Pressure to resign is growing by the minute on Rep. George Santos (R), the newly-elected New York congressman who admits to having misrepresented multiples aspects of his past life, including who he worked for and what he did for them.
So far, five days after being sworn in as a freshman member of the 118th Congress, Santos is refusing to resign. It’s hard to envision him not resigning sooner or later, however, because Republican leaders in his Long Island district gathered en masse Wednesday in a presser to demand that he leave the House of Representatives.
Nassau County Republican Chairman Joseph Cairo Jr. told reporters of his conversation with Santos regarding an endorsement. “We got into it, started getting personal about the fact that he came from a poor background but that he was able to be very successful. He told me, I remember specifically, I’m into sports a little bit — that he was a star on the Baruch [College] volleyball team, that they won the league championship.”
Well, Santos never attended Baruch or played on the college’s volleyball team. Claiming that he had was just a convenient fiction intended to advance the guy’s political career. And that was just one of many fictions spun by Santos during the 2022 mid-term election campaign, according to Cairo and others during the news conference.
Predictably, because Santos ran as a Republican, the Mainstream Media’s drive to push him out of Congress is gathering steam. He’s getting the mob treatment whenever he moves around Capitol Hill, with journalists thrusting mics and recorders in his face and demanding to know when he will resign.
But, to paraphrase a famous question asked by Jesus 2,000+ years ago, why aren’t the Mainstream Media owners, editors and reporters being asked: “What about that huge log in your own eye?”
That log would be a just-released data analysis by three European political scientists working with three from New York University, entitled: “Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency Foreign Influence Campaign on Twitter in the 2016 U.S. Election and its Relationship to Attitudes and Voting Behavior.”
Allow me to translate the academic jargon: Russiagate was a crock.
How do I know that? Here’s the summary of the key conclusions reached by the six data wonks:
“We demonstrate, first, that exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: only 1 percent of users accounted for 70 percent of exposures. Second, exposure was concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans.
“Third, exposure to the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians. Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”
In other words, there is no evidence — zero, none, nada — to support the conspiracy theory that Russian intelligence used Twitter and other social media to steal the 2016 presidential election from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and put Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
And you know the rest of the story. Clinton’s campaign bought the Russiagate Dossier from former British Intel agent Christopher Steele, who compiled it while consulting with an infamous Democratic opposition research operation and certain people in the Department of Justice and the FBI.
And that dossier was the basis of demands for the appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller to conduct a special counsel investigation of how Russian intelligence allegedly put Trump in the White House.
For the entirety of Trump’s four years as the nation’s chief executive, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, USA Today, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and every other establishment media outlet breathlessly reported over and over — even after Mueller failed to produce evidence for the conspiracy theory — that the Russians stole the election.
Let’s not forget, either, that now-former House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who claimed repeatedly to have seen the smoking gun evidence that proved Trump was a Russian toady, never bothered to make that evidence public.
And now, six years after the 2016 campaign and more than two years into the bumbling Biden tenure that followed Trump’s 2020 defeat, six academics who we must assume wouldn’t vote for The Donald if you paid them handsomely looked at the data and concluded, “we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”
No wonder Schiff never took the wraps off that smoking gun!
So many media outlets were showered with awards for their Russiagate coverage, including most notably the Washington Post, which received a Pulitzer. To the Post‘s credit, it did allow one of its reporters to do a story on this bombshell study.
But if George Santos should resign for misrepresenting the past, why shouldn’t the Post, at the very least, return that Pulitzer and apologize to its millions of readers for peddling as documented fact a conspiracy theory that is now seen without a doubt to have been transparent bunk?
Ditto for all the rest of the Mainstream Media that howled, “Russia! Russia!” for six years. They should apologize, return every award they received for their coverage, and fire every editor and reporter who did so much to destroy the last shreds of a once-honorable profession’s credibility.
No, I’m not holding my breath, either.
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