The following is satirical.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, has endorsed two female Democrats for president. In an endorsement entitled, “Deedlee-dee- dee-dee Two Ladies,” the Times endorsed both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, saying it was simply too much newspaper for one woman and didn’t want to restrict its passions to conform to outmoded ideas of fidelity.
The endorsement, written by Times Editor-in-Chief Blithering Prevarication the Third, says in part, “It’s not that we don’t love you, Amy, but a newspaper has needs, and there are times when it’s just natural for us to yearn for a certain amount of variety.  Sometimes, even when we’re with you, the thought of Elizabeth comes into our heads all unbidden and we ask ourselves: Why should we fight our desires like some uptight backwoods yokel when we’re all sophisticated adults who understand that these sorts of things happen even among the happiest couples?”
Mr. Third continued, “In the end, we found it impossible to decide between Amy’s Mean Mommy appeal that always makes us wish she would send us to our room, and Elizabeth’s Naughty Native American Librarian come-on that makes it hard to tell the difference between Cupid’s arrow and an Apache weapon of war.”
The Times conjectured that the two women probably had political differences as well. They called Klobuchar the realist model and Warren the radical model and wrote, “We just can’t decide whether we want to be seduced into socialist slavery like someone following the scent of an enticing perfume and the mesmerizing clockwork of a lady’s walk, or whether we want to be dragged off to pure Communism like that time we visited a dungeon and were hung upside down by leather straps and thrashed deliciously — but perhaps that’s too much information.”
Though some journalistic observers scorned the historic double endorsement, the Times editorial board defended their decision in a statement saying, “We’re dithering idiots who know even less about policy than we do about American history, so that explains it.”
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/warren-refuses-to-answer-any-more-questions-about-sanders-being-sexist-after-earlier-claim-backfires">Warren Refuses To Answer Any More Questions About Sanders Being Sexist After Earlier Claim Backfires</a>

Heart Shape

New York Times Says It’s Too Much Newspaper For Just One Woman [Satire]

Amy Klobuchar

Elizabeth Warren

New York Times

Satire

The New York Times editorial board announced on Sunday that it was endorsing two Democratic presidential candidates for the party&#8217;s nomination – Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) – a decision that was quickly mocked online by critics.
&#8220;In a break with convention, the editorial board has chosen to endorse two separate Democratic candidates for president,&#8221; the Times leftist editorial board wrote. &#8220;American voters must choose between three sharply divergent visions of the future.&#8221;
The Times immediately demonized everything that President Donald Trump has accomplished as racist and done out of &#8220;the veneration of a mythological past.&#8221;
The Times correctly noted that almost any one of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates would be &#8220;the most&#8221; far-left &#8220;president in decades on issues like health care, the economy, and government’s allocations of resources.&#8221;
The Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/19/opinion/amy-klobuchar-elizabeth-warren-nytimes-endorsement.html">wrote</a>:
<blockquote>There are legitimate questions about whether our democratic system is fundamentally broken. Our elections are getting less free and fair, Congress and the courts are increasingly partisan, foreign nations are flooding society with misinformation, a deluge of money flows through our politics. And the economic mobility that made the American dream possible is vanishing.
Both the radical and the realist models warrant serious consideration. If there were ever a time to be open to new ideas, it is now. If there were ever a time to seek stability, now is it.
That’s why we’re endorsing the most effective advocates for each approach. They are Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.</blockquote>
The Times joined the rest of the media in trying to put an end to Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders&#8217; campaign, highlighting problems with his age, health, and style of politics. The Times wrote:
<blockquote>Mr. Sanders would be 79 when he assumed office, and after an October heart attack, his health is a serious concern. Then, there’s how Mr. Sanders approaches politics. He boasts that compromise is anathema to him. Only his prescriptions can be the right ones, even though most are overly rigid, untested and divisive. He promises that once in office, a groundswell of support will emerge to push through his agenda. Three years into the Trump administration, we see little advantage to exchanging one over-promising, divisive figure in Washington for another.
Good news, then, that Elizabeth Warren has emerged as a standard-bearer for the Democratic left.
Senator Warren is a gifted storyteller. &#8230;</blockquote>
The reaction to the Times endorsements appeared to be most negative, including from those on the political Left.
Varshini Prakash, executive director of the far-left Sunrise Movement, responded mockingly: &#8220;oh ya totally this makes sense&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
oh ya totally this makes sense <a href="https://t.co/HYGIk8TbRY">https://t.co/HYGIk8TbRY</a>
— Varshini Prakash (@VarshPrakash) <a href="https://twitter.com/VarshPrakash/status/1219110233303330817?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 20, 2020</a></blockquote>
Left-wing activist Cameron Kasky wrote: &#8220;Which demographic is smaller: The amount of people who care about the NYT editorial board’s endorsement or the amount of people who saw &#8216;Dolittle&#8217; this weekend?&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Which demographic is smaller:
The amount of people who care about the NYT editorial board’s endorsement or the amount of people who saw “Dolittle” this weekend? <a href="https://t.co/nP0cwEJnvi">https://t.co/nP0cwEJnvi</a>
&mdash; Cam Kasky (@cameron_kasky) <a href="https://twitter.com/cameron_kasky/status/1219109110504984577?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 20, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Commentary Editor Abe Greenwald wrote: &#8220;The fear of being definitive, of saying no to one thing and yes to another, is one of the defining pathologies of the age.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
The fear of being definitive, of saying no to one thing and yes to another, is one of the defining pathologies of the age. <a href="https://t.co/nrpNZTPJWb">https://t.co/nrpNZTPJWb</a>
&mdash; Abe Greenwald (@AbeGreenwald) <a href="https://twitter.com/AbeGreenwald/status/1219112621565259776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 20, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Radio host John Batchelor wrote: &#8220;&#8216;Why, sometimes I&#8217;ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.&#8217; Lewis Carroll&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
“Why, sometimes I&#39;ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Lewis Carroll <a href="https://t.co/QHOAqJYQlV">https://t.co/QHOAqJYQlV</a>
&mdash; John Batchelor (@batchelorshow) <a href="https://twitter.com/batchelorshow/status/1219108412061077512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 20, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Chris Martin Palmer wrote: &#8220;Literally seconds from cancelling my subscription.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Literally seconds from cancelling my subscription. <a href="https://t.co/rgrEnruAFr">https://t.co/rgrEnruAFr</a>
&mdash; Chris Martin Palmer (@ChrisPalmerNBA) <a href="https://twitter.com/ChrisPalmerNBA/status/1219116155865948162?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 20, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Carol Roth wrote: &#8220;This is so patronizing and cringey&#8230; they can’t even pick one. &#8216;Oh, let’s be progressive and pick a woman! Well, we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Let’s pick both, they won’t mind&#8230;'&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
This is so patronizing and cringey&#8230; they can’t even pick one. “Oh, let’s be progressive and pick a woman! Well, we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Let’s pick both, they won’t mind&#8230;” <a href="https://t.co/l6xxtPUCmD">https://t.co/l6xxtPUCmD</a>
&mdash; Carol Roth (@caroljsroth) <a href="https://twitter.com/caroljsroth/status/1219111096466001920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 20, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
This is a breaking news story, refresh the page for updates.

Democrats

New York Times Makes Odd Endorsement In Democratic Presidential Primary, Gets Mocked

2020 Election

President Donald Trump responded to a New York Times report on Saturday about a proposal that the Army Corps of Engineers is studying to protect New York from future hurricanes and tsunamis, saying that it is too costly, won&#8217;t work, and will look terrible.
The plan involves constructing &#8220;man-made islands with retractable gates&#8221; that stretch six miles long &#8220;from the Rockaways in Queens to a strip of land in New Jersey south of Staten Island&#8221; and could save &#8220;property and lives.&#8221;
&#8220;Those who support a barrier miles from Manhattan’s coast — one in the outer New York Harbor, out of sight from many residents and tourists — say it would be the best solution for protecting the most people, properties and landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, from a storm surge swelling the East and Hudson Rivers, without cutting off the city from its waterfront,&#8221; the Times reported. &#8220;The Corps’s barrier designs aim to address only storm surges. They would not counter two other climate-related threats — flooding from high tides and storm runoff — and they could trap sewage and toxins, which would threaten the nascent ecological revival of New York’s waterways.&#8221;
&#8220;The Corps estimates the wall to cost $119 billion, and it is unclear if the city, New York State, New Jersey and Congress will agree to jointly fund the project, which would take 25 years to build,&#8221; the Times added. &#8220;Even if construction went smoothly, opponents say, the barrier could be obsolete within decades because, they say, the Corps’s estimates of future sea levels are too low.&#8221;
Trump responded to the story by writing on Twitter: &#8220;A massive 200 Billion Dollar Sea Wall, built around New York to protect it from rare storms, is a costly, foolish &amp; environmentally unfriendly idea that, when needed, probably won’t work anyway. It will also look terrible. Sorry, you’ll just have to get your mops &amp; buckets ready!&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
A massive 200 Billion Dollar Sea Wall, built around New York to protect it from rare storms, is a costly, foolish &amp; environmentally unfriendly idea that, when needed, probably won’t work anyway. It will also look terrible. Sorry, you’ll just have to get your mops &amp; buckets ready!
&mdash; Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1218674016942219265?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 18, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
New York City, New York State and New Jersey have to approve whatever solution the Army Corps of Engineers comes up with and would have to pay for 35% of the cost and Congress would have to agree to fund the remaining 65%.
Clifford S. Jones III, the planning chief for the Corps’s New York district told the Times that the best options were &#8220;what the agency called middle-ground options&#8221; which cost &#8220;$43 billion to $47 billion&#8221; and &#8220;propose multiple smaller barriers, across, for example, the Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn, and the entrances to Jamaica Bay, Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal.&#8221;
Last year, the Army Corps of Engineers and New York State <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/100-19/mayor-de-blasio-governor-cuomo-senator-schumer-congressman-rose-seawall-staten">secured</a> $400 million in federal funds to go toward the Army Corps of Engineers&#8217; $615 million project of building a 5.3 mile seawall to protect waterfront communities in Staten Island.
&#8220;This innovative project will protect Staten Islanders from future devastating storms, enhance access to the shore, create thriving wetlands and bring peace of mind to the diverse communities that live along the coastline,&#8221; said Governor Andrew M. Cuomo. &#8220;Today&#8217;s agreement will allow New York to move forward with this critical resiliency project, which will ensure vulnerable communities have the resources they need to build back stronger after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy and better prepare for the next 100-year storm.&#8221;

Winter weather Jan 14th 2020

‘Get Your Mops And Buckets Ready!’: Trump Responds To NYT Story On Sea Wall

Donald Trump

A new report from The New York Times highlights how President Donald Trump&#8217;s economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran have devastated the country and have allowed the U.S. to become even more aggressive toward the terror-sponsoring state because it is afraid of any additional fallout from continued escalation.
The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/business/economy/iran-economy.html">reported</a> Monday:
<blockquote>Iran is caught in a wretched economic crisis. Jobs are scarce. Prices for food and other necessities are skyrocketing. The economy is rapidly shrinking. Iranians are increasingly disgusted.
Crippling sanctions imposed by the Trump administration have severed Iran’s access to international markets, decimating the economy, which is now contracting at an alarming 9.5 percent annual rate, the International Monetary Fund estimated. Oil exports were effectively zero in December, according to Oxford Economics, as the sanctions have prevented sales, even though smugglers have transported unknown volumes.</blockquote>
On Tuesday, European countries triggered a dispute mechanism against Iran, which is <a href="https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Soleimani-killing-Window-of-opportunity-open-for-Israel-against-Iran-614151">producing</a> enough enriched uranium to build one nuclear bomb by the end of the year, for violating the Iran nuclear deal.
The Foreign Ministers of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom <a href="https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/country-files/iran/news/article/joint-statement-by-the-foreign-ministers-of-france-germany-and-the-united">said</a> in a joint statement on Tuesday:
<blockquote>Following Iran’s announcement in May 2019 that it would cease meeting some of its commitments under the JCPoA, we have sought to persuade Iran to change course. The E3 have worked hard to address Iran’s concerns and bring it back into compliance with its commitments under the nuclear agreement. We have also undertaken and supported diplomatic efforts, such as France’s initiative, to deescalate tensions and to bring Iran and the US to the negotiating table for a comprehensive negotiated solution. The E3 remain fully committed to this diplomatic effort and intend to resume it as soon as conditions allow.
However, in the meantime Iran has continued to break key restrictions set out in the JCPoA. Iran’s actions are inconsistent with the provisions of the nuclear agreement and have increasingly severe and non-reversible proliferation implications.
We do not accept the argument that Iran is entitled to reduce compliance with the JCPoA. Contrary to its statements, Iran has never triggered the JCPoA Dispute Resolution Mechanism and has no legal grounds to cease implementing the provisions of the agreement.
We publicly stated our concerns, along with the High Representative of the European Union, on 11 November. At the Joint Commission on 6 December, we made clear to Iran that unless it reversed course, we would have no choice but to take action within the framework of the JCPoA, including through the Dispute Resolution Mechanism.
Instead of reversing course, Iran has chosen to further reduce compliance with the JCPoA and announced on 5 January that &#8220;the Islamic Republic of Iran, in the fifth step in reducing its commitments, discards the last key component of its limitations in the JCPOA, which is the ‘limit on the number of centrifuges’”, and that “the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear program no longer faces any operational restrictions”, including on enrichment and enrichment-related matters.
We have therefore been left with no choice, given Iran’s actions, but to register today our concerns that Iran is not meeting its commitments under the JCPoA and to refer this matter to the Joint Commission under the Dispute Resolution Mechanism, as set out in paragraph 36 of the JCPoA.</blockquote>
As The Times noted, the fact that conditions are deteriorating so rapidly in Iran means that its government is concerned about continued protests, which seem to become more problematic for the regime every time they break out.
As a result, &#8220;the bleak economy appears to be tempering the willingness of Iran to escalate hostilities with the United States, its leaders cognizant that war could profoundly worsen national fortunes,&#8221; The Times added. &#8220;In recent months, public anger over joblessness, economic anxiety and corruption has emerged as a potentially existential threat to Iran’s hard-line regime.&#8221;
The Trump administration launched new sanctions against Iran last week after the world&#8217;s leading state sponsor of terrorism launched missile attacks against U.S. forces stationed in Iraq. The sanctions were announced on Friday by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a press briefing at the White House.
“First, the President is issuing an executive order authorizing the imposition of additional sanctions against any individual owning, operating, trading with, or assisting sectors of the Iranian economy, including construction, manufacturing, textiles, and mining,” Mnuchin began. “And let me be clear: These will be both primary and secondary sanctions. The EO also allows us to designate other sectors in the future as Secretary Pompeo and me think is appropriate.”
“Second, we are announcing 17 specific sanctions against Iran’s largest steel and iron manufacturers, three Seychelles-based entities, and a vessel involved in the transfer of products,” Mnuchin said. “As a result of these actions, we will cut off billions of dollars of support to the Iranian regime, and we will continue our enforcement of other entities.”
“Third, we are taking action against eight senior Iranian officials who advanced the regime’s destabilizing activity and were involved in Tuesday’s ballistic missile strike,” Mnuchin concluded. “Today’s sanctions are part of our commitment to stop the Iranian regime’s global terrorist activities. The President has been very clear: We will continue to apply economic sanctions until Iran stops its terrorist activities and commit that it will never have nuclear weapons.”

IRAN-POLITICS-US-CANADA-AVIATION

New York Times: Trump’s Sanctions Against Iran Are Working, Gives U.S. Unique Position

Iran

The following is satirical.
Democrats and journalists — but I repeat myself — are furiously accusing the Trump administration of giving conflicting explanations for the killing of terrorist leader Qassem Soleimani.
Pencil-necked McCarthyite Adam Schiff went on &#8220;Meet the Press&#8221; with NBC anchorman Chuck Credulous, and actually managed to keep a straight face as he said, “Administration officials keep changing their tune. First they said they killed Soleimani because he was going to kill Americans, then they said it was because he was going to bomb American embassies, then they said it was because he was going to launch terrorist attacks against Americans. Well, which is it? After all, we can’t rest easy knowing this violent, psychopathic murderer of our countrymen may have been harmed unjustly.”
In an op-ed in The New York Times, a former newspaper, Editor-in-Chief Blithering Prevarication the Third wrote, “The State Department said Soleimani planned imminent attacks, but given their deplorable English pronunciation, it was impossible to tell whether they meant i-m-m-a-n-e-n-t and thus the attack was indwelling and inherent, or whether they meant it was an eminent attack being ‘high in station, rank or repute,’ or whether they actually were trying to imply that Mr. Soleimani was planning to attack us in the near future, which of course would be an entirely different spelling than the others. These are the things that should be keeping America up at night not trifling matters like whether Donald Trump avenged the deaths and saved the lives of our fellow Americans.”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told a mannequin in a department store she’d been lost in since last Wednesday, “I have said many times that all roads lead back to Russia, but now it seems they actually all lead to the ladies lingerie department, and if someone doesn’t get me out of here soon, I may starve to death.”
Pelosi then wandered off to the cosmetics department where she discovered a new color of lipstick to put on her forehead.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/kevin-mccarthy-backs-house-dems-into-corner-will-introduce-resolution-supporting-iranian-protestors">Kevin McCarthy Backs House Dems Into Corner, Will Introduce Resolution Supporting Iranian Protestors</a>

Iran Propaganda

Democrats Demand To Know Why Trump Killed Terrorist Who Was Murdering Americans [Satire]

Adam Schiff

Nancy Pelosi

More than five months after his death behind bars, Jeffrey Epstein continues to spark controversy — and legal battles. On Monday, Lawrence Lessig, a prominent law professor at Harvard University, filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts against The New York Times for publishing what he describes as &#8220;clickbait defamation&#8221; against him in an Epstein-focused story.
On Sept. 14, just over a month after Epstein was found dead in his prison cell by self-strangulation after being charged with sex trafficking of minors, The New York Times published a story on Epstein&#8217;s donations to M.I.T. titled, &#8220;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/business/lessig-epstein-ito-mit.html">A Harvard Professor Doubles Down: If You Take Epstein’s Money, Do It in Secret.</a>&#8221; The story, which offers &#8220;a conversation with Lawrence Lessig about Jeffrey Epstein, M.I.T. and reputation laundering,&#8221; begins:
<blockquote>
It is hard to defend soliciting donations from the <a class="css-1g7m0tk" title="" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-investigation.html">convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein</a>. But Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, has been trying.
Mr. Lessig is a friend of Joichi Ito, who <a class="css-1g7m0tk" title="" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/business/mit-media-lab-jeffrey-epstein-joichi-ito.html">resigned</a> as the director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, as well as from the boards of The New York Times Company and other organizations, after it was revealed that he had courted money from Mr. Epstein and worked to hide it. Mr. Ito also traveled twice to <a class="css-1g7m0tk" title="" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/business/jeffrey-epstein-island.html">Mr. Epstein’s Caribbean island home</a>.
</blockquote>
The Times then provides a summary of Lessig&#8217;s &#8220;doubling down&#8221; on his supposed defense of taking money from Epstein:
<blockquote>
Mr. Lessig signed a letter in support of Mr. Ito, and then published <a class="css-1g7m0tk" title="" href="https://medium.com/@lessig/on-joi-and-mit-3cb422fe5ae7" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">a 3,500-word essay</a> on the subject. He argued that in an ideal world, no institution should take money from people like Mr. Epstein, but that in reality, much of the money that props up universities and other elite institutions comes from troubling sources.
Mr. Lessig suggested that donors to places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could be organized in four buckets, ranging from “people like Tom Hanks or Taylor Swift — people who are wealthy and whose wealth comes from nothing but doing good” — to “entities and people whose wealth comes from clearly wrongful or harmful or immoral behavior.” Mr. Lessig, who noted that he was a childhood victim of sexual abuse, also argued that the act of veiling Mr. Epstein’s contributions was good, because it avoided “whitewashing” his reputation.
</blockquote>
Now, as reported by <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/01/13/harvard-law-professor-sues-new-york-times-over-jeffrey-epstein-story/4457147002/">USA Today</a>, Lessig is accusing the Times of deliberately distorting what he said about donations from the likes of Epstein, publishing a &#8220;sensationalized, false and defamatory &#8216;clickbait&#8217; headline and lede&#8221; that presents the &#8220;direct opposite&#8221; of what he actually argued.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Today I sued the <a href="https://twitter.com/nytimes?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@nytimes</a>: <a href="https://t.co/tXEXgzcD9w">https://t.co/tXEXgzcD9w</a>
&mdash; Lessig (@lessig) <a href="https://twitter.com/lessig/status/1216746210226135041?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 13, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Lessig&#8217;s lawsuit states that &#8220;within hours&#8221; of the publication of the story, the professor &#8220;became associated with the notoriety surrounding the Epstein scandal, and the community that quietly or silently tolerated such monstrosity.&#8221; The story, Lessig contends, is a clear case of defamation, as he explains at length in a blogpost on <a href="https://medium.com/@lessig/on-suing-the-times-9f66f3dd9063">Medium</a> posted Monday.
The Times&#8217; title and lede for the article on his discussion about the Epstein donation scandal, Lessig writes in the blogpost, &#8220;are false.&#8221; After pointing out passages from his original post, including where he states clearly that &#8220;it was a mistake to take this money, even if anonymous,&#8221; Lessig writes:
<blockquote>
My essay was clearly not “defend[ing] soliciting donations” from Epstein. My essay said—repeatedly—that such soliciting was a “mistake.” And more importantly, it was a mistake because of the kind of harm it would trigger in both victims and women generally. &#8230; I did not defend taking money from Epstein. I didn’t say it was ok to take money from Epstein “if in secret.” I said it was wrong to take Epstein’s money, “even if anonymous.” The assertion—in the tweeted headline and lede—to the contrary is thus flatly false.
</blockquote>
&#8220;I love the Times,&#8221; Lessig writes. &#8220;I know that journalism is hard, and deadlines are short. So I when I asked the Times to correct these two false and defamatory statements, I fully expected they would, and I fully expected that would be the end of it. And I so I was astonished when they not only refused to fix the mistake, but doubled down on the absurdity of their justifications.&#8221;
The Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/01/13/us/ap-us-times-lawsuit-epstein-1st-ld-writethru.html">responded</a> Monday to Lessig&#8217;s lawsuit by declaring that it will defend against his claim &#8220;vigorously.&#8221;
“When Professor Lessig contacted The Times to complain about the story, senior editors reviewed his complaint and were satisfied that the story accurately reflected his statements,&#8221; said Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha. &#8220;We plan to defend against the claim vigorously.”
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/alleged-epstein-suicide-attempt-footage-no-longer-exists-after-jail-saves-wrong-video">Alleged Epstein Suicide Attempt Footage ‘No Longer Exists’ After Jail Saves Wrong Video</a>

Jeffrey Epstein

Harvard Professor Sues New York Times Over Epstein Story; NYT Responds

Harvard

On Wednesday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claimed he was hacked with child pornography.
&#8220;Well, I’m on the phone with my computer security service, and as I understand it someone compromised my IP address and is using it to download child pornography,&#8221; Krugman posted.
The columnist then suggested a conspiracy theory group dubbed &#8220;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon">Qanon</a>&#8221; planted the child porn.
&#8220;I might just be a random target. But this could be an attempt to Qanon me,&#8221; he wrote.
Krugman added, &#8220;It’s an ugly world out there.&#8221;
The tweet from Krugman has since been <a href="https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1214991222009409536">deleted</a>, but a screenshot of the post is below:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
NYT‘s Paul Krugman claims he was hacked w child porn <a href="https://t.co/hoNDqpIao1">pic.twitter.com/hoNDqpIao1</a>
&mdash; Amanda (@AmandaPresto) <a href="https://twitter.com/AmandaPresto/status/1215096650642882560?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 9, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
After the bizarre tweet raised eyebrows and prompted folks online to ask questions, Krugman backpedaled hours later.
&#8220;The Times is now on the case,&#8221; he wrote via Twitter, eventually adding: &#8220;Deleted original tweet. Times thinks it may have been a scam. Anyway, will have more security in future.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Deleted original tweet. Times thinks it may have been a scam. Anyway, will have more security in future
&mdash; Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) <a href="https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1215080448113725441?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 9, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Questions still swirled online.
&#8220;If I found out someone downloaded child porn using my IP address I would immediately hire a lawyer, file a police report and call the FBI,&#8221; posted Breitbart&#8217;s John Nolte. &#8220;I would NOT try to massage the PR problem on social media.&#8221;
&#8220;Krugman is Unbelievable,&#8221; Nolte, a former Daily Wire writer, added.
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If I found out someone downloaded child porn using my IP address I would immediately hire a lawyer, file a police report and call the FBI. 
I would NOT try to massage the PR problem on social media. 
Krugman is Unbelievable.
&mdash; John Ocasio-Nolte (@NolteNC) <a href="https://twitter.com/NolteNC/status/1215081916480868361?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 9, 2020</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;Child pornography is an extremely serious matter. Has FBI or NYPD been contacted about this? [New York Times PR]???&#8221; asked New York Post&#8217;s Jon Levine.
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Child pornography is an extremely serious matter. Has FBI or NYPD been contacted about this? <a href="https://twitter.com/NYTimesPR?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NYTimesPR</a> ???
&mdash; Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) <a href="https://twitter.com/LevineJonathan/status/1215091231115677696?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 9, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Epoch Times writer Adrian Norman said he was &#8220;noticing a pattern,&#8221; highlighting a 2018 post from Krugman about &#8220;live sex cams.&#8221;
&#8220;Oh, joy. I got a notification that someone tried to sign me up for a site that offers &#8216;live sex cams,'&#8221; the Times columnist wrote in November of 2018. &#8220;I&#8217;m sure whoever is engaging in this harassment are very fine people.&#8221;
&#8220;If one of these attempts succeeds, advance notice: it wasn&#8217;t me,&#8221; he said.
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Oh, joy. I got a notification that someone tried to sign me up for a site that offers &quot;live sex cams&quot;. I&#39;m sure whoever is engaging in this harassment are very fine people. If one of these attempts succeeds, advance notice: it wasn&#39;t me.
&mdash; Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) <a href="https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1063083286312992768?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 15, 2018</a></blockquote>
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I’m noticing a pattern here with Paul Krugman. <a href="https://t.co/DW36u0ltvH">https://t.co/DW36u0ltvH</a>
&mdash; Adrian Norman (@AdrianNormanDC) <a href="https://twitter.com/AdrianNormanDC/status/1215114228438188032?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 9, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Computer engineer and Daily Wire contributor Harry Khachatrian told The Daily Wire Krugman&#8217;s first tweet concerning his IP address was &#8220;unclear.&#8221;
&#8220;His IP address being compromised can suggest a whole host of things,&#8221; Khachatrian said. &#8220;His IP address being compromised could suggest that someone outside his home network discovered his IP address. But that wouldn’t be his IP address. It would be the address of his home router, assigned to him by his ISP (internet service provider). That’s his public IP address. His own, personal computer’s IP address is called a private IP address and is invisible to the outside world.&#8221;
&#8220;Hacking someone via their public IP address is no easy feat,&#8221; he explained. &#8220;While it is possible that someone got a hold of Krugman’s public IP, the likelihood of them then proceeding to somehow use it to &#8216;download child pornography&#8217; (on Krugman’s own computer) is incredibly low.&#8221;
&#8220;Far more likely that if they someone managed to obtain his IP and meander past his network security, they would be after personal banking information and financial statements,&#8221; added Khachatrian. 
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/paul-krugman-mocks-trump-giving-highest-honor-ashe-schow">Paul Krugman Mocks Trump For Giving Highest Honor To Someone Who ‘Hits Golf Balls For Money.’ There’s Just One Problem.</a>
&nbsp;

Paul Krugman

NYT Columnist Claims He Was Hacked With Child Porn, Promotes Conspiracy, Backpedals

The New York Times caught heat on Tuesday after posting its sanitized obituary for terrorist Iranian general Qassem Soleimani — especially in comparison to an obituary the news outlet recently posted for a football coach who kept a female reporter out of the men&#8217;s locker room.
Blurbing the obituary for Soleimani on Tuesday, the Times simply captioned and headlined the obit: &#8220;Qassim Suleimani, Master of Iran’s Intrigue and Force, Dies at 62.&#8221;
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Qassim Suleimani, Master of Iran’s Intrigue and Force, Dies at 62 <a href="https://t.co/POoNRnRz26">https://t.co/POoNRnRz26</a>
&mdash; NYT Obituaries (@NYTObits) <a href="https://twitter.com/NYTObits/status/1214467726695120898?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 7, 2020</a></blockquote>
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By comparison, when the Times posted an obituary for former NFL coach Sam Wyche, the publication felt it necessary to highlight Wyche &#8220;barring a female reporter from the team’s locker room.&#8221;
&#8220;Sam Wyche, who was the last coach to lead the Cincinnati Bengals to the Super Bowl, but who was later fined by the National Football League for barring a female reporter from the team’s locker room, has died,&#8221; said the caption of the obituary, which was first published on Friday.
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Sam Wyche, who was the last coach to lead the Cincinnati Bengals to the Super Bowl, but who was later fined by the National Football League for barring a female reporter from the team’s locker room, has died <a href="https://t.co/A2cnDDYbQu">https://t.co/A2cnDDYbQu</a>
&mdash; NYT Obituaries (@NYTObits) <a href="https://twitter.com/NYTObits/status/1214551524115922944?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 7, 2020</a></blockquote>
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The two posts were published on Twitter less than seven hours apart.
Politicos online noticed the Times&#8217; differing posts on the two very different men and took the outlet to task.
&#8220;Six hours apart,&#8221; conservative writer and podcast host Stephen Miller captioned two screenshots of the Times&#8217; obituary posts.
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Six hours apart. <a href="https://t.co/rLgIGgPmtv">pic.twitter.com/rLgIGgPmtv</a>
&mdash; Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) <a href="https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1214568383129112576?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 7, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Popular conservative Twitter account &#8220;neontaster&#8221; mocked, &#8220;Did Soleimani ever bar a woman from a locker room? Check mate, neocons.&#8221;
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Did Soleimani ever bar a woman from a locker room? Check mate, neocons.
&mdash; neontaster (@neontaster) <a href="https://twitter.com/neontaster/status/1214571905627443203?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 7, 2020</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;Sometimes the sins of the recently departed are worth highlighting. [S]ometimes they aren’t,&#8221; snarked the Washington Examiner&#8217;s Becket Adams.
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sometimes the sins of the recently departed are worth highlighting. sometimes they aren’t. <a href="https://t.co/cYHnVVLBwZ">pic.twitter.com/cYHnVVLBwZ</a>
&mdash; 𝚒&#39;𝚖 𝚊 𝚑𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚠𝚊𝚢 𝚝𝚜𝚊𝚛 (@BecketAdams) <a href="https://twitter.com/BecketAdams/status/1214565985287458820?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 7, 2020</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;The New York Times gives more favorable PR to a brutal terrorist than to a football coach,&#8221; Daily Wire contributor Harry Khachatrian said.
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The New York Times gives more favorable PR to a brutal terrorist than to a football coach <a href="https://t.co/7YY682KI5L">https://t.co/7YY682KI5L</a> <a href="https://t.co/NxCWKCyGij">pic.twitter.com/NxCWKCyGij</a>
&mdash; Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) <a href="https://twitter.com/Harry1T6/status/1214586120035540992?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 7, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Soleimani was strategically killed early Friday by a Trump-ordered airstrike near Baghdad International Airport. He was the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, and responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans.
“Soleimani was the head of the Iranian and Iranian-backed forces carrying out those operations killing American troops” during the Iraq War, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/state-dept-iranian-general-killed-in-u-s-strike-responsible-for-17-of-american-deaths-in-iraq?%3Futm_source=twitter&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_campaign=dwtwitter">Fox News</a> reported. “According to the State Department, 17% of all deaths of U.S. personnel in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 were orchestrated by Soleimani.”
Soleimani was in the process of “coordinating” attacks on U.S. personnel, according to the State Department.
“We can confirm that in the past several days, General Soleimani had been traveling in the Middle East coordinating further imminent large-scale attacks against U.S. diplomats and service members. These threats were highly credible and the intelligence is sound,” the State Department said.
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State Department: “We can confirm that in the past several days, General Soleimani had been traveling in the Middle East coordinating further imminent large-scale attacks against U.S. diplomats and service members. These threats were highly credible and the intelligence is sound”
&mdash; Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) <a href="https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1213192132581720065?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 3, 2020</a></blockquote>
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As noted by <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/ny-times-runs-piece-lionizing-soleimani-trump-administration-miscalculated">The Daily Wire</a>, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/podcasts/the-daily/trump-iran-soleimani.html?smid=tw-nytimes&amp;smtyp=cur">Times</a> also published a piece lionizing Soleimani on Tuesday:
<blockquote>The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/podcasts/the-daily/trump-iran-soleimani.html?smid=tw-nytimes&amp;smtyp=cur">ran a piece</a> titled, “Why Iran Is In Mourning,” in which the Times attempted to put the best face on Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, opining of his funeral that there was a “unified national outpouring that is reserved for a small handful of figures in any country, I mean a beloved president, a civil rights leader like Martin Luther King in the United States…” The Times reporter  theorized that the Trump administration had “miscalculated the level of admiration” that Iranians had for Soleimani, claiming that opposition figures who had been jailed by the Iranian government had said, “He was a national hero.”</blockquote>

Qassem Soleimani

New York Times Ripped For Soleimani Obituary Post In Comparison To Brutal Obit For ‘Sexist’ Football Coach

Foreign Policy

Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

Middle East

On Tuesday, The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/podcasts/the-daily/trump-iran-soleimani.html?smid=tw-nytimes&amp;smtyp=cur">ran a piece</a> titled, “Why Iran Is In Mourning,” in which the Times attempted to put the best face on Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, opining of his funeral that there was a “unified national outpouring that is reserved for a small handful of figures in any country, I mean a beloved president, a civil rights leader like Martin Luther King in the United States…” The Times reporter  theorized that the Trump administration had “miscalculated the level of admiration” that Iranians had for Soleimani, claiming that opposition figures who had been jailed by the Iranian government had said, “He was a national hero.”
Times reporter Farnaz Fassihi told host Michael Barbaro stated that Supreme Leader Ali Khameini recited the Muslim prayer for the dead during the funeral for Soleimani, adding that “in the middle of the prayer, several times he paused and openly cried. And the crowd also wept very loudly with him.” Fassihi continued, As a reporter who has covered Iran for over 25 years, what struck me was that the people who had attended were not just supporters of the regime, but a lot of people who were generally very critical of the regime … there were activist, there were opposition figures who had been jailed by the regime who attended, and when I asked them, ‘Why are you there? Why are you going?’ the response was, “General Soleimani protected our national security. He transcended politics. He was a national hero.”
Barbaro said, &#8220;What you are describing feels like the kind of unified national outpouring that is reserved for a small handful of figures in any country, I mean a beloved president, a civil rights leader like Martin Luther King in the United States, not for what our colleagues have described as a general who specializes in covert operations in Iran.”
Fassihi responded, &#8220;I think it&#8217;s difficult for most people in the United States and outside of Iran and perhaps the region to grasp the unique place and role that General Soleimani played in Iran and in regional politics.  He was singlehandedly the most revered influential character in Iran.”
Barbaro asked, “So how did Soleimani cultivate that role?  How did he make Iranians feel that way?  Where does that story start?”
Fassihi answered that it began with the Iranian revolution in 1979, making it seem like a rags-to-riches story:  &#8220;He was a young man working construction jobs &#8230; from a low income family.  His education was high school diploma level and he got swept up in the revolution, in the promise of Islam becoming the foundation of the government and of promises to empower the oppressed and low income class in Iran which had been neglected and sidelined under the pre-Western monarchy of the Shah.”  She stated that he rose quickly in the military ranks, &#8220;showing a lot of promise.&#8221;  She continued that after the Iran/Iraq war he was named commander of the Qods forces, (the wing of the Iranian military responsible for terrorist activities across the globe), saying, &#8220;That was really the beginning of the Qods forces and Islamic Republic&#8217;s ambition to create a paramilitary in the region and to kind of export the idea of an Islamic revolution of Shia dominance outside of the borders of Iran.”
Asked why Soleimani wanted to export the revolution, Fassihi answered that the Islamic republic theocracy was the first time that a Shia government had come to power in the Middle East.  Fassihi theorized that the Islamic Republic of Iran wanted to promote the Shia wing of Islam as it had been an historical minority compared to the Sunnis, adding, “As soon as they had established their government and power in the country, they started looking externally, and General Soleimani was pivotal in expanding the ambitions of Iran&#8217;s military and political apparatus in the Middle East.”
Fassihi noted Soleimani’s role in helping Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, without pointing out their role as terrorist groups.
Fassihi stated that the Trump administration had been ignorant of the importance of Soleimani when they decided to kill him, saying:
<blockquote>I think the Trump administration may have not known what he represented to Iraq.  I think they miscalculated the level of admiration, perhaps, or nationalistic sentiment that we have seen pouring out of Iran.  I think White House probably thought that it was taking out a military commander that may not be very popular with ordinary Iranians, that there&#8217;s been a lot of discontent in November against the government and maybe Iranians would support this decision.  For sure we have voices in Iran, outside and inside Iran among Iranians who think that taking out Mr. Soleimani out is justified and didn&#8217;t like him, but what we&#8217;ve seen is that the U.S. has effectively turned General Soleimani into a martyr.</blockquote>
When Barbari echoed that the U.S. may not have understood what Soleimani meant in the hearts of Iranians, Fassihi concluded that Iran had been an “island of stability in the Middle East, saying, “I think that&#8217;s absolutely right.  And I think we have to remember Iran has been an island of stability in a region ablaze with terrorism and car bombs and beheadings and kidnappings and women being sold by Isis and Iranians have watched the whole region unravel around them.”
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Not that you’re glorifying a monster again, but guess you can’t feature some quotes how safe his American victims felt
&mdash; Razor (@hale_razor) <a href="https://twitter.com/hale_razor/status/1214553156044017664?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 7, 2020</a></blockquote>
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&nbsp;

New York

NY Times Runs Piece Lionizing Soleimani, Trump Administration ‘Miscalculated’

This will not be Tehran 1979. Nor Benghazi 2012.
There were, apparently two groups of invaders at the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-iran-behind-attack-on-u-s-embassy-in-baghdad-will-pay">U.S. embassy in Baghdad</a> — hordes of rioting protesters in the streets and well-covered, professional-looking, careful militia members entering the out building. Security forces (and some contractors) used tear gas and stun guns against the demonstrators as the United States protected its embassy compound — <a href="https://www.tribuneledgernews.com/opinion/embassies-and-consulates-are-not-foreign-territory/article_781a9a04-d64a-11e8-9977-334e978bea56.html">sovereign American territory</a> by international convention.
A bit of U.S.-Iranian history is instructive here. When the Iranians overran the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, President Jimmy Carter dubbed the Ayatollah Khomeini “<a href="https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Father-of-the-Iranian-revolution">a holy man</a>” with whom, presumably, one could do business. President Barak Obama was certain, in 2015, that “the only alternative to the JCPOA is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-defense-of-the-iran-deal-comes-with-a-tough-love-message/2015/07/15/a7614b4a-2b04-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html">war with Iran</a>,” presumably meaning that the so-called “Iran nuclear deal” was the way to avoid war and restore Iran to the family of nations.
The result of Carter’s assistance to the ayatollah, and Obama’s lapse in memory — the Iranians had, actually, been in a declared state of war with the United States (and Israel) since 1979 — was to allow the juggernaut of Shiite expansionist theology to ruin Iran, invade Iraq, incubate ISIS, occupy Syria, bring its proxy to power and ruin Lebanon, run the Houthi war in Yemen, undermine Bahrain, attack Saudi Arabia, and spread its tentacles across Africa. And this transpired all while Iran violated the U.N. ban on Iranian arms imports and exports, the U.N. ban on the development of Iranian ballistic missiles, and the P5+1-ratified-by-the-U.N. ban on the development of nuclear weapons technology.
President Donald Trump harbors no such fantasies. He has already shown that <a href="https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2018/03/05/punishing-syrian-chemical-weapons-use/">retaliation</a> for acts of war is in his playbook. But he has also shown that it isn’t necessary to retaliate every time for every single thing — including Iran’s attack on <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/world/middleeast/saudi-iran-attack-oil.html">Saudi oil facilities.</a>
As Iran’s tentacles have <a href="https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2019/09/03/the-shiite-crescent-and-regional-disaster/">spread farther</a>, it has begun to show signs of “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/bryen-irans-imperial-overreach">imperial overreach</a>.” The re-imposition of American sanctions means Iran has fewer and fewer resources to stoke the flames of revolution extraterritorially. Rebellion against the clerical regime actually began in December 2017 — not 2019, when The New York Times began to report on it. Uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq began earlier this year — both decidedly anti-Iran and anti-clerical. And, as Iran watches Russia swallow Syria’s <a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/78261">reconstruction money</a> for its own purposes, the mullahs appear to have decided it is now time for Iran to reassert itself.
Iranian forces are <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/iran-says-it-shot-rioters-after-rights-group-claims-200-n1094651">out in the streets</a> of multiple Iranian cities and the U.S. confirms that the death toll among demonstrators is <a href="https://www.voanews.com/middle-east/voa-news-iran/us-confirms-report-citing-iran-officials-saying-1500-killed-protests">more than 1,500</a>, including hundreds of women. The ayatollahs have cut off the internet, to the extent they can, to prevent Western understanding of the devastation. Iranian-backed Shiite militias have been out in force in Iraq — not only in Baghdad, but in Shiite cities across the south of the county. The <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/11/lebanon-military-forces-must-end-arbitrary-arrests-and-torture-of-protesters/">Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF)</a> plus Hezbollah militias are <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-defund-lebanon-and-do-it-yesterday">trying to get Lebanon</a> under control with some brutal tactics.
It hasn’t been working very well.
A wounded adversary is the most dangerous. The 1944 Battle of the Bulge reflected Hitler’s understanding that the Allies would not be held off forever, so he wanted to make it harder and bloodier to reach V-E Day. Emperor Hirohito’s determination that every Japanese civilian would fight to the death on the mainland — knowing defeat was inevitable — was the impetus for President Truman’s use of the atomic bomb (in part) to short-circuit the casualty count, assessed by analysts to be in the millions.
This is NOT a suggestion that the U.S. storm Iran — or heaven forbid, use an atomic or other weapon against Iranian cities. Not, not, not!
It is, however, a reminder of what we face. Iran has been begging for the sort of American retaliation that it could (A) use to try to bring its population together in opposition to the “Great Satan,” or (B) use to launch Hezbollah to attack Israel, presenting the U.S. with the conundrum that legitimate American retaliation might harm an ally. The death of an American contractor and wounding of several American soldiers last week in Iraq — in a barrage of more than 30 rockets — followed weeks of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-launches-strikes-in-iraq-and-syria-targeting-iran-backed-militia-pentagon-says/2019/12/29/28c12e22-2a64-11ea-be79-83e793dbcaef_story.html">Pentagon warnings</a> that Iranian-backed groups in Iraq were likely to attack U.S. forces there.
American retaliation was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-launches-strikes-in-iraq-and-syria-targeting-iran-backed-militia-pentagon-says/2019/12/29/28c12e22-2a64-11ea-be79-83e793dbcaef_story.html">precise, hitting three sites</a>: Weapons storage facilities and locations the militia used to plan attacks against coalition forces.
What happens next is unclear. At this writing, reinforcements for the U.S. embassy have been called in. But there is a clear understanding in Washington that this is not an uprising of Iraqis against the United States. These are Iranian acts of war. Where American retaliation goes will, no doubt, take that into account.
&nbsp;
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of <a href="https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org">The Jewish Policy Center</a> in Washington, and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.

Outraged Iraqi protesters storm US embassy in Baghdad

BRYEN: The Unyielding Iranian Menace

Iraq

Islamic State (ISIS)

Lebanon

Nuclear Weapons

Radical Islam

Over the weekend, The New York Times ran an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/opinion/sunday/2019-best-year-poverty.html">opinion pie</a>ce by two-time Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Nicholas Kristof whose title must have freaked out leftists bent on remaking the world into their Utopia: “This Has Been the Best Year Ever.”
Kristof began by positing, “If you’re depressed by the state of the world, let me toss out an idea: In the long arc of human history, 2019 has been the best year ever … since modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago, 2019 was probably the year in which children were least likely to die, adults were least likely to be illiterate and people were least likely to suffer excruciating and disfiguring diseases.
The list of reasons for Kristof’s supposition included these tidbits: “Every single day in recent years, another 325,000 people got their first <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS">access to electricity</a>. Each day, more than 200,000 <a href="https://washdata.org/data/household#!/">got piped water</a> for the first time. And some 650,000 <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS">went online</a> for the first time, every single day.”
Kristof noted that in 1950, 27% of all children died by age 15; that has plunged to 4%. In 1981, 42% of the global population subsisted on less than $2 per day; that figure has dropped to less than 10%. The last famine that the World Food Program acknowledged came in 2017 in Sudan and only lasted several months.
Kristof wrote, “Diseases like polio, leprosy, river blindness and elephantiasis are on the decline, and global efforts have turned the tide on AIDS. A half century ago, a majority of the world’s people had always been illiterate; now we are approaching 90 percent adult literacy.”
In 2018, the leftist site Vox <a href="https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health-crime-literacy-good-news">also acknowledged</a> the spectacular progress made around the world, noting, “Extreme poverty has fallen by half since 1990, and life expectancy is increasing in poor countries.” Vox pointed out that between 2000 and 2016, there was a 40% reduction in child labor around the globe.
Vox wrote, “Female and male life expectancy both increased by more than six years between 1990 and 2016.” The U.S. homicide rate in 2016 was lower than any year between 1965 to 2007.
<a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/democratic-doomsayers">The Washington Examiner</a> noted in August: &#8220;The nation’s unemployment rate has been at or below 4% for 16 consecutive months, the lowest in half a century. Wages have been rising steadily for seven years. Inflation remains below 2%. Inflation in health-related prices is below even the core inflation rate. The stock market is reaching record highs each month. The poverty rate is at or near historic lows, as are rates of violent crime &#8230; The grand total of fewer than 17,000 troops in even semi-hot, bullets-flying war zones is quite low, and combat fatalities are averaging fewer per year than they averaged per day for most years in Vietnam.&#8221;
Oxford University economist Max Roser told the New York Times, “If you were given the opportunity to choose the time you were born in, it’d be pretty risky to choose a time in any of the thousands of generations in the past. Almost everyone lived in poverty, hunger was widespread and famines common. We are some of the first people in history who have found ways to make progress against these problems. We have changed the world. How awesome is it to be alive at a time like this?”

Dick Clark&#8217;s New Year&#8217;s Rockin&#8217; Eve With Ryan Seacrest 2019

New York Times: 2019 ‘Best Year Ever’

On Friday, The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/opinion/little-women-movie.html?smtyp=cur&amp;smid=tw-nytimes">published a piece</a> that insisted the reason the new film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel “Little Women” has not garnered huge numbers of nominations for film awards is simple: those sexist males who populate the United States are disinterested.
In the piece, huffily titled. “Men Are Dismissing ‘Little Women.’ What a Surprise,” writer Kristy Eldredge claims the film, which stars “an A-list cast (including Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet and Meryl Streep),” has been “lauded by critics” but “noticeably underrepresented during awards season.”
Eldredge grudgingly admits that the film <a style="font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit;" href="https://twitter.com/boxofficemojo/status/1210242968835088384">placed third</a>, behind the new “Star Wars” and the latest “Jumanji,” on opening day, but then quoted New York Times critic Janet Maslin had recently <a style="font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit;" href="https://twitter.com/JanetMaslin/status/1208612495822401536">tweeted</a> of the “active hostility about ‘Little Women’ from men I know, love and respect.”
Eldredge seems confused; she writes, “In 2019, this attitude seems like history repeating itself.” But she admits that when the book was released in 1868, “it was an instant success — it <a style="font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit;" href="https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/summer/feature/taking-little-women-seriously">was favorably reviewed by many of the top magazines</a> and has <a style="font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit;" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/how-little-women-got-big">never gone out of print</a>.”
She continues with an attempt to make sense of her preceding remarks: “ …but that made it an outlier. At that time American women’s novels were not most critics’ idea of ‘serious’ writing. “
After noting “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ <a href="http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/interpret/exhibits/winship/winship.html">could barely keep up with demand</a> after its 1852 publication, Eldredge claims, “But that widespread appeal was used to slight the genre out of hand and further relegate it to the status of mere entertainment.”
After lauding “how inventive Ms. Gerwig’s adaptation — which takes many interesting creative liberties, such as ditching the linear narrative — is,” Eldredge admits that Maslin later reversed her belief that men were so disinterested, writing, “<a style="font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit;" href="https://twitter.com/janetmaslin/status/1210035131236401153?s=21">Men are loving it</a>. Even ones who said they wouldn’t go.”
Eldrdege concludes, “Yet that this concern even existed to begin with is disheartening. If many men haven’t wanted to give it a chance because they don’t think it’s meant for them, we still have a way to go in considering all kinds of narratives about women to be deserving of thoughtful attention.”
It is possible, of course, that there are multiple reasons for the paucity of award nominations that “Little Women” has accrued; when one looks at the kinds of films that have garnered award nominations over the last few years, there does seem to be an abundance of nominations for stories that are anything but a reflection on a traditional American family, with a traditional two-parent home shown as happy and productive.
By claiming that the blame for the lack of awards success for “Little Women” be laid at the feet of men, Eldredge is simply ignoring the prevailing trend of honors given to films that actually challenge the role of the traditional American family. The leftists who control and pervade awards nomination groups in Hollywood and New York have an agenda to pursue, and there is little room left for a story as traditional and American as “Little Women.”
&nbsp;

&#8220;Little Women&#8221; World Premiere

NYT Op-Ed Moans: New &#8216;Little Women&#8217; Fails To Get Awards Because Men Are Sexist

On Friday, The New York Times, in its inestimable arrogance, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/letter-to-the-editor-historians-critique-the-1619-project-and-we-respond.html">published a response</a> by its editor-in-chief rejecting the claims of five noted historians that the Times’ 1619 project, which is intended to be used to inform the education of schoolchildren across the country and is an attempt to paint the founding of the United States as built on slavery rather than freedom, contained factual errors.
The historians started by writing:
<blockquote>We write as historians to express our strong reservations about important aspects of The 1619 Project. The project is intended to offer a new version of American history in which slavery and white supremacy become the dominant organizing themes. The Times has announced ambitious plans to make the project available to schools in the form of curriculums and related instructional material.</blockquote>
The historians even recycled the leftist talking point of slavery being an “enduring centrality of slavery and racism to our history” before criticizing the “factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” They noted “the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain ‘in order to ensure slavery would continue.’ This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false. Some of the other material in the project is distorted, including the claim that ‘for the most part,’ black Americans have fought their freedom struggles ‘alone.’”
The historians continued, “Still other material is misleading. The project criticizes Abraham Lincoln’s views on racial equality but ignores his conviction that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal equality, for blacks as well as whites, a view he upheld repeatedly against powerful white supremacists who opposed him. The project also ignores Lincoln’s agreement with Frederick Douglass that the Constitution was, in Douglass’s words, “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” Instead, the project asserts that the United States was founded on racial slavery, an argument rejected by a majority of abolitionists and proclaimed by champions of slavery like John C. Calhoun.”
The historians concluded, “We ask that The Times, according to its own high standards of accuracy and truth, issue prominent corrections of all the errors and distortions presented in The 1619 Project. We also ask for the removal of these mistakes from any materials destined for use in schools, as well as in all further publications, including books bearing the name of The New York Times. We ask finally that The Times reveal fully the process through which the historical materials were and continue to be assembled, checked and authenticated.”
Jake Silverstein, the Times’ Editor-in-Chief, responded to the charges by claiming, “While we welcome criticism, we don’t believe that the request for corrections to The 1619 Project is warranted.” He continued by citing the 1619 Project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer at the magazine.
Silverstein protested, “We did not assemble a formal panel for this project. Instead, during the early stages of development, we consulted with numerous scholars of African-American history and related fields, in a group meeting at The Times as well as in a series of individual conversations …  our researchers carefully reviewed all the articles in the issue with subject-area experts.”
He admitted, “We can hardly claim to have studied the Revolutionary period as long as some of the signatories, nor do we presume to tell them anything they don’t already know, but I think it would be useful for readers to hear why we believe that Hannah-Jones’s claim that ‘one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery’ is grounded in the historical record.”
Silverstein spends a great deal of time citing the “landmark 1772 decision of the British high court in Somerset v. Stewart,” which he claims “caused a sensation nonetheless. Numerous colonial newspapers covered it and warned of the tyranny it represented. Multiple historians have pointed out that in part because of the Somerset case, slavery joined other issues in helping to gradually drive apart the patriots and their colonial governments.” He quotes one historian saying, “The black-British alliance decisively pushed planters in these [Southern] states toward independence.” Silverstein’s contention that the British were more advanced on the subject of slavery ignores the fact that not only did the Declaration of Independence pronounce all men were created equal in 1776, eight states, including Massachusetts and Pennsylvania in 1780, Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784, Vermont in 1786, New Hampshire in 1792, New York in 1799, and New Jersey in 1799, passed anti-slavery acts before Great Britain abolished slavery in 1833.
Silverstein then cites the 1775 Dunmore Proclamation, issued in late 1775, which offered freedom to any enslaved person who fled his plantation and joined the British Army, then writes a “member of South Carolina’s delegation to the Continental Congress wrote that this act did more to sever the ties between Britain and its colonies ‘than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.’” Yet Silverstein ignores the obvious point that South Carolina’s delegation that signed the Declaration of Independence would not do so until Thomas Jefferson’s original clause, which ripped King George III over slavery and stated, “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither,” had been stripped from the Declaration.
Silverstein rips Abraham Lincoln, snidely remarking the the public “tends to view Lincoln as a saint,” before noting his evolution on the subject of slavery, then adding, “To be sure, at the end of his life, Lincoln’s racial outlook had evolved considerably in the direction of real equality. Yet the story of abolition becomes more complicated, and more instructive, when readers understand that even the Great Emancipator was ambivalent about full black citizenship.” For a clearer picture of Lincoln’s own opposition to slavery and his own well-thought out plan to eradicate, Silverstein might want to read Harry Jaffa’s immortal book, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Crisis-House-Divided-Phoenix-Paperback/dp/0226391124/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1829WTGUHOD1E&amp;keywords=crisis+of+the+house+divided&amp;qid=1577105745&amp;sprefix=Crisis+of+the+House+%2Caps%2C133&amp;sr=8-2">Crisis of the House Divided</a>.”
Silverstein writes, “And while our democratic system has certainly led to many progressive advances for the rights of minority groups over the past two centuries, these advances, as Hannah-Jones argues in her essay, have almost always come as a result of political and social struggles in which African-Americans have generally taken the lead, not as a working-out of the immanent logic of the Constitution.”
Silverstein may not know that the famed abolitionist Lysander Spooner, who was white, <a href="https://www.crf-usa.org/images/pdf/Abolitionists-and-the-Constitution.pdf">wrote in his 1845 book</a>, &#8220;The Unconstitutionality of Slavery,&#8221; that the Preamble of the Constitution supported liberty for all slaves, arguing that it “does not declare that ‘we, the white people,’ or ‘we, the free people,’ or ‘we, a part of the people’ — but that ‘we, the people’ — that is, we the whole people — of the United States, ‘do ordain and establish this Constitution.’” He continued, “Because the whole people of the country were not allowed to vote on the ratification of the Constitution, it does not follow that they were not made citizens under it; for women and children did not vote on its adoption; yet they are made citizens by it . . . and the state governments cannot enslave them.”
But Silverstein must be aware that hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers, predominantly white, were killed or wounded in the Civil War in order to eradicate the evil of slavery.. For years, it was assumed that at least a massive total of more than 360,000 Union soldiers died; in 2011., historian J. David Hacker <a href="https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/recounting-the-dead/#more-105317">wrote</a>in Silverstein’s own New York Times that the number was likely higher than that.

Historians Tell NYT: Your 1619 Project Is Wrong. NYT: Take A Hike.

In an extensive report that is part of its &#8220;Privacy Project,&#8221; The New York Times revealed Thursday that it has gained access to cell phone tracking data for millions of Americans and was able to rather easily track the movements of regular Americans as well as high-profile and powerful figures, including President Trump himself — details of whose actions the Times published in a follow-up report.
In its initial report, titled &#8220;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html">Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy</a>,&#8221; the Times warns that if you were able to see the data which they obtained from a single private cell phone app company, &#8220;you might never use your phone the same way again.&#8221;
&#8220;The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so,&#8221; the Times explains. &#8220;The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers.&#8221;
The single data file the Times obtained is &#8220;by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists,&#8221; the Times claims, containing &#8220;more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.&#8221; That data covers a period of several months in 2016 and 2017, the Times notes.
Times researchers spent &#8220;months&#8221; analyzing the data, and in that time tracked cell phone activity involving some very famous names. &#8220;One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the Playboy Mansion, some overnight,&#8221; the Times reports. &#8220;Without much effort we spotted visitors to the estates of Johnny Depp, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, connecting the devices’ owners to the residences indefinitely.&#8221; They also took some time to track the movements of participants at both pro-Trump and anti-Trump rallies.
Using the data — which the Times notes can be legally obtained by companies, who defend collecting the data because it is &#8220;anonymous&#8221; and app users give their &#8220;consent&#8221; to being tracked — the Times says they spent most of their attention &#8220;identifying people in positions of power&#8221;:
<blockquote>
With the help of publicly available information, like home addresses, we easily identified and then tracked scores of notables. We followed military officials with security clearances as they drove home at night. We tracked law enforcement officers as they took their kids to school. We watched high-powered lawyers (and their guests) as they traveled from private jets to vacation properties. We did not name any of the people we identified without their permission.
The data set is large enough that it surely points to scandal and crime but our purpose wasn’t to dig up dirt. We wanted to document the risk of underregulated surveillance. Watching dots move across a map sometimes revealed hints of faltering marriages, evidence of drug addiction, records of visits to psychological facilities.
</blockquote>
In a follow-up report titled &#8220;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/opinion/location-data-national-security.html">How to Track President Trump</a>,&#8221; the Times reveals that it easily followed the movements of Trump — even providing a map of those movements — by simply identifying a cell phone owned by a person in his entourage:
<blockquote>
The device&#8217;s owner was easy to trace, revealing the outline of the person’s work and life. The same phone pinged a dozen times at the nearby Secret Service field office and events with elected officials. From computer screens more than 1,000 miles away, we could watch the person travel from exclusive areas at Palm Beach International Airport to Mar-a-Lago.
The meticulous movements — down to a few feet — of the president’s entourage were recorded by a smartphone we believe belonged to a Secret Service agent, whose home was also clearly identifiable in the data. Connecting the home to public deeds revealed the person’s name, along with the name of the person’s spouse, exposing even more details about both families. We could also see other stops this person made, apparently more connected with his private life than his public duties. The Secret Service declined to comment on our findings or describe its policies regarding location data.
</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html">Read the initial report here</a>.

NYT: We Spied On Trump And Other Powerful People With Phone Tracking Data

Succinctly put, President Trump last week made one of the most positive moves to combat anti-Semitism ever seen from a world leader. But the media, always anxious to paint the president’s every action as wrong and even anti-Semitic, are acting true to form. In this case, media outlets such as The New York Times are doing tremendous harm to Jewish students on campus — and to simple fairness, to boot.
The president&#8217;s executive order should be uncontroversial. It simply declares that the administration will treat anti-Semitic hatred similarly to discrimination against other minority groups under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. It states that “individuals who face discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin do not lose protection under Title VI for also being a member of a group that shares common religious practices.”
Instead, the Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/us/politics/trump-antisemitism-executive-order.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/us/politics/trump-antisemitism-executive-order.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1576640644853000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEwvLMe8EnZgRBrkwEUYUDBc3GvZQ">led</a> with the false notion that the executive order “will effectively interpret Judaism as a race or nationality,” rather than solely as a religion. As <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/menken-secular-jews-claim-they-dont-exist-to-spite-the-president" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dailywire.com/news/menken-secular-jews-claim-they-dont-exist-to-spite-the-president&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1576640644853000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEf7vEbO6-jBEVVyyBQKDjMY1OWDw">I wrote previously</a>, left-wing Jews immediately deemed this a “re-classification” of Jews that would lead back to concentration camps. Others claimed this serviced the trope of Jewish “disloyalty,” as if being Jewish would make someone less American.
The executive order was not, as critics wailed, “anti-Semitism of the highest order.” This reaction, however, was insanity of the highest order.
The basis for Jews being considered a distinct people is not the Nazis, but the Bible. The Book of Exodus teaches that God took the Jews from Egypt to be His nation, and references to the Nation of Israel abound from there onwards.
But this is all a moot point, because the executive order contains no such reference to redefining Jews or Judaism as a national origin. It merely borrows language from the bipartisan Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2019, which had stalled in Congress. This is why so many Jewish members of Congress, such as Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and Reps. Max Rose (D-NY) and Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), approved of this order. By Wednesday, even left-wing sources such as Vox’s <a href="https://twitter.com/imillhiser/status/1204792506040422406" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/imillhiser/status/1204792506040422406&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1576640644854000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHbyRww0Mc2uNU9HtLAfLFaR6D-Xg">Ian Millhiser</a> and Israel’s Haaretzwere <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-trump-to-sign-executive-order-on-anti-semitism-in-college-campuses-treating-jeiwshn-1.8255875" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-trump-to-sign-executive-order-on-anti-semitism-in-college-campuses-treating-jeiwshn-1.8255875&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1576640644854000&amp;usg=AFQjCNG7WbQVIK05BOZyJSUtIbMhTfeImA">calling</a> out the Times for its rush to judgment
But the Times was unimpressed. It returned days later with a new reason why students should “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/us/trump-anti-semitism-order-college-students.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/us/trump-anti-semitism-order-college-students.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1576640644854000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHluHUehq6KhvShpVGmoYOuF-NavQ">fear</a>” Trump’s executive order: It might squelch free speech and thus “backfire for Jews.” 
This executive order is as timely and necessary as it should be uncontroversial. On Tuesday, two murderers with links to the black nationalist and anti-Semitic “Hebrew Israelite” cult opened fire at a kosher market in Jersey City, New Jersey, killing four — <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/nyregion/jersey-city-shooting.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/nyregion/jersey-city-shooting.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1576640644854000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEmaFyxybO1dXb-g3lqd0FssRuR3A">including</a> a veteran police officer and a 24-year-old rabbinical student. 
To be sure, hate speech is protected like any other form of speech, and no executive order can stifle it. Nonetheless, a student organization should not receive university funding to create an unsafe environment for others.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), true to form, rushed to attribute the Jersey City killings to “white supremacy” and deleted her erroneous tweet <a href="https://unitedwithisrael.org/tlaib-blames-white-supremacy-for-nj-shooting-deletes-tweet/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://unitedwithisrael.org/tlaib-blames-white-supremacy-for-nj-shooting-deletes-tweet/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1576640644854000&amp;usg=AFQjCNE3bbi52gl0AppzsOY_r1HYjFuI6A">a little too late</a>. She is anxious that Americans perceive Jew-hatred as a neo-Nazi trait, in order to cover for its most salient and pernicious current form: The storm of anti-Semitic rhetoric within our colleges and universities posing as mere “criticism of Israel.”
The executive order directs federal agencies to consider the definition of anti-Semitism provided by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) when identifying evidence of discrimination. Contrary to the Times’ quote from a Jewish leftist, the IHRA definition specifically states that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country” is not anti-Semitic. But modern examples of anti-Semitism include “justifying the killing or harming of Jews,” “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination,” and calling the state of Israel “a racist endeavor.”
And that, of course, is the problem: The so-called “pro-Palestinian” movement does all three of these on an ongoing basis. Its map of “Palestine” is not that of the British, the Ottoman Turks, or even the Romans, but rather that of modern-day Israel. It calls Israel racist and advocates for its destruction — all while attempting to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/germany-takes-stronger-stance-against-anti-josh-hammer">replicate the Nazi boycott</a> under the name “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.” The movement in general, and the Students for Justice in Palestine on-campus organization in particular, regularly holds events honoring murderers of Jews.
It is no surprise, then, that these bigots are protesting the executive order. Indeed, under the new rules, anti-Semitic hatred cloaked as “anti-Israel advocacy” will be no more acceptable than preaching white supremacy. That is how it should be. Anyone has the right to voice hatred and bigotry — but not with taxpayer funding.
Unlike leftist Jews with little real attachment to Judaism, the Orthodox Jewish community firmly adheres to our ancient faith — and Orthodox Jews are much more likely to experience anti-Semitism. A recent survey by Ami Magazine found that 92.5% of Orthodox Jews believed that President Trump and the Republicans were more dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, compared to 1.5% who gave the nod to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the Democrats. That is a stark contrast.
After this executive order, it is likely that the president’s support will trend even higher. History has taught us that anti-Semitism, like all forms of racism, must be nipped in the bud before it metastasizes into a societal epidemic. President Trump is working to stop the irrational hatred of Jews from spreading, but the media are too consumed with their own irrational hatred of the president to care.
&nbsp;
Rabbi Yaakov Menken is the Managing Director of the <a href="https://coalitionforjewishvalues.org">Coalition for Jewish Values</a>, the largest Rabbinic public policy organization in America.

New York Times Headquarters in New York City

MENKEN: When Fake News Harms the Jews

Anti-Semitism

Black Nationalism

Crime

Fake News

Judaism

Media

Media Bias

Students for Justice in Palestine

Trump Administration

On Thursday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about a New York Times column that the Christmas classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is full of “queer code.” Video and partial transcript below: 
Apparently, The New York Times editorial page, when it&#8217;s not defending anti-Semitism coming from particular sources, is also a place for people to spill their feelings about their childhood struggles with sexuality. 
It’s amazing, half of editorial pages on the left-wing are now dedicated to people telling their personal stories about coming to grips with their own orientation, and it&#8217;s like, why? Okay, so what? Here&#8217;s the example. 
Jennifer Finney Boylan, who is a transgender woman, meaning a man who believes that he’s a woman, has a piece in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/opinion/rudolph-christmas-queer.html">The New York Times</a> called “Rudolph, The Queerest Holiday Special.”
<blockquote>It gets better for misfit reindeer, too.</blockquote>
So now we are to believe that a holiday special constructed in 1964 is actually a secret decoded message about being gay in America. So we have a long piece about why Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer is an inspiration to gay kids the world over. 
<blockquote>I&#8217;m sure that conservatives who love this old holiday chestnut will be infuriated by this suggestion.</blockquote>
Not infuriated, just puzzled why you would think that a holiday special constructed in 1964 is about gay rights — and also, why I would care how you interpret Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. This is like a trite entry from your journal, diary, in your &#8220;intersectional theory&#8221; class. But Jennifer Finney Boylan says:
<blockquote>But if you watch the show without understanding that it&#8217;s central conflict is the way people who are different are constantly shunned and humiliated — well, I don&#8217;t know what show you&#8217;re watching. </blockquote>
Well, what if that&#8217;s just a general message that applies to anyone who&#8217;s ever been bullied? I was viciously bullied in high school — that had nothing to do sexual orientation. A lot of kids are, but apparently everything is now about sexual orientation. 
<blockquote>Conservatives seem to miss the point of a lot of things having to do with Christmas, actually. Is it really possible that anyone can watch (or read) Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” without understanding its fundamental critique of capitalism?</blockquote>
“A Christmas Carol” is not really about capitalism so much as it is about the idea that capitalism doesn&#8217;t solve the problem of the need for charity. Again, this goes back to the fundamental point of the show, which is that free markets and liberty are wondrous, wondrous things. But, you also have to have an underlying social fabric in order to promote those things. 
<blockquote>As for “Rudolph,” the whole movie feels as LGBTQ-friendly to me as any episode of “Queer Eye” or “Steven Universe” or “The L Word.” </blockquote>
Except for the fact that Rudolph doesn&#8217;t, you know, like have sex with any of the other male reindeer. So aside from that, and the fact that it&#8217;s a children&#8217;s special — I am particularly tired of the hijacking of children&#8217;s literature &#8230; in order promote political viewpoints on sexual matters. It&#8217;s a piece of children&#8217;s literature, cut it out. 
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The Left likes to play this game a lot when it comes to TV. So what they will do is, for example, some members of the LGBTQ community will start saying that &#8220;SpongeBob Square Pants&#8221; is like a gay metaphor, and then people on the Right will be like, “What are you talking, that&#8217;s ridiculous. Like, stop it.” [Then the Left will say] “Aha, you&#8217;re upset by a children&#8217;s cartoons.&#8221; Like, well, no, you&#8217;re the ones who are hijacking a children&#8217;s cartoon to make a point about your own sexual orientation. 
I remember this was a big controversy in the early &#8217;90s when some members of the LGBTQ community were suggesting that some of the Teletubbies were gay. And so Jerry Falwell made a comment [paraphrasing], “Well, the Teletubbies aren&#8217;t gay and it&#8217;s silly to try and hijack children&#8217;s characters” and the Left was like, “Aha, trolled you.” 
How about this — how about you just leave the children&#8217;s literature alone, especially because you have a whole wing of children&#8217;s literature, we&#8217;ve talked about it on the show, that is specifically designed to promote these sexualized viewpoints for children. Can’t you just leave Rudolph alone? He&#8217;s got enough problems than you putting your your own issues with sexual orientation on his fragile flying back.
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ben-shapiro-show/id1047335260">Listen to full episodes of “The Ben Shapiro Show” on iTunes. 
</a><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-ben-shapiro-show">Watch “The Ben Shapiro Show” on-demand!</a>

Reindeer

SHAPIRO: NYT Columnist: Rudolph Is The ‘Queerest Holiday Special’

Children

Christmas

LGBT

Political Correctness

Sexuality

The White House is calling out headline bias at the New York Times after the outlet published multiple slanted reports relating to the impeachment hearings on Wednesday.
Hogan Gidley, deputy assistant to the president and principal deputy press secretary, posted a tweet Wednesday afternoon with a screenshot of multiple Times headlines with annotations pointing out various points of bias in allegedly straight news reporting.
“Media bias is real, it’s wrong, it’s dangerous, and it must be called out and exposed. Here are four <a href="https://twitter.com/nytimes">@nytimes</a> headlines and six clear, egregious examples of bias,” Gidley tweeted. “Can you spot more? (Keep in mind, these are JUST the headlines&#8230;we didn’t even post all examples IN the articles.)”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Media bias is real, it’s wrong, it’s dangerous, and it must be called out and exposed. Here are four <a href="https://twitter.com/nytimes?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@nytimes</a> headlines and six clear, egregious examples of bias. Can you spot more? (Keep in mind, these are JUST the headlines&#8230;we didn’t even post all examples IN the articles.) <a href="https://t.co/Bkwy0haLBc">pic.twitter.com/Bkwy0haLBc</a>
— Hogan Gidley (@hogangidley45) <a href="https://twitter.com/hogangidley45/status/1202323558266855424?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 4, 2019</a></blockquote>
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The examples included relate to how the Times referred to law professor Jonathan Turley, who was called by Republicans to testify at the Judiciary Committee’s first impeachment hearing, and the three other professors, who were called by Democrats.
The main headline from the Times read: “Trump Committed Impeachable Offenses, 3 Scholars Tell Judiciary Committee.” Gidley noted that the Times did not say the three scholars who supported impeachment were all called by Democrats, but did note that the lone voice against the impeachment proceedings was called by Republicans.
The second headline from the Times read: “But Expert Invited by Republicans Says Case Is ‘Slipshod.’” As Gidley explained, the Times not only made this “GOP perspective” headline smaller than the “anti-Trump headline,” it also put in quotes the “anti-impeachment perspective” while stating the “pro-impeachment perspective” authoritatively without quotes.
Further, the Times twice noted that the anti-impeachment scholar was invited by Democrats while never mentioning the three pro-impeachment scholars were invited by Democrats.
Another headline read: “The Republicans’ lone expert witness, the law professor Jonathan Turley, has represented whistle-blowers and terrorism suspects.” Gidley claimed this headline “implies GOP could only find one but hides that Dems prevented GOP from inviting more” (emphasis original). He also suggests the Times “cherry-picked experience highlights” to make Turley look bad and a Democrat-called scholar, Pamela Karlan, look good. To be fair, representing whistle-blowers is probably not seen as a bad thing, but many might think differently about terrorism suspects. The Times did not include information for Karlan that the paper would view as a negative.
The headline about Karlan read: “Pamela Karlan, also a law professor, counts a landmark gay rights case as among her litigation experience.” Now, perhaps the Times felt some readers would view that as a negative, but it was clearly not worded in a way that would allow readers to make that decision. The Times called the case a “landmark gay rights case,” emphasizing that it was important and about rights, something everyone should support. This is a common tactic the media uses in allegedly unbiased news articles – they add “rights” to the end of the cause they support, such as gay rights or abortion rights, to signal which side people should be on.
The reaction to Gidley’s tweet was predictably mixed, with right-leaning accounts asking for the White House to put out more diagrams such as this one, and left-leaning accounts demanding Gidley do the same for Fox News’ bias, ignoring the fact that Democrats have an entire apparatus, Media Matters for America, that does just that and is declared a serious, non-partisan watchdog group by left-wing media outlets.

White House Highlights NYT Bias In Coverage Of Impeachment Hearings

On Tuesday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about a New York Times article that raises the issue of “self-coupling.” Video and partial transcript below: 
This is why the culture wars matter so much — I present to you, as Exhibit A in the pitch that the Left is making, this article from yesterday in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/opinion/emma-watson-self-partnering-marriage.html">The New York Times</a> by an associate professor of religious studies at Skidmore College, Bradley Onishi, [who asks], “Could I be my own soulmate?”
Are you your own soulmate? The article describes Emma Watson, the actress, and Lizzo, the rapper and flautist, who are both saying that they are their own One — that they are self-coupling. This religion, Professor Onishi, he says: 
<blockquote>For most people, the idea of self-coupling may be jarring, but a closer look might reveal it to be more of an end point of a trend. Marriage rates have been declining steadily since the 1970s. Many of us are &#8220;dating&#8221; more, but somehow going on fewer dates. Sex is safer and less burdened with shame than in the past, and seemingly more available, but we’re having less of it than we were a generation ago. And despite all these mixed signals, most of us are still looking for The One&#8230;
According to Stephanie Coontz, the author of the 2005 book “Marriage: A History,” finding The One used to be about completion. In the 19th century, the rise of the market economy divided the sexes — men into the world of bread-winning work and women into that of unpaid domestic labor. “When these two spheres were brought together in marriage,” Ms. Coontz wrote, “they produced a perfect well-rounded hole.”</blockquote>
That&#8217;s ignoring the several thousand years before that, where marriage was actually a pretty congenial relationship. 
<blockquote>This approach to partnership, wherein two members of opposite sex complete each other, was essentially religious in origin — “complementarianism,” for the theologians out there — a well-known example being the biblical adage that “two shall become one.” It also recalls Plato&#8217;s “Symposium” — one of the earliest purveyors of the soul mate myth — where the comic poet Aristophanes explains that humans were once united in pairs, but were then split into unhappy halves by Zeus&#8230;
The ideal of completion hearkens to a time when women were economically and socially dependent on men and marriage was reserved for heterosexual couples. Today, instead of a life-defining relationship, many of us now see partnership as one part of a puzzle that includes a career (which often demands geographic mobility), family, a social life, personal wellness, volunteer work and creative or recreational outlets. A relationship is not the foundation of selfhood, but only a piece.</blockquote>
The redefinition of marriage into one choice among many, just something that you do if you feel like it — the problem is that that may work for a very, I would say very, very limited coterie of people who read The New York Times. It does not work broadly across the United States. But our cultural institutions are all nationalized: Hollywood is nationalized, Netflix is nationalized, The New York Times is nationalized, Facebook is nationalized, and that means that the social bleed over effect, the social trickle-down effect of leftist social policy, which, by the way, is not even engaged in by people at the upper echelons in places like New York and California. 
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One of the peculiar things you&#8217;ll find about Hollywood is the same people who are routinely preaching the virtues of bleeding-edge social leftism — get rid of marriage, have any relationship you want, open marriages, polyamory — those same people tend to get married at higher rates than a lot of people who are actually not living in those areas. They tend not to have kids out of wedlock, particularly a lot, and if they do have kids out of wedlock, they can afford it because they&#8217;re very wealthy. Those social messages do not apply equally to everyone.
In other words, just as with every other policy in human life, not all policies affect everybody equally. The fact that folks on the Left seem to think that policies undertaken by liberal elites over at The New York Times or in Hollywood, that those policies affect people in downtrodden economic areas the same way that they do in upper/elite establishments that discarded religion as a social fabric decades ago, just demonstrates a tremendous level of ignorance. Trying to re-shift these definitions of fundamental institutions — that is indeed creating a phenomenon in which the United States is dividing. These [three] phenomena — income inequality rising, the changes in the economy, and the bleed over of social liberalism — this is leading to a toxic brew. 
Now, there are people on the Right and the Left who think that the way to fix this is to fix the economic side. The way we&#8217;re gonna do this with redistributionism! You&#8217;ve got Andrew Yang proposing universal basic income on the Democratic side, or you have people like — as I&#8217;ve said — Tucker Carlson talking about regulating out of existence self-driving cars, stopping economic progress, limiting trade, bringing back all these jobs to manufacturing areas, as though that&#8217;s ever really going to happen. I have serious doubts about that, considering the technology has basically put a lot of these jobs out of commission.
Then, there is the stuff that is actually in the control of the people who are living today, and that is making the next right decision. The fact is that there are certain factors in your life that are fundamentally going to guarantee [that you] have a better shot at life — finishing high school, not having kids out of wedlock, getting married. These things actually change your life in ways for the better, and the fact that our culture is so focused in on a sort of Marxist materialism, in which if we solve your economic circumstance, that this will solve all of your other problems — this is not right. 
Solving the problem of making right and moral decisions that better your life — that is how your life gets better. That means taking seriously the fundamental social institutions that [have] been broken by the Left since the 1960s, focusing on restoring those — because those are things you can do. Not things that you have to wait for some government savior to do — and, by the way, those government saviors ain’t showing up.
Income inequality is breaking out in major blue cities, where they&#8217;ve gotten rid of the social institutions and where the ladder to success doesn&#8217;t exist even for the underclass in those cities themselves. Forget about red areas versus blue areas — in the cities themselves. You need a restoration of personal responsibility in order to lead to a restoration of the ladder to success that does exist for people who make the best possible decision.
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ben-shapiro-show/id1047335260">Listen to full episodes of “The Ben Shapiro Show” on iTunes.</a> 
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2018 Vanity Fair Oscar Party Hosted By Radhika Jones &#8211; Arrivals

SHAPIRO: ‘Self-Coupling’: The Newest Frontier On The Culture War

Millennials

In a series of recent interviews, prominent historians criticized The New York Times&#8217; &#8220;1619 Project&#8221; — which describes itself as seeking &#8220;to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are&#8221; — as an &#8220;unbalanced, one-sided account,&#8221; which lacks important &#8220;context and perspective&#8221; on the complexity of slavery&#8217;s role in America&#8217;s history.
&#8220;In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists,&#8221; the &#8220;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html">1619 Project</a>&#8221; splash page reads. &#8220;No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. In the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.&#8221;
Recent interviews with three highly regarded historians published by the <a href="https://www.wsws.org">World Socialist Web Site</a>, which presents analysis and news from a socialist perspective, focus on the degree of historical accuracy and perspective fueling key claims made in the Times&#8217; highly touted series and found it glaringly &#8220;biased&#8221; and at times even &#8220;anti-historical&#8221; (h/t HotAir&#8217;s <a href="https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2019/11/30/prominent-historians-criticize-ny-times-1619-project/">John Sexton</a>).
For the first of the interview series, published Nov. 14, WSWS spoke with Princeton University&#8217;s <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/14/mcph-n14.html">James McPherson</a>, &#8220;the author of dozens of books and articles, including thePulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, widely regarded as the authoritative account of the Civil War.&#8221; Asked about his initial reaction to the &#8220;1619 Project,&#8221; McPherson delivered a rather scathing rebuke of its &#8220;biased&#8221; and &#8220;narrow view&#8221; of the country&#8217;s history:
<blockquote>McPherson: Well, I didn’t know anything about it until I got my Sunday paper, with the magazine section entirely devoted to the 1619 Project. Because this is a subject I’ve long been interested in I sat down and started to read some of the essays. I’d say that, almost from the outset, I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly, obviously, not an exclusively American institution, but existed throughout history. And slavery in the United States was only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many centuries. And in the United States, too, there was not only slavery but also an antislavery movement. So I thought the account, which emphasized American racism — which is obviously a major part of the history, no question about it — but it focused so narrowly on that part of the story that it left most of the history out. So I read a few of the essays and skimmed the rest, but didn’t pursue much more about it because it seemed to me that I wasn’t learning very much new. And I was a little bit unhappy with the idea that people who did not have a good knowledge of the subject would be influenced by this and would then have a biased or narrow view.</blockquote>
In an interview published four days later, City University of New York&#8217;s <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/18/oake-n18.html">James Oakes</a> — author of two Lincoln Prize-winning books, &#8220;The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of anti-slavery Politics&#8221; (2007) and &#8220;Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865&#8221; (2012), as well as &#8220;The Scorpion’s Sting: anti-slavery and the Coming of the Civil War&#8221; (2014) — likewise expressed his dismay at the degree of bias and lack of context permeating the &#8220;1619 Project.&#8221;
Asked to discuss the claim that &#8220;the horrors of contemporary American capitalism are rooted in slavery,&#8221; as suggested by Matthew Desmond in a piece for the &#8220;1619 Project,&#8221; Oakes noted that the attempt to connect chattel slavery and capitalism has received &#8220;some very strong criticism from scholars in the field&#8221; and mocked the overly simplistic thinking that guides Desmond&#8217;s argument:
<blockquote>Oakes: There’s been a kind of standard bourgeois-liberal way of arguing that goes all the way back to the 18th century, that whenever you are talking about some form of oppression, or whenever you yourself are oppressed, you instinctively go to the analogy of slavery. At least since the 18th century in our society, in western liberal societies, slavery has been the gold standard of oppression. The colonists, in the imperial crisis, complained that they were the “slaves” of Great Britain. It was the same thing all the way through the 19th century. The leaders of the first women’s movement would sometimes liken the position of a woman in a northern household to that of a slave on a southern plantation. The first workers’ movement, coming out of the culture of republican independence, attacked wage labor as wage slavery. Civil War soldiers would complain that they were treated like slaves. Desmond, following the lead of the scholars he’s citing, basically relies on the same analogy. They’re saying, “look at the ways capitalism is just like slavery, and that’s because capitalism came from slavery.” But there’s no actual critique of capitalism in any of it. They’re saying, “Oh my God! Slavery looks just like capitalism. They had highly developed management techniques just like we do!” Slaveholders were greedy, just like capitalists. Slavery was violent, just like our society is. So there’s a critique of violence and a critique of greed. But greed and violence are everywhere in human history, not just in capitalist societies. So there’s no actual critique of capitalism as such, at least as I read it.</blockquote>
In a third &#8220;1619&#8221; interview, published Nov. 28, WSWS spoke with Brown University&#8217;s <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/28/wood-n28.html">Gordon Wood</a> — author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book &#8220;The Radicalism of the American Revolution&#8221; and &#8220;Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815&#8221; — who likewise expressed disappointment, and even disbelief, at the reductive nature of the Times&#8217; series:
<blockquote>Wood: I was surprised when I opened my Sunday New York Times in August and found the magazine containing the project. I had no warning about this. I read the first essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which alleges that the Revolution occurred primarily because of the Americans’ desire to save their slaves. She claims the British were on the warpath against the slave trade and slavery and that rebellion was the only hope for American slavery. This made the American Revolution out to be like the Civil War, where the South seceded to save and protect slavery, and that the Americans 70 years earlier revolted to protect their institution of slavery. I just couldn’t believe this. I was surprised, as many other people were, by the scope of this thing, especially since it’s going to become the basis for high school education and has the authority of the New York Times behind it, and yet it is so wrong in so many ways.</blockquote>
Asked to expand on his comment about not being approached about the project, Wood said, &#8220;None of the leading scholars of the whole period from the Revolution to the Civil War, as far I know, have been consulted. &#8221; Asked for his perspective on the relationship between the American Revolution and the institution of slavery, Wood replied:
<blockquote>Wood: One of the things that I have emphasized in my writing is how many southerners and northerners in 1776 thought slavery was on its last legs and that it would naturally die away. You can find quotation after quotation from people seriously thinking that slavery was going to wither away in several decades. Now we know they couldn’t have been more wrong. But they lived with illusions and were so wrong about so many things. We may be living with illusions too. One of the big lessons of history is to realize how the past doesn’t know its future. We know how the story turned out, and we somehow assume they should know what we know, but they don’t, of course. They don’t know their future any more than we know our future, and so many of them thought that slavery would die away, and at first there was considerable evidence that that was indeed the case. At the time of the Revolution, the Virginians had more slaves than they knew what to do with, so they were eager to end the international slave trade. But the Georgians and the South Carolinians weren’t ready to do that yet. That was one of the compromises that came out of the Constitutional Convention. The Deep South was given 20 years to import more slaves, but most Americans were confident that the despicable transatlantic slave trade was definitely going to end in 1808.</blockquote>
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/livestream-ben-shapiro-america-wasnt-built-on-slavery">WATCH: Ben Shapiro Dismantles The Left’s Claim That America Was Built On Slavery</a>

New York Times HQ

Historians Shred NYT ‘1619 Project’ That Claims Slavery Defines America

American History

Racism

Slavery

Ahead of the release of the highly anticipated report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz due out on Dec. 9, The New York Times has published a series of reports based on sources &#8220;familiar with a draft&#8221; indicating that Horowitz&#8217;s findings will largely disappoint Trump and his supporters.
Last week, the Times reported that its sources say the draft of the report will criticize FBI leaders for how they handled the Trump-Russia investigation and detail a series of &#8220;errors and omissions&#8221; in the obtaining of the wiretap for Trump associate Carter Page, but will ultimately say that the FBI did not take &#8220;politically motivated&#8221; action against Trump.
Now, in a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/27/us/politics/fbi-trump-campaign-inspector-general.html?smtyp=cur&amp;smid=tw-nytimes">report</a> published Wednesday, the Times says that Horowitz&#8217;s final report is expected to conclude that the FBI &#8220;never tried to place undercover agents or informants inside the Trump campaign.&#8221; The claim has raised questions about a  Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/politics/fbi-government-investigator-trump.html">report</a> from May on how the &#8220;F.B.I. sent [an] investigator posing as [his] assistant to meet with [a] Trump aide in 2016.&#8221;
&#8220;The Justice Department’s inspector general found no evidence that the F.B.I. attempted to place undercover agents or informants inside Donald J. Trump’s campaign in 2016 as agents investigated whether his associates conspired with Russia&#8217;s election interference operation,&#8221; the Times reported Wednesday, citing sources familiar with a draft of the report, which the Times has not seen.
The finding &#8220;contradicts some of the most inflammatory accusations hurled by Mr. Trump and his supporters, who alleged not only that F.B.I. officials spied on the Trump campaign but also at one point that former President Barack Obama had ordered Mr. Trump’s phones tapped,&#8221; the Times adds.
While the Times stresses that the report is expected to find that the FBI did not try to place informants &#8220;inside&#8221; the Trump campaign, the paper has reported in the past about the FBI&#8217;s attempts to get information out of people connected to the Trump campaign, most famously through an investigator disguised as an assistant to academic Stefan Halper in order to try to get information out of Trump aide George Papadopoulos. The Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/politics/fbi-government-investigator-trump.html">reported</a> in May:
<blockquote>
The conversation at a London bar in September 2016 took a strange turn when the woman sitting across from George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, asked a direct question: Was the Trump campaign working with Russia?
The woman had set up the meeting to discuss foreign policy issues. But she was actually a government investigator posing as a research assistant, according to people familiar with the operation. The F.B.I. sent her to London as part of the counterintelligence inquiry opened that summer to better understand the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.
The American government’s affiliation with the woman, who said her name was Azra Turk, is one previously unreported detail of an operation that has become a political flash point in the face of accusations by President Trump and his allies that American law enforcement and intelligence officials spied on his campaign to undermine his electoral chances. Last year, he called it Spygate.
The decision to use Ms. Turk in the operation aimed at a presidential campaign official shows the level of alarm inside the F.B.I. during a frantic period when the bureau was trying to determine the scope of Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 election, but could also give ammunition to Mr. Trump and his allies for their spying claims.
</blockquote>
The Times addresses this incident in its new report by claiming that while Halper and the undercover agent were trying to get information out of Trump associates, they were not &#8220;seeking inside campaign information or a role in the organization.&#8221;
Horowitz &#8220;found no evidence that Mr. Halper tried to infiltrate the Trump campaign itself, the people familiar with the draft report said, such as by seeking inside campaign information or a role in the organization,&#8221; the Times reports. &#8220;The F.B.I. also never directed him to do so, former officials said. Instead, Mr. Halper focused on eliciting information from Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos about their ties to Russia.&#8221;
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In its <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/us/politics/russia-investigation-inspector-general-report.html">report</a> last week, the Times announced that the IG report will &#8220;sharply criticize lower-level F.B.I. officials as well as bureau leaders involved in the early stages of the Trump-Russia investigation,&#8221; but ultimately will &#8220;absolve the top ranks of abusing their powers out of bias against President Trump.&#8221;
The report &#8220;portrays the overall effort to seek the wiretap order and its renewals as sloppy and unprofessional,&#8221; the Times explains, and it &#8220;will also sharply criticize as careless one of the F.B.I. case agents in New York handling the matter and say that the bureau and the Justice Department displayed poor coordination during the investigation.&#8221;
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-heres-the-real-reason-i-held-back-money-from-ukraine-blocked-impeachment-testimony">Trump: Here’s The Real Reason I Held Back Money From Ukraine, Blocked Impeachment Testimony</a>
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