Kind of heartening to see that truth, like water, manages to make its way despite the obstacles and dams our elites put up. Interesting to see the chain of information work its magic even without the help of conservative or mainstream media. At least now we have a U.S. Senator (Ted Cruz) grilling the head of the FBI about who Ray Epps is and how many FBI people were aiding and inciting violence on 1/6. Theatre, for sure, but it's got to start there.
To watch how the info bubbled up is interesting. No conservative magazine let alone liberal outfit would touch the Ray Epps story or how there were FBI inciting rioters to crimes. It all fell to a rinky-dink website called “The Revolver”. But that unknown site caught fire. It slowly made its way up Trump-friendly media. It got picked up by American Greatness. It got picked up by the fearless Tucker Carlson, who mentioned Ray Epps to Ted Cruz. And Cruz, whether playing simply for the crowd or not had some words for the FBI head. Likely nothing will come further since the FBI is impervious to discipline. I mean, if they used a dossier they knew was fake to try to bring down a president, then what would they fear from a congressman?
But the lesson is that without fringe, alternative news sources there would be no questions from Cruz on it. National Review is an example of respectable but useless publication since if they can’t feign interest in civil liberties and protection of citizens from the state then what good are they?
The money quote is from Julie Kelly on the Eric Metaxas show:
"There’s no condemnation from National Review of this abusive, punitive, prosecution of hundreds of Americans in a political prison in the shadows of the U.S. Capitol...I think a lot of it is laziness. I think these people are just in their safe little sinecures, they get paid by big donors, they don’t have to do the detailed investigative work. I don’t think anyone at National Review has listened to one court hearing about January 6th. Their reporting on this is very thin and to the extent any is involved it condemns Donald Trump and Republicans.”
Seems a reasonable deduction. I came to a similar conclusion during the post-election when they had zero interest in the subject of election fraud despite at least 70% of Republicans being very interested in it. If they weren’t lazy, they’d serve their readership. Or perhaps they did serve whom they were interested in serving: their big donors.
National Review went from being anti-Trump in ’15 and then coming around during the Trump years in defending him to some extent. They turned on him the minute he left office. Less about truth than politics. But that’s a defining characteristic of our time - it’s extremely difficult to treat corruption used in service of defeating an enemy as anything less than good. It's shame on all of us.
This has certainly broken my own partisanship. I would vote for Tulsi Gabbard or Andrew Yang or Bernie Sanders before Bush, French or Kasich. That is certainly a new attitude for me. I've finally come around to the view the great Tom of Disputations had many years ago: vote for the person with the best character regardless of party. And there are few tests of character more obvious than how you view the least of our brothers being stripped of due process.
It's likewise a test of character to take the concerns of the "deplorables" about election fraud seriously. It's a test of character when you promote trade policy that kowtows to China and makes millionaires into billionaires while stripping thousands of blue collar jobs.
Ideally election security would be of interest no matter who the candidate was. Likewise you’d think the story of the Feds helping to trigger a riot would be interesting no matter how repulsive the political rioters. Obviously that’s not the way the real world works. But National Review showed itself as indifferent to the rule of law and there’s the rub - it used to be their brand.
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