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To kick off a great Fourth of July Weekend we’ll need firecrackers, but, of course, only with adult supervision. For the former, we’ve got John Yoo filling in for Rob and Charles C.W. Cooke as our first guest – for the latter, Mr. Bill McGurn.
To start, Peter and James get to pick Yoo’s brain on a few of the recent Supreme Court decisions along with Bill Cosby’s release. Then Charlie gives an ode to the only country on Earth that lets you move here and consider yourself a full member. Lastly, Bill fills us in on his saintly godson, Jimmy Lai, and his concerns for the future of Hong Kong. A podcast for all lovers of freedom and justice!
Music from this week’s show: Saturday in the Park by Chicago.
And we’re off next week, but we’ll see you again on the 16th. Happy Independence Day to all!
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The basic point is that for any conservative or so called conservative or self declared conservative to point to The New York Times as an authority on authority on any politics is insane or foolish or both.
What I have seen over and over again is that never Trump political people on the right repeat Democrat talking points in order to attack Trump.
You don’t like Trump Scott. That is obvious. Because I don’t think you’re actually a leftist I can’t come up with any other reason why you would keep siding with them.
The goal post moving here is really quite something. Do you have them on wheels are are you carrying it by hand?
As I have said to you before, I’m agnostic about Trump, Bryan. I liked many of his policies, often did not like the way he expressed himself, and found much of his behavior exhausting and self-defeating. Is that so terrible?
If you want to defend or try to minimize (“it was a peaceful protest!“) an invasion of the U.S. Capitol in order to subvert the counting of the Electoral College votes, go ahead and do that. But I don’t have to agree with it, even you are a customer. And if I did have to agree with it, I’d quit.
And seriously, stop with the Democratic talking points BS. It’s a law and order talking point, not a political one. If a leftist group had done this, you’d be screaming your head off about what a threat to democracy it was. And you’d be right.
I think we’re all more concerned with the actual rioting – burning, looting, shooting, etc – that took place over the last year-plus, but which seems to get scant attention compared to the 1/6 “insurrection.” For sure, nobody involved with those violent riots that actually involved guns and fire and stuff, is being treated anywhere near as harshly as those who may have just been on-site for 1/6, not actually doing anything.
I think that’s a good point Kedavis. I’m against violent protests always so I’m against the 1/6 idioicy but I think Blue Yeti is being a little hyperbolic when he says January sixth was a threat to democracy. Things can be bad and dumb and not be a threat to democracy.
I don’t think “hyperbolic” is nearly enough.
If that is the way you want to see it, go right ahead. I am not the one investing in the NYT to support my argument that an unarmed woman should have been shot.
Why don’t both watch the video (it won’t bite you and it won’t hypnotize you against your will and turn you into a Democrat either — I promise) and then think about what your reaction would be to this event if it were a bunch of lefties doing it.
I highly doubt you’d be describing it so casually. In fact I’m sure of it. And neither would I.
No, I would not, as evidenced by the fact I am not screaming my head off about real violent riots in other parts of the country. I have condemned them.
But, if you have evidence to the contrary, please post it. I’ll wait.
This was not an attempt to subvert the EC counting, and to say such, is to parrot leftist talking points. And if you are really this upset, where is your outrage on the taking of the capital in WI by Democrats? I’ll wait on that.
When you side with Democrats, and you cheer the murder of a vet, and the holding of Americans as political prisoners, yes, it is so terrible. You side with with Tyrants.
And if you don’t support sex robots, you support poverty and misery. So there!
Bryan, since you refuse (or you’re afraid) to watch the video you clearly haven’t seen the people involved saying on tape that this was their stated intention. So please stop with the spin and the propaganda about what this was about and who perpetrated it.
My criticism of this event in no way, shape, or form means I’m supportive of any other murder or invasion or anything else. And quite frankly, it’s Stalinist to suggest such a thing. Both are abhorrently wrong.
Illegal acts are illegal acts no matter who commits them or what their motivations are. You want to have a discussion about Madison, WI or the BLM riots or anything else, I’m game. But that’s not what we’re discussing here. So stop with the equivocating. It’s not relevant.
@blueyeti — “you clearly haven’t seen the people involved saying on tape that this was their stated intention.”
The NY Times tape interviews several hundred rioters? Wow, that must be one looooong tape!
Or do you mean that 5-6 selected interviews are allegedly representative of several hundred rioters? Sort of like the Nick Sandmann video?
You sure know a lot about a video you refuse to watch. Or let’s just say you make a ton of presumptions about a video you refuse to watch.
Also, there aren’t any interviews in this video. No one sits down with a NYT reporter and answers questions. It’s extemporaneous comments made by people participating in the event as it was happening. It’s quite revealing and powerful. Which you’d know if you had watched it. But you won’t.
So brave.
By the way, in the Sandmann case, video was used to expose inaccuracies in written stories that did not capture the entirety of what happened that day. So in other words, the video provided proof of what actually occurred. Somehow, I don’t think that was the point you were trying to make. Because you just asserted that video is more accurate than written accounts of events.
Ooops.
Which leads me to my next thought:
This video has been out for almost a week now and has over a million views on YouTube and presumably a lot more for the version on the NYT website (they don’t have a view counter there).
I’ve already asked (and no one has answered) why no one in Conservative media have put out their own version of the video to refute the 1/6 MSM narrative (it would be easy to do — again, all of the footage is in the public domain). Unless of course that the existing video can’t be used to create the “peaceful protest” narrative you all are so sure actually happened.
Now I have a second question: Has anyone in Conservative media publicly claimed it’s a fake? Has anyone at Breitbart or Gateway Pundit or NewsMax or OANN or James O’Keefe or Steve Bannon or Seb Gorka or anyone else gone on the record saying they have proof the video is a piece of fiction? I haven’t even seen a Tweet claiming the video is fake or manipulated. Have any of you seen anyone even fact check the NYT video? If you have, please send it to me, I’d really like to read it.*
It can’t be for lack of trying. Because we all know that if someone could prove that the NYT faked any part of the video or manipulated it in any way, it would be the Conservative Media Scoop of The Century and the person or organization who proved it it would be hailed as the Right Wing Woodward and Bernstein. They’d be showered with acclaim and money and fame for the rest of their days. And rightfully so. So the incentives to do this are all in place.
And yet, (at least so far) crickets….
* Side note: I’ve been creating, editing, and producing video professionally for 30+ years. I’ve spent thousand of hours in edit bays working with editors to create hundreds of hours of video content. I’m very well versed in spotting manipulated video because I know what to look for. Didn’t see a frame of that in this video. It’s certainly possible that I missed something, but I don’t think so.
@blueyeti — This seems to be a pattern. I ask you a simple question and get a complicated evasion in return. I find this disheartening, because I expect progressives to behave that way, not conservatives. With progressives just about every utterance is some kind of scam.
My simple question, that you evaded, is how many of the hundreds of January 6 rioters are on this tape you are touting, stating that they were trying to overthrow the Constitution, or whatever it is you are accusing them of.
True, those interviews may have been manipulated and taken out of context as well; but let’s start with how many there are.
“You sure know a lot about a video you refuse to watch. Or let’s just say you make a ton of presumptions about a video you refuse to watch.”
On what basis do you say I “refuse to watch” this video? I only heard of it a couple of hours ago, in these comments! (Maybe you’re mixing up your interlocutors.)
Nor have I ever heard any conservative say anything at all about this tape, aside from the comments here. What I have heard conservatives say is that there are thousands and thousands of hours of video of January 6 that the Biden Administration refuses to release. Of course, if the New York Times was permitted by the administration to look at those thousands of hours, that wouldn’t surprise me. The White House knows who its friends are.
Finally, you seem to have completely garbled the Nick Sandmann case: “P.S. In the Sandmann case, video was used to expose inaccuracies in written stories that did not capture the entirety of what happened that day. So in other words, the video provided the proof of what actually occurred. ” (Emphasis yours.)
Here’s what actually happened: “The video that initially went viral was largely misleading, and did not show how the Native American elder confronted the students. Multiple news outlets quickly and incorrectly claimed Sandmann was the aggressor.” https://nypost.com/2020/09/10/sandmann-slams-aclu-staffer-for-saying-college-shouldnt-take-him/
The video, taken out of context, was precisely the basis of the lie. Were you, like Bill Kristol, taken in by it?
Short take: “Video doesn’t lie, but liars take and edit video.”
Yawn. @kedavis: You’re so wrong about so many things so often it’s stunning. I already have two full time jobs and neither of them include responsibility for fact checking you.
Live in whatever reality you want. Read or watch whatever you want. Tell yourself whatever you need to be content. Makes zero difference to me.
I evaded nothing, my friend. Breaking: I’m not your research assistant. If you are so curious about how many statements there are in the thing (again, there are no interviews in it), watch it yourself and count.
Once more: There. Are. No. Interviews. In. This. Video. This is now the THIRD time I’ve made this point.
Fair. I retract that with regards to you.
Can you provide a citation for the “thousands of hours of tape that the Biden administration refuses to release”? Because based on the video in the NYT doc (it’s 40 minutes long) and hundred of other videos in circulation, there already is a lot of clips on the internet in various places (I have no idea what that means in term of actual minutes of footage in circulation). But clearly, there is a ton of video of this event. If the Biden or the Justice Dept is holding back “thousands of hours” of video, that would be important info. I don’t believe I’ve read that, but it’s absolutely possible that I missed it.
The video, taken out of context, was precisely the basis of the lie. Were you, like Bill Kristol, taken in by it?
Nope, that’s not what happened.
And I “garbled” nothing, sir. I know this story very well because I help some friends who write for other publications sift through the huge amount of video to piece together what transpired. Spent a couple of weeks on it back in the day. Here’s a basic timeline:
The NYT (!) ran a written story on the event first, followed soon after by the WaPo. Both stories blamed the kid and got the story wrong. Then CNN, keying off the NYT and WaPo stories (as they often do because they are lazy) got into the mix and got a hold of some piecemeal footage that left out the same context and therefore appeared the NYT and WaPo stories had missed. But they didn’t know that at the time — or maybe they just wanted to believe that what they had was the complete event. It wasn’t. Several other publications then ran written stories (including National Review!) blaming the kids based on the stories run by the NYT, WaPo, and CNN. Later, this was blamed on the fact that this story occurred on a weekend and most of the people manning the news desks were young and inexperienced. So kids were thrown under the bus twice in this story.
Later that day and into the night, more footage started to appear on social media and other places that showed that the kids did nothing wrong. Conservative media had a field day with that and correctly embarrassed the MSM reporters and editors who rushed out a story that confirmed their priors on Trump supporters (and/or their kids). In the next 72 hours, the MSM stories were retracted, re-written, or spiked. But the larger point remains: video corrected the initial incorrect print stories that got the ball rolling on the mis-reporting of this story.
I have no memory of what Bill Kristol said or wrote about this story and I don’t get why it’s relevant to the 1/6 story, which is what I thought was the topic of this conversation.
Never mind. We are at the name calling phase with the CEO.
@blueyeti — I don’t know if you heard: paleontologists say the yeti went extinct due to their excessive credulity. They kept trading their food to the Denisovans in return for “magic beans”.
On the subject of credulity, it’s many years since Daniel Okrent, the NY Times’ first Public Editor or ombudsman, stated that anyone who thought his publication played it down the middle has his head in the sand. Last year, of course, we — and, more importantly, Times employees — learned that even the slightest digression from the progressive narrative is a firing offense.
This, of course, applies in spades to the makers of that documentary. Touting it puts you in the position of, say, urging us to read Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize-winning articles about abundant harvests in Ukraine in the early Thirties, or the 6000-word essay that tried to paste together the collapsing rape case against the Duke lacrosse team.
The sensible first reaction to that documentary, thus, is to look at it as partisan garbage, a selection of one-sided anecdotes. So far you have refused to give us any reason to trust it.
More later.
@blueyeti – “Can you provide a citation for the ‘thousands of hours of tape that the Biden administration refuses to release’?”
The Capitol Police shared thousands of hours of Jan. 6 surveillance camera footage with two key congressional committees investigating the mob attack on the building — and provided “numerous” clips to the Democrats prosecuting Donald Trump’s impeachment, the department’s top lawyer revealed Monday. …
DiBiase said the department also provided more than 14,000 hours of surveillance camera footage — encompassing the hours of noon to 8 p.m. on Jan. 6 — to two key committees investigating the Capitol assault …
DiBiase said that the agency’s legally authorized policy is to sharply restrict access to such videos because it could be used by bad actors — including many of the alleged insurrectionists now facing charges — to map out the interior of the Capitol and pose a future threat to lawmakers. …
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/29/capitol-police-jan6-footage-478439
It was unclear in the articles I perused whether the videos from January 5 are still extant.
“[T]he press and public have not been able to access these videos on the Court’s electronic dockets,” lawyers representing CNN, ABC News, the Wall Street Journal and others wrote in a May 3 letter. “Delayed access to these historic records shuts the public out of an important part of the administration of justice.” The government, the lawyers told Howell, refuses to give a “substantive answer” as to why the video evidence isn’t publicly available and listed several cases where surveillance footage was played in court but not otherwise accessible.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/10/why-is-the-government-hiding-january-6-video-footage/
This thread got awful heated. I don’t really understand why.
John Yoo was fabulous. I’m glad that Charles Cooke is proud to have become an American. My father used to say that opinions are like a person’s backside. Everyone’s got one. It takes a little bit of discernment to figure out which is full of s… Well. You know.
My dad was funny. :)
Per the stuff about the oath here, I would love someone to ask Cooke if he kept dual citizenship and if he did any research into the words he said per how they bound him to this place instead of our Mother Country…. I also wonder if his wife has ever established dual citizenship in Britain and what her oath would have been there per her getting a passport from the UK…. I’m mostly just curious how that works.
Hint: try a YouTube search and find out.
@blueyeti — I’m talking about how Nick Sandmann was victimized by an intentionally out-of-context viral video; you sneakily change the issue to how the Covington “kids” were treated by the press. Which, as pro-life Trump supporters, was not well, of course!
Sandmann in 2019 became a national news story when as a student at Covington Catholic High School he was in Washington, DC, for the annual March for Life rally.
In a video that gained national attention, Sandmann was in an encounter with Omaha tribe elder Nathan Phillips, who was beating a hand-held drum and singing at the Indigenous Peoples March at the Lincoln Memorial on the same day.
Another video that surfaced days later provided additional context for the encounter, but the first video had gone viral, touching off widespread controversy as photos of the teenager and the red Make America Great Again hat he was wearing spread across social media.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/24/media/washington-post-sandmann-settlement-lawsuit/index.html
You will note that CNN’s account is the same as the NY Post, previously. After all, it was the viral video that first brought Sandmann to the press’ attention. Absent the video, he was just an anonymous one of hundreds of “kids”.
Not sure why you keep pushing a false narrative here. I mean, it’s not like any sensible person could deny that an edited, out-of-context video can deceive.
N.B.: I mentioned Bill Kristol as an example of a “conservative” who fell for the video because his Trump Derangement Syndrome made him want to believe the worst of Trump supporters. If he ever admitted his error, I’m sure he said it was all Donald Trump’s fault!
P.S.: Given that “Omaha tribe elder” Nathan Phillips was a fake Vietnam veteran, well, let’s just say I’d like to see what a DNA test would say about his claim of Native American ancestry.
Too much of the NT behavior around Sandman was absolutely shameful. Maoist.
Well, let’s see. If the Capitol system produces “more than 14,000 hours of surveillance camera footage” every eight hours, that implies over 42,000 hours a day. Only major media operations would be able to do anything with such a mass of material; but they were the ones complaining a few months ago that it was not available.
The footage that is out there now is off peoples’ camera phones, not from the government.
BTW, the January 5 footage is of interest only because of claims by Democrats than Republicans Congressmen helped the rioters “case the joint” a day in advance. But we’ve not heard much of this apparently baseless claim lately.
There are absolutely tons of baseless claims to go around on all sides of this. Which is why I never mentioned anything other than the cell phone video taken by the protestors themselves. It’s the only thing that matters to me because again, it’s the video they wanted us to see.
You are free to twist yourself into whatever rhetorical knots you want to justify not watching the thing. I’m fine with that.
The Democrats are going to run a million campaign spots with that footage in the mod-terms next year, you can count on that. How you folks feel about won’t matter then and we’ll see how it plays to the general public.
No. It’s only that portion of the video the NYT wanted us to see.
I seem to remember him saying once that he keeps his British passport (and therefore, his citizenship?) to make it easier to travel back and forth. If this is correct I would find it curious because he’s such an America fanboy and because he’s such a “process” guy.
This thread is disappointing. Are you all really arguing about Nick Sandmann??
Happy Independence Day. 🙄
What you got against Nick Sandmann?
I had used him as an example of how videos can be manipulated and deceptive. Which would have been the end of it, except @blueyeti was seized by the quixotic desire to defend the honor and probity of viral videos. I had to remind him what actually happened.