New york times

Doctor rebuts NYT hit piece about Kushner’s coronavirus efforts

The doctor at the center of a New York Times story alleging Jared Kushner bungled the administration's attempts to procure medical supplies is pushing back on the negative tone of the piece, indicating that the Times’s reporting 'did not fully reflect my experience.' Dr Jeffrey Hendricks is quoted in a Times article from May 5 expressing frustration with Kushner's assembled team of coronavirus volunteers, whose job it was to identify potential sources of medical equipment. 'When I offered them viable leads at viable prices from an approved vendor, they kept passing me down the line and made terrible deals instead,' Hendricks said of dealing with the volunteer team, adding that getting responses at all was difficult.

Jared Kushner

Will the coronavirus succeed where Russiagate and Ukrainegate failed?

Back on March 12, I noted in this space that one of the most potent effects of our latest Chinese import would be as a weapon of political propaganda — a new club, that is to say, which the Dems would wield to beat President Trump. It has taken a while for the Hephaestus of the Left to fashion the appropriate weapon. Back at the end of January, there was a brief moment where a stiletto was thought to be the weapon of choice. Trump suspended air travel from China of January 31: stab him with the charge of xenophobia, slice him with slur of racism, carve him up with the charge of overreacting. Towards the end of February, however, there was a sudden shift in sentiment. There were hardly any cases, even fewer fatalities, but the public-health tea kettles were screaming panic.

coronavirus Donald Trump at a press briefing, Credit: Getty

Why is the New York Times shilling for the World Health Organization?

Donald Trump announced this week he intends to halt funding for the World Health Organization over the group's suspicious relationship with China. Doubtless you'll be shocked to hear that the establishment media quickly fell in line to defend one of its favorite globalist institutions, regardless of its actual effectiveness. The New York Times, fresh off picking apart the woman who has accused Joe Biden of sexual assault, scraped together an article defending the WHO's response to the coronavirus outbreak in a stunning display of  revisionist history. 'The World Health Organization, always cautious, acted more forcefully and faster than many national governments', declared the Times's standfirst, which prompted Cockburn to spit out his double-roast espresso.

new york times WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Why the mainstream media won’t take Tara Reade seriously

'The gym bag, I don’t know where it went. I handed it to him. It was gone and then his hands were on me and underneath my clothes. And then he went down my skirt, but then up inside it and he penetrated me with his fingers.' That's how former Senate aide Tara Reade described a 1993 encounter with her former boss Joe Biden on a podcast last month. A Biden spokesperson says the account is 'false’, but Reade's claim is supported by a friend and her younger brother, who both say she told them about the alleged assault shortly after it happened. But most establishment media outlets, such as the Washington Post, didn’t give her allegation more than a passing mention. Biden managed to give seven interviews to the press without being asked about Reade's claims once.

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sovereignty

Sovereignty rules

Washington, DC At the end of March, about two weeks into the coronavirus emergency, I looked out my window onto the street below and saw something that made me uneasy about the future of the country. There was a commotion down there. Two white teenagers were standing in the street with their hands up. A man — who looked and sounded like an East African immigrant — had stopped his car in the middle of the road and sprung out. I squinted to see what it was he was holding in front of him that made the kids look so alarmed. It was a pizza. The kids had ordered it. The car was marked with a Domino’s insignia. ‘Whoa, whoa, man!’ said one of the kids. ‘Take it easy!’ He was grotesquely corpulent.

The coronavirus class divide

Tone-deaf media elites and celebrities demand we all just stay home just as they do, self-isolating in their multi-million-dollar LA mansions or NYC brownstones. Journalists who don’t care to educate themselves about rural America — even after wildly misunderstanding the rise of Trump in 2016 — now lecture us country bumpkins, because we’re too stupid to understand how to quarantine ourselves. The architect of this condescending union of the fatuous and the famous was the New York Times.

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Apocalypse soon

An age demands a name when it’s an age of upheaval. The name should describe the ills of society and even suggest their cure. Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society aims to do exactly that — and succeeds in ways that he might not have intended. Douthat rejects the common view of decadence as Caligula-inspired orgies or Marquis de Sade-style perversion, or even excessive consumption of chocolate cake by women. For him, decadence is ‘neither empty of any judgment nor excessively deterministic’. He finds this sweet spot in the work of Jacques Barzun, who defined decadent times by their ‘deep concerns’ and ‘peculiarly restless’ mood.

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A short list of Biden backers who declared Trump mentally unfit for office

If there ever were a theme to emerge from the Trump era it is this: hypocrisy. We're all guilty, we all change our minds and contradict ourselves on occasion. So it is that we come full circle during the ascendancy of Joe Biden and observe that the very same commentators and pundits who once suggested that Donald Trump was mentally unfit for office find themselves enthusiastically endorsing one Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. for president. There's something especially egregious about declaring Trump intellectually incapable of governing while supporting the candidacy of a man who often forgets where he is and the office for which he's running. In the spirit of the time we find ourselves living in, let's name and shame the worst offenders.

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Trump campaign hits the media where it hurts — in court

The Trump campaign named the Washington Post in a libel suit on Tuesday over two articles the paper published last year claiming that the campaign tried to conspire with Russia. The first article, published June 13, asserted that the campaign ‘tried to conspire with’ a ‘sweeping and systematic’ Russian attack on the American electoral system, while a second article published on June 20 questioned ‘who knows what sort of aid Russia and North Korea will give to the Trump campaign, now that he has invited them to offer their assistance?

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The biggest problem with today’s writers? Mediocrity

There is nothing writers love to write about more than writers. We are an extraordinarily self-important breed. Find a group of plumbers, office workers or electricians and they will talk about anything except their line of work. When writers come together, though, the subject of conversation is invariably their peers and themselves. But I can hardly talk. Here I am, coming to you today not just to write about writers and writing but to write about a writer writing about writers and writing. (Did you make it through that sentence OK? I'm sorry for inflicting it on you. Have a drink or something. You deserve one.) What have we done to deserve this kind of self-absorption? Writing, at its best, adds a little truth and a little beauty to the world.

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California bound

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. I think it was from the late Roger Scruton, back when he was writing about wine for another magazine, that I learned the importance of being a terroiriste — not, nota bene, a terrorist. That, as Qasem Soleimani learned to his sorrow, is something else entirely. No, what Sir Roger had in mind was the importance of environment to the production of delicious wine. Terroir means the composition of the soil, yes, but it also means so much more. One dictionary sums it up as the ‘complete natural environment in which a particular wine is produced, including...the soil, topography, and climate’.

Award winning bottles of wine

The rise of cancel chic

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Last summer, at a secretive dinner in Manhattan, I heard a New York Times staffer regale our table with some tales. He told us about how a dozen or so people had, like him, faced the most perilous horror imaginable for a blue checkmark Twitter person. They’d been canceled. For some, it was a tweet. For others, posing in a photograph with a Republican, or clicking ‘like’ on a Facebook post written by a known transphobe, or perhaps expressing an unhealthy familiarity with the work of Milton Friedman. For the Times staffer, he deigned to question gender theory in the office and sent half his team hyperventilating into paper bags and the other privately giving him the thumbs up.

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Why John Bolton won’t win his war on Trump

The first sentence of the New York Times report on John Bolton’s tell-all memoir about his time in the Trump White House contains a bombshell — but not the one that everybody thinks. The real revelation is that it suggests that President Trump is innocent of the charges on which Democrats are trying to impeach him. Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt reported on Sunday that Trump 'wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.

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A hostile media helps Donald Trump

The news media of the late 1700s and early 1800s consisted almost entirely of partisan political operations. Ron Chernow, the biographer of Washington and Hamilton, describes the newspapers of that era as 'avowedly partisan’, with 'no pretense of objectivity'. It was, Chernow, writes, a 'golden age for wielding words as rapier-sharp political weapons’. Some two centuries later, we are returning to a media landscape in which the majority of sources are 'avowedly partisan' with little pretense of the objectivity that only a few decades ago was a hallmark of American journalism.

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Why did the New York Times minimize the Bosnian genocide?

‘Why Did I Let a Convicted War Criminal Practice Energy Healing on Me?’ wonders Jessica Stern in a New York Times excerpt from her forthcoming book. The war criminal in question is Radovan Karadžić, a Bosnian Serb leader responsible for the energetic orchestration and execution of genocide against Bosnian Muslims during the 1990s war. His most notorious crime against humanity includes the murder of over 8,000 Muslim men and boys over a few days in Srebrenica. The book in question is My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide, a memoir of Stern’s interviews with Karadžić.

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In Apprentice-Style Special, New York Times Endorses Trump for President

In the New York Times’s latest self-centered Hulu special, the op-ed board invited Democratic primary candidate after candidate into their lavish board room, peered over their elitist glasses at them and demanded why each of them might be worthy of their precious ink. One by one, the candidates willingly prostrated themselves before the court. At the end of this hour-long special, the Times revealed its endorsement. The suspense is over. The New York Times has endorsed Donald Trump for president. That television special, like the Times’s docu-series The Weekly, lets the mask slip.

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No, Megxit doesn’t mean Britain is racist

Here we go again. Just when it seemed that the rancor might abate and wounds might start to heal, along comes another express train of controversy to divide Britain. Brexit has been replaced by Megxit (as the tabloids are calling it) following the bombshell announcement by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex that they want to ‘step back’ as senior members of the royal family while continuing to have their cakes and eat them — or, rather, ‘work to become financially independent.’ Suddenly, those who strive tirelessly to rid Britain of its monarchy altogether have been galvanized. So man those ramparts! Re-arm! Let the venom flow once more! Some on the left are even calling for a referendum on the matter.

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The 1619 Project is the 2019 Project — and the 2020 Project

It is increasingly clear that the 1619 Project, foisted on the American public in August by the New York Times, was ill advised. Fatuous, tendentious and tedious, 1619 is more advocacy than history, and is intended mainly to stoke the woke and to keep race on the front burner in the upcoming 2020 elections. No close observer of the Times over the past few years would have expected otherwise, for in its domestic coverage it reads at times more like a Midtown edition of the Amsterdam News than a national newspaper of record. While still indispensable in some ways, its editorial slant and, indeed, news coverage have become unmoored.

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For some reason, Michael Bloomberg thinks he should be president

Who would you like to see better represented in the already-crowded Democratic primary? Septuagenarians? Centrists? Or billionaires? For those of you who answered 'all three', you may be in luck, as the New York Times reports that former New York mayor and current 17th richest person in the world Michael Bloomberg is set to file paperwork in Alabama designating himself a presidential candidate. Bloomberg has sat on the sidelines over the past few months. He has watched once-respected politicians address near-empty tents in New Hampshire and seen Tom Steyer splurge his own cash on TV and internet ads to distort the proportion of his popularity. It takes real guts to observe that and think 'I too would like to get 3 percent in a poll — how much of my money would you like?

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Dear journalism students…

Stacked up next to lessons on queering Shakespeare, feminist interpretive dance, and non-binary archery, studying journalism is only mildly less ridiculous than many courses offered by the academy today. Yet each time my alma mater’s increasingly woke newsletter arrives in the mail I’m stunned these programs still exist. I think, these poor students are being led so far astray, as I was, by studying journalism. Today, more than ever, it is harming, not helping, their future career. I came out of school in 2005, before iPhones, before Big Social Media, before journalism was completely dead, when reading the news on your computer was unpleasant and people mostly still bought print.

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