An alarming timeline.

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When I started writing news articles for The Town Crier at Los Angeles’ Paul Revere Junior High School in 1978, our journalism teacher stressed the importance of getting sources on the record — if not all, at least a couple of them. This is especially true, we were told, when stories brush with defamation. NBC News no longer meets this ninth-grade standard of journalism. Exhibit One is Tuesday’s execrable article by Chloe Melas, Courtney Kube, and Sarah Fitzpatrick headlined “Pete Hegseth’s drinking worried colleagues at Fox News, sources tell NBC News.” The Peacock Network’s flamboyant tale claims that former Fox News colleagues of President reelect Trump’s nominee for defense secretary “felt like they needed to ‘babysit’ Hegseth because of his drinking and late nights.” Other Fox staffers, the article alleges, “smelled alcohol on him before he went on air.” The invisibility of Hegseth’s accusers spoils the iridescent portrait that NBC’s three writers tried to paint. Indeed, they concede: “This account of Hegseth’s time at Fox News is based on NBC News interviews with three current and seven former Fox employees, all of whom asked not to be named because of fear of retaliation.” So, 10 sources say that Hegseth has a drinking problem that he could not control even while broadcasting from Fox’s Rockefeller Center headquarters. And yet not one of them stood up to be counted by name? Fear of retaliation? Current Fox employees might be concerned that attacking a just-departed colleague could blunt their prospects at the cable news leader. But what do the seven Fox alumni have to fear? They cannot get fired from jobs they no longer hold. Since NBC News seems unfamiliar with the concept of named sources, this handy tutorial should help these struggling scribes learn to write such stories. These 15 current or former Fox News colleagues of Hegseth say they never saw him intoxicated on air or on set. All 15 stood with Hegseth on X, did so publicly, and identified themselves by name. Kyle Becker: “I sae [sic] @PeteHegseth numerous times while working at Fox News. Never got the impression he was ever drunk. No bloodshot eyes. No slurred speech. No disheveled appearance. No wobbly gait. Nothing.” Guy Benson: “I’ve co-hosted with Pete and have never experienced anything like what was claimed in this anonymously-sourced report.” Dan Bongino: “Worked with Pete for years. This is absolute BULLSHIT.” Lisa Boothe: “I’ve guest co-hosted with him numerous times before. Not once did this happen. Not once have I heard this from others. This is such a disgusting and false smear. It is wrong and malicious.” Will Cain: “Your story is horseshit @NBCNews,” Hegseth’s Fox & Friends Weekend co-host declared Tuesday. “Put my name on it. On the record. It’ll be your only on the record source. Signed, The guy who sat next to him for 8 hours every week for five years starting at 6am.” Cain added: “Bullshit. 100 percent bullshit. Actually … horseshit.” Rachel Campos-Duffy: “The losers at @NBCNews never reached out to me either,” Hegseth’s other regular co-host stated. “@willcain is right – your story IS horseshit. You now have 2 people who sat next to him 8+ hours a week on the record. Will you retract or correct your story?” Sara Carter: “I have known @PeteHegseth since we were both at The Blaze way back when and as a contributor for Fox since 2017, I have never once seen this type of reported lies or behavior. He’s always been a gentleman and great guy!” William Case: “I worked with @PeteHegseth for YEARS — on set, in the control room, in the newsroom, in taxis, on boats, on location. This is all LOLOL. The F&F staff all LOVED Pete, and women of every rank thought he was just the greatest thing (oh the stories).” Corey DeAngelis: “I’ve been interviewed by @PeteHegseth and have chatted with him before/after segments. He never smelled or acted like he was under the influence.” Mollie Hemingway: “I can’t stand the propaganda practice of using anonymous sources to smear political opponents, as NBC does here. FWIW, I have nothing but good things to say about Pete and the anonymously sourced stories don’t match my personal experience in any way. Quite the contrary, in fact.” Joey Jones: “I don’t drink. I’m disgusted by the smell of alcohol on someone’s breath. I’ve never EVER seen Pete drink like that, and have never smelled alcohol on his breath at work. These hit pieces are getting laughable.” Breanna Morello: “As a former Fox producer, I’ve never heard this in my life. Everyone spoke highly of him and still does til this day.” Piers Morgan: “This relentless onslaught against @PeteHegseth is getting pathetic. Done @foxandfriends many times with him and never known Pete [to] be anything but utterly professional on camera and a nice, respectful guy off it.” Nicole Saphier: “I have routinely sat on the couch with @PeteHegseth for 8 years. Not once did I suspect he had consumed anything other than an egg sandwich and coffee before going on air.” Rob Smith: “Generally when Pete Hegseth was helping book me on Fox segments, counseling me on career moves, or making crucial introductions for me in the political and media world, I didn’t smell alcohol on him.” Journalism connoisseur John Nicosia perfectly understands this fake news. “I have covered the media for 15 years,” he wrote on X late last night. “If @PeteHegseth was as drunk on set, etc., as people are saying, it would’ve been gossip everywhere. I was Managing Editor at @Mediaite when the Roger Ailes stuff went down. That place (Fox) talks/leaks a LOT. Until tonight. Not a word or post on the current media gossip sites about the smell of booze, nothing. The media business is brutal. Getting rid of him if he was drinking opens up another prime spot for the next star in line to take a seat on the couch. It’s just that simple. Someone would’ve leaked it far sooner. This is a hit piece and garbage, nothing more.” Meanwhile, Hegseth has interviewed me on multiple occasions on Fox & Friends over the years. I never sensed that he was drunk or even tipsy in our studios. Rather, he was invariably crisp, sharp, quick-witted, alert, and professional. I have known Pete since he worked at the Manhattan Institute around 2007. He is reliably smart, affable, and in full control of his faculties. NBC’s Not Ready for Ninth Grade Newspaper “article” must have been penned about Pete Smith, Pete Jones, or Pete Gomez. It bears no resemblance to the Pete Hegseth whom I know and admire. Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor. READ MORE: Dear Kamala, Please Stick Around At MSNBC, Rising Tensions Fuel Fears of Collapse The post Hegseth’s On-Record Defenders Crush Baseless Drinking Claims by Nameless Sources appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Living at the edge of California’s Gold Country, I’m often astounded by the entire enterprise — the idea that people flocked here from across the globe to extract gold from the hills and try to make a quick fortune. The resulting lawlessness and violence can’t be overlooked, but nearby historic boom towns — Angel’s Camp, Placerville, Grass Valley, and even Sacramento — are testaments to the enduring communities that sprung up in the Gold Rush’s wake. “The gold of California was not under private ownership,” wrote the late historian Kevin Starr in California: A History. “It belonged to everyone, provided one could find it, lay legal claim to it, extract it and get it safely to one or the other of the many assay centers that were now springing up where nuggets could be weighed, valued and melted into ingots for shipment to San Francisco and New York.” It’s quite a story and I highly recommend a trip along Highway 49. The idea of the California Dream has long been celebrated in these parts, even though, to quote Starr again, “[T]he dream outran the reality, as it always does.” I became a California dreamer late in the game, moving to Orange County from the Midwest in the late 1990s long after the idea had become tarnished. By that time, the new progressive era — as opposed to the earlier one led by Gov. Hiram Johnson — was coming into its own. The mood in the late 1990s was perhaps best defined by the official state approach to the sesquicentennial, which should have been a triumphant fête of California’s history. “California’s efforts to celebrate its 150th birthday have been drowned by bad management, politics and apathy,” reported the Los Angeles Times, which noted that the “state government has officially backed away from celebrating its own birthday.” Three decades earlier, California had built the infrastructure for a booming future. Democratic Gov. Pat Brown — despite losing reelection to Ronald Reagan in 1966 — is revered more by Republicans than Democrats these days. His “sweeping successes” included making “the state’s public college and university system the best in the world, the building of highways and … the ‘most significant public water project in world history,’” per a KPBS retrospective. In the 1970s, California soared again mostly as the result of the private sector. While the rest of the country was suffering through malaise, Southern California became the center of the defense and aerospace industries, the tech industry emerged in Silicon Valley, the wine industry took off in Sonoma and Napa, the Hollywood film industry become the world leader, and our ports became the hubs of international trade, explained author Francis J. Gavin. I found Gavin’s following summary most revealing: “The Silicon Valley experience also transformed how innovation was encouraged and financed, with the rise of venture capital and the new start-up culture. A culture of entrepreneurship, which celebrated risk and tolerated failure, took hold. The consequences for America’s power position in the world was undeniable.” The key to California’s success, from the Gold Rush to modern times, had always been its spirit of entrepreneurship and private investment. In the ensuing years, California’s leaders came to disdain the private sector, seeing it mainly as something to regulate, tax, and sue. They expanded government at every opportunity, and not mainly to build the kind of infrastructure projects championed by Pat Brown. Our recent leaders — and starting really with Pat’s son Jerry’s early terms as governor — have purposefully disinvested in freeways, water projects, and the like. We still have vaunted industries, but many of them are leaving. So here we are. I often detail the myriad problems facing our once-great state — including a crime wave, exploding homeless population, a housing affordability crisis, and traffic congestion. California officials seem far more concerned about changing the entire Earth’s climate than they are about addressing their fundamental responsibilities in their own state. For reasons that go beyond the scope of this article, voters have given them license. Consider this recent summary from the Legislative Analyst’s Office: “Since the beginning of 2022, the state’s labor markets have grown modestly but shown some signs of weakness. A closer look at this period unveils a more worrisome trend: large and mounting private-sector job losses that have been offset by continued hiring in public sector (and publicly supported) fields.” Over that period, the private sector has lost a net 154,000 jobs and the public sector has gained 361,000 jobs. It’s almost as if our leaders believe the government is the key to prosperity. As President-elect Donald Trump prepares a new administration (which poses its own challenges to the free market), Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta are preparing the state to fight against federal GOP policies. This isn’t entirely inappropriate. Just as Texas geared up to fight Biden administration mandates, California will at times have to fight Trump’s efforts. “The problem is that this is an exclusively defensive approach to solving a grassroots problem that will outlast Trump’s second term,” wrote Carlsbad business owner Bob Stonebrook in a commentary for CalMatters. “A far better and proactive approach — and one that would significantly increase the benefit to all Californians over the long haul — is to improve the effectiveness of our state government.” That’s exactly right. Instead of taking the same partisan approach (and one that rarely amounts to more than political posturing), what if our state committed itself to returning to its former glory and becoming a model for good governance? What if state officials got serious about fixing our problems, reforming wasteful bureaucracies, lowering taxes, and improving the business climate? Given the enduring appeal of California’s geography, culture, and weather, it’s not wrong to think it might spark a new Gold Rush. Steven Greenhut is Western Region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org. READ MORE: Lessons From a Previous Trade War California Voters Reject ‘California Values’ The post Restoring the California Dream appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

These days, when one ponders misogyny and antisemitism, one’s mind should almost immediately turn to Hamas’s “genocidal” and sadistic rapes, kidnappings, and murders of Israeli women on 10/7.  Of Israeli men, too. But let’s be clear. Hamas is a Muslim, Islamist, terrorist group funded by Iran, Qatar, and major Western philanthropists, and covered for by both the Western intelligentsia and the Western media. Please recall, that the mobs on the “Jew hunt” in Amsterdam were mainly Muslims whose country of origin was Morocco. As for the media: Consider the op-ed published in the New York Times Dec. 2. It’s written by two professors, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Rachel Schreiber, both of whom teach at the New School. Remember it’s the school that had the first faculty led anti-Israel/pro Hamas encampment in Manhattan. The piece is titled “Misogyny and Antisemitism Are a Toxic Brew.” Good title, important subject, but guess what? Is Hamas or Iran correctly identified, targeted, focused upon? Absolutely not. The co-authors do note, but only in passing, that “antisemitism and misogyny can be found across the political spectrum” but do not name or describe any alleged wrong-doers among Democrats, on the American Left, or in the Muslim world. Instead, they specifically, and rather shockingly, name President-elect Trump. “The problem is rampant on the right, as conservatives platform a Hitler apologist and lionize Donald Trump, a man who has been found liable for sexual abuse and scapegoated Jews in anticipation of a possible loss.” First of all, “conservatives” didn’t platform a Hitler apologist, Tucker Carlson (inexcusably) did. Last time I looked, Carlson was banished from the most widely watched conservative cable news channel, Fox. Secondly, are the Times authors saying that Trump sexually abused Jewish women? Because they were Jews? Did his orthodox Jewish daughter have anything to say about this? Or are they mixing it all up due to the lack of corroborating evidence and joining Trump’s alleged abuse of non-Jewish women with statements he made about the Jewish vote? Utterly incoherent. Petrzela and Schreiber also describe a rapist in Texas “who put on Christmas music and raped (a woman) after she disclosed she was Jewish.” One is meant to assume that the Texas rapist is a Christian. This is all passing strange. Here’s why. These co-authors begin their piece this way: “Zio bitch! A young man in a kaffieyeh and Black Lives Matter T-shirt barked at one of us.” We are not told the young man’s name, skin-color, or religion. When something is omitted, it usually means that we are talking about a Muslim or an African American perpetrator. Courtesy of DEI, even if this might be an accurate description — it will still be perceived as a racist or “Islamophobic” statement. One will be fired, cancelled, ostracized. Thus, consider the gang-rape of the 12 year-old girl in France, which the op-ed mentions. Everyone in France knows that the French media and the French police do not mention race, skin-color, ethnicity, or country of origin in criminal matters. It was the Jewish community which informed  the public that the girl was a Jew, and that the young rapists “used antisemitic slurs while they violated her.” Does anyone believe that White, Catholic Crusaders or white Nazis did this? Please recall, that the mobs on the “Jew hunt” in Amsterdam were mainly Muslims whose country of origin was Morocco. One is not allowed to write this — and frankly, since so many Caucasian Dutch soon supported the “Jew hunt,” perhaps it matters a bit less. The silence of feminists globally after 10/7 is something I know a bit about. The co-authors mention it as well as the “hostility” towards anyone who tried to break this silence. But what’s this point doing here? Being de-platformed is not the same as being raped, is it? Are the feminist censors rapists, or at least rape-collaborators? If so, why not say so? Petrzela and Schreiber mention pornography, pogroms, and  Jews, and quote Jean Paul Sartre and Andrea Dworkin who both refer to 20th century matters. What the Hamas terrorists did on 10/7, in the 21st century was, in part, influenced by pornography but they also took it a step further, by video-ing it, proudly sending their crimes to their victims’ families, and turning it loose on the internet. Finally, the co-authors point out how “intersectionalists” have sought to redress all forms of bias — except that of antisemitism. White, Jewish women, in particular, are “soft targets,” and remain unprotected by academic DEI feminists. The co-authors are right. But they fail to connect this with the silence of feminists on 10/7. Or to place the silence in the larger context of Islamist/left-wing Jew-hatred. I wonder how heavily edited this piece was — or whether the co-authors themselves are proud of it just as it is. READ MORE from Phyllis Chesler: ICC Fails Afghan Women. Filmmakers Step In. Ban Face Masks: Our Safety Requires It The post Whitewashing Leftist and Islamist Jew Hatred appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.