first to wonder aloud if maybe Trump got it right again?
Anyone?

KLAVAN: The Unbearable Rightness Of Trump

Globalism

Southern Border

Both <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Health/coronavirus-live-updates-china-reports-deaths-1st-time/story?id=70014891">ABC News</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/us-coronavirus-death-toll-latest-one-day-high">The Guardian</a> lead with alarming headlines on Tuesday stating that the death toll from the current COVID-19 pandemic had skyrocketed in a single day spike. ABC proclaimed an unprecedented death toll in New York City and The Guardian followed suit. From the headlines alone, one could only conclude that our current crisis had not only worsened, but that hope remained at a premium. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/us-coronavirus-death-toll-latest-one-day-high">The Guardian</a> certainly tried to make no bones about it:
<blockquote>The US suffered its highest daily death toll from <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/coronavirus-outbreak">coronavirus</a> on Tuesday, with 1,858 people succumbing to the disease, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.</blockquote>
It turns out the supposed spike in the daily death toll came about because officials have now begun recording fatalities outside of hospitals. In fact, the very same <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Health/coronavirus-live-updates-china-reports-deaths-1st-time/story?id=70014891">ABC News</a> piece proclaiming the unprecedented spike offered much-needed clarification well below the actual headline (emphasis added):
<blockquote>The daily death toll is appearing to spike because authorities are now recording fatalities that occurred outside hospitals and previously were unknown. Out of the newly reported 1,417 deaths, 607 occurred in hospitals in the last day, while other fatalities were previously unreported deaths outside of hospitals.</blockquote>
The spike was caused by new information being added to the overall analyses, not a direct spike in fatalities as the headlines very clearly suggested. In other words, the pandemic hadn’t worsened. The statistical margins had simply broadened to include other data.
Unfortunately, these headlines are being bandied about on an hourly basis and are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting">gaslighting</a> the American public to a dizzying degree. The mainstream media doesn’t have any interest at all in providing any sort of hope or solidarity in this crisis. They simply want panic-stricken clicks to fill their coffers and to promote their own misguided agendas.
Lest we forget, newspaper publishers have continued to see <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/184880/revenue-sources-of-us-newspaper-publishers-since-2005/">their revenues plummet</a> over the last few decades. It’s no wonder that they now resort to sensationalism, gaslighting, and in some cases, outright lies. This is now true more than ever amid the current pandemic.
Aside from glaring inaccuracies, one of the most egregious attempts at gaslighting by the media continues to be the belabored trope that President Trump declared COVID-19 a hoax. Regardless of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/conservatives-2016-election-already-lost-jeremy-boreing">what some of us may think of him</a>, in no uncertain terms did he make such a statement.
Media giants like CNN continue to run with this story though. In an attempt to drive home this false narrative, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/06/politics/scott-stringer-coronavirus-donald-trump-cnntv/index.html">they recently ran a piece</a> about a New York City official who lost his mother to COVID-19:
<blockquote>“Had the President taken this threat seriously and put people&#8217;s health before his political interests, he would have acted immediately,&#8221; Stringer said. &#8220;Instead, he wasted months of time – and spent it talking about how coronavirus was a &#8216;Democratic hoax&#8217; and how the problem would disappear &#8216;like a miracle.&#8217; It was wrong, it was reckless, it cost lives.&#8221;</blockquote>
The fact of the matter is that even <a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-coronavirus-rally-remark/">Snopes</a>, hardly a bastion of conservatism and generally an exceedingly liberal site, begrudgingly admits that Trump never declared COVID-19 a hoax:
<blockquote>In context, Trump did not say … that the virus itself was a hoax. He instead said that Democrats’ criticism of his administration’s response to it was a hoax.</blockquote>
Now more than ever, we must critically evaluate everything we are reading and hearing amid this crisis. We can’t allow for confirmation bias, nor can we succumb to dogmatic overtures. Most importantly, we can’t allow ourselves to be gaslighted by the media into states of panic and despair.

Newspapers

KHAN: The Media Continues To Gaslight The American Public About The Current Pandemic

President Donald Trump shut down a reporter on Tuesday for not knowing key information that was apparently related to a question that they were trying to ask.
“Mr. President, can I just check in on the oil again today?” Bloomberg News reporter Justin Sink asked.
&#8220;Oil?&#8221; Trump responded. &#8220;Where is it today?&#8221;
&#8220;Well, I was wondering if you&#8211;?&#8221; Sink continued.
&#8220;No, no. Where’s the price?&#8221; Trump fired back. &#8220;Give me the price.&#8221;
&#8220;Uh, I’m not sure to be honest,&#8221; Sink responded.
&#8220;How can you ask a question when you don’t know the price?&#8221; Trump fired back.
&#8220;I’ll look it up for you,&#8221; Sink said.
&#8220;OK, let me do somebody else then,&#8221; Trump responded as he then pointed at another reporter and said, &#8220;go ahead.&#8221;
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
savage <a href="https://t.co/Qb63H788i2">pic.twitter.com/Qb63H788i2</a>
&mdash; Nathan Brand (@NathanBrandWA) <a href="https://twitter.com/NathanBrandWA/status/1247657458153279494?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 7, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The Wall Street Journal highlighted the current problem in the oil market in a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-forecasts-oil-production-drop-could-be-factor-in-saudi-russia-price-war-11586283353">report</a> on Tuesday:
<blockquote>U.S. production of crude oil will fall 13% by year’s end, according to a government forecast Tuesday—numbers the White House hopes to use to convince Saudi Arabia and Russia to end their price war, a senior administration official said.
Saudi Arabia, in a dispute with Russia, has worsened a global oil glut by ramping up production at a time when demand has dropped because of the coronavirus pandemic. Both countries have said privately they are open to reducing production only if the U.S. also agrees to mandate cutbacks.
Trump administration officials have shunned any attempts at coordinating or even passively sanctioning output cuts from U.S. producers, considering it an intervention into private enterprise. But they are now trying to thread a diplomatic needle, potentially giving foreign rivals the signal they want, even without government mandates.</blockquote>
The Wall Street Journal added that the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasted that American oil companies will reduce oil production by 2 million barrels per day by the fourth quarter compared to where they were at in the first quarter.
CNBC <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/06/russia-saudi-arabia-are-very-close-to-an-oil-production-deal-rdif.html">reported</a> on Monday:
<blockquote>Russia and Saudi Arabia are “very, very close” to a deal on oil production cuts, according to the chief executive of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund RDIF.
“I think the whole market understands that this deal is important and it will bring lots of stability, so much important stability to the market, and we are very close,” said Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund.
A virtual meeting between OPEC and its allies was scheduled to happen on Monday, but is now “likely” to take place on Thursday instead, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC. Reductions in oil output were expected to be discussed at the meeting that could bring the price war in oil to an end.</blockquote>
Trump indicated last week that he wanted the oil war between Russia and Saudi Arabia to end.
&#8220;I think they both want to make a deal,&#8221; Trump <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/04/07/828688400/trump-urges-saudi-arabia-and-russia-to-end-oil-war">said</a>. &#8220;And they&#8217;re both smart. They love their countries. They want to make a deal. It&#8217;s good. But it&#8217;s also good for the world if they do &#8217;cause you save an industry.&#8221;
This article has been updated with additional reporting.

US-HEALTH-VIRUS-BRIEFING

Trump Shreds Reporter For Not Knowing Key Info: ‘Let Me Do Somebody Else Then’

Oil and Gas

A reporter in the White House press corps pressed President Donald Trump on Sunday on why he has not directed a shutdown of all businesses nationwide, including grocery stores.
&#8220;Obviously, we know anyone can spread the disease unwittingly,&#8221; EWTN White House correspondent Owen Jensen said. &#8220;So, why even have a few businesses open? Why not just shut everything down?&#8221;
&#8220;There are grocery stores that are open, fast food places,&#8221; Jensen continued. &#8220;Why even take a little chance? Just shut it all down.&#8221;
&#8220;We&#8217;ll answer that question later,&#8221; Trump responded. &#8220;All I can say is that right now, things are looking really good and opening up with a bang will be a great thing.&#8221;
The Trump administration has implemented social distancing guidelines that it is asking all Americans to follow through the end of the month and most states have closed down non-essential businesses to prevent the spread of the highly contagious virus.
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Video: As many people have already pointed out on here, a reporter actually asked Trump about shutting down essential businesses like grocery stores. Seriously.
Here that was. <a href="https://t.co/Eg4uJ9v52G">pic.twitter.com/Eg4uJ9v52G</a>
&mdash; Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) <a href="https://twitter.com/CurtisHouck/status/1246953958914035715?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 6, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The White House released the following guidelines on March 29 which last till the end of April and has been dubbed &#8220;30 Days To Slow The Spread&#8221;:
<ul>
<li>Listen and follow the directions of your state and local authorities.</li>
<li>If you feel sick, stay home. Do not go to work. Contact your medical provider.</li>
<li>If your children are sick, keep them at home. Do not send them to school. Contact your medical provider.</li>
<li>If someone in your household has tested positive for the coronavirus, keep the entire household at home. Do not go to work. Do not go to school. Contact your medical provider.</li>
<li>If you are an older person, stay home and away from other people.</li>
<li>If you are a person with a serious underlying health condition that can put you at increased risk (for example, a condition that impairs your lung or heart function or weakens your immune system), stay home and away from other people.</li>
<li>Even if you are young, or otherwise healthy, you are at risk and your activities can increase the risk for others. It is critical that you do your part to stop the spread of the coronavirus.</li>
<li>Work or engage in schooling from home whenever possible.</li>
<li>If you work in a critical infrastructure industry, as defined by the Department of Homeland Security, such as health care service and pharmaceutical and food supply, you have a special responsibility to maintain your normal work schedule. You and your employers should follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance to protect your health at work.</li>
<li>Avoid social gatherings in groups of more than 10 people.</li>
<li>Avoid eating or drinking in bars, restaurants, and food courts — use drive-thru, pick-up or delivery options.</li>
<li>Avoid discretionary travel, shopping trips and social visits.</li>
<li>Do not visit nursing homes or retirement or long-term care facilities unless to provide critical assistance.</li>
<li>Practice good hygiene.</li>
<li>Wash your hands, especially after touching any frequently used item or surface.</li>
<li>Avoid touching your face.</li>
<li>Sneeze or cough into a tissue, or the inside of your elbow.</li>
<li>Disinfect frequently used items and surfaces as much as possible.</li>
</ul>
This report has been updated to include additional information.

Menu

Media

WATCH: McEnany Rips Press For Ignoring Murders: ‘I Didn’t Receive One Question On The Deaths That We Got In This Country This Weekend’

Media Outlets Describe Trump’s Rushmore Speech As ‘Dark’ And ‘Divisive’

GRAHAM: The Media’s Broadcast Brutality Against Trump

Louisville PD Apologizes After Officer Appears To Fire Pepper Balls At On-Air News Crew

ERICKSON: #BelieveAllJournalists

KLAVAN: Biden Is A Ventriloquist’s Dummy – And The Press Knows It

Trump Tells Reporters He May Attend SpaceX Launch, Jokes: ‘I’d Like To Put You On The Rocket’

GRAHAM: AP Says Ditch The ‘Mistress’

LIMBAUGH: Trump’s Critics Can’t Have It Both Ways

Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Reminds Media How They Downplayed Coronavirus Outbreak

Leftists Leave Context Out Of Trump’s Remark On Lincoln And Distort What He Said

Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Rips ABC News Reporter During First Press Briefing

White House Cancels This Week’s Coronavirus Briefings After Trump Rips Media Coverage

Trump Ends Daily Coronavirus Briefings After Media Clashes: ‘Not Worth The Time And Effort’

Tucker Carlson Shows How Media And Democrats Appear To Be Parroting Chinese Propaganda

GRAHAM: Academe Assesses The Conservative Media

KLAVAN: The Unbearable Rightness Of Trump

KHAN: The Media Continues To Gaslight The American Public About The Current Pandemic

Trump Shreds Reporter For Not Knowing Key Info: ‘Let Me Do Somebody Else Then’

Reporter Presses Trump To Shutdown Grocery Stores, Fast Food Restaurants

Menu

Media

WATCH: McEnany Rips Press For Ignoring Murders: ‘I Didn’t Receive One Question On The Deaths That We Got In This Country This Weekend’

Media Outlets Describe Trump’s Rushmore Speech As ‘Dark’ And ‘Divisive’

GRAHAM: The Media’s Broadcast Brutality Against Trump

Louisville PD Apologizes After Officer Appears To Fire Pepper Balls At On-Air News Crew

ERICKSON: #BelieveAllJournalists

KLAVAN: Biden Is A Ventriloquist’s Dummy – And The Press Knows It

Trump Tells Reporters He May Attend SpaceX Launch, Jokes: ‘I’d Like To Put You On The Rocket’

GRAHAM: AP Says Ditch The ‘Mistress’

LIMBAUGH: Trump’s Critics Can’t Have It Both Ways

Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Reminds Media How They Downplayed Coronavirus Outbreak

Leftists Leave Context Out Of Trump’s Remark On Lincoln And Distort What He Said

Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Rips ABC News Reporter During First Press Briefing

White House Cancels This Week’s Coronavirus Briefings After Trump Rips Media Coverage

Trump Ends Daily Coronavirus Briefings After Media Clashes: ‘Not Worth The Time And Effort’

Tucker Carlson Shows How Media And Democrats Appear To Be Parroting Chinese Propaganda

GRAHAM: Academe Assesses The Conservative Media

KLAVAN: The Unbearable Rightness Of Trump

KHAN: The Media Continues To Gaslight The American Public About The Current Pandemic

Trump Shreds Reporter For Not Knowing Key Info: ‘Let Me Do Somebody Else Then’

Reporter Presses Trump To Shutdown Grocery Stores, Fast Food Restaurants

Don't miss a beat of our coverage.