Links - 14th January 2026 (2 - US Media [including Scientific American])

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "The average man is stronger than 99.9% of women.  https://sciencedirect.com/science/articl"
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: "The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports."
Costs and benefits of fat-free muscle mass in men: relationship to mating success, dietary requirements, and native immunity - "The mean effect size for these sex differences in total and upper body muscle mass and strength is about 3, which indicates less than 10% overlap between the male and female distributions, with 99.9% of females falling below the male mean. An effect size of this magnitude also means that sex—a single dichotomous variable—explains roughly 70% of the variance in muscle mass and upper body strength in humans. The sex difference in upper-body muscle mass in humans is similar in magnitude to the sex difference in lean body mass in gorillas, the most sexually dimorphic primate (Zihlman & McFarland, 2000)."

Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ on X - "For just the second time in its 179-year history, Scientific American is endorsing a candidate for president of the United States: Kamala Harris."
Enguerrand VII de Coucy on X - "The other time was 4 years ago, which tends to imply that the current editor Laura Helmuth has broken with an extremely old and well established tradition of not wading Scientific American into politics. The Scientific American that was about science is dead"
wanye on X - ""For just the second time in its 179-year history" is meant to imply that this is something they rarely do, when the truth is that the first time was last election and it's something they just started doing. Speaks to a fundamental commitment to deception and dishonesty."

Thread by @martianwyrdlord on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "How did a formerly respectable, once excellent publication focusing on high quality popularization of cutting edge scientific research turn into a cut rate political rag?  Forget about the masthead. Let's look at the people hiding behind it.  First up: the editor in chief, Laura Helmuth.  Helmuth is actually a scientist (PhD cognitive neuroscience), although she prefers to be known as a Woman In Science. From her bio, "She speaks frequently on ... ways to use social media effectively and fight misinformation."
Next up, the managing editor Jeanna Bryer.  Bryer has an English BA, an MSc in biogeochemistry, and a graduate degree in journalism. Not really a scientist, though apparently she did some wetland conservation work.  "She is a firm believer that science is for everyone". Does 'everyone' include Trump voters? Rhetorical.  Yikes, that haircut though. Just screams 'bitter middle aged shrew with penis envy'.
Next up, senior news reporter Meghan Bartels. From her bio she doesn't seem to have any actual scientific training - she's worked exclusively as a "science reporter" and has master's in journalism.  This is a face that despises ethics in gaming journalism.
Next we have Sunya Bhutta, the "Chief Audience Engagement Editor", which sounds like she runs social media or something, and is in fact precisely that. Once again she has absolutely no scientific training - she's an English BA, which appears to be her highest qualification.  WYB?
The first male we find is Lee Billings, senior editor for space/physics. Billings doesn't appear to be a scientist either (journalism degree), but the American Institute of Physics gave him an award for a book he wrote about astrobiology, so there's that.  This face is screaming to be soyjaked.
The senior graphics editor is another middle aged woman, Jen Christiansen. The problem glasses and chainsaw haircut immediately inform you that she has Strong Opinions on politics, and that she will take every opportunity to inform you about those opinions, despite it being wholly unnecessary as a glance at her is sufficient to determine what those opinions are.  Once again, no actual scientific training. Her job is to make the graphs look pretty.
Jeffery DelViscio is the Chief Multimedia Editor. He's a former NYT reporter, but does actually have some scientific experience, having worked on an oceanographic research vessel.  As an aside, it really jumps out that what small amount of scientific training the editors have seems to be top-heavy with climatology-adjacent fields. I wonder why that might be.
Arminda Downey-Mavromatis is the Associate Engagement Editor, i.e. the social media intern. There's an even chance she wrote the tweet the OP QT'd. Hi, Arminda!  To her credit, she has a BA (not a BSc?) in biochemistry, but seems to have worked exclusively in publishing.
This smarmy-looking character, straight out of central casting for "middle management", is Mark Fischetti, Senior Editor, Sustainability. "Sustainability" is apparently a scientific field now.  He does, however, have a physics degree - the first hard scientist in the pressroom - and has a pretty impressive publication record, having co-authored a book with Tim Berners-Lee.  That he isn't the editor in chief is remarkable, until you consider the politics, which he certainly supports. Though I can't help but wonder how he feels about not being editor in chief because of his chromosal disability (XY, yuck).
There are dozens more in the pressroom to get through, but the point has already been made.  Scientific American isn't Scientific American. It's a skinsuit being worn by a cabal of overpromoted head girls and their housebroken soyboys, for whom science is only interesting insofar as it can be used to bolster propaganda imperatives for their side's political goals - "sustainability", "equity", and so on. If those goals require "science" to be redefined as "supporting a cackling social-climbing prostitute with the verbal IQ of a parakeet", then that's what The Science means.  Science journalism is desperately in need of a Gamergate.
There are 28 individuals listed in the SciAm pressroom. Of these, 17 are women, 10 are men, and 1 is a "they".  Ctl-F 'physics' yields 3 with physics degrees, of whom 1 has a PhD.  Ctl-F 'Ph.D.' yields a whole 3 hits."

FischerKing on X - "The downfall of popular science magazines into political rags is really depressing. Something like Scientific American used to be a bridge between real scientists and the reasonably intelligent layman. It opened a space so the dentist or lawyer knew roughly what the physicist was doing.   That link is broken now thanks to woke losers polluting the pages with race Marxism and other delusions."

Dr Adam Rutherford on X - "Scientific American endorse Harris. Which is good and obviously a pro-evidenced based and scientific stance. Cue: all the data bros going  eeeuuuhh science isn’t political and meeeeeh science shouldn’t take sides waaaah."
Porkchop Express on X - "It’s the exact same scientists that told you that suspecting that corona might have emerged from very advanced gain-of-function research being conducted in China was… racist. Scientists might be intelligent, but not in ways that are practical."

Gurwinder on X - "If you really care about evidence-based science, know that the evidence says that not only do political endorsements by science magazines not sway people, but they actually cause people to lose trust in the magazine and in scientists generally."
Political endorsements can affect scientific credibility
Clear proof that those who don't Trust The Science are Ignorant Deplorables

Scientific American Article Claims There’s No Difference Between Male, Female Athletes - " The once-respected publication Scientific American has published a paragraph that is so woke and filled with real disinformation regarding biology that it must be considered for addition to this list.  The November issue featured “The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong,” by Cara Ocobock and Sarah Lacy.  In this piece, the authors examine the example of Sophie Power, who, in 2018, ran the 105-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc while breastfeeding her baby at rest stations. They attribute her endurance to estrogen.  Then Ocobock and Lacy make this claim, which is perhaps the most woke paragraph in the history of pseudoscience…yet:
'    “The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.”      As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best.      Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters at women’s events because of the belief they will make women “artificially faster”, as though the women were not doing the actual running themselves.'
I will simply note that the use of the word “inequity” here ties this rubbish to the equity agenda infiltrating scientific fields. But I digress.  In reality, serious scientists agree that men have many physical differences in height, muscle mass, upper-body strength, and other factors that boost their performance over women. Men have 25-40% more muscle mass than women, thanks to testosterone... research shows that men handle competition-related stress better, too."

The Heretical Liberal 🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈 on X - ""There are no biological differences between men and women that account for the universal trend of male athletes outperforming female athletes in just about every single athletic sport/event that exists. Its actually because men aren't allowed to be pacesetters in women's endurance races"
This absolute woke idiocy from @sciam doesn't even require a rebuttal, it rebuts itself. Do they have anybody with a scientific background at Sci Am anymore, or is it all trans zealots now?
@sciam : "there is no differences in the athletic capability of men and women"
@sciam  , the very next sentence: "men can't be pacesetters in women's events because they run faster than women" 🤦🏼‍♂️🤡
How is this trash magazine still in business?"

Jonatan Pallesen on X - "Hard competition, but this may be the worst paragraph of all time in "Scientific American".  Here is how I think it happened:  The author of this article was predisposed to thinking that there are no biological differences.   Then she read this thing about pacesetters, in which it said that using male pacesetters would make women 'artifically faster'. She took this to mean that there is a sort of conspiracy to make women not run as fast as they can.  She could have considered that pacesetters only run the first part of the race, and that if the pace is set too high here, the runners will run out of energy later on. But she didn't consider that, because she was excited to see evidence for what she wanted to believe.  Probably she used this argument a number of times on her colleagues, with the punchline "as though women were not actually doing the running themselves", to great success. What a silly assumption, haha.
Another contender is not thinking the normal distribution is a real phenomenon"

Emil O W Kirkegaard on X - "Reposting because it's so funny. Hit piece on E. O. Wilson in Scientific American, talks about how normal distributions assume there are default humans. In fact, they do the exact opposite, implying there is a variety of humans. The linked source for the claim is an article by the author herself. In true schizoposting fashion, the article contains neither the word normal nor the word Guassian, thus having nothing to do with the claim it is cited for. All of her work is of the same type, African tribalism."
The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson | Scientific American - "the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against"
Demolishing the Myth of the Default Human That Is Killing Black Mothers

Meme - Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil: "This is my nomination for peak Scientific American."
"Here's What the 'Manosphere' Gets Wrong about Cuckoldry. In online forums the term "cuck" has become synonymous with "sucker" and "loser." But this use distorts its history and meaning, creating a baseless moral panic that harms both women and science"

Meme - Colin Wright @SwipeWright: "We are at a peculiar moment where newspapers are retreating from taking official political stances to preserve their credibility, while scientific publications continue torching theirs by adopting political positions. *Washington Post not endorsing anyone as per their roots, Scientific American endorsing Kamala Harris*"

Michael Shermer on X - "Reminder of how far @sciam has fallen: “Inequity between male & female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.” So Serena Williams could beat Roger Federer but for...?"

Meme - Kevin Bass PhD MS @kevinnbass: "Ladies and gentlemen, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American"
Laura Helmuth @laurahelmuth.bsky.social: "I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists
Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high- school classmates are celebrating early results because fuck them to the moon and back
Every four years I remember why I left Indiana (where I grew up) and remember why I respect the people who stayed and are trying to make it less racist and sexist. The moral arc of the universe isn't going to bend itself"

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "No person has ever brought ignominy and disrepute upon a once-respected publication as quickly and decisively as this ridiculous woman."
Laura Helmuth @laurahelmuth.bsky.social: "I've decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief. I'm going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching), but for now I'd like to share a very small sample of the work I've been so proud to support (thread)"

‘Scientific American’ Departing Editor Laura Helmuth Helped Degrade Science - "Helmuth may in fact have been itching to spend more time bird watching—who wouldn't be?—but it seems likely that her departure was precipitated by a bilious Bluesky rant she posted after Donald Trump was reelected... Helmuth's posts were symptoms of a much larger problem with her reign as editor. They accurately reflected the political agenda she brought with her when she came on as EiC at SciAm—a political agenda that has turned the once-respected magazine into a frequent laughingstock... increasingly, during Helmuth's tenure, SciAm seemed a bit more like a marketing firm dedicated to churning out borderline-unreadable press releases for the day's social justice cause du jour. In the process, SciAm played a small but important role in the self-immolation of scientific authority—a terrible event whose fallout we'll be living with for a long time. When Scientific American was bad under Helmuth, it was really bad. For example, did you know that "Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy"? Or that the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? No, really: Three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died, SciAm published a surreal hit piece about him in which the author lamented "his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior." That author also explained that "the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against." But the normal distribution doesn't make any such value judgments, and only someone lacking in basic education about stats—someone who definitely shouldn't be writing about the subject for a top magazine—could make such a claim. Some of the magazine's Helmuth-era output made the posthumous drive-by against Wilson look Pulitzer-worthy by comparison. Perhaps the most infamous entry in this oeuvre came in September 2021: "Why the Term 'JEDI' Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion." That article sternly informed readers that an acronym many of them had likely never heard of in the first place—JEDI, standing for "justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion"—ought to be avoided on social justice grounds. You see, in the Star Wars franchise, the Jedi "are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of "Jedi mind tricks," etc.)"  You probably think I'm trolling or being trolled. There's no way that actual sentence got published in Scientific American, right? No, it's very real. But what really caught my eye was SciAm's coverage of the youth gender medicine debate. This is one of the few scientific subjects on which I've established a modicum of expertise: I've written articles about it for major outlets like The Atlantic and The Economist, and am working on a book. I found SciAm's coverage to not just be stupid (JEDI) or insulting or uncharitable (the Wilson story), but actually a little bit dangerous. I know, I know: We're not supposed to call mere words "dangerous." Hear me out: The evidence for youth gender medicine—blockers, hormones, and (sometimes) surgery for minors to treat their gender dysphoria—is scant. We really don't know which treatments help which kids in which situations. Every major government or government-backed effort to look into this question, most recently the U.K.'s Cass Review, has come to this conclusion. The supposed leading professional organization, WPATH, is mired in scandal, with evidence from court cases strongly suggesting it has suppressed negative research results. One of the leading clinicians and researchers in the country admitted to The New York Times that she and her team suppressed negative research results (not the first time, I don't think).   Rather than cover these important developments, Scientific American has hermetically sealed itself and its readers inside a comforting, delusional cocoon in which we know youth gender medicine works, beyond a shadow of a doubt, and only bigots and ignoramuses suggest otherwise. Over and over, SciAm simply took what certain activist groups were saying about these treatments and repeated it, basically verbatim, effectively laundering medical misinformation and providing it with the imprimatur of a highly regarded science magazine.   This was a chronic problem at Scientific American. One article, to which I wrote a rebuttal for my newsletter, contained countless errors and misinterpretations: Most importantly, it falsely claimed that there is solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates adolescent suicidality, when we absolutely do not know that to any degree of certainty. As far as I can tell, every article SciAm published on this subject during Helmuth's tenure followed the exact same playbook of reciting activist claims — often long after they'd been debunked.   Some of these articles might have done serious damage to the public's understanding of this issue. For example, SciAm ran a response to the Cass Review written by a pair of writers who were somehow able to issue a searing critique of the review despite having clearly never read it. They wrote that the document's problems "help explain why the Cass recommendations differ from previous academic reviews and expert guidance from major medical organisations such as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the American Academy of Pediatrics." But part of the Cass Review's remit was to evaluate the strength of these exact pieces of expert guidance—the Cass Review explicitly explains why the WPATH and AAP guidelines are weak and untrustworthy. Anyone who read the document would have understood that. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Cass Review argued that the WPATH and AAP guidelines were shoddily constructed, and SciAm published a response accusing the Cass Review of differing from the WPATH and AAP guidelines. That's the sort of error that can only occur in the context of lax editorial standards married to ideological certitude. People trust Scientific American... SciAm has had no qualms about spreading what can only be described as medical misinformation on this subject—something it decries when the sources and claims in question are right-coded... The crisis of expert authority has many causes. But one of them is experts mortgaging their own credibility. When magazines like Scientific American are run by ideologues like Helmuth, producing biased dreck as a result, it only makes it more difficult to defend the institution of science itself from relentless attack. This lack of trust absolutely contributes to the sorts of dunderheaded, reactionary populism presently threatening America and much of Europe.  If experts aren't to be trusted, charlatans and cranks will step into the vacuum"

Meme - CNBC: "Vance wants to raise the child tax credit to $5,000: Here's why that could be difficult" - MON, AUG 12
CNBC: "Harris calls for expanded child tax credit of up to $6,000 for families with newborns" - FRI, AUG 16

Meme - Taylor Lorenz: "Good time to remind people that Pirate Wires is not a journalistic outlet and regularly publishes false information. It, like Bari Weiss' Free Press, cosplays as independent media while existing to prop up the interests of billionaires"
Mike Solana @micsolana: "this is libel. we have never published a false story. but a good time to remind people taylor has published lies for years. I probably won't sue bc I'm busy, and I can't respond because she blocked me. but please tell her I said hi, and share your favorite lies of hers below. fyi we’ve created a new resource for keeping track of this walking infohazard’s many lies. please let us know if we’ve missed anything, or when anything new should be added (constant, we expect)"
Pirate Wires @PirateWires: "An up to date timeline of Taylor's lies and distortions, which we will happily update with new information when we get it."
"Taylor Lorenz's History of Lies. this week, former wapo reporter taylor lorenz accused us of regularly posting false information, which we categorically deny, and are following up with a list of lies she's told online. Neeraja Deshpande"

Meme - @jason @Jason: "The @nytimes  vs @a16z  / tech just hit a new level with @TaylorLorenz  claiming @pmarca  is using the “r-word”  on @joinClubhouse  — then deleting the tweet because.... it didn’t happen?!"
Sarah Haider 👾 @SarahTheHaider: "Just a few days ago, NYT lost a veteran reporter for repeating a bad word years ago, and now its reporters are attempting to tattle on others for similar crimes (which did not even occur).   The most esteemed journalistic institution in the world, staffed with kindergarteners.
Worth nothing:
- Veteran reporter was covering perhaps the most important beat, the pandemic, and doing a fantastic job.
- Tattle-teller Taylor Lorenz covers TikTok influencers, with what can barely be described as "analysis".
One is fired, the other will remain untouchable"

Taylor Lorenz Gets Wrecked for Calling 9/11 a 'Punchline' - "New York Times and Washington Post alum Taylor Lorenz is getting raked over the coals online for calling the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people a “punchline” on Thursday.  Reacting to a post from another user condemning the baking of a “9/11 cake” on X, Lorenz wrote:      “You don’t have enough respect for the sanctity of 9/11” is such a ridiculously out of touch and frankly boomer ass take in 2025. 9/11 has been a punchline for over a decade, ppl are having 9/11 themed parties and there are 9/11 parody t shirts and memes all over.  “Young ppl today also correctly recognize that 9/11 didn’t happen in a vacuum, it was a direct response to/consequence of US foreign policy in the middle east,” she added. “The more u know abt what the US has done in the middle east the more u understand why many believe the US deserved 9/11.”...   “GenX here. Three people I knew died in the towers, human beings just like Taylor Lorenz, who got on the subway and went to work one day and then suddenly while they were drinking their coffee they had to decide whether to jump or burn to death,” wrote The Washington Post‘s Megan McArdle. “Not a fucking punchline.” “Bashing Taylor Lorenz is too easy. There will always be crazy assholes like her, clamoring for attention,” observed economic commentator Noah Smith. “Instead we need to ask why, as a society, we elevated Taylor Lorenz to be an important public intellectual, and gave her important jobs at the country’s top newspapers.” “I think we all know that Taylor Lorenz is not mentally stable and none of us would be surprised one day to read of her untimely demise,” submitted conservative radio host Erick Erickson. “She needs help and an intervention and she needs a lot of prayer. She is simply not well.” “Young people (not Lorenz) cannot appreciate how horrifying 9/11 was for those old enough to experience it,” observed the Manhattan Institute’s Jessica Riedl. “My translation for younger people is to imagine another school shooting. Except its 3,000 victims instead of 10. And on live TV. And you wondered if your school was next.”... During Taylor Lorenz’s tenure at the NYT and WaPo non-leftists were complaining about her stories but were told with no small amount of disdain that we just hated the truth and that reporters don’t root for a side period but in reality she was having 9/11 parties the whole time.  — Jarvis (@jarvis_best)... Lorenz has also been criticized in recent days for celebrating former President Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis and championing Luigi Mangione, the man who has been charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson late last year."

AG on X - "Taylor Lorenz hangs out with a bunch of crazed pro-terror left-wing extremists obsessed with hating America and thus assumes their deranged behavior is also normalized among other Americans."
Charles C. W. Cooke on X - "The best part is that she casts those who don’t think like this as “out of touch.”"

Why Are the Irish Media Ignoring an Apparent Islamist Knife Attack?

Why Are the Irish Media Ignoring an Apparent Islamist Knife Attack?

On July 29th 2025, a member of the Irish police (Garda Siochana) was attacked by Abdullah Khan, a second-generation Pakistani Muslim immigrant in Dublin city centre. Ireland’s state broadcaster, RTE, in the immediate aftermath of the knife attack was quick to assert that the attacker had Irish citizenry: “The man, who is an Irish citizen and born in Ireland, can be questioned for up to 24 hours.”

However, those of us of a more cynical disposition across these islands have noticed in recent years that when the media rush to assert the Irish or British identity of a violent criminal, it usually signifies he’s from a non-European ethnic minority background. If last week’s Dublin knife attacker had been an indigenous Irish man, we wouldn’t have been informed of what passport he’s entitled to or where he was born. Similarly, the Welsh choirboy status of the Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana would never have been immediately asserted had he been a Welsh choirboy. Unfortunately for Ireland’s biased liberal-Left media and political establishment, there’s a thing called reality that people can now record on smartphones and see with their own eyes. So, as footage emerged online of last week’s knife attack, people noticed that the perpetrator wasn’t ethnically Irish and they pointed this out on social media. The media and police response was to accuse the people who noticed that the man wasn’t ethnically Irish of spreading misinformation.

It would appear that our governing and media elites only want us to notice ethnic and cultural diversity when they want us to regurgitate the diversity is our strength mantra. Last week’s knife attack by an ethnic Pakistani Muslim is an example of diversity not always being a strength and so the political and media establishment has pretended not to notice the ethnicity of the attacker and the culturally specific nature of what appears to be an Islamist style attack that is alien to Irish culture.

The cognitive dissonance of the open borders liberal-Left demands that diversity is a strength while simultaneously reacting to expressions of cultural incompatibility by insisting we are all the same.

Focusing on Abdullah Khan’s passport as opposed to his cultural identity is a way for the media to sidestep dealing with inconvenient truths that conflict with their pro-migration biases. According to the liberal-Left mindset, being Irish, British or European is just a matter of having the correct paperwork in order. While I’m not an ethnic nationalist, being of mixed ancestry myself, at the very least I expect ethnic minority citizens to fully integrate into the culture of their host society. They also need to remain firmly in the minority so that there’s a dominant, indigenous culture with which to integrate.

Two days after the Dublin knife attack, new footage was obtained and broadcast by the independent, conservative leaning media outlet Gript.

It showed the seconds leading up to the attack in which Abdullah Khan is seen running from behind towards the Garda while shouting “Allahu Akbar“. This is an Arabic phrase shouted by every Islamic terrorist during a terrorist attack.

The mainstream media’s response to this new footage has simply been to ignore it. It’s quite bewildering that in the days since Gript released updated footage that there hasn’t been a single article anywhere in the Irish media responding to recorded evidence of what appears to have been an Islamist terror attack in Dublin city centre. The mainstream media, the entire political class and the state appear to be content to leave it on the record that Abdullah Khan is just an ordinary Irish person who engaged in a violent attack and that the motive is so far unknown. When a Muslim from a migrant background living in any European country plunges a knife into someone from behind while shouting an Arabic phrase that precedes every jihadist attack, it’s a giveaway that he most definitely hasn’t integrated into his host culture and society. What’s more he clearly views his host society as his enemy. We should view him and his ilk accordingly. He is not one of us.

It is an egregious dereliction of duty for the Irish media not to query the apparent Islamist dimension of last week’s stabbing. Islamist terror is a significant threat right across Europe and has claimed hundreds of lives in recent years in brutal attacks. Had Abdullah Khan successfully immobilised the two Gardai, there’s a strong probability that he would have continued his attack on members of the public, as usually occurs during Islamist knife attacks. Several years ago, it was revealed by the UK authorities that approximately 40,000 potential Islamist terrorists are being monitored by the security services. Alarmingly, several high profile Islamist attacks were carried out by individuals not on the watchlist, which indicates that the figure of 40,000 potential Islamist terrorists in the UK is an underestimate.

Given that the Republic of Ireland shares a common travel area with the UK, any Islamists with a UK or Irish passport can move freely between both jurisdictions. In the aftermath of last week’s apparent Islamist stabbing, the media should be querying the extent of the Islamist terror threat in Ireland. However, to probe the Islamist terror threat also raises questions about Islamic immigration more generally and its overall compatibility with Western liberal democracy. This is a conversation that pro-migration zealots in the Irish media and political establishment are unwilling to have.

Any honest appraisal of mass Islamic immigrat

The fact that many Muslims are genuine moderates has no bearing on the very many who have views that place them on the extremist spectrum. The inconvenient truth for our political and media elites is that as your Islamic population grows so does the security threat posed by violent Islamists, along with the prevalence of cultural practices and value systems that are directly opposed to liberal democratic values. In 2016, former UK Labour Party politician Trevor Phillips conducted an opinion poll for Channel 4 which revealed that a range of extremist views incompatible with liberal democracy are widespread within Britain’s Muslim population. In fact, many Muslims living in Ireland also hold views that place them somewhere on the extremist spectrum, even if they don’t support terrorism in Western countries.

As I wrote for pieces in the Conservative Woman, I encountered such extremist mindsets in both Dublin and Manchester as well as detailing how Ireland’s largest mosque has close ties with the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an affiliated organisation. Most people in Ireland are completely unaware of the extent of extremist views among Muslims living in Ireland. This is hardly surprising when the political and media class chooses to pretend that an ethnically Pakistani Muslim shouting Allahu Akbar while stabbing a Garda is as culturally Irish as making small talk about the weather. At some point, the Irish media and political class is going to have to engage with reality and the negative consequences of its preferred immigration policies.

What we see in trends right across Europe is that the threat from both violent and non-violent Islamism and cultural tensions related to mass Islamic immigration are only going to worsen. Pretending the problem doesn’t exist won’t make it go away.

ion would reveal that Ireland, like other European countries, now has to contend with the threat of Islamist violence and other social pathologies from the Islamic world that were absent from our societies a few decades ago. Nowhere in Europe had female genital mutilation, forced marriages and people in hiding for contravening Islamic blasphemy laws before mass Islamic immigration. It doesn’t matter that most Muslims aren’t violent jihadists or that FGM isn’t practised by all Muslims (although Somalians do have a 99.2% FGM rate). 

 

Links - 3rd August 2025 (1 - US Media)

Thread by @Theo_TJ_Jordan on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - CNN: "Argentina once led on LGBTQ rights. After 4 lesbians are set on fire, critics blame rising intolerance on Milei’s government"
"Wow, this is some of the most wicked Hatecraft I have seen. And you know that's a high bar. This isn't some activist org, but our Most Trusted Name In News. 👁  🧵 Pull up a stool and let me show you how these bastards craft this evil political tool. ✊️ I saw it on Yahoo 👇 and that's CNN's above. Both paint an obvious picture. The far-right (aka: all opposition) is evil and, really, responsible for the murder of lesbians. They call it lesbicide. 😵‍💫  It's worth noting the little cunt who wrote this. Only pics I could find... It starts with a truly awful fact-pattern in Argentina. Some 62yr old madman lit his neighbor's apartment on fire and killed 3 of the 4 occupants. He's obviously deeply unwell and meant to murder them. Horrible.  But that's what we have here. A murder of women who live together. Michael confirms not once but twice in his own piece that this isn't even a "hate crime"...  "Police have arrested a 62-year-old man who lived in the building but, according to Conder, aren’t currently treating the incident as a hate crime as they say the motive is still unclear.  Despite calls from LGBTQ activists, the arson is currently being investigated as an aggravated homicide rather than a hate crime."  Journalists have to keep some semblance of reporting the most basic facts, I guess. But wait a minute, what is the entire theme of this "news article"? 👁Well, here are the three bolded subsections...
"Rise in hate crimes"
"Milei under fire"
"Progress in Argentina"
Ohhh, so it's a bunch of FrankenFemme scripture and Queer+ Equity garbage from some punk-ass Gen Z who traffics in emotional-abuse propaganda to please his corporate masters. ✊️ "Progress" 🌊  Fuck off, Michael Rios.  It's so pretextual to any functioning brain that it's disgusting. The fact this is on outlets like CNN tells such a story. It's been that way for years, but I'll get to that in a second.  It's grotesque Hatecraft to functioning brains, yes. But that does not include everyone... You'll note the Gen Z kid's CNN piece is all based around activist groups. Of course it is, like always. Same astroturf revolutionary bullshit we see across the west right now. ✊️ Always driven by Hatecraft. 😵‍💫🌊  Look at the scenes it's causing there... Mighty familiar, eh? ✊️🧟‍♂️🧟🧟‍♀️
Look how the story is being covered locally...  "The attack may be ‘the most abhorrent hate crime in recent years,’ according to the Argentine LGBT Federation"  Yeah, it just "may be", batshit crazy Queer+ Equity revolution activist group. ✊️😵‍💫And who wrote that? This chick. 👇 some loco FrankenFemme who is consumed by this Jonestown shit. ✊️😵‍💫 Of course; I mean, I really didn't even need to click and that's from another hemisphere. It's The Same Thing everywhere!  I don't even want to tag her. This facade is so easy This is no different than what we see in the states, of course. It's so vile, but Team Progress is so brainwashed they can't even see what they're part of. Most don't want to see it. Same people able to be convinced Biden was competent until last week 😵‍💫🌊... Here's what should really unnerve you...  We all remember the manufactured insanity of 2020 (aka: last election cycle 💡). That was done under race. ⬛️✊🌊  But it was cultivated by the same outlets and advanced with the same type of Hatecraft.  Well... They tipped their hand that they were going to radicalize the same this cycle around Queer+. ✊🌊  What we are facing right now is somethinf historic. Most people still don't appreciate the scope and ramifications at all. This propaganda is destroying people. Just as it was designed to... This is why they must destroy Milei. 👇 The same reason all opposition across every country in the west becomes the same "far-right" Monster.   "Reactionary" 👁  Take your Hatecraft and GFY! The party is over."
Teaching kids about hell is emotional abuse, but climate change hysteria and left wing fear mongering are good

Veronica 🇦🇷 on X - "Argentina aquí. No hay marchas, ni protestas en la calle por este hecho. Solo un grupo politizado de feministas relacionado con el peronismo y la izquierda sacan a relucir este homicidio como odio a la comunidad del alfabeto. En cuanto al feminismo y la comunidad, la ciudadanía está aún impactada y no olvidará el horrible asesinato de un niño de 5 años en manos de su madre y su pareja lesbiana. El niño fue golpeado, torturado y sodomizado sistemáticamente por la pareja" ("Argentina here. There are no marches or protests in the street for this fact. Only a politicized group of feminists related to Peronism and the left bring up this homicide as hatred of the alphabet community. Regarding feminism and the community, citizens are still shocked and will not forget the horrible murder of a 5-year-old child at the hands of his mother and her lesbian partner. The boy was systematically beaten, tortured and sodomized by the couple")

End Wokeness on X - "If a mob of white teens chased down and assauIted an old black man, we'd ALL be subjected to wall-to-wall coverage of it. The reverse happened this week in DC. If not for X, you would have no clue."

ZUBY: on X - "There is an ongoing pattern of
1/ Something is blatantly obvious
2/ Some people point out that the thing is blatantly obvious
3/ These people are attacked and ridiculed
*time passes*
4/ 'The experts' concede the blatantly obvious thing was correct
5/ No apologies
Also, every incident of a CHILD contracting monkeypox needs to be looked into.  Right now. For obvious reasons."
From 2022, referring to Monkeypox being a sexually transmitted infection, but really applicable to lots of things (Covid, Biden being senile etc), which proves the point

i/o on X - "The median age of an MSNBC viewer is 70. At Fox News it's 69. Younger people watch CNN (median age 67)."
So much for insulting Fox News viewers as "boomers"

Thread by @0xAlaric on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Walter Cronkite is why we lost the Vietnam War.  By 1968 we had damaged the NVA/VC badly — the Tet Offensive was a last-ditch, all-out effort. They were expended. All it would have taken was a coup de grace.
Walter Cronkite (the “most trusted man in America”) went to Vietnam in the aftermath, and gave his famous “mired in stalemate” report based on what he saw. What he didn’t see was the overall strategic reality — but that report irreparably shifted public opinion against the war. Contrary to popular opinion, it wasn’t hippies at protests that turned public opinion — it was Cronkite’s poor read of the situation. He later went on to say that he regretted the report, and its results. But it was too late. In the moment, it killed public support for Vietnam (fairly high btw) and forced moderation — at a time where the US needed one final offensive to finish the war.  The end result was indeed fighting “for nothing,” because the US essentially gave up.
We didn’t lose Vietnam because of the indomitable fighting spirit of the Vietnamese (lmao) — but rather because the political rearguard faltered when it needed to push.  If anything, Vietnam should serve as a warning against half-measures, and cavorting to public opinion."

Melissa Chen on X - "In that slimy NYT profile of @bariweiss , one of the most annoying journos on the internet calls @TheFP  a “salon for the privileged laments of the powerful.”  The dude is writing this in the New York Times, for the New York Times.  Seriously? The media is one is the most hated institutions in America precisely because it’s been full of trust fund kids and elite-educated clout-chasers whose writing masquerades as “the grievances of the oppressed.”  And guess what? Fresh new media outfits like The Free Press that don’t have contempt for average and working class Americans who are sick of imbibing propaganda and luxury beliefs, are going to out-compete the old guards.  Cutting herself loose from the NYT was the best thing Bari did. They’re forced to sit on the sidelines and watch her star rise while they get seconds from her scoops and reporting. She gets to lead the news cycle on which the Times now has to follow. Must be so hard for them."
Left wingers want to be oppressed so much. Of course they accuse right wingers of the same thing, because left wingers love projection

Meme - "THE MEDIA: WHY WON'T YOU TRUST US?
ALSO THE MEDIA: The crowd is chanting "Let's go Brandon!""

Meme - Steve @SteveLovesAmmo: "Things not in the news anymore....
-Maui wildfires.
-East Palestine, Ohio (for the 2nd time)
-Joe Biden classified documents as a Senator.
-Fauci working with China to create a bioweapon
-Pete Buttigieg's best friend in prison for child porn.
-Cocaine in the White House.
-The data collected from the Chinese spy balloons.
-Ukraine intelligence documents released that showed they were suffering massive losses and the American taxpayer was being lied to.
-Nancy Pelosi's film crew on J6
-Veterans being kicked out of shelters to make room for illegals."

Ari Ingel on X - "NY Times journalist Natasha Frost has now been named as the person who downloaded about 900 pages of content from an Australian Jewish chat thread and shared it w/ an anti-Israel activist who doxxed everyone in the group. Frost regularly pens anti-Israel news for the Times."
Stephen L. Miller on X - "But Bari Weiss was just too controversial and unacceptable to be employed there."
Left wingers continue claiming the NYT is "Zionist"

i/o on X - "The Atlantic has posted a correction to its gross mischaracterization of my position on group differences, which reads: "This article originally misstated that the X account @Eyeslasho has posted about the 'genetic inferiority' of Black people. In fact, the account has not directly attributed group differences to biology."
I'm obviously pleased that the correction was made, but I'm not particularly pleased with its new "corrected" description of my account:
"Musk has also repeatedly engaged with @Eyeslasho , a self-proclaimed “data-driven” account that has posted statistics supposedly illustrating the inferiority of Black people."
The publication just had to work the morally-loaded word "inferiority" in there (even if it meant watering down its attack with the phrase "supposedly illustrating" to give it some wiggle room if criticized for yet again mischaracterizing me). It's a familiar tactic and is a transparent indication of the author's intent to smear. The only people who use the terms "inferior" or "superior" to describe racial groups are far-right racists who use it sincerely and progressives who use it in bad faith to attempt to publicly taint people who talk candidly about group differences."

Richard Hanania on X - "John Cena follows 856,200 people on Twitter. A journalist wrote a story about how some of them are racist. Beyond pathetic."

Meme - IGN: "Warhammer Space Marine 2 developer Saber Interactive won't say whether or not a controversial YouTube comment is from its CEO."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Clickbait title for a clickbait article, "Fun and Immersive" is not controversial, "Controversial" comment can be found here:"

The Atlantic on X - "Jeff Bezos "has fallen victim to the campaign to convince the world that all media should be assumed to be biased politically unless proved otherwise," @chucktodd writes:"
Thread by @Musa_alGharbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Yes, absolutely. Mainstream media is a (*checks notes*) poor helpless victim when it comes to (*double-checks*) influencing public perceptions about culture, world events, and the media itself.  Bezos is definitely *blaming the victim.* Poor widdle mainstream media. 😥  A 🧵
It's sad that they can't even be perceived neutral when journalists are rabidly clamoring for a political endorsement of the Democratic nominee, and the paper itself quite explicitly defined itself in opposition to Trump since 2016.  And the endorsements definitely don't reflect or enhance perceptions of political bias. The fact that the paper has literally never outright endorsed a Republican since 1976 when they started the practice -- this is just a pure coincidence: washingtonpost.com/opinions/patri…  The Democrats are just better, 100 percent of the time. That's not bias, that's fact. And the editorial bones should make no bones about it. And if the public thinks it might indicate bias that over nearly 50 years the paper endorses only one political party for the presidency (and overwhelmingly endorses Democrats for lower seats as well) -- that's just because *those people* have their brains cooked by the Koch Brothers and Trump. And speaking of facts, the fact that Democrats outnumber Republicans 10:1 in the field likely does absolutely nothing to influence which topics they cover and how they cover them (as I highlight here, we're clearly unbiased: youtube.com/watch?v=o-uS14… ). It's silly that people would even think that. There's no evidence of bias whatsoever with how outlets cover (or ignore) contentious moral and political issues. How would anyone even get this idea, other than by through evil right-wing smear campaigns? The fact that the Washington Post and most other mainstream media outlets abruptly grew intensely focused on prejudice and discrimination across all dimensions during the "Great Awokening" -- this likely has nothing whatsoever to do with the political, ideological, and demographic composition of the field: musaalgharbi.com/2023/02/08/gre…  It's dumb to even think that. The fact that the @washingtonpost was absolutely obsessed with Trump, covered him more than any other candidate pre-election and post-election, covering him more than Joe Biden even after he was voted out of office -- with nearly unanimously negatively throughout irrespective of world events -- and the fact that similar patterns held for pretty much all other media outlets...  It's really unfair that anyone could possibly perceive bias in this in any way, shape, or form: musaalgharbi.com/2019/11/13/med… You definitely can't check out my book to find out a lot more about the composition and political economy of the journalism field, and how it relates to a lot of these tensions: musaalgharbi.com/we-have-never-…  After all, there's nothing to even possibly discuss here. Chuck Todd is right. Mainstream media organizations are just tiny helpless victims of an empty moral panic. Nothing they should, would, or even could change about what they do. And no need to change -- things are going swimmingly!"

BREAKING: MSNBC writer, producer admits network has ‘made their viewers dumber,’ is ‘indistinguishable’ from Democrat Party: OMG reports - "An MSNBC staffer revealed that the network is doing everything in its power to help Vice President Kamala Harris defeat former President Donald Trump in November, according to an undercover investigation by O'Keefe Media Group (OMG). He also admitted that the network has contributed to the dumbing down of their viewers, have "narrowed" their views, and is "indistinguidable" from the Democrat Party.  Basel Hamdan, a writer and producer for MSNBC News, told an OMG journalist that the network has gone all-in on ensuring Harris wins the White House, describing MSNBC as a "mouthpiece" and propaganda machine for the DNC.  "The type of people who work in Democratic politics, and in the campaign, are a lot of the same type of people that would appear on air on MSNBC," Hamdan told the undercover journalist. "It hammers home the point that I'm making: that this news network is indistinguishable from the party." Hamdan chastised the network for being "very partisan Democrat," claiming that MSNBC is "aligned too closely" with the Democratic Party and would benefit more if it were not. Furthermore, he claimed, according to the video, that MSNBC's ultra-left-leaning slant has taught its viewers to dislike not only Republicans but also moderate Democrats.  The producer said that MSNBC has made its viewers "dumber" over the years, saying it conducts "bad journalism" to maintain its progressive slant, which includes pushing misinformation on its audience.  "[MSNBC] should tell the truth from a progressive perspective but they shouldn't be tied to a political party. They just are way too cozy with Democratic politicians," he said. "The anchor and the politician are just in total agreement about everything."  Pressing the matter further, the undercover OMG journalist asked Hamdan: "Do you feel like MSNBC is doing enough to help the Harris campaign?"  "I mean, they're doing all they can to help," he said, explaining that the network has been "amplifying" the VP and "what her message of the day is.""

Meme - "reporters then: Question everything the government says!
reporters now: Questioning the government is white supremacy."

Meme - Escape The Echo Chamber: CNN continues to double down on their blatantly slanted and false reporting on Joe Rogan. Even the Washington Post is taking the network to task.  To paraphrase Rogan: “If CNN will lie about something as small as this, what does this say about the integrity of their big stories?”
“After hearing Rogan’s concerns about how CNN cast the issue, Gupta said, “They shouldn’t have said that.” “Yet CNN’s statement sounds more like the work of an advocacy group than a journalism outfit. The “issue,” actually, begins and ends with the integrity of CNN’s content. If we take Rogan’s prescription claim at face value — and CNN hasn’t challenged it — then the network’s coverage was slanted in some cases and straight-up incorrect in others.”… “So in this instance, you don’t have to endorse Rogan to abhor CNN’s coverage of this topic. Here’s a network, after all, that prides itself on impeccable factual hygiene, a place where there’s no conceptual hair too fine to split, no political statement too sprawling to flyspeck. It’s tough living by your own standards.”"
From 2021

Meme - POLITICO @politico: "Trump drags Hurricane Helene into 2024 campaign"
POLITICO @politico: "Biden's campaign plans to harness the "incredible anger" among Puerto Riican voters in Florida over Trump's handling of Hurricane Maria in 2017"

MAZE on X - "Billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs sitting next to Kamala Harris, talking about why she purchased The Atlantic. To create narratives that she thinks will build a more just and equal society. 🤡"
Coddled affluent professional on X - "Amazing clip. Reputational self immolation beyond what even the most ardent critics of the institutions could have hoped for: A news media whose explicit purpose is to instantiate the empathy-inflected ideological fantasies of its philanthropic benefactors."
Clearly only fascists criticise the media or even insinuate they're biased

Meme - Martin Skold @MartinSkold2: "NYT said the quiet part out loud a few years back."
"The New York Times newsroom. The paper is in the midst of an evolution from the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of great narratives. Jeenah Moon for The New York Times"

Meme - The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole84: "The legacy media doesn’t have time to report meaningfully because they are busy generating fake oppression narratives."
"Yearly Mentions of Prejudice in Popular U.S. News Media outlets
racism + racist + racists
Sexism + sexist + misogyny
homophobia + homophobic
transphobia + transphobic
islamophobia + islamophobic
anti-semitism + anti-semitic
*skyrocketing*
New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal"

Meme - Chicago Tribune @chicagotribune: "A 23-year-old man was critically injured Saturday following a shootout with Chicago police in the West Rogers Park neighborhood on the city’s Far North Side, according to authorities."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "The headline is misleading. A Jewish Man Was Shot On Way To His Synagogue, The Suspect Shouts 'Allah Akbar!' In Shootout With Police. Video of incident:"

JD Vance Smacks Down Jake Tapper Over CNN's 'Russia Hoax' Coverage of Trump - "The conversation covered former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly's recent allegations that Trump was a "fascist" and touched on the Trump-Russia investigation during his presidency.  Vance asked Tapper "to step back a little bit and ask yourself a basic question about network integrity. You guys [CNN] talked about the Russia Hoax nonstop." Tapper interjected, "The FBI was investigating it," adding that the outlet was covering the FBI investigation.  In 2017, the FBI began an investigation into allegations that Russia launched an influence campaign favoring Trump in the 2016 election. The "Steele dossier," which was created by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, contained unverified and uncorroborated allegations that were reported on by news outlets, including CNN. The document, originally opposition research, was funded by Democrats... "And so you took the words of unnamed FBI agents and put them on your network as if they were the gospel truth, you did it again and again. A viewer of your network would have believed that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin conspired in 2016—"  "No," Tapper said shaking his head.  "—That was totally and preposterously false," Vance said. Tapper rebutted, "What you just said is false. We covered an FBI investigation."  Vance pushed back saying, "You covered it in a way that gave credence to anonymous sources' accusations, you did it yourself, your network did it."  He later added that, "Kamala Harris and her media allies--and I would put CNN in this category--you guys seem to care more about Donald Trump's past than the future of the American people.""

JD Vance To CNN: I Reject The Premise Of Your Question, You're Putting Words In Trump's Mouth - "TAPPER: And this is what John Kelly -- this is what John Kelly was alarmed by, the idea of using the U.S. military to go after Americans.  That's what he said.
VANCE: He's not -- Donald Trump never said Americans, writ large. You keep on putting words in his mouth.
TAPPER: Are they -- or are they not Americans?...
VANCE: He said that Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi, he used in a separate context in a separate conversation. And what you're doing is you're smashing two totally different conversations...
VANCE: He's going to pursue economic policies that lower the cost of groceries and make life more affordable again. He talks about it every single day on the campaign trail. And so do I. What you're talking about is an anonymously sourced story or one guy who...
TAPPER: Nothing anonymously sourced, zero...
VANCE: Or who -- one guy who is a disgruntled employee.
TAPPER: I told you 10 people.
VANCE: Five other people push back against him and said that what he said was dishonest. So why don't we talk about the policy that's affecting American citizens and not what Donald Trump allegedly said, according to one guy who's pissed off because he got fired by Donald Trump?"
Since you can't use the US military on Americans, having the National Guard protect the presidential inauguration in 2021 was fascism

Meme - Shaun Maguire @shaunmmaguire: "This is evil reporting by The Atlantic  They make an outrageous claim, which one of the two sources denies (Pfeiffer) but they run the story anyways  They also claim Trump denigrated a dead soldier, whose family (Mayra) denies it  Dear MSM, you will die if you keep doing this"
Mayra Cullen @mguilen_: "Wow. I don't appreciate how you are exploiting my sister's death for politics- hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members. President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today."
The Atlantic @TheAtlantic: ""I need the kind of generals that Hitler had": Trump's obsession with dictators and disdain for America's military are deepening, @JeffreyGoldberg reports:"

Happy Independence Day, NPR

Happy Independence Day, NPR - by Uri Berliner

The Senate just voted to cut federal funding for the news organization I worked at for 25 years. It only has itself to blame.

The Senate voted this morning to claw back $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding for NPR, PBS, and local stations. Pending final approval in the House, the federal government will, after more than half a century, no longer be in the business of supporting NPR.

The vote is a victory for Republicans who have long had National Public Radio (NPR) in their sights. But it is also a victory for those of any political stripe who believe the government has no business funding the media.

I didn’t use to count myself among them. But over the past year, under the leadership of a divisive new CEO, instead of taking criticisms of its coverage to heart, NPR instead doubled down on agenda-driven journalism. So, as someone who had spent most of his career at the network, I didn’t support defunding. I instead suggested that NPR could build back credibility by voluntarily giving up federal support. Obviously that didn’t happen.

NPR has said President Donald Trump’s push for defunding is an attack on press freedom and the First Amendment. While defunding is a harsh rebuke to NPR, it’s not fatal. A relatively small portion of its budget—some 5 to 10 percent depending on how you do the math—comes from direct and indirect federal funding. But for small public radio stations that rely more on federal support, the repercussions could be severe. While Republicans cast the votes to defund, NPR also has itself to blame for the outcome...

It’s a self-inflicted wound, a product of how NPR embraced a fringe progressivism that cost it any legitimate claim to stand as an impartial provider of news, much less one deserving of government support.

I witnessed that change firsthand in my 25 years at the network—and I tried to do something about it. I was a senior business editor at NPR when, a little more than a year ago, I published my account in The Free Press of how the network had lost touch with the country, and, like the legacy media everywhere, forfeited the trust of the public.

I explained how over time, as NPR became a boutique product for a well-heeled audience clustered around coastal cities and college towns, it shed moderate and conservative listeners.

Once fairly evenly divided between liberals, moderates, and conservatives, NPR’s news audience shifted sharply to the left. And by 2023, liberals outnumbered conservatives more than six to one. True to the tote bag cliché, NPR became an accessory for Whole Foods shoppers. Which is sad, because in another era, NPR, and public radio more broadly, developed some of the most creative and entertaining programming anywhere, from Car Talk to This American Life, Planet Money, Radiolab and A Prairie Home Companion.

Thanks in part to this ideological transformation, NPR botched major stories—and damaged its bond with the American people.

To name a couple of prominent examples: It repeatedly insisted that the lab leak theory of Covid had been debunked and it refused to cover Hunter Biden’s laptop. NPR’s reporting on the most contentious issues of the day—climate change, youth gender medicine, and the war in Gaza—leaned on moralizing.

Inside NPR, rules on the use of language reflected the direction and mindset of the organization. We were told to avoid the term biological sex, warned not to say illegal immigrant (a hurtful label). A racial punctuation hierarchy was imposed; black would be uppercase, white lowercase. NPR adopted the phrase “gender affirming care” to describe childhood medical interventions that can mean sterilization and the surgical removal of genitals. These were not merely style choices. They were tribal signals, ideological markers.

NPR could have addressed these failings. I wrote my essay because I hoped the network might rediscover the values on which its success had been built. NPR could have regained some equilibrium, reclaimed a smidgen of independence, by copping to this reality even a little. It could have taken some visible steps back to the journalism gold standard of neutral impartiality. And it could have done all this prior to Trump’s reelection, so it wouldn’t look like NPR was caving to pressure from his administration.

But NPR did none of these things.

Katherine Maher, the former head of Wikipedia’s parent organization who became NPR’s CEO in March 2024, soon found herself having to justify why taxpayers should continue to fund the network. But she seemed reluctant to tackle the criticisms head-on.

Maher declined a request to appear before Congress in May 2024, to defend the organization against claims of persistent progressive bias. Instead, she chose to make her case in more congenial settings like the Carnegie Endowment and Fast Company. She has rarely addressed specific claims about network bias and focused instead on the threat of defunding to small town and rural public radio stations. She also notes, in NPR’s defense, that it receives only about 1 percent of its operating funds directly from federal tax dollars. However, an urgent plea that popped up on the NPR website said if defunding is enacted it “will be the greatest blow to the NPR Network in history.”

After Trump won and the Republicans gained control of the Senate and the House, the push to defund public broadcasting gained steam. NPR called it “textbook retaliation” and, in a legal head-scratcher, a violation of the First Amendment.

When Maher and her counterpart at the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Paula Kerger, were summoned to testify at a DOGE House subcommittee hearing on March 26, Maher did the case for public funding no favors. In her opening statement, Maher said she welcomed “the opportunity to discuss the essential role of public media in delivering unbiased, nonpartisan, fact-based reporting to Americans.”

But then she struggled to answer basic questions about both NPR—and herself. It was clear Maher was out of her depth and her performance would damage NPR further.

In another exchange, Representative Michael Cloud, another Texas Republican, asked Maher about NPR’s insistence that the Covid lab leak was a debunked conspiracy theory. Maher sought to make the case that NPR’s coverage had evolved, and that it was now informing its audience about the growing support for the lab leak theory from independent researchers and intelligence agencies, including the CIA. “We acknowledge that the new CIA evidence is worthy of coverage and have covered it.”

But when I looked through NPR’s archives, I couldn’t find the coverage she cited. And when I asked the NPR communications team to locate the coverage for me, they didn’t respond to my inquiries. Nor has Maher replied to my request for an interview for this article.

Cloud also asked Maher about my essay in The Free Press. She told Cloud she wished she “had the opportunity” to speak with me after the publication of my piece in April 2024.

Maher added, “I would have loved to have had him engage and come back to us with some suggestions as to what we could do editorially in order to address what he perceived as bias.”

But we could have had that talk. I would have welcomed it.

This is what actually happened.

In my essay, in which I said NPR had lost its curious spirit, I wrote very little about the new CEO.

I didn’t report that in a 2021 Atlantic Council interview Maher called the First Amendment “the number one challenge” in her time at Wikimedia because it made it “tricky” to root out disinformation. A remarkable statement from someone hired to run one of the nation’s leading news organizations.

I didn’t mention her social media history: Maher wearing a Covid mask and donning a Biden cap, Maher tweeting that America is addicted to white supremacy, that Donald Trump is a “deranged racist sociopath,” scolding Hillary Clinton for using the phrase “boy and girl” because it erases “language for non-binary people.”

I simply acknowledged that NPR had a new CEO and welcomed her to the network saying: “It’s a tough job” and “I’ll be rooting for her.”

Her response?

I was suspended without pay for five days and Maher posted a statement on NPR’s website calling my words “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.” To further her point, and without citing a shred of evidence or offering one example, Maher stated that I questioned the professional integrity of my colleagues “based on little more than the recognition of their identity.” I have never questioned anyone’s integrity based on their identity, nor would I.

On April 17, I resigned.

That same day Maher appeared at the Carnegie Endowment and told the moderator, in response to a question about my essay, that she didn’t sit in the newsroom. “We have our guidelines. Our editorial policies are made public, and that is all completely independent of the CEO.”

And then she followed up, adding: “I let the journalists be our journalists and the editors be our editors because that is what they do and there is a very strong line between us.”

And yet, the “very strong line” that Maher described is exactly the line she crossed when she posted her disparaging statement about me—one of her own journalists—just five days before. The CEO’s statement remains on the NPR website to this day.

Maher’s most serious and dubious claim is the one that began her Congressional testimony, her core message about NPR and public media delivering “unbiased” reporting. NPR’s progressivism is obvious to any fair-minded person who listens or reads long enough. If you want more than my perspective, there’s also this, this, and this—ll data-driven assessments of NPR’s coverage that come to the same conclusion. If there’s one reason why the Senate just voted to defund NPR, it’s the failure of Maher, or anyone in NPR’s leadership, to acknowledge this basic fact.

In the first week of November 2022, after a spate of particularly egregious coverage, including a piece entertaining the merits of dumping soup on masterworks in the name of fighting climate change and another suggesting that worries about crime were racist, I emailed a top NPR news executive and said we were headed for trouble.

“The lack of viewpoint diversity and the unwillingness of top editors to push back against one-sided, opinionated journalism is causing great harm to NPR,” I wrote.

I predicted that if the GOP swept the upcoming 2022 midterms, NPR would be headed for defunding and “and unfortunately, we will have given them the ammunition that they need.”

My timing was off by a few years.

Could NPR, which is more steeped in ideology than PBS, have done something to keep the federal axe at bay? It’s impossible to say, but what’s clear is that NPR did just about everything possible to assure its own decapitation.

Now NPR will be like any other media organization, free to be as partisan as it chooses, stripped of its unique claim to taxpayer support, still protected by the First Amendment, but subject to the same financial and competitive pressures as everyone else.

My hope is that this will be a wake-up call, returning NPR to its roots where a curious spirit endeared it to generations of listeners.

But don’t count on it.

Happy Independence Day, NPR. You earned it.  

"Minority" Framing in the Media

Imtiaz Mahmood on X

"Oumair Aejaz from Bengaluru didn't feel safe in India. So he moved to the US where he worked as a doctor with various institutions. He felt safe there. So he started doing what his brothers all over the world do, started filming and sexually assaulting patients as young as two years old. Only ONE of the many hard drives found had over 13000 videos. He only recorded kafir women. He is a good man. American Media on cue is reporting him as Indian Doctor. If he had won an award they would have called him a Muslim Doctor. What a time to be alive..."

~ Eminent Intellectual @total_woke_"

In more detail:

Media across the world identifies US-based sexual predator Dr Oumair Aejaz as ‘Indian’ (from OpIndia)

"The media, especially the Western media, has its own ways of shielding the religious identity of Muslims when found involved in criminal activities and emphasising the same they happen to do something positive. The world is in shock after A 40-year-old doctor in Michigan, Oumair Aejaz was arrested in the US after being charged with numerous sex crimes, including recording thousands of nude images of women and children over the past six years. A significant section of the media even in this horrifying crime managed to fan stereotypes against Indians and conceal the religious identity of the perpetrator.

In a flagrant display of hypocrisy, a large section of the media across the world emphasises a Muslim person’s religious identity when they do something great or decent, but downplays or obscures the same identity when they engage in criminal activity. While usually, the foreign media calls the accused persons involved in such cases either Asian or South Asian, this time, the emphasis is explicitly on his Indian origins.

Sadly, even the Indian media outlets toed the Western media’s line meant to tarnish India’s image globally and reported Oumair Aejaz as an “Indian doctor”. Interestingly, there can be Muslim doctors’ associations, and their religious identity be highlighted if they do something laudable but the same cannot be done with a Muslim doctor like Oumair Aejaz carries out horrendous crimes...

On the face of it, nothing much might seem problematic here since perpetrator Oumair Aejaz is indeed of Indian origin, however, the emphasis on his Indian connection is the problem. Have a look at how the both Indian and foreign media report incidents wherein the “good Samaritan” happens to be a Muslim.

In 2017, Australian news outlet The Weekly Times reported: “Muslim doctor saves man’s life”.

In 2016, the Times of India reported how a Muslim girl saved her Hindu classmate from kidnappers even as there was no imperative to mention the girl’s Muslim identity but only talk about her act of bravery.

Just a few days back, a Pakistani news publication AajTV, boasted in its report how a “Heroic Muslim” saved people in the London knife attack. However, demonstrating its hypocrisy, the same publication chose to call Oumair Aejaz an “Indian doctor” in its report and not highlight his Muslim identity. Interestingly, the same Pakistani media called javelin throw star Neeraj Chopra’s Tokyo Olympics gold win a “victory of South Asia” but when a Muslim man Oumair Aejaz carries out a horrendous crime in Michigan, they dismiss him as a “Indian doctor”.

In January last year, Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), a ‘Human rights’ group, reported about an incident wherein a man named Tipu Sultan saved girl Monali Kaushal’s life as she was drowning in Madhya Pradesh. “Muslim man risks life to save a Hindu girl from drowning in Madhya Pradesh,” CJP reported even as there was no imperative to highlight the saviour’s religious identity.

Another CJP report asserted how a “Muslim woman” saved the lives of many people through post-humous organ donation. The CJP, however, failed to mention that donating organs is prohibited in Islam and only receiving is allowed.

In July last year, Turkish news outlet Anadolu reported how a French Muslim “risked his life” to save people from fire in Romans-sur-Isere in southeastern France.

It must also be recalled how the Indian mainstream media highlighted the Muslim identity of rat miners who rescued 41 workers stranded in the Uttarakhand tunnel last year even as several Hindu rat miners were also involved in the rescue mission. The leftist media selectively highlighted the religious identity of Muslim rescuers making them national heroes while no such emphasis was laid on the religious identity of Hindu rescuers.

Ironically, the very same section of foreign and Indian media that leaves no opportunity to glorify the Muslim identity when something good happens even as that the religiosity has little or nothing to do with the good actions of the people, also indulges in whitewashing the crimes committed by Muslims. A classic case of this is being seen in their coverage of anti-Hindu pogroms in Bangladesh, wherein Hindus are being attacked, killed, raped and their houses and temples vandalised, Hindu officials being forced to resign by Islamists solely out of their hatred for Hindus, yet the media outlets like Al Jazeera, NYT, ABC, etc passed these incidents off as “politically motivated revenge attacks”. Moreover, these hypocrites of top order highlighted the Muslim identity of those forming the farcical “human chains” to ‘protect’ Hindu temples, but failed to ‘verify’ whether the attacks on Hindus were driven by Islamism.

Clearly, the Islamist sympathising media lives in and wants to further their delusion that there are only good Muslims and the rest just bad people even if they kill and rape non-Muslims in the name of their religion and Allah.

When Muslims achieve significant success or make great contributions to society, their Islamic identity is frequently highlighted even if their good actions are unrelated to their faith. This narrative framing aims to dispel negative perceptions and promote the notion of Muslims as integral and constructive members of Western society. However, when it comes to naming Islamic terrorists what they truly are, these same media outlets promote a “terrorism has no religion” lie. Apparently, the media and the left-liberals globally want the world to live in denial of the Islamist threat knocking at their doors.

Even with the infamous UK grooming gangs, the mainstream media called them “Asian”, despite the fact that it was their Muslim identity that made them groom non-Muslim girls. For example, take this The Telegraph report’s headline, “Telford scandal: Over 1,000 girls abused and raped by Asian gangs while police looked the other way”. All the perpetrators in this grooming gang were Muslims, mostly of Pakistan descent who singled out non-Muslim, white girls groomed them, sexually abused them multiple times, and threatened to kill them over disclosing their deeds to anyone and yet the media failed to or deliberately covers up the religious and racial motivation behind the crime.

Be it Rotherham, Telford, or Rochdale grooming and sexual exploitation cases, the pattern remained the same, non-Muslim girls including Hindu, Sikh, and White Christian girls being systematically targeted in the United Kingdom by Pakistani Muslims out of their religiously and racially motivated hatred towards non-Muslims. While the pro-Islamist bias is an obvious reason behind downplaying these cases for years or concealing the religious motivation behind the crime, another important reason for the cover-up was the fear of offending the perennially offended Muslim community.

By calling the Muslim groomers “Asian grooming gangs” or by simply their nationality, avoiding the explicit mention of their Muslim identity, the media perpetuates a generalisation unfairly implicating other Asian communities who were the victims of these Muslim grooming gangs, while also avoiding uncomfortable discussions about the specific religious factors involved.

The idea behind laying selective emphasis on the religious identity of Muslims is apparently, intended to create a skewed perception, where the positive aspects or deeds are linked to the religion, but the negative aspects are detached from it. This contributes to the establishment of a one-sided narrative that only those who do good deeds are ‘real Muslims’ while the predators, terrorists etc are not real Muslims even if they quote they carry the Quran in one hand and weapon in another to eliminate non-Muslims as seen in the case of ISIS executing kafirs.

The Muslim grooming gangs in the UK were shielded by the media and pro-Islamist politicians by passing them off as “Asian” or “South Asian grooming gangs”, The Palestinian Islamic terrorist group Hamas’s religiously driven attacks on Jews and Israel are passed off as ‘resistance’, Islamist attackers are labelled as “Bhatke huye naujawan [mislead youths] and grooming Jihad targeting Hindu women in India is outrightly dismissed as ‘hoax’, ‘fiction’, ‘right-wing conspiracy theory’ and whatnot. Currently, the media is obscuring Oumair Aejaz’s Muslim identity and passing him off as an ‘Indian doctor’, had the person happened to be a Hindu, the leftist media outlets would have somehow linked the crime with his religious identity and even to his political leanings. But since a Muslim can’t be bad because of being a Muslim, according to the leftist-Islamist propagandists, Aejaz and other criminals like him are and will be labelled “Asian”, “South Asian”, or “Indian”."

How Generic Can Kamala Harris Be?

How Generic Can Kamala Harris Be?

"For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been circling around this question: Does it actually matter if Kamala Harris stands for something? The days that have passed since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President have been filled with palace intrigue, the occasional stirring speech, a bounce in the polls, and a Vice-Presidential pageant that, frankly, got a bit boring, as a handful of perfectly fine candidates tried very hard to be nice to one another. We know Campaign Kamala is about “freedom,” which her first ad defines in terms that align entirely with the policy preferences of the Democratic Party—so, for instance, the freedom to own whatever kind of gun you want is superseded by, as the ad puts it, “the freedom to be safe from gun violence.” This is totally reasonable but, linguistically speaking, perhaps a bit of a stretch. We know that Harris was a prosecutor. We know that Donald Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, are “weird.” And we know that Harris has erased much of Trump’s lead in swing states, and that things are looking up.

That’s about the extent of it. Harris has shown more talent for giving speeches than the last time she ran, in 2019, and her campaign and her fellow-Democrats deserve credit for her rise in the polls amid heavy skepticism from many, including me, that they could pull off a candidate switch. But we should also be honest about what we are dealing with here. In tennis, a “pusher” is a player who safely returns the ball over the net, again and again, waiting for an increasingly frustrated opponent to make a mistake. This appears to be Campaign Kamala’s strategy: don’t make any unforced errors, keep things vanilla, and eventually Trump or Vance will implode. Harris—as Vance has repeatedly pointed out on Twitter, with the hashtag #wheresKamala—has taken almost no questions from reporters, and has spent most of her time giving stump speeches at rallies. She has not explained what, exactly, happened in Washington after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate; or why she has changed her mind on fracking, which she once said should be banned, and has wobbled on Medicare for All, which she once supported; or what she plans to do with Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, who is said to be unpopular among some of Harris’s wealthy donors; or much about how a Harris Administration would handle the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. 

I suspect that a majority of voters don’t really care about the answers to those questions, at least not in any serious way. On the Democratic side, there’s an energized, good feeling about Campaign Kamala—to a degree not felt, on a Presidential level, since Barack Obama’s last race—and nobody wants to mess that up with debates about policy. Harris is popular; Biden was not. Harris gives the Democrats a shot at beating Trump; Biden most likely did not. Most of the liberals I know seem to be enveloped in a pleasant if thin fog in which concerns and criticisms melt away. The believers do not need explanations as long as Harris’s poll numbers remain encouraging...

There was a chance, perhaps, that Harris could have defined herself more pointedly with her choice for Vice-President... Like every other aspect of Harris’s campaign to date, they represented safe choices, and the decision arrived with little public explanation from above. (Another thing about the Harris campaign: so far, it seems to have leaks under control.) Walz, in the end, might not bolster the ticket enough to get Harris elected, but it’s hard to see him becoming the center of constant negative attention the way that Vance has for the Trump campaign. He is another ball played safely back over the net.

Part of Harris’s success thus far derives from the extraordinary circumstances that led to her becoming the presumptive nominee. She is running in a general election without having gone through a primary, in which all her vague positions would have been interrogated both by the press and by the candidates running against her. There have been no awkward debate moments, like the one in 2019 when Tulsi Gabbard, then a member of Congress, reminded voters that Harris had put more than fifteen hundred people in prison for marijuana violations and had “laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.” (In response, Harris, who inconsistently adopted her “prosecutor President” persona in what ultimately was a confused campaign, didn’t address the specific critique, instead later noting how poorly Gabbard was polling and calling her an apologist for the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad.) Now Harris is running as a quasi-incumbent who doesn’t have to answer all that much for what she did during the past four years. A Democratic polling firm concluded, for instance, that “voters do not hold her accountable for Biden’s perceived failures on inflation,” meaning that Harris “can run hard on economic messaging.” She can claim credit for things that voters like about the last four years while plausibly distancing herself from some of the things they don’t.

As wildly different as Harris and Trump are, their campaigns seem to share a degree of indifference to the specifics of what their candidates are saying, because both campaigns realize that many of their voters are unconcerned about such details—or, at the very least, are unlikely to be moved by them. What matters to many voters right now is their hatred and fear, however justified, of the opposing candidate, and the fun they have calling the other side weird, dangerous, and deranged. Harris and Trump, under differing circumstances, and in different ways, have floated above what was once the perfunctory and deeply unsexy muck of campaigning on a platform, or for some particular issue, and seem to exist more as brands. Other Presidential candidates have risen above that muck, too—often the highly charismatic ones, like John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Obama—but I can’t think of a race that was quite as unmoored as this one from the actual details of governance. Trump has been insisting that he doesn’t actually know anything about Project 2025. Harris’s campaign Web site, meanwhile, does not even have a policy section, or an articulation of beliefs. There’s just a button to donate, some merch and yard signs, and a biography that describes her as “the daughter of parents who brought her to civil rights marches in a stroller.”

The task of filling in what Harris prefers to leave blank would usually fall to the press. But, to date, there have not been particularly loud or widespread calls for her to sit down and answer questions, as there were for Biden after his catastrophic debate. I think it’s fair to say that, so far, the mainstream press has handled Harris quite gently. This is not, in my view, a matter of partisan leaning—although I should say that, having worked in the media for about fifteen years, at several institutions, I have not had a single co-worker who openly supported Trump. (I don’t even know of anyone who I suspect might have voted for him.) But if the media’s liberal makeup inured all Democratic candidates from criticism, we wouldn’t have had endless coverage of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, or a relentless call for Biden to withdraw from the race. You could argue that the overwhelming push in the media to remove Biden simply had to be followed by the lionization of his successor—but the media, especially those of us who churn out opinions for a living, cannot actually achieve that level of coördination...

I wonder how the mainstream press will respond to a scandal, or even a hiccup, in the Harris campaign. If it turns out that Harris has been maintaining an idiosyncratic and not entirely secure approach to e-mail, or if a relative dropped off a laptop filled with salacious images for repair and they were shared with the New York Post, how would the media handle the story? More plausibly, if Campaign Kamala sticks with this strategy of keeping the candidate on message through speeches and answering few questions from the press corps, will reporters just shrug and let it go? Should we care that she has not done a sitdown interview or had to answer a substantive policy question in weeks?

The answer is that reporters should care but shouldn’t expect voters, or even their audiences, to follow suit. This may be a minority view, but I don’t think that journalists are ethically bound to stop Trump and “preserve democracy,” nor do I think that every criticism of or investigation into a liberal candidate needs to be balanced with a cursory statement about how Trump is a lying felon. If Harris is running a campaign that’s full of energy but short on specifics, we should say that, even if we think that Harris’s content-light approach is an optimal strategy for winning in November.

A few weeks ago, back when Biden was still the presumptive Democratic nominee, I wrote about his attacks on the media. He seemed to be tapping into a feeling that members of the press, who had labelled themselves the guardians of democracy during the first Trump Presidency, should live up to that grandiose title and protect the Republic against the dangers of his opponent. I understand why many people feel that this is the press’s job right now, and it can be difficult to write proportionally about flip-flops and fudging when those things are measured against Trump’s absurd inventions and provocations. But I do not think that it will help anyone if the media allows Harris to run her campaign with zero criticism, or any probing into where she stands on contentious issues—even if such questioning is met with pushback on social media, where the mildest criticism of the Democrats can unleash a flood of outraged claims that the press is repeating the “but her e-mails” travesty and dooming the country to four more years of Trump. One can believe, as I do, that some mistakes were made in the coverage of Clinton’s e-mail server and still understand that the media should do its job, and interrogate the Harris campaign, especially the parts that don’t exist yet.

A generic candidate who promises nothing on the campaign trail and is unburdened by any past might be the dream of electoral-politics nerds, but it’s the job of the press in a healthy democracy to make sure that voters know whom they’re supporting. An unexamined candidate can become anything, and can work under the influence of anyone, when they assume power. This week, Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland, suggested on CNBC that a Harris Administration would change course from Biden’s more restrictive regulatory economic policies and create a friendlier atmosphere for “our large industries.” Was he speaking on Harris’s behalf? Does he know something that Harris has declined to share with the public herself?

On Wednesday, Harris was interrupted by pro-Palestinian demonstrators at a rally in Michigan, a state with a large Arab and Muslim population. She went off script, one of the few times in the past three weeks that she has done so; after responding respectfully to the chants at first, she said, “You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” She has called for an end to the war in Gaza and has coupled her concern about the suffering of Palestinians with an ironclad support for Israel. But how does she plan on bringing about the ceasefire that she says she’s for? On Wednesday, the Times reported that Harris, before the rally, had told leaders of the Uncommitted Movement, seeking to discuss an arms embargo, that she was open to a meeting; on Thursday morning, her national-security adviser insisted that she was not in favor of an arms embargo. Why the seeming change in tone? And how does Harris feel about the student protesters who will be returning to their campuses in the upcoming weeks? We don’t know the answers to any of these questions."