Wednesday, April 10, 2024

FBI alleged a decrease in crime rates, but then an independent group of analysts dug a little deeper and found otherwise


There are fake stats everywhere—climate metrics, economy numbers, inflation rates, employment/unemployment… and what else?

Well, of course, crime.

See this, from a Fox News article by Jamie Joseph, published yesterday:

Public safety group finds FBI violent crime data is higher than initially reported

A new report claims violent crimes are significantly underreported, and FBI crime classification has changed[.]

An independent group of law enforcement officials and analysts claim violent crime rates are much higher than figures reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in its 2023 violent crime statistics.

The “figures reported” by the FBI refers to a quarterly report released by the agency just a few weeks back; here are the details on that via an AP item at the time:

US violent crime decreased in 2023, continuing to reverse pandemic-era spike, FBI data shows

New FBI statistics show overall violent crime in the U.S. dropped again last year, continuing a downward trend after a pandemic-era spike.

Murders dropped 13% in the last three months of 2023 compared with the same period the year before, according to FBI data released this week. Violent crime overall was down 6%.

When this FBI data came out, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the numbers were “encouraging” and bragged about Democrat policies that made it all possible! Thanks Joe!

Yet… as Joseph reports:

‘There’s a series of caveats attached to the FBI data that the FBI doesn’t make as clear as they should,’ Sean Kennedy, one of the lead researchers, told Fox News Digital in an interview.

Kennedy said that, particularly in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd riots, several police departments redefined the classifications for certain violent crimes and transitioned away from a decades-old recording system.

Is this anything like all those police departments booking non-whites as “white”?

When we think about the current state of political affairs, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who can’t see the striking parallels between the Joe Biden government, and the Ingsoc government of George Orwell’s Oceania—unless you’re on a college campus, in a BLM march, at a rally for “Palestine,” or hanging out any other place where useful idiots gather en masse.

Yet, in recognizing those similarities, we often latch on to the most obvious ones: Trump Derangement Syndrome is no different from the “Two Minutes Hate” of course, and the censorship and surveillance is quite literally Big Brother. But does anyone remember the Ministry of Plenty?

Recall this excerpt:

For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no near- er the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions.

Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot.

We know the books are cooked, because we feel the pain, like the barefoot resident of Oceania. We’re the ones left bleeding from a grocery run. We’re the ones getting punched in the face while walking down the NYC sidewalk. We see the National Guardsmen deployed to the subway stations. We’re the ones getting laid off while illegals take our place. We’re the ones closing our small businesses because the market no longer supports us. We’re the ones losing our homes to squatters.

But again, the fake stats are everywhere, and despite our lived experiences, Joe Biden and his Bidenite bureaucrats assure us that things have never been better. Four more years!



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X22, And we Know, and more- April 10

 




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The Ministry of BS Will See You Now


I wonder if there is ever a moment while DHS Secretary Mayorkas is claiming that America’s borders are entirely secure and blaming “climate change” for the influx of tens of millions of illegal aliens into the United States when he thinks, “Wow, I am really full of BS.  I mean, it is simply amazing how much BS I shovel down the American people’s throats every single day.”

The notion that powerful people lie to the public is certainly not new.  You can go back through the centuries and find essays, songs, drawings, and folktales that all attest to the timeless truth that every generation sees its “rulers” as an unworthy camarilla of cutthroats, liars, backstabbers, and thieves.  Still, the lies being told today are just so brazen.  Damaging tornado?  That’s what we get for driving cars.  Too many white mathematicians?  Obviously another bout of “systemic racism” rearing its ugly head.  Trump’s beating Biden in the polls?  Duh — that’s because America runs on “hate”!  

Disney and other child-grooming companies keep telling us that the only way to protect America’s youth is to put them on puberty blockers and let them dance for skeevy adults.  We used to call those skeevy adults “pedophiles,” but now the medical community insists that we treat them with more respect.  I have trouble respecting a profession that wants me to respect child molesters.  I also have trouble respecting a profession that pushes experimental “vaccines” on patients without their informed consent.  The fact that so few physicians have taken responsibility for their unscientific and unethical behavior during totalitarianism’s favorite overhyped pandemic feels like a giant whiff and strike three for medicine.  Or maybe the white coats (“systemic racism” alert!) struck out four years ago when medical associations insisted that Antifa and BLM be allowed to burn down neighborhoods in the name of “social justice health,” while the rest of us were forced to stay inside and participate in the theatrical production of the “Great COVID Hoax.”  A lot of MDs have BS degrees.

PINO Joe Biden tells listeners (when he’s not tripping over his own words or feet) that “white supremacy” is the “most dangerous terrorist threat” in America.  Really?  I’ve never met a dreaded “white supremacist.”  I’ve never even seen the elusive creature from a distance!  I do know generations of Americans who grew up learning the valuable lesson that a person should be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin.  The day before yesterday, we celebrated those moral people as colorblind Americans who were creating an integrated America and a better world.  Then the Democrat Party decided that “integration” was racist and that only the forced segregation that comes from oxymoronic DEI edicts and other race-based sorting programs will do.  Those who don’t obsess over the color of another person’s skin are now deemed the worst kinds of racists, while those who glorify race over every other feature of a person’s identity are applauded for their enlightenment!  The Old Democrats fought first for slavery and then for segregation.  The New Democrats fight for welfare-dependent slavery and segregation.  Yet they congratulate themselves for somehow being on the forefront of both progress and civil rights.  What unbelievable BS!

In order to understand the enemy, I read a lot of articles from legacy media institutions (i.e., corporate vehicles for State-approved propaganda).  When you dive into the slop and dross that win Pulitzers, you’ve got to hold your nose and suspend your capacity for critical thinking.  If you can convince your brain cells to play dead for a while, you realize that the more prestigious the publication, the more likely its writers are pod people still plugged into the Matrix.

Anyway, the prestigious pod people are absolutely blown away by how spectacular Dementia Joe’s economy is and cannot understand why any American would doubt that we’re living through a golden age of splendor.  I think, “Hello, McFly!  Anybody Home?”  Have you not been inside a grocery store in Inflation Joe’s America?  Everything costs twice as much as it did before mail-in ballot fraud catapulted his senile corpse into office.  Have you not filled up a car with gasoline or paid a home energy bill lately?  The “green energy” Nazis have jacked up the cost of fuels everywhere in their insane war on hydrocarbons.  Even public transportation lackeys are feeling the pinch, as bankrupt cities that are hemorrhaging taxpayers desperately seek to keep municipal budgets afloat by doubling the price of sitting next to a urinating drunk on the subway (warning: they pinch, too). 

Everything’s gotten so expensive in Touchy-Feely-Woke-and-Woozy Joe’s America that being just plain poor — as opposed to destitute — has become a privilege!  Bidenomics means that “99 Cents Only” stores must go out of business nationwide.  Nobody can make a buck in this miserable economy.  Unless you crossed into the country illegally — then Democrats will give you more money than they provide struggling military families.  If you’re here legally, though, you’re out of luck.  When McDonald’s is selling twenty dollar “value meals,” chicken wings cost more than illegal drugs, and thrift stores are the most popular shopping spots in town, life feels a little Great Depression-y.  Ooh, but don’t tell the geniuses at The New York Times or The Washington Post.  To them, Biden Land is a magical place where middle class parents get to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet!  How dreamy…in a dystopian BS kind of tragedy!

The boneheads at The Economist are always telling me (in some hoity-toity-posh-and-snobby accent, no less) that Americans have nothing to complain about because food and energy prices are so much worse in Europe.  What kind of a-hole tells a person who’s being robbed to stop complaining because there are even worse robbers sticking it to the blokes on the other side of the pond?  I don’t find remedial comfort from the knowledge that the criminals running Old Europe might be worse than the criminals destroying the New World here at home.  I say, “Throw all the parasites out — whether they feed on the people from the banks of the Potomac, Thames, Seine, or Spree!”  The Bastille might lie in rubble, but I hear the Tower of London provides lovely lodgings this time of year.  Oh, dear.  Did I just commit a “hate crime” by gluing a few words together in a syntactically impermissible way?  How dreadfully felonious of me.  Somewhere there’s a self-hating Scot who secretly roots for Edward Longshanks over William Wallace during showings of Braveheart just itching to punish me for dabbling in free speech.  To that, I say, “Shut it, ya bampot dobber!”  Aye, what bollocky BS.

I don’t know.  Maybe it’s just me.  Maybe everything’s fine, and what I see as pervasive BS is really some imaginary MAGA bugaboo playing tricks in my head.  On the other hand, here’s a two hour and twenty-three minute video of Joe Biden — supposedly the president of the United States — struggling to string words together and form cogent thoughts.  Here’s an article about an Oregon professor who blames “climate change” on a “surplus” of “white nationalism.”  (Spoiler Alert: if we have too much of something, I guess we have to eliminate some white people.)  Here’s a Reuters article whining that “climate change” is having a harmful impact on “Indonesian Trans Sex Workers.”  Here’s a whole brouhaha on Reddit in which “trans” activists are arguing “whether they should commit mass suicide or mass genocide to accomplish their political goals.”  And here’s an NBC local news affiliate blaming New Jersey’s recent earthquake on man-made “climate change.”

Nah, I must be right on this one.  We’re neck deep in nuclear-grade BS today.



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Calm Down About Trump’s Abortion Position


Look, you’re not going to find anybody more against killing babies than me, but I don’t have a problem with what Donald Trump said the other day about abortion. I didn’t have a problem with it for the last 50 years either when that was generally the position of the Republican Party. We got rid of Roe v. Wade, a constitutional and moral atrocity, by observing that the Constitution does not say anything about abortion, that the issue should be left to the states, and that each state must decide. Well, that’s what happened. We got what we wanted. And that’s what some members of our party are mad about. They want a federal law controlling abortion. Except that’s not what we promised.

It’s hard to understand how one justifies dishonesty as a political strategy. That’s what this is. They are asking that we conduct a bait and switch. We promised that every state would decide for itself, and now it’s, “No, now we’re going to decide for you.” How do you expect people to react to that? We overturned Roe with the understanding that some states would be awesome and largely ban the barbarian practice and that other states, like my own California, would declare open season on fetuses. And that’s what has happened. But you know what? Thousands and thousands of lives have been saved. In the butchery states? No, abortion continues there. But we’ve made progress. We’ve saved lives.

We have to stop making the good the enemy of the perfect and start understanding that progress is made incrementally. The left imposed Roe v. Wade, which made a huge, horrifying leap in one fell swoop. And look what happened. It got overturned in one fell swoop.

The battle against abortion is not going to end by passing a law at the federal level. It just isn’t. First of all, it’s not clear Congress even could enact one. You know, we just threw out a ruling that said the federal government could make abortion laws. It’s unclear why anyone would think that the specific abortion laws that the Supreme Court imposed would be somehow different from the specific abortion laws that Congress would impose in terms of constitutional validity. And I’ve got to ask, where in the Constitution is the enumerated power allowing the federal government to make abortion laws? I don’t see it. I guess you could say “Commerce Clause” because the Commerce Clause has been twisted and stretched to cover pretty much everything, but now we’re doing exactly what we oppose. I guess you could make a twisted 14th Amendment argument, but that’s what Roe did, too. This isn’t just a technicality. The federal government’s powers are limited to what we’ve granted it in the Constitution, and as much as I despise abortion – and I don’t think you understand the full depth of my horror at the practice – I don’t see abortion laws in the Constitution.

Then, let’s get to the practical matters. Could we pass a law effectively banning or seriously limiting abortion? Of course, we couldn’t. Who are the 60 senators who are going to vote for that? What are their names? I know we had stupid Lindsay Graham decide to screw up the 2022 cycle by giving the Democrats the abortion issue in demanding a federal law on it. Who are the other guys who will join in? More specifically, what are the names of the 10 Democrats willing to sign on? Let me save you time. There aren’t any. It is never going to happen. So stop wasting your time fantasizing about it.

And then there’s the fact that we don’t even agree on ourselves. Even on the pro-life side, people have different views. Some approve of the common life of the mother, rape, and incest exceptions. Others don’t. And some pro-life people are willing to allow it to six or maybe a few more weeks. And yes, I understand that some pro-life people demand zero abortions ever. But that’s just not where the vast majority of Americans are. We are not going to be able to dictate to the rest of America. 

If we even make a serious effort to do this, the rest of America will resent us for it, and when I say resent us for it, I mean vote against us in November. We’ve seen abortion referendum after abortion referendum since Dobbs, and they all seem to pass. The Democrats have been beating us around the head with abortion. What they’ll do is call us liars if we try and pass an abortion law, and they have the advantage of truth because we didn’t promise this. We promised the opposite. It’s electoral poison, and there’s a lot more at stake than abortion – free speech, economic prosperity, and peace, to name just a few. But as for abortion itself, if the Democrats get the power, they’ll legalize it up to the moment that a kid gets his driver’s license. If you want to kill more kids, push for a federal abortion ban because that is a certain way of killing more kids.

The way to change abortion is to change hearts and minds one state at a time. I wish we could wave a magic wand and make this barbaric practice disappear. But I’m not a child. I understand that even things I believe in deeply are not going to just happen through the sheer power of rightness. We’ve got a lot of work to do. We can’t just wish the practice away because we accurately assess it as horribly wrong.

Is Donald Trump immoral for feeling the way he does about abortion? There are lots of pro-life people who are ticked off at him, but these people need to understand that Donald Trump, first of all, represents most Americans’ position and, second, that he was the most successful pro-life president in American history. This man has saved thousands upon thousands of lives through his judicial appointments who tossed out Roe. Trump hasn’t betrayed anybody. He just disagrees at the margins. 

Trump is looking at things realistically and, yes, politically. And he damn well better look at things politically because there’s a lot more at stake here than abortion in 2024. A lot more. We need to look at the big picture. We need to say “Yes” to our successes. And we need to do the hard work necessary to win in the future. We are not going to win by pouting or whining that we haven’t been able to skip through the constitutional processes to get what we want. Instant victory is not going to happen. And frankly, it shouldn’t happen. We should win this the right way – by changing hearts and minds because if we try any other strategy, we’re going to end up establishing a federal right to control abortion, and then the Democrats are going to have their say, and a lot more babies are going to die when there are no restrictions on abortion at all.

Be real, be smart, because the alternative is total failure.



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Wall Street Journal Embraces ‘Book Ban’ Hoax



Warning: This article contains a book excerpt with graphic sexual descriptions.

It’s news to no one that legacy media love to publish Democrats’ unsubstantiated narratives — but the latest doozy from The Wall Street Journal is no exception.

On Monday, the outlet hopped on the Democrat conspiracy train by pushing the baseless claim that conservatives are “banning” books from schools and public libraries. In its article, “Book-Ban Campaigns Hit 4,240 Titles Last Year: Here Are the Top 10 Targets,” the Journal cited figures from the neo-Marxist American Library Association (ALA), which created a list of the top 10 books “targeted” by parents concerned about their children being exposed to these works’ pornographic and otherwise age-inappropriate content.

The newspaper regurgitated and legitimized the false, leftist-manufactured “book ban” phrase numerous times throughout the piece and gave some of the objectionable authors and ALA president space to mischaracterize conservatives concerned about what their children are consuming. For instance, here’s the author (whom the Post legitimizes as “nonbinary”) of All Boys Aren’t Blue, which includes descriptions of anal sex and sexual abuse:

“Every book that I write will probably be challenged because all of my books are going to live in the wheelhouse of queerness and Blackness, and those two things have been deemed unacceptable by those who are banning books,” said Johnson, who is nonbinary.

Johnson said book challenges were attempts to “dumb down the nation” by denying people the opportunity to read about the lived experience of marginalized communities.  

The works the ALA flagged as the “most targeted” in 2023 by conservatives include pornographic content unsuitable for minors. According to the ALA report, the most contested was Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir, which contains graphic depictions of sexual acts and, according to the New York Post, glorifies trans surgeries such as double mastectomies.

One of the lines included in the book reads: “I can’t wait to have your c-ck in my mouth. I’m going to give you the blowjob of your life. Then I want you inside of me.”

The book is so sexually graphic that local Florida news stations reportedly cut their livestream when Gov. Ron DeSantis played a video highlighting its contents during a press conference last year.

Also included in ALA’s list of “targeted” works is Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan’s Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human. That book features “drawings and descriptions of masturbation, instructions for anal sex, and a guide on how to send sexually explicit text messages and images to others — with tips that include hiding birthmarks, piercings and other identifiable features,” according to the Post.

Flamer by Mike Curato — which contains depictions of underage boys “performing sex acts with each other at a summer camp” — was also included on the ALA’s top 10 list.

As my colleague David Harsanyi previously explained, contrary to Democrats’ hyperbolic rhetoric, there is no conservative-backed effort to “ban” books. There is nothing authoritarian about libraries curating their literary offerings. Moreover, books not available at public or school libraries can be purchased online with the click of a button or at retail bookstores.

What many parents and groups like Moms for Liberty are advocating for is the removal of books containing sexually explicit and other inappropriate content from libraries accessible to small children. There is no defensible reason why minors should be exposed to the aforementioned materials — especially without parental consent.

But according to so-called “news” organizations like the Journal, maintaining the innocence of children is no different than an angry mob burning books in a public square.



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The Washington Post Is More Dangerous Than So-Called Russian Propaganda

WaPo says Russian ‘propaganda’ is eroding support for Ukraine. Apparently, the Post’s own propaganda is the only type allowed.



An unintentionally hilarious “EXCLUSIVE” in The Washington Post this week claimed that Russian “propaganda” is both creating and exacerbating opposition among Republicans to dumping more money into the war in Ukraine.

And next week: The dark foreign influence campaign that has men hating Amy Schumer…

Apparently, the only reason a plurality of Americans — 31 percent, according to Pew Research — feels we’ve financially shackled ourselves a little too tightly to Ukraine, sinking hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into a conflict we have no way to account for, is that Russia said so.

“Russia has been ramping up its propaganda operations,” the Post reported Monday, “as part of a second front that current and former senior Western officials said has become almost as important for Moscow as the military campaign in Ukraine — especially as congressional approval for further aid has become critical for Kyiv’s ability to continue defending itself.”

An example of such allegedly poisonous “propaganda” was included at the very top: a fake American citizen created by a Russian communications firm who would somewhere be cited (presumably on social media) professing he “doesn’t support the military aid that the U.S. is giving Ukraine and considers that the money should be spent defending America’s borders and not Ukraine’s. He sees that Biden’s policies are leading the U.S. toward collapse.”

Raise your hand if you needed someone, real or fake, to tell you the southern border has collapsed as a direct consequence of the president’s policies, and everything else has gone to hell for the same reasons.

As dumb and gullible as the media believe middle-class Americans are, nobody goes to the grocery store or the gas station right now and finishes up saying, “All my money is gone, but I really can’t wait to send another $20 billion to Ukraine.” Likewise, nobody sees the shocking images of the hordes of foreign men bum-rushing their way through border agents and thinks, “Hey, that’s neat!”

The Post nonetheless referred darkly to Russia’s “increasingly sophisticated strategy … to interfere in the U.S. political system” by way of disseminating messages. The intent, the Post said, is to “cultivate an environment in which ‘Americans are not ready to sacrifice their well-being for the sake of the conflict in Ukraine’…” (I mean, yeah. I’m not. But the Post and the rest of establishment Washington are ready to do it for you!) The elaborate Russian scheme is said to include “Kremlin-linked political strategists and trolls [who] have written thousands of fabricated news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions.”

If Russians are spending a single dollar with the hopes of instigating “racial tensions” in America, someone really needs to tell them to save their money. We’ve already got MSNBC and The Washington Post to do that for us. As for the rest, maybe Democrats can just tell Biden to be a better president. Turning off the internet won’t fix the border or put more money in my account. And I can promise it’s not some marvel of Russian geopolitical ingenuity that Americans aren’t as sexually aroused as Max Boot at the thought of Ukraine receiving more funds. The war is two years old with no end in sight, and its continuation serves no benefit to us normal Americans here.

We’re not exactly living in luxury at the moment. Why would anyone feel the urgency to prioritize the problems of Eastern Europe when Washington won’t fix the fundamental ones we have on our own?

The “Russian propaganda” nonsense is just as big a threat in 2024 as it was in 2016, which, the Post claims, is when the Russian government “deployed a network of trolls — creators of fake social media accounts — to spread disinformation boosting the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and seeking to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, including stories using material hacked from the Clinton campaign.” (Notice how the Post conflates real material with “disinformation” because it hurt the media’s preferred candidate.)

[Here’s Why I Didn’t Fall For The Russia-Trump Conspiracy]

It was a ridiculous claim in 2016, and it’s a ridiculous claim now. Recall the diabolically genius ways Democrats and the media say Russians spread “disinformation” back then. One meme during the election promoted by the account “Army of Jesus” depicted Jesus Christ arm-wrestling Satan and was captioned, “Satan: If I win, Clinton wins! Jesus: Not if I can help it!”

Another ad said, “Stop Trump! Stop racism!”

A third personal favorite featured an illustration of then-Democrat candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders wearing only a Speedo and flexing for gay rights.

It’s worth noting that Democrats lied through their teeth about accounts having originated from hostile actors in Russia, as the “Twitter Files” showed. Moroeover, not a single vote was demonstrably swayed by any of it, and it’s absurd to think Americans aren’t passionately devoted to Ukraine purely because they’ve been manipulated by deceitful propaganda. 

If only changing public opinion on the matter was so simple, the Post might have been more successful in its own pro-Ukraine propaganda campaign, which it wages at the extreme peril of setting the U.S. and our European allies in an existential conflict with a nuclear power.

Since the conflict began, the Post has published countless articles and columns either romanticizing the conflict as a fight for “democracy” (Ukraine has suspended elections, and President Volodymyr Zelensky closed down information outlets critical of his leadership even before the war) or suggesting that Russia was on the cusp of defeat.

“Ukraine is winning the information war,” The Washington Post, March 1, 2022.

“Is Russia losing the war?” The Washington Post, March 14, 2022. 

“Putin, unaccustomed to losing, is increasingly isolated as war falters,” The Washington Post, Dec. 30, 2022.

“Pressing for elections now would weaken Ukrainian democracy,” The Washington Post, Oct. 1, 2023.

“Ukraine remains stronger than you might think,” The Washington Post, Feb. 21, 2024.

Maybe the Post should try a meme with Zelensky in a Speedo.



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NPR Exposed: Insider Tells All About 'News' Outlet's Incredible Bias, Various Story Cover-Ups


Bonchie reporting for RedState 

A 25-year veteran at NPR has come forward to offer details of just how far the once-respected organization has fallen. Uri Berliner, who appears to be still employed there, released a self-penned article on Tuesday going through the extreme bias and politicized censorship that has destroyed the "news" outlet's credibility over the last several years. 

Left-Wing NPR Sets Up a 'Disinformation Team'

Perhaps the most stunning example came during the 2020 election, in which NPR first refused to report on the Hunter Biden laptop at all, putting out the following statement.

“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.”

In April of 2021, NPR finally decided to cover the story, but it did so with a tortured defense of Hunter Biden, including making the outright false claim that the laptop "was discredited by U.S. intelligence and independent investigations by news organizations."

NPR Attempts to Fluff Hunter Biden

As I noted in my write-up at the time, there was no evidence that the U.S. intelligence apparatus discredited the laptop nor did any independent investigations by news organizations (and we now have indisputable proof of its authenticity). That line appeared to be made up out of whole cloth, with NPR offering a "correction" the next day. Still, it offered a window into the non-existent reporting standards and abject politicization that had engulfed the outlet's structure. 

In his writings on the matter, Berliner exposed that NPR knew the story was true but chose to bury it because it might "help Trump."

But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump. 

It wasn't just the Hunter Biden saga that led to NPR throwing journalistic integrity into the trash, though. Berliner also explained how "Russian collusion" became an obsession among its reporters and editors, with Rep. Adam Schiff being a primary source for their coverage. 

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff. 

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming. 

No evidence of Russian collusion was ever provided by Schiff, who spent years spreading falsehoods on the matter while suffering no real consequences. Yet, as Berliner points out, once the Mueller report was released, discrediting the California congressman's claims, NPR barely covered it. They simply moved on to the next anti-Republican cover-up of the truth.

NPR's far-left posture didn't change during the COVID-19 pandemic either. On the contrary, it was one of the primary outlets proclaiming that the lab leak theory, now all but confirmed, had been "debunked." 

The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists. 

But that wasn’t the case.

Again and again, NPR chose to wedge the pro-Democrat viewpoint into its news coverage. It did not do so out of laziness or error. It did so on purpose to try to influence American politics and elections. Berliner provides a further example in NPR's coverage of the George Floyd riots. 

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

(...)

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too. 

So how did NPR get to a place where it went from a center-left outlet trusted and respected by most Americans (yes, there was a time when that was true) to the deranged group of activists it is today? One look at who makes up the newsroom provides the answer.

In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.

Keep in mind that NPR still receives significant federal funding from various direct and indirect government means. Taxpayers might as well be funding the Daily Kos. Berliner coming forward provides evidence of what has been suspected for a long time: There is no daylight anymore between NPR and the most rabidly left-wing outlets in existence.



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The West Doesn’t Understand How Russia Fights Wars

Dmitry Adamsky’s book, The Russian Way of Deterrence, delves into Russia’s unique cultural views on military strategy that help explain the conflict in Ukraine.



Given the catastrophic failure of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine — through which Moscow has lost territory it previously controlled, suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, and become an unparalleled pariah on the world stage — we can be forgiven for asking: What the hell were the Russians thinking?

In The Russian Way of Deterrence: Strategic Culture, Coercion, and War, Dmitry Adamsky’s engaging and tightly-argued precis on Russian strategy, we can discern the emergence of the historical, cultural, and political forces that have characterized Moscow’s military doctrine for decades — and that seem to explain its behavior in Ukraine.

A Russophone professor of strategy and international relations in both Israel and Lithuania, Adamsky defines Russian deterrence much more broadly than its traditional Western analog. In his telling — the results of painstaking research into Russian military circulars, official records, and other definitive sources — it encompasses “employing threats, sometimes accompanied by limited use of force, to maintain the status quo, change it, shape the strategic environment within which the interaction occurs, prevent escalation, or de-escalate.”

Even more interesting is how the Russian approach is derived. “The main argument of this book,” Adamsky proclaims, “is that cultural and ideational factors account for the peculiarities of the Russian approach.” Specifically, Russia’s strategic culture, military customs, intelligence traditions, and national mentality condition the country’s warfighting posture, which Adamsky colorfully labels “deterrence a la Russe.”

One key difference between Russian and Western notions of deterrence is etymological. Adamsky observes that the English term “deterrence” derives from “terror” or fear and “implies the infliction of apprehension to shape an adversary’s choices and actions.” By contrast, the Russian equivalent, sderzhivanie, connotes restraining or containing a person, a group, or a force straining to change the status quo. Accordingly, deterrence, to Russians, entails an action, specifically the “concrete engagement of the competitor.” (The Russian language also boasts the word ustrashenie, or intimidation, which, like “deterrence,” derives from the word “terror,” but this term is used only in a negative sense when describing what Russia’s enemies seek to do to her.)

Then, too, Russian deterrence fundamentally entails a “cross-domain” approach that employs all available tools, including conventional, nonconventional, and subconventional military means, as well as diplomacy and information warfare. With respect to the latter, while Western strategists generally distinguish between cognitive-psychological tactics and digital-technological capabilities, deterrence a la Russe merges these “forms of influence under one roof.” Adamsky notes how, during the Russian engagement in Syria in the early 2010s, Moscow combined these tactics in navigating — and shaping — the vicissitudes of inter-confessional conflict fomented by its ally, the Syrian autocrat Bashar Assad.

So what explains these differences?

Pointing to cultural, ideational, and historical factors, Adamsky accentuates certain “systemic breakdowns” characteristic of Russian culture, such as recklessness, negligence, and carelessness, that have accounted for battlefield catastrophes. In addition, Moscow’s “culture of war tends to emphasize morale and psychological-cognitive factors over material-technological ones” to such an extent that it tends to deploy “a peculiar metaphysics about overcoming the enemy qualitatively, morally.” In the absence of a technological edge, Russians have typically pressed their advantage by emphasizing martial values of endurance, patience, and heroism.

Ideationally, Russia has traditionally relied on “reflexive control,” Adamsky’s term for “a complex of measures that forces the adversary to act according to a false picture of reality in a predictable way, favorable to the initiator of the effort, and seemingly benign to the target.” Reflexive control seeks to subtly and undetectably manipulate the adversary’s very sense of reality, a sort of Russian version of gaslighting. Its cousin, maskirovka, or military cunningness, incorporates “active measures,” or affirmative, generally clandestine, but nonviolent measures, to influence state actors to grave detriment, including by sowing discord among citizens.

And throughout Russian and Soviet history, certain traditional concepts proliferated and persisted. These included “reasonable sufficiency,” or the smallest amount of military investment that would permit the USSR to maintain rough parity with its Western rivals — the military equivalent of the term “minimally viable product” used in high-tech. This notion, consistent with the typical Russian inferiority in materiel, required military and political leaders to carefully calibrate resources for the purposes they served, to maximize bang for the ruble. The related idea of “correlation of forces and means” sought to ensure a balance of geopolitical power, similar to the Western “realist” school of international relations.

With this background, the logic of Putin’s ill-fated Ukrainian invasion begins to emerge.

First, Moscow believed, prior to the war, that its comprehensive “coercive signaling” across all platforms — informational, diplomatic, and military — would convey to the West, without firing a single shot, its determination to change the status quo among NATO, Ukraine, and Russia and reshape the post-Cold War order. But, of course, Putin miscalculated, badly.

“Moscow’s coercive signaling achieved the opposite results,” Adamsky writes. “Not only did it push Kyiv closer to Brussels and Washington; it also prompted NATO to beef up its presence along the Russian borders, exercise regularly on a scale unseen since the Cold War, and invest in countermeasuring Russia all across its strategic periphery.”

Then, too, the emphasis Moscow has placed on spiritual values like endurance and heroism, including what Adamsky labels “the traditional Russian glorification of ‘death on military duty,’” provides insight into how Putin continues to throw recruits into the abattoir in the Donbas, notwithstanding the deaths of more than 100,000 of them in the last two years alone.

In addition, the “systemic breakdowns” afflicting the implementation of Russian doctrine explains many of the signal failures in Ukraine.

Finally, these characteristics also shed light on Moscow’s nuclear saber-rattling during the conflict. Adamsky outlines the emerging doctrine of “Russian nuclear orthodoxy,” or a “nexus between the Orthodox Church and the nuclear forces.” Putin has coopted much of the former and has fused it with the latter in an effort to enforce traditional values and back them with the ultimate threat. 

Adamsky’s prose occasionally suffers from an overreliance on academic jargon and acronyms employed by area specialists but unfamiliar to the general reader. The book would also benefit from a more detailed exposition of examples, which abound in the rich and storied history of Russia.

But The Russian Way of Deterrence carefully plumbs the minds, hearts, and souls of Russian military strategists and provides sobering advice for those who would counter them.



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