Nazi salutes
Members of the press would have you believe Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who defended free speech rights during a recent congressional hearing, is a possible Nazi sympathizer.
It’s a lie.
On Oct. 27, Cruz pushed Attorney General Merrick Garland to defend the Justice Department’s decision to mobilize the federal law enforcement apparatus against school board protesters. Specifically, Cruz asked Garland to explain which “threats” and “acts of violence” directed at school administrators necessitate federal intervention. Then, pointing specifically to the National School Boards Association’s since-withdrawn Sept. 29 letter to the White House, which it wrote in coordination with Biden administration staffers and which Garland claims is the impetus for the federal task force to investigate school protests, Cruz ticked through the list provided by the association detailing recent confrontations between parents and board members.
Among the examples included in the letter is an Aug. 17 incident in which an angry parent tossed school board officials a sarcastic Nazi “Sieg Heil,” clearly conveying his dissatisfaction with a group he believes has behaved in a fascistic manner.
Like the angry parent, Cruz’s point was clear: Does a protester making a sarcastic Nazi salute justify the decision to mobilize federal law enforcement agencies against parents who oppose school mask mandates and racialist and hypersexual curricula? After all, the salute, which was done in protest and not in earnest, is protected speech. Garland concurred. It is protected speech under the First Amendment, the attorney general said.
However, members of the press pounced, focusing exclusively on Cruz’s comments to suggest the GOP senator is a possible Nazi sympathizer.
“Ted Cruz defends parents doing Nazi salutes at school board meetings,” the Daily Beast reported.
CNN reported, “Ted Cruz defends parent’s use of Nazi salute.”
“Cruz’s home state has seen several recent public displays of anti-Semitism,” the Washington Post warned in its write-up of the congressional hearing.
If you’re wondering who is responsible for this particularly dishonest news cycle, look no further than Vox’s Aaron Rupar. He started all of this by tweeting a video from the hearing with the accompanying caption, “Ted Cruz defends Nazi salutes at school board meetings.”
The press operate in an echo chamber, where all that is required for an erroneous narrative to take hold, promoted throughout the country by the most powerful newsrooms, is a single so-called journalist alleging a thing that is clearly not true.
The devout Biden
If you have to remind everyone repeatedly that a man is a “devout,” he probably isn’t.
Meet President Joe Biden, “devout” Catholic.
“Devout Roman Catholic Joe Biden meets Pope Francis in the Vatican at a time when the U.S. president is under pressure from conservatives in the Church for his conflicted position in the dispute over abortion rights,” Reuters reported on Oct. 27.
It’s not enough to say Biden is a Catholic. No, one must emphasize he is a “devout Catholic.” It’s obvious why this specific descriptor is tucked in there: It’s to counteract the disparity between Biden’s steadfast support for abortion and the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on the matter, which is that abortion is a grave moral evil and that the punishment for either procuring or participating in one is automatic excommunication, also referred to as “excommunication latae sententiae.”
Former Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is a practicing Catholic. Yet, according to a LexisNexis search, there are no similar news headlines denoting he is a “devout” Catholic. There is, however, a 2012 New Yorker article on Biden and Ryan, both self-professed Catholics, whose headline read, “The abortion debate: Biden’s faith, Ryan’s extremism.”
In Reuters’s defense, it isn’t the only major newsroom to slip such qualifiers into its reporting to soften what is an obvious contradiction between Biden’s politics and Catholic doctrine. Everyone is doing it.
“Biden, deeply Catholic president, finds himself at odds with many U.S. bishops,” the Washington Post reported in June in an article that — you guessed it — sought to reconcile Biden’s support for abortion with the Catholic teaching.
Agence France-Presse in January also published a headline that claimed, “A devout Catholic, Biden wears his faith on his sleeve.”
“Trump claims Joe Biden, a devout Catholic, wants to ‘hurt God,’” CNN reported in an on-air headline in August 2020.
The Biden White House likewise leverages the president’s alleged piety as a shield against criticisms of his overzealous support for abortion, maintaining he is not just a Catholic but also a “devout” one.
The media keep telling us the president is a “devout Catholic.” Maybe he should start acting like one.
The bad kind of opinion article
The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 27 published a letter to the editor authored by former President Donald Trump.
In the letter, the former chief executive alleged, again, that the 2020 presidential election was fixed in President Joe Biden’s favor.
“The election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured out,” Trump wrote. “This is why Democrats and the Fake News Media do not want a full forensic audit” of states such as Pennsylvania.
Members of the press responded with fury and disgust, criticizing the Wall Street Journal’s decision to publish a letter authored by the 45th president.
“Newspapers don’t exist so that powerful people can publish whatever lies they want. In fact, that may be one of the very opposite reasons newspapers exist,” the Daily Beast’s Matt Fuller said.
MSNBC legal analyst Jill Wine-Banks said, “Makes you wonder if freedom of the press needs some amending?”
At CNN, anchor Jake Tapper, who often hosts professional election truther and failed Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, mocked the Wall Street Journal, saying, “Coming soon to the WSJ letters to the editor: ‘The moon landing was faked,’ by that dude [Buzz Aldrin] punched in the face.”
In February 2020, the New York Times published an opinion article authored by Taliban deputy leader and suspected terrorist Sirajuddin Haqqani. The op-ed includes several falsehoods, including the damnable lie that the Taliban “did not choose [their] war with the foreign coalition led by the United States. We were forced to defend ourselves.”
Later, in April of the same year, CNN published a report copying almost word for word a Chinese Communist Party press release, praising the People’s Liberation Army Navy for supposedly containing the coronavirus while highlighting the U.S. Navy’s alleged failure to do likewise.
Then, in November 2020, the New York Times published an opinion article authored by a high-ranking Chinese government official, who defended the many human rights cases of abuse perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party, including literal genocide.
Curiously, neither the pro-Taliban nor the pro-Chinese articles inspired denunciations or outrage similar to what the corporate journalist class unleashed following the Wall Street Journal’s decision to publish Trump’s letter to the editor.
Yeah, publishing propaganda in support of genocidal regimes and murderous terrorist cells is one thing, but publishing the former president is a bridge too far!
