Saturday in the tabs, every day’s the Fourth of July …
Now, years later, Savage not only re-writes this passage without the name “Papadopoulos” and without references to “dirt” or “thousands of emails,” but uses sleight-of-hand to suggest what was said between the young Trump aide and the Australian diplomat was meaningful. He describes a “Trump campaign adviser suggesting, before the [Russian] hacking had become public, that the campaign had received outreach from Russia and knew what it would do.” Knew what it would do? Savage leaves out the fact that Papadopoulos had not, in fact, received outreach from Russia, and did not have or claim to have foreknowledge of hacking. He played no meaningful role. It’s part of the Times legend that he did, however, so Charlie twisted the prose like a pipe cleaner to fit the few remaining usable factoids.
The irony is that while Papadopoulos was not the real beginning of Russiagate, the story Durham told about the U.S. acquiring a large chunk of intelligence from Russia far earlier in 2016 likely was. This was real intelligence concerning Russia that was embarrassing to Clinton, not Trump. Even at this late date, after so many Russiagate stories the paper screwed up, they continue to vomit up this nonsense. Give back your Pulitzer, you clowns!
Ed: The NYT is in full Protection Racket Media mode now. And their vomit is being lapped up by the rest of the dogs in the PRM, too. Be sure to read all of this from Matt Taibbi.
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After spending nearly 10 years screaming that the Hillary Clinton-funded Steele dossier somehow proved Trump colluded with Russia, corrupt corporate media are now trying to claim there was never an operation to frame Trump as a Russian agent.
They can’t refute any of the new…
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 2, 2025
They can’t refute any of the new evidence, so their response is to claim the entire last decade never happened. Shocking levels of dishonesty.
Ed: I agree with everything Sean writes except its “shocking” nature. The national news media has read “1984” as a how-to manual.
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Mike Benz, a former State Department official in the Trump 45 administration who now runs the Foundation for Freedom Online, found what is tantamount to the Rosetta stone for the Censorship Industrial Complex.
And it’s right here: “The point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue. Say something like a critical infrastructure threat for the election to feel menace [sic] since both POTUS and VPOTUS have acknowledged the fact [that] IC would speed up searching for evidence that is regrettably still unavailable.”
In a series of posts on X, Benz laid out why this sentence from an email from a Soros Open Society Eurasian official told the story of how they planned to get Trump even after they’d lost the election. They magic’d up a system whereby elections would now become “critical infrastructure” run by the feds.
Ed: Our pal Adam Baldwin flagged this for me. Click over to PJM to watch the entire 17-minute video, in which Benz goes into depth on this issue. Don’t forget that the excuse given by the Biden administration for suppressing dissent and debate online during the pandemic was that social media platforms also were “critical infrastructure.” The Left basically attempted to nationalize speech and regulate it to shut down their opposition. It wasn’t just elections.
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Btw this is also technically slavery https://t.co/Hh8HLi4Qlq
— (((Aaron Walker))) (@AaronWorthing) August 2, 2025
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Media spends two weeks on Hamas talking points of mass widespread famine, cropping photographs and performing in front of cameras.
Hamas releases photo of an actual
starved Jewish hostage, and they all ignore it.— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) August 2, 2025
Ed: If we thought our job in pushing back against the Academia/media/Democrat censorship complex was over with the election, think again. This is going to be a long fight. So if you’re digging these Final Word posts and want to support independent platforms, why not join our VIP Membership program? Choose VIP to support Hot Air and access our premium content, VIP Gold to extend your access to all Townhall Media platforms and participate in this show, or VIP Platinum to get access to even more content and discounts on merchandise. Use the promo code FIGHT to join or to upgrade your existing membership level today, and get 60% off!
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A reporter for a glossy magazine is doing a profile of me. I agreed to an interview, but as the time drew closer I felt my adrenaline and hostility rising. I was about to be attacked—again.
Except I wasn’t.
I left the interview feeling something I haven’t for years. I felt hope for journalism’s future.
Ed: Read all of Mark Judge’s essay. He does offer the caveat that he has yet to see how the reporter in question will use the material he provided, but Mark has good instincts formed in the crucible of the Kavanaugh smear campaign. I hope he’s right, but I’ll believe it when I start seeing a pattern of honesty and integrity begin to eclipse The Narrative in the Protection Racket Media.
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Somebody’s getting sued https://t.co/r7Lq1A8Fya
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) August 2, 2025
Ed: We can hope, anyway. These venues have shoved their politics down our throats for years. They started it, and now they don’t like it.
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President Donald Trump has been dangerously successful.
With a seeming snap of his fingers, he has restored our nation’s borders. He has dismantled elite wokeness— rescuing our God-given pronouns and kicking men out of women’s sports. He has neutered Iran’s march toward nuclear weapons, ended taxpayer-funded pro-Hamas campus activism, and quashed Bidenflation. To the astonishment of our foreign policy establishment, he has strengthened Europe’s support of NATO to match our 5%-of-GDP goal.
Trump has blown up the USAID’s corrupt funding of a global anti-American bureaucracy. His tariffs breathe life into the people’s economy, while unemployed bureaucrats flee Washington’s economy, leaving their homes behind like empty shells.
That’s all great news–and the Republican Party’s big problem, too.
Ed: Alex Castellanos is a smart thinker, and this is well worth the time to read. Yes, there are always dangers with success, especially in overreach and ignoring the feedback loops that made you successful in the first place. However, I would much rather have these potential problems on the horizon than not succeed in the first place.
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Russiagate is as much as a scandal and hoax for the US corporate media as it is for the CIA and FBI. The dominant media conspiracy from mid-2016 to 2019 was: Putin is blackmailing Trump and controlling the US.
Of course NYT/CNN will lie now to protect the fraudsters: it’s them! https://t.co/LIKzHlGaL7
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 2, 2025
Ed: Without that success, would we have ever seen the evidence? Not a chance in hell.
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For almost half a century, the federal government has operated like a college that didn’t look at SAT scores when admitting students. Rescinding the Luevano Consent Decree could take the government from safety-school status to Ivy League.
“We’re making civil service great again,” Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told The Daily Wire Friday.
The move opens the door to technocratic hiring assessments that allow the government to hire applicants who objectively demonstrate the most aptitude.
Ed: I’m still not tired of the winning. This is the moment for boldness rather than consolidation. Keep an eye on the potholes on the horizon, but don’t take the foot off the gas pedal.
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JUST IN: American Eagle refuses to apologize in a new statement posted to Instagram after receiving backlash for their Sydney Sweeney ad.
The new statement is already being met with more backlash from angered liberals.
“‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about… pic.twitter.com/xOvK12q65T
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 1, 2025
Ed: I had to leave you with a smile on your faces …
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