“Kyle Rittenhouse, Project Veritas, and the Inability to Think in Terms of Principles
Those whose worldview is bereft of universally applied principles, and based solely on tribal allegiances, assume everyone else is plagued by this very deficiency.”
“The FBI has executed a string of search warrants targeting the homes and cell phones of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and several others associated with that organization. It should require no effort to understand why it is a cause for concern that a Democratic administration is using the FBI to aggressively target an organization devoted to obtaining and reporting incriminating information about Democratic Party leaders and their liberal allies.
That does not mean the FBI investigation is inherently improper. Journalists are no more entitled than any other citizen to commit crimes. If there is reasonable cause to believe O’Keefe and his associates committed federal crimes, then an FBI investigation is warranted as it is for any other case. But there has been no evidence presented that O’Keefe or Project Veritas employees have done anything of the sort, nor any explanation provided to justify these invasive searches. That we should want and need that is self-evident: if the Trump-era FBI had executed search warrants inside the newsrooms of The New York Times and NBC News, we would be demanding evidence to prove it was legally justified. Yet virtually nothing has been provided to justify the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and his colleagues, and the little that has been disclosed by way of justifying this makes no sense.
The FBI investigation concerns the theft last year of the diary of Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley, yet Project Veritas, while admitting they received a copy from an anonymous source, chose not to publish that diary because they were unable to verify it. Nobody and nothing thus far suggests that Project Veritas played any role in its acquisition, legal or otherwise. There is a cryptic reference in the search warrant to transmitting stolen material across state lines, but it is not illegal for journalists to receive and use material illegally acquired by a source: the most mainstream organizations spent the last month touting documents pilfered from Facebook by their heroic “whistleblower” Frances Haugen.
On Monday night, we produced an in-depth video report examining the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and Project Veritas and the dangers it presents (as we do for all of our Rumble videos, the transcript will soon be made available to subscribers here; for now, you can watch the video at the Rumble link or on the player below). One of the primary topics of our report was the authoritarian tactic that is typically used to justify governmental attacks on those who report news and disseminate information: namely, to decree that the target is not a real journalist and therefore has no entitlement to claim the First Amendment guarantee of a free press.
This not-a-real-journalist tactic was and remains the primary theory used by those who justify the ongoing attempt to imprison Julian Assange. In demanding Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions.” Yet the five-term Senator insisted: “but he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.”
This not-a-real-journalist slogan was also the one used by both the CIA and the corporate media against myself and my colleagues in both the Snowden reporting we did in 2013, as well as the failed attempt to criminally prosecute me in 2020 for the year-long Brazil exposés we did: punishing them is not an attack on press freedom because they are not journalists and what they did is not journalism.
What is most striking about this weapon is that — like the campaign to agitate for more censorship — it is led by journalists. It is the corporate media that most aggressively insists that those who are independent, those who are outsiders, those who do not submit to their institutional structures are not real journalists the way they are, and thus are not entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. In order to create a framework to deny Project Veritas’s status as journalists, The New York Times claimed last week that anyone who uses undercover investigations (as Veritas does) is automatically a non-journalist because that entails lying — even though, just two years earlier, the same paper heralded numerous news outlets such as Al Jazeera and Mother Jones for using undercover investigations to accomplish what they called “compelling” reporting.
I am very well-acquainted with this repressive tactic of trying to decree who is and is not a real journalist for purposes of constitutional protection. Many have forgotten — given the awards it ultimately ended up winning — that the NSA/Snowden reporting we did in 2013 was originally maligned as quasi-criminal not just by Obama national security officials such as James Clapper but also by The New York Times. The first profile the Paper of Record published about me the day after the reporting began referred to me in the headline as an “Anti-Surveillance Activist” and then, once backlash ensued, it was changed to “Blogger” (the original snide, disqualifying headline is still visible in the URL).
As the New York Times’ own Public Editor at the time objected, by purposely denying me the label “journalist,” the paper was knowingly increasing the risks that I could be prosecuted for my reporting. Indeed, recent reporting from Yahoo! News about CIA plots to kidnap or murder Julian Assange reported that denying Assange the label “journalist,” and then re-defining what I and my colleague Laura Poitras were doing from “journalist” to “information broker,” would enable the U.S. Government to spy on or even prosecute us without having to worry about that inconvenient “free press” guarantee of the First Amendment.
All of this demonstrates how dangerous it is to invoke this very same not-a-real-journalist tactic against O’Keefe and Project Veritas. Yet, if one warns of the dangers of the FBI’s actions, that is precisely what one hears from liberals, from Democrats and from their allies in the media: the FBI’s targeting of Project Veritas has nothing to do with press freedoms since they’re not real journalists. They are invoking the authoritarian theory that maintains that the state (or, in this case, the FBI) is vested with the power to decree who is a “real journalist” — whatever that means — and who is not.
There are so many ironies to the use of this framework. So often, employees of media corporations who have never broken a major story in their lives (and never will) revel in accusing independent journalists who have broken numerous major stories (such as Assange) of not being real journalists. At the height of the Snowden reporting, I went on Meet the Press in July, 2013, only for the host, David Gregory, to suggest that I ought to be in prison alongside my source Edward Snowden because I was not really a journalist the way David Gregory was. At the time, Frank Rich, writing in New York Magazine, noted how bizarre it was that the TV personality David Gregory assumed he was a real journalist, whereas I was a non-journalist who belonged in prison for my reporting, given that Gregory — like most employees of large media corporations — had never broken any story in his life. “
“Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple has a good column on the FBI raid on James O’Keefe and the seizure of his cell phones in the matter of Ashley Biden’s diary. Wemple’s column is “Did the Justice Department overreach in raiding James O’Keefe’s home?” Wemple’s column provides a careful account of the facts as we have been given to understand them so far (links omitted):
Before the 2020 election, a conservative website called the National File published pages of an item purporting to be Ashley Biden’s diary. The Trump administration’s Justice Department launched an investigation, according to the Times, after a Biden family representative claimed that some of Ashley Biden’s items had been stolen. On Nov. 5, the Times reported that federal agents had searched two locations in an operation that targeted “people who had worked” with Project Veritas in connection with the diary; O’Keefe disclosed that his group had received a grand jury subpoena. Next came the raid at O’Keefe’s home, where agents seized two of his phones.
Project Veritas has told its version of events — first in a Nov. 5 video, then in a Sean Hannity interview with O’Keefe and his lawyer Paul Calli, and finally in a 16-page motion to U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres. In 2020, according to the filing, two tipsters contacted Project Veritas and claimed to have obtained items that Ashley Biden had allegedly left behind in a Florida location. The source claimed that it had “lawful possession” of the material, Calli said on “Hannity,” with O’Keefe noting that his group didn’t “know whether it was stolen or not.”
Project Veritas purchased the rights to the diary, according to Calli. Then the organization made efforts to authenticate the diary, O’Keefe said in the video. But it ended up killing the story, “because, in part, we could not determine if the diary was real,” O’Keefe said.
The group tried to return the diary to a lawyer for Ashley Biden, said O’Keefe, but the lawyer declined to verify her ownership. So Project Veritas “arranged” to have the item delivered to law enforcement. “Despite an internal belief that the diary was genuine, Mr. O’Keefe and Project Veritas could not sufficiently satisfy themselves with the diary’s authenticity such that publishing a news story about it would meet ethical standards of journalism,” Project Veritas wrote in its filing.
As to how National File ended up with the diary: It “claimed to have received the diary from a ‘whistleblower’ at another news organization that had chosen not to report on the diary,” alleges the Project Veritas motion. Tom Pappert, National File’s editor in chief, said that his organization heard from an individual he identified as a whistleblower at Project Veritas who was “upset by the … decision to spike a story that had been thoroughly vetted, in the words of our whistleblower.” That vetting, claims Pappert, included a phone call that Project Veritas had taped with Ashley Biden in which she confirmed that the diary was hers. (Attempts to secure comment from a Biden family representative were unsuccessful.)
Shortly before National File published the purported diary pages, it called O’Keefe to ask for the recording of that call, according to Pappert. Asked how O’Keefe responded, Pappert said, “not happily.” Nothing that National File learned from the whistleblower, said Pappert, “could be construed as criminality” on part of Project Veritas.
Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer for Project Veritas, emailed, “Project Veritas does not know how National File obtained the materials it published. Project Veritas does not employ the person National File has publicly suggested is the whistleblower.” (Pappert maintains his organization hasn’t suggested the identity of the whistleblower.)”
What evidence does the Justice Department have to justify the raid on James O'Keefe's home. It had better be good. https://t.co/mHzY9pL72F
“Bill Maher is just asking to be canceled, but he doesn’t care. This isn’t the first time he’s duked it out with people of the “woke” mindset. He has slapped down guests who have been apologists for radical Islam. He’s pro-free speech. He’s not a political correctness junkie either. He’s still a classical liberal, just not insane. It’s quite an evolutionary tale. In less than a generation, the Democratic base has become so insane that Bill Maher looks conservative. There are others like him. Data scientist David Shor, a self-described progressive, knows that some of his own views simply do not sit well with most voters. He has warned Democrats for months about how they need to expand their messaging strategies beyond the professional elites that dominate the party brass nowadays.
On CNN, Bill Maher’s interview with Chris Cuomo zeroed in on this cancer eating away at Democrats—and it’s not hard to figure out. The party has lost all common sense. Nicholas Fondacaro of Newsbusters clipped and wrote about this one-on-one interview that probably infuriated CNN’s audience.”
Bill Maher speaks with Chris "Fredo" Cuomo about how "wokeness" is killing the Democratic Party. "I keep saying this to the Democratic Party. The reason why you're so toxic is because you have become the party of no common sense." pic.twitter.com/tLC528MNVS
“To hear the Biden administration talk about it, there’s something for literally everybody in the 2,000-plus pages of the $1.8 trillion Build Back Better spending packages. After all, you’ll get tax breaks if you want to buy an electric bike, and there will be federal money available to you if you work as a doula, as my PJ Media colleague Rick Moran pointed out recently.
But there’s one group that won’t benefit from the largesse that Build Back Better offers if the bill passes as-is: child care facilities affiliated with religious institutions.
The New York Times is reporting that lobbyists are trying to talk Congress into stripping a provision from Build Back Better that would prevent religious preschools and child care centers from receiving their share of the gargantuan funds.
The provision at issue is a standard one in many federal laws, which would mandate that all providers comply with federal nondiscrimination statutes. Religious organizations, whose child care programs are currently exempt from some such laws, argue that it would effectively block many of their providers from participating, while civil rights advocates contend it is long past time for such institutions to comply.
Some of the faith groups are pressing lawmakers to scrap or modify the nondiscrimination language, asserting that it would essentially shut them out of the new federal program unless they made major changes to the way they operate. For instance, it could bar federal funds from going to programs that refused to hire a gay employee, gave preference to applicants of their faith or failed to renovate their facilities to accommodate disabled students.
According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, about 53% of families with children in preschool or daycare enroll their kids in religious-affiliated facilities, so you can see the problem here: for all that the Biden administration and congressional Democrats have promised to families of kids in childcare, over half won’t benefit one bit.
The NYT reports that while reliable Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) wants to include faith-based childcare centers in the legislation, House Democrats unsurprisingly want to leave out “any organization that discriminates.”
“The latest indictment by Special Counsel John Durham has created a stir in Washington as the investigation into the Russian collusion scandal exposed new connections to the Clinton campaign.
The indictment of Igor Danchenko exposes additional close advisers to Hillary Clinton who allegedly pushed discredited and salacious allegations in the Steele dossier. However, one of the most interesting new elements was the role of a liberal think tank, the Brookings Institution, in the alleged effort to create a false scandal of collusion.
Indeed, Brookings appears so often in accounts related to the Russian collusion scandal that it could be Washington’s alternative to the Kevin Bacon parlor game. It appears that many of these figures are within six degrees of Brookings.
Washington remains a small town for the ruling elite, where degrees of separation can be quite small as figures move in and out of government. Moreover, think tanks are often the parking lots for party loyalists as they wait (and work) for new administrations. The Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation play a similar role for conservative figures.
However, even in Washington’s inbred environment, the layers of connections to Brookings are remarkable in the three Durham indictments and accounts of the effort to create a Russian collusion scandal.
The effort was hardly a secret before anyone knew the name of the former British spy Christopher Steele. On July 28, former CIA Director John Brennan briefed then-President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s alleged “plan” to tie Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” Notes from the meeting state the plan to invent a collusion narrative was “alleged approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” That was three days before the Russian investigation was initiated.
Durham is detailing how this plan was carried out and many of those references are within not six but two degrees of separation from Brookings.
Brookings played a large role in pushing the Russian collusion narrative, hiring a variety of experts who then populated media outlets like MSNBC and CNN stating confidently that Trump was clearly incriminated in a series of dubious criminal acts.
While no such crimes were ever charged, let alone prosecuted, Brookings maintained a deep bench of enabling experts like Susan Hennessey (now a national security adviser in the Biden administration), Ben Wittes (who defended James Comey in his leaking of FBI memos) and Norm Eisen (who then become counsel in the Trump impeachment effort). This included the Brookings site, LawFare, which ran a steady stream of columns on how Trump could be charged for crimes ranging from obstruction to bribery.
However, that type of media cross-pollination is common. What is most surprising is how the indictment seems to map out roads that keep leading back to Brookings:”
“At first, Democrats were cheering on social media after seeing the following post from the CBO.
That excitement came from a misreading of how the CBO is scoring this bill. Instead of giving one, succinct number, the CBO is taking it piece by piece. That was set up purposely by Democrats in hopes of muddying the waters.
What the CBO is actually announcing there is that the new tax enforcement provisions would supposedly produce a deficit savings of $207B. I would certainly hope that such enforcement wouldn’t cost more than it brings in (because if it did, that would make no sense at all), but that was not a score on the actual spending portions of the bill.
Here’s what that looks like laid out on an easy-to-read chart.”
🚨BREAKING 🚨- CBO scores show Build Back Better would add $159 billion to the deficit, as written.
“A Virginia college professor has been placed on leave for defending “minor-attracted people” in a recently published book and podcast appearance.
Old Dominion University in Norfolk announced in a statement Tuesday that Dr. Allyn Walker had been placed on administrative leave effective immediately.
Walker, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the school, published a book called A Long Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity. Walker highlighted the use of the term minor-attracted person, or MAP, in the title and throughout the book.
Walker made a recent appearance on a podcast hosted by the Prostasia Foundation, which includes a “peer support chat for minor attracted people who are fundamentally against child sexual abuse and committed to never harm children.”
“It’s important to use terminology that members of that group want others to use for them,” he said.
Walker noted that “MAP advocacy groups, like Before You Act, have advocated for use of the term MAP … primarily because it’s less stigmatizing than other terms like pedophile.”
“A lot of people, when they hear the term pedophile, they automatically assume that it means a sex offender,” he said. “And that isn’t true, and it leads to a lot of misconceptions about attractions toward minors.”
The professor pushed back on the idea that “the use of the term minor-attracted person suggests that it’s OK to be attracted to children,” maintaining that “using a term that communicates who someone is attracted to doesn’t indicate anything about the morality of that attraction.”
Walker’s comments on the podcast published Nov. 8 led to outrage among ODU students. Students started a Change.org petition calling for Walker’s firing.
“Old Dominion University students who support this petition are in agreement that Dr. Allyn Walker’s, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at ODU, views about minor attraction are unacceptable and we want them removed from ODU staff,” the petition reads. “Dr. Walker uses the term ‘MAP,’ which is an umbrella term for minor attracted persons. We want to be clear that this is pedophilia and should not be considered a sexual preference.”
The petition warned that allowing Walker to continue in his role gives the instructor an opportunity to “effect [sic] the next generation in a negative way.”
——-
Nice to see some college students aren’t woke idiots.
“It takes an epic level of chutzpah for a president to do his best to suppress production of oil and gas by blocking pipelines and putting federal lands off limits, and then complain when the prices of oil and gas rise. President Biden achieved the ultimate absurdity by blocking production of petroleum products in the U.S, and then begging Russia and Saudi Arabia to increase their production to bring prices down. This is a level of cosmic stupidity that we may not see again in our lifetimes.
There is more going on than sheer incompetence, however. The truth is that the Democrats want oil and gas to be more expensive. They have been admitting as much, in their more candid moments, for the last twenty years. This is a key part of their grand design to force the rest of us to depend on expensive, unreliable and environmentally damaging “green” energy.
The Democrats’ problem is that no one can run for office on a platform of, “The price of gasoline is up 43%! Home heating is up 80%! I did that! On purpose. Because I think it’s good for you to pay more!” On the contrary, “I did that” is a rebel meme along the lines of “Let’s go Brandon!”
So Democrats have to lie. Joe Biden’s latest lie is a whopper: he wants the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the oil companies for “anti-consumer behavior.” This is truly pathetic:”
Pres. Biden, saying there is “mounting evidence of anti-consumer behavior by oil and gas companies,” in letter to the FTC: “The Federal Trade Commission has authority to consider whether illegal conduct is costing families at the pump. I believe you should do so immediately.” pic.twitter.com/0SCa26hiqG
“It is remarkable, isn’t it, how just a few years ago America was the number one producer of petroleum products in the world, we were energy independent and a net exporter, and energy prices were affordable. Now American families are struggling to make ends meet in an inflationary environment driven largely by skyrocketing energy costs. Gosh, whatever could have happened?
Joe Biden’s theory is that the petroleum companies have suddenly started engaging in “anti-consumer behavior.” A saner theory is that the Democrats’ anti-energy policies are having their intended effect. Somehow I suspect that if we elect a Republican to succeed Doddering Joe in 2024, petroleum prices will drop again. Not because of “collusion” on the part of the oil companies, but because arbitrary and irrational obstacles to supply will be removed.
In the meantime, one almost feels sorry for a politician so desperate as to adopt the slogan, “Investigate the oil companies!” The Democrats are indeed America’s stupid party.”
“A source who works with Bank of America has disclosed a pilot program beginning Nov. 18 that plans to separate vaccinated from unvaccinated employees at an administration building in Jacksonville, Florida.
The source, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Epoch Times that the program was initiated as a way to bring employees back to the office after a period of working remotely during the pandemic. But the plan casts a dark shadow on our potential future society, the source said.
Don’t believe Republicans, the CBO, or common sense….
Believe the daytime drunk instead…
Pelosi on GOPers saying bill isn’t paid for: Let’s not present what the Republicans say is any fact that you're predicating a question on I mean, understand what's happening around here? OK, because, you know, these figures show they hit
Being a Democrat means you can just make #$%@ up and the liberal lie spreading media never calls you on it.
The Chairman of the Judiciary Cmte just lied by calling Rittenhouse an “armed person crossing state lines.” His gun was never in Illinois. His dad lives in, and Rittenhouse works in, Kenosha, 20 min away from his mom’s house in Antioch. This is an irresponsible ploy to incite. https://t.co/w4NUuHgxQn
He doesn’t care, Dana. People cough up these lies to try to inflict as much damage as they can, continue to massage their preferred narrative, then slink away knowing their sheep will believe anything they uttered. The maddening thing is that no one will hold them accountable.
Wandering Views 
“Kyle Rittenhouse, Project Veritas, and the Inability to Think in Terms of Principles
Those whose worldview is bereft of universally applied principles, and based solely on tribal allegiances, assume everyone else is plagued by this very deficiency.”
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/kyle-rittenhouse-project-veritas
“The FBI has executed a string of search warrants targeting the homes and cell phones of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and several others associated with that organization. It should require no effort to understand why it is a cause for concern that a Democratic administration is using the FBI to aggressively target an organization devoted to obtaining and reporting incriminating information about Democratic Party leaders and their liberal allies.
That does not mean the FBI investigation is inherently improper. Journalists are no more entitled than any other citizen to commit crimes. If there is reasonable cause to believe O’Keefe and his associates committed federal crimes, then an FBI investigation is warranted as it is for any other case. But there has been no evidence presented that O’Keefe or Project Veritas employees have done anything of the sort, nor any explanation provided to justify these invasive searches. That we should want and need that is self-evident: if the Trump-era FBI had executed search warrants inside the newsrooms of The New York Times and NBC News, we would be demanding evidence to prove it was legally justified. Yet virtually nothing has been provided to justify the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and his colleagues, and the little that has been disclosed by way of justifying this makes no sense.
The FBI investigation concerns the theft last year of the diary of Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley, yet Project Veritas, while admitting they received a copy from an anonymous source, chose not to publish that diary because they were unable to verify it. Nobody and nothing thus far suggests that Project Veritas played any role in its acquisition, legal or otherwise. There is a cryptic reference in the search warrant to transmitting stolen material across state lines, but it is not illegal for journalists to receive and use material illegally acquired by a source: the most mainstream organizations spent the last month touting documents pilfered from Facebook by their heroic “whistleblower” Frances Haugen.
On Monday night, we produced an in-depth video report examining the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and Project Veritas and the dangers it presents (as we do for all of our Rumble videos, the transcript will soon be made available to subscribers here; for now, you can watch the video at the Rumble link or on the player below). One of the primary topics of our report was the authoritarian tactic that is typically used to justify governmental attacks on those who report news and disseminate information: namely, to decree that the target is not a real journalist and therefore has no entitlement to claim the First Amendment guarantee of a free press.
This not-a-real-journalist tactic was and remains the primary theory used by those who justify the ongoing attempt to imprison Julian Assange. In demanding Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions.” Yet the five-term Senator insisted: “but he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.”
This not-a-real-journalist slogan was also the one used by both the CIA and the corporate media against myself and my colleagues in both the Snowden reporting we did in 2013, as well as the failed attempt to criminally prosecute me in 2020 for the year-long Brazil exposés we did: punishing them is not an attack on press freedom because they are not journalists and what they did is not journalism.
What is most striking about this weapon is that — like the campaign to agitate for more censorship — it is led by journalists. It is the corporate media that most aggressively insists that those who are independent, those who are outsiders, those who do not submit to their institutional structures are not real journalists the way they are, and thus are not entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. In order to create a framework to deny Project Veritas’s status as journalists, The New York Times claimed last week that anyone who uses undercover investigations (as Veritas does) is automatically a non-journalist because that entails lying — even though, just two years earlier, the same paper heralded numerous news outlets such as Al Jazeera and Mother Jones for using undercover investigations to accomplish what they called “compelling” reporting.
I am very well-acquainted with this repressive tactic of trying to decree who is and is not a real journalist for purposes of constitutional protection. Many have forgotten — given the awards it ultimately ended up winning — that the NSA/Snowden reporting we did in 2013 was originally maligned as quasi-criminal not just by Obama national security officials such as James Clapper but also by The New York Times. The first profile the Paper of Record published about me the day after the reporting began referred to me in the headline as an “Anti-Surveillance Activist” and then, once backlash ensued, it was changed to “Blogger” (the original snide, disqualifying headline is still visible in the URL).
As the New York Times’ own Public Editor at the time objected, by purposely denying me the label “journalist,” the paper was knowingly increasing the risks that I could be prosecuted for my reporting. Indeed, recent reporting from Yahoo! News about CIA plots to kidnap or murder Julian Assange reported that denying Assange the label “journalist,” and then re-defining what I and my colleague Laura Poitras were doing from “journalist” to “information broker,” would enable the U.S. Government to spy on or even prosecute us without having to worry about that inconvenient “free press” guarantee of the First Amendment.
All of this demonstrates how dangerous it is to invoke this very same not-a-real-journalist tactic against O’Keefe and Project Veritas. Yet, if one warns of the dangers of the FBI’s actions, that is precisely what one hears from liberals, from Democrats and from their allies in the media: the FBI’s targeting of Project Veritas has nothing to do with press freedoms since they’re not real journalists. They are invoking the authoritarian theory that maintains that the state (or, in this case, the FBI) is vested with the power to decree who is a “real journalist” — whatever that means — and who is not.
There are so many ironies to the use of this framework. So often, employees of media corporations who have never broken a major story in their lives (and never will) revel in accusing independent journalists who have broken numerous major stories (such as Assange) of not being real journalists. At the height of the Snowden reporting, I went on Meet the Press in July, 2013, only for the host, David Gregory, to suggest that I ought to be in prison alongside my source Edward Snowden because I was not really a journalist the way David Gregory was. At the time, Frank Rich, writing in New York Magazine, noted how bizarre it was that the TV personality David Gregory assumed he was a real journalist, whereas I was a non-journalist who belonged in prison for my reporting, given that Gregory — like most employees of large media corporations — had never broken any story in his life. “
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More…..
“THE O’KEEFE PROJECT”
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/11/the-okeefe-project-erik-wemple-edition.php
“Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple has a good column on the FBI raid on James O’Keefe and the seizure of his cell phones in the matter of Ashley Biden’s diary. Wemple’s column is “Did the Justice Department overreach in raiding James O’Keefe’s home?” Wemple’s column provides a careful account of the facts as we have been given to understand them so far (links omitted):
Before the 2020 election, a conservative website called the National File published pages of an item purporting to be Ashley Biden’s diary. The Trump administration’s Justice Department launched an investigation, according to the Times, after a Biden family representative claimed that some of Ashley Biden’s items had been stolen. On Nov. 5, the Times reported that federal agents had searched two locations in an operation that targeted “people who had worked” with Project Veritas in connection with the diary; O’Keefe disclosed that his group had received a grand jury subpoena. Next came the raid at O’Keefe’s home, where agents seized two of his phones.
Project Veritas has told its version of events — first in a Nov. 5 video, then in a Sean Hannity interview with O’Keefe and his lawyer Paul Calli, and finally in a 16-page motion to U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres. In 2020, according to the filing, two tipsters contacted Project Veritas and claimed to have obtained items that Ashley Biden had allegedly left behind in a Florida location. The source claimed that it had “lawful possession” of the material, Calli said on “Hannity,” with O’Keefe noting that his group didn’t “know whether it was stolen or not.”
Project Veritas purchased the rights to the diary, according to Calli. Then the organization made efforts to authenticate the diary, O’Keefe said in the video. But it ended up killing the story, “because, in part, we could not determine if the diary was real,” O’Keefe said.
The group tried to return the diary to a lawyer for Ashley Biden, said O’Keefe, but the lawyer declined to verify her ownership. So Project Veritas “arranged” to have the item delivered to law enforcement. “Despite an internal belief that the diary was genuine, Mr. O’Keefe and Project Veritas could not sufficiently satisfy themselves with the diary’s authenticity such that publishing a news story about it would meet ethical standards of journalism,” Project Veritas wrote in its filing.
As to how National File ended up with the diary: It “claimed to have received the diary from a ‘whistleblower’ at another news organization that had chosen not to report on the diary,” alleges the Project Veritas motion. Tom Pappert, National File’s editor in chief, said that his organization heard from an individual he identified as a whistleblower at Project Veritas who was “upset by the … decision to spike a story that had been thoroughly vetted, in the words of our whistleblower.” That vetting, claims Pappert, included a phone call that Project Veritas had taped with Ashley Biden in which she confirmed that the diary was hers. (Attempts to secure comment from a Biden family representative were unsuccessful.)
Shortly before National File published the purported diary pages, it called O’Keefe to ask for the recording of that call, according to Pappert. Asked how O’Keefe responded, Pappert said, “not happily.” Nothing that National File learned from the whistleblower, said Pappert, “could be construed as criminality” on part of Project Veritas.
Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer for Project Veritas, emailed, “Project Veritas does not know how National File obtained the materials it published. Project Veritas does not employ the person National File has publicly suggested is the whistleblower.” (Pappert maintains his organization hasn’t suggested the identity of the whistleblower.)”
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When he’s right, he’s right….
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/11/18/bill-maher-zeroes-in-on-the-cancer-eating-away-at-democrats-n2599284
“Bill Maher is just asking to be canceled, but he doesn’t care. This isn’t the first time he’s duked it out with people of the “woke” mindset. He has slapped down guests who have been apologists for radical Islam. He’s pro-free speech. He’s not a political correctness junkie either. He’s still a classical liberal, just not insane. It’s quite an evolutionary tale. In less than a generation, the Democratic base has become so insane that Bill Maher looks conservative. There are others like him. Data scientist David Shor, a self-described progressive, knows that some of his own views simply do not sit well with most voters. He has warned Democrats for months about how they need to expand their messaging strategies beyond the professional elites that dominate the party brass nowadays.
On CNN, Bill Maher’s interview with Chris Cuomo zeroed in on this cancer eating away at Democrats—and it’s not hard to figure out. The party has lost all common sense. Nicholas Fondacaro of Newsbusters clipped and wrote about this one-on-one interview that probably infuriated CNN’s audience.”
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Of course…..
“Biden Moves to Destroy Religious-Based Childcare”
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2021/11/18/the-religious-liberty-violation-buried-in-build-back-better-n1534042
“To hear the Biden administration talk about it, there’s something for literally everybody in the 2,000-plus pages of the $1.8 trillion Build Back Better spending packages. After all, you’ll get tax breaks if you want to buy an electric bike, and there will be federal money available to you if you work as a doula, as my PJ Media colleague Rick Moran pointed out recently.
But there’s one group that won’t benefit from the largesse that Build Back Better offers if the bill passes as-is: child care facilities affiliated with religious institutions.
The New York Times is reporting that lobbyists are trying to talk Congress into stripping a provision from Build Back Better that would prevent religious preschools and child care centers from receiving their share of the gargantuan funds.
The provision at issue is a standard one in many federal laws, which would mandate that all providers comply with federal nondiscrimination statutes. Religious organizations, whose child care programs are currently exempt from some such laws, argue that it would effectively block many of their providers from participating, while civil rights advocates contend it is long past time for such institutions to comply.
Some of the faith groups are pressing lawmakers to scrap or modify the nondiscrimination language, asserting that it would essentially shut them out of the new federal program unless they made major changes to the way they operate. For instance, it could bar federal funds from going to programs that refused to hire a gay employee, gave preference to applicants of their faith or failed to renovate their facilities to accommodate disabled students.
According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, about 53% of families with children in preschool or daycare enroll their kids in religious-affiliated facilities, so you can see the problem here: for all that the Biden administration and congressional Democrats have promised to families of kids in childcare, over half won’t benefit one bit.
The NYT reports that while reliable Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) wants to include faith-based childcare centers in the legislation, House Democrats unsurprisingly want to leave out “any organization that discriminates.”
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Gee, that’s odd…… 🙄
“Jonathan Turley: This liberal think tank keeps popping up in Durham investigation”
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/brookings-think-tank-durham-investigation-jonathan-turley
“The latest indictment by Special Counsel John Durham has created a stir in Washington as the investigation into the Russian collusion scandal exposed new connections to the Clinton campaign.
The indictment of Igor Danchenko exposes additional close advisers to Hillary Clinton who allegedly pushed discredited and salacious allegations in the Steele dossier. However, one of the most interesting new elements was the role of a liberal think tank, the Brookings Institution, in the alleged effort to create a false scandal of collusion.
Indeed, Brookings appears so often in accounts related to the Russian collusion scandal that it could be Washington’s alternative to the Kevin Bacon parlor game. It appears that many of these figures are within six degrees of Brookings.
Washington remains a small town for the ruling elite, where degrees of separation can be quite small as figures move in and out of government. Moreover, think tanks are often the parking lots for party loyalists as they wait (and work) for new administrations. The Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation play a similar role for conservative figures.
However, even in Washington’s inbred environment, the layers of connections to Brookings are remarkable in the three Durham indictments and accounts of the effort to create a Russian collusion scandal.
The effort was hardly a secret before anyone knew the name of the former British spy Christopher Steele. On July 28, former CIA Director John Brennan briefed then-President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s alleged “plan” to tie Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” Notes from the meeting state the plan to invent a collusion narrative was “alleged approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” That was three days before the Russian investigation was initiated.
Durham is detailing how this plan was carried out and many of those references are within not six but two degrees of separation from Brookings.
Brookings played a large role in pushing the Russian collusion narrative, hiring a variety of experts who then populated media outlets like MSNBC and CNN stating confidently that Trump was clearly incriminated in a series of dubious criminal acts.
While no such crimes were ever charged, let alone prosecuted, Brookings maintained a deep bench of enabling experts like Susan Hennessey (now a national security adviser in the Biden administration), Ben Wittes (who defended James Comey in his leaking of FBI memos) and Norm Eisen (who then become counsel in the Trump impeachment effort). This included the Brookings site, LawFare, which ran a steady stream of columns on how Trump could be charged for crimes ranging from obstruction to bribery.
However, that type of media cross-pollination is common. What is most surprising is how the indictment seems to map out roads that keep leading back to Brookings:”
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Huh.
And yet Biden and Dems have assured us it would cost nothing…. zero is the word they used.
But they lie, and can’t do basic math.
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/11/18/the-cbo-just-swept-the-leg-of-joe-bidens-build-back-better-boondoggle-n478267
“At first, Democrats were cheering on social media after seeing the following post from the CBO.
That excitement came from a misreading of how the CBO is scoring this bill. Instead of giving one, succinct number, the CBO is taking it piece by piece. That was set up purposely by Democrats in hopes of muddying the waters.
What the CBO is actually announcing there is that the new tax enforcement provisions would supposedly produce a deficit savings of $207B. I would certainly hope that such enforcement wouldn’t cost more than it brings in (because if it did, that would make no sense at all), but that was not a score on the actual spending portions of the bill.
Here’s what that looks like laid out on an easy-to-read chart.”
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Ewwww…..
Fire this perv, and then have police take a real close look at he and his friends….
“Va. professor placed on leave after defending ‘minor-attracted people’ in book, podcast”
https://www.christianpost.com/news/prof-placed-on-leave-over-comments-on-minor-attracted-people.html
“A Virginia college professor has been placed on leave for defending “minor-attracted people” in a recently published book and podcast appearance.
Old Dominion University in Norfolk announced in a statement Tuesday that Dr. Allyn Walker had been placed on administrative leave effective immediately.
Walker, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the school, published a book called A Long Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity. Walker highlighted the use of the term minor-attracted person, or MAP, in the title and throughout the book.
Walker made a recent appearance on a podcast hosted by the Prostasia Foundation, which includes a “peer support chat for minor attracted people who are fundamentally against child sexual abuse and committed to never harm children.”
“It’s important to use terminology that members of that group want others to use for them,” he said.
Walker noted that “MAP advocacy groups, like Before You Act, have advocated for use of the term MAP … primarily because it’s less stigmatizing than other terms like pedophile.”
“A lot of people, when they hear the term pedophile, they automatically assume that it means a sex offender,” he said. “And that isn’t true, and it leads to a lot of misconceptions about attractions toward minors.”
The professor pushed back on the idea that “the use of the term minor-attracted person suggests that it’s OK to be attracted to children,” maintaining that “using a term that communicates who someone is attracted to doesn’t indicate anything about the morality of that attraction.”
Walker’s comments on the podcast published Nov. 8 led to outrage among ODU students. Students started a Change.org petition calling for Walker’s firing.
“Old Dominion University students who support this petition are in agreement that Dr. Allyn Walker’s, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at ODU, views about minor attraction are unacceptable and we want them removed from ODU staff,” the petition reads. “Dr. Walker uses the term ‘MAP,’ which is an umbrella term for minor attracted persons. We want to be clear that this is pedophilia and should not be considered a sexual preference.”
The petition warned that allowing Walker to continue in his role gives the instructor an opportunity to “effect [sic] the next generation in a negative way.”
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Nice to see some college students aren’t woke idiots.
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“LAST REFUGE OF A SENILE SCOUNDREL”
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/11/last-refuge-of-a-senile-scoundrel.php
“It takes an epic level of chutzpah for a president to do his best to suppress production of oil and gas by blocking pipelines and putting federal lands off limits, and then complain when the prices of oil and gas rise. President Biden achieved the ultimate absurdity by blocking production of petroleum products in the U.S, and then begging Russia and Saudi Arabia to increase their production to bring prices down. This is a level of cosmic stupidity that we may not see again in our lifetimes.
There is more going on than sheer incompetence, however. The truth is that the Democrats want oil and gas to be more expensive. They have been admitting as much, in their more candid moments, for the last twenty years. This is a key part of their grand design to force the rest of us to depend on expensive, unreliable and environmentally damaging “green” energy.
The Democrats’ problem is that no one can run for office on a platform of, “The price of gasoline is up 43%! Home heating is up 80%! I did that! On purpose. Because I think it’s good for you to pay more!” On the contrary, “I did that” is a rebel meme along the lines of “Let’s go Brandon!”
So Democrats have to lie. Joe Biden’s latest lie is a whopper: he wants the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the oil companies for “anti-consumer behavior.” This is truly pathetic:”
“It is remarkable, isn’t it, how just a few years ago America was the number one producer of petroleum products in the world, we were energy independent and a net exporter, and energy prices were affordable. Now American families are struggling to make ends meet in an inflationary environment driven largely by skyrocketing energy costs. Gosh, whatever could have happened?
Joe Biden’s theory is that the petroleum companies have suddenly started engaging in “anti-consumer behavior.” A saner theory is that the Democrats’ anti-energy policies are having their intended effect. Somehow I suspect that if we elect a Republican to succeed Doddering Joe in 2024, petroleum prices will drop again. Not because of “collusion” on the part of the oil companies, but because arbitrary and irrational obstacles to supply will be removed.
In the meantime, one almost feels sorry for a politician so desperate as to adopt the slogan, “Investigate the oil companies!” The Democrats are indeed America’s stupid party.”
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Incredible – segregation all over again.
This is the same bank that turned over private banking information to the FBI for anyone and everyone who was in D.C. on January 6th.
You’d be far better off at a credit union.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/bank-of-america-initiates-a-pilot-program-separating-vaccinated-from-unvaccinated-employees_4110521.html
“A source who works with Bank of America has disclosed a pilot program beginning Nov. 18 that plans to separate vaccinated from unvaccinated employees at an administration building in Jacksonville, Florida.
The source, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Epoch Times that the program was initiated as a way to bring employees back to the office after a period of working remotely during the pandemic. But the plan casts a dark shadow on our potential future society, the source said.
“It’s segregation,” they said. “I’m blown away.””
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Don’t believe Republicans, the CBO, or common sense….
Believe the daytime drunk instead…
——–
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Celebrate while you can, because in the Senate, this monstrosity dies. 🙂
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https://twitter.com/bonchieredstate/status/1461711205907763207?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1461711205907763207%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Fdougp-3137%2F2021%2F11%2F19%2Fhooray-for-inflation-dems-cheer-as-house-passes-another-bbb-spend-a-palooza-bill%2F
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Swalwell makes it way too easy….
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Justice!!!
Probable lawsuits against the media to follow…
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/kyle-rittenhouse-acquitted-on-all-counts_4113953.html
“KENOSHA, Wisconsin—Jurors acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse on all counts on Friday.
The jury reached the verdict just after 12:10 p.m. local time and the foreman read it aloud in the Kenosha County Courthouse shortly afterwards.
Rittenhouse, 18, sat quietly before the verdict was read. Afterwards, he started shaking and breathing heavily. He hugged his lawyer.
“You were a wonderful jury to work with,” Kenosha County Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder told jurors.”
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I hope he sues every media outlet that has published lies about him throughout this process. They need to pay or they’ll never learn.
They just won’t stop.
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They want you to sue them Kyle. This fraud too.
Let’s not disappoint them….
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So many lefty blue checks, politicians, and journalists are losing it, and still lying. 🙂
Sue. Them. All.
Enjoy their misery! 🙂
https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2021/11/19/totally-sane-and-not-at-all-a-burden-on-society-heres-a-bunch-of-blue-check-lefties-losing-their-ever-loving-minds-over-rittenhouse-verdict/
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These will be helpful when preparing the list of defendants. 🙂
The media’s lies about this have gone on since the shooting. Time to make them pay. They’re garbage, this link proves it yet again.
https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2021/11/19/drew-holdens-masterful-thread-revisiting-kyle-rittenhouse-coverage-conveniently-doubles-as-a-list-of-potential-defendants-in-upcoming-defamation-lawsuits/
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That’s helpful. 🙂
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And just a reminder, although he can plead insanity and everyone would believe that.
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🙂
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Being a Democrat means you can just make #$%@ up and the liberal lie spreading media never calls you on it.
———
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And where on Earth have Twitter and Facebook’s misinformation censors disappeared to today?
They must all have the week off…..
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