“If they keep this up, liberals and conservatives may start talking for real, and maybe even fix a thing or two.“. Well said Matt. I’m of a conservative bent; and I love reading what you have to say. I know we would absolutely not agree on a lot of things, particularly when it comes to specific policies; however, we do have common cause on this recent journalistic absurdity! We SHOULD talk and maybe fix a thing or two 🙂
I'm on the right too, But the way I see it, we're in a fight now to save basic constitutional liberties and try to get control of the national security state, now completely run amok. Therefore, I think we need to set aside our differences on things like taxes and spending and unite with anyone who will join to preserve freedom, much as the Tories and Labour suspended their economic battles to form their unity government in World War II.
Exactly-the “right” and not GloboCaps both have an honest stake-and belief in-basic bedrock principles of American civic religion-the 1st Amendment, trial by jury, sanctity of an honest (and mouthy) press, etc, etc.
Almost every advanced nation requires voter ID, if that's what you're referring to. The ID should be free and easily accessible; if it's not, I'd push to make it easier. Vote by mail without verification is also not safe and not accepted globally. And no, not every effort in this direction is "voter suppression." Thanks for playing.
Vote by mail (not "without verification) has worked extremely well in Oregon for a couple of decades now. I recommend it highly.
There is one proviso: Oregon is a "clean" state; there is no tolerance for scandal, probably because not so long ago the state was very corrupt. If your state has a corruption problem, then vote-by-mail probably won't be any cleaner than what you have.
There is nothing more racist then believing a person of a certain race is incapable of obtaining an ID. An ID we literally require to do everything from drive a car to buy alcohol to fly.
Indeed. Every person I know has an id. I have no clue where these people assume that minorities are unable to get one. They really think minorities are just that incapable. It is insane. That’s why I say they’re just lemmings repeating the Cathedral. Unless they’re really just that racist. I’d hate to believe it but maybe it’s true.
It's not race, it's economic status. And buying alcohol and flying are not rights guaranteed by the Constitution that you no doubt claim to believe in (but actually do not).
Are you capable of arguing your point factually rather than with Democrat talking points? Are you aware that the new Georgia voting law is in some ways less restrictive, and others no more restrictive, than the law already in place in Colorado? Just because red states are passing laws to make sure only legal votes are cast does not make them automatically "voter suppression."
Revisions to voting laws have to be considered in context of existing law. If Georgians are used to certain voting procedures, and then find those procedures have been changed when they go to vote, their votes will not get counted.
I'm totally in favor of a nationwide system to eliminate these discrepancies.
You do understand that what Matt has been writing about is that it is Democrats who are behaving as fascists, not Republican's? Can you explain how censoring speech on big tech about the lab leak possibility or Hunter's laptop is not fascists?
The knee-jerk accusation that cleaning up voting registration rolls and ensuring that the vote is honest means one is a racist who wants to suppress the black vote is one of the stupidest arguments put forth by the party that prides itself on how smart it is. The overwhelming majority of blacks already can vote without any problems, and BTW, they also approve of voter ID by something like 80% . If you want to suppress the black vote, I cannot think of a more useless method for doing it. This is so darn lazy of you, try another conspiracy theory with some credibility to it.
I can't speak for every state, but I live in Georgia, which of course just passed one of these laws, and it is indeed free and easily accessible to get a state issued ID here. So what you're saying is false, at least here. Are you referring to other states? If so, can you point me to which one(s)?
A) A lot of the developed world has vote by mail: Canada, the UK, Germany, Austria and Switzerland all have vote by mail, and they work.
B) It is voter suppression though. It'd be one thing to pass strict voter ID requirements, but the GOP is doing so much more to suppress the vote, not just constraining mail-in ballots: curtail early voting on weekends, prohibiting election officials from accepting grants from non-governmental organizations, banning “line-warming” activities such as passing out water and blankets to voters standing in long lines, eliminating straight-ticket voting, and in Texas, before it was cut out, a provision in the Senate bill would have strictly regulated where Texas’s largest counties — the ones that include big cities dominated by Democrats — are allowed to locate polling places. Had this provision passed, it was expected to shut down many polling places in Democratic areas with a large share of minority voters.
So it's voter suppression to preclude an election official from accepting a "grant" from "non-governmental organizations?" That may be one bit of graft we don't yet have in Illinois. People actually pass out blankets to voters on election day? Who cares if election officials hand out stuff; just not your "non-governmental organizations." Not having straight ticket voting is suppression, because, what, people are only supposed to vote for the best Party, not the best candidate?
At what point does a voter have some minimal responsibility in this process? So what we need is the federal government running all elections, not local authorities. Yeah, that will make things better. This whole vote suppression theme is a scam, at the least.
"curtail early voting on weekends" do you know how much and why? or did the talking point suffice?
"prohibiting election officials from accepting grants from non-governmental organizations" - aka, "avoiding corruption," also nothing close to voter suppression. (this one is a Doozy!)
"banning “line-warming” activities..." - this silly talking point again. it known as electioneering and it has been prohibited forever. election workers CAN hand out water. campaign representatives cannot. because common sense.
"eliminating straight-ticket voting" - consider how preposterous it is to think that the inability to vote straight ticket automatically will keep a single person from voting.
your list of examples consists of nothing it is supposed to support.
MarkS, doesn't it seem reasonable and fair to consider legislation that affects voting procedures individually, and on the merits? There are certainly bad faith legislative efforts to reduce the numbers of votes Democratic candidates receive in future elections. There are also bad faith legislative efforts to increase the number of votes Democratic candidates receive. And there are good faith efforts to improve the integrity and workability of elections. If you start by characterizing all tradeoffs with which you happen to disagree as "voter suppression" then you are doing the exact thing which you claim to abhor: slandering any position on this subject with which you do not personally agree as deplorable. Stop doing that please.
Perhaps you are confused. The emergency policies put in place by blue states disenfranchised many American voters. When a scheme is put in place to eliminate chain of custody and signature verification and thus make it nearly impossible to audit the election except by a forensic audit--bad faith can be imputed to Democrat politicians as well as establishment Republicans. Changing voting laws in the middle of a pandemic, and ignoring the legislative branch, is dictatorial.
Also -- nobody seems to bring up the fact that the CDC released a statement saying that "regardless of whether you have COVID or not -- it's okay and encouraged to show up and vote". So...what were all those laws for? I thought the whole point was to keep people from showing up and spreading COVID?
I love how you don't even give a shit about proving the other statement he made because it lines up with what you already believe. 😂 I'm going to try to help -- I would strongly encourage you to re-examine the things you assume to be true and do a deep introspective dive into why you believe what you believe. Because people like you are so transparent in your ignorance -- you're honestly just hurting yourself at this point.
Bring it up with New York before Texas. NYC's voting laws are much more restrictive than those recently passed by Georgia and Texas. Why don't we hear about that more?
This is a fact. You cannot obtain an absentee ballot for convenience. You have to represent, under penalty of perjury, that you are either unable to travel to a polling location or will be out of town on election day. And there is no early-voting period. I continue to be confused by the firmly-held view of low-value commenters like MarkS that somehow restrictions on absentee voting favors Republicans. It's not impossible that it's right, but there's no evidence of it. The more organized a campaign's get out the vote machine is, the more it ought to favor restrictions on absentee ballots. Also, permissive absentee balloting ought to favor voting by old people (leans Republican), mildy-interested employed people (who the hell knows) and out-of-state college students (leans Dem). Why would anyone be confident they know which party would truly benefit from these changes? What seems clear to me is that restrictive voting laws favor incumbents and candidates with political machines. I know NY school boards sure as hell don't want easy voting. They don't even want to be forced to publicly communicate the dates votes are held.
No, just as the courts must find a balance with evidence requirements to both minimize the innocent people found guilty and the guilty people found not guilty, voting systems must find a balance between maximising accessibility and minimising fraud. There is never a perfect answer and trade offs are ALWAYS necessary
What actual evidence is there that requiring a photo ID is voter suppression? I've heard this many times but never once have seen the slightest evidence. You have to have a photo ID to get on a plane or (if you look young enough) even buy cigarettes or alcohol. Yet not to vote?!
That's like saying the majority of voting age minorities don't even have a driver's license. It's absurd.
You actually don’t need a photo ID to get on a plane. My wallet got stolen a few years back and I needed to visit my dad, who was dying, several times before I was able to visit the DMV to get a replacement. All I needed to board my planes was a couple pieces of mail with my name on it and my temporary replacement debit card, which didn’t even have my photo on it, like a “real” debit card does.
Also, requiring an ID is absolutely a way to discourage people from voting, if not make it outright impossible. My ID’s been expired since December 2019, but I didn’t even know it because, seriously, who the fuck pays attention to when their ID expires? The only reason I even realized it was expired was because the COVID shit started and I needed to order something online in March 2020 that required a current ID. I’ve made two appointments to get it replaced, but had to cancel both appointments because something came up that I had to deal with that was more important than getting a new ID. So, yeah, if there was an election happening in the next few weeks or maybe even months (not sure when I’m gonna make it to the DMV) and I needed an ID to vote, I wouldn’t be able to.
Not to mention, there’s overwhelming evidence that voter fraud in the form of people who aren’t who they say they are voting, or casting more than one vote, is virtually nonexistent (certainly not to the degree that it would affect the outcome of an election); AND that things like voter ID laws do discourage people from voting. “Discourage” isn’t even the right word; it makes it impossible for people who don’t have an ID (like me) to vote.
Those studies of voter fraud were done prior to Covid and the beginning of mail in ballots. The potential for a lot more problems are there and someone else who sees this is Jeff Bezos. I read a couple of months ago there was some kind of balloting (sorry, don't remember what it was for) within Amazon and he would not allow mail in votes b/c --- too great a risk for fraud.
These new laws are being brought about because of what?
Rampant fraud?
A lot of fraud?
Some fraud?
A little fraud?
All this new legislation to "protect our democracy" when one man cried fraud and couldn't prove ANY. And THAT is what has violently shaken our democracy, not Americans cheating, but Donald not accepting defeat.
The Fraud Genie is out of the bottle and a lot of Americans won't trust our elections. The thing is: there are no such things as a Genie. Trump took the loyalty and trust of good Americans and used it to fuck up my country.
Nobody in their right mind should trust any American elections. A quilt-patch of legislation and rules and voting machines without a paper verification trail. The rest of the world must be laughing their asses off at the 'Merican Democracy and Freedumb.
Gerrymandering on both sides. Disenfranchisement on both sides. Polling locations reductions (mostly on the Repugs side).
And this is the shining beacon on the hill of democracy? Makes me wanna puke.
There's a simple audit one could do in Fulton County. Ask everyone who "requested" an absentee ballot if they "voted" in the last election. My guess is that there would be a non-zero number of people who received and returned ballots who answer "No."
You can build trust. One way to do that is to run a meticulous, understandable and auditable process. Then you can say "you don't have to trust me: check for yourself".
If you trust you run an auditable system well, your response to challenges should be "bring it", not fervent insinuations that nothing happened just trust me.
Even if the election was legit, if your concern is trust, audits are good. The Dems are so in the grip of some kind of must trample Trump in every avenue possible mania that they don't get that: the trust-building processes must be attacked because they cast doubt on the Party and that should not be allowed to happen.
A bit dramatic? I don't know what you were doing between November and January 6th, but I was watching an assault on our process culminating in a takeover of our Capitol building where our congress was in danger and a woman was shot and killed. All of that was dramatic and every bit of that was because of Trump. He tried to overturn the election results and got waaaay too close to pulling it off. I hope you are right about us healing easily and quickly, although state legislatures answer to the coup attempt is to make voting harder and to give themselves power to declare winners ( in Georgia at least).
Voter suppression is just the latest shiny object put forward by the Dems to distract from having opened both barn doors at the southern border. As Matt's piece illustrates, that's how they, and their media enablers, roll.
Right, all those NEWLY PASSED LAWS in more than a dozen states are just inventions of the MSM! They didn't REALLY get passed and signed into law, the MSM just made it all up!!!
But lets just ignore all the new laws that were passed -- unconstitutionally in some cases -- BEFORE the election. Nah...that would make your point seem stupid and trite.
Not aware of any voting law changes that were ruled unconstitutional. The Texas AG did file a silly case which the SCOTUS refused to take due to lack of standing.
Voter fraud is just the latest shiny object put forward by Republicans to distract from how unpopular they are, and to help keep them in power by specifically targetting groups who don't vote for them with new voting restrictions to keep them away from the polls.
Matt's piece has zero to do with this. But if you weren't suffering from confirmation bias, you would know this.
Voting security is not voter suppression - making voting easy and cheating very hard - everyone has access to a picture I.D. You must believe people of color are incapable of performing the simplest of tasks - the bigotry of low expectations plays a central role in Democratic Party public policy, and, it's finally falling apart.
assertion doesn't make the case with people who think. you'll need to be more specific how these efforts would suppress votes. as it is, Georgia codifying and formalizing pandemic year measures is less restrictive than many blue states with early voting and voting by mail, yet it was called "jim crow on steroids." you'd have to be a fool to take the same liars' line on Texas without a shred of proof.
If you believe that these laws that require voter ID or other methods to verify a person's US citizenship, voter registration and legitimate right to vote in that particular election is somehow voter suppression then either you're
1 Brainwashed by leftist propaganda and haven't bothered to check the validity of those leftist Lies
2 you're a person who believes "By any means necessary" including cheating, noncitizen voting and multiple votes by a single person and other means of voter fraud is the right thing to do if it means your side wins
If you think that voter ID is Racist against black people because they have trouble getting ID, then you're just a Racist as most black voters will tell you
MLB made a private business decision to move it's signature midseason event to protest racism... by moving the game into a stadium named after a racist family. Do some research on Joseph Coors. It's obvious that MLB didn't.
I'm pretty sure there are instances and people for whom obtaining an ID *today* is problematic. That's why the state should bend backwards to help such people.
Serious question. Is there any person in need in this country not able to get a cell phone? (Don't mean to be confrontational here; just asking a question) Or an abortion? Jim Crow on the voter ID. Right.
I suppose there could be. I certainly don't have any data one way or another. Often it is not a matter of obtaining a cell phone, but rather a continuous obligation to pay for it/data plan.
Regarding abortion, I think there are states with just one clinic providing the service. I would be very surprised if there weren't people who couldn't afford a trip...
To be fair - on this issue, voter ID tests historically have been used in this way, and college students especially might be going off what they just learned about that.
Yes, in the South there were laws in place such as literacy tests, poll fees and other requirements that were aimed at black voters. Those are gone (thankfully). A simple driver's license is hardly a reinstatement of Jim Crow. And many businesses and college campuses require ID to even get in the buildings.
Matt I am a subscriber and I would like to print out your articles (especially this one}
to share with others. Your website has a mechanism that prohibits printing. Why? I am not doing this for profit and the people I share might actually become paid subscribers.
For example, the FISA court and FISA warrants need to be abolished or very rigorously reformed. Restrictions on domestic electronic surveillance should be strengthened. The CIA is a rogue agency with a horrendous track record on both effectiveness and respect for human rights and civil liberties; I'd like to see downsizing, elimination with functions spread to military and other bodies, or at least rigorous reform. The FBI has also racked up a horrible record, from their corrupt forensic lab onward; ditto for them. No time for a treatise. Overall, both federal law enforcement and intelligence services need a huge rethink, restructuring, and probably hefty cuts in finding.
I sympathize with the sentiment, but we ain't got no more Frank Church. Even he didn't get the job done. Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich have made moves in the right direction but I'm not sure how far they are able or willing to carry the ball.
I'm glad it's not a "grab yer guns" level of fight you're referencing but policy and overhaul, rethinking etc. Our current political process of bad faith leading to fruitless non-negotiations, leading to ramrodded legislation, makes it seem very far off.
The Aspen Institute wants to restrict “information disorder” — from one side, and require what it calls “foundational” changes down the line. Fleets of people fired for expressing mild opinions, or for insufficient enthusiasm for the Word. Congressional hearings in which the Democrats hectored Big Tech to censor speech.
You are so far above my intelligence level that I can't even see the point of your reply to my request for specifics. It's a legitimate ask and it was well answered.
Glad to know you AMWL! Let's make common cause against finance capital. Leave this dreary culture war distraction behind and see what we have in common: The government should serve people, not capital. Yes?
Yes. Of, by and for the people; Consent of the governed. There is a place for capital, but what we have today is a gross monstrosity that has taken over the government and is robbing the people of prosperity while accumulating vast wealth unto itself. Certainly not promoting the general Welfare, nor securing the Blessings of Liberty for all.
What a thought provoking, brilliant framing of our current horrendous clusterfuck. I love supporting you here on Substack, but it sure seems like this would do a lot of public good if it were more widely disseminated.
The reactions on Twitter are truly scary. A lot of folks are now equating old school ACLU liberalism with fascism because it means defending the constitutional rights of folks whose views you find odious.
A lot of these so-called socialists on Twitter are the shitlibs they love to hate.
I believe this is a conscious and organized trolling effort to discredit you. You are a unique and a huge threat. A lot of power and money depends on the woke industrial complex. You're one of the few people with the credibility to speak to both left and right. They're trying to cut off your left flank.
It is unfortunately little known that "TK News" -- despite Taibbi's coy pretensions -- in fact stands for "Taibbi-Klendathu Newswire."
The efforts to smear him as a Russian agent have been an elaborate double false-flag operation designed to deflect attention. He has been working for the Bugs -- a far more dangerous adversary -- all along.
With much of the heat coming from a newly-formed army of Team Blue trolls. I saw a bunch of them dog-piling onto an article about Greenwald recently. It seems Team Blue has learned from Team Red and now employs its own army of trolls.
You're "taking heat" because you are making sense, and exposing the "elephant in the room" that Mainstreamers are so busy talking past. Just throwing this out there, but I had a piece published @ the Dissident Voice website in December, "Whose Afraid of Glenn Greenwald?", which was inspired by Mr Greenwald's escape from The Intercept, and also hit pieces on Glenn by writers @ The New Yorker, The Daily Beast (of course!), and CounterPunch. Regardless, very impressed with your tenacity on this issue...
Tech-oligarchs are one thing. Does Jeff Bezos count as one? I guess. But I still like Amazon, so good on him.
The newspaper he sponsors though, and the ever-burgeoning fanaticism of the people who operate it... that is quite a different animal. Indeed, I think it's unprecedented in human history. The utter, hysterical nonsense that one must now imbibe and regurgitate in order to gain access to the information-flows of modern power would shame the most obsequious priest of simpler times.
To justify his King's Divine Right, all he had to do was scare superstitious peasants with the prospect of famine:
"Ye doubt this inbred moron was blessed by the Almighty to rule? Ye doubt the Almighty? Must ye then also doubt His benevolence concerning your harvest? Shame! Trust in God! And your King!"
That sort of thing. A simple trick, but one can see how it would work.
Now though... If you want to advance up the (N)GO ladder, you must join a hermaphroditic mystery cult. You must believe---not just think, but *believe*---that sex roles are a modernist conspiracy, and that hormones shower people willy-nilly like mana from heaven. Indeed, if you *really* want to ride the power train, you ought believe that the modern scientific state knows *better* than heaven, and ought to correct the latter's hormonal mistakes with injections and whatnot.
This is insane, obviously; yet only scratches the surface of the delirium engulfing our modern clerisy.
Unprecedented? Hardly. Imagine how a Roman pagan might've felt during the rise of Christianity, or what things were like in collapsing Weimar or revolution-era Russia or China.
You can paint a picture of the Russian intelligentsia that feels very familiar:
There are theories that the Islamic Golden Age ended when religious fanatics started gaining power. Mad clerics have always been with us, and if Eric Hoffer is right, the mass movements they inspire will eventually calm down (often once they've attained power or been crushed violently, mind).
But not all of the clerics' religions are made equal. I don't cherish the idea of 70 years of lite Sovietism.
What's unprecedented is not the wackiness of the ideas---but the technology that spreads them.
Modern Americans are subjected to a bombardment of State propaganda such as the world---including the old Eastern Bloc---has never seen. It taints every work of popular art, every professional promotion, every conversation between strangers (even if they're of the same race). And it foments its mad lies in its most prestigious institutions.
"There will never be a female Navy SEAL." I said this in an undergraduate seminar a few years ago, when the topic of 'integrated' special forces came up. And the looks I got from all those young, aspiring fanatics...
I might go back to school just to see it again.
P.S. It's adorable you imagine this "lite Sovietism" may only last 70 years.
<<"There will never be a female Navy SEAL." I said this in an undergraduate seminar a few years ago, when the topic of 'integrated' special forces came up. And the looks I got from all those young, aspiring fanatics...>>
Clearly you did not see G.I. JANE or STARSHIP TROOPERS (both 1997).
In the USA, perception is reality, and has been for quite some time. Washington and New York are both great powers, but Hollywood is the greatest power.
I think a possible interpretation of the authoritarian phenomena you mention is not that the ruling and leadership classes are increasing their power and tightening their grip, but the opposite: they are losing control, and they are _trying_ to tighten their grip as in fact they are losing it. The problem is that a dispersion of certain kinds of wealth and power into the lower orders has been occurring. I'll give just a few examples. 100 years ago, if wanted to spread one's opinions about and lacked a radio station or a printing press, you were stuck with individual conversations, letters, or leaflets. Today, everyone has access to very high-powered social media which predictably has become the focus of ruling-class concern. The opening shot was the exposure of Kennedy-Lewinsky; that could not have happened without the early stage of social media it occurred in. Another is the development of terrorist-usable weapons like drones, and "cyberterror".
The trends.... Broad revolutionary movements and events are not brought about by ideology but by objective, material facts. The proles are acquiring the power to take part in history. Going by 1914-1945, it might be a rough ride.
The far left isn't a part of the alliance in the first graf. That portion of the alliance is clearly center-left. The actual left in this country has no part of this; it's tiny regardless.
I am familiar with her from the profile in Politico last February. This is related to Karl Rove's central insight: elections are decided by motivating the base, not by targeting swing voters.
Kotkin? Kotkin, Kotkin, Kotkin---yes, Kotkin! Joel Kotkin. My old friend from new geography.com. A good numbers man, somewhat excitable, but eminently certifiable to the good burghers of the local Chamber of Commerce. When I last checked in with Professor K, he was still sifting through old census reports, trumpeting the moral worth of freshly mowed lawns and two-car garages.
He was once more than an occasional blip on my radar screen back when I was up to my ears in all things urban, but then suddenly, for no apparent reason, I said the hell with it, and beat a hasty but much needed retreat to the sticks, and thus lost track of the New Geographer.
Professor Kotkin is not only a solid B-lister of the nation's commentariat, over the years he's also been willing, with bullhorn in hand and dressed in a seersucker suit, to reassure the nation's Babbitts that all is well, pay no attention to....wait! Apparently new alarms are sounding and battle flags are being raised down at the hardware stores and beauty parlors.
So Professor K has dusted off Coleridge's old clerisy and dressed them up as the "new" clerisy. As an old hand in the book publishing world, a hat tip to the professor for this clever intellectual refashioning and regurgitation. One presumes there's not a lot money in tracking migration rates, and a fella's gotta get paid!
In brief: Apparently, this "new" clerisy , composed of the upper-middle-class global elite, Phds and those hauling in six to seven figure salaries, let's call'em the 9-percenters (the Professor will, hopefully, find utility with this "new" numerical coining for his census-taking); these people, as Kotkin reassess, are the butlers and handmaidens who oversee the propaganda and balance sheets of the one percenters (those people again). What Marx designated the '"bourgeoisie" will find themselves or will find themselves---it's not clear what tense we should be shivering about---awash in society marked by, composed of, threatened by, wait for this one...neo-medievalism. Huzzah!
Kotkin classifies this new "clerisy" as the creme of the old middle class. Remember them? And the one percenters, and especially 0.1 percenters, are feverishly eyeballing the newly annointed clerisy's freshly mowed lawns and two-car garages, with the desire of reducing them to the current state of neo-medievalism that the 90- percenters currently enjoy. Now, this sort of warmed-over hand-wringing at this juncture in our on-going national and global breakdown is sure to excite the minds of the young denizens who have erected permanent camps on the platforms of the internet, and who like to imagine themselves as senior analysts at the Rand Corporation, as they continue to make sense of a world that they have analyzed almost exclusively through their phones and computers. But I cavil here.
But this is merely a reading of the Professor's web-posted summary of his longer work. I intend to acquire the Professors book, "The Coming of Neo-Medievalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class" and hope to profit by this new take on an old theme, about 10,000 years old in fact. But I cannot refrain here from cautioning the good Professor himself. We've been forewarned for some time now about the aims and actions of this so-called "new" clerisy.
And now that we've been warned anew by the good Professor, what action(s) do we take to battle this Gothic elite? Indeed, I look forward to reacquainting myself with the thought and theories of Professor Kotkin, with the hope that he has for us not just a strategy and outline of tactics for the coming battle, but a remedy or two for curing our current social and political divisions.
John, is that you? Oh, Zwiebel. Thought you were another John. Discussion? I failed to detect a discussion when I wrote this. I sometimes get lost in all the boogaloo/deep state bullshit in this comment section. And also, what passes for discussion typically is childish logrolling and fevered whispers of the coming and goings of far left ghosts and goblins.
Booh! It's me, the deep state. But please, explain what was being "discussed." And I should note that not all expository writing seeks to "make a point."
I certainly wasn't trying to make a point. Please explain the discussion, and then explain why this "failed to to add to the discussion."
You accuse me of not adding to the discussion, then slyly hint that 100 of my words would have sufficed to add to the discussion, but then I still don't know what's being discussed! And for that matter, these 100 words---are they my 100 words? Or somebody else's 100 words? If they are mine, which 100 words would you choose to make the point I wasn't even trying to make? You see where you've gotten us?
And do you really want to be seen sneering at another commenter for using "big words." This is the taunting of a 6th grader. Or an adult dum-dum. I sincerely trust you're neither of these, but frankly, given the general run of the comments here, well, we can't discount that possibility, Mr Zwiebel.
Hey everybody, don't forget to dumb it down for Mr. Zwiebel! He likes his words somewhat smallish. And you damn well better "make a "point" with them words. Zwiebel likes his words "pointy." Evidently, all of our big words clash with his small ideas! Probably over a hundred words here, wouldn't you say, John?
But I've think I've made my point here, hopefully to John's satisfaction. My point here? I think I'll use big, no even gigantic, words whenever I like. And hundreds and hundreds of them. So there. Good to hear from you, though. Write again and often. Don't be a stranger.
A "point" well taken is not a "point" well shaken...
McWhorter has been killing it over the last several months - if you didn't catch him, he mopped the floor with Michelle Goldberg on the NYT's The Argument in May. It was an absolute pleasure to read, and he has multiple protection devices that can thwart the woke mob - because he's Black, no one can use the racist card on him. Because he's a very well-credentialed academic, they can't use use the education card on him. It's delicious.
James Lindsay! Kid, you're too much. Exotic indeed. It's unclear, however, what strain of "exotic" we speak of here:
This kind of exotic? --"The hoax got the attention of Michael O’Fallon, a conservative activist and president of Sovereign Nations, a conservative Christian nationalist group. O’Fallon, who also has organized cruises for tea partyers and Calvinist Christian nationalists, has long been a critic of liberal causes and critical theory.
He has claimed that evangelical and Catholic leaders have been bought off by the Open Society Foundation led by philanthropist George Soros...."
"Lindsay and O’Fallon have close ties."
Or this kind of exotic---"The grievance studies hoax transformed Lindsay’s career. Before the hoax, he was a massage therapist who ran a business called Twisted Roots Bodywork, which combined massage with martial arts.
"On social media, he’s joked about his lack of credentials in critical theory.
“Looks like the story finally broke too,” he wrote on Twitter last summer. “The guy who pranked all those academic journals was a massage therapist too. LOL lol LOL.”
You know the old saying---once a massage therapist, always a massage therapist...
"Speaking of regurgitation, there is nothing in what you said that wasn't said by Marcuse: a deep, snobby, pretentious loathing of the suburban working class and small business owners."
I kid you not---in an argument once with my father when I was in high school, he responded with precisely these words when I declined to work an extra shift at one of the hardware stores he owned. Prescient. Very. "You and your Marcuse, I would mutter back to him, you and your Marcuse."
Huffington Horseshit... how is it any different than Daily Caller Horseshit...
Matt's indepth reporting is limited only to the left while all but ignoring the glaring PROPAGANDA model on the right that has produced such non sense as Stop the Steal and Tax cuts to the rich trickle down.
Give me a break. What Matt has proven is that Right Wingers can handle the truth if it told on their enemies but will take their ball home and sob if the truth is told about the media they believe... Right?
First of all I don't think the mainstream press is "the left." Neither am I, for that matter, but despite some superficial overtures to leftism, particularly in the op-ed pages, the mainstream press is basically corporate. Second, Fox is no longer a standard-bearer for institutional power. It plays to an enormous audience of people, as entirely red as MSNBC's audience is blue, but its influence is limited to whipping up passions in that population. The rest of the press, which incidentally is much larger in terms of bandwidth and reach, with many more outlets in both print and broadcast, is much more intimately part of a larger system now, practically an outpost of the security agencies on some issues. So my focus lately, as opposed to, say, the Bush years (when Fox was a leader of the political consensus driving us to war and I wrote a lot about that channel), is on that other "side." As I wrote in Hate Inc., Fox invented a lot of the commercial techniques that got us into this mess, but the behaviors we're seeing now in outlets like the New York Times and CNN -- with almost constant errors and deceptions, many fed to them directly from security sources, while they're all cheering on censorship -- to me is far more dangerous than Fox. The difference between "Stop the Steal" and Russiagate is that the latter was and is an officially approved attempt to re-shape reality. "Stop the Steal" to me is just Donald Trump's personal crusade. Add the fact that I guess I expect the New York Times to be better, and that's why I'm not as interested in the foibles of red media lately.
That’s exactly correct. Stop the Steal is online nonsense that Trump pushes but has almost no impact.
CNN’s misleading chyrons and gaslighting and the Times’ deceptions are in fact much more problematic. We need them to be better and right now they’re not.
Just one example- we’re going thru this odd almost Maoist like cultural revolution
with schools and institutions resegregating and declaring themselves racist and purging and where is the reporting? The only reporting you see from the Paper of Record is largely a reflexive defense of CRT and an effort to delegitimize the critics.
1) Oswald didn't act alone, else why was he immediately assassinated by a mid-level Mafia operative in a sharkskin suit?
2) Epstein had help, else why were all the video cameras turned off, for the most high-profile prisoner in the U.S. incarceration system?
3) The virus came from the Wuhan lab, since the coincidence of the initial outbreak being right next to the virology lab is... about 1 in 1 million.
4) The election was flawed, else why do 4 simultaneous swing states simultaneously go dark (2 with "plumbing problems), kick out poll watchers, then re-emerge hours later with a 6 point swing to Biden? (Look at the PA court proceeding where the judge had to incredulously ask 2 times what the vote counts were during the blackout.... more than 100x1 for Biden).
About #4, I remain agnostic, but certainly a full forensic audit is warranted, if for no other reason than to restore faith in the elective process (50 million Americans currently think the election was stolen, which is a dangerous situation).
As a wise person recently told me, "There wouldn't be so many conspiracy theories if there weren't so many conspiracies".
5). The Clinton foundation is perhaps the biggest money laundering scheme in American history and one doesn’t need to be a genius to figure out that the donations from despotic regimes throughout the Middle East were not made because the philanthropic heads of state wanted to alleviate world suffering and thought the Clinton foundation to be the best vehicle through which to deliver aid.
So the Marxists are willing to destroy the economy, fund our nation’s enemies, allow an invasion of our borders of destitute foreign welfare leeches, remove all incentive for these foreigners to assimilate, outlaw all non-emergency vaccine remedies killing tens of thousands of people, destroy decades of civil rights and race relation advances, along with dozens of other actions just as evil and destructive to our country BUT they would NEVER cheat to win an election. THAT would just be too much? Seriously???
Of course, they tried. They knew that universal mail in would benefit Biden and so they pushed it hard. That’s not cheating. It’s malpractice by Trump’s team to not have an answer. And his own last minute blunders and gaffes sealed his fate.
But it is fair to ask "If there was no cheating in the last election, why such pushback on the part of Democrats for a proper audit of election results?". The MSM argument against widespread chicanery is something along the lines of 'that is living in Crazy Town, man; only wack jobs believe that.'
I agree, much of what we are seeing today actually reeks of the steps of subversion that Yuri Bezmenov—disclaimer: I don't know exactly how I feel about him, but do find his steps of subversion to be compelling—talked about after "defecting" from the KGB.
I also want to clarify that I am not asserting that Russia is principally involved in the direction we are seeing today, but that our own KGB would likely come to similar conclusions about how to control society en masse and therefore would employ similar techniques to retain control.
How is "Stop the Steal" just "online non-sense with no impact? It's a major campaign from the most popular leader on one side of the political isle in a two-party system that inevitably cycles through partisan changes in power. It also lead recently to a riot/insurrection or whatever you want to call it. I get that some of that gets exaggerated, but why respond by downplaying it completely?
Because they’re indulging the worst impulses of Trump. It may have some people online hyped up about it but I don’t see it going anywhere.
I watched Jan 6 live. Seemed to me - a few bad people mixed in with some ignoramuses amped up by a crowd of thousands. Some rioted and others tresspassed. They’re being charged as is correct. To try and shoehorn it into a 9/11 or a White Supremacist attempted Coup is simply not true. No matter how many times CNN says it. It just isn’t true.
The worst damage caused by the attempted (in a rather lame way imo) insurrection is that people now equate GIVING PEOPLE MORE OPPORTUNITY TO VOTE due to the pandemic, with STEALING THE VOTE. The two are not the same, but it's useful to conflate them if you want to keep people from agreeing that the populace should find voting so easy that it's shameful to not vote.
I hate that conflation. It's evil and dresses the worst illness of our civic body (non participation) in the false premise of righteous indignation.
it's believed by the majority of a major political party and it is the product of the most influential politician in that party. How is that not a relevant topic for institutional critique?
"Stop the Steal" is a simile that means what people want. You seem to interpret it as large-scale hard-core ballot fraud, which hasn't been shown conclusively. Some see "the steal" as publicly documented changes to absentee voting that favored Biden while being of questionable legality.
Beyond what "the steal" really means, the necessary standard of evidence is also open to debate. Should it be "beyond a reasonable doubt", "a preponderence of evidence", or "arguably true if you look from a certain angle", i.e. good enough for sports fans.
You won't understand people if you're unwilling to see things from their perspective.
RWK - A huge chunk of a democracy thinking that the presidential election was RIGGED in the voting booth is far more damaging to democracy than the FBI investigating one of the most corrupt campaigns of all time and their possible ties to Russia. Absurdly hyped by the press yes. But thinking an ex president got pee'd on in a Russian Hotel room is not going to rally people to storm the capital.
Piketty- stop worrying and obsessing over what some people think and say online. Who gives a fuck. Let them be. And let your side believe that Putin won in 2016.
I for one, value truth over being right all the time.
give it a try some time. admitting you’re not always right is good. for example, earlier this year I (like millions of others) was fooled into believing CPO Brian Sicknick was murdered at the Jan 6 riot with a fire extinguisher. when it became clear that wasn’t true, I admitted I was wrong. didn’t have a scratch on me. it won’t kill you.
FNR - That is like someone saying i was wrong once. I thought i was wrong and then found out i was actually right.
Give me a break.
I am a former Republican, President of college Republicans and worked at RNC and on several elections. I now reject all of the corporate BS the Republicans have pushed for decades. From voter suppression to cutting taxes to the rich promising it will trickle down to refusing to put in place a health care system that costs LESS than we are paying today and insures 100% of Americans like every other industrialized nation.
And i made all of those pivots within months of watch Trump and his Misinformed, Lying, corrupt ass float down that Elevator in his heavily mortgaged building with his pathetic name on it.
I spent 30yrs raising kids and saving for my future and barely paid attention to what my party had morphed into while i was working and raising a family. Trump and his charm got the people in my party to reveal what they really cared about and it was not doing what is best for the entire country. In fact is was a strong desire to burn this thing down rather than not have it tilted to them.
I missed the anger because i was in a world not destroyed by 2008, not destroyed by technology or globalization. I got lucky.
That is called admitting you were wrong. Your sorry excuse for admitting you were wrong is nothing more than a tesstment to your ego. Right?
Matt - "Stop the Steal" is a LIE that was 'officially approved' by the sitting US President, Many in the White House, Congress and the Senate and then pushed endlessly through right wing media channels that also took corporate advertising money.
How is that any different than the corporate funded NYT pushing State Department lies? They appear two sides of the same coin but you only report negatively on one side of that coin.
Your boards are filled with messages that push right wing Political Leaders lies which are then pushed through corporate sponsored right wing media outlets. Yet i have almost never seen someone on your board claiming Trump colluded with Russia or kente clothed Schumer and Pelosi represents true patriotism.
And since joining your sub stack after reading Hate Inc i have only seen you attacks Democratic leaning corporate media with lies pushed by Democratic leaders.
Is correlation causation? I think so... Your readers trust you and since you no longer attack the right wing media lies they freely repeat and thus believe them.
Then why do the Democrats so strongly oppose election audits? Why was Parler shut down when the Jan 6 miscreants almost exclusively used Twitter and FB to collaborate/coordinate (remember the Jan 6 shitstorm was cited as a prime reason for destroying Parler) ? And why doesn't CNN or anyone ever mention that Trump actually tweeted out, just before the shit hit the fan, that everybody needed to calm down, remain peaceful, and go home... only to have Jack and co. DELETE HIS TWEEET? Just a lot of weird questions that need answering before the skeptics among up will trust the gubmint.
Understood.. your focus is on corporate/ main stream press not just 'the left". And i understand you and Greenwald are particularly focused on security broadly as was Chomsky in framing the the Propaganda Model. Being a mouth piece of the security agencies is Bad. Totally agree!
But for those of us that follow you today and were not following you in 2004 or 5 in the build up to Iraq your writing reads as if you only see these issue in the same media that pushed Russia Gate and no State Sponsored lying in the media that claimed brown people were storming the southern boarder raping and stealing from Americans. Is that your intention?
If you look at posts on your own board you can consistently see "errors and deception" that is pushed by the larger media universe but in particular by the right wing side of the isle (Daily Caller, NewsMax etc...). Sure "Stop the Steal" is not state sponsored. Totally agree and excellent point. But does it get even a nod from you to how misleading the media that endorses this lie is? I don't think so.
You are building a dialog with this community, i would assume, and not a monolog like your pod cast. So if you have your community routinely scoffing at things like Russia Gate and then turning around pushing right wing media lies (state sponsored or not) then you are in essence validating their views.
Let me give an example. "The State" pushed Trumps tax cut through right and left wing and corporate media. That despite virtually every single major economist in the US stating explicitly that the cut would not accomplish what it was promising. No, that State Sponsored lie may not warrant a book but perhaps some consistent references to what a lie it was. But it seems like Trump administration State Sponsored lies get a pass from you despite you having shown great expertise in financial reporting. It is confusing to me.
Your audience are not as fired up about Trumps countless State sponsored lie as they are about Lab Leak, Steele Dossier etc... Nor do you point those out despite a wealth of examples.
So you're building an audience that believes the lies they hear from right wing media, and you sending almost zero contradictory scolding while endlessly (and accurately) scolding corporate media for lies about Trump. Is that intentional? It sure seems that way?
Bow Wow - I am not challenging Matt to validate my world view.
I am pointing out that in HateInc he showed how both side of corporate media produce MISINFORMED viewers. Yet on these boards I only see posts from Misinfomred right wing corporate media narratives (Trump did a great job leading the nation during covid, Trump won the election and it was stolen etc...) and i never ever see left wing corporate media narratives (Trump really did collude with Russia, Hunter Biden didnt do anything wrong etc...)
Given that Matt's posts since i have joined his substack only bash left leaning corporate media and never ever touch on the lies of right wing corporate media i am forced to wonder, how is what Matt is dong any different than what the NYT does?
He found an audience and he tells then what they want to hear. How is that different than the NYT?
You should read Matt’s very recent book: Hate, Inc. You’ll see the balanced criticism you crave and, maybe, you’ll come to recognize political tribalism as a pointless exercise. Both parties and their media appendages are dogshit.
“Woke capital” is upset at Taibbi calling out Wall St skullduggery b/c hey, they vote and give $$$ to Ds and BLM and happily scold rednecks from Ohio and Arkansas from their corporate perches-but Taibbi doesn’t appreciate their virtue signalling and still calls out their bs. How awful and un-woke of him
This article is in every way a direct continuation of the work in Hate, Inc., and is outlining the even more terrifying directions our politics and our media are moving in. I personally think it’s essential. - one of his best in months - and full of of the kind of hard truths that people just don’t want to accept, hence its (manufactured) controversy.
Yes, Fox News is still bad, but does anyone really think the other flavor is still better, or - even worse - that forcibly removing Fox and Tucker Carlson from the airwaves is in any way progress, or justice, or that it resembles what we used to call liberalism or leftism?
It isn't any different...that's exactly the point. But 90 percent of major media outlets are actively reporting on the horseshit on the right, while they will, as Tiabbi points out, ignore, excuse or actively suppress anything that makes Democrats or their reporting look bad. I am a life long liberal, NYT and Wapo subscriber, who actively reads a variety of newspapers and online outlets and I've witnessed it personally. I've become disgusted with the dishonesty of the media--while they label Tump and everyone on the right dishonest.
I am going to keep giving push back on right wing media driven lies i hear on this board. Hate Inc being the inspiration. Since starting this you would think the only lies are pushing the Democratic Narrative. Trump and Republican narrative are pock full of just as many lies and they get re mentioned here as if they are fact. No cutting taxes to the rich does not trickle down. No Trump did not win the election. Yes Trumps management of Covid cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives according to his own staff...
Those right wing lies are tossed around as fact on this board while also accurately condeming lies like Russia Gate.
While it's not a panacea, cutting taxes on the rich DOES trickle down. Trump didn't win the election? I'm not sure, but neither are you. Trump's mismanagement of Covid-19 cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives according to his own staff? That's kind of self-refuting, isn't it?
Oh please. Turn off CNN and get outside without your mask for a little bit of fresh air. Take a walk or a bike ride. You’re not making sense right now. Cool off and then come back later and we can discuss.
I no more consume CNN than i consume Fox... But you only mention CNN... interesting. Tell me, when was the last Stop the Steal zoom session you dialed into?
I am saying that the talking points you used are a narrative pushed by right wing media to make fun of liberals and 'indicate' sympathy with Trumps endless misstatement about what Americans should be doing during a pandemic where the US the wealthiest nation on the planet and with 5% of the worlds population ended up with 20% of the worlds deaths in a Pandemic created in China.
That FACT along with every single major global health organizaton ranking the US response to Covid among the worst in the developed world indicates to me you are most likely one of those misinformed media consumers that has not read the unanimous ranking of Trumps leadership failing and causing far more deaths than the US should have had. Even Trumps top Health Advisors, once he left office, validated that Trumps handling of Covid CAUSED higher death tolls.
But you are misinformed on this arent you. No different than the Rachel Maddow watcher that thinks Trump collueded with Putin. Your words reveal you, admit it, you dont realize what a failure in leadership Trump was during Covid to you.
This is the part where you start with the false equivilincies to justify Trumps failure and probably point to blue state governors. Just like the Maddow watcher pointing to the Steele Dossier as PROOF Trump colluded.
"Trumps leadership failing and causing far more deaths than the US should have had"
Oh, ffs! Has it not yet registered with you that a virus-is-gonna-virus® so the worst approach to dealing with this one is the approach liberal governors took? They shut their businesses down, they shut their communities down, they abandoned the children. And what did doing so earn them? more deaths, larger spikes, drug and mental healthcare crises.
That's what you wanted from Trump. Instead, he downplayed it. Instead, his OWS actually found the solution. I know your comment registers as incontestable to the majority of this country (thanks, corporate media!) but that doesn't make it true. Especially in hindsight, except for his National shutdown Trump could not have done a better job.
RWK - The Daily Caller lies to its audience far more often than the NYT. The fact that they may have gotten ONE or a FEW stories right that the NYT got wrong does not make the Daily Caller a trustworthy media source much less more trustworthy then the NYT...
Both media sources LIE. But the Daily Caller has a business model built around pushing Republican lies daily. Not occasionally the way the NYT does for the State.
That is why on these boards i regularly see posts from right wingers regurgitating right wing media lies, like Stop the Steal and almost never read posts from Liberals claiming Trump colluded with Russia. Why is that?
I have found the NYT to be pretty consistent about lying and propagandizing, along the lines of bad old _Pravda_. Right-wingers are often useful sources of information because their basic model of perception is paranoia. A story appearing in the _Times_ has a presumptive truth value of a story issued by a government.
Starry - Matt has pointed out failures at the NYT. The right wing media has those failures daily across almost all of its media outlets. The result is that right wing media consumers are among the most misinformed people to post on these boards. Can you explain that?
I don't know how to measure degree of (mis)information versus ideological temperature without make a lot of dubious assumptions about both factors. The first two messages I ever got about US government surveillance -- this was a long time ago -- were (1) a graffito written on the walls of the NY Public Library that said "FBI IN LIBRARY", and (2) a mimeographed flyer from (I think) an outfit called "Conservative Women of America" which stated that US agents were demanding, and getting, complete banking information from ordinary banks about ordinary people without warrants. I took both to be conspiracy theories and I was wrong on both counts, at least according to subsequent news reports. I can supply many other anecdotes of this sort.
Over the years I have become very impressed with the inability of people in general to get out of their tribal-ideological boxes.
The Daily Caller did some of the best reporting over the summer precisely because The Paper of Record abdicated or gaslit or deceived, whatever the reason was, on the issue of the riots.
Obviously, it leans to the right so I wouldn’t make it a sole source but it’s pretty damn accurate. If you have a story where they’ve lied- send me the link.
Ideological polarization is the point of both sides, what they run with is only relevant to what they can sell to their base. It is peoples selective exposure, curated through partisan channels, causing a national fragmentation, which seems to be the mutual endgame. The fact that your concerned about team red being overly bashed here fits into the same paradigm, people that are actually openminded don't have colored balls.
Jack - I am less concerned with team red not being bashed equally by Matt than i am with his communities non stop regurgitating of team red NON FACTUAL ideas, Everything from Stop the Steal is not a lie to Trump did a great job leading the country during covid. While i hear almost no team blue comments like Trump did collude with Russia or Hunter Biden did nothing wrong.
If i saw non factual comments on both sides on this board i would say Matt has accomplished something remarkable. He has created a platform that focuses on truth and not corporate media lies on the blue or red side.
But given that the non factual comments on this board are ALL coming from the red side and Matt is ONLY publishing stories that hammer the blue side for their lies i am forced to wonder how Matt is any different than say the NYT? Right?
Nonsense. Matt has done an excellent job of calling out corporate media lies that protect the Dems.
That does not change the fact that right wing corporate media, though not state sponsored, has pushed even more lies. From Stop the Steal to Tax cuts to the rich trickle down to M4A cant work in America.. But Matt does not seem to report on those lies with consistanlty or zeal with which he reports on lies to push the Democrats.
Lies and lies and you seem to be comfortable with one set of lies while challenging the other set of lies.. BOTH groups are lying and you not me are falling for one side.
Let me put this another way: there is already a huge institutional effort at "calling out" right-wing media. In fact it goes further than that, there's a rather advanced movement to shut down Fox altogether, and/or have the various tech platforms subdue those outlets - they already do this in some obvious cases, and also in some undeserved ones (like the Hunter Biden story). Almost no one who reads me is not already aware of the inclinations of Fox and the Daily Caller and so on. I'm hammering the other side these days for a couple of reasons. One, as I said before, it just represents a much bigger, more powerful segment of society. Two, we're in the middle of a movement to censor the Internet that is grounded in the idea that "misinformation" reigns, especially on the right-wing. I see this issue as a stalking-horse for a wider attempt to gain control over the press generally, am totally against it, and am therefore trying to show that "misinformation" is not exclusive to OANN and Newsmax and so on. The only route to stopping this dystopian effort to clamp down on the press is if Democratic voters reject it (Republicans already mostly do, although that might change if they get back into power). So, I'm trying to shine a light on what I see as the official lies. Moreover I'm a little concerned about inadvertently helping someone make the case for shutting down conservative outlets. That argument again is already being made by enough people. I know the focus seems curious to some but I've been thinking about this for almost five years now, since I started to see shifts in the media landscape and the movement toward censorship gain speed -- the amount of attention Im focusing in the various directions is intentional.
"I know the focus seems curious to some but I've been thinking about this for almost five years now"
To me, the current media environment seems remarkably similar to that c. 2002. It's necessary to direct hate at the official enemy (a remarkably Protean figure -- it could be S. Hussein, al-Qaeda, "terrorism," "white supremacy," whatever). It got kind of weird when it was directed toward the sitting President of the United States, regardless of one's opinions about his personal character or fitness for office. W. escaped this; Trump didn't. Why?
Like it or not, Dubya had his own political pedigree-2x Texas governor and a family lineage of DC powerbrokering. Trump was a lousy casino owner and reality TV host who never ran for office before. It’s easy to mock/instinctively hate a nouveau ruche gatecrasher.
Simple (probably inadequate) answers: because so many Democrats supported Bush's post-9/11 security state buildup, and were cheerleaders of the Iraq war. The NYT even had a pro-invasion shill on the front page.
Another answer is that Trump -- at least as a candidate -- posed a real threat to the R/D neoliberal order. He called the Bushes out, he said things like "we've killed a lot of people, too". He stated clearly that he wanted to pull troops out of foreign entanglements. He was willing to engage in trade wars despite the press reminding everyone that prices at wally world would likely rise as a result. I think it freaked them out that someone got into office using the rhetoric of a true change agent.
Matt - I 100% support your efforts and share your concern regarding the threat of 'clamping down on the press". From Fox to MSNBC and Daily Caller to Huff Post censorship will be destructive. That is what i got from your book Hate Inc... Support you and Greenwald 100%
So why is it that your audience on this board, since i have been on it, continually repeat as fact lies manufactured in the White House and Congress and Senate and pushed through right wing media sources?
On the flip side i am yet to see any messages on this board of your audience members claiming Trump really did collude with Putin or Kent Cloth wearing Pelosi and Schumer show real patriotism.
It would appear that your justified attacks on lies and false narratives from left leaning corporate media but not matched with equally justified attacks on false narratives from right leaning corporate media has produced an audience that feels free to regurgitate the right wing media lies as if they are fact.
Cause or correlation? My view is that your recent focus on the left lies while ignoring the rights lies is shifting your posts from the later to the former. No?
Because Taibbi is not a right-winger. If you've been following him for years, you'd remember him savaging the Right under Dubya. A few commenters notwithstanding, I doubt there are many, if any, serious koolaid drinking Trump lovers reading his articles and listening to his podcast (frequently pro-bernie, pro- M4A, anti-war, etc.).
And honestly, the Democrats have somehow managed to become worse for most of us on the left than the Trumpless Republicans. The GOP is fighting itself, the Democrats are trying to police thoughts. Shit, just actually read this article then ask yourself: is it really useful to make all bad behavior a comparison? Can't we talk about bad shit without having to strive for some fictional political balance?
If it makes you feel better, the exact same thing happens in reverse on the Never Trump right-wing message boards. I'm a Never Trump conservative and a fan of David French, who often criticizes the MAGA Right and the religious Right from a conservative perspective. But then you scroll down to the comments sections and it's mainly left-wing people saying THANK YOU FINALLY someone is recognizing how horrible the Right is, and then they give a bunch of mainly left-wing reasons, etc etc. I think it comes with the territory, the "aid and comfort to the enemy" effect.
A major point of agreement between honest liberals and conservatives who converge here can be the Chinese Communist Party. Aren't these things we can agree on?
Their civil liberties record is horrendous. They use slave labor, which is not only monstrous by itself, but makes them an unfair and unfit trading partner. (They will never allow a monitoring process that will reliably expose when slave labor has been used.)
They are an aggressive rising power. They have bribed leaders in developing countries to take exploitative loans that will cripple their economies and fledgling social welfare systems. (They do not enforce anything equivalent to our Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.)
They harvest organs from political prisoners. They have subjugated the people of Tibet, Xinjiang (Uighurs), and now Hong Kong. They certainly cancelled domestic flights from Wuhan after they learned of the virus outbreak, while allowing international flights to proceed. We may learn that they concealed the origins of the outbreak.
And they have helped skew and corrupt our political discourse. Why does Lebron James call out the police here, but stay silent about the camps for the Uighurs? Why hasn't Hollywood made a major film critical of China in almost 25 years (since Seven Years in Tibet in 1997)? They've certainly made plenty of films critical of America in that time. Why are the same American companies that may benefit from slave labor in China pouring money into BLM?
We should always expose and fight our domestic injustices. But has posturing on these become a cheap way to avoid accountability for participating in horrific humor rights abuses in another country?
I think a tough line on China (in trade, foreign policy, military alliances, and more) is a great dividing line in our politics. And it is not between left and right. It's between the bought and the rest of us.
Let's try less to bring democracy to China and focus on bringing democracy to our beloved country. -- I used to work in China...
Adrian Zenz and Falun Gong anti-Communist "religious" lunatics are not good source of information on China. Neither is Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo and war-mongers in CIA..
Let's focus on trying to introduce democracy in the US -- e.g., by starting to sharply reduce military expenditures for US imperialisms abroad. Or start conversation about DNC and Biden-family corruption...
You're doing exactly what Matt called out: You smear the "tough on China" cause with guilt by association by saying it relies on purported "lunatics" like Falun Gong or comes from "war mongers" like Pompeo and Cotton. You're suggesting that the cause cannot be right or legitimate, because these people you don't like support it.
That's not sound reasoning. A tough stance on China is either right or wrong, regardless of who else supports it.
And there's no way to avoid the issue by "focusing" on democracy at home. Choices have to be made. We're either going to have a tough or an open trading policy with China. Which should it be? Do we allow them to keep expanding their territory by creating artificial islands in the South China Sea, or do we push back? Do we take a supportive position on Taiwan, or signal that Taiwan is on its own? Do we provide assurances of engagement to our Asian partners who are concerned about China's rise, or do we pull back? We have to choose.
You imply that some of my facts are wrong because they may come from the "lunatics" of Falun Gong (presumably you're referring to the Epoch Times, which I don't read). Can you specify which facts you think are wrong? And by the way, which is more "lunatic"--Falung Gong, which to my knowledge has never hurt a soul? Or the Communist Party of China?
But which assertions are fiction and fabrications? If you can't or won't specify, I fear no one can believe you when you say criticism of China is always welcome.
But which assertions are fiction and fabrications? If you can't or won't specify, I fear no one can believe you when you say criticism of China is always welcome.
China has invited international observers to Xinjiang to disprove the genocide. It's strange that those who rant about "genocide" in China tend to ignore what the Saudis are doing in Yemen, described by UN observers as "the worst humanitarian crisis".
With the complete support of the US, a policy begun by Obama and continued by Trump, who even went so far as to veto a bill passed by congress that included ending our logistical support for the Saudis in Yemen.
Biden did end that support, but only for "offensive" operations, and weapons, which in D.C. speak could be defined very narrowly.
Everyone saw the CCP boot come down on Hong Kong last year. Were all those young people protesting, many of whom have now been rounded up and shipped away somewhere, agents of the American deep state?
It's not my practice to question people's intentions, and that's rarely a useful exercise. But I have difficulty with people who blanketly deny CCP human rights abuses, or suggest America is just as bad or worse. Come on.
For over 30 years I've been telling people I know that buying stuff made in The People's Republic of China, would benefit them short term but was a long term loser, something we've all come to realize, now that it's too late. For that, I was scoffed at.
Blaming the Chinese for our collective short term greed and selfishness may feel good, but it's we who are the problem, both as consumers and especially our political and economic elites who made the Chinese economic miracle come to pass sooner than it would have on its own. During these last 30 years, I've met at least 10 people who did business with the Chinese, and while they admitted the Chinese stole their intellectual property rights etc., they to a man said the market was too big to pass up, and that such practices were just a cost of doing business. Their only concern, one they wouldn't admit, was to do business in a place with next to no environmental standards and low wages, all to increase short term profits.
The obvious conceit of the US decision to open up trade with the Chinese was that they would forever be content to play second fiddle to us, happily making little plastic doodads for us, a decision clearly grounded in both racism and US exceptionalism. Fact is, the Chinese played us; taking the long term approach, while we pursued our typical what's in in for me right now approach to life.
The Chinese are an economic, not military challenge to us, a fact our elites and too many citizens just can't seem to quite grasp, accustomed as we are to militaristic solutions, ironic, given that the current US population has an historic low level of people who have actually served, or would do so. Our only chance to be able to compete with the Chinese is to end our failed and in vain attempt to militarily garrison the world, something we have neither the right or ability to accomplish, as our dismal post WWII war record so clearly attests, and a record that will only grow worse as the US share of world GDP shrinks with each decade.
Our salvation will come in realizing our limitations, both in the right to act and the ability to do so, to forget being a world dominating military and having just enough to be a regional power, with emphasis on defending the country, not making the world safe for the multinational corporations who own our government, to do business where and when they want.
We are no one to point the finger at other nations, especially given our horrific record of wars of choice, of punishing, near genocidal sanctions on nations we've attacked, killing half a million children in Iraq after Gulf War I, the devastation we've fueled in Syria, followed by yet more sanctions, Libya and Yemen. The Chinese are no saints, but the last time their military fought was a border skirmish with Vietnam in 1979; if only we could make such a claim.
"The Chinese are an economic, not military challenge to us"
I remember how baffled I was when hearing of the huge military threat China posed for the US. It was quite awhile back, they had 1 rather unimpressive aircraft carrier, ONE, and the rest of the Navy was lackluster to put it gently. Their air force wasn't that much better. What the hell did these people think they were going to do? China did have a huge numbers advantage, but OK, now what are they to do with their millions of soldiers? Projecting power half-way round the world? Against the US who can still fuck them on their home turf now? It was ludicrous. Then you think about the decades of propaganda about the threat posed by the USSR and what a Potemkin Village that turned out to be. I can see the Soviet Potemkins struggling to keep rebuilding and repainting what is nothing but a rotting façade while the US intelligence and military Potemkins serve as basically photoshop artistes and script doctors.
With our ME follies winding down, Shock and Awe a resounding failure, the MIC had to find someone to scare the bejeezus out of ignorant Americans, so they've selected the Chinese and Russia for that purpose to keep the useless gravy train of military spending alive.
Instead of actually planning to fight them, we would lose far too many personnel and equipment in such wars, the whole point is to simply identify a "threat" and then spend money on weapons that would theoretically oppose them, without ever being used. In reality, as long as the weapons are bought, the Mission Is Accomplished, especially given that some of them , the F-35 most obviously, are pieces of shit, more suited to impress US crowds at Super Bowl flyovers lasting 10 seconds that actually faring well in combat. A few years back, the F-35 went up against the F-16 in aerial combat, using lasers instead of weaponry for the kill shot, and lost 16 of 17 dogfights.
The irony of all this is that our political elites, the advocates of endless US militarism despite its woeful post WWII record, are nearly to a man people who never served, and if they were old enough, actively avoided doing so during Vietnam, sort of a congress made up of Marion Morrisons.
Those of us who have served, especially been in combat, know what war is really like, how futile it is, especially in wars like those of the last 19 years, where there is no military solution, as the problem is cultural/political, something no amount of high tech weapons can resolve, and that the generals, who so impress our elected representatives with their rows of brightly colored ribbons, most of which are nothing more than Boy Scout badges, are as incompetent as they are.
We are squandering our resources developing weapons to "counter" the PRC as meanwhile they continue their economic policy of investments in tomorrow's technologies, making loans and trade deals in resource rich countries, controlling the shipping ports of the world and behaving far more intelligently than we are.
We should ask the USSR what good all their weapons did them when their economy collapsed, but then, we're Americans, the exceptional nation, with nothing to learn.
"to scare the bejeezus out of ignorant Americans" I think they're the actual target of the shock and awe, I certainly was constantly shocked and awed by the stupidity, the carnage and the waste, the massive waste in so many different varieties.
"as long as the weapons are bought, the Mission Is Accomplished" that's the "photoshop artistes and script doctors" whole raison d'etre. With the USSR threat exposed as a paper tiger, why didn't the military budget plummet, and stay plummeted? There's always going to be the next boogey man, we got it in the form of terrorism, specifically Islamic terrorism, that massive existential threat that had killed no one on US soil before 9/11 but then required even more military buildup than the Soviet threat. It's pathetically easy to scare folks with irrational BS, they should be more afraid of their bathtubs.
When he was captured by the Americans, Herman Goering, who apparently was a guy you couldn't help but like on a personal level, was asked by them how it was that the Germans, so cultured and advanced could do what they did by following the Nazi program of hate, and he replied it had nothing to do with being German or Nazi, that such a thing could happen in any country, because while ordinary people naturally would not choose to go to war if it was their decision, they would also blindly put their faith in a leader who could convince them that out there was someone who would harm them unless they allowed such a leader to do what he felt necessary to protect them.
The US response to 9-11 made that claim a correct one. As the years went by, I would ask supporters of those wars, why, if the Muslim threat is so overwhelming, they simply didn't just buy guns and blow people away just like we do on the regular, a tactic that couldn't be foiled as it requires nothing but a few bucks and the willingness to kill and be killed.
The upshoot of all this has been a surveillance state that we were told was aimed at terrorists, but even those on the right who once supported such programs, now realize all too late that it was always meant for all of us. A people who give up their liberty for supposed security deserve and get neither, as Benjamin Franklin said over 250 years ago.
"The US response to 9-11 made that claim a correct one."
To me, what we've seen with Trump and his supporters makes that case to a far greater extent, and is much scarier. Repeatedly, I was astounded at how quickly and how thoroughly folks could blind themselves into passionately believing absurdities, which then fueled equally passionate hate and acceptance of obvious cruelties. How close did we come to something similar to the Nazis in Germany? It's still going on, look at the 1/6 deniers. What's at the root of this is a mindset, a personality type, those who are authoritarian, those whose nature is to "blindly put their faith in a leader". It's far more common in conservative types which makes this recent crap coming from the left more disconcerting.
I actually liked "The Quiet Man" more than those two, though "The Shootist" was good, too. Whenever I want a laugh, I'll tune in to one of his movies, to see one of the most wooden and lifeless humans ever to have makeup applied to his face and words put into his mouth prance around before a camera.
It may be pathetic, but I do get a kick out of reminding his fans that their hero deserted his wife and two small boys to shack up with the lefty bisexual, Marlene Dietrich, prior to WWII, and chose fame and her pussy over serving his country. I might have done the same, but I wouldn't have gone around afterwards dissing anyone who opposed any of our wars he was eventually too old to avoid fighting in.
I exaggerate for effect. RED RIVER is good too, but IMO that is primarily due to John Ireland scene-stealing. When it came out, John Ford was alleged to have been furious with Howard Hawks for squeezing a good performance out of Wayne; "I never knew the big son of a bitch could act!"
It is a great line, though I wonder how old you have to be to get it? I'm afraid I have a fondness for [or guilty pleasure?] "Rio Lobo" and "El Dorado", weirdly, they're almost the same movie.
EL DORADO is a remake of RIO BRAVO. RIO LOBO is a remake of EL DORADO, thereby being the 2nd remake of RIO BRAVO. Do not confuse either with John Ford's RIO GRANDE, in which Ben Johnson and Harry Carey Jr. act circles around John Wayne.
I am not enough of an aeronautics waffentwerp to tell if you are being sarcastic here, although I suspect that you are. If I got trolled, I got trolled.
Nope, no sarcasm at all. To your point, the F-35 isn’t much of of a dog fighter, not can it carry much in the way of ordnance. But it is stealthy, so it goes in first, clears up some pesky stuff and makes way for the F-15 to come in with a massive weapons load. You’re original comment is spot-on. I’m just your wing man here. 😎
"now what are they to do with their millions of soldiers? Projecting power half-way round the world?"
To your point, I think, but China doesn't seem to be particularly interested in projecting military power globally, unlike the US.
"Against the US who can still fuck them on their home turf now?"
This is... to put it lightly... an interesting proposition. Are you taking wagers?
In the event of a US amphibious invasion/land war against the PRC, I know where I'm putting my money. The vaunted US military has been unable to beat barefoot Afghan hillbillies for 20 years.
From what I've gleaned at looking at the US military's recent wars, which are boutique at best, and on my own experience in Vietnam, there seems to be a sense of unreality among their thinking. This is reflected in slogans like, "we never leave a man behind." BS. If you're in real combat, with forces comparably equal in firepower, you do what you need to do save the main force, even when it requires leaving behind any number of people, either wounded, or as cover for your retreat. Of course, In WWII"s Eastern front, that meant entire divisions or even armies were sacrificed.
My hope is we never enter a real war, but if we do, the shock of real casualties would be an eyeopener for this country.
The military learned how important it was to keep reality out of the press after Vietnam. They don't appear to have any qualms about blowing away reporters now and then. It's pathetic how little 'journalists' have fought for Manning and Assange.
Oh, I don't disagree with anything you've said, and trying to invade China would be folly times near infinity, for one thing, their numbers would matter in such a case, plus there's nothing short of a plethora of shittons of ways it would be insanity. [Well fuck me, I just read about Ellsberg's new documents and fuck me, a plethora of shittons of insanity probably isn't enough to deter some of these crazy fucks] All I said was we could fuck them up, and that we could do quite well even without nukes. Their response, should they deem it necessary, would necessarily involve nukes though, so ... It was only meant to be a comparison exposing how ludicrous it was to believe them to be a huge military threat.
Vietnam: (possibly infected with Wilsonian STD from prolonged and undesired contact with U.S.) "Too much genocidin', Pol Pot, you gots to go"
China: "Nah, he's our guy, leave him alone"
The Beltway Experts continue to warn about the Extreme Danger of Monolithic Global Communism, or Terrorism, or Evilism, or whatever. I continue to laugh.
Yup. A very real-time example of this is how you have the USA pointing fingers at China saying "they were responsible for the virus" and you have China saying "the USA are responsible for the virus". And the crazy thing? They're both right.
China is a modern day horror-show that we all need to get straight on. When they take over, concepts like "liberal" and "conservative" will be very old news indeed. Just ask Hong Kong or the Uighurs.
Stop the fucking bullshit!!!! You are fucking reading fucking Matt Taibbi! You cannot be so fucking stupid and gullible. Or you are a fucking useless no-good troll. Shush under the bridge!!!
Not at all. I don't agree with your post promoting the State Department propaganda, but I've not declared you a troll yet.
You become a troll when you knowingly post bullshit. And Taibbi readers - one would think - generally don't. So, the threshold here is lower for such proclamations.
Correct. So do you want to try defending your response to Parkito above now? Perhaps you’ve calmed down a bit and can actually give a reasonable response this time rather than the juvenile bile you chose to spew?
<<When they take over, concepts like "liberal" and "conservative" will be very old news indeed>>
I thought this was the point of this article by MT? It didn't require a Chinese invasion. The US elites did it to themselves.
The US government is visibly inept, corrupt, and tottering. While it pains me to direct ire at my fellow commenters, the last trick the elites have left in their book is to blame "external interference" by "foreign powers," and some of you are still lapping up that sweet, sweet syrup.
The PRC didn't outsource American jobs. American corporations did that, and China was like, "Yeah, OK, sure, we can make some money." This is a far cry from "CHINA IS TRYING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!" Look to greed at home before blaming China, Russia, or anyone else for your domestic problems.
Hey, I got an idea. I think it's pretty good one. Don't dismiss it out of hand. It just may work.
Why don't you go to China and spread your jizz wide there instead of spewing it here? That way the superior freedumb traits that are missing from the Chinese gene pool will be restored!
I could help you with the ticket, I know you'd need that.
It pains me very much that the fake 'wokism' is replacing the real ideals of the left, liberal ideas. I wonder if this is a response to the growing extremism on the right as well.
Hard to disagree with the assessment of the coming neo-feudalism. Or has it come already? When the government mandates the richest man on the planet gets $10B for his pet rocket project, what are we to do?
"I wonder if this is a response to the growing extremism on the right as well."
Anyone's perceptions are, well, their perceptions, but if anything I think the US "right" has greatly softened over the past ~15 years; one of the most encouraging developments I have seen in both online and IRL discourse is the rise of the antiwar "right." It may have had something to do with the husbands, wives, daughters and sons of traditionally conservative folks getting killed for no visible purpose.
The "woke/cancellation" craze now reminds me of nothing as much as the post-9/11 GWB "with us or against us" dogma. Those were ugly times. I can only imagine if Twitter had been invented in 2002.
That's a good observation. Indeed, the right must've softened to a significant degree. After all, the same-sex marriage progressed at a lightening speed.
At the same time, maybe there is polarization happening on the right as well. Maybe it's a smaller fraction now, but it is probably more extreme.
And the wokism could just as well be another mind-fuck from the PTB. :) Who benefits? <g>
Conflating leftism and liberalism is dangerous: It's true that liberals have leaned left in recent history, but leftism in its purer form - at least in our time after Robespierre and Marx - is not liberal at all. On the contrary, it's a fanatical creed of trying to make a new society, a new man, and it thinks it knows just how to do it. Add a heaping dose of the resentful egalitarianism that's part and parcel of modern leftist ideals and you get something very nasty.
Modern left-liberalism is a child of that French Revolutionarist spirit of constant progress, and that emotional heritage is exactly why it's being eaten alive by wokeness: They're built the same, but one values a certain degree of toleration for heretics, the other wants to burn them.
Liberalism is, at heart, a set of procedures of conduct for people who already have ideals and worldviews. It itself is thin gruel for sustaining a culture, and requires vehement assertiveness to uphold. SDly it tends to promote a yielding attitude because of its own live and let live tenets.
You’d think so but I’ve seen comments from communists (and my husband witnessed personally) that think the Uygher Muslim camps aren’t real. No one trusts any news and thus they don’t believe that the communist party is doing any human rights atrocities.
Absolutely no evidence of Uygher Muslim camps. All the sources are ridiculous and lead back to one far right blogger. Of course China is guilty of human rights abuses; they are an authoritarian country. So are we. Let's concentrate on OUR humans right abuses.
"The US State Department has previously described China's actions in Xinjiang as a genocide, and the parliaments of the UK, Canada, Netherlands, and Lithuania have passed resolutions making the same declaration."
Apply my statements to my behavior here? Of course. That's exactly what I do - I question silly information from the State Department regurgitated by gullible concerned citizens.
Sorry, but the only evidence for Uygher genocide comes from (1) Adrian Zenz, a literal Christian fascist, and (2) a US-government-backed "human rights" group. Anyone who has the intellect of an elementary school child should be able to immediately repudiate the comically inaccurate and incorrect claims in Zenz's paper.
As for whether or not you believe the US government is actually promoting "human rights" abroad – if you do, then maybe you'll also be amenable to the claim that there are WMDs in China. Perhaps you think we should start a war there? You know, just to make sure we spread "freedom" and "democracy"?
"The US State Department has previously described China's actions in Xinjiang as a genocide, and the parliaments of the UK, Canada, Netherlands, and Lithuania have passed resolutions making the same declaration."
Cool, your article does exactly nothing to counter my statement. It cites both Zenz and HRW, in fact. The only other evidence it gives is the opinion of the US State Department and a few other "experts". And, again, if you believe the State Department, I have some WMDs in China for you to find.
You said that the evidence of genocide only comes from two specific sources. The article clearly refuted that. So it actually does everything to counter your statement. Care to try again?
Sasha, instead of calling people imbeciles and throwing around a bunch of curse words, why don't you CONVINCE others that what you are saying is correct? You seem to get very angry that people speak the truth of the Chinese genocide against the Uighurs, which is now very well documented by Western media. You react like someone who is PAID to react that way.
What if you’re wrong? There were people who denied that the Holocaust was real back then as well. Are you willing to support a totalitarian fascistic regime that we know censors its population?
Use your brain instead of listening to lefty propaganda. I was like you, I thought the left wing media wasn’t lying and then I left and saw how much it lies.
Haven’t you figured it out by now? The “progressives” (aka communists) support Palestine because it’s supported by Iran because Iran is supported by China. You’re essentially watching communist propaganda when you watch any progressive media.
Democracy Now lost its credibility when it started advocating for the destruction of art.
Your first paragraph deserves some sort of award for sheer lunacy and is, in its way, the equal of what Matt's article covers regarding the "thinking" of the elite of this country.
It could just be that those who speak out on the Israelis' subjugation of the Palestinians are concerned about the human rights of a Semitic people whose subjugation and displacement by Israel continues and accelerates, all with the de facto support of the US hegemon. How it would have amused Hitler to see an innocent Semitic people, the Palestinians, be the scape goat for the collective guilt of the white Christian world's historical mistreatment of Jews.
There’s photos of the camps and people’s heads shaved waiting to be put on trains. There’s also first hand accounts of what they do to the women in these internment camps. Why don’t you go try looking for it? You expect everyone to do the work for you.
Those photographs have been proven to be other populations entirely and were taken in other countries. Do you know how to do a Google image search? Again, we have ample evidence of our own camps filled with children, and our own sexual abuse. How about you concentrate on those?
"The US State Department has previously described China's actions in Xinjiang as a genocide, and the parliaments of the UK, Canada, Netherlands, and Lithuania have passed resolutions making the same declaration."
Yes, and those same "sources" say Guaido is the real president of Venezuela. Do you have the slightest inclination of how governments and the media work? Have you ever learned to ask yourself "who benefits"?
Well, certainly China benefits when people like you do all the work of defending them, just like they benefited when our mainstream media suppressed any discussion of the lab leak hypothesis. Does that answer your question?
LOL--horrible analogy. The lab leak hypothesis was suppressed by scientists, and the media followed suit. Most scientists STILL disbelieve the lab leak hypothesis and are duking it out with the scientists who think a leak might be possible all over social media. A lab leak is still the least likely scenario. It is not at all a matter of "defending China." In fact, if there was a lab leak, the US is just as guilty as the Chinese since the work at the lab was a joint US/China project. Someone has not done his homework. And your underlying assumption seems to be that everyone should think China is "the enemy" as a baseline belief. I guess that old propaganda has worked well on you.
Just wow. The US pays the dissidents in Hong Kong, just as it paid the Tiannamen Square dissidents. That is a matter of fact. Our government has hosted the Hong Kong dissident leaders in Washington. In both instances, the Chinese police have been remarkably restrained, especially in Hong Kong, and it is actually the police who have been beaten, burned and killed by the dissidents. There is video of dissidents beating up innocent people on the street and in shops. In neither case was the general population sympathetic to the dissidents--they were thuggish hooligans. I have gotten NONE of my information from the Chinese government, but from independent Western reporters. The Chinese government is of course authoritarian and corrupt, but our government is the terrorist and bully of the world.
Do you think genocide requires mass graves? Perhaps you need to educate yourself on the legal definition of the term, then come back and tell me if you still stand by that statement.
Regarding media criticism, of course we need to be skeptical. But that doesn’t mean we can just dismiss any media report we don’t like either, which is what you appear to be doing. You’re not actually demonstrating any critical thinking when you do that, just ignoring what you don’t like.
On the second point - that's exactly what was done. Every media report on the subject is sourced by one or two entities. And they have been debunked. Read The Grayzone.
I don't know what's going on in China, nor do I have any way of finding out, but when you're deriving your information from official government and media outlets I suggest you call consider the sources, e.g. the US State Department, the parliaments of the UK, Canada, Netherlands, and Lithuania, and the BBC. I see no reason, based on a lifetime of experience, to believe in any of them. Maybe "Skeptic" above should try being a bit more skeptical.
Sure, but are you applying that same skepticism to the Chinese government. Of course all governments lie, but in a situation where you've got the CCP denying everying, and several other governments disagreeing with them, and you're not in a position to get the facts for yourself, which way are you going to tend to lean?
What I find stunning in all of this is that people are (correctly) pointing out the need to be skeptical of our own governments and media, but then acting as though somehow the CCP and Chinese News Media outlets are in any way trustworthy or reliable!
I think you are projecting a bit here. Many of those who express the sheer disbelief into the infowars propaganda spewing out of the Western 'intelligence' services (by the way of mass media) are not expressing an opinion on what Chinese government says. It would be highly unlikely that Chinese government doesn't lie.
Interestingly enough, though, I can't say I've seen Chinese lies about the US and the way people and dissidents/whistleblowers are treated here...
How credulous one needs to be to read all the suppositions in the article and come to a solid conclusion? How can anyone determine the ethnicity of the people - especially when they are blindfolded?
Even if what the video purports to show is true - is this the proof of a genocide?
"A major point of agreement between honest liberals and conservatives who converge here can be the Chinese Communist Party. Aren't these things we can agree on?"
The GloboCaps and their court jesters-looking at you NBA and Disney-went all in on the idea that opening Chinese markets would lead to human rights and government transparency/democracy. Now that this idea has blown in their faces rather spectacularly, all they can do is engage in PR spin and sanctimony.
I’ve lived in China for six years. China has nothing in common with ‘Cultural left’ .
China derangement syndrome. With so much shit in this country why constant references to China. How does China affect your life? Why look across the globe for enemies. Don’t worry about their human rights. Ask why Assange is rotting in prison just because he reported on American war crimes. Ask why your government destroyed Libya and is helping to destroy Yemen. Ask about human rights in Gaza.
I also wish there was more of a political consensus in opposition to China. It's quite alarming that our long-term political and economic rival practices and promotes an authoritarian government and social structure antithetical to liberal values.
But as a brief riff on a minor point of yours, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is a disaster. Corruption is the cost of doing business in many emerging economies, unfortunately, and its stringent penalties (despite how unpredictably and randomly enforced they are) have deterred economic linkages with developing countries that, cash-poor and lacking other partners to turn to, are now indebted to China as you describe.
It's a tough issue, but FCPA was passed after it was discovered in the 70s that Lockheed Corp had bribed the Prime Minister of Japan, and another defense contractor had bribed Indonesian officials to buy military equipment they had not even planned to buy or seemingly wanted. It was out of control. If you don't control it, your multinationals can foul up your foreign policy and contribute to the mess in developing countries.
FCPA is actually "moderate" compared to the British bribery law, because FCPA allows routine bribes to speed up nondiscretionary processes ("grease payments"), while UK does not.
But yeah, one consequence is that corrupt officials in developing countries will deal with China instead of us so they can get their sugar.
There are potentially marginal reputational benefits to the FCPA, and other countries may have more onerous variants, but I find those benefits intangible and likely make only an immaterial contribution to whether or not a country acts toward us in a way they otherwise wouldn't. First, I don't know how much the FCPA deters such abuses. Bribery is already illegal in Japan. These high-profile instances of corruption likely involve grift that wouldn't be deterred by additional legal consequences (especially given erratic enforcement). Indonesia and other counties have since been pressured into arms transactions with the US (often for the sake of maintaining a relationship with a military patron), which periodically may cause domestic blowback. But, even if the FCPA were to deter some of these fiascos, those reputational costs are a drop in the bucket. Considering the myriad factors that contribute to or detract from our credibility and that would factor in another state's actions towards the US.
However, the downstream chilling effect against investment in developing countries has harmed both our contact with developing countries (which over time could have been a liberalizing influence), and those countries development trajectories themselves. The harms are significant and, as far as I'm aware, quantitative studies have demonstrated them beyond a reasonable doubt (See: Spalding, "UNWITTING SANCTIONS: UNDERSTANDING ANTIBRIBERY LEGISLATION AS ECONOMIC SANCTIONS AGAINST EMERGING MARKETS," 62 Fla. L. Rev. 351, 427-407, 2010). Given the speculative and intangible nature of the benefits, I would asssess the costs are far greater.
I teach FCPA, and the arguments for and against are interesting. But in my view, they are purely academic. It is simply inconceivable that Congress would repeal FCPA and announce to the world that US multinationals are henceforth free to bribe foreign officials as they see fit in order to win contracts. I don't think that would be wise, but it doesn't really matter. It's never going to happen.
It's quite difficult to repeal or change legislation in general, and there is not a strong political coalition advocating for FCPA repeal at the moment (and truth be told it's not at the very top of my political agenda either). But that's a fairly fatalistic attitude. We should have healthy and honest debate, when we can, about what policy would be best in theory; gradually, depending on the relatively unpredictable shifts of the political winds over time, who knows what will happen? I guarantee you there will be forthcoming events over the next fifty years that appear out of left field and are deemed by conventional wisdowm to be a hell of a lot more inconceivable than repealing an often-criticized law few outside of specialists, industry and political insiders, and academics have heard of.
Leftist media outlets have become so doctrinaire that they can no longer even understand how people who disagree on some issues but agree on others can have a conversation.
But they also change the doctrine almost daily! There isn’t even a consistency to the lunacy that us ordinary folk can fight. So I just laugh at the absurdity. Which is fine until I talk to my daughter who gets all her news and opinions from these idiots.
It all started because the DNC was incapable of admitting that they blew the 2016 election, not because of Russia, not because of the Koch brothers, not because of Bernie but because of themselves. They still cannot admit it. That is what is called Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Yup. If you nominate a thoroughly unlikable harpy, who thinks it'd be a good idea to take August off during the campaign, and you reap the consequences.
Dude, people need to cool it with the Koch Bros. boogie man. Those guys are open border Chamber of Commerce (Capital L) Libertarians, they HATED Trump! Sheesh! I swear the Koch’s are the left’s version of George Soros!
Grim take, and I'm not saying you're wrong, but I wonder exactly how robust the "Biden coalition" is. I always thought the DNC made a strategic error by pushing Hillary over Joe in 2016. 2022 and 2024 will tell the tale, I guess.
I agree, but i think they made another big error in picking Harris for VP over, say, Cory Booker. Another one who couldn't make it to the primaries, but i would have felt a lot more comfortable with Booker when Joe packs it in than Harris. Underestimated, methinks. Wrong kind of underwear though.
I know he's disliked. I just can't help but like the guy. Only corporate Dem that i would have voted for in '20. But, identity stuff, it was Time For a Woman.
DNC more interested in donations than winning elections. that is the problem. DNC cannot imagine winning without donors. Winning means obtaining money, not votes. If votes counted they would completely change their platform. As it is they pretend to be progressive, where the votes are, and then stick it to progressives. It just doesn't work.
hat's sad is you can replace DNC with RNC and it remains true. Well except now the RNC is beholden to ex-President Ass Clown, a gifted grifter in his own right.
"They’re wrong on the ideology, but right about one thing: they’ve created a brand of imperious elite politics so revolting that it has the potential to unite even this Balkanized wreck of a country. If they keep this up, liberals and conservatives may start talking for real, and maybe even fix a thing or two."
Yes. And if this happens, you, Matt Taibbi, will be a significant part of the story. This site is ground zero.
I dunno... I have a hard time believing that people are going to wake up. Maybe the normies but that’ll be because of the shitshow that is Biden, not because of political discourse.
I was a lefty that switched and even my own mother refuses to consider that the Dems are the ones that are racist and authoritarian even though I give her examples. The only friend who stayed my friend after my switch refuses to look at anything I give her for fear of becoming extremely fearful and anxious. Yet she still votes bluenomatterwho.
I don’t see it happening. Many people are afraid to admit that everything they believe is a lie. They’re also afraid of losing all their friends like I did.
Sorry for the black pill. This is just what I see in my own life and from the interactions with my husband’s family who is also diehard Dem.
I went from left to right after 25 years of leftist adulthood. In my case, I saw some stuff up close that shook me (and then saw how the media wildly and willfully misreported it).
As long as we're alive and kicking, change is possible.
I am honestly heartened by the people of goodwill from different ends of the spectrum who meet here on this site to chew things over and figure things out. We have some of the usual assholes spouting the latest talking points, but that's not the prevailing spirit.
Agreed. Let us all thank the deities of our choice for Substack. The monoculture is beginning to crack, at least a bit. And there are multiple Substacks where people can have smart conversations that move beyond the logic of insufficient dichotomies.
Interesting, my entire extended family is red red red (with the exception on one person and me who is center, purple) and we never, ever talk about politics. My family just shrugs things off, like, no biggie. Sorry, but I live in a college town and so am around tons of blues and conservatives are 1000X easier to be around these days!
Everyone has their own experience. I have a family member who’s a Trump supporter and clearly deeply, deeply frustrated right now. We all do our best to avoid talking about politics around him but ever so often he randomly explodes, starts saying things that are hard to ignore, and begins asking us questions which, let’s say, are very difficult to answer without touching off controversy.
And once you get online and start talking with conservatives, the lid really seems to come off. I’m kind of trying to stop at this point, because I’m tired of being told over and over again that I’m a “communist” / “not real American” and should be deported, or worse.
when you start to question your politics, you tend to try to talk about your feelings and thoughts to people you know and trust. Right now, everyone on the left is so totalitarian that if you even tried that simple act, you will probably be X'ed from the life of anyone of that political bent.
I bailed on social media about a year after Obama was elected due to a consensus among my liberal friends that only they are allowed to talk politics, and it was deep and nasty. There was zero room for any dissent (the highest form of patriotism!) outside the parameters of the left.
Right now my best friend and I won't/can't talk about politics, even though we used to for hours on end. Even when we agree on things, there is just too much at risk for the friendship.
So, I’m not a Democrat, I’m on the actual left (let’s just say my politics are to the left of Bernie Sanders, but he was my candidate of choice in 2020). However, some of my friends here in Texas are Democrats, some are Republicans, some are libertarians, some are basically socialists like me. I’ve found that—in real life, away from the internet—people are quite reasonable, and frankly exhausted by politics. Maybe a lot of this boils down to individual experience. My friends and I disagree on a lot, but we care about each other too much to let that alienate us from our relationships. I think on some level we all understand two important truths: 1) We believe in each other’s fundamental goodness. I know my libertarian friends, for instance, are deeply involved in charitable donations of their money and time. We disagree intensely on the path to a just world for the working class, but I know that’s what they want. Some of my Democrat friends are still scared to visit me at my house, even though I’m vaccinated. But I know they’re just trying to do what they believe is right. There’s been such vast covid misinformation from all sides, who can blame anyone for distrusting institutions or the scientific clerisy when your family’s safety is on the line? I feel totally safe gathering with folks, that’s why I got the damn vaccine. But the point is, they’re good people doing their best in a chaotic world. 2) We also accept that we’re all captive to emergent social and institutional forces beyond our control. I don’t want to punish my liberal friends because I’m angry about the actions of their favored party’s leaders. What’s the point? They’re not responsible for, or capable of, abrogating the wickedness of power. They chose Biden because he felt like the least bad choice. Is it their fault they spent a lifetime believing that they could seek/find truth and reflections of reality from authoritative sources on the news? Naturally they believed Maddow when she said Russia was using Trump as a puppet. They’re wrong, but I understand the forces beyond their control that led them to think Russiagate was real. We hold fast to the universal human experience as much as possible. I wish more people were could do this. This country is hemorrhaging right now. If we actually want to save its life—not just scream and claw at each other until the US is a smoking crater—concessions, composure and restraint have to begin within personal relationships. It can be frustrating as hell, but worthwhile. Many times I’ve found my friends come around to my POV simply because I gave them space to express free of judgment. Historically I’ve never been a particularly complaisant gal, but I am seeing the tremendous remunerative value of what activist Lawrence Goodwyn called “ideological patience.”
I completely understand your frustration and depression. May I offer you a white pill? I have been in the same situation -- to the point that I refused to talk about politics anymore because it was ruining our relationship. Our relationship improved because of it. Then, one day, she randomly started bringing things up like Bill Gates' actions overseas and Prescott Bush because of a conversation she had about "truth" with somebody she really respected that told her some things to look up. It blew my mind.
This has been a 4+ year frustration for me that is finally crumbling. All is not lost!
I hear you...losing friends over politics is the WORST. For me it wasn't dem v repub so much as daring to ask a "friend" last year if I could visit in person. I still struggle with fear over how much it's safe to reveal to people.
This is some of your best writing, Matt. Your irony and jokes help the medicine go down...especially when discussing such dispiriting topics as ideological bullying and the widespread demise of free speech, debate, and objective journalism. For instance, this:
“ The American liberalism I knew growing up was inclusive, humble, and democratic. It valued the free exchange of ideas among other things because a central part of the liberal’s identity was skepticism and doubt, most of all about your own correctitude. Truth was not a fixed thing that someone owned, it was at best a fleeting consensus, and in our country everyone, down to the last kook, at least theoretically got a say. We celebrated the fact that in criminal courts, we literally voted to decide the truth of things.”
Those were the days, huh? On behalf of kooks everywhere, I hope we can pull it together and make your last paragraph come true.
It’s not about far left, it’s about deep blue. Neither party is about an ideology that can be described as part of a political spectrum. They’re just two teams with different color uniforms trying to win against each other.
It's a state of absolutism whether deep blue, far left doesn't really matter. The duopoloy has been running for decades, now the art of manipulation is just being perfected to a point of mastery. 2 minutes of hate would seem like a reprieve these days.
I disagree with that. The Trump wing of the Republican Party is ousting the neocons (like Liz Cheney) who are the warmongering globalists. There is an ideology on the right and its national populism. Unlike the left, the populists haven’t bowed down to the uniparty members in their party (neocon/neolib).
Cheney wasn’t given the boot for her ideology, it was because she didn’t show team spirit by closing ranks around Trump. The Republicans still have globalist/interventionalists like Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham in their coalition alongside nationalist/populists like Josh Hawley. It’s not about whether your philosophy matches Trump’s, it’s about whether the way you talk about Trump alienates his base. Their ideology is very much secondary to Team Red, which at the moment is synonymous with Team Trump.
Well Team Trump is much better than Team neocon. I’ll take the side that’s actually trying to purge the neo uniparty faction out of the Party. The progressives (who are supposed to be populist left) who vote in sync with the neolibs is the comparison I’m going with that you missed.
Your point is well taken but Trump ought to be credited for shining a light on the administrative state and how it conspires to undermine our faith in government.
There’s nothing populist about the people in the Democratic party who call themselves “progressive”, and they’re only vaguely pretending there is. And when it comes to those on either side whose ideology includes opposing the neverending war machine, it’s interesting to note that the losing coalition who tried to block the House’s blocking of Trump’s final-days move to withdraw from Afghanistan included Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz, both of whom have since been put on the chopping block. Don’t count on the Trumpies to reorient their party away from rubber stamping war. Trump escalated drone assassinations even more than Obama.
Lesser of two evils is still an evil.. I will take Bernie over either side fo the Republican party... Trump did not accomplish one thing that helped the poor and middle class other than entertain them. He did on the other hand accomplish what every Republican President but Bush1 have accomplished in my lifetime an that is growing the deficit by handing rich Americans a smaller tax bill...
Actions speak louder than words and Trumps actions PROVE he is and was a TOOL for the rich...
If you join any of the currently available teams you're swallowing one lie or another. Parsing the difference is part of how you convince yourself that another of the teams doesn't suck. The smart bet right now is being a free agent.
Trump was used like Steve Bannons tampon, to think he actually is anything other than a narcissistic, illiterate, self serving bully would be a stretch. The right has formed this ideology out of self preservation, convenience and nothing more, they would invade as many countries and transfer as much wealth as their base would accept, we know this because they already did it for decades.
the wealth transfer has been ongoing. Look at the 2008 crisis. Obama rescued the banks.. Look who benefitted from this pandemic. The middle class has been shafted by the elites. When jobs and industries are moved off shore--to cheaper labor--and regulation, who benefits? Not the middle class. The corporate class benefits from open borders and offshoring our jobs and industries. Massive wealth transfer by Democrats and uniparty. Identity politics is necessary to distract from this reality.
Absolutely. Culture war is the only thing that prevents something truly dangerous: class war. Expect lots and lots of culture war in the coming years, even (especially?) if it contributes to racial strife that gets out of hand.
Trump was a useful idiot for the right-wing elites. They discarded him as soon as they could. He was hated so much by both right and left because he sometimes told the truth.
SPOT ON... they would invade as many countries and transfer as much wealth as their base would accept, we know this because they already did it for decades."
BlueMAGA seems to be mad at Greenwald because he dares to question Democrats’ behavior especially regarding civil liberties. The Daily Beast article apparently ignored the obvious point that Greenwald isn’t invited on CNN or MSNBC.
Greenwald is not right wing? He is in the business of getting clicks and he can get clicks from right wing partisan hacks by attacking the same flaws in the mainstream leftest media as exist on the mainstream rightest media... All he has to do is IGNORE the exact same flaws in right wing media and gets clicks from right wingers. $$$
Either that or right wing media does not push lies and conspiricy's to distract right wing viewers from the real issues of the time. Right?
Sasha - The purpose of corporate dick sucking media is to misinform voters and thus enable the powerful to screw those with less power. Misinformed voters is the problem.
Corporate media is one cause. Right wing media is another cause. In Hate Inc Matt slammed BOTH form of media for their lies. Since reading the book and joining this board he ONLY slams corporate media and their lies and virtually ignores the lies of right wing media. In turn I rarely see the lies of corporate media on these message boards but i constantly see the lies of right wing media repeated on these boards.
Correlation or causation. I am telling matt it appears to be the later...
True... But after 40yrs of growing income inequality where we are in the middle of the first generation of Americans to have less than their parents and the resulting anger and hopelessness in so many Americans negatively effected by growing income inequality Matt should state clearly that he is ONLY calling out right winger lies in warmonger and NOT in economic policy where they LIE daily and right wing voters believe their lies and vote for leaders that are screwing them economicaly while pandering to their identity politics
Hey grifter Matt! Hope you're making good use of the $50 you swindled from me a few weeks ago for your annual subscription. Come another 11 months you'll be swindling another $50 from me if you keep up your good work . . . er, I mean the carnival act you write. You should be proud since nary a penny has been swindled from me by the NY Times, Washington Post, The Daily Beast or the Intercept.
Nice :). Had to read this twice to catch your drift, because there are actual subscribers here who do nothing but complain about having paid good money to subscribe and demanding Matt pay them back. I won't mention the prime offender, because he actually contributes very good comments to other substacks.
I love Matt's thoughts and his wicked sense of humor. Also a big fan and subscriber of Glenn Greenwald. Getting ready to to subscribe to Andrew Sullivan. They need to be supported monetarily.
Agreed! There’s sooooo many Substacks I want to support but I’m just a middle class mom w/ 2 youngish kids and can’t really afford the monthly payments for all these! If I were a (wealthy coastal elite ((snicker)) ) I would do yearly subscription to all these guys. I think that’s what it’s going to take to prove to the MSM what the public wants and is willing to pay for!
Those are my three subscriptions. A really great trio to stay informed and to walk away from the bullshit game the elites would have us play into oblivion.
Even though I do not share all of Matt's political views, I have been a fan for years, and I believe this may be the most important piece he has ever authored. How did we reach the point where "journalists" have decided they need not report any news that might reflect poorly on their political party? Hate Trump all you want, but does that mean you will simply allow failing policies by the next administration to continue without question?
As a border state resident, I awoke this morning, to news that a woman at the border being actively raped, was saved by US agents in a helicopter. With spotlights and a bullhorn, they were able to stop the attack midway. This was hours after a 5 year old boy was left all alone, screaming in the dark, in the desert, by smugglers and a day after drowning migrants were pulled from the Rio Grande by Texas troopers. It is snake season in Texas, few leave their dogs outside, alone this time of year, unless they know the area is clear, but as a nation we are OK with kindergarders traversing the wild solo, in the middle of the night?
The abuse of women and children is bad enough, but there has also been virtually no coverage of the potential for terrorists accessing the US, via the southern border. Biden may be convinced white supremacists are the nation's biggest threat, I am not so sure. A former neighbor in Northern California expressed relief at moving, with fire season starting two months early this year. Conditions are the worst on record. Has no one considered that it would be easy pickings for half dozen terrorists to slip across the border, wait until August and then with nothing more than matchbooks, watch large swaths of California glow, while people perish and the entire US economy is thrown for a loop?
There are a multitude of other topics the media has decided to ignore. Crime, inflation, the origins of Covid, housing prices, Hunter Biden, etc. etc. A former professor use to say the amendments were not numbered by accident. Freedom of speech and the press were first because a democracy cannot survive without a free press to keep those in power honest. He never contemplated what happens when the press is no longer honest.
Per the transcript Baquet said- "...went from being a story about whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia and obstruction of justice to being a more head-on story about the president’s character. We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story." That story was race in general (not solely Trumps character, although that was part of it). I may be blinkered but that doesn't seem to me to be this -we'll make any crap up to bring him down approach - that is being suggested?
"We spent two years on the Russia story, it didn't turn out the right way, so now we'll spend the next two years arguing that racism is the central idea of the American experiment." If you can't see what's wrong with that reasoning, I don't know what to tell you.
Tell people to read or listen to John Ralston Saul two term head of PENN International who is about as good as it gets in understanding the role of the press in a neoliberal society. Unlike Chomsky Saul has no problem with the word neoliberal as former COO of PetroCanada when it was a crown corporation. Neoliberalism even as it is neither new nor liberal is a very descriptive word.
If that's in the transcript from the Slate article linked to - then I missed it and can't find it now. But yes if Baquet said that, it's terrible and wrong.
I think Matt was paraphrasing, but if you search "I have another question about racism" in your browser on the Slate article page, you can see Baquet's response to this staffers is essentially this idea.
The staffer asks, "Hello, I have another question about racism. I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting."
Baquet's response is summed up with: "And I do think that race and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the American story. Sometimes news organizations sort of forget that in the moment. But of course it should be. I mean, one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that. Race in the next year—and I think this is, to be frank, what I would hope you come away from this discussion with—race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story."
Then, down near the end of the transcript, Baquet talks about the Russia debacle as being "Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice?", which then goes on to infer that race issues were Chapter 2, "How do we grapple with all the stuff you all are talking about? How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years."
I hate that mudslinging works. It works because we only have two parties. Sling enough mud and there is one person left standing. If there were several parties, candidates would have to present ideas rather than just sling mud.
Aside from whether the pivot to race was a "get Trump" effort. What concerns me is the possibility that it was a decision about how to generate clicks to earn revenue. If RussiaGate was losing steam, did they seize on race as an opportunity to generate more "outrage porn" so they could stay in business?
I would definitely say if the 1619 thing was dreamt up mainly/solely as some form of Trump attack, that would be very cynical and very wrong (and it probably backfired). In many other areas he should have been held to account for his approach to race and deliberate inflammation of race relations. I will certainly try and view more critically how and when these media orgs - decide to hold account though.
Which race are you referring to? He was clearly unkind (to say the least) to Mexicans in relation to defending the southern border. But didn't the media conflate that to blanket Racism? And was the use of 1619 by NYT just another example of that conflation?
Totally open to that. What do you think I am blinkered about and what am I zealous about? I fully agree most large media organizations suffer groupthink, make mistakes and can be cynical about chasing view/readership. We know that. But when you are selling yourself as an alternative to them - making those attacks your
main brand - when you have so much else to offer - is what I am raising as an issue.
..."they’ve created a brand of imperious elite politics so revolting that it has the potential to unite even this Balkanized wreck of a country. If they keep this up, liberals and conservatives may start talking for real, and maybe even fix a thing or two."
If you have read what is in the Hunter Biden laptop, it is terrifying. The so-called leader of the so-called free world ran for president because his senile brain is so besotted with his now elderly drug addict son, that when his meth mouth kid threw a tantrum about getting blamed by the family, daddy ran for president. Sonny boy wants to go back into the arms of the gangsters running Ukraine, take all the drugs he wants, and f*@k all the prostitutes they send him, and make porn videos of himself. This is all terrifying that the hand on the button in the white house is that deranged.
It also proves that Hunter Biden acted as exactly the nepotist hotline to the white house that some suspected. It brings into question WTAF was the reason for the USA overthrowing that friendly government.
This horseshit is how THIRD WORLD banana republics run. No exaggeration.
I voted for the Obams/Biden team, twice (2nd time with grave misgivings. But at this point I say the Obama administration is when the USA became a banana republic.
I'm a consultant to several liberal social services and arts organizations, many of which are now dedicating time and money to rooting out white supremacy within their midst. It's lunacy. It's Communists under the bed hysteria. Do these people really think that Nazis founded a food bank? I can't tell who's a True Believer and who's just going along to get along, but my guess is that the number of True Believers is distressingly high. Of course, in a few years, they'll forget they ever thought such nonsense.
The bottom line is Matt and Greenwald just have more brains and integrity than other media liberals, so they see the idiocy and hypocrisy of the reactionary group-think press and they can't help but call it out. Fortunately being ostracized by a bunch of middle-brow herd animals probably doesn't sting very much, especially when you don't need them..
The class (and character) composition of the media has changed. If you get a bunch of rich, grade grubber, social climbing striver types from Columbia J-School, you're going to get the media we have now.
Well, they also have massive name recognition making them a lot less dependent on mainstream colleagues for career/job security, as can be seen by both thriving on Substack now. It's a lot harder to be courageous if being shunned by the industry really means you're out in the cold. Nothing against Taibbi or Greenwald - just saying there are a lot of factors involved in how viable being courageous is for an individual in a broader system.
Massive name recognition is a bit much. Cardi B has massive name recognition. Peyton Manning has massive name recognition. Greenwald and Taibbi are nerd boy journalists (said with the utmost affection), unknown to most of the great unwashed.
They do that to everyone who strays. "What has happened to you," etc. Just saw one of them doing it to Josh Rogin for having the temerity to question the pack's Covid origin myth. Freaking middle-school.
This is not to take anything away from them, but I think honest liberal journalists of their ilk were pretty common twenty years ago. Something bad has happened, and that breed has almost died out (or been hunted to near extinction) Matt has explained some pieces of how it happened. It's ominous for the country.
The Daily Caller/The Intercept drivel is difficult to read without vomiting but, remember, they are fully harnessed into DNC/CIA lying cabal -- their corrupt leadership are now millionaires (read about Intercept's Betsy Reed, Ryan Grim, James Risen or TYT's (Cenk and Ana) salaries....
“If they keep this up, liberals and conservatives may start talking for real, and maybe even fix a thing or two.“. Well said Matt. I’m of a conservative bent; and I love reading what you have to say. I know we would absolutely not agree on a lot of things, particularly when it comes to specific policies; however, we do have common cause on this recent journalistic absurdity! We SHOULD talk and maybe fix a thing or two 🙂
I'm on the right too, But the way I see it, we're in a fight now to save basic constitutional liberties and try to get control of the national security state, now completely run amok. Therefore, I think we need to set aside our differences on things like taxes and spending and unite with anyone who will join to preserve freedom, much as the Tories and Labour suspended their economic battles to form their unity government in World War II.
Exactly-the “right” and not GloboCaps both have an honest stake-and belief in-basic bedrock principles of American civic religion-the 1st Amendment, trial by jury, sanctity of an honest (and mouthy) press, etc, etc.
So you're opposed to Republican efforts (in Texas and many other states) to suppress voting, correct?
Almost every advanced nation requires voter ID, if that's what you're referring to. The ID should be free and easily accessible; if it's not, I'd push to make it easier. Vote by mail without verification is also not safe and not accepted globally. And no, not every effort in this direction is "voter suppression." Thanks for playing.
Vote by mail (not "without verification) has worked extremely well in Oregon for a couple of decades now. I recommend it highly.
There is one proviso: Oregon is a "clean" state; there is no tolerance for scandal, probably because not so long ago the state was very corrupt. If your state has a corruption problem, then vote-by-mail probably won't be any cleaner than what you have.
The ID is most definitely not "free and easily accessible" in the very states where efforts are underway to suppress voting.
Don't be a fool. The Republican fascists know exactly what they're doing.
There is nothing more racist then believing a person of a certain race is incapable of obtaining an ID. An ID we literally require to do everything from drive a car to buy alcohol to fly.
Indeed. Every person I know has an id. I have no clue where these people assume that minorities are unable to get one. They really think minorities are just that incapable. It is insane. That’s why I say they’re just lemmings repeating the Cathedral. Unless they’re really just that racist. I’d hate to believe it but maybe it’s true.
He didn't mention race...but you did. Telling.
Absolutely no one says that "a person of a certain race is incapable of obtaining an ID". No one has EVER said that!
It's a total straw-man argument.
But if you're POOR, you can have problems, like the dude in Houston I already posted about.
It's not race, it's economic status. And buying alcohol and flying are not rights guaranteed by the Constitution that you no doubt claim to believe in (but actually do not).
Are you capable of arguing your point factually rather than with Democrat talking points? Are you aware that the new Georgia voting law is in some ways less restrictive, and others no more restrictive, than the law already in place in Colorado? Just because red states are passing laws to make sure only legal votes are cast does not make them automatically "voter suppression."
They are designed to suppress the votes of non-citizens and the dear departed.
Revisions to voting laws have to be considered in context of existing law. If Georgians are used to certain voting procedures, and then find those procedures have been changed when they go to vote, their votes will not get counted.
I'm totally in favor of a nationwide system to eliminate these discrepancies.
Found the lemming who follows whatever the Cathedral tells him to regurgitate. You are not the resistance. You are just a useful idiot.
Nothing but fact-free insults. What a surprise.
Your employer requires an ID in order for you to work but that's not racist.
You need an ID to drive but that's not racist.
You need an ID to have a bank account but that's not racist.
You need an ID to collect welfare but that's not racist.
You need an ID to get married but that's not racist.
You need an ID to get a hotel room but that's not racist.
You need an ID to fly but that's not racist.
Considering how much more necessary these things are to living life, how come all of the sudden it is racist when it comes to voting?
You do understand that what Matt has been writing about is that it is Democrats who are behaving as fascists, not Republican's? Can you explain how censoring speech on big tech about the lab leak possibility or Hunter's laptop is not fascists?
The knee-jerk accusation that cleaning up voting registration rolls and ensuring that the vote is honest means one is a racist who wants to suppress the black vote is one of the stupidest arguments put forth by the party that prides itself on how smart it is. The overwhelming majority of blacks already can vote without any problems, and BTW, they also approve of voter ID by something like 80% . If you want to suppress the black vote, I cannot think of a more useless method for doing it. This is so darn lazy of you, try another conspiracy theory with some credibility to it.
Is there anything more racist than assuming darker skinned Americans are too stupid to get an ID for which they cannot live in society without?
they are free and accessible.
I can't speak for every state, but I live in Georgia, which of course just passed one of these laws, and it is indeed free and easily accessible to get a state issued ID here. So what you're saying is false, at least here. Are you referring to other states? If so, can you point me to which one(s)?
Multiple problems with your argument:
A) A lot of the developed world has vote by mail: Canada, the UK, Germany, Austria and Switzerland all have vote by mail, and they work.
B) It is voter suppression though. It'd be one thing to pass strict voter ID requirements, but the GOP is doing so much more to suppress the vote, not just constraining mail-in ballots: curtail early voting on weekends, prohibiting election officials from accepting grants from non-governmental organizations, banning “line-warming” activities such as passing out water and blankets to voters standing in long lines, eliminating straight-ticket voting, and in Texas, before it was cut out, a provision in the Senate bill would have strictly regulated where Texas’s largest counties — the ones that include big cities dominated by Democrats — are allowed to locate polling places. Had this provision passed, it was expected to shut down many polling places in Democratic areas with a large share of minority voters.
So it's voter suppression to preclude an election official from accepting a "grant" from "non-governmental organizations?" That may be one bit of graft we don't yet have in Illinois. People actually pass out blankets to voters on election day? Who cares if election officials hand out stuff; just not your "non-governmental organizations." Not having straight ticket voting is suppression, because, what, people are only supposed to vote for the best Party, not the best candidate?
At what point does a voter have some minimal responsibility in this process? So what we need is the federal government running all elections, not local authorities. Yeah, that will make things better. This whole vote suppression theme is a scam, at the least.
It's voter suppression if I don't get a foot rub while casting my ballot.
none of that comes close to voter suppression.
"curtail early voting on weekends" do you know how much and why? or did the talking point suffice?
"prohibiting election officials from accepting grants from non-governmental organizations" - aka, "avoiding corruption," also nothing close to voter suppression. (this one is a Doozy!)
"banning “line-warming” activities..." - this silly talking point again. it known as electioneering and it has been prohibited forever. election workers CAN hand out water. campaign representatives cannot. because common sense.
"eliminating straight-ticket voting" - consider how preposterous it is to think that the inability to vote straight ticket automatically will keep a single person from voting.
your list of examples consists of nothing it is supposed to support.
I am sure you can do better.
MarkS, doesn't it seem reasonable and fair to consider legislation that affects voting procedures individually, and on the merits? There are certainly bad faith legislative efforts to reduce the numbers of votes Democratic candidates receive in future elections. There are also bad faith legislative efforts to increase the number of votes Democratic candidates receive. And there are good faith efforts to improve the integrity and workability of elections. If you start by characterizing all tradeoffs with which you happen to disagree as "voter suppression" then you are doing the exact thing which you claim to abhor: slandering any position on this subject with which you do not personally agree as deplorable. Stop doing that please.
Perhaps you are confused. The emergency policies put in place by blue states disenfranchised many American voters. When a scheme is put in place to eliminate chain of custody and signature verification and thus make it nearly impossible to audit the election except by a forensic audit--bad faith can be imputed to Democrat politicians as well as establishment Republicans. Changing voting laws in the middle of a pandemic, and ignoring the legislative branch, is dictatorial.
Also -- nobody seems to bring up the fact that the CDC released a statement saying that "regardless of whether you have COVID or not -- it's okay and encouraged to show up and vote". So...what were all those laws for? I thought the whole point was to keep people from showing up and spreading COVID?
What an extraordinary claim! Where is your extraordinary evidence?
>"There are also bad faith legislative efforts to increase the number of votes Democratic candidates receive."
Specific example please.
It's a well-known fact that Democrats in New York state purged thousands of votes from the rolls.
It is a well-known fact that DNC fucked Bernie over.
It's a well-known fact that the DNC chair at the time (I won't even use that witch's name here) presided over shenanigans in Tim Canova race.
It's a well-known fact that DNC argued in court that they don't have to abide by voters' wishes.
Your move, Mr. MarkS.
The quote was "There are also bad faith legislative efforts to increase the number of votes Democratic candidates receive."
Nothing you have written provides an example.
And Hillary got 16.9 million primary votes to Bernie's 13.2. Please tell me what the DNC did that swung 2 million votes from Bernie to Hillary.
I love how you don't even give a shit about proving the other statement he made because it lines up with what you already believe. 😂 I'm going to try to help -- I would strongly encourage you to re-examine the things you assume to be true and do a deep introspective dive into why you believe what you believe. Because people like you are so transparent in your ignorance -- you're honestly just hurting yourself at this point.
Which means you don't have a specific example either.
https://www.gp.org/hr1
Darn! How could I forget to add the Green party suppression by the Democrats?
Guess you're not the go-to lib who's gonna set aside differences. You're actually exactly what this article is about.
No, I'm not going to "set aside" my commitment to DEMOCRACY, which requires easy voting FOR ALL CITIZENS.
Bring it up with New York before Texas. NYC's voting laws are much more restrictive than those recently passed by Georgia and Texas. Why don't we hear about that more?
This is a fact. You cannot obtain an absentee ballot for convenience. You have to represent, under penalty of perjury, that you are either unable to travel to a polling location or will be out of town on election day. And there is no early-voting period. I continue to be confused by the firmly-held view of low-value commenters like MarkS that somehow restrictions on absentee voting favors Republicans. It's not impossible that it's right, but there's no evidence of it. The more organized a campaign's get out the vote machine is, the more it ought to favor restrictions on absentee ballots. Also, permissive absentee balloting ought to favor voting by old people (leans Republican), mildy-interested employed people (who the hell knows) and out-of-state college students (leans Dem). Why would anyone be confident they know which party would truly benefit from these changes? What seems clear to me is that restrictive voting laws favor incumbents and candidates with political machines. I know NY school boards sure as hell don't want easy voting. They don't even want to be forced to publicly communicate the dates votes are held.
Because that would be like supporting Trump and stuff. And like Cuomo clan is like the best. Can't say a bad word 'bout them.
Whataboutism again. Do better.
Dead or alive, huh?
lol
You spin me like a record, round, round, round....
OK. then no ID for drivers licenses, alcohol, flying, entrance to concerts. Let's abolish ID for everything else too.
No one wants to abolish ID, but if one is required to vote, then it must be FREE and EASY to obtain one.
No, just as the courts must find a balance with evidence requirements to both minimize the innocent people found guilty and the guilty people found not guilty, voting systems must find a balance between maximising accessibility and minimising fraud. There is never a perfect answer and trade offs are ALWAYS necessary
What actual evidence is there that requiring a photo ID is voter suppression? I've heard this many times but never once have seen the slightest evidence. You have to have a photo ID to get on a plane or (if you look young enough) even buy cigarettes or alcohol. Yet not to vote?!
That's like saying the majority of voting age minorities don't even have a driver's license. It's absurd.
And don't even look at that totalitarian state of Germany, where one even is required to register the place of residence.
:)
You actually don’t need a photo ID to get on a plane. My wallet got stolen a few years back and I needed to visit my dad, who was dying, several times before I was able to visit the DMV to get a replacement. All I needed to board my planes was a couple pieces of mail with my name on it and my temporary replacement debit card, which didn’t even have my photo on it, like a “real” debit card does.
Also, requiring an ID is absolutely a way to discourage people from voting, if not make it outright impossible. My ID’s been expired since December 2019, but I didn’t even know it because, seriously, who the fuck pays attention to when their ID expires? The only reason I even realized it was expired was because the COVID shit started and I needed to order something online in March 2020 that required a current ID. I’ve made two appointments to get it replaced, but had to cancel both appointments because something came up that I had to deal with that was more important than getting a new ID. So, yeah, if there was an election happening in the next few weeks or maybe even months (not sure when I’m gonna make it to the DMV) and I needed an ID to vote, I wouldn’t be able to.
Not to mention, there’s overwhelming evidence that voter fraud in the form of people who aren’t who they say they are voting, or casting more than one vote, is virtually nonexistent (certainly not to the degree that it would affect the outcome of an election); AND that things like voter ID laws do discourage people from voting. “Discourage” isn’t even the right word; it makes it impossible for people who don’t have an ID (like me) to vote.
Those studies of voter fraud were done prior to Covid and the beginning of mail in ballots. The potential for a lot more problems are there and someone else who sees this is Jeff Bezos. I read a couple of months ago there was some kind of balloting (sorry, don't remember what it was for) within Amazon and he would not allow mail in votes b/c --- too great a risk for fraud.
LOL! That was for a union vote - and Bezos didn't want mail in for the same reason the Rs didn't - he wanted to stunt the vote ...
If you look at the GA election law, you don’t need an ID, just a piece of mail, similar to what you’re describing.
These new laws are being brought about because of what?
Rampant fraud?
A lot of fraud?
Some fraud?
A little fraud?
All this new legislation to "protect our democracy" when one man cried fraud and couldn't prove ANY. And THAT is what has violently shaken our democracy, not Americans cheating, but Donald not accepting defeat.
The Fraud Genie is out of the bottle and a lot of Americans won't trust our elections. The thing is: there are no such things as a Genie. Trump took the loyalty and trust of good Americans and used it to fuck up my country.
Nobody in their right mind should trust any American elections. A quilt-patch of legislation and rules and voting machines without a paper verification trail. The rest of the world must be laughing their asses off at the 'Merican Democracy and Freedumb.
Gerrymandering on both sides. Disenfranchisement on both sides. Polling locations reductions (mostly on the Repugs side).
And this is the shining beacon on the hill of democracy? Makes me wanna puke.
There's a simple audit one could do in Fulton County. Ask everyone who "requested" an absentee ballot if they "voted" in the last election. My guess is that there would be a non-zero number of people who received and returned ballots who answer "No."
You can build trust. One way to do that is to run a meticulous, understandable and auditable process. Then you can say "you don't have to trust me: check for yourself".
If you trust you run an auditable system well, your response to challenges should be "bring it", not fervent insinuations that nothing happened just trust me.
Even if the election was legit, if your concern is trust, audits are good. The Dems are so in the grip of some kind of must trample Trump in every avenue possible mania that they don't get that: the trust-building processes must be attacked because they cast doubt on the Party and that should not be allowed to happen.
This is a bit dramatic...we will heal from this easily and quickly.
A bit dramatic? I don't know what you were doing between November and January 6th, but I was watching an assault on our process culminating in a takeover of our Capitol building where our congress was in danger and a woman was shot and killed. All of that was dramatic and every bit of that was because of Trump. He tried to overturn the election results and got waaaay too close to pulling it off. I hope you are right about us healing easily and quickly, although state legislatures answer to the coup attempt is to make voting harder and to give themselves power to declare winners ( in Georgia at least).
For some reason the US does not believe in ID cards for its citizens.
'cause they don't need them. They have all the information they need on us in Langley.
Your phone is in your pocket more than your wallet anymore.........
Voter suppression is just the latest shiny object put forward by the Dems to distract from having opened both barn doors at the southern border. As Matt's piece illustrates, that's how they, and their media enablers, roll.
Right, all those NEWLY PASSED LAWS in more than a dozen states are just inventions of the MSM! They didn't REALLY get passed and signed into law, the MSM just made it all up!!!
But lets just ignore all the new laws that were passed -- unconstitutionally in some cases -- BEFORE the election. Nah...that would make your point seem stupid and trite.
Such as...
Not aware of any voting law changes that were ruled unconstitutional. The Texas AG did file a silly case which the SCOTUS refused to take due to lack of standing.
Grandstanding as it were.
“Seem”?
Those laws were all reviewed and approved by the Republican-controlled Supreme Court of the United States. Which you know perfectly well.
so they're bad because they're NEWLY PASSED ?
what makes new laws inherently bad?
Voter fraud is just the latest shiny object put forward by Republicans to distract from how unpopular they are, and to help keep them in power by specifically targetting groups who don't vote for them with new voting restrictions to keep them away from the polls.
Matt's piece has zero to do with this. But if you weren't suffering from confirmation bias, you would know this.
Oy. Anyone who talks about shiny objects and confirmation bias... go back to Ezra Klein's JournoList. Please.
It's OK if you can't follow along, I'm sure you'll figure it out eventually, once you sort out your logical fallacies.
Voting security is not voter suppression - making voting easy and cheating very hard - everyone has access to a picture I.D. You must believe people of color are incapable of performing the simplest of tasks - the bigotry of low expectations plays a central role in Democratic Party public policy, and, it's finally falling apart.
There is basically zero cheating in US elections, so all we are left with are solutions in search of a problem and the motives behind them.
A minority party -- Republicans -- is certainly motivated to promote the idea that there is election fraud causing them to lose.
assertion doesn't make the case with people who think. you'll need to be more specific how these efforts would suppress votes. as it is, Georgia codifying and formalizing pandemic year measures is less restrictive than many blue states with early voting and voting by mail, yet it was called "jim crow on steroids." you'd have to be a fool to take the same liars' line on Texas without a shred of proof.
I live in Texas and I missed the suppression part. Please define.
Here, I'll spot you one No Sunday voting till 1pm.
WOW!!! Jim F***** Crow!
MarkS
If you believe that these laws that require voter ID or other methods to verify a person's US citizenship, voter registration and legitimate right to vote in that particular election is somehow voter suppression then either you're
1 Brainwashed by leftist propaganda and haven't bothered to check the validity of those leftist Lies
2 you're a person who believes "By any means necessary" including cheating, noncitizen voting and multiple votes by a single person and other means of voter fraud is the right thing to do if it means your side wins
If you think that voter ID is Racist against black people because they have trouble getting ID, then you're just a Racist as most black voters will tell you
Like when the GloboCap-woke Ds forced MLB to move the All Star game to a state that is whiter and has similar voting laws to Georgia?
Quack conspiracy believer alert.
MLB is a private business which made a private business decision. Don't like it? Don't do business with them.
MLB made a private business decision to move it's signature midseason event to protest racism... by moving the game into a stadium named after a racist family. Do some research on Joseph Coors. It's obvious that MLB didn't.
Who owns Coors these days...those evil Canadians!
So you believe that black people don't know how to get an ID, correct? What does that say about you?
I'm pretty sure there are instances and people for whom obtaining an ID *today* is problematic. That's why the state should bend backwards to help such people.
If the state doesn't do that, that's a problem.
Serious question. Is there any person in need in this country not able to get a cell phone? (Don't mean to be confrontational here; just asking a question) Or an abortion? Jim Crow on the voter ID. Right.
I suppose there could be. I certainly don't have any data one way or another. Often it is not a matter of obtaining a cell phone, but rather a continuous obligation to pay for it/data plan.
Regarding abortion, I think there are states with just one clinic providing the service. I would be very surprised if there weren't people who couldn't afford a trip...
When did you suffer your traumatic brain injury? Do you have an appointment for a weekly blunt head strike?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW2LpFkVfYk
This is a video of interviews of people on the street. It proves only that most people are the street (of all races) are poorly informed.
To be fair - on this issue, voter ID tests historically have been used in this way, and college students especially might be going off what they just learned about that.
Yes, in the South there were laws in place such as literacy tests, poll fees and other requirements that were aimed at black voters. Those are gone (thankfully). A simple driver's license is hardly a reinstatement of Jim Crow. And many businesses and college campuses require ID to even get in the buildings.
Matt I am a subscriber and I would like to print out your articles (especially this one}
to share with others. Your website has a mechanism that prohibits printing. Why? I am not doing this for profit and the people I share might actually become paid subscribers.
Yes, I can imagine it would have mattered 200 years ago. Dark history similar to minimum wage laws.
But you couldn't POSSIBLY be one of those people who are slightly misinformed -- right?
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/07/644648955/for-older-voters-getting-the-right-id-can-be-especially-tough
Yes.
Skeptic wrote; "..we're in a fight now to save basic constitutional liberties and try to get control of the national security state,.."
What do you mean by that? Please be specific.
For example, the FISA court and FISA warrants need to be abolished or very rigorously reformed. Restrictions on domestic electronic surveillance should be strengthened. The CIA is a rogue agency with a horrendous track record on both effectiveness and respect for human rights and civil liberties; I'd like to see downsizing, elimination with functions spread to military and other bodies, or at least rigorous reform. The FBI has also racked up a horrible record, from their corrupt forensic lab onward; ditto for them. No time for a treatise. Overall, both federal law enforcement and intelligence services need a huge rethink, restructuring, and probably hefty cuts in finding.
We need a new Church Committee. ASAP.
I sympathize with the sentiment, but we ain't got no more Frank Church. Even he didn't get the job done. Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich have made moves in the right direction but I'm not sure how far they are able or willing to carry the ball.
Wyden (one of my Senators) makes some good noises, but he's gutless when it comes to action.
He's certainly no Wayne Morse, or even Hatfield.
Thanks!
I'm glad it's not a "grab yer guns" level of fight you're referencing but policy and overhaul, rethinking etc. Our current political process of bad faith leading to fruitless non-negotiations, leading to ramrodded legislation, makes it seem very far off.
Specificity.
Here’s a piece by Matt you appear to have missed. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-biden-appointees-troubling-viewsf
The Aspen Institute wants to restrict “information disorder” — from one side, and require what it calls “foundational” changes down the line. Fleets of people fired for expressing mild opinions, or for insufficient enthusiasm for the Word. Congressional hearings in which the Democrats hectored Big Tech to censor speech.
There’s also Matt’s piece well, today.
You are so far above my intelligence level that I can't even see the point of your reply to my request for specifics. It's a legitimate ask and it was well answered.
That's a gracious response. Nothing to do with smarts-- I simply pay attention to speech and a press, mainly because both are no longer free.
Glad to know you AMWL! Let's make common cause against finance capital. Leave this dreary culture war distraction behind and see what we have in common: The government should serve people, not capital. Yes?
Yes. Of, by and for the people; Consent of the governed. There is a place for capital, but what we have today is a gross monstrosity that has taken over the government and is robbing the people of prosperity while accumulating vast wealth unto itself. Certainly not promoting the general Welfare, nor securing the Blessings of Liberty for all.
I've no problem with markets. And to do big things we will need capital. But excessive private capital accumulation is a problem.
AMWL, you're of the conservative bent. Go fuck yourself. Now let's talk. I'm sure we have a lot in common.
Thank you sir, may I have another.
The Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
Well they did write most of their own songs, well except for Ringo.
Is this satire?
Taibb's said not to lose our humor. I though it was funny.
The indication would be you have already lost yours, then. Cursing people is not funny.
Not funny TO YOU. Or do you believe you're the official arbiter of what is and isn't funny to all human beings?
It made me smile.
What a thought provoking, brilliant framing of our current horrendous clusterfuck. I love supporting you here on Substack, but it sure seems like this would do a lot of public good if it were more widely disseminated.
I’m unlocking this piece. Taking a lot of heat for it, but that’s okay.
The reactions on Twitter are truly scary. A lot of folks are now equating old school ACLU liberalism with fascism because it means defending the constitutional rights of folks whose views you find odious.
A lot of these so-called socialists on Twitter are the shitlibs they love to hate.
If you are taking heat, it means it's working. White-hot, baby!
Absolutely, flying low directly over the target always does that
It sucks when you get shot down though.
But all the flack indicates the flight path is true and on course.
No heat, no light. QED
I believe this is a conscious and organized trolling effort to discredit you. You are a unique and a huge threat. A lot of power and money depends on the woke industrial complex. You're one of the few people with the credibility to speak to both left and right. They're trying to cut off your left flank.
It is unfortunately little known that "TK News" -- despite Taibbi's coy pretensions -- in fact stands for "Taibbi-Klendathu Newswire."
The efforts to smear him as a Russian agent have been an elaborate double false-flag operation designed to deflect attention. He has been working for the Bugs -- a far more dangerous adversary -- all along.
https://youtu.be/JiI7UaW6Rkc?t=140
Would you like to know more?
I shouldn't have doubted that the Starship Troopers would be applicable in any situation.
The Bug is scared.
it's spot on. nailed it!
With much of the heat coming from a newly-formed army of Team Blue trolls. I saw a bunch of them dog-piling onto an article about Greenwald recently. It seems Team Blue has learned from Team Red and now employs its own army of trolls.
You're "taking heat" because you are making sense, and exposing the "elephant in the room" that Mainstreamers are so busy talking past. Just throwing this out there, but I had a piece published @ the Dissident Voice website in December, "Whose Afraid of Glenn Greenwald?", which was inspired by Mr Greenwald's escape from The Intercept, and also hit pieces on Glenn by writers @ The New Yorker, The Daily Beast (of course!), and CounterPunch. Regardless, very impressed with your tenacity on this issue...
That's how you know it's true!
anyone giving heat not already on the a-hole list?
Tech-oligarchs are one thing. Does Jeff Bezos count as one? I guess. But I still like Amazon, so good on him.
The newspaper he sponsors though, and the ever-burgeoning fanaticism of the people who operate it... that is quite a different animal. Indeed, I think it's unprecedented in human history. The utter, hysterical nonsense that one must now imbibe and regurgitate in order to gain access to the information-flows of modern power would shame the most obsequious priest of simpler times.
To justify his King's Divine Right, all he had to do was scare superstitious peasants with the prospect of famine:
"Ye doubt this inbred moron was blessed by the Almighty to rule? Ye doubt the Almighty? Must ye then also doubt His benevolence concerning your harvest? Shame! Trust in God! And your King!"
That sort of thing. A simple trick, but one can see how it would work.
Now though... If you want to advance up the (N)GO ladder, you must join a hermaphroditic mystery cult. You must believe---not just think, but *believe*---that sex roles are a modernist conspiracy, and that hormones shower people willy-nilly like mana from heaven. Indeed, if you *really* want to ride the power train, you ought believe that the modern scientific state knows *better* than heaven, and ought to correct the latter's hormonal mistakes with injections and whatnot.
This is insane, obviously; yet only scratches the surface of the delirium engulfing our modern clerisy.
Unprecedented? Hardly. Imagine how a Roman pagan might've felt during the rise of Christianity, or what things were like in collapsing Weimar or revolution-era Russia or China.
You can paint a picture of the Russian intelligentsia that feels very familiar:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-liberals
How about this bit from late 300s Rome? Familiar, no?
https://twitter.com/Sturgeons_Law/status/1321293684470591490
There are theories that the Islamic Golden Age ended when religious fanatics started gaining power. Mad clerics have always been with us, and if Eric Hoffer is right, the mass movements they inspire will eventually calm down (often once they've attained power or been crushed violently, mind).
But not all of the clerics' religions are made equal. I don't cherish the idea of 70 years of lite Sovietism.
What's unprecedented is not the wackiness of the ideas---but the technology that spreads them.
Modern Americans are subjected to a bombardment of State propaganda such as the world---including the old Eastern Bloc---has never seen. It taints every work of popular art, every professional promotion, every conversation between strangers (even if they're of the same race). And it foments its mad lies in its most prestigious institutions.
"There will never be a female Navy SEAL." I said this in an undergraduate seminar a few years ago, when the topic of 'integrated' special forces came up. And the looks I got from all those young, aspiring fanatics...
I might go back to school just to see it again.
P.S. It's adorable you imagine this "lite Sovietism" may only last 70 years.
<<"There will never be a female Navy SEAL." I said this in an undergraduate seminar a few years ago, when the topic of 'integrated' special forces came up. And the looks I got from all those young, aspiring fanatics...>>
Clearly you did not see G.I. JANE or STARSHIP TROOPERS (both 1997).
In the USA, perception is reality, and has been for quite some time. Washington and New York are both great powers, but Hollywood is the greatest power.
Outstanding! 👍
I think a possible interpretation of the authoritarian phenomena you mention is not that the ruling and leadership classes are increasing their power and tightening their grip, but the opposite: they are losing control, and they are _trying_ to tighten their grip as in fact they are losing it. The problem is that a dispersion of certain kinds of wealth and power into the lower orders has been occurring. I'll give just a few examples. 100 years ago, if wanted to spread one's opinions about and lacked a radio station or a printing press, you were stuck with individual conversations, letters, or leaflets. Today, everyone has access to very high-powered social media which predictably has become the focus of ruling-class concern. The opening shot was the exposure of Kennedy-Lewinsky; that could not have happened without the early stage of social media it occurred in. Another is the development of terrorist-usable weapons like drones, and "cyberterror".
The trends.... Broad revolutionary movements and events are not brought about by ideology but by objective, material facts. The proles are acquiring the power to take part in history. Going by 1914-1945, it might be a rough ride.
You mean "Clinton/Lewinsky" I'm sure.
I'm happy though that someone has a some-what positive spin on events.
Yes, Clinton. It's probably no surprise that I was thinking about the Kennedys, however. Imagine what the social media could have done with JFK.
Kotkin is a rare example of an honest observer from the political center (which is pretty much center-right in the US).
The far left isn't a part of the alliance in the first graf. That portion of the alliance is clearly center-left. The actual left in this country has no part of this; it's tiny regardless.
I am familiar with her from the profile in Politico last February. This is related to Karl Rove's central insight: elections are decided by motivating the base, not by targeting swing voters.
Kotkin? Kotkin, Kotkin, Kotkin---yes, Kotkin! Joel Kotkin. My old friend from new geography.com. A good numbers man, somewhat excitable, but eminently certifiable to the good burghers of the local Chamber of Commerce. When I last checked in with Professor K, he was still sifting through old census reports, trumpeting the moral worth of freshly mowed lawns and two-car garages.
He was once more than an occasional blip on my radar screen back when I was up to my ears in all things urban, but then suddenly, for no apparent reason, I said the hell with it, and beat a hasty but much needed retreat to the sticks, and thus lost track of the New Geographer.
Professor Kotkin is not only a solid B-lister of the nation's commentariat, over the years he's also been willing, with bullhorn in hand and dressed in a seersucker suit, to reassure the nation's Babbitts that all is well, pay no attention to....wait! Apparently new alarms are sounding and battle flags are being raised down at the hardware stores and beauty parlors.
So Professor K has dusted off Coleridge's old clerisy and dressed them up as the "new" clerisy. As an old hand in the book publishing world, a hat tip to the professor for this clever intellectual refashioning and regurgitation. One presumes there's not a lot money in tracking migration rates, and a fella's gotta get paid!
In brief: Apparently, this "new" clerisy , composed of the upper-middle-class global elite, Phds and those hauling in six to seven figure salaries, let's call'em the 9-percenters (the Professor will, hopefully, find utility with this "new" numerical coining for his census-taking); these people, as Kotkin reassess, are the butlers and handmaidens who oversee the propaganda and balance sheets of the one percenters (those people again). What Marx designated the '"bourgeoisie" will find themselves or will find themselves---it's not clear what tense we should be shivering about---awash in society marked by, composed of, threatened by, wait for this one...neo-medievalism. Huzzah!
Kotkin classifies this new "clerisy" as the creme of the old middle class. Remember them? And the one percenters, and especially 0.1 percenters, are feverishly eyeballing the newly annointed clerisy's freshly mowed lawns and two-car garages, with the desire of reducing them to the current state of neo-medievalism that the 90- percenters currently enjoy. Now, this sort of warmed-over hand-wringing at this juncture in our on-going national and global breakdown is sure to excite the minds of the young denizens who have erected permanent camps on the platforms of the internet, and who like to imagine themselves as senior analysts at the Rand Corporation, as they continue to make sense of a world that they have analyzed almost exclusively through their phones and computers. But I cavil here.
But this is merely a reading of the Professor's web-posted summary of his longer work. I intend to acquire the Professors book, "The Coming of Neo-Medievalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class" and hope to profit by this new take on an old theme, about 10,000 years old in fact. But I cannot refrain here from cautioning the good Professor himself. We've been forewarned for some time now about the aims and actions of this so-called "new" clerisy.
And now that we've been warned anew by the good Professor, what action(s) do we take to battle this Gothic elite? Indeed, I look forward to reacquainting myself with the thought and theories of Professor Kotkin, with the hope that he has for us not just a strategy and outline of tactics for the coming battle, but a remedy or two for curing our current social and political divisions.
Lots of words, big words, that failed to add anything to the discussion or make a point that should have been made in 100 words or less:
"The conflict between classes has been ongoing since humanity first existed. Perhaps it is time to determine which side, of many sides, you are on."
John, is that you? Oh, Zwiebel. Thought you were another John. Discussion? I failed to detect a discussion when I wrote this. I sometimes get lost in all the boogaloo/deep state bullshit in this comment section. And also, what passes for discussion typically is childish logrolling and fevered whispers of the coming and goings of far left ghosts and goblins.
Booh! It's me, the deep state. But please, explain what was being "discussed." And I should note that not all expository writing seeks to "make a point."
I certainly wasn't trying to make a point. Please explain the discussion, and then explain why this "failed to to add to the discussion."
You accuse me of not adding to the discussion, then slyly hint that 100 of my words would have sufficed to add to the discussion, but then I still don't know what's being discussed! And for that matter, these 100 words---are they my 100 words? Or somebody else's 100 words? If they are mine, which 100 words would you choose to make the point I wasn't even trying to make? You see where you've gotten us?
And do you really want to be seen sneering at another commenter for using "big words." This is the taunting of a 6th grader. Or an adult dum-dum. I sincerely trust you're neither of these, but frankly, given the general run of the comments here, well, we can't discount that possibility, Mr Zwiebel.
Hey everybody, don't forget to dumb it down for Mr. Zwiebel! He likes his words somewhat smallish. And you damn well better "make a "point" with them words. Zwiebel likes his words "pointy." Evidently, all of our big words clash with his small ideas! Probably over a hundred words here, wouldn't you say, John?
But I've think I've made my point here, hopefully to John's satisfaction. My point here? I think I'll use big, no even gigantic, words whenever I like. And hundreds and hundreds of them. So there. Good to hear from you, though. Write again and often. Don't be a stranger.
A "point" well taken is not a "point" well shaken...
You can buy the book at Amazon. Only. Amazon.
What makes you say this? It's freely available wherever they sell books, save used bookstores, of course.
McWhorter has been killing it over the last several months - if you didn't catch him, he mopped the floor with Michelle Goldberg on the NYT's The Argument in May. It was an absolute pleasure to read, and he has multiple protection devices that can thwart the woke mob - because he's Black, no one can use the racist card on him. Because he's a very well-credentialed academic, they can't use use the education card on him. It's delicious.
Here, I fixed it for you. First paragraph works much better, I believe, as a parody of an Ezra Pound poem.
Enough! Flatulent, bloviating gibberish
It could fill a large hot air balloon.
and send it into the stratosphere
For an around-the-world trip
You seem to be saying
That you are uninformed
Which explains a lot
As the cultural-left continues to marinate and rot
A toxic echo chamber of lies and emotional manipulation
There is a market for criticism of anti-liberals
O’ Taibbi......O’ Greenwald!
These are examples of how
to be successful in that market...
James Lindsay! Kid, you're too much. Exotic indeed. It's unclear, however, what strain of "exotic" we speak of here:
This kind of exotic? --"The hoax got the attention of Michael O’Fallon, a conservative activist and president of Sovereign Nations, a conservative Christian nationalist group. O’Fallon, who also has organized cruises for tea partyers and Calvinist Christian nationalists, has long been a critic of liberal causes and critical theory.
He has claimed that evangelical and Catholic leaders have been bought off by the Open Society Foundation led by philanthropist George Soros...."
"Lindsay and O’Fallon have close ties."
Or this kind of exotic---"The grievance studies hoax transformed Lindsay’s career. Before the hoax, he was a massage therapist who ran a business called Twisted Roots Bodywork, which combined massage with martial arts.
"On social media, he’s joked about his lack of credentials in critical theory.
“Looks like the story finally broke too,” he wrote on Twitter last summer. “The guy who pranked all those academic journals was a massage therapist too. LOL lol LOL.”
You know the old saying---once a massage therapist, always a massage therapist...
"Speaking of regurgitation, there is nothing in what you said that wasn't said by Marcuse: a deep, snobby, pretentious loathing of the suburban working class and small business owners."
I kid you not---in an argument once with my father when I was in high school, he responded with precisely these words when I declined to work an extra shift at one of the hardware stores he owned. Prescient. Very. "You and your Marcuse, I would mutter back to him, you and your Marcuse."
But the skeptics here also recognize your word salad nonsense about the left, parroting the usual right wing blather about culture.
e.pierce19 hr ago
the "left" invented word salad.
You should extend your reading to certain previous eras.
So, who do I oppose?
I agree.
“Huffing horeshit into Headlines”.
So true, so perfectly stated. Sums up our mainstream media today.
Huffington Horseshit... how is it any different than Daily Caller Horseshit...
Matt's indepth reporting is limited only to the left while all but ignoring the glaring PROPAGANDA model on the right that has produced such non sense as Stop the Steal and Tax cuts to the rich trickle down.
Give me a break. What Matt has proven is that Right Wingers can handle the truth if it told on their enemies but will take their ball home and sob if the truth is told about the media they believe... Right?
First of all I don't think the mainstream press is "the left." Neither am I, for that matter, but despite some superficial overtures to leftism, particularly in the op-ed pages, the mainstream press is basically corporate. Second, Fox is no longer a standard-bearer for institutional power. It plays to an enormous audience of people, as entirely red as MSNBC's audience is blue, but its influence is limited to whipping up passions in that population. The rest of the press, which incidentally is much larger in terms of bandwidth and reach, with many more outlets in both print and broadcast, is much more intimately part of a larger system now, practically an outpost of the security agencies on some issues. So my focus lately, as opposed to, say, the Bush years (when Fox was a leader of the political consensus driving us to war and I wrote a lot about that channel), is on that other "side." As I wrote in Hate Inc., Fox invented a lot of the commercial techniques that got us into this mess, but the behaviors we're seeing now in outlets like the New York Times and CNN -- with almost constant errors and deceptions, many fed to them directly from security sources, while they're all cheering on censorship -- to me is far more dangerous than Fox. The difference between "Stop the Steal" and Russiagate is that the latter was and is an officially approved attempt to re-shape reality. "Stop the Steal" to me is just Donald Trump's personal crusade. Add the fact that I guess I expect the New York Times to be better, and that's why I'm not as interested in the foibles of red media lately.
That’s exactly correct. Stop the Steal is online nonsense that Trump pushes but has almost no impact.
CNN’s misleading chyrons and gaslighting and the Times’ deceptions are in fact much more problematic. We need them to be better and right now they’re not.
Just one example- we’re going thru this odd almost Maoist like cultural revolution
with schools and institutions resegregating and declaring themselves racist and purging and where is the reporting? The only reporting you see from the Paper of Record is largely a reflexive defense of CRT and an effort to delegitimize the critics.
If it quacks like a duck....
1) Oswald didn't act alone, else why was he immediately assassinated by a mid-level Mafia operative in a sharkskin suit?
2) Epstein had help, else why were all the video cameras turned off, for the most high-profile prisoner in the U.S. incarceration system?
3) The virus came from the Wuhan lab, since the coincidence of the initial outbreak being right next to the virology lab is... about 1 in 1 million.
4) The election was flawed, else why do 4 simultaneous swing states simultaneously go dark (2 with "plumbing problems), kick out poll watchers, then re-emerge hours later with a 6 point swing to Biden? (Look at the PA court proceeding where the judge had to incredulously ask 2 times what the vote counts were during the blackout.... more than 100x1 for Biden).
About #4, I remain agnostic, but certainly a full forensic audit is warranted, if for no other reason than to restore faith in the elective process (50 million Americans currently think the election was stolen, which is a dangerous situation).
As a wise person recently told me, "There wouldn't be so many conspiracy theories if there weren't so many conspiracies".
5). The Clinton foundation is perhaps the biggest money laundering scheme in American history and one doesn’t need to be a genius to figure out that the donations from despotic regimes throughout the Middle East were not made because the philanthropic heads of state wanted to alleviate world suffering and thought the Clinton foundation to be the best vehicle through which to deliver aid.
Hunter Biden is running a close second and closing the gap
Donning a sharkskin suit just makes you immediately want to assassinate someone. No reason for it. No point in looking for one, either.
Grand Theft Auto:Vice City
Excellent. You sound just like me. :)
Great examples
So the Marxists are willing to destroy the economy, fund our nation’s enemies, allow an invasion of our borders of destitute foreign welfare leeches, remove all incentive for these foreigners to assimilate, outlaw all non-emergency vaccine remedies killing tens of thousands of people, destroy decades of civil rights and race relation advances, along with dozens of other actions just as evil and destructive to our country BUT they would NEVER cheat to win an election. THAT would just be too much? Seriously???
Yes, basically.
Of course, they tried. They knew that universal mail in would benefit Biden and so they pushed it hard. That’s not cheating. It’s malpractice by Trump’s team to not have an answer. And his own last minute blunders and gaffes sealed his fate.
But it is fair to ask "If there was no cheating in the last election, why such pushback on the part of Democrats for a proper audit of election results?". The MSM argument against widespread chicanery is something along the lines of 'that is living in Crazy Town, man; only wack jobs believe that.'
Ok, fair enough. Then help with the audits.
And one more thing: remember that the chief engineer at Dominion may have been a member of Antifa who reportedly said 'Trump is not going to win. I made f***ing sure of that.' (https://en-volve.com/2020/11/16/anti-trump-engineer-of-dominion-voting-systems-said-i-made-sure-trumps-not-gonna-win-in-secret-call-with-antifa-claims-man-who-infiltrated-group/ ) This little tidbit surfaced in mid November but was quickly memory holed by the usual suspects.
So it is not all 'out of thin air' paranoia. Especially when audits are so strongly opposed.
A much simpler argument to that effect: If you actually believed your opponent was a fascist or worse, why on Earth would you play fair?
Wait 'till we seize power. At the top of the agenda: we're gonna kill all the puppies and outlaw ice cream.
I agree, much of what we are seeing today actually reeks of the steps of subversion that Yuri Bezmenov—disclaimer: I don't know exactly how I feel about him, but do find his steps of subversion to be compelling—talked about after "defecting" from the KGB.
I also want to clarify that I am not asserting that Russia is principally involved in the direction we are seeing today, but that our own KGB would likely come to similar conclusions about how to control society en masse and therefore would employ similar techniques to retain control.
How is "Stop the Steal" just "online non-sense with no impact? It's a major campaign from the most popular leader on one side of the political isle in a two-party system that inevitably cycles through partisan changes in power. It also lead recently to a riot/insurrection or whatever you want to call it. I get that some of that gets exaggerated, but why respond by downplaying it completely?
Because they’re indulging the worst impulses of Trump. It may have some people online hyped up about it but I don’t see it going anywhere.
I watched Jan 6 live. Seemed to me - a few bad people mixed in with some ignoramuses amped up by a crowd of thousands. Some rioted and others tresspassed. They’re being charged as is correct. To try and shoehorn it into a 9/11 or a White Supremacist attempted Coup is simply not true. No matter how many times CNN says it. It just isn’t true.
The worst damage caused by the attempted (in a rather lame way imo) insurrection is that people now equate GIVING PEOPLE MORE OPPORTUNITY TO VOTE due to the pandemic, with STEALING THE VOTE. The two are not the same, but it's useful to conflate them if you want to keep people from agreeing that the populace should find voting so easy that it's shameful to not vote.
I hate that conflation. It's evil and dresses the worst illness of our civic body (non participation) in the false premise of righteous indignation.
it's believed by the majority of a major political party and it is the product of the most influential politician in that party. How is that not a relevant topic for institutional critique?
I call it a protest that got out of hand. Or, if you prefer, "a slow day in Portland".
"Stop the Steal" is a simile that means what people want. You seem to interpret it as large-scale hard-core ballot fraud, which hasn't been shown conclusively. Some see "the steal" as publicly documented changes to absentee voting that favored Biden while being of questionable legality.
Beyond what "the steal" really means, the necessary standard of evidence is also open to debate. Should it be "beyond a reasonable doubt", "a preponderence of evidence", or "arguably true if you look from a certain angle", i.e. good enough for sports fans.
You won't understand people if you're unwilling to see things from their perspective.
RWK - A huge chunk of a democracy thinking that the presidential election was RIGGED in the voting booth is far more damaging to democracy than the FBI investigating one of the most corrupt campaigns of all time and their possible ties to Russia. Absurdly hyped by the press yes. But thinking an ex president got pee'd on in a Russian Hotel room is not going to rally people to storm the capital.
Piketty- stop worrying and obsessing over what some people think and say online. Who gives a fuck. Let them be. And let your side believe that Putin won in 2016.
This is so well put.
Piketty learns that details are the enemy of joy.
FNR - Truth is the enemy of those that value something more than truth ... St. Paul.
I for one, value truth over being right all the time.
give it a try some time. admitting you’re not always right is good. for example, earlier this year I (like millions of others) was fooled into believing CPO Brian Sicknick was murdered at the Jan 6 riot with a fire extinguisher. when it became clear that wasn’t true, I admitted I was wrong. didn’t have a scratch on me. it won’t kill you.
FNR - That is like someone saying i was wrong once. I thought i was wrong and then found out i was actually right.
Give me a break.
I am a former Republican, President of college Republicans and worked at RNC and on several elections. I now reject all of the corporate BS the Republicans have pushed for decades. From voter suppression to cutting taxes to the rich promising it will trickle down to refusing to put in place a health care system that costs LESS than we are paying today and insures 100% of Americans like every other industrialized nation.
And i made all of those pivots within months of watch Trump and his Misinformed, Lying, corrupt ass float down that Elevator in his heavily mortgaged building with his pathetic name on it.
I spent 30yrs raising kids and saving for my future and barely paid attention to what my party had morphed into while i was working and raising a family. Trump and his charm got the people in my party to reveal what they really cared about and it was not doing what is best for the entire country. In fact is was a strong desire to burn this thing down rather than not have it tilted to them.
I missed the anger because i was in a world not destroyed by 2008, not destroyed by technology or globalization. I got lucky.
That is called admitting you were wrong. Your sorry excuse for admitting you were wrong is nothing more than a tesstment to your ego. Right?
Fox is the loyal opposition now that the media has abdicated that role
Perfectly stated.
Matt - "Stop the Steal" is a LIE that was 'officially approved' by the sitting US President, Many in the White House, Congress and the Senate and then pushed endlessly through right wing media channels that also took corporate advertising money.
How is that any different than the corporate funded NYT pushing State Department lies? They appear two sides of the same coin but you only report negatively on one side of that coin.
Your boards are filled with messages that push right wing Political Leaders lies which are then pushed through corporate sponsored right wing media outlets. Yet i have almost never seen someone on your board claiming Trump colluded with Russia or kente clothed Schumer and Pelosi represents true patriotism.
And since joining your sub stack after reading Hate Inc i have only seen you attacks Democratic leaning corporate media with lies pushed by Democratic leaders.
Is correlation causation? I think so... Your readers trust you and since you no longer attack the right wing media lies they freely repeat and thus believe them.
Then why do the Democrats so strongly oppose election audits? Why was Parler shut down when the Jan 6 miscreants almost exclusively used Twitter and FB to collaborate/coordinate (remember the Jan 6 shitstorm was cited as a prime reason for destroying Parler) ? And why doesn't CNN or anyone ever mention that Trump actually tweeted out, just before the shit hit the fan, that everybody needed to calm down, remain peaceful, and go home... only to have Jack and co. DELETE HIS TWEEET? Just a lot of weird questions that need answering before the skeptics among up will trust the gubmint.
Matt - Thanks for the response.
Understood.. your focus is on corporate/ main stream press not just 'the left". And i understand you and Greenwald are particularly focused on security broadly as was Chomsky in framing the the Propaganda Model. Being a mouth piece of the security agencies is Bad. Totally agree!
But for those of us that follow you today and were not following you in 2004 or 5 in the build up to Iraq your writing reads as if you only see these issue in the same media that pushed Russia Gate and no State Sponsored lying in the media that claimed brown people were storming the southern boarder raping and stealing from Americans. Is that your intention?
If you look at posts on your own board you can consistently see "errors and deception" that is pushed by the larger media universe but in particular by the right wing side of the isle (Daily Caller, NewsMax etc...). Sure "Stop the Steal" is not state sponsored. Totally agree and excellent point. But does it get even a nod from you to how misleading the media that endorses this lie is? I don't think so.
You are building a dialog with this community, i would assume, and not a monolog like your pod cast. So if you have your community routinely scoffing at things like Russia Gate and then turning around pushing right wing media lies (state sponsored or not) then you are in essence validating their views.
Let me give an example. "The State" pushed Trumps tax cut through right and left wing and corporate media. That despite virtually every single major economist in the US stating explicitly that the cut would not accomplish what it was promising. No, that State Sponsored lie may not warrant a book but perhaps some consistent references to what a lie it was. But it seems like Trump administration State Sponsored lies get a pass from you despite you having shown great expertise in financial reporting. It is confusing to me.
Your audience are not as fired up about Trumps countless State sponsored lie as they are about Lab Leak, Steele Dossier etc... Nor do you point those out despite a wealth of examples.
So you're building an audience that believes the lies they hear from right wing media, and you sending almost zero contradictory scolding while endlessly (and accurately) scolding corporate media for lies about Trump. Is that intentional? It sure seems that way?
Why this obsessive need to have Matt Taibbi validate your worldview?
Bow Wow - I am not challenging Matt to validate my world view.
I am pointing out that in HateInc he showed how both side of corporate media produce MISINFORMED viewers. Yet on these boards I only see posts from Misinfomred right wing corporate media narratives (Trump did a great job leading the nation during covid, Trump won the election and it was stolen etc...) and i never ever see left wing corporate media narratives (Trump really did collude with Russia, Hunter Biden didnt do anything wrong etc...)
Given that Matt's posts since i have joined his substack only bash left leaning corporate media and never ever touch on the lies of right wing corporate media i am forced to wonder, how is what Matt is dong any different than what the NYT does?
He found an audience and he tells then what they want to hear. How is that different than the NYT?
You should read Matt’s very recent book: Hate, Inc. You’ll see the balanced criticism you crave and, maybe, you’ll come to recognize political tribalism as a pointless exercise. Both parties and their media appendages are dogshit.
I did.. what i read in that was far more balanced than his criticism on sub stack. Why is that?
I think it is you, not him. Matt seems very much the same old Matt these days to me.
The "Matt, what happened to you?" thing on Twitter is so abjectly ludicrous that it deserves pithy meme-ification.
“Woke capital” is upset at Taibbi calling out Wall St skullduggery b/c hey, they vote and give $$$ to Ds and BLM and happily scold rednecks from Ohio and Arkansas from their corporate perches-but Taibbi doesn’t appreciate their virtue signalling and still calls out their bs. How awful and un-woke of him
This article is in every way a direct continuation of the work in Hate, Inc., and is outlining the even more terrifying directions our politics and our media are moving in. I personally think it’s essential. - one of his best in months - and full of of the kind of hard truths that people just don’t want to accept, hence its (manufactured) controversy.
Yes, Fox News is still bad, but does anyone really think the other flavor is still better, or - even worse - that forcibly removing Fox and Tucker Carlson from the airwaves is in any way progress, or justice, or that it resembles what we used to call liberalism or leftism?
Hate Inc is literally a collection of his articles from substack. You do know that, right?
It isn't any different...that's exactly the point. But 90 percent of major media outlets are actively reporting on the horseshit on the right, while they will, as Tiabbi points out, ignore, excuse or actively suppress anything that makes Democrats or their reporting look bad. I am a life long liberal, NYT and Wapo subscriber, who actively reads a variety of newspapers and online outlets and I've witnessed it personally. I've become disgusted with the dishonesty of the media--while they label Tump and everyone on the right dishonest.
I am going to keep giving push back on right wing media driven lies i hear on this board. Hate Inc being the inspiration. Since starting this you would think the only lies are pushing the Democratic Narrative. Trump and Republican narrative are pock full of just as many lies and they get re mentioned here as if they are fact. No cutting taxes to the rich does not trickle down. No Trump did not win the election. Yes Trumps management of Covid cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives according to his own staff...
Those right wing lies are tossed around as fact on this board while also accurately condeming lies like Russia Gate.
While it's not a panacea, cutting taxes on the rich DOES trickle down. Trump didn't win the election? I'm not sure, but neither are you. Trump's mismanagement of Covid-19 cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives according to his own staff? That's kind of self-refuting, isn't it?
Oh please. Turn off CNN and get outside without your mask for a little bit of fresh air. Take a walk or a bike ride. You’re not making sense right now. Cool off and then come back later and we can discuss.
I no more consume CNN than i consume Fox... But you only mention CNN... interesting. Tell me, when was the last Stop the Steal zoom session you dialed into?
They have Stop the Steal Zoom sessions? Really? And what are they doing on there? Planning on storming the AZ Secty of State’s office?
I am saying that the talking points you used are a narrative pushed by right wing media to make fun of liberals and 'indicate' sympathy with Trumps endless misstatement about what Americans should be doing during a pandemic where the US the wealthiest nation on the planet and with 5% of the worlds population ended up with 20% of the worlds deaths in a Pandemic created in China.
That FACT along with every single major global health organizaton ranking the US response to Covid among the worst in the developed world indicates to me you are most likely one of those misinformed media consumers that has not read the unanimous ranking of Trumps leadership failing and causing far more deaths than the US should have had. Even Trumps top Health Advisors, once he left office, validated that Trumps handling of Covid CAUSED higher death tolls.
But you are misinformed on this arent you. No different than the Rachel Maddow watcher that thinks Trump collueded with Putin. Your words reveal you, admit it, you dont realize what a failure in leadership Trump was during Covid to you.
This is the part where you start with the false equivilincies to justify Trumps failure and probably point to blue state governors. Just like the Maddow watcher pointing to the Steele Dossier as PROOF Trump colluded.
You are just as misinformed arent you?
"Trumps leadership failing and causing far more deaths than the US should have had"
Oh, ffs! Has it not yet registered with you that a virus-is-gonna-virus® so the worst approach to dealing with this one is the approach liberal governors took? They shut their businesses down, they shut their communities down, they abandoned the children. And what did doing so earn them? more deaths, larger spikes, drug and mental healthcare crises.
That's what you wanted from Trump. Instead, he downplayed it. Instead, his OWS actually found the solution. I know your comment registers as incontestable to the majority of this country (thanks, corporate media!) but that doesn't make it true. Especially in hindsight, except for his National shutdown Trump could not have done a better job.
Keep in mind- The Daily Caller did outstanding reporting over the summer that NYT’s had abdicated and gaslit and deceived.
RWK - The Daily Caller lies to its audience far more often than the NYT. The fact that they may have gotten ONE or a FEW stories right that the NYT got wrong does not make the Daily Caller a trustworthy media source much less more trustworthy then the NYT...
Both media sources LIE. But the Daily Caller has a business model built around pushing Republican lies daily. Not occasionally the way the NYT does for the State.
That is why on these boards i regularly see posts from right wingers regurgitating right wing media lies, like Stop the Steal and almost never read posts from Liberals claiming Trump colluded with Russia. Why is that?
I have found the NYT to be pretty consistent about lying and propagandizing, along the lines of bad old _Pravda_. Right-wingers are often useful sources of information because their basic model of perception is paranoia. A story appearing in the _Times_ has a presumptive truth value of a story issued by a government.
Starry - Matt has pointed out failures at the NYT. The right wing media has those failures daily across almost all of its media outlets. The result is that right wing media consumers are among the most misinformed people to post on these boards. Can you explain that?
I don't know how to measure degree of (mis)information versus ideological temperature without make a lot of dubious assumptions about both factors. The first two messages I ever got about US government surveillance -- this was a long time ago -- were (1) a graffito written on the walls of the NY Public Library that said "FBI IN LIBRARY", and (2) a mimeographed flyer from (I think) an outfit called "Conservative Women of America" which stated that US agents were demanding, and getting, complete banking information from ordinary banks about ordinary people without warrants. I took both to be conspiracy theories and I was wrong on both counts, at least according to subsequent news reports. I can supply many other anecdotes of this sort.
Over the years I have become very impressed with the inability of people in general to get out of their tribal-ideological boxes.
The Daily Caller did some of the best reporting over the summer precisely because The Paper of Record abdicated or gaslit or deceived, whatever the reason was, on the issue of the riots.
Obviously, it leans to the right so I wouldn’t make it a sole source but it’s pretty damn accurate. If you have a story where they’ve lied- send me the link.
Otherwise go back to sleep.
Ideological polarization is the point of both sides, what they run with is only relevant to what they can sell to their base. It is peoples selective exposure, curated through partisan channels, causing a national fragmentation, which seems to be the mutual endgame. The fact that your concerned about team red being overly bashed here fits into the same paradigm, people that are actually openminded don't have colored balls.
Jack - I am less concerned with team red not being bashed equally by Matt than i am with his communities non stop regurgitating of team red NON FACTUAL ideas, Everything from Stop the Steal is not a lie to Trump did a great job leading the country during covid. While i hear almost no team blue comments like Trump did collude with Russia or Hunter Biden did nothing wrong.
If i saw non factual comments on both sides on this board i would say Matt has accomplished something remarkable. He has created a platform that focuses on truth and not corporate media lies on the blue or red side.
But given that the non factual comments on this board are ALL coming from the red side and Matt is ONLY publishing stories that hammer the blue side for their lies i am forced to wonder how Matt is any different than say the NYT? Right?
UFO's are hovering outside, right now.
https://wearethemutants.com/2018/09/25/ufos-are-real-a-childhood-close-encounter/
You're so programmed to ONLY see what you've been conditioned to see.
Maybe pull your head out of your ass and try again.
Nonsense. Matt has done an excellent job of calling out corporate media lies that protect the Dems.
That does not change the fact that right wing corporate media, though not state sponsored, has pushed even more lies. From Stop the Steal to Tax cuts to the rich trickle down to M4A cant work in America.. But Matt does not seem to report on those lies with consistanlty or zeal with which he reports on lies to push the Democrats.
Lies and lies and you seem to be comfortable with one set of lies while challenging the other set of lies.. BOTH groups are lying and you not me are falling for one side.
Let me put this another way: there is already a huge institutional effort at "calling out" right-wing media. In fact it goes further than that, there's a rather advanced movement to shut down Fox altogether, and/or have the various tech platforms subdue those outlets - they already do this in some obvious cases, and also in some undeserved ones (like the Hunter Biden story). Almost no one who reads me is not already aware of the inclinations of Fox and the Daily Caller and so on. I'm hammering the other side these days for a couple of reasons. One, as I said before, it just represents a much bigger, more powerful segment of society. Two, we're in the middle of a movement to censor the Internet that is grounded in the idea that "misinformation" reigns, especially on the right-wing. I see this issue as a stalking-horse for a wider attempt to gain control over the press generally, am totally against it, and am therefore trying to show that "misinformation" is not exclusive to OANN and Newsmax and so on. The only route to stopping this dystopian effort to clamp down on the press is if Democratic voters reject it (Republicans already mostly do, although that might change if they get back into power). So, I'm trying to shine a light on what I see as the official lies. Moreover I'm a little concerned about inadvertently helping someone make the case for shutting down conservative outlets. That argument again is already being made by enough people. I know the focus seems curious to some but I've been thinking about this for almost five years now, since I started to see shifts in the media landscape and the movement toward censorship gain speed -- the amount of attention Im focusing in the various directions is intentional.
"I know the focus seems curious to some but I've been thinking about this for almost five years now"
To me, the current media environment seems remarkably similar to that c. 2002. It's necessary to direct hate at the official enemy (a remarkably Protean figure -- it could be S. Hussein, al-Qaeda, "terrorism," "white supremacy," whatever). It got kind of weird when it was directed toward the sitting President of the United States, regardless of one's opinions about his personal character or fitness for office. W. escaped this; Trump didn't. Why?
Like it or not, Dubya had his own political pedigree-2x Texas governor and a family lineage of DC powerbrokering. Trump was a lousy casino owner and reality TV host who never ran for office before. It’s easy to mock/instinctively hate a nouveau ruche gatecrasher.
"W. escaped this; Trump didn't. Why?"
Simple (probably inadequate) answers: because so many Democrats supported Bush's post-9/11 security state buildup, and were cheerleaders of the Iraq war. The NYT even had a pro-invasion shill on the front page.
Another answer is that Trump -- at least as a candidate -- posed a real threat to the R/D neoliberal order. He called the Bushes out, he said things like "we've killed a lot of people, too". He stated clearly that he wanted to pull troops out of foreign entanglements. He was willing to engage in trade wars despite the press reminding everyone that prices at wally world would likely rise as a result. I think it freaked them out that someone got into office using the rhetoric of a true change agent.
Hate Sells!
Matt - I 100% support your efforts and share your concern regarding the threat of 'clamping down on the press". From Fox to MSNBC and Daily Caller to Huff Post censorship will be destructive. That is what i got from your book Hate Inc... Support you and Greenwald 100%
So why is it that your audience on this board, since i have been on it, continually repeat as fact lies manufactured in the White House and Congress and Senate and pushed through right wing media sources?
On the flip side i am yet to see any messages on this board of your audience members claiming Trump really did collude with Putin or Kent Cloth wearing Pelosi and Schumer show real patriotism.
It would appear that your justified attacks on lies and false narratives from left leaning corporate media but not matched with equally justified attacks on false narratives from right leaning corporate media has produced an audience that feels free to regurgitate the right wing media lies as if they are fact.
Cause or correlation? My view is that your recent focus on the left lies while ignoring the rights lies is shifting your posts from the later to the former. No?
Because Taibbi is not a right-winger. If you've been following him for years, you'd remember him savaging the Right under Dubya. A few commenters notwithstanding, I doubt there are many, if any, serious koolaid drinking Trump lovers reading his articles and listening to his podcast (frequently pro-bernie, pro- M4A, anti-war, etc.).
And honestly, the Democrats have somehow managed to become worse for most of us on the left than the Trumpless Republicans. The GOP is fighting itself, the Democrats are trying to police thoughts. Shit, just actually read this article then ask yourself: is it really useful to make all bad behavior a comparison? Can't we talk about bad shit without having to strive for some fictional political balance?
If it makes you feel better, the exact same thing happens in reverse on the Never Trump right-wing message boards. I'm a Never Trump conservative and a fan of David French, who often criticizes the MAGA Right and the religious Right from a conservative perspective. But then you scroll down to the comments sections and it's mainly left-wing people saying THANK YOU FINALLY someone is recognizing how horrible the Right is, and then they give a bunch of mainly left-wing reasons, etc etc. I think it comes with the territory, the "aid and comfort to the enemy" effect.
...speaking of outrage porn.
A major point of agreement between honest liberals and conservatives who converge here can be the Chinese Communist Party. Aren't these things we can agree on?
Their civil liberties record is horrendous. They use slave labor, which is not only monstrous by itself, but makes them an unfair and unfit trading partner. (They will never allow a monitoring process that will reliably expose when slave labor has been used.)
They are an aggressive rising power. They have bribed leaders in developing countries to take exploitative loans that will cripple their economies and fledgling social welfare systems. (They do not enforce anything equivalent to our Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.)
They harvest organs from political prisoners. They have subjugated the people of Tibet, Xinjiang (Uighurs), and now Hong Kong. They certainly cancelled domestic flights from Wuhan after they learned of the virus outbreak, while allowing international flights to proceed. We may learn that they concealed the origins of the outbreak.
And they have helped skew and corrupt our political discourse. Why does Lebron James call out the police here, but stay silent about the camps for the Uighurs? Why hasn't Hollywood made a major film critical of China in almost 25 years (since Seven Years in Tibet in 1997)? They've certainly made plenty of films critical of America in that time. Why are the same American companies that may benefit from slave labor in China pouring money into BLM?
We should always expose and fight our domestic injustices. But has posturing on these become a cheap way to avoid accountability for participating in horrific humor rights abuses in another country?
I think a tough line on China (in trade, foreign policy, military alliances, and more) is a great dividing line in our politics. And it is not between left and right. It's between the bought and the rest of us.
Let's try less to bring democracy to China and focus on bringing democracy to our beloved country. -- I used to work in China...
Adrian Zenz and Falun Gong anti-Communist "religious" lunatics are not good source of information on China. Neither is Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo and war-mongers in CIA..
Let's focus on trying to introduce democracy in the US -- e.g., by starting to sharply reduce military expenditures for US imperialisms abroad. Or start conversation about DNC and Biden-family corruption...
You're doing exactly what Matt called out: You smear the "tough on China" cause with guilt by association by saying it relies on purported "lunatics" like Falun Gong or comes from "war mongers" like Pompeo and Cotton. You're suggesting that the cause cannot be right or legitimate, because these people you don't like support it.
That's not sound reasoning. A tough stance on China is either right or wrong, regardless of who else supports it.
And there's no way to avoid the issue by "focusing" on democracy at home. Choices have to be made. We're either going to have a tough or an open trading policy with China. Which should it be? Do we allow them to keep expanding their territory by creating artificial islands in the South China Sea, or do we push back? Do we take a supportive position on Taiwan, or signal that Taiwan is on its own? Do we provide assurances of engagement to our Asian partners who are concerned about China's rise, or do we pull back? We have to choose.
You imply that some of my facts are wrong because they may come from the "lunatics" of Falun Gong (presumably you're referring to the Epoch Times, which I don't read). Can you specify which facts you think are wrong? And by the way, which is more "lunatic"--Falung Gong, which to my knowledge has never hurt a soul? Or the Communist Party of China?
Thank you - we disagree.
CIA decade old lies about China have been fully refuted.
Criticizing any country, including the US and China, is always welcome -- but with facts, not with malicious fiction and falsifications...
But which assertions are fiction and fabrications? If you can't or won't specify, I fear no one can believe you when you say criticism of China is always welcome.
OK -- let's play naïve
One much aggressively touted is "genocide" of Uyghurs...
Not that long ago -- there was "coming genocide of Jews" in USSR...
Elie Wiesel's Israeli propaganda and the myth of Soviet genocide against the Jews
His book "The Jews of Silence" was created as part of Israel’s covert propaganda and influence program targeting American Jews.
Elie Wiesel's Israeli propaganda and the myth of Soviet genocide against the Jews - Immigrants as a Weapon (substack.com)
https://yasha.substack.com/p/elie-wiesels-israeli-propaganda-and
Yasha Levine -- Apr 28
Boris - Did you just claim that the USSR did not have a Jewish Genocide?
But which assertions are fiction and fabrications? If you can't or won't specify, I fear no one can believe you when you say criticism of China is always welcome.
OK -- let's play naïve
One much aggressively touted is "genocide" of Uyghurs...
Not that long ago -- there was "coming genocide of Jews" in USSR...
Elie Wiesel's Israeli propaganda and the myth of Soviet genocide against the Jews
His book "The Jews of Silence" was created as part of Israel’s covert propaganda and influence program targeting American Jews.
Elie Wiesel's Israeli propaganda and the myth of Soviet genocide against the Jews - Immigrants as a Weapon (substack.com)
https://yasha.substack.com/p/elie-wiesels-israeli-propaganda-and
Yasha Levine -- Apr 28
One of Greenwald's main tenants is that we don't have much, if any, agency for changing other countries policies.
>You're suggesting that the cause cannot be right or legitimate, because these people you don't like support it.
The cause is not right because there is no cause - just lies.
Which lies? Are you saying China is guilty of none of the things I described?
China has invited international observers to Xinjiang to disprove the genocide. It's strange that those who rant about "genocide" in China tend to ignore what the Saudis are doing in Yemen, described by UN observers as "the worst humanitarian crisis".
With the complete support of the US, a policy begun by Obama and continued by Trump, who even went so far as to veto a bill passed by congress that included ending our logistical support for the Saudis in Yemen.
Biden did end that support, but only for "offensive" operations, and weapons, which in D.C. speak could be defined very narrowly.
Read the fucking Grayzone, you imbecile.
OK -- let's play naïve
One much aggressively touted is "genocide" of Uyghurs...
Not that long ago -- there was "coming genocide of Jews" in USSR...
Elie Wiesel's Israeli propaganda and the myth of Soviet genocide against the Jews
His book "The Jews of Silence" was created as part of Israel’s covert propaganda and influence program targeting American Jews.
Elie Wiesel's Israeli propaganda and the myth of Soviet genocide against the Jews - Immigrants as a Weapon (substack.com)
https://yasha.substack.com/p/elie-wiesels-israeli-propaganda-and
Yasha Levine -- Apr 28
Um... I have friends whose family ran away from the USSR because of the Soviet genocide against the Jews. You are akin to a Holocaust denier.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html
Wasn’t the Uighurs an issue before the USA even started talking about it? I seem to remember a joint European statement on it a few years ago.
Indeed. And it's certainly not just a right wing (or left wing) issue. The Guardian, for example, has reported heavily on the satellite evidence of a gulag archipelago being created in Xinjiang. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/24/china-imprisoning-uighurs-satellite-images-xinjiang
Everyone saw the CCP boot come down on Hong Kong last year. Were all those young people protesting, many of whom have now been rounded up and shipped away somewhere, agents of the American deep state?
It's not my practice to question people's intentions, and that's rarely a useful exercise. But I have difficulty with people who blanketly deny CCP human rights abuses, or suggest America is just as bad or worse. Come on.
For over 30 years I've been telling people I know that buying stuff made in The People's Republic of China, would benefit them short term but was a long term loser, something we've all come to realize, now that it's too late. For that, I was scoffed at.
Blaming the Chinese for our collective short term greed and selfishness may feel good, but it's we who are the problem, both as consumers and especially our political and economic elites who made the Chinese economic miracle come to pass sooner than it would have on its own. During these last 30 years, I've met at least 10 people who did business with the Chinese, and while they admitted the Chinese stole their intellectual property rights etc., they to a man said the market was too big to pass up, and that such practices were just a cost of doing business. Their only concern, one they wouldn't admit, was to do business in a place with next to no environmental standards and low wages, all to increase short term profits.
The obvious conceit of the US decision to open up trade with the Chinese was that they would forever be content to play second fiddle to us, happily making little plastic doodads for us, a decision clearly grounded in both racism and US exceptionalism. Fact is, the Chinese played us; taking the long term approach, while we pursued our typical what's in in for me right now approach to life.
The Chinese are an economic, not military challenge to us, a fact our elites and too many citizens just can't seem to quite grasp, accustomed as we are to militaristic solutions, ironic, given that the current US population has an historic low level of people who have actually served, or would do so. Our only chance to be able to compete with the Chinese is to end our failed and in vain attempt to militarily garrison the world, something we have neither the right or ability to accomplish, as our dismal post WWII war record so clearly attests, and a record that will only grow worse as the US share of world GDP shrinks with each decade.
Our salvation will come in realizing our limitations, both in the right to act and the ability to do so, to forget being a world dominating military and having just enough to be a regional power, with emphasis on defending the country, not making the world safe for the multinational corporations who own our government, to do business where and when they want.
We are no one to point the finger at other nations, especially given our horrific record of wars of choice, of punishing, near genocidal sanctions on nations we've attacked, killing half a million children in Iraq after Gulf War I, the devastation we've fueled in Syria, followed by yet more sanctions, Libya and Yemen. The Chinese are no saints, but the last time their military fought was a border skirmish with Vietnam in 1979; if only we could make such a claim.
"The Chinese are an economic, not military challenge to us"
I remember how baffled I was when hearing of the huge military threat China posed for the US. It was quite awhile back, they had 1 rather unimpressive aircraft carrier, ONE, and the rest of the Navy was lackluster to put it gently. Their air force wasn't that much better. What the hell did these people think they were going to do? China did have a huge numbers advantage, but OK, now what are they to do with their millions of soldiers? Projecting power half-way round the world? Against the US who can still fuck them on their home turf now? It was ludicrous. Then you think about the decades of propaganda about the threat posed by the USSR and what a Potemkin Village that turned out to be. I can see the Soviet Potemkins struggling to keep rebuilding and repainting what is nothing but a rotting façade while the US intelligence and military Potemkins serve as basically photoshop artistes and script doctors.
With our ME follies winding down, Shock and Awe a resounding failure, the MIC had to find someone to scare the bejeezus out of ignorant Americans, so they've selected the Chinese and Russia for that purpose to keep the useless gravy train of military spending alive.
Instead of actually planning to fight them, we would lose far too many personnel and equipment in such wars, the whole point is to simply identify a "threat" and then spend money on weapons that would theoretically oppose them, without ever being used. In reality, as long as the weapons are bought, the Mission Is Accomplished, especially given that some of them , the F-35 most obviously, are pieces of shit, more suited to impress US crowds at Super Bowl flyovers lasting 10 seconds that actually faring well in combat. A few years back, the F-35 went up against the F-16 in aerial combat, using lasers instead of weaponry for the kill shot, and lost 16 of 17 dogfights.
The irony of all this is that our political elites, the advocates of endless US militarism despite its woeful post WWII record, are nearly to a man people who never served, and if they were old enough, actively avoided doing so during Vietnam, sort of a congress made up of Marion Morrisons.
Those of us who have served, especially been in combat, know what war is really like, how futile it is, especially in wars like those of the last 19 years, where there is no military solution, as the problem is cultural/political, something no amount of high tech weapons can resolve, and that the generals, who so impress our elected representatives with their rows of brightly colored ribbons, most of which are nothing more than Boy Scout badges, are as incompetent as they are.
We are squandering our resources developing weapons to "counter" the PRC as meanwhile they continue their economic policy of investments in tomorrow's technologies, making loans and trade deals in resource rich countries, controlling the shipping ports of the world and behaving far more intelligently than we are.
We should ask the USSR what good all their weapons did them when their economy collapsed, but then, we're Americans, the exceptional nation, with nothing to learn.
"to scare the bejeezus out of ignorant Americans" I think they're the actual target of the shock and awe, I certainly was constantly shocked and awed by the stupidity, the carnage and the waste, the massive waste in so many different varieties.
"as long as the weapons are bought, the Mission Is Accomplished" that's the "photoshop artistes and script doctors" whole raison d'etre. With the USSR threat exposed as a paper tiger, why didn't the military budget plummet, and stay plummeted? There's always going to be the next boogey man, we got it in the form of terrorism, specifically Islamic terrorism, that massive existential threat that had killed no one on US soil before 9/11 but then required even more military buildup than the Soviet threat. It's pathetically easy to scare folks with irrational BS, they should be more afraid of their bathtubs.
When he was captured by the Americans, Herman Goering, who apparently was a guy you couldn't help but like on a personal level, was asked by them how it was that the Germans, so cultured and advanced could do what they did by following the Nazi program of hate, and he replied it had nothing to do with being German or Nazi, that such a thing could happen in any country, because while ordinary people naturally would not choose to go to war if it was their decision, they would also blindly put their faith in a leader who could convince them that out there was someone who would harm them unless they allowed such a leader to do what he felt necessary to protect them.
The US response to 9-11 made that claim a correct one. As the years went by, I would ask supporters of those wars, why, if the Muslim threat is so overwhelming, they simply didn't just buy guns and blow people away just like we do on the regular, a tactic that couldn't be foiled as it requires nothing but a few bucks and the willingness to kill and be killed.
The upshoot of all this has been a surveillance state that we were told was aimed at terrorists, but even those on the right who once supported such programs, now realize all too late that it was always meant for all of us. A people who give up their liberty for supposed security deserve and get neither, as Benjamin Franklin said over 250 years ago.
"The US response to 9-11 made that claim a correct one."
To me, what we've seen with Trump and his supporters makes that case to a far greater extent, and is much scarier. Repeatedly, I was astounded at how quickly and how thoroughly folks could blind themselves into passionately believing absurdities, which then fueled equally passionate hate and acceptance of obvious cruelties. How close did we come to something similar to the Nazis in Germany? It's still going on, look at the 1/6 deniers. What's at the root of this is a mindset, a personality type, those who are authoritarian, those whose nature is to "blindly put their faith in a leader". It's far more common in conservative types which makes this recent crap coming from the left more disconcerting.
You know the MIC is desperate when they wage “war” on the nebulous notion of “climate catastrophe.”
"sort of a congress made up of Marion Morrisons."
You're killin' it, MTN.
The Duke made exactly 2 good movies: STAGECOACH and THE SHOOTIST.
I actually liked "The Quiet Man" more than those two, though "The Shootist" was good, too. Whenever I want a laugh, I'll tune in to one of his movies, to see one of the most wooden and lifeless humans ever to have makeup applied to his face and words put into his mouth prance around before a camera.
It may be pathetic, but I do get a kick out of reminding his fans that their hero deserted his wife and two small boys to shack up with the lefty bisexual, Marlene Dietrich, prior to WWII, and chose fame and her pussy over serving his country. I might have done the same, but I wouldn't have gone around afterwards dissing anyone who opposed any of our wars he was eventually too old to avoid fighting in.
I exaggerate for effect. RED RIVER is good too, but IMO that is primarily due to John Ireland scene-stealing. When it came out, John Ford was alleged to have been furious with Howard Hawks for squeezing a good performance out of Wayne; "I never knew the big son of a bitch could act!"
It is a great line, though I wonder how old you have to be to get it? I'm afraid I have a fondness for [or guilty pleasure?] "Rio Lobo" and "El Dorado", weirdly, they're almost the same movie.
EL DORADO is a remake of RIO BRAVO. RIO LOBO is a remake of EL DORADO, thereby being the 2nd remake of RIO BRAVO. Do not confuse either with John Ford's RIO GRANDE, in which Ben Johnson and Harry Carey Jr. act circles around John Wayne.
The F-35 is now being teamed-up with the venerable air superiority fighter par excellence: the F-15. It’s a devastating duo.
I am not enough of an aeronautics waffentwerp to tell if you are being sarcastic here, although I suspect that you are. If I got trolled, I got trolled.
Nope, no sarcasm at all. To your point, the F-35 isn’t much of of a dog fighter, not can it carry much in the way of ordnance. But it is stealthy, so it goes in first, clears up some pesky stuff and makes way for the F-15 to come in with a massive weapons load. You’re original comment is spot-on. I’m just your wing man here. 😎
"now what are they to do with their millions of soldiers? Projecting power half-way round the world?"
To your point, I think, but China doesn't seem to be particularly interested in projecting military power globally, unlike the US.
"Against the US who can still fuck them on their home turf now?"
This is... to put it lightly... an interesting proposition. Are you taking wagers?
In the event of a US amphibious invasion/land war against the PRC, I know where I'm putting my money. The vaunted US military has been unable to beat barefoot Afghan hillbillies for 20 years.
From what I've gleaned at looking at the US military's recent wars, which are boutique at best, and on my own experience in Vietnam, there seems to be a sense of unreality among their thinking. This is reflected in slogans like, "we never leave a man behind." BS. If you're in real combat, with forces comparably equal in firepower, you do what you need to do save the main force, even when it requires leaving behind any number of people, either wounded, or as cover for your retreat. Of course, In WWII"s Eastern front, that meant entire divisions or even armies were sacrificed.
My hope is we never enter a real war, but if we do, the shock of real casualties would be an eyeopener for this country.
The military learned how important it was to keep reality out of the press after Vietnam. They don't appear to have any qualms about blowing away reporters now and then. It's pathetic how little 'journalists' have fought for Manning and Assange.
Hmmmm? Grisha....sounds Russian...you wouldn't be one of them Russian trolls that keeps tryin to subvert our deeMOCKracy would you? :)
that would me I.
Oh, I don't disagree with anything you've said, and trying to invade China would be folly times near infinity, for one thing, their numbers would matter in such a case, plus there's nothing short of a plethora of shittons of ways it would be insanity. [Well fuck me, I just read about Ellsberg's new documents and fuck me, a plethora of shittons of insanity probably isn't enough to deter some of these crazy fucks] All I said was we could fuck them up, and that we could do quite well even without nukes. Their response, should they deem it necessary, would necessarily involve nukes though, so ... It was only meant to be a comparison exposing how ludicrous it was to believe them to be a huge military threat.
Larry WIlkerson says every war game progressed to the nukes quite quickly.
"the last time their military fought was a border skirmish with Vietnam in 1979; if only we could make such a claim."
Shit was crazy! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War
Vietnam: (possibly infected with Wilsonian STD from prolonged and undesired contact with U.S.) "Too much genocidin', Pol Pot, you gots to go"
China: "Nah, he's our guy, leave him alone"
The Beltway Experts continue to warn about the Extreme Danger of Monolithic Global Communism, or Terrorism, or Evilism, or whatever. I continue to laugh.
Yup. A very real-time example of this is how you have the USA pointing fingers at China saying "they were responsible for the virus" and you have China saying "the USA are responsible for the virus". And the crazy thing? They're both right.
Not just an economic challenge, cultural too since they encourage the elite to focus on the Chinese market.
Sounds vaguely Trumpish, and I mean that as a compliment.
Very well said, Mr. Nola.
China is a modern day horror-show that we all need to get straight on. When they take over, concepts like "liberal" and "conservative" will be very old news indeed. Just ask Hong Kong or the Uighurs.
Stop the fucking bullshit!!!! You are fucking reading fucking Matt Taibbi! You cannot be so fucking stupid and gullible. Or you are a fucking useless no-good troll. Shush under the bridge!!!
"if you don't agree with me then you are a troll". Keep up the good work sasha
Not at all. I don't agree with your post promoting the State Department propaganda, but I've not declared you a troll yet.
You become a troll when you knowingly post bullshit. And Taibbi readers - one would think - generally don't. So, the threshold here is lower for such proclamations.
Correct. So do you want to try defending your response to Parkito above now? Perhaps you’ve calmed down a bit and can actually give a reasonable response this time rather than the juvenile bile you chose to spew?
People making extraordinary claims are expected to provide extraordinary proof. So it is not on me, it's on Parkito.
And there's plenty more bile left, juvenile or otherwise.
<<When they take over, concepts like "liberal" and "conservative" will be very old news indeed>>
I thought this was the point of this article by MT? It didn't require a Chinese invasion. The US elites did it to themselves.
The US government is visibly inept, corrupt, and tottering. While it pains me to direct ire at my fellow commenters, the last trick the elites have left in their book is to blame "external interference" by "foreign powers," and some of you are still lapping up that sweet, sweet syrup.
The PRC didn't outsource American jobs. American corporations did that, and China was like, "Yeah, OK, sure, we can make some money." This is a far cry from "CHINA IS TRYING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!" Look to greed at home before blaming China, Russia, or anyone else for your domestic problems.
Yes. Good. Accurate. Nothing to add.
Hey, I got an idea. I think it's pretty good one. Don't dismiss it out of hand. It just may work.
Why don't you go to China and spread your jizz wide there instead of spewing it here? That way the superior freedumb traits that are missing from the Chinese gene pool will be restored!
I could help you with the ticket, I know you'd need that.
Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer for covering up Holomodor for Stalin. The media has always been in the business of selling leftism.
Nope. The media is in the business of sucking elite's cock.
It pains me very much that the fake 'wokism' is replacing the real ideals of the left, liberal ideas. I wonder if this is a response to the growing extremism on the right as well.
Hard to disagree with the assessment of the coming neo-feudalism. Or has it come already? When the government mandates the richest man on the planet gets $10B for his pet rocket project, what are we to do?
"I wonder if this is a response to the growing extremism on the right as well."
Anyone's perceptions are, well, their perceptions, but if anything I think the US "right" has greatly softened over the past ~15 years; one of the most encouraging developments I have seen in both online and IRL discourse is the rise of the antiwar "right." It may have had something to do with the husbands, wives, daughters and sons of traditionally conservative folks getting killed for no visible purpose.
The "woke/cancellation" craze now reminds me of nothing as much as the post-9/11 GWB "with us or against us" dogma. Those were ugly times. I can only imagine if Twitter had been invented in 2002.
That's a good observation. Indeed, the right must've softened to a significant degree. After all, the same-sex marriage progressed at a lightening speed.
At the same time, maybe there is polarization happening on the right as well. Maybe it's a smaller fraction now, but it is probably more extreme.
And the wokism could just as well be another mind-fuck from the PTB. :) Who benefits? <g>
Conflating leftism and liberalism is dangerous: It's true that liberals have leaned left in recent history, but leftism in its purer form - at least in our time after Robespierre and Marx - is not liberal at all. On the contrary, it's a fanatical creed of trying to make a new society, a new man, and it thinks it knows just how to do it. Add a heaping dose of the resentful egalitarianism that's part and parcel of modern leftist ideals and you get something very nasty.
Modern left-liberalism is a child of that French Revolutionarist spirit of constant progress, and that emotional heritage is exactly why it's being eaten alive by wokeness: They're built the same, but one values a certain degree of toleration for heretics, the other wants to burn them.
Liberalism is, at heart, a set of procedures of conduct for people who already have ideals and worldviews. It itself is thin gruel for sustaining a culture, and requires vehement assertiveness to uphold. SDly it tends to promote a yielding attitude because of its own live and let live tenets.
Great, please take notes, as this will be on the exam.
Uh-oh. Another victim of Zenz. Please, get ahold of The Grayzone reporting.
I would agree with your post in its entirety if you wrote it properly and used USA instead of China.
You'd best move to China to be safe, then! Bon voyage.
My best move is to remain Skeptic-al.
You’d think so but I’ve seen comments from communists (and my husband witnessed personally) that think the Uygher Muslim camps aren’t real. No one trusts any news and thus they don’t believe that the communist party is doing any human rights atrocities.
Absolutely no evidence of Uygher Muslim camps. All the sources are ridiculous and lead back to one far right blogger. Of course China is guilty of human rights abuses; they are an authoritarian country. So are we. Let's concentrate on OUR humans right abuses.
"The US State Department has previously described China's actions in Xinjiang as a genocide, and the parliaments of the UK, Canada, Netherlands, and Lithuania have passed resolutions making the same declaration."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57318564
Regurgitating the same claims doesn't make them true.
I hope you keep posting this drivel to demonstrate how insane it is.
Have you considered applying your statement to your own behaviour here? I suspect not.
Apply my statements to my behavior here? Of course. That's exactly what I do - I question silly information from the State Department regurgitated by gullible concerned citizens.
Sorry, but the only evidence for Uygher genocide comes from (1) Adrian Zenz, a literal Christian fascist, and (2) a US-government-backed "human rights" group. Anyone who has the intellect of an elementary school child should be able to immediately repudiate the comically inaccurate and incorrect claims in Zenz's paper.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02634937.2018.1507997
As for whether or not you believe the US government is actually promoting "human rights" abroad – if you do, then maybe you'll also be amenable to the claim that there are WMDs in China. Perhaps you think we should start a war there? You know, just to make sure we spread "freedom" and "democracy"?
Please do better moving forward.
"The US State Department has previously described China's actions in Xinjiang as a genocide, and the parliaments of the UK, Canada, Netherlands, and Lithuania have passed resolutions making the same declaration."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57318564
Cool, your article does exactly nothing to counter my statement. It cites both Zenz and HRW, in fact. The only other evidence it gives is the opinion of the US State Department and a few other "experts". And, again, if you believe the State Department, I have some WMDs in China for you to find.
You said that the evidence of genocide only comes from two specific sources. The article clearly refuted that. So it actually does everything to counter your statement. Care to try again?
Only one source is enough.
There is no genocide going on in China. And I'm not a communist (on paper).
Sasha, instead of calling people imbeciles and throwing around a bunch of curse words, why don't you CONVINCE others that what you are saying is correct? You seem to get very angry that people speak the truth of the Chinese genocide against the Uighurs, which is now very well documented by Western media. You react like someone who is PAID to react that way.
Your post is the very good example why I get angry. Well documented by Western media. Is it as well documented as the Russiagate?
What if you’re wrong? There were people who denied that the Holocaust was real back then as well. Are you willing to support a totalitarian fascistic regime that we know censors its population?
Use your brain instead of listening to lefty propaganda. I was like you, I thought the left wing media wasn’t lying and then I left and saw how much it lies.
The ironic part is that it's the left media that make such claims. Even Democracy Now! All sourced by one or two disinformation outlets.
I bet you never been to China, but feel qualified to make grand pronouncements.
one correction..."the left media"= the pseudo-left media.
Haven’t you figured it out by now? The “progressives” (aka communists) support Palestine because it’s supported by Iran because Iran is supported by China. You’re essentially watching communist propaganda when you watch any progressive media.
Democracy Now lost its credibility when it started advocating for the destruction of art.
Your first paragraph deserves some sort of award for sheer lunacy and is, in its way, the equal of what Matt's article covers regarding the "thinking" of the elite of this country.
It could just be that those who speak out on the Israelis' subjugation of the Palestinians are concerned about the human rights of a Semitic people whose subjugation and displacement by Israel continues and accelerates, all with the de facto support of the US hegemon. How it would have amused Hitler to see an innocent Semitic people, the Palestinians, be the scape goat for the collective guilt of the white Christian world's historical mistreatment of Jews.
Sorry, that chain makes no sense to me.
Yes, the gulags were just a fiction of the Birchers...
There was a solid proof of gulags. What is your proof of genocide in China? Do share the photos of those mass graves!
There’s photos of the camps and people’s heads shaved waiting to be put on trains. There’s also first hand accounts of what they do to the women in these internment camps. Why don’t you go try looking for it? You expect everyone to do the work for you.
Those photographs have been proven to be other populations entirely and were taken in other countries. Do you know how to do a Google image search? Again, we have ample evidence of our own camps filled with children, and our own sexual abuse. How about you concentrate on those?
Those making the claims usually provide the evidence.
"The US State Department has previously described China's actions in Xinjiang as a genocide, and the parliaments of the UK, Canada, Netherlands, and Lithuania have passed resolutions making the same declaration."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57318564
Yes, and those same "sources" say Guaido is the real president of Venezuela. Do you have the slightest inclination of how governments and the media work? Have you ever learned to ask yourself "who benefits"?
Well, certainly China benefits when people like you do all the work of defending them, just like they benefited when our mainstream media suppressed any discussion of the lab leak hypothesis. Does that answer your question?
LOL--horrible analogy. The lab leak hypothesis was suppressed by scientists, and the media followed suit. Most scientists STILL disbelieve the lab leak hypothesis and are duking it out with the scientists who think a leak might be possible all over social media. A lab leak is still the least likely scenario. It is not at all a matter of "defending China." In fact, if there was a lab leak, the US is just as guilty as the Chinese since the work at the lab was a joint US/China project. Someone has not done his homework. And your underlying assumption seems to be that everyone should think China is "the enemy" as a baseline belief. I guess that old propaganda has worked well on you.
Unreservedly believing the Chinese government when it comes to this issue strikes me as just as foolish as believing the progressive media.
Are you going to tell us there’s absolutely no CCP persecution of dissidents going on in Hong Kong as well?
Just wow. The US pays the dissidents in Hong Kong, just as it paid the Tiannamen Square dissidents. That is a matter of fact. Our government has hosted the Hong Kong dissident leaders in Washington. In both instances, the Chinese police have been remarkably restrained, especially in Hong Kong, and it is actually the police who have been beaten, burned and killed by the dissidents. There is video of dissidents beating up innocent people on the street and in shops. In neither case was the general population sympathetic to the dissidents--they were thuggish hooligans. I have gotten NONE of my information from the Chinese government, but from independent Western reporters. The Chinese government is of course authoritarian and corrupt, but our government is the terrorist and bully of the world.
Adam, Adam, Adam... If all of those entities came out and declared that the sky is blue, I would not believe either of them.
You should be a bit more critical when media reprints such proclamations.
Proving the genocide should be very easy. Just one picture of mass graves would do it. Have you seen it?
Do you think genocide requires mass graves? Perhaps you need to educate yourself on the legal definition of the term, then come back and tell me if you still stand by that statement.
Regarding media criticism, of course we need to be skeptical. But that doesn’t mean we can just dismiss any media report we don’t like either, which is what you appear to be doing. You’re not actually demonstrating any critical thinking when you do that, just ignoring what you don’t like.
My gawd... You must be one of those smart dumb people I've been talking about.
Yes, mass graves are a must for a genocide. Here, I googled it for you:
https://www.google.com/search?q=genocide&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS710US710&oq=genocide&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i61l2&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
On the second point - that's exactly what was done. Every media report on the subject is sourced by one or two entities. And they have been debunked. Read The Grayzone.
I don't know what's going on in China, nor do I have any way of finding out, but when you're deriving your information from official government and media outlets I suggest you call consider the sources, e.g. the US State Department, the parliaments of the UK, Canada, Netherlands, and Lithuania, and the BBC. I see no reason, based on a lifetime of experience, to believe in any of them. Maybe "Skeptic" above should try being a bit more skeptical.
Sure, but are you applying that same skepticism to the Chinese government. Of course all governments lie, but in a situation where you've got the CCP denying everying, and several other governments disagreeing with them, and you're not in a position to get the facts for yourself, which way are you going to tend to lean?
What I find stunning in all of this is that people are (correctly) pointing out the need to be skeptical of our own governments and media, but then acting as though somehow the CCP and Chinese News Media outlets are in any way trustworthy or reliable!
Of course I apply the same skepticism to the government of China and of any other state entity. Why wouldn't I?
I think you are projecting a bit here. Many of those who express the sheer disbelief into the infowars propaganda spewing out of the Western 'intelligence' services (by the way of mass media) are not expressing an opinion on what Chinese government says. It would be highly unlikely that Chinese government doesn't lie.
Interestingly enough, though, I can't say I've seen Chinese lies about the US and the way people and dissidents/whistleblowers are treated here...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/23/china-footage-reveals-hundreds-of-blindfolded-and-shackled-prisoners-uighur
Wasn't that video thoroughly debunked?
How credulous one needs to be to read all the suppositions in the article and come to a solid conclusion? How can anyone determine the ethnicity of the people - especially when they are blindfolded?
Even if what the video purports to show is true - is this the proof of a genocide?
"A major point of agreement between honest liberals and conservatives who converge here can be the Chinese Communist Party. Aren't these things we can agree on?"
NO! The assumption in your question seems to be that if we all gang up on China, we can all sing kumbaya. Have you ever thought that you may be brainwashed on China? Most of us have at one time, but perhaps it's time to listen to an American that has actually lived there and changed his preconceptions: https://risingtidefoundation.net/2021/04/09/a-journey-with-jeff-j-brown-through-chinas-history-political-economy-and-culture/
Is this a joke?
The GloboCaps and their court jesters-looking at you NBA and Disney-went all in on the idea that opening Chinese markets would lead to human rights and government transparency/democracy. Now that this idea has blown in their faces rather spectacularly, all they can do is engage in PR spin and sanctimony.
I’ve lived in China for six years. China has nothing in common with ‘Cultural left’ .
China derangement syndrome. With so much shit in this country why constant references to China. How does China affect your life? Why look across the globe for enemies. Don’t worry about their human rights. Ask why Assange is rotting in prison just because he reported on American war crimes. Ask why your government destroyed Libya and is helping to destroy Yemen. Ask about human rights in Gaza.
Actually, I think I'll read Orwell and then go to bed.
1984 was about UK and by extension US. Very prescient. Animal farm was about Soviet Union.
Are you sure you didn't mean that it's your "new age (buddhist)" friends who are holding "snuggle" sessions to "engage in psychological terrorism?"
I also wish there was more of a political consensus in opposition to China. It's quite alarming that our long-term political and economic rival practices and promotes an authoritarian government and social structure antithetical to liberal values.
But as a brief riff on a minor point of yours, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is a disaster. Corruption is the cost of doing business in many emerging economies, unfortunately, and its stringent penalties (despite how unpredictably and randomly enforced they are) have deterred economic linkages with developing countries that, cash-poor and lacking other partners to turn to, are now indebted to China as you describe.
It's a tough issue, but FCPA was passed after it was discovered in the 70s that Lockheed Corp had bribed the Prime Minister of Japan, and another defense contractor had bribed Indonesian officials to buy military equipment they had not even planned to buy or seemingly wanted. It was out of control. If you don't control it, your multinationals can foul up your foreign policy and contribute to the mess in developing countries.
FCPA is actually "moderate" compared to the British bribery law, because FCPA allows routine bribes to speed up nondiscretionary processes ("grease payments"), while UK does not.
But yeah, one consequence is that corrupt officials in developing countries will deal with China instead of us so they can get their sugar.
There are potentially marginal reputational benefits to the FCPA, and other countries may have more onerous variants, but I find those benefits intangible and likely make only an immaterial contribution to whether or not a country acts toward us in a way they otherwise wouldn't. First, I don't know how much the FCPA deters such abuses. Bribery is already illegal in Japan. These high-profile instances of corruption likely involve grift that wouldn't be deterred by additional legal consequences (especially given erratic enforcement). Indonesia and other counties have since been pressured into arms transactions with the US (often for the sake of maintaining a relationship with a military patron), which periodically may cause domestic blowback. But, even if the FCPA were to deter some of these fiascos, those reputational costs are a drop in the bucket. Considering the myriad factors that contribute to or detract from our credibility and that would factor in another state's actions towards the US.
However, the downstream chilling effect against investment in developing countries has harmed both our contact with developing countries (which over time could have been a liberalizing influence), and those countries development trajectories themselves. The harms are significant and, as far as I'm aware, quantitative studies have demonstrated them beyond a reasonable doubt (See: Spalding, "UNWITTING SANCTIONS: UNDERSTANDING ANTIBRIBERY LEGISLATION AS ECONOMIC SANCTIONS AGAINST EMERGING MARKETS," 62 Fla. L. Rev. 351, 427-407, 2010). Given the speculative and intangible nature of the benefits, I would asssess the costs are far greater.
I teach FCPA, and the arguments for and against are interesting. But in my view, they are purely academic. It is simply inconceivable that Congress would repeal FCPA and announce to the world that US multinationals are henceforth free to bribe foreign officials as they see fit in order to win contracts. I don't think that would be wise, but it doesn't really matter. It's never going to happen.
It's quite difficult to repeal or change legislation in general, and there is not a strong political coalition advocating for FCPA repeal at the moment (and truth be told it's not at the very top of my political agenda either). But that's a fairly fatalistic attitude. We should have healthy and honest debate, when we can, about what policy would be best in theory; gradually, depending on the relatively unpredictable shifts of the political winds over time, who knows what will happen? I guarantee you there will be forthcoming events over the next fifty years that appear out of left field and are deemed by conventional wisdowm to be a hell of a lot more inconceivable than repealing an often-criticized law few outside of specialists, industry and political insiders, and academics have heard of.
"China benefits from a weak, divided USA."
That would seem like a perfectly uncontroversial thing to say, yet reading through some of these comments I'm not so sure.
Leftist media outlets have become so doctrinaire that they can no longer even understand how people who disagree on some issues but agree on others can have a conversation.
Rational discourse is the new fascism.
But they also change the doctrine almost daily! There isn’t even a consistency to the lunacy that us ordinary folk can fight. So I just laugh at the absurdity. Which is fine until I talk to my daughter who gets all her news and opinions from these idiots.
This article helped me understand a lot about the ever changing language of the elite "woke" crowd: https://www.thebellows.org/the-left-has-become-a-guild/
You sound like a racist. (sarc)
You shouldn't need the footnote.
https://linksharing.samsungcloud.com/Wty2P9zkJ0MN
This is satirical comment I posted on Huffpo the other day, its running upwards of 30 likes, would be hillarious if it wasn't terrifying.
Link expired. Just out of curiosity, what was the comment?
It all started because the DNC was incapable of admitting that they blew the 2016 election, not because of Russia, not because of the Koch brothers, not because of Bernie but because of themselves. They still cannot admit it. That is what is called Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Yup. If you nominate a thoroughly unlikable harpy, who thinks it'd be a good idea to take August off during the campaign, and you reap the consequences.
Calling potential voters deplorable does not seem terribly smart either.
That's so 2016. We became Chumps in 2020.
Oh yeah, that too!
I can't say you've not been proven right by history, but I really did like that harpy.
Dude, people need to cool it with the Koch Bros. boogie man. Those guys are open border Chamber of Commerce (Capital L) Libertarians, they HATED Trump! Sheesh! I swear the Koch’s are the left’s version of George Soros!
Grim take, and I'm not saying you're wrong, but I wonder exactly how robust the "Biden coalition" is. I always thought the DNC made a strategic error by pushing Hillary over Joe in 2016. 2022 and 2024 will tell the tale, I guess.
I agree, but i think they made another big error in picking Harris for VP over, say, Cory Booker. Another one who couldn't make it to the primaries, but i would have felt a lot more comfortable with Booker when Joe packs it in than Harris. Underestimated, methinks. Wrong kind of underwear though.
OMG the only thing worse than HARRIS’ giggles is CORY’s “PINCHING A LOAF” serious serious subject face.
Don't forget his Spartacus moment.
Yeah, i heard about that, but i didn't watch that bit of theatre.
That was funny.
I know he's disliked. I just can't help but like the guy. Only corporate Dem that i would have voted for in '20. But, identity stuff, it was Time For a Woman.
"I just can't help but like the guy."
I know he's garbage but he's weirdly charismatic! The most important quality for a candidate on the national stage.
...you seem to know a lot more about Booker's underwear than I do.
Only speculation. But i am speculating that he got them in the Men's dept.
I could be wrong, i could be right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPj-8_wOZcA
DNC more interested in donations than winning elections. that is the problem. DNC cannot imagine winning without donors. Winning means obtaining money, not votes. If votes counted they would completely change their platform. As it is they pretend to be progressive, where the votes are, and then stick it to progressives. It just doesn't work.
hat's sad is you can replace DNC with RNC and it remains true. Well except now the RNC is beholden to ex-President Ass Clown, a gifted grifter in his own right.
Rewarded with divisiveness that increases daily.
"They’re wrong on the ideology, but right about one thing: they’ve created a brand of imperious elite politics so revolting that it has the potential to unite even this Balkanized wreck of a country. If they keep this up, liberals and conservatives may start talking for real, and maybe even fix a thing or two."
Yes. And if this happens, you, Matt Taibbi, will be a significant part of the story. This site is ground zero.
I dunno... I have a hard time believing that people are going to wake up. Maybe the normies but that’ll be because of the shitshow that is Biden, not because of political discourse.
I was a lefty that switched and even my own mother refuses to consider that the Dems are the ones that are racist and authoritarian even though I give her examples. The only friend who stayed my friend after my switch refuses to look at anything I give her for fear of becoming extremely fearful and anxious. Yet she still votes bluenomatterwho.
I don’t see it happening. Many people are afraid to admit that everything they believe is a lie. They’re also afraid of losing all their friends like I did.
Sorry for the black pill. This is just what I see in my own life and from the interactions with my husband’s family who is also diehard Dem.
I went from left to right after 25 years of leftist adulthood. In my case, I saw some stuff up close that shook me (and then saw how the media wildly and willfully misreported it).
As long as we're alive and kicking, change is possible.
I am honestly heartened by the people of goodwill from different ends of the spectrum who meet here on this site to chew things over and figure things out. We have some of the usual assholes spouting the latest talking points, but that's not the prevailing spirit.
Agreed. Let us all thank the deities of our choice for Substack. The monoculture is beginning to crack, at least a bit. And there are multiple Substacks where people can have smart conversations that move beyond the logic of insufficient dichotomies.
Interesting, my entire extended family is red red red (with the exception on one person and me who is center, purple) and we never, ever talk about politics. My family just shrugs things off, like, no biggie. Sorry, but I live in a college town and so am around tons of blues and conservatives are 1000X easier to be around these days!
Conservatives are definitely easier to talk to. And I was a huge 60s era liberal. Independent now.
Everyone has their own experience. I have a family member who’s a Trump supporter and clearly deeply, deeply frustrated right now. We all do our best to avoid talking about politics around him but ever so often he randomly explodes, starts saying things that are hard to ignore, and begins asking us questions which, let’s say, are very difficult to answer without touching off controversy.
And once you get online and start talking with conservatives, the lid really seems to come off. I’m kind of trying to stop at this point, because I’m tired of being told over and over again that I’m a “communist” / “not real American” and should be deported, or worse.
You lost all your friends? Jesus, why not just agree to a moratorium on politics conversation? Life is too long to live without friends.
when you start to question your politics, you tend to try to talk about your feelings and thoughts to people you know and trust. Right now, everyone on the left is so totalitarian that if you even tried that simple act, you will probably be X'ed from the life of anyone of that political bent.
I bailed on social media about a year after Obama was elected due to a consensus among my liberal friends that only they are allowed to talk politics, and it was deep and nasty. There was zero room for any dissent (the highest form of patriotism!) outside the parameters of the left.
Right now my best friend and I won't/can't talk about politics, even though we used to for hours on end. Even when we agree on things, there is just too much at risk for the friendship.
So, I’m not a Democrat, I’m on the actual left (let’s just say my politics are to the left of Bernie Sanders, but he was my candidate of choice in 2020). However, some of my friends here in Texas are Democrats, some are Republicans, some are libertarians, some are basically socialists like me. I’ve found that—in real life, away from the internet—people are quite reasonable, and frankly exhausted by politics. Maybe a lot of this boils down to individual experience. My friends and I disagree on a lot, but we care about each other too much to let that alienate us from our relationships. I think on some level we all understand two important truths: 1) We believe in each other’s fundamental goodness. I know my libertarian friends, for instance, are deeply involved in charitable donations of their money and time. We disagree intensely on the path to a just world for the working class, but I know that’s what they want. Some of my Democrat friends are still scared to visit me at my house, even though I’m vaccinated. But I know they’re just trying to do what they believe is right. There’s been such vast covid misinformation from all sides, who can blame anyone for distrusting institutions or the scientific clerisy when your family’s safety is on the line? I feel totally safe gathering with folks, that’s why I got the damn vaccine. But the point is, they’re good people doing their best in a chaotic world. 2) We also accept that we’re all captive to emergent social and institutional forces beyond our control. I don’t want to punish my liberal friends because I’m angry about the actions of their favored party’s leaders. What’s the point? They’re not responsible for, or capable of, abrogating the wickedness of power. They chose Biden because he felt like the least bad choice. Is it their fault they spent a lifetime believing that they could seek/find truth and reflections of reality from authoritative sources on the news? Naturally they believed Maddow when she said Russia was using Trump as a puppet. They’re wrong, but I understand the forces beyond their control that led them to think Russiagate was real. We hold fast to the universal human experience as much as possible. I wish more people were could do this. This country is hemorrhaging right now. If we actually want to save its life—not just scream and claw at each other until the US is a smoking crater—concessions, composure and restraint have to begin within personal relationships. It can be frustrating as hell, but worthwhile. Many times I’ve found my friends come around to my POV simply because I gave them space to express free of judgment. Historically I’ve never been a particularly complaisant gal, but I am seeing the tremendous remunerative value of what activist Lawrence Goodwyn called “ideological patience.”
Only need to look at Snowden to know that things aren’t what they seem. Yes, reality is too creepy for some
I completely understand your frustration and depression. May I offer you a white pill? I have been in the same situation -- to the point that I refused to talk about politics anymore because it was ruining our relationship. Our relationship improved because of it. Then, one day, she randomly started bringing things up like Bill Gates' actions overseas and Prescott Bush because of a conversation she had about "truth" with somebody she really respected that told her some things to look up. It blew my mind.
This has been a 4+ year frustration for me that is finally crumbling. All is not lost!
I hear you...losing friends over politics is the WORST. For me it wasn't dem v repub so much as daring to ask a "friend" last year if I could visit in person. I still struggle with fear over how much it's safe to reveal to people.
This is some of your best writing, Matt. Your irony and jokes help the medicine go down...especially when discussing such dispiriting topics as ideological bullying and the widespread demise of free speech, debate, and objective journalism. For instance, this:
“ The American liberalism I knew growing up was inclusive, humble, and democratic. It valued the free exchange of ideas among other things because a central part of the liberal’s identity was skepticism and doubt, most of all about your own correctitude. Truth was not a fixed thing that someone owned, it was at best a fleeting consensus, and in our country everyone, down to the last kook, at least theoretically got a say. We celebrated the fact that in criminal courts, we literally voted to decide the truth of things.”
Those were the days, huh? On behalf of kooks everywhere, I hope we can pull it together and make your last paragraph come true.
The question is how far left do you have to be to think Glenn Greenwald is right wing?
It’s not about far left, it’s about deep blue. Neither party is about an ideology that can be described as part of a political spectrum. They’re just two teams with different color uniforms trying to win against each other.
It's a state of absolutism whether deep blue, far left doesn't really matter. The duopoloy has been running for decades, now the art of manipulation is just being perfected to a point of mastery. 2 minutes of hate would seem like a reprieve these days.
I disagree with that. The Trump wing of the Republican Party is ousting the neocons (like Liz Cheney) who are the warmongering globalists. There is an ideology on the right and its national populism. Unlike the left, the populists haven’t bowed down to the uniparty members in their party (neocon/neolib).
Cheney wasn’t given the boot for her ideology, it was because she didn’t show team spirit by closing ranks around Trump. The Republicans still have globalist/interventionalists like Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham in their coalition alongside nationalist/populists like Josh Hawley. It’s not about whether your philosophy matches Trump’s, it’s about whether the way you talk about Trump alienates his base. Their ideology is very much secondary to Team Red, which at the moment is synonymous with Team Trump.
Well Team Trump is much better than Team neocon. I’ll take the side that’s actually trying to purge the neo uniparty faction out of the Party. The progressives (who are supposed to be populist left) who vote in sync with the neolibs is the comparison I’m going with that you missed.
The history shows that Trump's 'purge' was all show and no action. The swamp he drained indeed, right.
Your point is well taken but Trump ought to be credited for shining a light on the administrative state and how it conspires to undermine our faith in government.
There’s nothing populist about the people in the Democratic party who call themselves “progressive”, and they’re only vaguely pretending there is. And when it comes to those on either side whose ideology includes opposing the neverending war machine, it’s interesting to note that the losing coalition who tried to block the House’s blocking of Trump’s final-days move to withdraw from Afghanistan included Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz, both of whom have since been put on the chopping block. Don’t count on the Trumpies to reorient their party away from rubber stamping war. Trump escalated drone assassinations even more than Obama.
Sure lesser of two evils seems to be the play usually, I'll take Bernie and breaking up the banks, that is what Globocap nightmares are made of.
Lesser of two evils is still an evil.. I will take Bernie over either side fo the Republican party... Trump did not accomplish one thing that helped the poor and middle class other than entertain them. He did on the other hand accomplish what every Republican President but Bush1 have accomplished in my lifetime an that is growing the deficit by handing rich Americans a smaller tax bill...
Actions speak louder than words and Trumps actions PROVE he is and was a TOOL for the rich...
Bernie turned out to be the cuck-in-charge. What a useless spineless, knee-bending ass.
FT - To be on team Trump do you have to believe the LIE that he actually won the Election or can you know he is lying and still be on team Trump?
If you join any of the currently available teams you're swallowing one lie or another. Parsing the difference is part of how you convince yourself that another of the teams doesn't suck. The smart bet right now is being a free agent.
Trump was used like Steve Bannons tampon, to think he actually is anything other than a narcissistic, illiterate, self serving bully would be a stretch. The right has formed this ideology out of self preservation, convenience and nothing more, they would invade as many countries and transfer as much wealth as their base would accept, we know this because they already did it for decades.
the wealth transfer has been ongoing. Look at the 2008 crisis. Obama rescued the banks.. Look who benefitted from this pandemic. The middle class has been shafted by the elites. When jobs and industries are moved off shore--to cheaper labor--and regulation, who benefits? Not the middle class. The corporate class benefits from open borders and offshoring our jobs and industries. Massive wealth transfer by Democrats and uniparty. Identity politics is necessary to distract from this reality.
Absolutely. Culture war is the only thing that prevents something truly dangerous: class war. Expect lots and lots of culture war in the coming years, even (especially?) if it contributes to racial strife that gets out of hand.
Anything but the briar patch. I find that applies to a lot of shit in life...
Bingo.
Double bingo!
Trump was a useful idiot for the right-wing elites. They discarded him as soon as they could. He was hated so much by both right and left because he sometimes told the truth.
Are you aware you just described the Biden boys?
SPOT ON... they would invade as many countries and transfer as much wealth as their base would accept, we know this because they already did it for decades."
Epic!
Totally agree.
They are competing for the same cock they want to blow until tomorrow comes.
well said.
BlueMAGA seems to be mad at Greenwald because he dares to question Democrats’ behavior especially regarding civil liberties. The Daily Beast article apparently ignored the obvious point that Greenwald isn’t invited on CNN or MSNBC.
The question isn't "how far left" one has to be, but how authoritarian one has to be.
Authoritarians exist on both ends of the political spectrum.
Not sure why you felt a need to state the obvious as if I was implying something otherwise, but ok.
Answer: Barking Mad.
Stalinesque
if by "left" you mean "stupid"...
Greenwald is not right wing? He is in the business of getting clicks and he can get clicks from right wing partisan hacks by attacking the same flaws in the mainstream leftest media as exist on the mainstream rightest media... All he has to do is IGNORE the exact same flaws in right wing media and gets clicks from right wingers. $$$
Either that or right wing media does not push lies and conspiricy's to distract right wing viewers from the real issues of the time. Right?
Sophistry. There is *NO LEFT-WING MEDIA IN THE US*. There is a corporate dick-sucking media only.
Sasha - The purpose of corporate dick sucking media is to misinform voters and thus enable the powerful to screw those with less power. Misinformed voters is the problem.
Corporate media is one cause. Right wing media is another cause. In Hate Inc Matt slammed BOTH form of media for their lies. Since reading the book and joining this board he ONLY slams corporate media and their lies and virtually ignores the lies of right wing media. In turn I rarely see the lies of corporate media on these message boards but i constantly see the lies of right wing media repeated on these boards.
Correlation or causation. I am telling matt it appears to be the later...
I think you are creating a problem where there is none.
Glenn also attacks right-wingers too, e.g. on warmongering stuff.
True... But after 40yrs of growing income inequality where we are in the middle of the first generation of Americans to have less than their parents and the resulting anger and hopelessness in so many Americans negatively effected by growing income inequality Matt should state clearly that he is ONLY calling out right winger lies in warmonger and NOT in economic policy where they LIE daily and right wing voters believe their lies and vote for leaders that are screwing them economicaly while pandering to their identity politics
Batshit f-ing crazy.
"prestige" should be in quotes.
Hey grifter Matt! Hope you're making good use of the $50 you swindled from me a few weeks ago for your annual subscription. Come another 11 months you'll be swindling another $50 from me if you keep up your good work . . . er, I mean the carnival act you write. You should be proud since nary a penny has been swindled from me by the NY Times, Washington Post, The Daily Beast or the Intercept.
As they say, I see what did there! So glad to see at least some people have a sense of humor.
Nice :). Had to read this twice to catch your drift, because there are actual subscribers here who do nothing but complain about having paid good money to subscribe and demanding Matt pay them back. I won't mention the prime offender, because he actually contributes very good comments to other substacks.
I love Matt's thoughts and his wicked sense of humor. Also a big fan and subscriber of Glenn Greenwald. Getting ready to to subscribe to Andrew Sullivan. They need to be supported monetarily.
Andrew is great. Also try out Freddie DeBoer. He writes beautifully about the progressive insanity that's taken over his side of politics (left).
Thanks for the tip. I've been reading Andrew Sullivan for 20 years, but Freddie DeBoer is a new name. I'll look him up.
His recent piece about Vietnam Vets is breathtaking. And I say this as someone with no predisposition to be interested in that topic.
Awesome tip. I just subscribed after reading one essay (on the "inescapable war" between freedom and safety). Thank you.
Agreed! There’s sooooo many Substacks I want to support but I’m just a middle class mom w/ 2 youngish kids and can’t really afford the monthly payments for all these! If I were a (wealthy coastal elite ((snicker)) ) I would do yearly subscription to all these guys. I think that’s what it’s going to take to prove to the MSM what the public wants and is willing to pay for!
DM me (if such a thing exists here - I don't know). I'll gift you Glenn's subscription.
Agree, I couldn't subscribe fast enough.
Those are my three subscriptions. A really great trio to stay informed and to walk away from the bullshit game the elites would have us play into oblivion.
classic :)
Hmm... This post does the wave 🌊. Angry. Happy. Angry.
Even though I do not share all of Matt's political views, I have been a fan for years, and I believe this may be the most important piece he has ever authored. How did we reach the point where "journalists" have decided they need not report any news that might reflect poorly on their political party? Hate Trump all you want, but does that mean you will simply allow failing policies by the next administration to continue without question?
As a border state resident, I awoke this morning, to news that a woman at the border being actively raped, was saved by US agents in a helicopter. With spotlights and a bullhorn, they were able to stop the attack midway. This was hours after a 5 year old boy was left all alone, screaming in the dark, in the desert, by smugglers and a day after drowning migrants were pulled from the Rio Grande by Texas troopers. It is snake season in Texas, few leave their dogs outside, alone this time of year, unless they know the area is clear, but as a nation we are OK with kindergarders traversing the wild solo, in the middle of the night?
The abuse of women and children is bad enough, but there has also been virtually no coverage of the potential for terrorists accessing the US, via the southern border. Biden may be convinced white supremacists are the nation's biggest threat, I am not so sure. A former neighbor in Northern California expressed relief at moving, with fire season starting two months early this year. Conditions are the worst on record. Has no one considered that it would be easy pickings for half dozen terrorists to slip across the border, wait until August and then with nothing more than matchbooks, watch large swaths of California glow, while people perish and the entire US economy is thrown for a loop?
There are a multitude of other topics the media has decided to ignore. Crime, inflation, the origins of Covid, housing prices, Hunter Biden, etc. etc. A former professor use to say the amendments were not numbered by accident. Freedom of speech and the press were first because a democracy cannot survive without a free press to keep those in power honest. He never contemplated what happens when the press is no longer honest.
Indeed it should be a very big scandal if the NYT committed to a deliberate strategy to inflame racial tensions , as part of a business plan.
IF - Tiabbi is hardly an impartial trusted voice on this stuff nowadays. He’s become what he criticizes, a blinkered zealot.
Read the linked transcript and judge for yourself. Baquet says they went after race because the Russia story collapsed.
Baquet opened the door and now it can’t be closed.
Per the transcript Baquet said- "...went from being a story about whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia and obstruction of justice to being a more head-on story about the president’s character. We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story." That story was race in general (not solely Trumps character, although that was part of it). I may be blinkered but that doesn't seem to me to be this -we'll make any crap up to bring him down approach - that is being suggested?
"We spent two years on the Russia story, it didn't turn out the right way, so now we'll spend the next two years arguing that racism is the central idea of the American experiment." If you can't see what's wrong with that reasoning, I don't know what to tell you.
Matt,
Tell people to read or listen to John Ralston Saul two term head of PENN International who is about as good as it gets in understanding the role of the press in a neoliberal society. Unlike Chomsky Saul has no problem with the word neoliberal as former COO of PetroCanada when it was a crown corporation. Neoliberalism even as it is neither new nor liberal is a very descriptive word.
If that's in the transcript from the Slate article linked to - then I missed it and can't find it now. But yes if Baquet said that, it's terrible and wrong.
I think Matt was paraphrasing, but if you search "I have another question about racism" in your browser on the Slate article page, you can see Baquet's response to this staffers is essentially this idea.
The staffer asks, "Hello, I have another question about racism. I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting."
Baquet's response is summed up with: "And I do think that race and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the American story. Sometimes news organizations sort of forget that in the moment. But of course it should be. I mean, one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that. Race in the next year—and I think this is, to be frank, what I would hope you come away from this discussion with—race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story."
Then, down near the end of the transcript, Baquet talks about the Russia debacle as being "Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice?", which then goes on to infer that race issues were Chapter 2, "How do we grapple with all the stuff you all are talking about? How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years."
"we'll make any crap up to bring him down approach - that is being suggested?"
Can't speak for MT, but as a media consumer, that's sure what it looked like to me.
You didn't have to be a MAGA-hat wearer to watch it unfold in real time.
Mud-slinging works, especially if it is widespread (which it was) and relentless (which it was)
I hate that mudslinging works. It works because we only have two parties. Sling enough mud and there is one person left standing. If there were several parties, candidates would have to present ideas rather than just sling mud.
Aside from whether the pivot to race was a "get Trump" effort. What concerns me is the possibility that it was a decision about how to generate clicks to earn revenue. If RussiaGate was losing steam, did they seize on race as an opportunity to generate more "outrage porn" so they could stay in business?
I would definitely say if the 1619 thing was dreamt up mainly/solely as some form of Trump attack, that would be very cynical and very wrong (and it probably backfired). In many other areas he should have been held to account for his approach to race and deliberate inflammation of race relations. I will certainly try and view more critically how and when these media orgs - decide to hold account though.
"deliberate inflammation of race relations"
Which race are you referring to? He was clearly unkind (to say the least) to Mexicans in relation to defending the southern border. But didn't the media conflate that to blanket Racism? And was the use of 1619 by NYT just another example of that conflation?
They are supposed to be a "news" paper not a "narrative" paper!
"Tiabbi is hardly an impartial trusted voice on this stuff nowadays."
I am pretty sure "Tiabbi," given the vast number of references to him, is mirror-universe Taibbi with an Evil Goatee, just like Evil Spock.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series); https://i.pinimg.com/originals/63/d0/1b/63d01bbb0b6f9b124017417667202e1f.jpg
If I were MT, any time Twitter asked me "What happened to you, Matt?" I would respond "It wasn't me, it was Tiabbi."
Holy shit!
https://twitter.com/search?q=%22What%20happened%20to%20you%2C%20Matt%3F%22&src=typed_query
I know, right? Almost as if it's a talking point or something.
Have you considered the possibility that it's your own blinkered zealotry that makes you see him in this way? No, of course you haven't.
Totally open to that. What do you think I am blinkered about and what am I zealous about? I fully agree most large media organizations suffer groupthink, make mistakes and can be cynical about chasing view/readership. We know that. But when you are selling yourself as an alternative to them - making those attacks your
main brand - when you have so much else to offer - is what I am raising as an issue.
"making those attacks your main brand - when you have so much else to offer"
Genuinely curious: What do you think Taibbi should be writing about that he isn't writing about?
You’ve got egg on your face nicks. Perhaps you should apologize to Matt for impugning his integrity.
Ding ding ding! You just described the entire phony controversy surrounding this piece in a nutshell.
..."they’ve created a brand of imperious elite politics so revolting that it has the potential to unite even this Balkanized wreck of a country. If they keep this up, liberals and conservatives may start talking for real, and maybe even fix a thing or two."
From your lips to God's ears.
If you have read what is in the Hunter Biden laptop, it is terrifying. The so-called leader of the so-called free world ran for president because his senile brain is so besotted with his now elderly drug addict son, that when his meth mouth kid threw a tantrum about getting blamed by the family, daddy ran for president. Sonny boy wants to go back into the arms of the gangsters running Ukraine, take all the drugs he wants, and f*@k all the prostitutes they send him, and make porn videos of himself. This is all terrifying that the hand on the button in the white house is that deranged.
It also proves that Hunter Biden acted as exactly the nepotist hotline to the white house that some suspected. It brings into question WTAF was the reason for the USA overthrowing that friendly government.
This horseshit is how THIRD WORLD banana republics run. No exaggeration.
I voted for the Obams/Biden team, twice (2nd time with grave misgivings. But at this point I say the Obama administration is when the USA became a banana republic.
I'm a consultant to several liberal social services and arts organizations, many of which are now dedicating time and money to rooting out white supremacy within their midst. It's lunacy. It's Communists under the bed hysteria. Do these people really think that Nazis founded a food bank? I can't tell who's a True Believer and who's just going along to get along, but my guess is that the number of True Believers is distressingly high. Of course, in a few years, they'll forget they ever thought such nonsense.
The bottom line is Matt and Greenwald just have more brains and integrity than other media liberals, so they see the idiocy and hypocrisy of the reactionary group-think press and they can't help but call it out. Fortunately being ostracized by a bunch of middle-brow herd animals probably doesn't sting very much, especially when you don't need them..
The class (and character) composition of the media has changed. If you get a bunch of rich, grade grubber, social climbing striver types from Columbia J-School, you're going to get the media we have now.
More importantly, they have true courage to stand up to the shaming beast.
Well, they also have massive name recognition making them a lot less dependent on mainstream colleagues for career/job security, as can be seen by both thriving on Substack now. It's a lot harder to be courageous if being shunned by the industry really means you're out in the cold. Nothing against Taibbi or Greenwald - just saying there are a lot of factors involved in how viable being courageous is for an individual in a broader system.
Massive name recognition is a bit much. Cardi B has massive name recognition. Peyton Manning has massive name recognition. Greenwald and Taibbi are nerd boy journalists (said with the utmost affection), unknown to most of the great unwashed.
Sure... But in the context of print journalism, they're pretty far up there.
They do that to everyone who strays. "What has happened to you," etc. Just saw one of them doing it to Josh Rogin for having the temerity to question the pack's Covid origin myth. Freaking middle-school.
This is not to take anything away from them, but I think honest liberal journalists of their ilk were pretty common twenty years ago. Something bad has happened, and that breed has almost died out (or been hunted to near extinction) Matt has explained some pieces of how it happened. It's ominous for the country.
Matt, Aaron and Glenn are not corrupt.
The Daily Caller/The Intercept drivel is difficult to read without vomiting but, remember, they are fully harnessed into DNC/CIA lying cabal -- their corrupt leadership are now millionaires (read about Intercept's Betsy Reed, Ryan Grim, James Risen or TYT's (Cenk and Ana) salaries....
The truth.
Great observation there.