{"id":10592,"date":"2017-09-18T13:17:53","date_gmt":"2017-09-18T20:17:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=10592"},"modified":"2017-09-18T13:17:53","modified_gmt":"2017-09-18T20:17:53","slug":"beware-of-narratives-and-misinformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/beware-of-narratives-and-misinformation\/","title":{"rendered":"Beware of Narratives and Misinformation"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Narratives surrounding the DNC hack & Antifa reveal media bias and government bureaucracy at their worst.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

U.S. intelligence agencies said Russia was responsible for hacking Democratic National Committee e-mail accounts, leading to the publication of about 20,000 stolen e-mails on WikiLeaks.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But that finding was reportedly based largely on the DNC\u2019s strange outsourcing of the investigation to a private cybersecurity firm. Rarely does the victim of a crime first hire a private investigator whose findings later form the basis of government conclusions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is many things. But so far he has not been caught lying about the origin of the leaked documents that came into his hands. He has insisted for well over a year that the Russians did not provide him with the DNC e-mails.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When it was discovered that the e-mails had been compromised, then\u2013DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz weirdly refused to allow forensic detectives from the FBI to examine the DNC server to probe the evidence of the theft. Why did the FBI accept that refusal?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That strange behavior was not as bizarre as Wasserman Schultz\u2019s later frenzied efforts to protect her information-technology specialist, Imran Awan, from Capitol Police and FBI investigations. Both agencies were hot on Awan\u2019s trail for unlawfully transferring secure data from government computers, and also for bank and federal-procurement fraud.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So far, the story of the DNC hack is not fully known, but it may eventually be revealed that it involves other actors beyond just the Russians.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There is not much left to the media myth of James Comey as dutiful FBI director, unjustly fired by a partisan and vindictive President Donald Trump. A closer look suggests that Comey may have been the most politicized, duplicitous, and out-of-control FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

During the 2016 election, Comey, quite improperly, was put into the role of prosecutor, judge, and jury in the investigation of Hillary Clinton\u2019s use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state. That proved a disaster. Comey has admitted under oath to deliberately leaking his own notes \u2014 which were likely government property \u2014 to the media to prompt the appointment of a special counsel. That ploy worked like clockwork, and by a strange coincidence it soon resulted in the selection of his friend, former FBI director Robert Mueller.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Comey earlier had assured the public that his investigation of Clinton had shown no prosecutable wrongdoing (a judgment that in normal times would not be the FBI\u2019s to make). It has since been disclosed that Comey offered that conclusion before he had even interviewed Clinton.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That inversion suggests that Comey had assumed that whatever he found out about Clinton would not change the reality that the Obama administration would probably drop the inquiry anyway \u2014 so Comey made the necessary ethical adjustments.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Comey was also less than truthful when he testified that there had been no internal FBI communications concerning the infamous meeting between Clinton\u2019s husband, former president Bill Clinton, and then\u2013attorney general Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac. In fact, there was a trail of FBI discussion about that supposedly secret rendezvous.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Before he fired Comey, Trump drafted a letter outlining the source of his anger. But it seemed to have little to do with the obstruction of justice.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Instead, Trump\u2019s anguished letter complained about Comey\u2019s private assurances that the president was not under FBI investigation, which were offered at about the same time a winking-and-nodding Comey would not confirm that reality to the press, thus leaving the apparently deliberate impression that a compromised president was in legal jeopardy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There is also a media fantasy about the Antifa street protesters. Few have criticized their systematic use of violence. But when in history have youths running through the streets decked out in black with masks, clubs, and shields acted nonviolently?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Antifa rioters in Charlottesville were praised by progressives for violently confronting a few dozen creepy white supremacists, Klansmen, and neo-Nazis. The supremacists were pathetic losers without any public or political support for their odious views, and they were condemned by both political parties. Yet Antifa\u2019s use of violence was compared perversely by some progressives to American soldiers storming the beaches on D-Day.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Later, Antifa thuggery in Boston and Berkeley against free speech and against conservative groups without ties to white supremacists confirmed that the movement was fascistic in nature.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It was recently disclosed that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had warned the Obama administration in 2016 that Antifa was a domestic terrorist organization that aimed to incite violence during street protests. That stark assessment and Antifa\u2019s subsequent violence make the recent nonchalance of local police departments with regard to Antifa thuggery seem like an abject dereliction of duty.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Doubts about official narratives of the DNC leaks and the errant behavior of James Comey, and misinformation about the violent extremists of Antifa, illustrate media bias \u2014 not to mention entrenched government bureaucracies that are either incompetent, ethically compromised, or completely politicized.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review   Narratives surrounding the DNC hack & Antifa reveal media bias and government bureaucracy at their worst.   U.S. intelligence agencies said Russia was responsible for hacking Democratic National Committee e-mail accounts, leading to the publication of about 20,000 stolen e-mails on WikiLeaks.   But that finding was reportedly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1110,1099,46,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2KQ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1157,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wikileaks-selective-mortality\/","url_meta":{"origin":10592,"position":0},"title":"WikiLeaks’ Selective Mortality","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 29, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There has never been anything quite like WikiLeaks in American military history. We are engaged in a great experiment to see whether the U.S. military can still persist in a conflict when it knows that any and all of its private communications can\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2010"","block_context":{"text":"October 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/october-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1105,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-confused-morality-of-wikileaks\/","url_meta":{"origin":10592,"position":1},"title":"The Confused Morality of WikiLeaks","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 4, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner The latest WikiLeaks trove raises once more the following two issues \u2014 the circumstances of the release of classified documents and their contents. We won\u2019t know the full extent of the diplomatic archives for days, but so far the particulars seem as embarrassing as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2010"","block_context":{"text":"December 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/december-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9908,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/presidential-payback-for-media-hubris\/","url_meta":{"origin":10592,"position":2},"title":"Presidential Payback for Media Hubris","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 2, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/Defining Ideas \u00a0 \u00a0This article is reprinted from Defining Ideas, an online journal at the Hoover Institution. To read the original article click here.\u00a0 Donald Trump conducted a press conference recently as if he were a loud circus ringmaster whipping the media circus animals into shape. The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":999,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/how-did-all-that-happen\/","url_meta":{"origin":10592,"position":3},"title":"How Did All That Happen?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 31, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The Improbables There are a number of improbables, anomalies, paradoxes, ironies, absurdities \u2014 call them what you wish \u2014 on the national scene that simply defy reason. We usually fault an ignorant media as culpable for creating narratives that have no basis in fact\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2010"","block_context":{"text":"December 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/december-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1032,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/julian-assanges-egoleaks\/","url_meta":{"origin":10592,"position":4},"title":"Julian Assange’s EgoLeaks","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 15, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Julian Assange, the public face of WikiLeaks, is, among many things, cowardly. Courageousness would involve meeting with Iranian dissidents, Russian journalists, Pakistani Christians, or Chinese human-rights activists \u2014 and then releasing any confidential information that they might have about the torment institutionalized by\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2010"","block_context":{"text":"December 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/december-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9493,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-tenth-life-of-donald-trump\/","url_meta":{"origin":10592,"position":5},"title":"The Tenth Life of Donald Trump","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 11, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0 by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Online By seizing control of Sunday night\u2019s debate, he steadied his faltering candidacy \u2014 a bit. The Sunday debate recalibrated the moribund Trump candidacy. It will not end this week. The stampede and groupthink calls for his resignation will ease. Trump might have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10592"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10592"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10593,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10592\/revisions\/10593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}