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Stop Trying To Make ‘Taylor Swift Is A Psyop’ Happen

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So two months ago, I was the guy who dared to say the unspeakable: Taylor Swift’s overwhelming popularity was in some grand sense a sign of societal decline. While the blunt headline on my column got people’s attention — getting denounced by British tabloids wasn’t exactly on my bucket list — as per usual, people missed the substantive forest for the clickbait trees.

In the last year or so, Swift’s popularity reached such a crescendo that a great many of America’s self-styled intellectuals, who are nothing if not thirsty for cultural relevance, were falling all over themselves to praise a woman whose artistry is finely tuned to appeal to not particularly precocious teenagers. Indeed, there was a rash of think pieces that had this off-putting and very meta overtone of cultural critics working overtime to convince themselves of the truth of what they were writing.

And so, the basic point of my piece was pretty simple: Do not ascribe this much cultural power to a figure that hasn’t earned it or deserves it! It was stupid to read the NYT treat a thoroughly middling songwriter like the second coming of Bob Dylan. And this obnoxious treatment was on top of the fact that Swift is otherwise sucking up every available pocket of pop culture oxygen. It seemed inevitable that a backlash would arrive — even if it’s fair to say Swift didn’t necessarily ask for all this undue attention.

Considering anyone who’s dipped a toe in social media in the

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How Biden’s Mental Decline Went From ‘Misinformation’ To Fact In A Week

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On CNN today, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, reports that people close to Joe Biden —people “who loved him, have supported him, and among them are some people who would raise a lot of money for him” — say his disastrous debate performance wasn’t a “one-off.” There have been, according to these insiders, “15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed.”

Yeah, we know. All of us saw the horror show in a bunch of videos you hacks kept telling us was “misinformation.”

Last month, Dem apparatchik Oliver Darcy attacked the “glaring problems” of a well-sourced Wall Street Journal piece detailing a litany of Biden’s slips. Not long before the first presidential debate, CNN ran another piece headlined, “Right-wing media outlets use deceptively cropped video to misleadingly claim Biden wandered off at G7 summit.”

Why didn’t Bernstein speak up?

Before the debate, NBC News senior politics reporter Alex Seitz-Wald ran an article headlined, “Misleading GOP videos of Biden are going viral. The fact-checks have trouble keeping up.” In it, Seitz-Wald regurgitates most of the White House’s transparently ridiculous talking points about videos that accurately illustrated Biden’s mental and physical decline.

On the same day, David Ingram of NBC News — a network that doesn’t get nearly enough credit for its hackery — published a piece headlined, “The deceptive Biden G7 video was quickly debunked, but it kept going viral anyway.” Full-court press.

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New Whistleblower Report Corroborates Charges Of FBI Retaliation

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The House Judiciary Committee received a new whistleblower complaint Tuesday morning corroborating previous reports of political retaliation within the FBI.

On Friday, attorneys sent a complaint for an anonymous supervisory special agent (SSA) to the Justice Department inspector general and the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. The complainant, who is a registered Democrat and has won awards as an agent for work against child trafficking, reports witnessing colleagues within the FBI experience political retribution. The whistleblower also claimed to have been retaliated against. The complaints were submitted to the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and shared with The Federalist.

According to the disclosures, the latest whistleblower “witnessed firsthand as an SSA how the FBI’s Security Division improperly suspended or revoked employees’ security clearances whose political views, medical views, or even ethnicity were questioned by Security Division leadership.”

“The outcomes of clearance investigations and adjudications were often pre-determined by the Division’s acting Deputy Assistant Director and the acting Section Chief responsible for security clearance investigations and adjudications, who often overruled line staff and even dictated the wording of documents in the clearance process,” the disclosure read.

The special agent in question was suspended last year after serving half a decade as an SSA since 2018. Protected disclosures were particularly made against Jeffrey Veltri, the acting deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Security Division, and Dena Perkins, the acting section chief for the Security Integrity and Investigations Section.

“SSA Client quickly discovered that acting

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NPR Runs Cover For Biden’s Federal Election Interference

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In its latest iteration of “Republicans pounce!“, America’s ethically bankrupt media is framing Joe Biden’s use of the federal government to interfere in the 2024 election as the victim of “partisan” Republican attacks. But anyone who’s bothered to research the issue knows that’s complete nonsense.

The deceptive stunt came Sunday, when NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang published an article titled, “Republicans are turning Biden’s voter registration order into a partisan flash point.” The piece focuses on Executive Order 14019, a directive signed by Biden in March 2021 that ordered hundreds of federal agencies to interfere in state and local election administration by using taxpayer dollars to engage in voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities.

Under the order, federal departments were required to draft “strategic plan[s]” explaining how their agencies intended to fulfill Biden’s directive. The administration has routinely stonewalled efforts by good government groups to acquire these plans by slow-walking its response to federal court orders and heavily redacting any related documents it’s released. Agencies were also instructed to collaborate with so-called “nonpartisan third-party organizations” that have been “approved” by the White House to provide “voter registration services on agency premises.”

Conservatives have expressed concerns about this “Bidenbucks” order and its intent for years. But that didn’t stop Wang from dishonestly attempting to make such worries a new, unfounded phenomenon.

“Backed with no substantial evidence, GOP lawmakers and state election officials, along with right-wing activists, have launched a barrage of claims that the Biden administration is using this order to overstep the federal government’s role in

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