When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.
—Edward R. Murrow
This is CNN …
One of the most settled bits of “settled science” is that members of the species homo sapiens who are born with an XY chromosomal pair are male and those born with an XX pair are female.
Ten are dead at the hand of a devout muslim immigrant from Syria who hates Trump and who was radicalized by mainstream media reporting.
The Narrative hardest hit.
Glenn Greenwald has a post up on his Substack account about How Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods. It’s long, but its review of how the Main Stream Media have cooperated in selling false narratives in service of The Narrative is worth the read. Here’s the TL/DR—
But all of this highlights the real crisis in journalism, the reason public faith and trust in media institutions is in free fall. With liberal media outlets deliberately embracing a profit model of speaking overwhelmingly to partisan Democrats who use them as their primary source of news, there is zero cost to publishing false claims about people and groups hated by that liberal audience.
That audience does not care if these media outlets publish false stories as long as it is done for the Greater Good of harming their political enemies, and this ethos has contaminated newsrooms as well. Given human fallibility, reporting errors are normal and inevitable, but when they are all geared toward advancing one political agenda or faction and undermining the other, they cease to be errors and become a deliberate strategy or, at best, systemic recklessness.
But whatever else is true, it is vital to understand what news outlets mean when they claim they have “independently verified” the uncorroborated reports of other similar outlets. It means nothing of consequence. In many if not most cases — enough to make this formulation totally unreliable — it signifies nothing more than their willingness to serve as stenographers for the same anonymous political operatives who fed their competitors similar propaganda.
Yes, the folks play-acting as journalists will keep working as propagandists for The Party until it becomes too costly for them.
Until then,
Нет известия в «Правдa» и нет правда в «Известия».
There is no news [izvestia] in Pravda and no truth [pravda] in Izvestia.
We’re already beginning to see some cracks in the foundation supporting of the current media structure, and two forces are acting to further destabilize the system. First, Orange Man Bad is gone from the news cycle, and the story lines built on railing against Trump no longer have traction. Viewers aren’t tuning in as the did, and the revenue that underpins many of the media operations is shrinking. Layoffs are occurring.
Second, after years in attack mode, they’ve been unable to find good news to report to sell the new Narrative. For example, years of ranting about kids in cages has made it hard to put a positive spin on a sudden surge in minor children being detained at the border. Masks still required after vaccination, no Fourth of July, and renewed bombing in the Middle East are not an easy sell as good news. Reality keeps interfering with The Narrative, and the public is beginning to suspect that the warm fluid on our legs isn’t rain.
Alternatives to the Main Stream Media and Main Stream Social Media are popping up and some are getting traction because the compete with The Narrative rather than colluding with it. There’s a market for news and truth, and I suspect that many of the legacy media companies will be replaced by new organizations.
You can see signs of panic in the calls for censorship that are beginning appear, some from media outlets beginning to sense they are at a disadvantage competing with truthful reporting. Given the level of control The Party has over the House, Senate, White House, and corporate media/social media, the next few years probably will be stressful for the First Amendment.
Stay tuned.
Al Franken has an oped over at The Daily News called Rush Limbaugh’s Real Legacy. It’s basically a complaint that Rush Limbaugh was successful in his career while Franken wasn’t.
I’m so old, I remember when the Left had a significant, often dominant, share of talk radio. That began to change during the Regan era, and Rush Limbaugh’s arrival in national syndication more or less coincident with the Clinton’s arrival in national politics was part of decisively tipping the balance on the AM band toward the Right. Rush was funny, and he was effective.
Part of the Left’s response to Rush was an outfit called Air America which included Al Franken, then a minor-league comedy writer and occasional SNL player, as one of its featured hosts. Air America failed, but Franken used his time in talk radio to increase his clout on the Left. He was able to get to the Senate through what many see as a rigged election, but he failed there too. Meanwhile, Rush consistently held on to tens of millions of listeners to the end of his career.
I’m seeing some folks wonder who can replace Rush. Beats me, but I’m reasonably certain that someone else will come along who is funny and effective and who the Left will love to hate.
Stay tuned.
Journalism is sometimes referred to as the first draft of history. This tweet from Time—
—links to an article that describe a covert operation to interfere in the 2020 election. Of course, Time portrays the whole thing as a white hat operation.
FWIW, here’s another blast from Time‘s past about election integrity—
CNN legal analyst Jennifer Rodgers has said.”You don’t have a First Amendment right to lie.” (HT: The Daily Caller)
CNN hardest hit.
WaPo seems to imply that because the Democrats disagree with Trump’s assessment of the election’s integrity, his speech should not be protected under the First Amendment. You’d think that a media outlet such as WaPo would be an ardent defender of the First Amendment and the American principle that the cure for bad/stupid/wrong speech is more speech exposing errors rather than censorship.
OTOH, WaPo’s preferred politicians are running the show for the moment, so they feel safe—and the other side tends to play by our historic rules of press freedom, so WaPo has never been under any serious threat for the government.
Hmmmmm.
A lot of the stuff in academic publications, the main stream media, main stream social media, and the like sure looks that way to me. But I’m a straight white male, so my opinion is now outside the Overton Window.
‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.
‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’
‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are 81,281,502. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced the arrest of Rachel Rodriguez for election fraud, illegal voting, unlawfully assisting people voting by mail, and unlawfully possessing an official ballot. Those are all felonies in Texas. Rodriguez was caught on video by Project Veritas engaging in ballot harvesting. She admits in the video that what she was doing was illegal and that she could go to jail for it.
BTW, this story broke before noon today, but as of 9:45 pm ET this evening, none of the major nation media are on it.
You only silence critics when you have something to hide.
—Huma Yusuf
A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind.
—Winston Churchill
IMHO, that’s the money quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four. O’Brien says it to Winston Smith during his torture in Room 101.
‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.
‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’
‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’
Given the reporting of the events in DC from all the various sources, each pushing its own narrative, I’m not sure if what I’m seeing in front of my eyes is real. There are so few trustworthy sources.
I suppose I’m not even a slow learner.
One of the presuppositions behind truthful communication in Western Civilization is that the language used will have sufficient commonality among the talkers and listeners that both sides of the conversation will have similar understanding of what is being said. That doesn’t seem to a valid basis for approaching what many on the Left are now saying and writing. They are using old words with new and often contradictory meanings as well as using new, ill-defined terms.
Consider the word sedition. It is defined in law as an act or conspiracy to overthrow the government, to prevent it from acting lawfully, or to unlawfully seize government property. Some on the left are now trying to spin using the courts to prevent the government from acting unlawfully as sedition, using the word exactly opposed to is definition in law. It’s hard to follow an argument that is based in the premise that A and not-A are the same thing, particularly for those of us we still think 2+2=4 or can remember when we weren’t at war with EastAsia.
And then there’s all these new pronouns and categories of oppressed people. I keep losing track. I can’t remember if the Gostak is the oppressed or the oppressor or whether its a good to be the distimor or the distimee. Or whether Doshes have come up at all during 2020.
For now, I’m sticking with Standard American English as my primary language rather than the media’s Newsspeak. I’ve lived in America for 73 years now. If new immigrants don’t have to learn a new language, why should I?
UPDATE—The Gostak and the Doshes
Gentle Reader, I don’t know if your doshes are galloons. YMMV.
The fat lady ain’t singin’ yet, but I can hear her warming up backstage. The odds now highly favor a successful theft of the election by the Democrats. Their candidate will probably be taking the oath of office on 20 January.
However, Democrats have overreached. His Fraudulency Joe Xiden’s “victory” has been, and will continue to be, extremely costly. First, the blatant theft of the election was so throughly bungled that almost a third of all Democrat voter’s believe the count was crooked. There’s simply no way enough of the public will believe in the integrity of future elections without stringent reforms in counting procedures. The coming fight in blue states over electoral reform has the potential to consume much of their political bandwidth.
BTW, the Left’s increasing use of street violence over the past four years was unwise for many reasons, not the least of which is the way it has tried the patience of many in the Center and on the Right. Bluntly, if public order breaks down, there are more veterans in the political Center and on the Right, and history favors the assumption that they wouldn’t allow corrupt thuggery to destroy public order if push comes to shove. However, even the mayor of Portland is trying to put an end to the street thugs, so problem may fade.
In 2020, the Left has also overreached into the day-to-day lives of the American people through unscientific, control-freak regulations allegedly aimed at controlling the Wuhan virus pandemic. Today is the 307th day of the 15-to-45 days that I was told I would not be working on-site in order to deal with the pandemic. I’ve been working remotely, sometimes overtime, and haven’t missed a paycheck. But too many people have been crushed financially for no good reason. Too many have had non-pandemic medical issues complicated by incompetently designed and managed lockdowns. Too many were killed in nursing homes by wrongheaded regulations. Too many people have been kept out of their houses of worship. But now, people are fighting back, and there are too many instance of non-compliance and too many court cases before honest judges for the blue states to maintain their control much longer, especially since law enforcement agencies are now beginning to side with the people rather than the politicians.
Meanwhile, the Republicans have increased their levels of control in state legislatures. They will have the upper hand in redistricting for the House of Representatives, and that will weaken the Democrats’ position going into the 2022 elections.
All is not lost.
That’s not to say that the next couple of years will be easy.
First, The Empire Deep State Strikes Back would be a fitting title for next two years. Much of the Deep State is intact, and it would be foolish to believe that it won’t try to regain as much power and influence as it can. But most of its power can from how deeply it could hide its activity. The last five years have removed much of its cover. People will be watch, and they know many of place to be looking. The smarter members of the Deep State will burrow deeper or move on to other sinecures, but most of them will actively participate in the Xiden/Harris attempt to revitalize the Left’s control of the bureaucracy. I expect there will be lots of clumsy attempts at restoring “order.”
Second, there will be plenty of work required to keep exposing what happens to public view—and to keep people laughing at the Xiden/Harris failures. The Main Stream Media and Main Stream Social Media are now essentially fully integrated with the Left. I believe that it’s time to revitalize the Blogosphere as it existed a decade ago. That will restore a platform for opposition voices, and those opposition voices should be merciless in holding a Xiden/Harris administration to account. And we should do it with humor. Remember Alinsky’s Rule 5: Humor is man’s most potent weapon. The people we’re dealing with take themselves too seriously. They are too self important. They can’t stand to be laughed at, but most the American people still have a sense of humor.
2021 may out-wierd 2020.
Fasten your seat belts and stay tuned.
Headline from the Daily Mail:
When I first started using Twitter eight years ago, it was still a more-or-less open platform where I was able to interact with folks of all sorts of political persuasions, but by 2015, it had evolved into a space much less friendly to conservatives. I was one of the first conservatives permanently banned, allegedly because I was engaged in “targeted abuse” of a leftwing political operative. I was also one of the few to have one of my accounts restored when it turned out the allegations against me were false. Twitter appeared to have learned from that episode and became more careful in the way they describe their reasons for lockouts and bans. By being nebulous about their “Rules” they’ve managed to avoid making provably false statements about punished users, protecting the company from defamation claims.
That changed this year. Twitter is now willing to punish users who publish truthful material and to publicly state a false reason for the punishment. The case of the @nypost account lockdown is but one example. Yes, Twitter has now admitted that the Post‘s story was factual and based on documents that weren’t hacked, but as I write this, the @nypost account is still locked.
Based on what I can see, it looks as if Twitter is afraid of the likely changes in the regulatory and legal environments that could come during a second Trump administration, not just for the leftwing causes the company and many of its employees support, but also for the company’s own power in the marketplace. It’s not that Twitter has nothing to lose. It’s more like they feel they have everything to lose and are willing to sacrifice (the stock price tanked after @jack’s testimony this week) to save a failing business model—and their sense of importance and control. They’re all in.
Meanwhile in the Real World (and the part of the Internet that intersects with it), Twitter’s attempts at suppressing truthful reporting on the Hunter Biden story have backfired.
Barbara Streisand and Brett Kimberlin were unavailable for comment.
UPDATE—Twitter has unlocked the @nypost account without requiring the newspaper to take down it tweets to truthful news stories. Also, institutional investors took an aggregate loss somewhere north of 2 billion dollars over this week’s drop in Twitter’s stock price. The Gentle Reader may remember that I have suggested that the market may provide corrective action for the misbehavior of various social media companies faster than any government.
You only silence critics when you have something to hide.
—Huma Yusuf
When I first checked this poll, Biden was ahead with about 56 %. I checked it again about an hour after the debate ended and found this.
BTW, abc7 dot com is the website for KABC-TV in Los Angeles. That suggests these poll numbers are mostly driven by California voters.
UPDATE— As I was about to hit the PUBLISH button, I checked the poll again. Trump was up to 56 %, and the percentage of vote switchers was up to 6 %.
Hmmmmm.
… I remember when CBS aspired to have a credible news department as part of their operation.
I doubt that either Fred Friendly or Edward R. Murrow would have voted for Donald Trump, but I’m also reasonably certain that neither would have tolerated the sort of shoddy journalism displayed by Leslie Stahl in her recent interview with the President.
For decades, the Left conducted what has been called its march through the institutions to place itself in control. They wish to stay in control, but in 2016 the Deplorables cheated by using the Electoral College to install Donald Trump as President. Trump, in turn, has worked to disrupt the Left’s control. The situation is intolerable. Therefore, the Left has pulled out all the stops and is using every means necessary to defeat Trump in 2020. At times, their naked use of their power to conceal one form of corruption has revealed another, but the Left doesn’t seem to care. Winning really has become the only thing for them.
Victor Davis Hanson has a post over at National Review about the Left’s efforts to retain control.
The progressive project is now hubristic, drunk with power and the belief that it can control an America that does not like it and that in turn it holds in contempt.
But with hubris comes nemesis, as we saw on all fronts last week. Joe Biden, the DNC, the media, Silicon Valley, the identity-politics industry, and the FBI were all shown to be not so much partisan and corrupt as, far more important, inept and ridiculous.
The corrupt can tolerate charges that they are dishonest, because such an accusation implies (they assume) a tacit compliment that they are also cunning and adroit in obtaining such power in the first place to use for such unethical purposes.
One of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is to hold the opponents to their own rules. Another is that ridicule is the most potent weapon. That’s why the Hunter’s Laptop and the Toobin Zoom stories are so important. As VDH notes,
But when they become so brazen that they are exposed as silly and absurd, they begin to fear. The Left doesn’t mind being portrayed as Machiavellian or even perhaps a little Rasputin-like. But they can’t tolerate being revealed as the buffoons they so often are.
If we want to win this November, we Deplorables would be well advised to follow an order given by a 19th-century Democrat, and “Keep up the skeer!” We need to keep confronting the Left with the incompetence of their corruption so that all voters understand the real nature of the choice before them.
The Left has given up on any pretense of fair play for the coming election. They are lying brazenly, and they’re pulled out all the stops on their Internet censorship. The censorship of this morning’s Hunter Biden story from the NY Post by Facebook and Twitter show the Left really has reached the point where they feel they must use any means necessary to defeat Donald Trump.
In order to confirm the censorship was happening, I attempted to post a link to the Biden story on Twitter. I was blocked.
Then, I posted this tweet.
Twitter has suspended the New York Post‘s account and suspended or locked the accounts of several people who tried to link to the Biden article, including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Twitter responded to users’ questions about the blocking and suspensions with tweets from @TwitterSafey containing various excuses, but while I was typing this post, this tweet from@Jack popped up in my timeline—
Twitter may be feeling some heat, but I’m pessimistic about their ultimate response. Based on my personal experience from having been unjustly banned for truthful reporting, I expect that Twitter will do its damnedest to continue its censorship. (I was banned for allegedly harassing Brett Kimberlin. I got the @wjjhoge account back when the false criminal complaint against me dropped for lack of evidence. I suspect that their lawyers figured out that I had an open-and-shut defamation case against them.)
The Left has pushed all their chips out on the table. If Trump wins the election, I expect the Left, including Facebook and Twitter, will go down swinging. Things have gotten ugly; I’m afraid they’re about to get uglier.
“Anonymous sources …” “A source close to …” “Experts say …”
I’m getting tired of fictional rumor mill “news” from the Main Stream Media. At least, the supermarket tabloids used to claim a source for their stories with headlines along the lines of Elvis Says Space Aliens Framed OJ.
Who, what, when, where, why, how and the truth, please.
Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. … I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
—George Orwell