The setting is dramatic. Moses has led the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt and across the Red Sea to freedom. He has guided them to Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments, and repented their sin of the Golden Calf. Now, Moses stands with them near the boundary of the Promised Land.
.. The majority, ten out of the twelve, give a discouraging report to the people. “We came to the land to which you sent us, and it is flowing with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. However, the people who inhabit the land are mighty, and the cities are extremely huge and fortified, and there we saw even the offspring of the giant. … We are unable to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we. … The land we passed through to explore is a land that consumes its inhabitants, and all the people we saw in it are men of stature. … There we saw the giants …. In our eyes, we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we were in their eyes.” (13: 27-33)
This is the first recorded example of “fake news.” It includes two types of fakery. One involves “facts” that are just made up — stories of giants and grasshoppers. The other involves true facts — “milk and honey” — that are spun in a damaging way, couched in editorial language — “We are unable” — that is calculated to create division and despair.
.. The “fake news” has had its effect — not only misinforming the people, but encouraging political division and sedition.
.. As punishment, the Children of Israel are condemned to wander in the desert for another 40 years, until nearly all of the adults have died. Only a new generation, the Lord decrees, will be able to enter the Promised Land. (14: 29-35)
.. So fake news is nothing new. What fundamentally divided the spies was not what they saw when they scouted the land, but what they believed about their ability to inhabit it. The majority did not have enough faith, and sought to undermine the faith of others. They planted faulty intelligence with that deliberate, destructive agenda in mind.
.. Today we face the same problem. The truth is obvious enough for our reporters to see. But some are determined to divide the country and undermine its leadership. They feed false information to the public, or present true facts in the most negative light. As a result, half the country lives in a nightmarish alternate reality, terrified of the country’s leadership.
It is not just a crisis of reporting, but also a crisis of faith. We lack faith in the country’s institutions; we lack faith in ourselves.
Donald Trump Is the Worst Boss in Washington
Mr. McMaster, was forced to defend the White House after Mr. Trump leaked sensitive intelligence to the Russian ambassador and then, it was recently reported in Politico, left stunned as Mr. Trump took crucial language about NATO out of a speech he’d labored over. “People I know, they look at what’s happening with McMaster and they think, well, if you’re the national security adviser and you can’t even get in that sentence, just an obviously low-hanging-fruit achievement, why should anybody assume you’ll have any control over major foreign policy decisions?” Mr. McFaul said.
.. Earlier on in the administration, there was a level of plausible deniability: You could tell yourself Mr. Trump had just been mouthing off during the campaign, but that he was likely to run like a normal business-friendly Republican.
Five months in, though, those people — both already hired and in the group that might be invited to be — are clearly feeling far more anxious.
.. In terms of who might want her old job, Ms. Palmieri said, the most likely candidate now would be someone from Breitbart or Infowars, “a propaganda artist that you would normally not see in America at the very important position of the White House communications director.”
.. The people still willing to take political positions are likely to be more careerist, and in many jobs more ideological. They’re also likely to be older, Mr. McFaul said. Younger people are more likely to wait out the administration altogether and not get branded with a scarlet “T.”
Breitbart: Media Ramp Up Attacks on President’s Democratic Manhattanite Son-In-Law
The establishment press have largely brushed aside the notion that Kushner may have wanted to set up the “back channel” to discuss Syria policy, especially if he feared that the Obama administration may have been spying on Trump’s campaign team. Fox News reported that the idea for a “back channel” was not even Kushner’s idea in the first place.
.. The media have also downplayed the fact that Russians often embellish things to engage in disinformation campaigns.
.. There are certainly more questions that need to be answered—like whether Kushner met with Russian banker Sergey Gorkov as a representative of his private company or as a representative of Trump’s transition team.
.. If Kushner did not realize it already, he should be well aware by now that the Democrats, the institutional left, and the left-wing establishment media seek to destroy, do not give an inch, and play for keeps. And they may just be warming up.
Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg Elections A British Right-Wing Firebrand Gets a Reality Check in America
Farage, grinning broadly and never apologizing, has been attacked for wanting to deny some health care to immigrants and for putting up candidates who do things like decrying aid to “Bongo-Bongo land.” Here, surrounded by reporters and American conservatives, he is at unusually high risk for an international incident.
.. Jan Helfeld. Showing up at CPAC means risking an encounter with Helfeld, a minarchist who has been dubbed “the Socratic assassin” and (less kindly) “the libertarian Borat” for his meek-yet-torturous interviews about whether all government action is violence.
.. The American trip .. is supposed to connect UKIP with strategists who don’t know about it. “There are things like data mining where you’re much further advanced than we are,” says Farage. The conservative movement in America is stewing with ideas, compared to the U.K. “You’ve got think tanks; you’ve got policy development. Almost all of our commercial law is made in Brussels.”
.. When Britain’s leading Conservatives have made news in America, it’s been for hiring Obama campaign veterans for their own races, or for criticizing the Republicans who made foreign policy trips to London.
.. Farage said in a 2010 speech addressed to European Council President Herman Van Rompuy. “If you rob people of their identity, if you rob them of their democracy, then all they’re left with is nationalism and violence. I can only hope that the Euro project is destroyed by the markets before that really happens.”
.. In a Jan. 14 Fox News appearance, Farage said that Europe was riddled with “no-go zones,” and that “wherever you look you see this blind eye being turned and you see the growth of ghettos where the police and all the normal agents of the law have withdrawn and that is where Sharia Law has come in.” Just five days later, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal spoke in London and warned of immigrants trying to colonize Europe.
.. “Farage gave an amazing speech at the embassy,” recalls Breitbart News’s Steve Bannon. (“The embassy” is the nickname for the house Breitbart News rents in Washington.) “I had Schlapp on one side, [Senator Jeff] Sessions on one side, and Laura Ingraham on the other, and they were blown away. The dinner ends, and Schlapp asks, ‘Is there any way you can come to CPAC?’”
.. “We’ve done it by picking up votes across the spectrum, but in particular we’ve done it by picking up votes from people who run their own businesses, who get up early in the morning, who work hard, and who find themselves, in our modern corporatist economy—I say that, instead of our modern capitalist economy—looking for champions,”
.. He acts on the belief that he doesn’t owe anything to the media. They’ve never been nice to him, and that’s still the case.”
.. “We have all, in the west, mistakenly—and I think in a very cowardly manner—we have pursued a policy of multiculturalism. We have pursued a policy of encouraging division in our lives, when we should have pursued a policy of coming together.”