Pun Salad

The incredible decision by Twitter and Facebook to block access to a New York Post story about a cache of emails reportedly belonging to Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter, with Twitter going so far as to lock the 200 year-old newspaper out of its own account for over a week, continues to be a major underreported scandal.

The hypocrisy is mind-boggling. Imagine the reaction if that same set of facts involved the New York Times and any of its multitudinous unverifiable “exposes” from the last half-decade: from the similarly-leaked “black ledger” story implicating Paul Manafort, to its later-debunked “repeated contacts with Russian intelligence” story, to its mountain of articles about the far more dubious Steele dossier. Internet platforms for years have balked at intervening at many other sensational “unverified” stories, including ones called into question in very short order […]

Ohio may be a red state with a Republican governor and state legislature, but the Ohio Department of Education kicked off this school year by promoting far-left, racialist, anti-police propaganda in the form of its recommended “Anti-Racist Allyship Starter Pack,” a resource for social studies teachers. The starter pack contains about 200 links to “antiracist” op-eds, essays, and blog posts, which exemplify what President Trump meant when he spoke of a “left-wing cultural revolution” in our schools “designed to overthrow the American revolution” in favor of “far-left fascism.”

The case against Trump in 2020 is a lot like the case against Trump in 2016 but bolstered by the accumulation of evidence and experience. Any hope that he might mature in office and come to appreciate the gravity of his responsibility has been dissolved. He is, if anything, a less serious candidate in 2020 than he was in 2016, and even more the game-show host. He has a few good people around him who have tried to push him in the right direction, but they have, for the most part, failed.

Anyone who thinks these labels ["misinformation" and "disinformation"] are not being selectively applied should consider a relevant example. At the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., I had a brief encounter with the conservative activist James O'Keefe of Project Veritas, best known for surreptitiously recording undercover videos of liberals making embarrassing statements. I had quarreled with O'Keefe on Twitter, and we renewed the argument during the conference. I told him that since he used dishonest means to obtain his footage, his results were suspect: If you mislead people about your intentions, your opinions, and indeed, your identity, any subsequent revelations must be treated skeptically. O'Keefe disagreed, and that was the end of the exchange.

We now know that elsewhere during this same event, the actor, impersonator, and Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen was engaged in an undercover operation of his own. He entered CPAC wearing KKK robes ("I'm Stephen Miller!" he reportedly shouted), changed into a full Trump costume, and attempted to crash Vice President Mike Pence's speech while offering his fake daughter—the actress Maria Bakalova—as a child bride. The incident is featured prominently in Baron Cohen's new movie, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, which was released last week to much fanfare.