A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
Conservatives surveyed the controversy over whether President Trump told the widow of a soldier killed earlier this month in Niger that he “knew what he signed up for.” National Review’s Rich Lowry called the matter—which came out of Trump’s claim Monday that Obama and other presidents hadn’t called the families of fallen soldiers—perhaps the “stupidest and most unworthy controversy of the year.” “[T]rump’s “knew what he signed up for” statement seems horrible in isolation, but it’s hard to know what to make of it except in context and listening to the conservation,” he wrote. “Now, Trump is engaged in a fight over what he really said. Is it too much to ask that everyone back off this one and not to add to anyone’s distress and leave condolence calls — if nothing else — out of our poisonous political debate?”
Michelle Malkin joined Trump in accusing Democratic Rep. Frederica Wilson, who first disclosed Trump’s remarks, of lying. Wilson’s story has been corroborated by the soldier’s mother.
At the Resurgent, Erick Erickson warned against rushing to judgement:
I would like to hear the full quote and context before rolling my eyes and saying something not nice about the President.
We live in an age where the false tweet gets 10,000 retweets and the correction gets 100. No one cares about facts, just resistance fan fiction. If it sounds true and makes the President look bad, it is, whether or not it happened.
I think I will wait.
RedState’s Andrea Ruth took on the late-breaking revelation that Trump promised $25,000 to a Gold Star family that was never delivered over the summer. After the Washington Post reported the incident, the White House claimed the check had been sent. “This is reminiscent of the fundraiser Trump held when he acted like a spoiled brat and skipped a Republican debate,” Ruth wrote. “All the monies raised from the event were promised to helping veterans organizations. But until the media shamed Trump after he won the election, the funds stayed in his accounts. I have no hope Donald Trump will learn any lesson from the latest news cycle over his call to LA David Johnson’s widow, but hopefully, he’ll learn not to make promises he doesn’t intend to keep to grieving Gold Star families.”
In other news:
Conservatives continued to weigh in on the national conversation over sexual harassment and assault in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Ann Coulter accused four reporters at the New York Post of sidelining or downplaying details of the Ambra Battilana Gutierrez assault case in multiple articles:
Tina Brown explained exactly how Weinstein controlled reporters: “If there was any stirring of a negative story, Harvey would offer them a book contract, a development deal, a consultancy, and they used to succumb. Journalists are often short of money, and they were also very star-struck with the world that Harvey offered, which was movies and Hollywood.”
So what DID the bitter gossip girls get? Did Mara Siegler, Jamie Schram, Danika Fears or Maria Wiesner end up with phony “consultancies,” “book contracts” or “movie options” with Weinstein’s companies? (Paging the IRS!)
The only other explanation is that the Weinstein-compliant scandal sheets illustrate the oldest primal urge, one even more basic than the compulsion that drove Weinstein: Ugly girls taking their revenge on pretty girls.
Michelle Malkin—who has been behind a campaign defending Daniel Holtzclaw, an Oklahoma City police officer convicted of rape and assault in 2015—wrote about the #MeToo campaign and false rape accusations in National Review:
It’s one thing to break down cultural stigmas constructively, but the #MeToo movement is collectivist virtue-signaling of a very perilous sort. The New York Times heralded the phenomenon with multiple articles “to show how commonplace sexual assault and harassment are.” The Washington Post credited #MeToo with making “the scale of sexual abuse go viral.” And actress Emily Ratajkowski declared at a Marie Claire magazine women’s conference on Monday: “The most important response to #metoo is ‘I believe you.’ ”
No. I do not believe every woman who is now standing up to “share her story” or “tell her truth.” I owe no blind allegiance to any other woman simply because we share the same pronoun. Assertions are not truths until they are established as facts and corroborated with evidence. Timing, context, motives, and manner all matter.
The Federalist’s Bre Payton responded to a Medium post listing ways men can support women. “Instead of telling men to act like women, we should be telling them to act like men and accept the responsibilities and expectations that have historically come with that privilege,” Payton wrote. “The women of The Federalist have compiled our own list of ways men can actually support women.” Items on the list included lifting heavy objects, marrying women, killing spiders, apologizing for being wrong, and grilling meat.
