Commentary: The Evolving Style Sheets of Big Media Institutionalize Political Bias

Many publications provide their writers with “style sheets,” a list of dos and don’ts with respect to things like diction, punctuation, grammar, and linguistic etiquette. My personal list of “dos” includes the Oxford comma (apples, oranges, and pears: that last comma is requisite) and, in most cases, using the singular masculine pronoun after collective nouns like “everyone” and “someone” (e.g., “Everyone likes to have his [not ‘their’] own way”).

Style sheet prescriptions (and proscriptions) can be more elaborate, and can affect substantive as well as stylistic matters. Over the last year or so, I have noticed an innovation, at once stylistic and substantive, that has taken root throughout the regime media. It is this: whenever referring to Donald Trump and the 2020 presidential election, be sure to insert editorial comments to the effect that any concerns about the fairness of that election are “baseless” or the result of “lies.”

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Wyoming GOP Votes to No Longer Recognize Liz Cheney as a Republican

On Saturday, a meeting of the Wyoming Republican Party led to the passage of a resolution expelling Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from the party and no longer recognizing her as a member, as reported by CNN.

The resolution was passed by the Wyoming GOP Central Committee, by a vote of 31 to 29. Although the measure does not actually wield any direct power over Cheney, it marks the latest symbolic blow to the incumbent representative as a result of her frequent anti-Trump statements, which have all but eroded her popular support in her own state.

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Commentary: Democrats Repeat the Mistakes of 2016

Donald Trump waving

As we get to the midpoint between the last presidential election and next year’s midterms, all political sides are expending extraordinary effort to ignore the 900-pound gorilla in the formerly smoke-filled room of American politics. This, of course, is Donald Trump.

The Democrats are still outwardly pretending Trump has gone and that his support has evaporated. They also pretend they can hobble him with vexatious litigation and, if necessary, destroy him again by raising the Trump-hate media smear campaign back to ear-splitting levels.

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Judge in Case of Anti-Trump Mudslinger is Married to Attorney for Ex-FBI Lawyer Lisa Page

FBI logo outside of building

Last week, the special counsel appointed to oversee the probe into the FBI’s investigation of former president Donald Trump indicted Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Republicans and Trump allies are optimistic about the latest development in John Durham’s investigation but are still concerned that Attorney General Merrick Garland might halt the investigation to protect allies and even the president himself.

FBI notes appear to suggest that as vice president, Joe Biden played a role in the Democratic Party project to smear Trump as a Russian asset by raising the obscure, disused, 18th century statute the Logan Act as a possible vehicle for prosecuting Michael Flynn for speaking with the Russian ambassador to Washington — even after FBI case agents had cleared Trump’s incoming national security adviser of wrongdoing.

And now Republicans are raising concerns that the judge appointed to the Sussmann case has too many conflicts of interest to preside over it fairly.

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Former Speaker John Boehner Backs House Republican Under Threat from Pro-Trump Primary Challenger

One of the scant few House Republicans who voted to impeach President Donald Trump last year is receiving backing from former Speaker of the House John Boehner ahead of a primary challenge from a pro-Trump candidate.

Boehner next week will appear at a Zoom fundraiser for Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, according to Politico. Gonzalez, who is up for reelection in 2022, was among the 10 Republicans in the House to vote to impeach Trump on charges of having “incited” the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

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Colleges Investigate Community Members for Attending Pro-Trump Protest

College community members are subjects of internal and even federal probes for their presence at “Stop the Steal” protests on Jan. 6.

It’s largely unclear if the identified participants committed acts of violence at the U.S. Capitol or simply showed up to peacefully protest the Senate’s confirmation of Electoral College votes.

Yet their alleged attendance – and in one case, online rhetoric – was enough to spawn investigations by their colleges and, in another case, the feds.

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New Evidence Implicates FBI Higher-Ups in Dishonesty of Anti-Trump Lawyer

For the past year, defenders of the FBI have consistently downplayed the significance of an FBI staff lawyer falsifying evidence in the government’s investigation into Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia. They argue Kevin Clinesmith’s crime of altering a CIA document to obscure the fact that former Trump campaign aide Carter Page worked for U.S., not Russian, intelligence was a rare lapse in judgment by an overworked bureaucrat. It was not, his apologists say, part of any broader conspiracy to conceal exculpatory information from surveillance court judges, who never learned of Page’s history with the CIA before approving FBI warrants to wiretap him as a suspected Russian agent.

But such explanations are challenged by new revelations from court papers filed in the case, which some civil libertarians call the most egregious violation and abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) since it was enacted more than 40 years ago.

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Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: A Time of Chaos Upon Chaos Atop Chaos

America will weather its current hysterias.

But the tensions and furor are reminiscent of the last generations of the Roman Republic. In its last century, Romans began to adjudicate politics by obsequious partisan town criers (their version of our media), mass demonstrations, and freelance street gangs. Looters, arsonists, and demonstrators did pretty much as they pleased in the streets of Rome without fear of legal consequences.

In our time, the media has now vanished – kaput, no more, ended.

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Black Man Goes on Anti-Trump Rampage in California, Punches Several Women, Including an 84-Year-Old

A 33-year-old black man went on an anti-Trump rampage in Aliso Viejo, California, Wednesday evening, allegedly assaulting several females—including an 84-year-old woman—during a Trump rally.

One woman was reportedly hospitalized with a neck injury. The elderly woman was left battered and bruised by the attack.

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Details Obtained in Roger Stone Juror Tomeka Hart’s Jury Questionnaire Appear to Contradict Public Statements She Made on Twitter

Tomeka Hart

The lead juror at Roger Stone’s trial said in a written questionnaire for prospective jurors that she was “not sure” whether she posted online about the Russia investigation or Stone, and that she “may have shared an article” on social media on the topics, according to a portion of the document reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

But Tomeka Hart’s Twitter feed shows that she indeed posted multiple times about the Russia probe and at least once about Stone, who was sentenced on Thursday to 40 months in prison in a case that stemmed from the special counsel’s investigation.

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Commentary: Anti-Trump Fraternity and NeverTrump Sorority Collude in Impeachment Scam

How stupid does the anti-Trump fraternity think the American people are? By “anti-Trump fraternity” I mean not only the increasingly frantic Democrats who, like Belshazzar at that memorable dinner party many years back, can see the writing ever more clearly on the wall for 2020, but also the NeverTrump sorority who just cannot get over the fact that someone was elected president of the United States without their permission, indeed, over their explicit objections. How dare they!

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Commentary: Tedious, Entitled, Ignoble and Mad – the Anti-Trump Circus Turns Four Years Old

by Victor Davis Hanson   We are now in the fourth year of an anti-Trump mania, and about reaching the point of caricature. The Left should have learned something after the failed celebrity appeal to undermine the Electoral College, the initial articles of impeachment, the empty invocations of the Logan…

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Commentary: Right-Wing Intellectuals Hate Trump for Smashing Their Pretensions

Max Boot

by Deion Kathawa   More than two years into President Trump’s historic presidency, it behooves us to think more deeply about a persistent sticking point in the political life of the nation: Why do (most) right-wing intellectuals loathe him? This kind of nearly unified opposition cries out for explanation. After…

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Roger Kimball Commentary: Burying the Dead With Bile-Filled Histrionics

military funeral

by Roger Kimball   The big news last week revolved around the funerals of a 1960s pop singer and an unreliable Republican senator with a cult following among masochistic conservatives and cynical leftists eager to capitalize on his capacity to spread dissension among his nominal allies. I suppose the exploitation…

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Bredesen Fundraiser Features Anti-Trumper Who Condemns Christians That Support the President

Phil Bredesen, Jason Isbell, Ben Folds

Despite his claims to be a different kind of Democrat who will work with President Donald Trump when it helps Tennessee and oppose the partisanship that divides Washington DC along political lines, Phil Bredesen continues to align himself with the most partisan and extremist elements of the Democratic Party. Bredesen…

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Prosecutors: Reality Winner Faces ‘Longest’ Sentence Ever Imposed For Media Leak

Reality Winner, NSA

by Chuck Ross   Former National Security Agency contractor Reality Winner’s 63-month prison sentence will be the “longest” ever served by a federal employee in a case involving leaks to the media, prosecutors said Tuesday. Winner, who worked for an NSA contractor based in Augusta, Georgia, pleaded guilty in June…

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