Posts Tagged ‘Hunter Biden’

“Disinformation” conference proves Trump is right, the media is the enemy of the people

Posted: April 10, 2022 by John Ruberry in Always look at the bright side of Trump, culture, media, News/opinion, opinion/news
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By John Ruberry

Last year, in his farewell column, longtime Chicago journalist Phil Kadner spoke of his praises, and he indeed deserved his own pats on the back. Kadner mostly covered the generally overlooked, but corrupt, south suburbs of Chicago. I grew up there, they are a rat-hole of graft.

A creature of the left, who called for President Trump’s impeachment in 2019, Kadner discussed in that final column, his anger after Trump said the media was “the enemy of the people.”

Is Kadner an enemy of the people? No.

But with a few exceptions, most of the media is. 

The latest example of why that is true took place at the University of Chicago, which hosted along with the Atlantic, the Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy conference. A quick look at the speakers at the event betrays what kind of conference it was, there were no conservative panelists. Only the self-appointed “cool kids” are allowed in the tree house.

Ah, but there were at least a couple of conservatives there, including freshman U of C student Daniel Schmidt, who challenged one of the speakers, the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum. Schmidt blew the whistle on her for dismissing the importance of the Hunter Biden laptop revelations in 2020, which at the time Applebaum wrote that it “barely registers” with her.

Her response? “My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop I think is totally irrelevant.” Applebaum continued, “I mean it’s not whether it’s disinformation or, I mean, I didn’t think the Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States, so I don’t find it to be interesting, that would be my problem with that as a main news story.”

Ah, now here is an enemy of the people to be sure, Anna Applebaum.

Hunter Biden, if not Joe Biden, because of what has been discovered on that laptop, can rightly be called as I’ve remarked before, the head of a Chicago-style influence peddling ring. 

It’s arguable that the Biden family has sold out America to our enemies, particularly China. 

The Clown Prince of Disinformation is CNN’s Brian Stelter, the host of the laughably misnamed Reliable Sources. He spoke on the next day at the conference. And it was the turn of another University of Chicago freshman, Christopher Phillips, who said of Stelter’s network, “They push the Russian collusion hoax, they push the Jussie Smollett hoax, they smear Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh as a rapist, and they also smeared Nick Sandmann as a white supremacist,” Phillips told Stelter. “And yes, they dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop affair as pure Russian disinformation.” 

Phillips continued, “With mainstream corporate journalists becoming little more than apologists and cheerleaders for the [Biden] regime, is it time to finally declare that the canon of journalistic ethics is dead or no longer operative?”

Stelter quipped, “Too bad, it’s time for lunch,” but then gave a meandering reply that didn’t address any of Phillips’ points.

The Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy conference was reminiscent of a bad Hollywood thriller, where the protagonist is finally able to report his findings of an anti-government conspiracy after escaping captivity, only to learn that those he trusts in the government are part of that nefarious plot too. 

I believe there are two possibilities in regard to what has gone wrong with the mainstream media, and neither are good. The first is that the most members of the fake-news media are indeed propagandists for the left and the Democrat Party. The second is that they’ve deluded themselves into believing that they are indeed truthful providers of information, reminiscent of when legendary New York Yankees slugger Mickey Mantle, while downing booze during breakfast, remarked to a reporter with a straight face that he’s not an alcoholic. 

Mantle died of liver cancer, despite receiving a liver transplant, and alcoholism very likely contributed to his death.

Where will the mainstream media end up?

Right now, the media, most of it, is indeed the enemy of the people.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

White House press secretaries should be banned from taking media jobs for two years after leaving post

Posted: April 3, 2022 by John Ruberry in media, News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

One lesson from the 2020 presidential campaign, one of many, is that more than ever information is power. More importantly, the flow of information is power.

The journalistic malpractice by the mainstream media, in regard to suppressing and censoring the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, is a subject I covered here at DTG last month. Glenn Greenwald, in a Substack post, deemed it, “One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history.” As for myself I can’t think of one that was worse. 

Joe Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, has generally brushed off questions about Hunter’s laptop, unless she blamed “Russian disinformation” for its existence. Hunter’s MacBook Pro offers damning proof that the president’s son was the head of a Chicago-style influence peddling ring.

Last week Axios broke the news that Psaki will resign and next month join MSNBC and its Peacock streaming service in an on-air role. Axios touched on the obvious ethical concerns in its report. Psaki refuses to confirm the Axios story.

Going back to at least the Obama administration, there have been executive orders that prevent, for a period, senior officials in the executive branch of the federal government accepting a lobbying job. On his first full day in office, Biden signed an executive order that bans his political appointees from taking a lobbying job for two years after leaving their posts. Donald J. Trump signed an even stronger executive order on lobbying bans for his top staffers, one for five years, but in what I see as a bad decision, he rescinded it on his last day as president. 

Biden, as well as his eventual successor, needs to sign an executive order that blocks future press secretaries, as well as White House communications directors, from media jobs for two years. From 2015-2017 Psaki served in that latter post, before leaving for an on-air job with CNN. As for that network, Psaki reportedly has also recently explored a return to CNN, as well as seeking jobs with CBS and ABC, according to Puck. 

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but last week, vice president Kamala Harris was interviewed, exclusively, by MSNBC’s Joy Reid.

In a rare moment of toughness since Biden because president, Psaki was confronted about those ethical concerns of her possible move to MSNBC by the White House press corps, including an NBC reporter.

As I mentioned at the top of this entry, information, as well as the censorship and suppression of it, is power. So is the granting of access to the media of senior White House officials. 

It’s time to rein in, at least a little bit, the White House gatekeepers of that information. 

And oh yes, Republican press secretaries have benefitted from the “revolving door” from the White House to a media gig too. Psaki’s predecessor, Kayleigh McEnany, who served under Trump, is an on-air contributor on Fox News. She negotiated the landing of that job while still working at the White House.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Because of suppression and censorship by the media and social networks, the 2020 presidential election was not free and fair

Posted: March 20, 2022 by John Ruberry in Always look at the bright side of Trump, culture, election 2020, elections, elections, media, News/opinion, politics
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Salem, Wisconsin, October 11, 2020

By John Ruberry

Last week, in the 24th paragraph of a New York Times article about Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s tax problems and his emails, the Old Gray Lady sneaked in this line, “Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Biden in a Delaware repair shop,” the three authors of the story (why does the current media need to utilize multiple writers?) wrote. And they added, “The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”

Flashback to October 2020. It was “October Surprise Time” again as a presidential election winded down. Yeah, I know what I wrote. With the over-reliance on early voting, drop-off ballot boxes, and ballot harvesting, Election Day is almost an afterthought, we now have Election Season. And the ’20 surprise was a shocker, as the New York Post revealed that it had obtained a copy of the hard drive of a MacBook Pro laptop computer that Hunter dropped off at the aforementioned repair shop and then apparently forgot about it, like an old suit left behind with a dry cleaner.

Besides embarrassing photos, emails discovered on the hard drive by the Post revealed what intelligent people with an open mind long suspected, that Hunter Biden was the head of an influence peddling ring that profited from the political career of his lifetime politician father. Or perhaps Joe Biden, “the Big Guy.” who might have been the recipient of 10 percent of a never-realized financial deal with a Chinese energy firm, was in charge, was the CEO of a Chicago-style political racketeering operation, a bit like this one.

Twitter, Facebook, and the mainstream media–Fox News was a major exception–immediately went on attack mode to block and suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

During his radio show on Friday, Dan Bongino said, “Hunter was working in Ukraine, his dad knew about it, his dad was the point man in Ukraine for the Obama administration. The corruption is back-breaking. There is no way Joe Biden would have won the last election if the media didn’t conspire to make that story–the Ukraine-Biden story and the laptop–go away.” He added, “They rigged the election through their censorship of the story.”

“Look at the polling data,” Bongino exclaimed. Let’s do just that. According to a Media Research Center post-election survey, of the voters Biden voters who weren’t aware of the Hunter Biden scandals, 16 percent of them would have changed their vote. Incumbent Donald J. Trump lost by less than one percent in these four battleground states: Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. If those states went to Trump, then he still would be president.

Although he had no experience in the energy industry and he does not speak Ukrainian, Hunter Biden served on the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm, while his father was vice president.

Twitter was the worst offender in censoring the laptop story, blocking the posting of reports under the false belief that the laptop revelations were hacked, despite possessing no evidence that those suspicions were true. For nearly two weeks, as Americans daily voted for president, Twitter suspended the New York Post’s popular main Twitter feed.

Facebook, which funds fact-checkers at USA Today, PolitiFact, and LeadStories, suppressed the Hunter laptop story. “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post,” FB spokesperson Andy Stone Tweeted at the time, “I want [sic] be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.” No such fact-checks every were done by FB’s favored fact-checkers.

During the final presidential debate, moderated by NBC’s Kirsten Welker, and also while being interviewed by 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl, Trump tried to initiate a discussion about the Hunter Biden laptop. Welker deflected, and Stahl replied to Trump about the scandal, “Can’t be verified.” Well, now it has been, Stahl, by the paper that publishes “all the news that’s fit to print,” the New York Times.

Where is your apology, Lesley?

Government-funded NPR also dismissed the Hunter Biden story. On Twitter in 2020, in response to a question on why NPR hadn’t covered the laptop scandal, NPR’s managing editor Terence Samuels, who apparently is the kind of arrogant SOB that Groucho Marx used to justifiably torment, replied, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions. And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”

In preparation for the writing of this story I endured one hour of CNN’s ludicrously misnamed Reliable Sources, hosted by a circus clown masquerading as a journalist, Brian Stelter. Much of today’s broadcast was dedicated to policing “misinformation” and “disinformation” by Russian media sources as the war in Ukraine continues. But Stelter and his sycophantic guests didn’t utter a peep about the New York Times update on the laptop. “So slowly and surely,” Stelter said at the end of today’s episode, “media criticism can improve media diets.” How ’bout starting with criticizing yourself, Stelter? His latest email newsletter, which I hear is very popular among liberal journalists, omitted mention of the Times’ revision on the Hunter MacBook.

Here’s a flashback for you.

“This is a classic example of the right-wing media machine,” Stelter said about the laptop on October 18, 2020. “Fox and Trump have this in common: They want you to stay mad and stay tuned.”

A former host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz, on Fox News Sunday this morning declared, “It is an absolute embarrassment that the way that the way media downplayed or ignored or mocked or minimized this story, the New York Times now says [Hunter] is under active federal investigation for possible tax violations or lobbying violations by [him]–and they’re still not covering it.”

After some complaining about those commments from fellow Fox News Sunday panelist Juan Williams, Kurtz shot back, “It was censorship.”

A free and fair election process allows open distribution of information. The mainstream media, Twitter, and Facebook, by suppressing and censoring coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop revelations, prevented a free and fair election.

John Ruberry, just John and not two others, regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Nine months that shook the world: A list of Biden’s failures

Posted: October 24, 2021 by John Ruberry in News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

It took four years for Jimmy Carter, America’s 39th president, to amass a reputation for abject failure. Joe Biden only needed nine months, the time it takes for a baby to go from conception to birth. 

Here’s a list–and I am sure that I’m leaving out a few–of his failures. 

Gasoline prices. Liberals hate relatively cheap gas prices. On his first day in office Biden cancelled construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. In doing so, to borrow the words used in the Biden-Harris sign pictured here, he killed thousands of “good union jobs.” Gas prices immediately jumped. Also that day Biden signed an executive order blocking oil and natural gas drilling at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The next day Biden imposed a suspension of new natural gas and oil drilling leases on federal lands–which fortunately was overruled by a judge in June.

It’s all part of the plan is what I believe. Leftists–excluding themselves of course–want as many people as possible to ditch their cars and trucks and take buses and trains everywhere. In 2012 Steven Chu, the Obama-Biden administration’s secretary of Energy, was asked by a Republican member of Congress if it was the goal of the White House to have lower gasoline prices. He replied to the contrary, adding “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Gasoline prices in 2012 were about $4-a-gallon–in Europe at that time they were $8 to $9-per gallon. Yeah I know, Chu, under pressure no doubt, walked back those comments the next day, as Barack Obama and Joe Biden were up for reelection that year. 

Gas prices are at a seven-year high. Donald Trump was not president seven years ago.

As I’ve observed many times before, leftists particularly love trains–because they only travel where there are tracks.

On the other hand if you are a liberal you may consider higher gasoline prices as a Joe Biden success. But more expensive fuel hurts the poor the most. And liberal politicians always say it is they, not the evil Republicans, who are protecting poor people.

Afghanistan. I’ll be brief on this one. Yes, Donald Trump made a pledge to pull our troops out by May 1. But Biden extended that deadline to September 11 then he moved it back to August 31. Biden blamed Trump for setting a withdrawal date–after the Afghan government collapsed in the middle of August. Biden promised an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan–and said it would not be like our dramatic and tragic departure from South Vietnam. But that government stayed in power two years after American combat troops were flown home. 

Biden either lied–or forgot–about being advised to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan to at least slow the government’s collapse. During the hasty evacuation from Kabul thirteen members of our military were killed by a terrorist bombing. And despite another Biden promise, Americans were left behind enemy lines in the Taliban-ruled nation. At least 200 remain.

The southern border. While Biden all but said his hands were tied by Trump’s agreement to take our troops out of Afghanistan, he felt no such need to continue the stay-in-Mexico policy for refugees that Trump successfully negotiated with the Mexican president. The result is the ongoing crisis at the southern border. Illegal crossings at that border have soared since January. A record number–1.7 million–have illegally entered the nation at that border so far in 2021. They are unmasked and not checked to see if they are infected by the COVID-19 virus. 

COVID-19. Biden promised to get the virus under control. Meanwhile, despite a vaccine developed under the push initiated by Trump, COVID, by way of the Delta Variant, has roared back. Biden is pushing mask mandates–but what about people crossing the southern border? What’s that about “health care” on that sign?

More Americans have died from COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020.

Critical race theory: A little more than a year ago President Trump issued an executive order banning divisive CRT training in federal agencies. Biden reversed that order. Biden’s attorney general, faux moderate Merrick Garland, announced that the FBI would investigate parents who protest the teaching of CRT at school board meetings, citing unnamed threats.

Supply chain crisis. About the time Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg went on paternity leave–without publicly disclosing it–the supply chain crisis began. Container ships are backed up in the Pacific off of Long Beach harbor. There is also a shortage of truck drivers. As Santa said in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, “We’ll have to cancel Christmas.” Okay, not really, but there will likely be fewer gifts under Christmas trees this year.

Jobs: Job growth has been anemic since Biden was sworn in.

Inflation. Higher gasoline prices are always a driver of inflation. And I already mentioned the shortage of truck drivers. Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan pumped cash into the economy. While that seems like a good thing at the base level inflation is caused when there is too much money chasing too few goods. And there is a shortage of semiconductor chips, new automobiles, used cars, plastics, palm oil, magnesium, and more. Oh, besides truck drivers there are not enough workers overall. Biden and the Democrats want to double down on stupid with a so-called infrastructure bill, Build Back Better, priced at over $3 trillion. That bill is drenched with social-engineering and Green New Deal nonsense. Inflation is not going away.

Hunter Biden: Just last week a New York art gallery began selling his paintings. Influence peddling is a long tradition of the Biden family. Who will buy Hunter’s artwork?

Kamala Harris: Biden’s vice president, the Queen of Cackles, was put in charge of the southern border. How is that working out? Biden turns 79 next month and Harris is a heartbeat away from succeeding him. He could have of course done worse with a running mate choice, but Biden also could have done so much better.

Cognitive decline. The spin has been off of Joe Biden’s fastball–and that pitch was never a commanding one–for a few years now. On a mental level things will only get worse for him. Is Biden running the White House? If not then who is?

Or is no one in charge?

Why haven’t we heard from Biden’s doctor, Kevin C. O’Connor?

Allies losing faith in us. People are attracted to strong leaders and repelled by weak ones. Unless, in regards to the latter, bad people want to take something that doesn’t belong to them. Like for instance, Taiwan. I already mentioned the Afghanistan debacle. But Biden screwed over the French by stealing a nuclear submarine deal they had with Australia. Or maybe I’m being too harsh. John Kerry said the Biden didn’t even know about the France deal.

Can America be trusted? Can America be relied upon? Our allies are surely asking those questions. And our enemies, China, Russia, and North Korea, certainly sense opportunity.

And of course we are just nine months into this Rosemary’s Baby of an administration.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Update (DTG) Welcome Whatafinger readers. Take a look around. Check out these interviews with General Bolduc who is running for the US Senate in NH, and Rebekah Hagan of the Abortion Pill Reversal Network check out my quick commentary on a trap that employers are falling into not to mention Christopher Harper’s piece titled Jimmy Carter Redux and if you live in driving distance of Fitchburg MA, Medford Ma or Boston come see Fr. Leonard Mary of EWTN Tuesday through Sat for events masses and healing services, details here.

And if you really like what you read please consider kicking into DaTipJar so I can afford to keep paying John and the rest of my Magnificent Seven writers every month.

Update 2 (DTG) Biden vs Trump in song before the election a less musical list is here. plus this line on Joe Biden on the day he was sworn in:

Which brings us to Joe Biden. He comes into office with one advantage that Trump had namely the lowest expectations of any incoming president for years.

He has one disadvantage that Trump never had but Obama did, a press that will by so fawning (till Jan 21st 2023) that he will never be challenged (till Jan 21st 2023) which will make his mistakes more glaring and likely more destructive as they’ll not be challenged.

The media is still spinning these failures as success at least as much as they can.

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