Congressman Devin Nunes has filed a defamation lawsuit against Ryan Lizza and Hearst Magazine Media for publishing an allegedly false story about a farm operated by his family. The district court dismissed the suit, but the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has reinstated two of the claims—one related to Lizza’s republishing the story on Twitter and the other about an alleged conspiracy between Lizza and Hearst.
This one should be worth watching.
Hmmmmm.
UPDATE—”[H]e was acting on behalf of specific clients, namely, Tech Executive-1 and the Clinton Campaign.”
Tech-Executive-1?
Too many of the wrong people have been caught up in the Afghanistan fiasco for The Media to quietly go along with the Xiden Administration’s attempts to edit the news. During the long war, reporters who spent time in Afghanistan made friends among the Afghan people. Other reporters have college friends or family members working with NGOs in the country. These personal connections to real people in real distress are The Media them to challenge Xiden’s spin.
Here are a couple of examples.
The Guardian has reported in a significant difference between the American and French governments’ version of the minutes of a phone call between Joe Xiden and French President Macron. A British newspaper is reporting on the French lecturing us on moral behavior.
The White House’s readout of a call between Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron on the crisis in Afghanistan leaves out an impassioned plea from the French president that the US and its allies have a “moral responsibility” to evacuate Afghan allies.
ABC has now published the entire transcript of the Xiden interview conducted by George Stephanopoulos, including about 1,000 words that were edited from the broadcast version. The full version simply makes Xiden look even less prepared to handle the crisis.
People who haven’t been to Room 101 yet tend to be supportive of friends and family, even over the demands of the Inner Party.
YouTiube cited the same alleged reason when they banned my account, and they blew off my appeal as well.
Heh.
It is my firm belief, and I say this as a dictum, that all these tools now at our disposal, these things part of this explosive evolution of means of communication, mean we are now heading for an era of solitude. Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal—be it fax, phone, email, internet or whatever—human solitude will increase in direct proportion.
—Werner Herzog
Bye, bye. Rebekah!
When I checked on Rebekah Jones’ media accounts today—
Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.
Stay tuned.
UPDATE—Her campaign account is gone too.
Reuters reports that the Government of India has issued an ultimatum to Twitter—the platform has one last chance to comply, or face “unintended consequences.”
Everything isn’t with the program yet, but some things are beginning to proceed as I have foreseen.
The Government of Nigeria has suspended Twitter because of “persistent use of the platform for activities that are capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence.”
Perhaps @jack should have checked his spam folder of Nigerian emails.
Facebook has been blocking links to Hogewash! for a bout a year. Recently, they stated that the reason someone could not post a link to Hogewash! was because of spam. I contacted Facebook demanding that they either provide evidence of a connection between this site and spam by close of business Eastern Time yesterday or that they cease and desist from blocking links to Hogewash!.
I received no response from Facebook. However, when one of the Gentle Readers attempted to link to a post yesterday evening, he received this notice—
I am not amused.
Susan Crabtree has an article over at RCP titled Group of Tech Execs Takes On Social Media Censorship. It takes a look at what may be going on behind the scenes in Silicon Valley related to Facebook’s recent uncensoring of discussion about the possibility of a lab leak being the source of the recent pandemic from the point of view of Mike Matthys, a venture capital executive. She also cites Matthys’ criticism of Facebook’s censorship relating to a Wall Street Journal review of a book on climate change, YouTube’s suppression of a video about the efficacy of masks and lockdowns by Gov. DeSantis and physicians from Stanford and Harvard, and an attempt by Reps. Eshoo (D-CA) and McNerney (D-CA) to pressure media companies.
[P]olitically biased censorship only further fuels widespread mistrust in the media writ large – especially when they suddenly reverse course and lift bans on certain narratives that subsequent evidence shows weren’t crackpot ideas at all.
Many of the Titans of Tech have become intoxicated with their success to date. They’ve become legends in their own minds, and that has led them to overreach. Hubris invariably attracts Nemesis.
Hogewash! is very tiny slice of the overall media pie, but it has been the a victim of social media censorship. In 2015, my blog and I were banned from Twitter because truthful reporting was deemed to be targeted harassment. That was very early in Twitter’s campaign to control The Narrative, and the company wound up restoring one of my accounts. However, Twitter has applied some of the lessoned learned dealing with accounts like mine to refine their censorship methods and try to keep them within the Section 230 safe harbor.
About a year ago, I began receiving emails and comments saying that Facebook was not permitting users to post links to Hogewash! because this site violated Facebook’s “community standards.” Given Facebook’s behavior with regard to free speech, I took that as a badge of honor, and late in 2020, I closed my own Facebook account. Last month, I received an email from one of the Gentle Readers with a copy of a notice he received when he tried to link to a post at Hogewash!. This notice gave a more specific reason for banning links to Hogewash!—it claimed this site is a source of spam.
I have asked Facebook to provide me with any evidence they have connecting this site with spam by close of business today.
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.
Andrea Mitchell (B.A., English Lit., Penn., 1967) had a bad day on Twitter yesterday after failing to recognize Macbeth as the original source of a quote. Speaking of Macbeth, here are a few more lines from the play that seem to fit the news of the day—
The Three Witches/Impeachment Managers: Fair is foul, and foul is fair …
Second Witch/Eric: I’ll give thee a wind.
The Three Witches/Impeachment Managers: A deed without a name.
Our revels now are ended …
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.’
Void where prohibited.
You only silence critics when you have something to hide.
—Huma Yusuf
Parler is suing Amazon Web Services alleging violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, breach of contract, and tortuous interference with business. IANAL, but it seems to me that this is exactly the approach that is most likely to be successful against Big Tech. If I read the complaint correctly, Parler is alleging that AWS effectively conspired with Twitter to silence Parler because it would be mutually beneficial for Amazon and Twitter.
Here’s the complaint.
Parler is asking for an injunction requiring AWS to restore their service pending the outcome of the case and for treble damages under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Stay tuned.
I only lost two followers on Twitter overnight.
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.
Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet.
—Abraham Lincoln