This woman is amazing.
Click through to watch the video:
This is the NY Post reporter who used authentic docs to report on Joe Biden's role in Hunter's business deals in Ukraine and China before the 2020 vote.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 20, 2023
CIA and @NatashaBertrand smeared her with lies that it was "Russian disinformation," then Big Tech censored her reporting. https://t.co/cmUIcGjUxc
I was wondering when this story would hit the big MSM.
CNN had a piece a day or two ago, but besides that, I've seen no coverage at the other major networks and newspapers.
The sleazy, pro-censorship pack of liberal employees of media corporations united last night to attack @mtaibbi -- as they do to any journalist who breaks a real story about real power centers -- and, because they were so desperate to discredit it, showed what they are. Watch: pic.twitter.com/DWEIL70G1h
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 3, 2022
It was, on the surface, a typical example of reporting the news: a journalist obtains internal documents from a major corporation, shedding light on a political dispute that flared in the waning days of the 2020 presidential race. But when it comes to Elon Musk and Twitter, nothing is typical. The so-called Twitter Files, released Friday evening by the independent journalist Matt Taibbi, set off a firestorm among pundits, media ethicists and lawmakers in both parties. It also offered a window into the fractured modern landscape of news, where a story’s reception is often shaped by readers’ assumptions about the motivations of both reporters and subjects. The tempest began when Mr. Musk teased the release of internal documents that he said would reveal the story behind Twitter’s 2020 decision to restrict posts linking to a report in the New York Post about Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son, Hunter. Mr. Musk, who has accused tech companies of censorship, then pointed readers to the account of Mr. Taibbi, an iconoclast journalist who shares some of Mr. Musk’s disdain for the mainstream news media. Published in the form of a lengthy Twitter thread, Mr. Taibbi’s report included images of email exchanges among Twitter officials deliberating how to handle dissemination of the Post story on their platform. Mr. Musk and Mr. Taibbi framed the exchanges as evidence of rank censorship and pernicious influence by liberals. Many others — even some ardent Twitter critics — were less impressed, saying the exchanges merely showed a group of executives earnestly debating how to deal with an unconfirmed news report that was based on information from a stolen laptop. And as with many modern news stories, the Twitter Files were quickly weaponized in service of a dizzying number of pre-existing arguments. The Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who often accuses liberals of stifling speech, made the claim that the “documents show a systemic violation of the First Amendment, the largest example of that in modern history.” House Republicans, who have called for an investigation into the business dealings of Hunter Biden, asserted with no evidence that the report showed systemic collusion between Twitter and aides to Joe Biden, who was then the Democratic nominee. (Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive at the time, later reversed the decision to block the Post story and told Congress it had been a mistake.) Former Twitter executives, who have lamented Mr. Musk’s chaotic stewardship of the company, cited the documents’ release as yet another sign of recklessness. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, said that publicizing unredacted documents — some of which included the names and email addresses of Twitter officials — was “a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do” and placed people “in harm’s way.” (Mr. Musk later said that, in hindsight, “I think we should have excluded some email addresses.”) The central role of Mr. Taibbi, a polarizing figure in journalism circles, set off its own uproar. Once a major voice of the political left, Mr. Taibbi rose to prominence by presenting himself as an unencumbered truth teller. He is perhaps best known for labeling Goldman Sachs a “vampire squid” in an article that galvanized public outrage toward Wall Street. But his commentary about former President Donald J. Trump diverged from the views of many Democrats — for instance, he was skeptical of claims of collusion between Russia and Mr. Trump’s campaign — and his fan base shifted. Skeptics of Mr. Taibbi seized on what appeared to be an orchestrated disclosure. “Imagine volunteering to do online PR work for the world’s richest man on a Friday night, in service of nakedly and cynically right-wing narratives, and then pretending you’re speaking truth to power,” the MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan wrote in a Twitter post. Mr. Taibbi clapped back on Saturday, writing: “Looking forward to going through all the tweets complaining about ‘PR for the richest man on earth,’ and seeing how many of them have run stories for anonymous sources at the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon, White House, etc.” Mr. Musk and Mr. Taibbi did not respond to requests for comment. That Mr. Musk is a fan of Mr. Taibbi, who left Rolling Stone to start a newsletter on Substack, is no big surprise; Mr. Musk often hails the virtues of citizen journalism. On Saturday, in a live audio session on Twitter, Mr. Musk said he was disappointed that more mainstream media outlets had not picked up Mr. Taibbi’s reporting. The New York Times requested copies of the documents from Mr. Musk, but did not receive a response. Mr. Musk said on Saturday that he had also given documents to Bari Weiss, a former editor and columnist at The Times whose Substack newsletter, Common Sense, bills itself as an alternative to traditional news outlets. Ms. Weiss declined to comment on Sunday. The commotion has also generated some odd bedfellows. Mr. Taibbi once compared former President George W. Bush to a “donkey.” On Sunday, his reporting was defended by the House Republican leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy, during an interview on Fox News. “They’re trying to discredit a person for telling the truth,” Mr. McCarthy said of Mr. Musk...
Following-up from last night.
Now the death toll is up to 19 children and 2 teachers murdered in Uvalde, Texas.
The Washington Post is reporting the gunman, Salvador Rolando Ramos, was bullied at school. See, via Memeorandum, "Gunman was bullied as a child, grew increasingly violent, friends say."
And Glenn Greenwald on Tucker's last night:
The funniest thing about this is I engaged this lady on Twitter a while back, not knowing a thing about all the crazy information on her.
The next you know she's appointed as the White House Disinformation Czar, after having a looong record of spreading insane disnfo herself.
Glenn Greenwald has it, "Homeland Security's 'Disinformation Board' is Even More Pernicious Than it Seems":
The power to decree what is "disinformation" now determines what can and cannot be discussed on the internet. It is now in the hands of trained disinformation agents of the U.S. Security State.
The most egregious and blatant official U.S. disinformation campaign in years took place three weeks before the 2020 presidential election. That was when dozens of former intelligence officials purported, in an open letter, to believe that authentic emails regarding Joe Biden's activities in China and Ukraine, reported by The New York Post, were "Russian disinformation.” That quasi-official proclamation enabled liberal corporate media outlets to uncritically mock and then ignore those emails as Kremlin-created fakes, and it pressured Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to censor the reporting at exactly the time Americans were preparing to decide who would be the next U.S. president. The letter from these former intelligence officials was orchestrated by trained career liars — disinformation agents — such as former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Yet that letter was nonetheless crucial to discredit and ultimately suppress the New York Post's incriminating reporting on Biden. It provided a quasi-official imprimatur — something that could be depicted as an authoritative decree — that these authentic emails were, in fact, fraudulent. After all, if all of these noble and heroic intelligence operatives who spent their lives studying Russian disinformation were insisting that the Biden emails had all of the "hallmarks" of Kremlin treachery, who possessed the credibility to dispute their expert assessment? This clip from the media leader in spreading this CIA pre-election lie — CNN — features their national security analyst James Clapper, and it illustrates how vital this pretense of officialdom was in their deceitful disinformation campaign... This same strategic motive — to vest accusations of “disinformation” with the veneer of expertise — is what has fostered a new, very well-financed industry heralding itself as composed of “anti-disinformation" scholars. Knowing that Americans are inculcated from childhood to believe that censorship is nefarious — that it is the hallmark of tyranny — those who wish to censor need to find some ennobling rationale to justify it and disguise what it is. They have thus created a litany of neutral-sounding groups with benign names — The Atlantic Council, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, various "fact-checking” outfits controlled by corporate media outlets — that claim to employ “anti-disinformation experts” to identify and combat fake news. Just as media corporations re-branded their partisan pundits as "fact-checkers" -- to masquerade their opinions as elevated, apolitical, authoritative decrees of expertise -- the term "disinformation expert" is designed to disguise ideological views on behalf of state and corporate power centers as Official Truth... This scam is the critical context for understanding why the Biden Administration casually announced last week the creation of what it is calling a "Disinformation Board” inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). There is no conceivable circumstance in which a domestic law enforcement agency like DHS should be claiming the power to decree truth and falsity. Operatives in the U.S. Security State are not devoted to combatting disinformation. The opposite is true: they are trained, career liars tasked with concocting and spreading disinformation. As Politico's Jack Schafer wrote: Who among us thinks the government should add to its work list the job of determining what is true and what is disinformation? And who thinks the government is capable of telling the truth? Our government produces lies and disinformation at industrial scale and always has. It overclassifies vital information to block its own citizens from becoming any the wiser. It pays thousands of press aides to play hide the salami with facts….Making the federal government the official custodian of truth would be like Brink’s giving a safe-cracker a job driving an armored car. The purpose of Homeland Security agents is to propagandize and deceive, not enlighten and inform. The level of historical ignorance and stupidity required to believe that U.S. Security State operatives are earnestly devoted to exposing and decreeing truth — as CNN's Brian Stelter evidently believes, given that he praised this new government program as “common sense” — is off the charts. As Jameel Jaffer, formerly of the ACLU and now with the Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute put it, most troubling is “the fact that the board is housed at DHS, an especially opaque agency that has run roughshod over civil liberties in the past.” Typically, any attempt to apply George Orwell's warning novel 1984 to U.S. politics is reflexively dismissed as hyperbolic: a free and democratic country like the United States could not possibly fall prey to the dystopian repression Orwell depicts. Yet it is quite difficult to distinguish this “Disinformation Board” from Ingsoc's Ministry of Truth. The protagonist of Orwell's novel, Winston Smith, worked in the Ministry of Truth and described at length how its primary function was to create official versions of truth and falsity, which always adhered to the government's needs of the moment and were subject to radical change as those interests evolved. That the Board will be run by such a preposterous and laughable figure as Nina Jankowicz — a liberal cartoon, a caricature of a #Resistance Twitter fanatic who spent 2016 posting adolescent partisan tripe such as: “Maybe @HillaryClinton's most important point so far: ‘A @realDonaldTrump presidency would embolden ISIS.’ #ImWithHer” — has, in some sense, made this board seem more benign and harmless. After all, how nefarious and dangerous can a board be when it is governed by a person as frivolous and banal as this, calling herself “the Mary Poppins of disinformation”? But just as banality can be a vehicle for evil, it can also be a vehicle for repression and tyrannical control. Jankowicz, reacting with horror to Elon Musk's vow to restore a modicum of free speech to the internet, just last week on NPR touted the virtues of censorship: "I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities ... which are already shouldering ... disproportionate amounts of this abuse," she said. Her just-released book, entitled “How to Be A Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment, and How to Fight Back,” is full of justifications for online censorship. Last year, she condemned me and Fox News host Tucker Carlson as “disgusting” for the crime of criticizing the fabrications of then-New York Times front-page reporter Taylor Lorenz, on the ground that powerful professional women (with the right political ideology) must not be criticized because such accountability results in harassment...
It's neoconservative author and columnist Robert Kagan (who is married to Victory Nuland, part of the "neocon cabal" Glenn Greenwald's been wailing about), at Foreign Affairs, "Can America Learn to Use Its Power?":
For years, analysts have debated whether the United States incited Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interventions in Ukraine and other neighboring countries or whether Moscow’s actions were simply unprovoked aggressions. That conversation has been temporarily muted by the horrors of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A wave of popular outrage has drowned out those who have long argued that the United States has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine, that it is in Russia’s sphere of interest, and that U.S. policies created the feelings of insecurity that have driven Putin to extreme measures. Just as the attack on Pearl Harbor silenced the anti-interventionists and shut down the debate over whether the United States should have entered World War II, Putin’s invasion has suspended the 2022 version of Americans’ endless argument over their purpose in the world. That is unfortunate. Although it is obscene to blame the United States for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading. Just as Pearl Harbor was the consequence of U.S. efforts to blunt Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland, and just as the 9/11 attacks were partly a response to the United States’ dominant presence in the Middle East after the first Gulf War, so Russian decisions have been a response to the expanding post–Cold War hegemony of the United States and its allies in Europe. Putin alone is to blame for his actions, but the invasion of Ukraine is taking place in a historical and geopolitical context in which the United States has played and still plays the principal role, and Americans must grapple with this fact. For critics of American power, the best way for the United States to cope is for it to retrench its position in the world, divest itself of overseas obligations that others ought to handle, and serve, at most, as a distant offshore balancer. These critics would grant China and Russia their own regional spheres of interest in East Asia and Europe and focus the United States’ attention on defending its borders and improving the well-being of Americans. But there is a core of unrealism to this “realist” prescription: it doesn’t reflect the true nature of global power and influence that has characterized most of the post–Cold War era and that still governs the world today. The United States was already the only true global superpower during the Cold War, with its unparalleled wealth and might and its extensive international alliances. The collapse of the Soviet Union only enhanced U.S. global hegemony—and not because Washington eagerly stepped in to fill the vacuum left by Moscow’s weakness. Instead, the collapse expanded U.S. influence because the United States’ combination of power and democratic beliefs made the country attractive to those seeking security, prosperity, freedom, and autonomy. The United States is therefore an imposing obstacle to a Russia seeking to regain its lost influence. What has happened in eastern Europe over the past three decades is a testament to this reality. Washington did not actively aspire to be the region’s dominant power. But in the years after the Cold War, eastern Europe’s newly liberated countries, including Ukraine, turned to the United States and its European allies because they believed that joining the transatlantic community was the key to independence, democracy, and affluence. Eastern Europeans were looking to escape decades—or, in some cases, centuries—of Russian and Soviet imperialism, and allying with Washington at a moment of Russian weakness afforded them a precious chance to succeed. Even if the United States had rejected their pleas to join NATO and other Western institutions, as critics insist it should have, the former Soviet satellites would have continued to resist Moscow’s attempts to corral them back into its sphere of interest, seeking whatever help from the West they could get. And Putin would still have regarded the United States as the main cause of this anti-Russian behavior, simply because the country was strong enough to attract eastern Europeans. Throughout their history, Americans have tended to be unconscious of the daily impact that U.S. power has on the rest of the world, friends and foes alike. They are generally surprised to find themselves the target of resentment and of the kinds of challenges posed by Putin’s Russia and by President Xi Jinping’s China. Americans could reduce the severity of these challenges by wielding U.S. influence more consistently and effectively. They failed to do this in the 1920s and 1930s, allowing aggression by Germany, Italy, and Japan to go unchecked until it resulted in a massively destructive world war. They failed to do so in recent years, allowing Putin to seize more and more land until he invaded all of Ukraine. After Putin’s latest move, Americans may learn the right lesson. But they will still struggle to understand how Washington should act in the world if they don’t examine what happened with Russia, and that requires continuing the debate over the impact of U.S. power. BY POPULAR DEMAND So in what way might the United States have provoked Putin? One thing needs to be clear: it was not by threatening the security of Russia. Since the end of the Cold War, the Russians have objectively enjoyed greater security than at any time in recent memory. Russia was invaded three times over the past two centuries, once by France and twice by Germany. During the Cold War, Soviet forces were perpetually ready to battle U.S. and NATO forces in Europe. Yet since the end of the Cold War, Russia has enjoyed unprecedented security on its western flanks, even as NATO has taken in new members to its east. Moscow even welcomed what was in many ways the most significant addition to the alliance: a reunified Germany. When Germany was reunifying at the end of the Cold War, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev favored anchoring it in NATO. As he told U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, he believed that the best guarantee of Soviet and Russian security was a Germany “contained within European structures.” Late Soviet and early Russian leaders certainly did not act as if they feared an attack from the West. Soviet and Russian defense spending declined sharply in the late 1980s and through the late 1990s, including by 90 percent between 1992 and 1996. The once formidable Red Army was cut nearly in half, leaving it weaker in relative terms than it had been for almost 400 years. Gorbachev even ordered the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Poland and other Warsaw Pact states, chiefly as a cost-saving measure. It was all part of a larger strategy to ease Cold War tensions so that Moscow might concentrate on economic reform at home. But even Gorbachev would not have sought this holiday from geopolitics had he believed that the United States and the West would take advantage of it. His judgment was sensible. The United States and its allies had no interest in the independence of the Soviet republics, as U.S. President George H. W. Bush made clear in his 1991 speech in Kyiv, in which he denounced the “suicidal nationalism” of independence-minded Ukrainians (who would declare independence three weeks later). Indeed, for several years after 1989, U.S. policies aimed first to rescue Gorbachev, then to rescue the Soviet Union, and then to rescue Russian President Boris Yeltsin. During the period of transition from Gorbachev’s Soviet Union to Yeltsin’s Russia—the time of greatest Russian weakness—the Bush administration and then the Clinton administration were reluctant to expand NATO, despite the increasingly urgent appeals of the former Warsaw Pact states. The Clinton administration created the Partnership for Peace, whose vague assurances of solidarity fell well short of a security guarantee for former Warsaw Pact members. It is easy to see why Washington felt no great compulsion to drive NATO eastward. Few Americans at that time saw the organization as a bulwark against Russian expansion, much less as a means of bringing Russia down. From the U.S. perspective, Russia was already a shell of its former self. The question was whether NATO had any mission at all now that the great adversary against which it was aimed had collapsed—and given just how hopeful the 1990s felt to most Americans and western Europeans. It was thought to be a time of convergence, when both China and Russia were moving ineluctably toward liberalism. Geoeconomics had replaced geopolitics, the nation-state was passing away, the world was “flat,” the twenty-first century would be run by the European Union, and Enlightenment ideals were spreading across the planet. For NATO, “out of area or out of business” was the mantra of the day. But as the West enjoyed its fantasies and Russia struggled to adapt to a new world, the nervous populations lying to the east of Germany—the Balts, the Poles, the Romanians, and the Ukrainians—viewed the end of the Cold War as merely the latest phase in their centuries-old struggle. For them, NATO was not obsolete. They saw what the United States and western Europe took for granted—the Article 5 collective security guarantee—as the key to escaping a long, bloody, and oppressive past. Much like the French after World War I, who feared the day when a revived Germany would again threaten them, eastern Europeans believed that Russia would eventually resume its centuries-long habit of imperialism and seek to reclaim its traditional influence over their neighborhood. These states wanted to integrate into the free-market capitalism of their richer, Western neighbors, and membership in NATO and the European Union was to them the only path out of a dismal past and into a safer, more democratic, and more prosperous future. It was hardly surprising, then, that when Gorbachev and then Yeltsin loosened the reins in the early 1990s, practically every current, and soon former, Warsaw Pact member and Soviet republic seized the chance to break from the past and shift their allegiance from Moscow to the transatlantic West. But although this massive change had little to do with U.S. policies, it had much to do with the reality of the United States’ post–Cold War hegemony. Many Americans tend to equate hegemony with imperialism, but the two are different. Imperialism is an active effort by one state to force others into its sphere, whereas hegemony is more a condition than a purpose. A militarily, economically, and culturally powerful country exerts influence on other states by its mere presence, the way a larger body in space affects the behavior of smaller bodies through its gravitational pull. Even if the United States was not aggressively expanding its influence in Europe, and certainly not through its military, the collapse of Soviet power enhanced the attractive pull of the United States and its democratic allies. Their prosperity, their freedom, and, yes, their power to protect former Soviet satellites, when combined with the inability of Moscow to provide any of these, dramatically shifted the balance in Europe in favor of Western liberalism to the detriment of Russian autocracy. The growth of U.S. influence and the spread of liberalism were less a policy objective of the United States than the natural consequence of that shift. Russian leaders could have accommodated themselves to this new reality. Other great powers had adjusted to similar changes. The British had once been lords of the seas, the possessors of a vast global empire, and the center of the financial world. Then they lost it all. But although some were humiliated at being supplanted by the United States, Britons rather quickly adjusted to their new place in the firmament. The French, too, lost a great empire, and Germany and Japan, defeated in war, lost everything except their talent for producing wealth. But they all made the adjustment and were arguably better for it. There were certainly Russians in the 1990s—Yeltsin’s foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, for one—who thought that Russia should make a similar decision. They wished to integrate Russia into the liberal West even at the expense of traditional geopolitical ambitions. But that was not the view that ultimately prevailed in Russia. Unlike the United Kingdom, France, and to some extent Japan, Russia did not have a long history of friendly relations and strategic cooperation with the United States—quite the contrary. Unlike Germany and Japan, Russia was not militarily defeated, occupied, and reformed in the process. And unlike Germany, which always knew that its economic power was irrepressible and that in the post–World War II order it could at least grow prosperous, Russia never really believed it could become a successful economic powerhouse. Its elites thought that the likeliest consequence of integration would be Russia’s demotion to, at best, a second-rank power. Russia would be at peace, and it would still have a chance to prosper. But it would not determine the fate of Europe and the world...
It's Glenn Greenwald on the creepy, vile social media lifestyle reporter Taylor Lorenz and her enablers in the Democrat-leftist "mainstream" media establishment, "Your Top Priority is The Emotional Comfort of the Most Powerful Elites, Which You Fulfill by Never Criticizing Them" Corporate journalists have license to use their huge platforms to malign, expose and destroy anyone they want. Your moral duty: sit in respectful silence and never object."
Glenn Greenwald's warning us not to jump to conclusions about Bucha, the town outside Kyiv where mass atrocities have been committed.
Look, if all the major newspapers are reporting this, and respected sources on the ground are tweeting photos photos of bodies and mass burials, the reports sure look credible to me. The best proof, for me, will be when CNN has reporters on the ground at the scene broadcasting live images. I haven't checked yet, but will after I get this posted.
At the Los Angeles Times, "LVIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian forces braced for an intensified Russian onslaught against the eastern Donbas region Sunday as officials from Ukraine, the U.S. and other countries condemned Moscow over allegations of civilian executions":
A gruesome cleanup was underway in the northern suburbs of Kyiv, the capital, following the withdrawal of Russian troops. Ukrainian soldiers were removing bodies from streets, homes and other sites in the towns of Bucha and Irpin, which had been recently occupied by Russian forces. “Bucha massacre proves that Russian hatred towards Ukrainians is beyond anything Europe has seen since WWII,” Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, wrote on Twitter. “The only way to stop this: help Ukraine kick Russians out as soon as possible. Partners know our needs. Tanks, combat aircraft, heavy air defense systems.” Ukrainian officials accused Russia of large-scale killings of civilians, alleging that some of the victims’ bodies in Bucha had been found with their hands tied. Russia has reportedly denied the allegations. “Kyiv region. 21st century Hell,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to the Ukrainian president, tweeted on Sunday alongside photos of bodies on the streets. “This was purposely done. ... Stop the murders!” The head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, called for an investigation into the alleged atrocities: “Appalled by reports of unspeakable horrors in areas from which Russia is withdrawing,” she wrote on Twitter. “An independent investigation is urgently needed. Perpetrators of war crimes will be held accountable.” Authorities in the battered outskirts of Kyiv were also clearing mines, unexploded ordnance, destroyed Russian armored vehicles and other rubble. Civilians in those suburbs had for weeks been trapped between Russian bombardments and Ukrainian forces trying to protect the capital. That toll was becoming increasing evident as retreating Russian soldiers — plagued by logistical and morale problems — left a landscape of ruin. Every day we collect the bodies of our residents from the streets,” Oleksandr Markushyn, the mayor of Irpin, told local media, adding that at least 200 civilians had been killed in Irpin. “Under the rubble there are also the bodies of the dead.” Meantime, several booming explosions broke the pre-dawn calm in the strategic southern port city Odesa, which had been quiet in recent weeks. Targeted were an oil-processing plant and fuel depots, according to a statement from the Russian military, which said missiles were fired at Odesa from ships and aircraft. There were no casualties, the mayor of Odesa said. Images showed a huge plume of black smoke arising in the aftermath of the attacks. The Odesa attacks continued a pattern of Russian missile strikes on fuel depots and defense infrastructure facilities throughout Ukraine. On Saturday, Russian missiles destroyed a refinery and surrounding fuel facilities in the central city of Kremenchuk, authorities said. The war, which began with a Russian thrust into Ukraine on Feb. 24, has left thousands dead, forced almost one-quarter of Ukraine’s population of 44 million from their homes and created a broad swath of destruction across the nation. Despite the widespread ruin and death, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky noted that the country’s forces continue to regain control of various areas — including the outskirts of Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv — that were previously occupied by Russian forces...
It's like these cats were put in deep-freeze since the surge in Iraq. And now? A go-to resource on the "Russian Campaign Offensive."
If there are "neocons" pushing for war in Ukraine, it would be these people. Yet besides daily updates on the Russia's campaign --- which are being cited by the New York Times, of all outlets --- there's been no Kaganite pro-war media blitz to plant U.S. forces in Lviv.
Nope, now Glenn Greenwald's warning against the "Bush/Cheney" cabal reincarnated in --- David Frum? Okay. *Shrugs.*
In any event, from ISW:
NEW: Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial #Russian campaign of this war. Its culmination is creating conditions of stalemate throughout most of #Ukraine.
— ISW (@TheStudyofWar) March 19, 2022
Read the latest Russian offensive campaign assessment from @TheStudyofWar and @criticalthreats: https://t.co/EtMCrMbAjO pic.twitter.com/4XrCCj5Gnj
Following up from last week, "Victoria Nuland, Biden's Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Claims Ukraine Has 'Biological Research Facilities' (VIDEO)."
Here's Glenn Greenwald on Tucker's:
These people are bloodthirsty.
Indiscriminate too, as Joe Rogan's really not a conservative.From Glenn Greenwald, "The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship":
The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorshiphttps://t.co/SAMtK31UY8
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 29, 2022
American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by "liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party). For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of "hate speech” to mean "views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech." Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship. Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful. When liberals’ favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC to The New York Times and The Atlantic, spend four years disseminating one fabricated Russia story after the next — from the Kremlin hacking into Vermont's heating system and Putin's sexual blackmail over Trump to bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the Biden email archive being "Russian disinformation,” and a magical mystery weapon that injures American brains with cricket noises — none of that is "disinformation” that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVID's origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assange stole classified documents and caused people to die. Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation, and, because of that, do so routinely. This "disinformation" term is reserved for those who question liberal pieties, not for those devoted to affirming them. That is the real functional definition of “disinformation” and of its little cousin, “misinformation.” It is not possible to disagree with liberals or see the world differently than they see it. The only two choices are unthinking submission to their dogma or acting as an agent of "disinformation.” Dissent does not exist to them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous — to the point that it cannot be heard. The data proving a deeply radical authoritarian strain in Trump-era Democratic Party politics is ample and have been extensively reported here. Democrats overwhelmingly trust and love the FBI and CIA. Polls show they overwhelmingly favor censorship of the internet not only by Big Tech oligarchs but also by the state. Leading Democratic Party politicians have repeatedly subpoenaed social media executives and explicitly threatened them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not censor more aggressively — a likely violation of the First Amendment given decades of case law ruling that state officials are barred from coercing private actors to censor for them, in ways the Constitution prohibits them from doing directly. Democratic officials have used the pretexts of COVID, “the insurrection," and Russia to justify their censorship demands. Both Joe Biden and his Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, have "urged” Silicon Valley to censor more when asked about Joe Rogan and others who air what they call “disinformation” about COVID. They cheered the use of pro-prosecutor tactics against Michael Flynn and other Russiagate targets; made a hero out of the Capitol Hill Police officer who shot and killed the unarmed Ashli Babbitt; voted for an additional $2 billion to expand the functions of the Capitol Police; have demanded and obtained lengthy prison sentences and solitary confinement even for non-violent 1/6 defendants; and even seek to import the War on Terror onto domestic soil. Given the climate prevailing in the American liberal faction, this authoritarianism is anything but surprising. For those who convince themselves that they are not battling mere political opponents with a different ideology but a fascist movement led by a Hitler-like figure bent on imposing totalitarianism — a core, defining belief of modern-day Democratic Party politics — it is virtually inevitable that they will embrace authoritarianism. When a political movement is subsumed by fear — the Orange Hitler will put you in camps and end democracy if he wins again — then it is not only expected but even rational to embrace authoritarian tactics including censorship to stave off this existential threat. Fear always breeds authoritarianism, which is why manipulating and stimulating that human instinct is the favorite tactic of political demagogues...
Glenn Greenwald:
The primary use of COVID discourse for liberal pundits is to be able to scream more loudly than usual their primary view -- Republicans are primitive, stupid troglodytes -- all while ignoring the actual demographics of who is vaccine hesitant, because those facts ruin their fun: https://t.co/bk1ObEMmh9
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 30, 2021
Glenn Greenwald posted an awesome thread on this yesterday: "The White House is admitting that they're compiling lists of people who they claim are posting content they regard as "problematic" and that constitute "misinformation" and are demanding Facebook remove them. This is authoritarianism."
And from yesterday's All-Star Panel with Bret Baier, at Fox News. An excellent segment, especially Ben Dominech and Kim Strassel:
This blows my mind.
My tweets are set to private, but in response to Steven Perlberg's tweet, linking his Business Insider piece (which is behind a paywall, of course), I quote-tweeted:
.@MelissaTweets Elizabeth Bruenig's a freakin' self-declared communist? Did she take the 100 percent boost in pay? Or did she decline on principle? Can't say, because the article's behind a paywall, hence, capitalism. I can't even. *Man facepalming.*
Now, while you probably can't read the article to which Perlberg is linking, it turns out Mediaite did read it, and they've written up a piece that reveals the mind-blowing information. See, "Substack Offered NYT Reporter Taylor Lorenz $300,000: Report."
Now that's why I yelled holy crap! when I saw that headline. You may not recall, but Ms. Lorenz is a very bad terrible person, and Tucker Carlson called her out a few weeks back, and it was glorious. But I knew how bad and terrible a person she was long ago, because, for one reason, she's been an awful no-good person for a long time, and Robert Stacy McCain wrote about her years ago, after Ms. Lorenz doxxed Pamela "Atlas Shrugged" Geller's daughters. You can't make this stuff up. (And Ms. Lorenz has of late been accused of stalking teenagers for inside interviews without the kids' parents permission, she's that bad.)
But no! She's getting offered a $300,000 advance to quite the Old Gray Lady and start her own newsletter? Well, I guess you gotta love free-market competition, which is why the New York Times is so freaked and has basically declared all-out war on the newsletter hosting platform, and this Sulzberger fellow, the publisher (or at least he used to be), is putting up some big bucks to go after top talent (some at Substack!) and have his own "by-line" bigwig writers up their game to meet the challenges of the day. Hoo boy, this is interesting.
At NYT, "Why We’re Freaking Out About Substack":
Danny Lavery had just agreed to a two-year, $430,000 contract with the newsletter platform Substack when I met him for coffee last week in Brooklyn, and he was deciding what to do with the money. “I think the thing that I’m the most looking forward to about this is to start a retirement account,” said Mr. Lavery, who founded the feminist humor blog The Toast and will be giving up an advice column in Slate. Mr. Lavery already has about 1,800 paying subscribers to his Substack newsletter, The Shatner Chatner, whose most popular piece is written from the perspective of a goose. Annual subscriptions cost $50. The contract is structured a bit like a book advance: Substack’s bet is that it will make back its money by taking most of Mr. Lavery’s subscription income for those two years. The deal now means Mr. Lavery’s household has two Substack incomes. His wife, Grace Lavery, an associate English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who edits the Transgender Studies Quarterly, had already signed on for a $125,000 advance. Along with the revenue the Laverys will bring in, the move is good media politics for the company. Substack has been facing a mutiny from a group of writers who objected to sharing the platform with people who they said were anti-transgender, including a writer who made fun of people’s appearances on a dating app. Signing up two high-profile transgender writers was a signal that Substack was trying to remain a platform for people who sometimes hate one another, and who sometimes, like Dr. Lavery, heatedly criticize the company. Feuds among and about Substack writers were a major category of media drama during the pandemic winter — a lot of drama for a company that mostly just makes it easy to email large groups for free. For those who want to charge subscribers on their email list, Substack takes a 10 percent fee. “The mindshare Substack has in media right now is insane,” said Casey Newton, who left The Verge to start a newsletter on Substack called Platformer. Substack, he said, has become a target for “a lot of people to project their anxieties.” Substack has captivated an anxious industry because it embodies larger forces and contradictions. For one, the new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers, even as journalists turn increasingly to labor unions to level out pay scales. This new direct-to-consumer media also means that battles over the boundaries of acceptable views and the ensuing arguments about “cancel culture” — for instance, in New York Magazine’s firing of Andrew Sullivan — are no longer the kind of devastating career blows they once were. (Only Twitter retains that power.) Big media cancellation is often an offramp to a bigger income. Though Substack paid advances to a few dozen writers, most are simply making money from readers. That includes most of the top figures on the platform, who make seven-figure sums from more than 10,000 paying subscribers — among them Mr. Sullivan, the liberal historian Heather Cox Richardson, and the confrontational libertarian Glenn Greenwald. This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn’t just transforming journalism. It’s also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it’s marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels. And Silicon Valley investors, eager to disrupt and angry at their portrayal in big media, have been gleefully backing it. Substack embodies this cultural shift, but it’s riding the wave, not creating it. And despite a handful of departures over politics, that wave is growing for Substack. The writers moving there full time in recent days include not just Mr. Lavery, but also the former Yahoo News White House correspondent Hunter Walker, the legal writer David Lat and the columnist Heather Havrilesky, who told me she will be taking Ask Polly from New York Magazine to “regain some of the indie spirit and sense of freedom that drew me to want to write online in the first place.” (Speaking of that spirit: Bustle Digital Group confirmed to me that it’s reviving the legendary blog Gawker under a former Gawker writer, Leah Finnegan.) And a New York Times opinion writer, Charlie Warzel, is departing to start a publication on Substack called Galaxy Brain. (Substack has courted a number of Times writers. I turned down an offer of an advance well above my Times salary, in part because of the editing and the platform The Times gives me, and in part because I didn’t think I’d make it back — media types often overvalue media writers.) The Times wouldn’t comment on his move, but is among the media companies trying to develop its own answer to Substack and recently brought the columnist Paul Krugman’s free Substack newsletter to the Times platform. And newsrooms can offer all sorts of support that solo writers don’t get. Jessica Lessin, the founder and editor in chief of The Information, a newsletter-centric Silicon Valley subscription publication, said part of its edge was “sophisticated marketing around acquiring and retaining subscribers.” Substack’s thesis is, in part, that media companies underpay their most prominent writers. So far, that seems to be bearing out. Mr. Warzel isn’t taking an advance, and many of the writers who took advances now regret doing so: They would have made more money by simply collecting subscription revenue, and paying Substack 10 percent, than making the more complex deals with money up front. The former Vox writer Matthew Yglesias calculated that taking the advance wound up costing him nearly $400,000 in subscription revenue paid to Substack. The writer Roxane Gay told me she earned back her advance within two months of starting The Audacity ($60 a year) with an audience of 36,000, about 20 percent of them paying. She also wrestles with what she sees as Substack “trying to have it both ways” as a neutral platform and a publisher that supports writers she finds “odious,” she said, but has concluded that her dislike of someone’s work is “not enough for them to not be allowed on the platform.” Isaac Saul, who told me his nonpartisan political newsletter Tangle brought in $190,000 in its first year, wrote recently that he came to Substack “specifically to avoid being associated with anyone else” after being frustrated by readers’ assumptions about his biases when he worked for HuffPost...
A great piece, from the fearless Gleen Greenwald, at his Substack page:
The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record. One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed. The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she twice publicly lied about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing). She also often uses her large, powerful public platform to malign private citizens without any power or public standing by accusing them of harboring bad beliefs and/or associating with others who do. (She is currently being sued by a citizen named Arya Toufanian, who claims Lorenz has used her private Twitter account to destroy her reputation and business, particularly with a tweet that Lorenz kept pinned at the top of her Twitter page for eight months, while several other non-public figures complain that Lorenz has “reported” on their non-public activities). It is to be expected that a New York Times journalist who gets caught lying as she did against Andreessen and trying to destroy the reputations of non-public figures will be a topic of conversation. The third reason this New York Times reporter is receiving attention is because she has become a leading advocate and symbol for a toxic tactic now frequently used by wealthy and influential public figures (like her) to delegitimize criticisms and even render off-limits any attempt to hold them accountable. Specifically, she and her media allies constantly conflate criticisms of people like them with “harassment,” “abuse” and even “violence.” That is what Lorenz did on Tuesday when she co-opted International Women’s Day to announce that “it is not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I have had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life.” She began her story by proclaiming: “For international women’s day please consider supporting women enduring online harassment.” She finished it with this: “No one should have to go through this.” Notably, there was no mention, by her or her many media defenders, of the lives she has harmed or otherwise deleteriously affected with her massive journalistic platform. That is deliberate. Under this formulation, if you criticize the ways Lorenz uses her very influential media perch — including by pointing out that she probably should stop fabricating accusations against people and monitoring the private acts of non-public people — then you are guilty of harassing a “young woman” and inflicting emotional pain and violence on her (it’s quite a bizarre dynamic, best left to psychologists, how her supporters insist on infantilizing this fully grown, close-to-middle-aged successful journalist by talking about her as if she’s a fragile high school junior; it’s particularly creepy when her good male Allies speak of her this way). This is worth focusing on precisely because it is now so common among the nation’s political and media elite. By no means is this tactic unique to Lorenz. She did not pioneer it. She is just latching onto it, exploiting it, in order to immunize herself from criticisms of her destructive journalistic misconduct and to depict her critics as violent harassers and abusers. With this framework implanted, there is no way to express criticisms of Taylor Lorenz’s work and the use and abuse of her journalistic platform without standing widely accused of maliciously inciting a mob of violent misogynists to ruin her life — that’s quite a potent shield from accountability for someone this influential in public life. But this is now a commonplace tactic among the society’s richest, most powerful and most influential public figures. The advent of the internet has empowered the riff-raff, the peasants, the unlicensed and the uncredentialed — those who in the past were blissfully silent and invisible — to be heard, often with irreverence and even contempt for those who wield the greatest societal privileges, such as a star New York Times reporter. By recasting themselves as oppressed, abused and powerless rather than what they are (powerful oppressors who sometimes abuse their power), elite political and media luminaries seek to completely reverse the dynamic. During Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign, one of the most common tactics used by her political and media supporters was to cast criticisms of her (largely from supporters of Bernie Sanders) not as ideological or political but as misogynistic, thus converting one of the world’s richest and most powerful political figures into some kind of a victim, exactly when she was seeking to obtain for herself the planet’s most powerful political office. There was no way to criticize Hillary Clinton — there still is not — without being branded a misogynist. A very similar tactic was used four years later to vilify anyone criticizing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — also one of the world’s richest and most powerful figures — as she sought the power of the Oval Office...
Still more.
And at Hot Air, "Glenn Greenwald’s Insightful Take on the Taylor Lorenz Situation."
You don't say?
And this is Matthew Yglesias, someone who blocked me on Twitter back in the day. I obviously don't care for the guy, but, as it's happening a lot these days, he's been on the wrong end of leftist "cancel culture." See Fox News's report, "Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias quits, cites 'inherent tension' and desire to be 'independent' voice: Yglesias follows Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss, and Andrew Sullivan in exodus of journalists from prominent news outlets."
Yglesias is up at WaPo with an op-ed, here, "Not all ‘anti-racist’ ideas are good ones. The left isn’t being honest about this: On some topics, progressives prefer pointing out right-wing hypocrisy to debating substance":The same Republicans championing free speech and deploring “cancel culture” are trying to pass laws criminalizing protests, bar classroom discussions of the New York Times’ 1619 Project on slavery and penalize people who advocate boycotts to oppose Israeli settlements. Combine that with the idea that we’ve got more important issues to deal with, from the pandemic to the Jan. 6 insurrection, and many progressives think they don’t have to engage with the argument that the left is too conformist and dogmatic on certain topics involving race. They don’t want to hear about the San Francisco Board of Education stripping Abraham Lincoln’s name from a high school, or Oregon teacher-training materials claiming that asking math students to “show their work” reinforces white supremacy. “One of America’s major parties has turned against democracy,” Vox’s Zack Beauchamp tweeted Feb. 9, after a Times a reporter who had used the n-word in a discussion with students about racism was compelled to resign, “and we’re talking about . . . the Times’ staffing decisions?” But it would be a significant mistake for mainstream progressives to duck the substance of these controversies. After all, it is progressives who in recent years have attempted to increase the stigma attached to racist speech while also expanding the scope of what’s “racist.” That double move introduces complications into discussions of racism that should invite more argumentation, not less. In educated liberal circles these days, everyone knows that racism is not just a question of individual prejudice or hatred. The conversations are about “structural” or “systemic” racism — impersonal properties of systems, embedded in processes. Certainly it’s true that race and racism have shaped many legal, political and social institutions, since America’s earliest days. But when you make the scope of racism so expansive, that necessarily means pushing the conversations into contestable terrain. The shift from dismantling monuments to the Confederacy to erasing homages to Lincoln, for example, raises important questions about how to balance the praiseworthy and lamentable aspects of political figures. (The school board noted that during Lincoln’s presidency, the military hanged 38 rebellious Native Americans in Minnesota.) But whether to cancel Lincoln is — for most people — a fairly easy case. Consider a more challenging one, involving land use restrictions in American cities. Having studied the issue, I believe that excessively strict regulations embody structural racism in housing: Such rules price low-income people, who are disproportionately Black and Brown, out of many areas. To me, it’s clear that the sensible (and progressive) course of action is to allow denser construction in the most expensive neighborhoods; increasing housing supply will have ripple effects that reduce housing prices for everyone. But I’m also aware that many people sincerely believe that allowing real estate development fuels gentrification and displacement — and that the key to racial justice is even more stringent regulations. Nothing is gained if the different parties in this debate call each other racists or invoke the specter of “white supremacy” to discredit their opponents. The affordable-housing question requires dispassionate analysis, not the censoriousness and scolding that might be appropriate for combating expressions of traditional prejudice, such as redlining. Yet many commentators urge a more fiery approach. Ibram Kendi, author of the bestseller “How to Be an Antiracist,” argues for an extremely expansive concept of racism that pushes the boundaries of structural analysis to the limits. According to Kendi, any racial gap simply is racist by definition; any policy that maintains such a gap is a racist policy; and — most debatably — any intellectual explanation of its existence (sociological, cultural, and so on) is also racist. He has famously argued that anything that is not anti-racist is perforce racist. This reaches its most radical form in Kendi’s conflation of measurements of problems with the problems themselves. In his book — ubiquitous in educational circles — he denounces not the existence of a large Black-White gap in school performance but any discussion of such a gap. Kendi writes that “we degrade Black minds every time we speak of an ‘academic-achievement gap’ ” based on standardized test scores and grades. Instead, he asks: “What if the intellect of a low-testing Black child in a poor Black school is different from — and not inferior to — the intellect of a high-testing White child in a rich White school? What if we measured intelligence by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environments?” We certainly could do that. But the fact remains that if African American children continue to be less likely to learn to read and write and do math than White children, and less likely to graduate from high school, then this will contribute to other unequal outcomes down the road. Education is not a cure-all for labor market discrimination, and educational disparities don’t fully account for the Black-White earnings gap. But they partially account for that gap while also leaving people less able to organize politically, protect themselves from financial scams and otherwise navigate the modern world. Stigmatizing the use of test scores and grades to measure learning undermines policymakers’ ability to make the case for reforms to promote equity — from providing air conditioning in schools to combating racially biased low expectations among teachers...
I disagree with most of this piece (Yglesias is much too soft on his fellow leftists), but he's got a point about the toxicity of Ibram X. Kendi, which is something I'm dealing with at my college, and which Tucker Carlson has been hammering in recent segments as "the most destructive ideology" of our lifetimes.
It's bad. Very bad. And as hard as it is, I sure hope more and more parents yank their kids out of public schools. That will help, but then there's the universities families have to consider. Professor William Jacobson created a new website to track racial indoctrination on campuses all across the country, and with luck, the word will get out, and spread farther, and more and more families will vote with their dollars, and they'll ultimately abandon all the "woke" education B.S., turning instead, one hopes, to decent, family-values oriented educational institutions.
Again, this is not easy to do, especially for families who're not wealthy, but if enough families indeed choose alternative educational paths for their kids, sooner or later the "woke" totalitarians will get what's coming to them --- ultimate repudiation and banishment from polite society.
It's Glenn Greenwald, one of the only online personalities, of any stripe, who gets what's going on.
On Substack:
Insisting on factual accuracy does not make one an apologist for the protesters. False reporting is never justified, especially to inflate threat and fear levels. What took place at the Capitol on January 6 was undoubtedly a politically motivated riot. As such, it should not be controversial to regard it as a dangerous episode. Any time force or violence is introduced into what ought to be the peaceful resolution of political conflicts, it should be lamented and condemned. But none of that justifies lying about what happened that day, especially by the news media. Condemning that riot does not allow, let alone require, echoing false claims in order to render the event more menacing and serious than it actually was. There is no circumstance or motive that justifies the dissemination of false claims by journalists. The more consequential the event, the less justified, and more harmful, serial journalistic falsehoods are. Yet this is exactly what has happened, and continues to happen, since that riot almost seven weeks ago. And anyone who tries to correct these falsehoods is instantly attacked with the cynical accusation that if you want only truthful reporting about what happened, then you’re trying to “minimize” what happened and are likely an apologist for if not a full-fledged supporter of the protesters themselves. One of the most significant of these falsehoods was the tale — endorsed over and over without any caveats by the media for more than a month — that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by the pro-Trump mob when they beat him to death with a fire extinguisher. That claim was first published by The New York Times on January 8 in an article headlined “Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage.” It cited “two [anonymous] law enforcement officials” to claim that Sicknick died “with the mob rampaging through the halls of Congress” and after he “was struck with a fire extinguisher.” A second New York Times article from later that day — bearing the more dramatic headline: “He Dreamed of Being a Police Officer, Then Was Killed by a Pro-Trump Mob” — elaborated on that story... After publication of these two articles, this horrifying story about a pro-Trump mob beating a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher was repeated over and over, by multiple journalists on television, in print, and on social media. It became arguably the single most-emphasized and known story of this event, and understandably so — it was a savage and barbaric act that resulted in the harrowing killing by a pro-Trump mob of a young Capitol police officer. It took on such importance for a clear reason: Sicknick’s death was the only example the media had of the pro-Trump mob deliberately killing anyone. In a January 11 article detailing the five people who died on the day of the Capitol protest, the New York Times again told the Sicknick story: “Law enforcement officials said he had been ‘physically engaging with protesters’ and was struck in the head with a fire extinguisher.” But none of the other four deaths were at the hands of the protesters: the only other person killed with deliberate violence was a pro-Trump protester, Ashil Babbitt, unarmed when shot in the neck by a police officer at close range. The other three deaths were all pro-Trump protesters: Kevin Greeson, who died of a heart attack outside the Capitol; Benjamin Philips, 50, “the founder of a pro-Trump website called Trumparoo,” who died of a stroke that day; and Rosanne Boyland, a fanatical Trump supporter whom the Times says was inadvertently “killed in a crush of fellow rioters during their attempt to fight through a police line.” This is why the fire extinguisher story became so vital to those intent on depicting these events in the most violent and menacing light possible. Without Sicknick having his skull bashed in with a fire extinguisher, there were no deaths that day that could be attributed to deliberate violence by pro-Trump protesters. Three weeks later, The Washington Post said dozens of officers (a total of 140) had various degrees of injuries, but none reported as life-threatening, and at least two police officers committed suicide after the riot. So Sicknick was the only person killed who was not a pro-Trump protester, and the only one deliberately killed by the mob itself. It is hard to overstate how pervasive this fire extinguisher story became...
Still more.
Following-up, "A Domestic Terrorism Law Is Debated Anew After Capitol Riot."
I'm not a huge fan of Glenn Greenwald's, particularly in light of his shady operations in years past.
I'll swear though, he's probably the most prescient thinker who gets significant media coverage, if only on Tucker Carlson's show. Whatever the case, he's worth a listen.
If you're familiar with Glenn Greenwald, he's not necessarily a sympathetic character. But he's been out here for a long time, and for good or bad (sometimes very bad, considering his views on Israel, his collaborations with Julian Assange, etc.), he's consistent. I think for that, in a time like this, folks who normally would ignore him are ready to listen.
I mean, he's now a regular on Fox News, if you can imagine that.
With all that said, he's not wrong on this, and it's frightening.
He's on Substack here, "Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath":
One is that striking at cherished national symbols — the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the Capitol — ensures rage and terror far beyond body counts or other concrete harms. That is one major reason that yesterday’s event received far more attention and commentary, and will likely produce far greater consequences, than much deadlier incidents, such as the still-motive-unknown 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 59 or the 2016 Orlando shooting that left 49 dead at the Pulse nightclub. Unlike even horrific indiscriminate shooting sprees, an attack on a symbol of national power will be perceived as an attack on the state or even the society itself. There are other, more important historical lessons to draw not only from the 9/11 attack but subsequent terrorism on U.S. soil. One is the importance of resisting the coercive framework that demands everyone choose one of two extremes: that the incident is either (a) insignificant or even justifiable, or (b) is an earth-shattering, radically transformative event that demands radical, transformative state responses. This reductive, binary framework is anti-intellectual and dangerous. One can condemn a particular act while resisting the attempt to inflate the dangers it poses. One can acknowledge the very real existence of a threat while also warning of the harms, often far greater, from proposed solutions. One can reject maximalist, inflammatory rhetoric about an attack (a War of Civilizations, an attempted coup, an insurrection, sedition) without being fairly accused of indifference toward or sympathy for the attackers. Indeed, the primary focus of the first decade of my journalism was the U.S. War on Terror — in particular, the relentless erosions of civil liberties and the endless militarization of American society in the name of waging it. To make the case that those trends should be opposed, I frequently argued that the threat posed by Islamic radicalism to U.S. citizens was being deliberately exaggerated, inflated and melodramatized. I argued that not because I believed the threat was nonexistent or trivial: I lived in New York City on 9/11 and remember to this day the excruciating horror from the smell and smoke emanating throughout Lower Manhattan and the haunting “missing” posters appended by desperate families, unwilling to accept the obvious reality of their loved ones’ deaths, to every lamp post on every street corner. I shared the same disgust and sadness as most other Americans from the Pulse massacre, the subway bombings in London and Madrid, the workplace mass shooting in San Bernardino. My insistence that we look at the other side of the ledger — the costs and dangers not only from such attacks but also the “solutions” implemented in the name of the stopping them — did not come from indifference towards those deaths or a naive views of those responsible for them. It was instead driven by my simultaneous recognition of the dangers from rights-eroding, authoritarian reactions imposed by the state, particularly in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event. One need not engage in denialism or minimization of a threat to rationally resist fear-driven fanaticism — as Barbara Lee so eloquently insisted on September 14, 2001...
Lots more at that top link.
It's Anna Wiener (whoever that is), at the New Yorker, "The newsletter service is a software company that, by mimicking some of the functions of newsrooms, has made itself difficult to categorize."
Establishment media outlets fear Substack, so they're out to destroy it. Big Media doesn't want you to read folks like Glenn Greenwald, a leftist who on Israel I can't stand, but who is amazingly good on a lot of other current stuff. See his great piece this week, "The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing to Do With Trump."
Or, Andrew Sullivan, also someone who's got a really sketchy and devious political pedigree, but has lately been on fire, "Do All Black Lives Matter? Or Just Some?"
And Matt Taibbai, "The YouTube Ban Is Un-American, Wrong, and Will Backfire: Silicon Valley couldn't have designed a better way to further radicalize Trump voters."
All of these guys are leftists, which tells you something, as they've been excommunicated form the leftist media precincts (especially Greenwald and Sullivan).
