WND’s annual review presents news that wasn’t ‘fit to print’
(WND) – At the end of each year, many news organizations typically present their retrospective replays of what they consider to have been the top news stories of the previous 12 months.
WND’s editors, however, long have considered it more newsworthy to publicize the most underreported or unreported news events of the year.
WND Editor and CEO Joseph Farah has sponsored “Operation Spike” every year since 1988, and since founding WND in May 1997, has continued the annual tradition.
Here, with the contribution of WND readers, are the 2016 picks:
1. The contents of the Podesta emails:
The hacking of emails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, certainly drew attention, with President Obama punishing Russia for the alleged act this week, without any hard evidence. Podesta, himself, declared the hacking of election-related emails the political equivalent of the 9/11 attack.
What was largely missing in establishment media coverage of the approximately 50,000 Podesta emails released by WikiLeaks, however, was the content of the messages. The emails shed light, for example, on Clinton campaign collusion with the media, pay-to-play schemes involving the Clinton Foundation when Clinton was secretary of state, Clinton’s profiting from Wall Street bankers and the DNC’s rigging of it primary at the expense of Bernie Sanders.
Here are a few of the many revelations:
In a March 4, 2015, email to Hillary Clinton’s lawyer Cheryl Mills, Podesta asks if they should withhold email exchanges between Clinton and President Obama that were sent over Clinton’s private server a day before the House Benghazi Committee privately told Clinton to preserve and hand over all her emails.
Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other financial firms, a point of contention during this year’s primary, were the subject of an email to Podesta. Excerpts from some of the speeches had been flagged by Clinton’s research team, including the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on issues. It was just part of “making sausage” in the political arena, she said, that certain positions on issues needed to be kept hidden from the public.
Some “flags” in Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches were noted in a Jan. 25 email from campaign research director Tony Carrk to top Clinton advisers, including Clinton’s declaration, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.”
The New York Times gave the Clinton campaign veto power over which interview quotes could be used in a profile of the candidate.
Democratic National Committee official and CNN contributor Donna Brazile apparently tipped off the Clinton campaign to a potentially difficult CNN town-hall question on capital punishment during the Democratic Party primary season.
Podesta discussed fomenting “revolution” in the Catholic Church with a progressive activist while Hillary’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, mocked Catholics who speak out against the liberal social causes of the Democratic Party.
Clinton, who has accused Trump of praising Vladimir Putin, called the Russian leader in a 2014 speech “engaging” and “a very interesting conversationalist.” Excerpts from Clinton’s speeches were contained in a document emailed to Podesta to point out quotes that could harm the campaign.
Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon alerted staffers that the Justice Department was proposing to publish Clinton’s work-related emails, contending it showed collusion between the Obama administration and Clinton’s campaign. Fallon wrote that “DOJ folks” told him a court hearing in the case had been planned.
The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, Podesta met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, a top official at the Justice Department. Lawyers also told the Clinton campaign in emails that Hillary’s private email scandal “smacks of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I’ve either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc.”
King Muhammad IV of Morocco made a $12 million pledge to fund the Clinton Global Initiative conference, but only if the likely presidential candidate attended the event as a speaker. Hillary’s top aide, Huma Abedin, wrote in a January 2015 email that “if HRC was not part of it, meeting was a non-starter.” Then she warned: “She created this mess and she knows it.” Hillary ended up not attending but her husband Bill did.
In a leaked 2013 paid speech to the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago, Hillary said Jordan and Turkey “can’t possibly vet all those refugees so they don’t know if, you know, jihadists are coming in along with legitimate refugees.” Two years later she called for a 550 percent increase in the number of Syrian refugees coming to the U.S. largely from United Nations refugee camps in Jordan.
The Clinton campaign tried to reschedule the Illinois presidential primary to lower the chances a moderate Republican would get a boost following the Super Tuesday primaries. “The Clintons won’t forget what their friends have done for them,” wrote Robby Mook, who later became Clinton’s campaign manager, in the November 2014 email to Podesta.
2. The true Obama economy:
President Obama repeatedly has boasted that he pulled the U.S. economy from the brink of depression and into robust growth, and Politico declared in December that Trump will inherit an “Obama boom,” handing his successor “an economy that’s now the envy of the world.”
But voters apparently thought otherwise, particularly the working class in the rust belt who flipped their Democratic-leaning states to Donald Trump. And there are economists who share their skepticism of the “Obama recovery.”
Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Peter Ferrara, the author of a report titled “Why the United States Has Suffered the Worst Economic Recovery Since the Great Depression,” noted Obama and his defenders often point out the recovery was especially strong given the depths of the financial crisis. Ferrara said that’s exactly backward.
“The American historical record is the worse the recession, the stronger the recovery. So there should have been an economic boom coming out of the recession in the summer of 2009. Here we are, eight years later, and that still hasn’t happened,” Ferrara said.
He said it has not happened because Obama pursued a Keynesian economic strategy that is a proven failure.
“Keynesian economics is a doctrine that the road to economic recovery is to increase government spending, deficits and debt. If that sounds crazy, it is crazy. It was introduced in the 1930s. It failed to end the Great Depression, but extended it and made it even worse,” Ferrara explained.
Obama issued labor regulations in the last year of his presidency estimated to cost the economy roughly $80 billion over the next 10 years and eliminate 150,000 jobs, according to a report from the National Association of Manufacturers.
Ferrara pointed out there was twice as much economic growth under Jimmy Carter as under Obama in his first term.
Under Obama, poverty rates skyrocketed and the middle class suffered a fiscal punch to the stomach, with income falling throughout his entire two terms in office.
But Ferrara has hope that President-elect Donald Trump will pursue a Reagan-like economic agenda.
“The reason Trump is going to create a boom is because every one of the key policies is doing the opposite of what Obama did,” Ferrara said. “He has proposed to cut taxes like Reagan did. He has proposed to reduce regulatory burdens like Reagan did. He will appoint good members to the Fed that will restore sound monetary policy that will stabilize the dollar over the long run.”
3. The doubling of the national debt under Obama
Perhaps the biggest symbol of Obama’s economic legacy is the national debt.
Currently at $19.9 trillion, it is projected to hit $20 trillion by Inauguration Day, up from $10.6 trillion when Obama entered the White House in 2009.
It means Obama will have added to the debt as much as all previous 43 presidents combined.
Two graphs illustrate why many financial analysts are concerned. The first shows the steep climb in debt under Obama.
The second shows the sharp rise in total U.S. credit market debt, including household debt and credit card debt, that has occurred since the 1980s. The total U.S. credit market debt hit a high of approximately 385 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product in 2009-2010 during the recession brought on by the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage market at the end of President George W. Bush’s second term in office.
The graph shows the ratio of total U.S. credit market debt to the GDP has fallen off in recent years, down to a current level of about 355 percent of GDP.
The drop-off has occurred only because household debt has been declining since 2010 while government spending has continued to rise.
Among the many concerns is that the staggering increase in U.S. national debt over the past eight years has limited the ability of the federal economy to stimulate the economy. Typically, monetary policy has employed deficit spending, a tool popular with economists who follow Keynesian principles of economic theory.
Last June, the Congressional Budget Office issued a 2015 budget assessment concluding that the long-term outlook for the federal budget has worsened dramatically in the wake of the 2007-2009 recession and the subsequent slow recovery.
As a result, budget deficits rose, totaling $5.6 trillion in the five years between 2008 and 2012. Four of the five years had budget deficits larger in relation to the size of the economy than any budget deficit since 1946, the year immediately after the end of World War II.
The CBO concluded that the federal debt held by the public nearly doubled during this period. In 2015, the federal debt held by the public was equivalent to 74 percent of U.S. GDP, a higher percentage than at any point in U.S. history, except for a seven-year period around World War II.
The CBO further projected that with the continued aging of the population and the rising of health-care costs, the federal deficit will grow from less than 3 percent of GDP in 2015 to 6 percent in 2040, at which point the federal debt held by the public would exceed 100 percent of GDP – a level considered by many traditional economists to be seriously detrimental to U.S. economic growth.
4. Illegal aliens’ impact on national presidential popular vote:
Shortly after the election, as the media was making hay of Hillary Clinton’s margin of more than 2 million in the national popular vote, Donald Trump tweeted that he won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College tally “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” prompting a media uproar.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram insisted there “has been no evidence of the widespread voter fraud that would have had to taken place to give Clinton millions of illegitimate votes.”
But voter-integrity activists, who point out that 19 states did not require identification to vote Nov. 8, believe Trump may be right.
Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, who waged a years-long fight against the IRS over its targeting of conservative groups, pointed out that without voter ID, “fraud has been institutionalized,” allowing non-citizens to flood voter rolls.
While there are no reliable figures yet on the number of illegal-alien voters, indications of the impact are there, said the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, a leading researcher of vote fraud.
He cited a case brought by the Public Interest Legal Foundation that found some 1,000 non-citizens registered to vote in just a eight Virginia counties shortly before the election. Many already had voted in prior elections.
And, he noted, a 2013 national survey by John McLaughlin found 13 percent of non-citizen Hispanics admitted they were registered to vote.
Just months before the 2016 election, von Spakovsky had warned that several organizations, such as the League of Women Voters and the NAACP, were fighting efforts to clamp down on non-citizens voting illegally, and they were being aided by the Justice Department.
He said the organizations sued in Washington to reverse a decision by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission that would have allowed Kansas and other states, including Arizona and Georgia, “to enforce state laws ensuring that only citizens register to vote when they use a federally designed registration form.”
William Gheen, president of the non-profit Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, noted Obama admitted to Spanish language TV audiences comprised of illegal immigrants that illegals would face no hindrances to voting.
Even a Pew Trust study, Gheen noted, concluded the nation’s voting systems “are plagued with errors and inefficiencies that … fuel partisan disputes over the integrity of our elections.”
ALIPAC released dozens of pages of documentation showing 46 states have prosecuted or convicted cases of voter fraud. It found that more than 24 million voter registrations are invalid, more than 1.8 million dead voters are still on rolls and more than 2.75 million Americans are registered to vote in more than one state.
The Florida New Majority Education Fund, Democratic Party of Florida and the National Council of La Raza currently are under investigation for alleged voter-registration fraud.
Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies said that if one looks at the likely 21 million non-citizens in the United States, based on the 2015 American Community Survey, there is the high probability that a substantial number voted.
5. Obama’s stealth moves to force U.S. communities to receive Muslim immigrants
Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America can be seen in the large numbers of Somali and Syrian refugees that have been planted against the will of the people in small-to-mid-sized cities such as Bowling Green, Kentucky; Owensboro, Kentucky; and Erie, Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, Minnesota and Ohio continue to be sent Somali refugees even though Minneapolis and Columbus have had terror recruitment problems within their Somali communities.
But Obama’s concentration of so many refugees in one place is a clear violation of statutes directing the Office of Refugee Resettlement to “insure that a refugee is not initially placed or resettled in an area highly impacted by the presence of refugees or comparable populations.”
Ann Corcoran, a leading refugee watchdog who authors the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog, believes the Obama administration and the federal resettlement contractors are deliberately trying to turn red states blue by injecting them with refugees who are likely to vote for Democrats.
“Of course it would take a while with refugee numbers, but add in the illegals, et cetera, in those states and, yes, it is about turning the state,” Corcoran said. “Consider it the California model – it worked there!”
WND’s Leo Hohmann, the author of “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and the Resettlement Jihad,” said the State Department is bringing the refugees in so fast now that it’s difficult to find places to house them.
Through the first 11 weeks of fiscal year 2017, the United States received 23,428 individuals as “refugees,” according to the Refugee Processing Center. At this rate, the U.S. will resettle roughly 110,580 this fiscal year, which would exceed President Obama’s target of 110,000.
Contrast that with last year, when the U.S. received only 13,786 “refugees” through the first 11 weeks of FY 2016. The country would end up receiving 84,995 by fiscal year’s end.
More than 97 percent of the Syrian refugees admitted so far this fiscal year are Muslims, as were more than 99 percent of Syrians admitted last year.
Hohmann said the U.S. has had the opposite of “extreme vetting” of Syrians over the past eight years.
“It’s gone from slack to even slacker,” he observed. “Back in the spring, Obama cut the screening period on Syrian refugees from 18-24 months down to three months by sending more screeners to the United Nations camps in Jordan and setting up a template that basically takes the refugees’ story of who they are and runs a search of social media and government databases to see if they can refute that story.
“Since there is little to no law enforcement data available on people who claim to be Syrians and false passports are easily purchased on the black market, we have no idea who these people are coming to our country as so-called Syrian refugees.”
While many Americans worry about the influx of Syrians, the U.S. has taken in even more refugees from Somalia this year. Through the first 11 weeks of FY 2017, the U.S. resettled 3,269 Somali refugees. At this rate, the country would absorb more than 15,550 by fiscal year’s end. At this point in FY 2016, the U.S. had only admitted 1,721 Somali refugees on its way to taking in 9,020 for the year.
More than 99.9 percent of the Somalis admitted this fiscal year are Muslims, as was the case in FY 2016 as well.
Hohmann noted Somali refugees are probably an even bigger risk than Syrians, as Somalis have committed several terrorist attacks on U.S. soil recently.
“There’s been no debate in Congress or the media asking the obvious questions: Why is America still taking thousands of refugees every year from Somalia more than 25 years after that country’s civil war broke out?” Hohmann asked. “How many is too many, and why aren’t the Somalis doing a better job of assimilating? Dozens have gone off to fight for overseas terror organizations while even more have been charged, tried and convicted here at home of providing material support to overseas terrorists.”
The migrant disaster in Germany should serve as a warning to the United States. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, after welcoming more than a million Muslim refugees with open arms in 2015 and into the first half of 2016, did a sudden about-face after the terror attacks started piling up and the campaign season neared.
She said such a mass influx of refugees “should never be repeated” in Germany and has even talked about the need to “ban the burqa.”
Pamela Geller, author of “Stop the Islamization of America,” sees a troubling aspect of the recent Berlin truck attack that applies to the United States, which has seen eight bloody terror attacks on its soil in less than 18 months – all carried out by Muslim migrants or sons of migrants.
“Will Democrats continue to demand that we also import these invaders?” Geller said in an email to WND. “We dodged a bullet — and a truck — with Hillary Clinton, who pledged to increase Muslim ‘refugee’ immigration [from Syria] by 550 percent.”
6. Huma Abedin’s connection to the Muslim Brotherhood:
Hillary Clinton’s longtime top aide and confidante Huma Abedin was a central figure in the 2016 presidential campaign, particularly as emails she sent and received while serving as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff for operations at the State Department came under the FBI’s scrutiny, culminating in a bombshell announcement by FBI Director James Comey 11 days before the election. Comey announced that the bureau had reopened its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information after discovering 650,000 of Abedin’s State Department emails on a computer owned by her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, who is under investigation for allegedly sexting a minor.
But almost entirely ignored during the campaign by establishment media or dismissed as irrelevant were Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia, including her position in her family’s institute, which was established by the Saudi government and supported by a prominent financial contributor to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.
Abedin served for several years as an assistant editor for the institute’s journal, while her father was editor and her mother a co-editor.
Alongside Abedin on the editorial board also was Abdullah Omar Naseef, the founder of the Rabita Trust, a financial institution founded prior to 9/11 for the explicit purpose of funding Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.
While Abedin was working with Naseef, she was in the White House working as an intern.
Abedin then became an aide to Hillary Clinton, a senior adviser to Clinton’s senatorial campaigns and office, and eventually deputy chief of staff at the State Department.
Former CIA officer and current vice president with the Center for Security Policy in Washington Clare Lopez notes that it was during that period of time when U.S. foreign policy “flipped on its head.”
The U.S., she said, went from “going after jihad and jihadist like al-Qaida to, in Libya, for example, aiding and abetting known al-Qaida jihadist militias to overthrow a sitting, sovereign government led by Moammar Gadhafi, no choir boy, to be sure, but our ally at the time.”
“All of this happened during the period of time when Clinton was secretary of state and Huma Abedin was at her side, whispering in her ear,” Lopez said.
The purpose of the Abedin-run institute, as WND has reported, is to instruct Muslims in foreign countries how to live according to the dictates of Islamic law, or Shariah, so they can fulfill the ultimate objective of making Shariah and the Quran the ultimate authority in the world, overturning “man-made” institutions such as the U.S. Constitution.
A Muslim Brotherhood document entered as evidence in the largest terrorism-financing trial in U.S. history shows the Brotherhood’s aim is to carry out “a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”
But Philip Haney, a former DHS subject matter expert on Islam, says Hillary Clinton’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood are even “broader and deeper” than Abedin’s, citing, for example, Clinton’s leadership promoting a U.N. resolution favored by the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Conference, which is run by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The resolution would effectively criminalize criticism of Islam.
In a Dec. 14, 2011, speech, Clinton said the resolution “marks a step forward in creating a safe, global environment for practicing and expressing one’s beliefs.”
“By endorsing U.N. Resolution 1618, by default Hillary Clinton is aiding and abetting the Muslim Brotherhood, on a macro, global level,” Haney says.
WikiLeaks founder Assange said the thousands of documents released by Wikileaks through its “Hillary Clinton Email Archive” contain some 1,700 emails that connect Clinton to al-Qaida and ISIS in both Libya and Syria, demonstrating Clinton supplied weapons to ISIS via Syria.
7. The threat of ISIS and its Islamic roots
Two conflicting views of the enemy the United States faces in the so-called “War on Terror” were on display as Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and President Obama responded to attacks by Muslims in Minnesota, New York and New Jersey over one September weekend during the presidential campaign.
Trump, chastising Clinton and Obama for refusing to name the enemy “radical Islam,” called the threat a “cancer from within” while Clinton reiterated the Obama administration’s insistence that calling ISIS, the Islamic State, Islamic would play into the hands of the jihadist group and its allies.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest downplayed the war against ISIS, saying “in some ways, this is actually just a war of narratives” against a “poisonous, empty bankrupt mythology.”
That attitude was summarized by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in the title of a Senate hearing he held in June, “Willful Blindness: Consequences of Agency Efforts To Deemphasize Radical Islam in Combating Terrorism,” in which former Department of Homeland Security officer Philip Haney testified that the administration “purged” more than 800 of his records related to the Muslim Brotherhood network in the U.S. because they somehow were an offense to Muslims.
Two days later, when Cruz confronted Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson with Haney’s testimony, Johnson insisted he had no knowledge of the incident and had never even heard of Haney. But in January, Johnson was reported saying that he not only knew about Haney’s claim, he had read an article the retired DHS officer wrote in the Hill, the influential Capitol Hill newspaper.
It’s no wonder that in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria earlier this month, Obama admitted that he was taken by surprise by the rise of ISIS as a territorial power in 2014, which he once dismissed as “the JV team.”
Meanwhile, as many as 1,750 ISIS jihadists have returned to Europe with orders to carry out attacks, a European Union report warned in December.In May, FBI Director James Comey said that of the nearly 1,000 FBI cases across the country looking at people who may have been “radicalized online,” about 80 percent are tied to ISIS.
In June, ISIS claimed responsibility for the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, as 50 people were killed at a packed gay nightclub by Omar Mateen, who was described by the ISIS Amaq news agency as an “Islamic State fighter.”
In another example, two Wisconsin men were arrested in Texas on charges of providing material support to ISIS. They were traveling to Mexico and allegedly had plans to travel on to Iraq or Syria.
In Maryland, a pro-ISIS imam at the center of a terrorism probe celebrated ISIS killings and immolations on Facebook and issued a fatwa against feminism through an Islamic law center he started in near the nation’s capital.
8. The establishment media’s ‘fake news’:
So far there’s been no solid evidence that Russian “fake news,” as the establishment media seem to believe, propelled Donald Trump to an astonishing victory over Hillary Clinton.
But in recent decades, and this year is no exception, the establishment media itself has been shown to be a purveyor of fake news, defined as the dissemination of false information from the government or a favored group.
Familiar memes are: the Benghazi 9/11 attack that killed four brave Americans was caused by a YouTube video, Michael Brown had his hands up and shouted “Don’t shoot” before Ferguson cop Darren Wilson shot him and man-caused global warming is settled science.
Some would argue a prime example this year was the assertion, reported as “settled science,” that Donald Trump was a buffoonish clown who had no chance of winning the Republican nomination, let alone the White House.
WND columnist Jack Cashill recalled others over the years:
2013: Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes ran the successful, if thoroughly dishonest, “Iran-deal messaging campaign.” As the Times conceded three years later, the story the White House told America about Iran “was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal.”
2012: A week after the Benghazi attack, Obama told David Letterman, “Here’s what happened. You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character.” The media, in the person of CNN debate moderator Candy Crowley, preserved Obama’s presidency by insisting Obama said Benghazi was a terrorist attack from day one.
2012: On Anderson Cooper’s “AC360,” CNN reporter Gary Tuchman, working with an audio design specialist, concluded that George Zimmerman referred to blacks as “coons.” This was one of a dozen fake news stories created to paint Hispanic civil rights activist and Obama supporter Zimmerman as a brutal racist in the shooting death of his thuggish attacker, the 6-foot-tall “little boy,” Trayvon Martin.
2011: Obama laid out the case for intervention in Libya, claiming that if he “waited one more day,” Gadhafi would have unleashed a massacre in Benghazi that would have “stained the conscience of the world.” Democratic Mideast expert Alan Kuperman did the calculations the media refused to do, writing two weeks later, “The best evidence that Gadhafi did not plan genocide in Benghazi is that he did not perpetrate it in the other cities he had recaptured.”
2006: “Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” So said Al Gore at the premiere of his movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”
2004: The story supposedly was that the Bush White House willfully leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame to discredit her allegedly whistleblowing husband, Joseph Wilson. After a year of Watergate-style hysteria, and eventually a movie, it turned out that Bush’s critics in the State Department accidentally leaked this utterly inconsequential bit of information.
2004: Following Barack Obama’s convention speech, the media openly celebrated what biographer David Remnick called Obama’s “signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal.” The details, however, were false. Despite his parents’ “improbable love,” infant Obama never spent a night under the same the roof as the old man and no more than a few weeks, if that, in the same state.
2004: On “60 Minutes,” Dan Rather attempted to derail President George Bush’s re-election campaign by claiming Bush went AWOL from his Air National Guard service. The documents proving this claim turned out to be fake. That did not stop Hollywood from trying to exonerate producer Mary Mapes in the absurdly titled 2015 movie “Truth.”
Back in 1996, Time magazine decried the “national epidemic of violence against black churches.” In fact, more white churches than black churches burned that summer, fewer than normal in both cases, and at least as many by Satanists as presumed racists.
In 1999, to justify bombing Serbia, President Clinton accused the Serbs of “genocide.” He claimed they murdered “tens of thousands of people” and compared their actions in Kosovo to the Holocaust. The media played along. In the war’s wake, however, international teams could find no signs of genocide. “We did not find one – not one – mass grave,” said the Spanish surgeon in charge.
9. Anti-Trump hoax incidents
To fuel its narrative that the election of Donald Trump had brought about unprecedented expressions of hatred toward minorities, the media breathlessly reported “hate crimes” purportedly committed by Trump supporters.
Many of those reports, however, turned out to be hoaxes, while actual crimes committed by anti-Trump rioters were virtually ignored.
NBC News reported an openly bisexual Chicago student claimed she received anti-gay, pro-Trump notes and emails after the election such as “Back to hell.” Taylor Volk of North Park University said she was a victim of “a countrywide epidemic all of a sudden.” But later, a university investigation found Volk had fabricated the messages.
A whiteboard message “Bye Bye Latinos Hasta La Vista that roiled the campus of Elon University, including condemnation from the president, turned out to have been written by a Latino student who saw it as a joke.”
Bowling Green State University student Eleesha Long falsely claimed to have been attacked on the school’s Ohio campus by three white men wearing Trump T-shirts just one day after the election.
In Philadelphia, a rash of “white supremacist” graffiti declaring “Black Bitch” and “Trump Rules” turned out to have been done by a black man.
A black man in the Boston area admitted he fabricated his claim that he was forced to run for his life after being threatened with lynching and told, “It’™s Trump country now.”
In another case, a Muslim woman at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette claimed two white males tore off her hijab. But the woman later admitted she made up the story.
The controversial Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report in November that compiled 867 alleged incidents of “harassment and intimidation” in the 10 days that followed the presidential election.
But many turned out to be hoaxes and most of the incidents on SPLC’s list, while deplorable if they actually happened, did not include physical violence, meaning the use of the term “attack” was misleading. Most of the incidents were uncorroborated assertions of verbal threats or racist comments that don’t appear to rise to the level of a crime, including chalking the word “Trump” on a university sidewalk and middle school students chanting “Build the wall!”
Further, SPLC’s definition of “haters” and “extremists” has been at variance with the mainstream. The organization, for example, labeled former GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson an “extremist.” After a nationwide backlash last year, the organization apologized and removed the post.
But the SPLC website still has a negative “file” on Carson that insists he has said things that “most people would conclude are extreme,” such as his belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.
When SPLC issued a widely cited survey-report charging Trump’s election sparked “hate crimes” in schools against minorities, it censored its finding that at least 2,000 educators nationwide reported racist slurs and other derogatory language against white students.
10. Democrats’ rigging of their own primary to make sure Bernie Sanders lost
As columnist Ron Hart put it: “Democrats and the legacy media got all twitchy after losing the election, saying the Russians rigged it. WikiLeaks released DNC emails showing how the DNC plotted to undermine Bernie Sanders in their primary. So to recap, if I understand what the left is saying here, Putin might have rigged our election by revealing how Democrats rigged their election.”
The WikiLeaks emails, released just days before the party’s presidential nominating convention, showed how top officials at the DNC privately planned to undermine Bernie Sanders’ campaign.
In one email, DNC press secretary Mark Paustenbach wrote to communications director Luis Miranda about planting a narrative to the media that Sanders’s “campaign was a mess.”
In another email in early May, DNC Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall brought up Sanders’ “Jewish heritage,” suggesting the DNC get someone in Kentucky and in West Virginia, which were holding upcoming primary elections, to ask if the candidate believes in God.
“He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist,” Marshall wrote.
DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz — who was forced to resign because of the revelations — wrote in May that Sanders “isn’t going to be president” and “has no understanding of” the Democratic Party.
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