Hi everyone, I hope you’re all well.
So, I’m sure you all remember the
Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation
saga of 2018.
At the
eleventh hour, Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah
Ramirez claimed
Kavanaugh engaged in sexual misconduct with
them decades ago.
This caused a media circus, but the claims
were uncorroborated.
So,
after much wailing and gnashing of teeth,
Kavanaugh was confirmed
as Justice of the Supreme Court.
Justice was served, the furore fizzled
out, and we all got on with our business.
Well, at least I thought we
had.
Something has happened recently regarding
Brett Kavanaugh
that is completely ridiculous.
And if you want to know something else ridiculous,
it’s that YouTube
no longer recommends independent content creators!
If you like my
videos and don’t want to miss any, then
hit that subscribe button.
I
do two videos a week and I also live stream
regularly, so if you want
to be notified every time I upload or stream,
than his that subscribe
button right now, it would make me super happy
if you did that!
Anyway, almost exactly a year since the Kavanaugh
allegations came
out, an article entitled Brett Kavanaugh Fit
In With the Privileged
Kids.
She Did Not., appeared in the New York Times,
written by Times
reporters Kate Kelley and Robin Pogrebin,
containing yet another
allegation against Brett Kavanaugh.
This one was made by former
classmate of Kavanaugh’s, Max Stier, who
relayed it to the FBI last
year.
The article was based on a book the authors
have written called The
Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,
which, at the time of
the publication of the article on September
14, had not been
released to the general public.
The article and the book focussed on the Deborah
Ramirez
allegation, claiming to have corroborated
it.
I say “claiming”, more
on that later.
So what was this new bombshell of an allegation?
Well,
according to the article
“We also uncovered a previously unreported
story about Mr.
Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes
Ms. Ramirez’s
allegation.
A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh
with his pants
down at a different drunken dorm party, where
friends pushed his
penis into the hand of a female student.
Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization
in Washington, notified
senators and the F.B.I. about this account,
but the F.B.I. did not
investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to
discuss it publicly.
We
corroborated the story with two officials
who have communicated
with Mr. Stier”
Sounds pretty damning, right?
Well, certainly damning enough to get
the anti-Kavanaugh squadrons into a tizzy.
The media went crazy,
and of course so did Twitter.
Based on this strength of this one
rather flimsy article, which was printed,
by the way, in the weekend
incarnation of the Times, and in the opinion
section rather than the
news section, there were renewed calls for
Kavanaugh’s
impeachment all over the place, including
from a number of high
profile Democrats.
But!
There’s always a but when it comes to this
stuff.
It turns out that
while the book wasn’t released to the public,
there were a few
people who had advance copies.
One of these was Mollie
Hemingway, Fox News contributor and author
of another recently
published book on Brett Kavanaugh entitled
Justice on Trial.
So Mollie, with all her Kavanaugh expertise,
was in the perfect
position to review and debunk this article
and the Pogrebin Kelley
book, which she did in a fabulous Twitter
thread.
Along with noting
the book is very weakly sourced, under researched,
and biased, she
also dropped this genuine bombshell
“The book notes, quietly, that the woman
Max Stier named as having
been supposedly victimized by Kavanaugh and
friends denies any
memory of the alleged event.
Seems, I don’t know, significant.”
Significant??
Very significant!
Only because it casts serious serious
doubt on the allegation made by Max Stier,
and thus the credibility
of the whole article.
This gave a very strong impression that the
New
York Times had tactfully chosen to leave this
little bit out in order to
smear Kavanaugh and strengthen Pogrebin and
Kelley’s case.
Needless to say, when Mollie spoke the truth,
there was huge public
pressure on the New York times.
Everyone wanted to know why
they’d left that bit out, and would they
be issuing a correction.
So,
the next day, the publication added half a
sentence to the paragraph
describing Stier’s allegation, which included
the relevant info, and
also an editor’s note.
Right at the bottom of the article, where
nobody would see it.
This correction, obviously, is not evidence
of a simple mistake.
While
I am a firm believer in Hanlon’s razor;
that is, never attribute to
malice that which is adequately explained
by stupidity, my opinion is
that in this situation there was at least
a large spoonful of malice,
with maybe a side of stupidity.
This brings me to why I wanted to make this
video in the first place;
not just to fill you in on the chronology,
but to expose the
ideological, money grubbing agenda of the
New York Times, and the
vapid, unscrupulous behaviour and reporting
of Robin Pogrebin and
Kate Kelley.
First; lets look at the flimsily sourced article.
It mentions that Brett
Kavanaugh denied Ramirez’s allegation, and
said if it had happened,
it would have been the talk of the campus.
However, Pogrebin and
Kelley claim they have evidence that it was,
asserting that at least
seven people, including Ramirez’s mother,
heard about it at the time.
Two of those people were apparently classmates
who heard of it
mere days after the party, which the authors
believe suggests it was
discussed among students at the time.
Again, sounds very spooky and damning!
Has Debora’s Ramirez’s
allegation finally been corroborated?
Not likely.
Here’s who those
seven people really are, and just how they
found out about the
incident, according to none other than Pogrebin
and Kelley’s book.
As reported by the Washington Examiner‘s
Byron York, who also
appears to have an advance copy, and synthesised
by Breitbart
News:
1) Deborah Ramirez’s mother claims her daughter
told her three
years after the alleged incident that “Something
happened at Yale.”
That’s it.
Nothing else.
Just “something happened at Yale”.
2) Kenneth Apold roomed with Kavanaugh and
claims two other
people told him what Kavanaugh did to Ramirez.
Apold doesn’t
remember who those two other students are.
And despite the fact a
number of prolific media organisations are
using their extensive
resources, no one can find these two students
or any witness to the
alleged incident.
3) Michael Wetstone, former Kavanaugh classmate,
claims Apold
told him this secondhand information (that
no one can verify)
sometime in 1989 or 1990 — making him no
more than a third-hand
“witness.”
4) Richard Oh, another classmate, says he
overheard a “female
student emotionally describing making contact
with a fake penis”
that ended up being real.
Oh’s story contradicts the alleged victim,
who says she didn’t tell anyone about is
at the time.
5) Someone anonymous says they heard something
about the
incident in the 1990s.
That’s it.
No other information is given.
6) Chad Ludington vaguely remember hearing
about something that
happened to Ramirez.
7) James Roche vaguely remembers hearing about
something that
happened to Ramirez.
That any journalist could call these testimonies,
or lack thereof,
corroborating evidence of anything is ludicrous.
Second, let’s have a look at Robin and Kate’s
explanation of just what
went down with the insertion of the relevant
info into the article
post-publication.
In short; they threw the editors under the
bus
Okay, so let me get this straight.
The reason the crucial information
that the alleged victim has no memory of the
incident was rescinded
was because the editors in a fit of haste
wanted to take her name
out of the article to protect her and in doing
so just happened to
remove the entire sentence containing that
crucial information even
though it would have been just as easy to
simply refer to her as a
female student, which she had already been
referred to as in the
article?
Are you high?!
What a load of proverbial crap!
How dare these two women insult
the intelligence of the general public by
expecting them to believe
something so obviously fabricated.
There is no way, even at a
student newspaper, that that would happen.
The next day, Robin and Kate went on The View
to further state their
case.
Along with reiterating the baloney about the
editors
accidentally removing the whole sentence,
they also had this to say
First of all; as Mollie Hemingway pointed
out, this is inconsistent with
what they said the night before on MSNBC,
where they claimed the
reason they added the info was because of
the heat they received
from the public.
On the View, they claimed they corrected it
“as soon
as they realised”.
Second; in another example of these women
insulting the
intelligence of the general public, do you
guys really buy this?
So, they expect us to believe that they, two
highly experienced
journalists with decades of work between them
“thought they had”
read through the draft and accidently missed
a bit before it went to
print?
As if!!
Not only that, publications even smaller than
the New York Times
tend to give their authors a final reading
of the article in the shape
it’s going to print, just so the author
can maybe point out any
mistakes the editors have missed.
There is no way this doesn’t
happen at the New York Times.
Pogrebin and Kelley had every opportunity
to prompt the editors to
include the info about the woman’s lack
of memory, but it didn’t
happen.
And it’s my opinion that if it hadn’t
been for Mollie
Hemingway and her advance copy and whistle
blowing thread of
tweets, they absolutely would not have added
the correction.
They would have just let the article sit there,
while Democrats
screamed about impeachment and Kavanaugh was
further smeared
because hey there’s an election coming up
and dirty tactics are okay
by these people.
Remember, when the article was published,
the book wasn’t
available to the general public, so there
could have been no mass
fact checking at the time.
And by the time the book was released,
which it has been now, nobody would care enough
to expose them
because books take time to read and the news
cycle would have
moved on.
Disgusting behaviour.
But look, let’s backpedal here; how can
I know that they wanted to
keep this information out of the article?
After all, Hanlon’s razor,
remember?
Well, that could be a possibility…were not
for their
pattern of neglecting to reveal crucial facts.
Again, according to Mollie Hemingway, thank
goodness for her, in a
long form interview with NPR, the interviewer
Terry Gross asked
them if any other women and come forward since
Ramirez?
While
the authors brought up Max Stier’s allegation
and talked extensively
about it, nowhere in that long form interview
did they disclose that
the alleged victim declined to be interviewed,
and had no memory of
the incident.
In fact, the omission was so glaringly significant
that Terry Gross
recorded an update and inserted it into the
show immediately
afterwards, noting the omission and how it
also had to be corrected
in the New York Times.
The other thing Pogrebin and Kelley have failed
to disclose is that
Max Stier isn’t any normal classmate.
He was a defense lawyer to the
Clintons, and worked in opposition to Brett
Kavanaugh in the 90s
during the Whitewater investigation, which
centered around
accusations that Clinton had exposed himself
to an Arkansas woman.
Instead, Pogrebin describes him as a “good
government guy”.
Now, there are a lot of people vouching for
Stier’s fairness and
credibility regardless of this, he has worked
for both sides of politics.
But there’s also a bit of commentary saying
he’s a Clinton hack.
Either way, I would have thought this was
a slight conflict of interest
that should not be misrepresented, given the
sensitivity and
implications of the allegation made by Stier.
And now for the biggest bombshell about the
authors that was not
disclosed until absolutely necessary.
It turns out that not only was
Robin Pogrebin a Yale student along with Kavanaugh,
she was in his
class, and even in his freshman dorm.
This came to light in an
interview with WMAL&#39;s &quot;Mornings on
the Mall”, but only right at the
end, when she was prompted to say so.
This is a major conflict of interest, and
while she says it didn’t
influence them, there is no way we can know
that.
There is no way
Pogrebin can pose as an objective entity if
she was associated with
Kavanaugh back in the day.
Which would be fine, if she had owned up to
that in the book or the
article.
Instead, she presented a false image of herself
as a
disconnected third party, and therefore suitable
to undertake a
wholly unbiased investigation.
What a joke.
So, there you have it.
The Failing New York Times has sunk to a new
low.
Five years ago, an article so poorly sourced
and unscrupulously
handled would not have been published in a
mainstream newspaper,
not even in the weekend opinion section.
But the New York Times no
longer cares about standards, or journalistic
integrity.
They care
about two things; money, and trashing everything
to do with the
Trump administration.
I can’t even bear to think of the millions
of dollars’ worth of clicks
this whole saga will eventually generate for
them.
And of course
Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelley will benefit;
their names have been
put on the map, and their book has got an
enormous amount of free
publicity and will likely fly off the shelves.
There is no honesty left at the New York Times,
once a bastion of
free speech and journalistic integrity.
As Donald Trump said; They’ve
taken the Old Grey Lady and broken her down,
destroyed her virtue
and ruined her reputation...
She can never recover, and will never
return to Greatness, under current Management.
The Times is DEAD.
