Tea at Trianon: The FBI Turned Reporters Into Weapons Against Conservatives

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, December 7, 2025

The FBI Turned Reporters Into Weapons Against Conservatives

From Amuse on X:

The most troubling revelation to emerge from the decade of investigations and counter-investigations tied to Russiagate is not the now familiar list of intelligence failures. It is the discovery that the FBI quietly transformed segments of the American press into tools of disruption, a tactic with deep historical roots and a corrosive effect on democratic accountability. To understand the scale of this transformation we must trace the origins of disruption itself, how it was abandoned after the Church Committee, and how it resurfaced during the Obama years with a sophistication that rivaled foreign influence programs once aimed exclusively at adversarial regimes overseas. The logic behind disruption was simple, if an official believes a political movement or individual poses a threat, he may decide it is safer to shape or sabotage that target’s environment before any crime occurs. The Church Committee concluded that this logic leads inevitably to the abuse of surveillance powers, political labeling, and the trampling of civil liberties. The FBI agreed in public and shelved the program. It returned when the war on terror hardened the belief that prevention is superior to prosecution. Under Obama this mindset widened until it blurred the line between intelligence and politics, especially when the rise of Donald Trump was interpreted inside parts of the bureaucracy as a national security emergency.
During these same years the US government funded thousands of journalists overseas through USAID. The program supported 6,200 journalists, 707 media outlets, and 279 media NGOs across Europe, Asia, and South America. In Ukraine roughly 80% of reporters were paid by the US government. America defended these activities by arguing that funded journalists helped build civil society in fragile states. The problem is that the model rewarded journalists who produced stories that undermined regimes the US opposed and elevated those who favored American objectives. This pattern began to influence how intelligence bureaucracies viewed the American press itself. Rather than a civic institution, they saw an operational asset. The FBI learned from USAID’s experience overseas and began cultivating domestic reporters in ways that would have been unthinkable after the Church Committee. The goal was not bribery or control but something more subtle, shaping news flow, feeding narratives, recruiting independent reporters, and using their stories as both catalysts and justifications for investigative action. (Read more.)

From Mark Judge at Splice Today:

As I reported earlier this year in Chronicles and in Splice Today, David Enrich, an “investigative reporter” at The New York Times who helped cover the Brett Kavanaugh nomination in 2018, apologized to me for his inaccurate reporting. Friends have told me that collecting his scalp is a rare win—liberal reporters just don’t admit they are wrong—but I’m not stopping there. I expect an apology from Sally Quinn. I also expect one from Jennifer Rubin.

Rubin’s the deranged former writer at The Washington Post. She’s the author of the terrible book Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump. Like Enrich, Quinn, and most of the media—even some on the right—Rubin isn’t competent. In the fall of 2018 during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, hearings that I was dragged into when I was accused of witnessing Kavanaugh sexually assault a girl in 1982, leftist nuts like Rubin claimed that I wasn’t participating in the hearings because it’d be bad for Kavanaugh. Rubin was wrong. I didn’t say anything, it was a fraud. Rubin had a chance to report on this, but because she’s a dingbat, she didn’t.

On October 3, 2018, in the wake of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, TV blowhard Joe Scarborough revealed that he’d been to some social events in Washington. He heard people expressing doubt about the stories told by Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford. Scarborough said: “Quite a few people that we talked to, and I think a lot of them were registered Democrats, raised questions about Dr. Ford’s story. Now that’s something in 24/7 news coverage, at least in mainstream media, you never hear anybody talk about. They won’t talk about it. They feel that if anybody sticks their neck out and says they disbelieve any part of her story or talk about how there are no corroborating witnesses, well, they’ll get absolutely slammed.” (Read more.)