Kyle Rittenhouse & Project Veritas vs. "a [Biden] Dishonest System, abetted by a [Biden] Dishonest Media" that has "no Room for Principles, Universally Applicable Rights, or Basic Reason"
FBI Raids Home of County Clerk and Whistleblower Tina Peters — The State Official Who Refused to Wipe Election Data from ComputersWithout Making a Copy - Gateway Pundit
In [leftist Glenn Greenwald's] post "Kyle
Rittenhouse, Project Veritas, and the Inability to Think in Terms of
Principles" he illustrates that the Biden Democrat system and Biden Democrat media from top to bottom are totally corrupt. - The Catholic Monitor
This, under the law, is called self-defense. Rittenhouse, aided by the video evidence and some very capable counsel, has made an excellent case for self-defense. The prosecution has looked, for the most part, ridiculous. It’s genuinely entertaining to see the faces of the hosts on CNN and MSNBC, not to mention the journalistic purveyors of lies that they routinely feature as guests and expert commentators, as their public prevarications have come crashing down. - Indian-American author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza
The openly leftist Intelligencer website in a hit piece on the principled Glenn Greenwald admitted that he was "a credit to leftist bloggers everywhere," but then called him a "Republican" apparently because he believes in "principles, universally applicable rights, [and] basic reason":
"At various points in the past decade, I’ve considered Glenn Greenwald an inspiration (for his righteous criticism of Barack Obama’s drone strikes, Israel’s human-rights violations, and the justice system’s class biases); a credit to leftist bloggers everywhere (for his unlikely but not unearned receipt of Edward Snowden’s leaks and subsequent transformation into an international celebrity); a polemicist who’s doing righteous and brave work in Brazil, but has gotten a bit too fixated on owning the libs (for treating hyperbolic coverage of an investigation into a presidential campaign’s genuine improprieties as the biggest outrage of the Trump era); and objectively a Republican." [https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/glenn-greenwald-speaks-truth-to-reply-guys.html]
The "leftist," but honest Greenwald is a dying breed in Joe Biden's incredibly shrinking leftist coalition in America because unlike him and as he from my perceptive implied most of the other members of the Biden coalition "view the world through a prism bereft of principles — either due to lack of intellectual capacity or ethics or both — assume everyone's world view is similarly craven. It is this same stunted mindset that saddles our discourse with so much illogic and so many twisted presumptions, such as the inability to distinguish between defending someone's right to express a particular opinion and agreement with that opinion. In a world in which ideology, partisan loyalty, tribal affiliations, in-group identity and personality-driven assessments predominate, there is no room for principles, universally applicable rights, or basic reason."
In his post "Kyle Rittenhouse, Project Veritas, and the Inability to Think in Terms of Principles" he illustrates that the Biden Democrat system and Biden Democrat media from top to bottom are totally corrupt:
The FBI has executed a string of search warrants targeting the homes and cell phones of Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe and several others associated with that organization. It should require no effort to understand why it is a cause for concern that a Democratic administration is using the FBI to aggressively target an organization devoted to obtaining and reporting incriminating information about Democratic Party leaders and their liberal allies.
That does not mean the FBI investigation is inherently improper. Journalists are no more entitled than any other citizen to commit crimes. If there is reasonable cause to believe O'Keefe and his associates committed federal crimes, then an FBI investigation is warranted as it is for any other case. But there has been no evidence presented that O'Keefe or Project Veritas employees have done anything of the sort, nor any explanation provided to justify these invasive searches. That we should want and need that is self-evident: if the Trump-era FBI had executed search warrants inside the newsrooms of The New York Times and NBC News, we would be demanding evidence to prove it was legally justified. Yet virtually nothing has been provided to justify the FBI's targeting of O'Keefe and his colleagues, and the little that has been disclosed by way of justifying this makes no sense.
The FBI investigation concerns the theft last year of the diary of Joe Biden's daughter, Ashley, yet Project Veritas, while admitting they received a copy from an anonymous source, chose not to publish that diary because they were unable to verify it. Nobody and nothing thus far suggests that Project Veritas played any role in its acquisition, legal or otherwise. There is a cryptic reference in the search warrant to transmitting stolen material across state lines, but it is not illegal for journalists to receive and use material illegally acquired by a source: the most mainstream organizations spent the last month touting documents pilfered from Facebook by their heroic "whistleblower” Frances Haugen.
On Monday night, we produced an in-depth video report examining the FBI's targeting of O'Keefe and Project Veritas and the dangers it presents (as we do for all of our Rumble videos, the transcript will soon be made available to subscribers here; for now, you can watch the video at the Rumble link or on the player below). One of the primary topics of our report was the authoritarian tactic that is typically used to justify governmental attacks on those who report news and disseminate information: namely, to decree that the target is not a real journalist and therefore has no entitlement to claim the First Amendment guarantee of a free press.
This not-a-real-journalist tactic was and remains the primary theory used by those who justify the ongoing attempt to imprison Julian Assange. In demanding Assange's prosecution under the Espionage Act, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions.” Yet the five-term Senator insisted: "but he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.”
This not-a-real-journalist slogan was also the one used by both the CIA and the corporate media against myself and my colleagues in both the Snowden reporting we did in 2013, as well as the failed attempt to criminally prosecute me in 2020 for the year-long Brazil exposés we did: punishing them is not an attack on press freedom because they are not journalists and what they did is not journalism.
What is most striking about this weapon is that — like the campaign to agitate for more censorship — it is led by journalists. It is the corporate media that most aggressively insists that those who are independent, those who are outsiders, those who do not submit to their institutional structures are not real journalists the way they are, and thus are not entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. In order to create a framework to deny Project Veritas's status as journalists, The New York Times claimed last week that anyone who uses undercover investigations (as Veritas does) is automatically a non-journalist because that entails lying — even though, just two years earlier, the same paper heralded numerous news outlets such as Al Jazeera and Mother Jones for using undercover investigations to accomplish what they called "compelling” reporting.
I am very well-acquainted with this repressive tactic of trying to decree who is and is not a real journalist for purposes of constitutional protection. Many have forgotten — given the awards it ultimately ended up winning — that the NSA/Snowden reporting we did in 2013 was originally maligned as quasi-criminal not just by Obama national security officials such as James Clapper but also by The New York Times (the first profile the Paper of Record published about me the day after the reporting began referred to me in the headline as an “Anti-Surveillance Activist” and then, once backlash ensued, it was changed to “Blogger” (the original snide, disqualifying headline is still visible in the URL)...
... The FBI's actions against Project Veritas and O'Keefe are so blatantly alarming that press freedom groups such as the Committee to Project Journalists and the Freedom of the Press Foundation (on whose Board I sit) have expressed grave concerns about it, including on their social media accounts for all to see. Even the ACLU — which these days is loathe to speak out in favor of any person or group disliked by their highly partisan liberal donor base — issued a very carefully hedged statement that made clear how much they despise Project Veritas but said: “Nevertheless, the precedent set in this case could have serious consequences for press freedom” (at least thus far, the ACLU has just quietly stuck this statement on its website and not uttered a word about it on its social media accounts, where most of its liberal donors track what they do, but the fact that they felt compelled to say anything about this right-wing boogieman demonstrates how extreme the FBI's actions are). The federal judge overseeing the warrants has temporarily enjoined the FBI from extracting any more information from the cell phones seized from O'Keefe and other Project Veritas employees pending a determination of their legal justification.
The reason this is such a grave press freedom attack is two-fold. First, as indicated, any attempt to anoint oneself the arbiter of who is and is not a "real journalist” for purposes of First Amendment protection is inherently tyrannical. Which institutions are sufficiently trustworthy and competent to decree who is a real journalist meriting First Amendment protection and who falls outside as something else?
But there is a much more significant problem with this framework: namely, the question of who is and is not a real journalist is completely irrelevant to the First Amendment. None of the rights in the Constitution, including press freedom, were intended to apply only to a small, cloistered, credentialed, privileged group of citizens. The exact opposite was true: the only reason they are valuable as rights is because they enjoy universal application, protecting all citizens.
Indeed, one of the most passionate grievances of the American colonists was that nobody was permitted to use the press unless first licensed by the British Crown. Conversely, the most celebrated journalism of the time was undertaken by people like Thomas Paine — who never worked for an established journalistic outlet in his life — as he circulated the pamphlet Common Sense that railed against the abuses of the King. What was protected by the First Amendment was not a small, privileged caste bearing the special label "journalists,” but rather the activity of a free press. The proof of this is clear and ample, and is set forth in the video we produced on Monday night.
But none of this matters. If you express concern for the FBI's targeting of O'Keefe, it will be instantly understood not as a concern about any of these underlying principles but instead as an endorsement of O'Keefe's politics, journalism, and O'Keefe himself. The same is true for the discourse surrounding Kyle Rittenhouse. If you say that — after having actually watched the trial — you believe the state failed to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in light of his defense of self-defense, many will disbelieve your sincerity, will insist that your view is based not in some apolitical assessment of the evidence or legal principles about what the state must do in order to imprison a citizen, but rather that you must be a "supporter” of Rittenhouse himself, his ideology (whatever it is assumed to be), and the political movement with which he, in their minds, is associated.
On some level, this is pure projection: those who are incapable of assessing political or legal conflicts through a prism of principles rather than personalities assume that everyone is plagued by the same deficiency. Since they decide whether to support or oppose the FBI's actions toward O'Keefe based on their personal view of O'Keefe rather than through reference to any principles, they assume that this is how everyone is determining their views of that situation. Similarly, since they base their views on whether Rittenhouse should be convicted or acquitted based on how they personally feel about Rittenhouse and his perceived politics rather than the evidence presented at the trial (which most of them have not watched), they assume that anyone advocating for an acquittal can be doing so only because they like Rittenhouse's politics and believe that his actions were heroic.
In sum, those who view the world through a prism bereft of principles — either due to lack of intellectual capacity or ethics or both — assume everyone's world view is similarly craven. It is this same stunted mindset that saddles our discourse with so much illogic and so many twisted presumptions, such as the inability to distinguish between defending someone's right to express a particular opinion and agreement with that opinion. In a world in which ideology, partisan loyalty, tribal affiliations, in-group identity and personality-driven assessments predominate, there is no room for principles, universally applicable rights, or basic reason. [Kyle Rittenhouse, Project Veritas, and the Inability to Think in Terms of Principles: Glenn Greenwald (greenwald@substack.com), You’re a free subscriber to Glenn Greenwald. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber]
Indian-American author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza goes into detail about how the Biden Democrat system and Biden Democrat media from top to bottom are totally corrupt:
The Kyle Rittenhouse trial is an important moment in American culture, because this isn’t just about Kyle Rittenhouse. In a sense, Antifa is also on trial. So is the narrative that the media has been peddling for months, not just about Rittenhouse, but also about many other things: President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan catastrophe, the open southern border, runaway inflation, government persecution of political dissidents, coordinated censorship between the Biden administration and digital platforms, and the list goes on.
For me, the unacknowledged heroes of the Rittenhouse case are the intrepid videographers who were on the scene recording what was taking place on the street. Without them, Rittenhouse would probably be facing a real risk of being convicted for double murder. Why? Because he’s dealing with a dishonest prosecutor, who doesn’t hesitate to say things he knows are misleading; dishonest detectives, who don’t hesitate to twist the truth; and a dishonest media, which has been brazenly lying about what happened between Rittenhouse and his combatants for a whole year.
Let’s begin with a detective, who was asked about how the three men whom Rittenhouse shot—Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, and Gaige Grosskreutz—came into contact with him. Here, we can go to the videotape, which clearly and unmistakably shows Rittenhouse being chased by a group of people, shouting, in effect, “Let’s get him.” Yet the detective pretended that this isn’t what happened. No, Grosskreutz wasn’t chasing after Rittenhouse. Rather, he was merely running in the same direction.
If you read media accounts of the confrontation, you would get the clear impression that it was Rittenhouse who was chasing Rosenbaum, not the other way around. For anyone reading these accounts, it would seem that the men were minding their own business when Rittenhouse decided on his own to hunt and gun them down. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Yet, if we didn’t have the videotape, we wouldn’t know this. In that case, all we would have is the word of the prosecutor and the accounts of the journalists. This recognition has implications beyond Rittenhouse. It might help to explain why the Biden Department of Justice is withholding the 14,000 hours of footage of the Jan. 6 incursion into the Capitol. Defense attorneys for the defendants say that the government is charging protesters with assaulting Capitol Police while the video evidence would clearly show that it was the police who assaulted the protesters, striking them and firing tear gas and pellets into the crowd without any provocation whatsoever.
Let’s now turn to the Rittenhouse prosecutor, Thomas Binger, whose operating premise seems to be that Rittenhouse had no business being in Kenosha. Here, Binger was merely echoing a theme that the media had been promulgating since the beginning of the case. I regularly see it blasted across social media. Yet the people who ask what Rittenhouse was doing in Kenosha never seem to pose the same question of Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz. Why did those three show up that day?..
... So he wasn’t, as prosecutor Binger insisted, a “chaos tourist” who crossed state lines simply looking for trouble. He was literally protecting a community that he could call his own. Prior to Rittenhouse disclosing this, none of the innumerable media accounts I scoured about the case mentioned it.
Binger also tried to get Grosskreutz—who was merely wounded, not killed, by Rittenhouse—to say that Rittenhouse wantonly shot him even though Grosskreutz posed no direct or immediate threat to Rittenhouse. Grosskreutz played along, at one point even suggesting he raised his arms to surrender to Rittenhouse. Yet under cross-examination Grosskreutz admitted that he was carrying a gun in his right hand and that Rittenhouse only shot him when he pointed the gun directly at Rittenhouse.
This, under the law, is called self-defense. Rittenhouse, aided by the video evidence and some very capable counsel, has made an excellent case for self-defense. The prosecution has looked, for the most part, ridiculous. It’s genuinely entertaining to see the faces of the hosts on CNN and MSNBC, not to mention the journalistic purveyors of lies that they routinely feature as guests and expert commentators, as their public prevarications have come crashing down. [https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/kyle-rittenhouse-and-the-false-narrative_4103010.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-11-17&mktids=07f44fa269cf6b2e5a5edd81cacdf557&est=2fkPKLhKuY7khEjbLff%2B5XtcNn%2FbnZn9XXr5wPn%2BP6CR%2BAgErI4euVZnVZMr]
Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis's Amoris Laetitia.