“How many times does someone have to lie to you before you call them a liar?” podcaster and independent journalist Tim Pool asks in a recent PragerU video.

Pool goes through several prominent cases of mainstream media outlets misrepresenting major national news stories, and suggests that said organizations do not deserve the blanket trust that some Americans still give them.

He specifically cites the Michael Brown shooting in 2014, where media portrayed Brown as a ‘gentle giant’ who was shot by a racist police after pleading for his life with the famous — and fictitious — line “hands up, don’t shoot!”.

In reality, Brown had just robbed a convenience store and had violently assaulted officer Darren Wilson, punching him and reaching for his gun. A local grand jury and a federal probe by the Justice Department under the Obama administration found that Wilson had justifiably used lethal force in self defense.

“The whole story was manufactured by the media.” Pool observed. “It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.”

Pool outlined other major scandals, such as the big tech suppression of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” during the 2020 election, and the mainstream media’s insistence that it was “Russian disinformation.” In a similar vein, Pool zeroes in on the “Russia Hoax” that dominated the aftermath of the 2016 election.

“The biggest whopper of them all was the Russia Hoax, the entirely made up story that Donald Trump the candidate, then Donald Trump the President of the United States, was a Russian Agent. This dark fantasy preoccupied the legacy media for 3 years.”

Pool notes that most of the reporting on this issue was sourced from opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign that was totally baseless — the New York Times and the Washington Post would both win Pulitzer Prizes for that baseless reporting.

Pool advised listeners to seek out information from across the political spectrum, and to critically evaluate the motives and credibility of their sources.

“If someone or some news source lies over and over again, you may not want to trust them.”

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Almost 12,000 amendments to the U.S. Constitution have been proposed since it first came into force in 1789, but only 27 have been ratified. John Yoo, Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, helps break them down in a new PragerU video.

Yoo described the first 10 as “the most famous amendments,” known as the Bill of Rights, ratified by the 1st Congress in 1791. These amendments restrain the federal government’s power and, among other things, guarantee freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, freedom from unwarranted search and seizures, and the right to a speedy and public trial.

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Another batch of major constitutional reforms would come after the Civil War: the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments would be passed by a Republican-controlled Congress between 1865 and 1870 and are collectively known as the Reconstruction Amendments. The 13th Amendment formally abolished slavery, while the 14th Amendment extended citizenship to former slaves and all other people born on American soil and extended equal protection under the law to all people. The 15th Amendment gave former slaves the right to vote and made it unconstitutional to deny citizens the franchise “on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

Beyond these generally accepted historical groupings, Yoo further subcategorized the others under three broad umbrellas: “Those that expanded the franchise, those that extended the federal government’s power, and those that fixed issues relating to the office of the presidency.”

Yoo groups the 17th, 19th, 23rd, 24th, and 26th Amendments together as expansions of the franchise. The 16th and 18th Amendments gave the federal government expansive new powers, and the 20th, 22nd, and 25th Amendments made various revisions to the election and removal of the president.

Apart from a handful of areas that have been subject to repeated revisions, much of the American Constitution remains in its original form.

“The Constitution has proven to be remarkably durable,” Yoo concluded. “Just as the framers intended.”