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Book Review: "The Gray Lady Winked"
After reading Ashley Rindsberg's "The Gray Lady Winked" it's hard to imagine a more deep and damning indictment of a major American institution (and of the oligarchic dynasty that has owned it for over a century). The book exposes in detail the long history of toxic news warping perpetrated by The New York Times. Continuing to this day it's a perfidy that Mr. Rindsberg exposes as having directly contributed to the worst waves of genocide and mass murder during the past century of world history.
The book is well researched with appropriate reference Notes and a Bibliography. Rindsberg covers a repeated pattern of perfidy in a series of New York Times journalistic travesties spanning from the early 20th century to this day. Exposing a history of agenda-driven cover-ups, narrative crammings, white washes, and omission bias reportings, Rindsberg builds an iron-clad case against the New York Times convicting it of manipulating world events using news distortion to repeatedly steer the world in a murderously toxic direction.
The book has chapters covering:
- How the Times lauded the Nazi regime and aided the rise of Hitler.
- How the Times, in conformity to a wave of anti-semitism, removed the word "Jew" from all its reporting and engaged in covering up the Holocaust during the very crucial early years of that hell on earth.
- How the Times aided the rise of Stalin and covered up his systematic murder of between 4 and 6 million innocent people under Stalinist socialism.
- How the Times covered up the harsh medical reality of the radiation aftermath of nuclear bombs.
- How the Times fomented the overthrow of the Vietnamese government thus prolonging that war by 10 years with the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
- How the Times crammed an obscure communist thug into a glorified false narrative and thereby aided the deliverance of Cuba into a long hell of communism.
- How the Times crammed a largely fabricated incident into a false narrative thus fomenting a Middle East wave of the Second Intifada and sparking a devastating jihadist frenzy of Islamic terrorism around the world.
- How the Times crammed largely fabricated information into a false narrative of Weapons of Mass Destruction thus fueling the Iraq war.
- How the Times deployed violations of basic rules of statistics in order to cram returning war veterans into a false narrative of them being murderous, abusive, depressed, and to be feared.
- How the Times launched a program (the "1619 Project") to cram all of American History into a false narrative of being systemically racist--a radical distortion to the degree that the nation didn't fight a civil war to end slavery and wasn't founded to institutionalize a system of liberty-based governance but instead was founded to further the enterprise of slavery. In conformity with Critical Race Theory (CRT) the 1619 Project crams America into the false narrative that America has an inescapable core of inherent racism as it's "DNA".
In this review I'll focus particularly on one of the most egregious episodes of the New York Times journalistic malfeasance. Rindsberg dedicates a fascinating chapter to the New York Times' Walter Duranty travesty. In that chapter Rindsberg gives some much deserved and long neglected attention to the real-life hero who was hidden by Duranty's New York Times travesty. Unlike Duranty, that heroic man was a genuine investigative journalist who ultimately gave his life trying to find and report the Truth of Socialism's promised paradise on earth. His name was Gareth Jones. Because of his efforts Jones was assassinated by Stalin's thugs. To the eternal shame of both the New York Times and the Pulitzer Prize idiots, the heroic courage of Gareth Jones is virtually unknown while one of the most evil journalists in history--who is fully blessed to this day by the New York Times--is still on record as a deserving Pulitzer Prize winner. For an astonishing dramatization revealing Gareth Jones's journalistic heroism there is an outstanding recent movie. If anything can give you a clue about the ethical stature of the current media mob of fake news sewage pumpers, this movie is it. Produced by folks in Poland (ie, the Polish Film Institute and the Ukrainian Film State Agency) who perhaps have a more objective historical purview of what went on under Stalin's Soviet socialist utopia, this English-speaking movie is a devastating portrayal of Jones's heroism in contrast to Duranty and the horrors that Duranty intentionally aided via his false reporting in the New York Times. Don't expect many more movies like "Mr Jones" from the socialist tycoonidiots and celebridiots in Hollywood. Buy the movie here (For USA buyers, make sure you order the Region 1 version playable in the USA):
The DVD of the movie: "Mr. Jones"The catch phrase for the "Mr. Jones" movie is: "The truth can't be hidden forever". As that movie reveals, for minor perks, fame, food pellets, and heroin-soaked prostitute parties in Moscow, Walter Duranty aided the murder of millions of innocent lives in Russia by intentionally lying to the Western World in the service of Stalin's Socialism. Duranty did so knowing fully that he was warping the news to cover up the mass murder of millions of innocent victims. In this context, Rindsberg's book properly situates Duranty's flippant quote that echoed the old French proverb: "But--to put it brutally--you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs...". The movie will concretize for you Duranty's omelette of broken eggs (ie, millions of innocent victims who were so desperate that they resorted to cannibalism--of their own children).
The solid research in this book is so important that the four issues I have with the book are not nearly enough to subtract from my highest rating. First, I would like to have seen the separate cases of major malfeasance presented in a more tightly organized chronological sequence. Second, an index into a work of this importance would be a great enhancement. Third, as other reviews have pointed out, the entire episode of the Times participation in the several years of the Russia Collusion false narrative against Donald Trump (with its accompanying Impeachment travesty) is absent from this edition of the book. This is a significant absence but I nonetheless find that what the book does offer is just so important a beach head of investigative effort that I have to forgive it. Such an earnest effort simply deserves the highest respect given the current reality of socialist-mob cancel culture. Fourth, the book suffers from a bad title that has more meaning for folks in the journalistic community. But a wider audience of intelligent independent thinkers (and voters) needs to understand what is in this book. I suspect that most folks in that wider audience wouldn't know the reference to the "Gray Lady" let alone what it would mean for that lady to "wink". The title sounds more like that of a novel. The book should have been titled something like: "All the News That's Fit to Warp". Given that the journalistic travesties of the New York Times are continuing with toxic gusto (eg, its recent "1619 Project"), I would look forward to a Second/New Edition of this book incorporating suggestions like these.
I think the major theme in "The Gray Lady Winked" is that there are certain juncture points in human history at which the need for the veracity of information is heightened to such a monumental level of importance that the very fulcrum of healthy world-wide human flourishing turns upon it. At those points humanity direly needs good journalism--journalism that courageously rises to the level of that need for truth. What humanity doesn't need at those points is the detestible journalism of petty little charlatans seeking their own notoriety by cramming the world (and themselves) into a false narrative that they've fabricated to sell newspapers. Such schlock journalism is now rightly called "fake news". In a series of grotesque instances, "The Gray Lady Winked" exposes a sufficient record of such schlock journalism as to convict--in the grand court of human history--the New York Times of gross malfeasance.
The scientific evidence is overwhelming: there is no excuse whatsoever for even the slightest tolerance of socialism/Marxism (including its latest stealth repackaging in Postmodernist "Critical Theory"). Socialism is the ultimate false narrative. In all of its communist/fascist variants socialism is--by body count and by incalculable human suffering--the single most toxic thing that the human race has ever encountered. As Rindsberg reveals, at critical juncture points in over a century of human history the New York Times has consistently aided and abetted one or another of those variants of ultimate toxicity.
One of the hallmarks of the kind of healthy culture that elicits human flourishing is a certain tipping point past which there is a sufficiency of thinking skill operating in the populace to enable the principled analysis of mixed packages--packages in the form of ideologies, institutions, and persons which carry good as well as bad elements. Most importantly, that thinking skill enables a valid consensus of identification and the resulting rejection of packages containing a net balance of toxic content. The health of a culture can be assessed on the basis of that sufficiency of thinking skill. The masquerade of such analytical thinking skill--typically exhibited in minds that are stuck in adolescence--is the feel-thinking pathology of narrative cramming. Narrative cramming involves the pounding of square pegs into round holes--always damaging the pegs and the holes. Despite their potential misuse, narratives are esthetic devices with artistic appeal. That appeal is why they are so dangerous as tools of manipulative propaganda.
The best of valid (ie, scientific) thinking operates to fit ideas so that they map the contours of reality. Pathologically invalid thinking attempts to pretend that conjured ideas--in this case, seemingly pleasing fabricated narratives--are so compellingly pleasing that they warrant a forcing of reality to fit the narrative. That Platonistic pathology has metastasized as the most toxic malady in human history. It has yielded an incalculable amount of death and misery--especially as manifest in the form of the narrative cramming that has been tyrannically enforced in some variant of socialism during humanity's most recent century. Now at the very pinnacle of delivering vast benefits to the whole of humanity the best of human culture is plagued with a retro-human resurgence of that narrative cramming malady. Unless that malignant resurgence is met head on and stopped dead in its tracks, humanity will yet again suffer the pendulum swing back to the pounding of humans to fit into false narratives yielding the mass death that tyranny always brings.
So, to wrap up this book review, in his "The Gray Lady Winked" freelance journalist Ashley Rindsberg reveals a stunning body of truth about the New York Times institution that you may not have known about. I didn't, which made the book well worth the price. I highly recommend this book as a long overdue dose of truth about the New York Times which remains a most prominent perpetrator of journalistic malfeasance. It's a breadth and depth of malfeasance which Rindsberg exposes in the naked historical context of the damage it has inflicted on humanity.
Given such narrative cramming warpage of history as the New York Times's recent "1619 Project", their level of recalcitrant evil renders their entire institutional package as irredeemably corrupt. They are not alone as purveyors of such schlock journalism. We are currently immersed in a culture-wide pandemic of it being pumped as fake news by "legacy media" mega-corporations. For a thorough debunking of the New York Times "1619 Project" buy the book "Debunking the 1619 Project" by Mary Grabar on Amazon here: "Debunking the 1619 Project".
At the time of this writing--late 2021--the culture and politics of America have been corrupted by a noisy minority of fanatically extreme socialists. In that context America sorely needs more books like "The Gray Lady Winked". Maybe the raw truth in the book will inspire you to the "red pill" moment that millions of us have now experienced. Then the passion of pro-liberty activism is energized to:
- Join the growing boycott of such fake news sewage pumpers as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, The Atlantic Media, The Guardian, and TMZ.
- Seek more objective alternative sources of news such as The Epoch Times newspaper, EpochTV, NewsMax magazine, NewsMaxTV, One America Network, Right Side Broadcasting Network, Fox News Online (Laura Ingram/Sean Hannity/Tucker Carlson).
- Boycott the corrupt online social media owned by toxic billionaire oligarchs, join in the growing number of petitions protesting against their campaigns of actual government-instigated censorship in toxic combination with massive corruption of elections. Support more healthy alternative online social media services (eg, TruthSocial, Locals, Rumble, Gettr, and Substack). To be better informed on the corruption in Big Tech Fake social media read Senator Josh Hawley's recent book: "The Tyranny of Big Tech".
- And finally going forward in USA elections (2022, 2024), vote MAGA Republican as the most plausible way to remove from power the extremely toxic socialist/communist/fascist Democrats who otherwise will fanatically continue, as petty little charlatans always do, to ride the gravy train of tyranny until their self-perpetuating scam span plays out and kills the host. For more on the fanatic socialist Democrats see here: Swampcreatures
In my Amazon review of "The Gray Lady Winked" I rated the book 5 Stars out of 5.
Here's a short video on "The Gray Lady Winked" featuring the author:
https://www.prageru.com/video/can-you-trust-the-ny-times?
Buy the book on Amazon here:
The paperback book: "The Gray Lady Winked"