Orwellians gonna Orwellian. "He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future." "Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
Ok, enough with the terrifyingly-accurate famous quotes.
The mental illness-as-ideology crowd happily gaslights itself into believing whatever belief the moment requires. What it bragged about yesterday never happened, if today requires that it did not. Every mundane act that threatens the Left is a Constitutional Crisis, undemocratic and white supremacist. Every appalling left-wing act is basic decency and "Be(ing) Kind".
This is what you get when you have no principles. I mean that literally. When you preach that Truth is Subjective, as left-wing movements always have, you derive that morality is just one more "social construct". Of course one can tell "noble lies". Words are just "power constructs"; they serve only to manipulate others into serving your interests. There are no real "principles"; only people stupid enough to buy into others' propaganda!
This is a war between people who have principles (any principles at all; we don't even have to have the same ones) and those who believe that principles are for silly children.
Ironically, the latter can be counted on to behave like toddlers.
Sadly, the brain-deadness of elite ideologues may be with us to the end of time. CS Lewis, in the voice of the security state goon Miss Hardcastle wrote in 1945:
“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”
Perfect quote for this article. Sometimes it seems that those who protest the loudest are looking in a mirror like a cat who takes a swipe at his own image in the mirror because he thinks it’s another cat and he must defend his territory. A lot of projection going on with our media.
It’s sad really if your entire focus is to find something to damage someone else instead of focusing on the positive changes you can make or help make happen.
About now I'd be happy if Team Trump and DOGE focused on damaging the corporate boards, dangerous bureaucrats, the lying media, and especially the New York Times. These folks tried to kill him, and will stop nothing to hang onto power. Right now their demise and accountability is all the positive change I need.
Like, what do you think the primary purpose of the public schools are? To indoctrinate you in the world view of the ruling classes, duh! How else could a few ruling classes and their comprador officer classes could control the masses without a large police force powerful enough to take power from them. Old saying "One Priest is better than 100 police and soldiers, cheaper and more effective". The same applies to the schools and the media.
Every single time it’s the well educated! Thanks for that quote. It’s much more accurate than my explanation which is “Trump broke them.” SMH
I have an aunt who has lived in NYC for over 60 yrs. She was an attorney, sold real estate in NYC, still sits on the board of a big charity organization etc she’s no dummy.
I visited many times and got many of my old time liberal views from her and her circle of friends. Little things like free speech, the importance of dialogue to explore beliefs esp when discussing issues w others who might not have the same beliefs. The willingness to explore “keep your options open,” etc.
The first Trump presidency was pre Covid. Imo , obv not a novel idea, that shut it down and feed them msm propaganda also was a huge assist to the govt.
I went to see her last fall. She was dead serious as she expressed how afraid she was and how she felt like he was evil. Ofc she’s unable to state any facts to back up her feels. She asked me early in Pres Trump rd 2 if I approved of all of the fast moves being made. I was just a little overzealous w answer
>I voted for this!
Later I saw an article in the NYP about the work being done by DOGE. Sent it to her
>after essentially looking down her nose
>I usually read the TIMES
her comment “I hope it’s true.”
Forgot that I also forwarded the DOGE website which, to my knowledge she has never opened.
Being "educated" is not a bad thing. There is a huge distinction that should be referenced whenever "educated" is mentioned. Institutional education is very different from an education acquired from actual experience. One is a basic indoctrination syllabus of questionable intent and the other (in my mind, preferable)is simply an accumulation of information based on critical thought, analysis, and "hands-on" applications in conjunction with trusted, successful mentors.
In ancient times (the early 60s) when I entered college, we were told that the goal was to learn how to think, not what. Holding a contrary opinion, if you could defend it, resulted in conversation and debate, not coventry.
Indeed. And Lewis, having the “pedigree” of a fine institutional education, but also having the deepest of wisdom and insight into the human condition arrived at through his own deep introspection and close friendships with people like Tolkien, would add that the two types of education are not mutually exclusive. However, the institutionally educated may deceive themselves into believing that such schooling is a substitute for introspection, wisdom, critical thinking, and developing consistent principles that guide one’s life.
At this point, after we've been hearing endlessly how this or that person is a Nazi or Hitler or is an existential threat it's hard not to immediately judge whoever is delivering the message. So much, "the sky is falling", or, "crying wolf"... WTF, didn't any of these people pay attention at storytime? I doubt highly any of them know what an allegory is.
As for the article, it's meant to sway those who don't follow or pay attention to history, or as you have said have chosen to engage in "mental illness-as-ideology".
Another example of what Michael Crichton called Gell-Mann amnesia, in his “Why Speculate?” speech. People see repeated examples of the “news” being wrong, but believe the next report anyway.
I think the issue is... so few of us have principles anymore. The world truly is "Clowns to the left of me, and jokers to the right." What is left in the middle here with you?!?!? 5%? 10%?
The wingnuts control it all, and they drag a great horde of the center along with them. Sun Tzu would be in heaven walking his armies right up the gut.
What most don't notice is that MAGA is essentially centerist. The New York Times labels him far-right, but Trump is basically a New Deal Democrat who hijacked the GOP. Many of his followers (and the people in his cabinet!) are old-school liberals who are sick of the far left rhetoric of the establishment and media. Also note that neocons like Dick Cheney and the Bushes have joined the dark side.
Yes. You state the simultaneously overtly but also subconsciously denied yet completely obvious fact: the Trump/MAGA agenda is absolutely not "far right".
Rule of law: the most glaring violation of which for years has been the flouting of immigration law.
Personal freedom: most importantly, freedom of speech.
Reducing bureaucracy and excessive regulation. Trump is pro-environment in that he's pro American health. That's why RFK Jr. is at HHS along with other key appointments.
Really, Trump/MAGA represent respect for the Constitution, America-first (i.e., foreign policy does not dictate domestic, it's the other way around), and basic..."common sense".
Hardly "far right".
But epithets, slogans and name-calling sell to the weak-minded. Just ask Katherine Maher, PBS/NPR and the Wikimedia Foundation.
For them, logical consistency and factual basis are irrelevant.
It is notable that all Left-wing policies, action, rhetoric, legislation, taxes, are to serve the interests of things, abstractions, institutions, diversity, multiculturalism, equality, inclusivity, equity, Paganesque worship of the environment, the rain forests, animals, the fish, the seas, the environment, the planet, the climate, etc. And the casualty is always Human beings who must suffer immiseration and impoverishment for “the greater good” as determined by the self-righteous.
Not a single thing is intended to serve the interests of people, rather designed to harm them, and they will instinctively react to oppose by all means anything that will advance the social and economic progress of Mankind.
It is indeed pathological immorality… wicked, debauched, spiteful, evil.
I'm not exactly clear on who you think "the left" is. Certainly not the DNC as represented by Obama, Biden, Pelosi, or Clinton (either of them).
Taibbi's claim in his request that we recommend his site to others is that it's "molded after I.F. Stone's Weekly". Izzy was a self-described liberal and this post of Taibbi's is one I'm sure Izzy would have applauded; I think the people you find objectionable are neoliberals, a completely different species. A subspecies, in fact, of homo-oligarchus, just not the one in power at the monement
When I was in college majoring in economics in the early 1990s, I was very much a globalist and believer in free trade and immigration. Over time, I came to realize that these policies didn't work as they were advertised in many ways and even to the extent they did, they came at enormous cost to wages, stability, and security for a large part of the country. I came as I grew older to understand that there are other important values beyond aggregate national wealth and the "free market". I didn't and haven't become what then would have been called a "liberal" but I have come to understand that the liberals back then had a point and I have moderated my views on these issues a lot.
Today it seems every Democrat and self described liberal I know supports trade and immigration policies that would have warmed the heart of my former libertarian leaning right wing self. Meanwhile, I find that I am the one making impassioned appeals about things like security, equality, opportunity, and the interests and welfare of all Americans rather than just the rich and information and government classes who benefit from these policies to the near exclusion of everyone else.
So, I ask you. Just who is the "left" these days, because I can't tell anymore. No one I know who claims to be on the left seems the slightest bit concerned about any of the things I always thought were the hallmark of what the left was.
I suspect the transnational neoliberal oligarchical classes sent the old left into bonkers-land, via the universities where they increasingly study ideas that are untethered to reality. In other words….they neutralized the threat.
It's a fair question to ask who is left these days since the DNC is clearly antagonistic to them. To a first approximation, they've gotta be seriously for a decent minimum wage, universal health care, and a tax structure that actually targets American oligarchs. This immediately rules out Clintons, Obama, Pelosi, and Biden.
Bernie calls himself a socialist but my take is in terms of domestic politics he's an FDR liberal w/o the racism or sexism of that era. Try Norman Solomon and Frank Thomas as examples. I think I'd put Senator Wyden in that camp too.
To be clear, I do not see myself as a liberal. As a child of the 1960s, I'm well to the left of the boundaries of the nation's Overton Window. It's just that liberals actually do care for and attempt to attend to the needs of the working class and poor. And not by the mythical "tide" that "raises all boats."
So you raise valid points. The de facto deal that was struck with American workers was that America’s capitalist class would off shore production and in exchange: we would 1) invest massively as a country in re-training workers 2) We would migrate to a service economy , which would generate new jobs, and 3) we would all benefit from cheaper stuff. That deal was broken. Obviously there was no retraining… programs were either slashed or eliminated by GOP cuts and those that existed were hopelessly outdated and inefficient. We did largely migrate to a service economy, millions of new jobs were generated and the American public became avid globalist by buying cheap junk in massive amounts. The world economy grew exponentially which only generated more wealth and growth. THE PROBLEM is: labor never had a seat at the table and never managed to obtain concessions from their huge sacrifices. Many areas either did not benefit or got a raw deal. But to add insult to injury the class that pocketed the historic windfall from offshoring — the capitalist class, received massive tax cuts which coincided with the largest transfer in wealth in US history. And now the irony is that that same class that pushed for offshoring in the first place now is coming in sheep’s clothing saying they will be the saviors of the working class. Don’t believe it. They want to use tarrifs in a fantasy world where we will go back to the 1890s and not have an income tax, and eliminate any semblance of government services (eg health and education). So if you truly care about US workers, sure use tarrifs sensibly, but you are pissing in the wind if you think those jobs are coming back in a massive way and unless hou talk seriously about clawing back those ill-gotten gains form the billionaire class.
Great revisionist history all around. We couldn't have lost the steel industry unless everyone involved helped, and it took years of bad decisions from all involved including the knuckleheaded union leaders and denialist management. From Selena Zito in today's PG:
"Black Monday and its aftermath was brought about by a combination of bad trade deals, newer plants in China and Japan that had better technology, owners here who stubbornly refused to upgrade their plants and a union leadership who wrongly thought the parade would never end."
My retelling doesn’t deny any of that. But are you willing to concede 1) that the factory owners came out like bandits by pocketing the lower costs combined with massive GOP tax cuts 2) that anybody who has ever bought a flat screen TV for $100 is complicit 3) great wealth was generated. In my worldview workers got shafted, but they will get screwed twice over if they think Trump is their savior.
Bringing industry back can help but they also have to do something about immigration. Wages of engineers and other technical fields haven't risen since the 1980s. That is entirely because of the explosion and total misuse of the H1B VISA program. The people you are talking about would never dream of ending that.
That may be true, but your Real Left walks in lockstep with the Democrats, so the distinction is largely meaningless. Leftists put up zero resistance during the 4 years that the braindead potato was in office, and didn't come out until January 2025. So does it really matter if Democrats aren't actually the left? Because it doesn't seem to matter to the left.
Words matter. Ideology matters. If you let Democrats colonize the TERM leftist, if we allow them to distort and pervert the political and historical TRUTH of leftism, you’re taking us that much further down the road to totalitarianism.
The election results would not have been possible without a sizable cohort of leftists voting against the Dems. So no, not all of us are hypnotized, and not all of us are playing along.
Yeah, Matt is like just Izzy Stone, that is if Izzy had gone to an ultra elite prep school, all expenses paid by daddy, spent time in post Soviet Union Russia behaiving like a drunken frat boy, binge drinking and cavorting while the country went into free fall, and now writes weekly columns telling us Trump ain’t that bad, while attracting legions of rightwing reactionaries… just like Izzy.
Incidentally, Matt has discussed how, when not writing, or chasing wild women in Russia, he also worked in construction, but I guess that wouldn't fit with your prep school, frat boy, nepo baby narrative.
And where are these "legions of rightwing reactionaries" in the comment section here? I seem to have missed them.
Poor Wright Stuff.
Still busy countering all that "lucrative right wing disinformation" . . .
I compare Matt's resume with the standard issue Columbia journalism graduate at the Times or WP (or any other ivy journalist). Misbehaving at summer camp in the Adirondacks is pretty weak stuff, not to mention almost misgendering the DEI counselor, compared to dodging bullets in Moscow, playing baseball in Mongolia and all the other things that prepared Matt for this part of his writing life.
What I wouldn't give to have another beer with Jimmy Breslin.
What I see from Matt is a talented writer from a super privileged background. The irony is he’s convinced himself that he has escaped the shackles of his class when he is merely reverting to form, which explains perfectly why he appears to see Trump’s second presidency as some deserved retribution, and every week he cheers it on as such. It’s the world of privilege he grew up in where there are no consequences for the misdeeds of the rich. His recent work has been sophomoric— he finds everything ‘amusing’ and ‘funny’ (his words) that is happening in the second Trump term. That is the language of extreme privilege of someone who has not lost his job due to DOGE or been targeted for their politics by Trump.
What do you care about Matt’s background? You seem to be fixated on the fact that he was born into a family with higher income than you were.
Get over it already!
For crying out loud, how old are you? I’m 66, and I don’t give a crap how much money anyone was born into, or has accrued. It has absolutely no impact on my life. I was born into the working class & have wound up back there, due to a series of unfortunate events.
Life is beautiful!
We’ll all go on — no matter how much money Matt Taibbi or Elon Musk has.
One of the best things about Matt’s writing is his quirky sense of humor, and we should all be happy that he is able to point out the absurdities of life so we can all share in the joke. That’s the best attitude to have.
Your answer is telling, especially today, on May 1st. Americans are one of the few countries in the world who tell themselves that class is either irrelevant or a 'temporary situation caused by a series of unfortunate events.' It is no accident that the US has the highest level of income inequality among developed nations. It is also no accident the US consistently ranks very poorly among other major developed countries when it comes to protecting workers' rights, wage policies, worker protections, and the right to organize. Ask yourself why that should be the case in the wealthiest nation on earth. So I don't particularly care about Matt's earnings, except in so far as it explains his inability to address the elephant in the room — 40 years of massive tax cuts for the super wealthy. Perhaps you are right and this has nothing to do with his class. It think it does. Happy May Day.
And I used to think that Trump was a clear and present danger to my civil liberties, you know, with undercover agents arresting people for thought crimes and all and with DOGE hovering the private data of millions without
any legal authorization to do so. Now that I’ve read Matt, I’ve learned to relax, not to fuss, and that things could be a lot worse. I’ve learned that Trump is just retribution for the sins of the past and to celebrate the new regime and to hope things get better. Thanks, Matt!
Well said except, they aren't behaving like toddlers. They are behaving like rabid ideologues.
"H.R. 4310, known as the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013, was signed into law in January 2013. This legislation authorized essential support for service members and their families, renewed vital national security programs, and included provisions that allowed the government to use propaganda domestically, effectively repealing the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. The act has been a subject of controversy, particularly regarding its implications for domestic propaganda."
Your argument is the perfect circle and it makes sense. The unprincipled will inevitably fail, because they're unprincipled. They're not fighting for anything except the moment, and it will pass. This is not to say the unprincipled can't cause havoc, but once the principled make it too unpleasant, they'll head back to the Starbucks.
I agree, except you're not describing leftism: you're describing a certain type of unhealthy personality [strongly consonant with cult-susceptibility features] that intrinsically latches onto then distorts & leverages certain elements of ACTUALLY PRINCIPLED, authentically "enlightenment-centric" sentiments & positions, via purposeful misrepresentations, pathological self-serving sophistry, intellectual dishonesty as a given-standard mode of discourse, &/or vulnerability to such pathological entrenchment of anchor bias as to flatly mute any & all cognitive dissonance.
[All the best features of narcissism, pathological liars, and borderline personality disorder all wrapped up in one neat package👌🤣🤣🤣.]
But: similarly to the old mic drop "Not all Republicans are racist but if you're racist you're probably a Republican" (ouch!), TODAY it's "Not EVERY Democrat's political 'opinions' consist of parroting VERBATIM media-wide lockstep-coordinated daily messaging blurbs, but if yours do? You're DEFINITELY a Democrat."
And in a "my, how the turns have tabled" twist, NOW, today, if you're preoccupied with racial identity, you're DEFINITELY a Dem. (Also stole the Tea Party's self-assumed unimpeachable moral-scold superiority, utter humorlessness, & achingly unfunny / cringe-y humor / satire / PR misfires, the 🤬 varlets.😡)
“We’re told that billionaires never held dominant roles in domestic politics, civil liberties never faced systematic threats, and most preposterously now, we never deployed a “sprawling domestic surveillance system” using centralized databases of “those who protest.’”
In order to work at the New York Times, you have to get a lobotomy first. Or have been in a coma since 2001. Every day is year zero for the leftists as they erase history to serve their narrative. If the news is fake, imagine how fake the history is. Heather Cox Richardson is a “historian” the same way Biden was sharp as a tack.
Trump is the focus or fulcrum, the scapegoat that is responsible for all the BAD in the Establishment's revisionist history going back to the Founding Fathers.
No one else in American history has ever had such influence.
Just so I understand this: The author of the op-ed wrote a book a decade ago that basically outlined decades in the growth of government surveillance across all agencies, but Trump is now singularly violating the law by creating a surveillance state that we've never seen before. My head's spinning. It's five o'clock somewhere ...
Once Google bought DoubleClick...the game was over with a real firewall between Personally Identifiable Information and digital information (cookies, tags, beacons, device ID's, MAID's, etc..).....gone.
Now Meta, Alphabet and Amazon have massive Identity Graphs on every US consumer.
If someone is naive enough to think that the US government hasn't tunneled into those Data Centers...I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
Only Trump would force the government to fabricate an elaborate story in order for the FBI to spy on his campaign! Doesn't he have any shame whatsoever?
That’s the major problem. It’s all projection and no self reflection. There might be hope for us as a nation if the Democrats looked hard in the mirror and at the abuses that came out of the Biden administration.
I was a lifelong NY Times reader until I got banned a few years ago after I accused DiBlasio of a Covid double standard: having the cops shut down the funeral of a beloved rabbi in Brooklyn, but letting the Floyd protests proceed unabated.
Still I enjoy the puzzles, and they cost $1 a month to subscribe. Fuck it. They can have my $1. But when I go to the home page, I literally close my eyes and scroll to the bottom so I don’t have to infect my eyeballs with the drek on the home page.
Sadly the Times is still delivered to my residence (not my choice, and I pick my battles). The blue bags are great for picking up my dog's sidewalk business, on the bright side. I do need to get another dog so the sum of their sidewalk business at least equals the crap in the bag when the paper is delivered.
That’s when they lost half the country. They couldn’t really be serious about social distancing and shut downs if yelling and screaming in crowds was somehow allowed, but attending Church and going to school was a death sentence.
I've always assumed the "$1 a month" was a teaser price and they would automatically increase it without notice after a while. And then you have to go through a long and painful
The “guest editorial” is a tried-and-true means for media to wedge in a new “narrative”. Next come staff editorials, “analysis” pieces, and before you know it, We’ve always been at war with Oceania.
Well.. It's the New York Times audience, so they'll eat it up like candy. The "Highly" "Educated" are all for eating up stories that solidify their feelings. I'd like to say this story surprises me, or is shocking in it's stupidity, but I am well beyond shock and surprise at how dumb the party I was once a part of is now.
Every time a republican takes the office of president (yes, especially Trump) it's as if all of my liberal friends awaken from a rip-van-winkle-esque slumber and are suddenly very concerned about all of the wrongdoings of the government. But soon enough--as soon as the next presidential election-- they'll drift back to sleep.
I mean... I was the same way at one point. The difference for me is that I saw what the Cheney admin did, and then I was all on the Obama train until he derailed Occupy using... yup.. what Cheney advanced (I wont' say created because that gives Dick too much credit). The Obama Admin was literally the most corrupt administration in the history of this country and I voted for him twice.
Yep, the Obama administration was awful in too many ways. I voted for him once too. A constitutional scholar and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize!
Of course, as Matt notes, Angwin and the NYT aren't necessarily wrong and could even be right about Trump, at least on some matters. But the hysteria and hyperbole are reminiscent of 2016-2020. There are waaaay too many hypothetical what-might-happen fright headlines in the press these days.
I will add for good measure that too many conservatives who were all fired up about the first amendment and authoritarianism during the past four years now seem all too comfortable, even pleased, with some of the Trump administration's constitutional shortcuts. Spitting cousins with the true blue partisans.
The argument I always remember about this stuff is don’t let it happen, in case a despot gets in power. It’s immaterial now if Trump is that despot, since the ground has already been laid by multiple previous administrations and a complicit Congress.
I saw the light when Holder went after the CA medical marijuana clinics and when press was not allowed to visit and report on oil spills, oh, and let's not mention the mess "arming the rebels" in Syria created. Still, which POTUS has not caused most of us to gasp at the errors of their ways?
Pardon me, but did I specifically mention free speech?
No, I pointed to the Trump administration's "constitutional shortcuts" and was referring to sweeping people of the streets and sending them to a foreign prison without due process. If you have any questions, I refer you to Judge Wilkinson's opinion declining to grant a stay of the federal district court's ruling in the Abrego Garcia case.
And flipshod is right. Too many conservatives have gone totally woke on Israel. Like BLM with a much louder bullhorn. Raising good faith questions about the war in Gaza is verbotten as somehow "antisemitic." Having an honest discussion on the topic is almost impossible--that's the objective of the woke right, just like it was for the woke left re racism, trans people, etc.
I had one big foot out the door in 2004. I was starting to figure out that if Bush-Cheney hadn't existed the Dems would have had to invent them, coz on the NSC transition to O was seamless. In hindsight, I'm glad he won, the alternatives were worse.
The latest line I've seen is, "Remember when you didn't have to worry about what the president was doing?" It says a lot about them that they weren't paying attention to a senile person doing radical things.
I opened that article this morning as just seeing the headline made me think "C'mon, nobody could be that disingenuous." Then I read the opening paragraph, thought "wow, I guess they can," closed my browser, and sat at my desk bemused by the idea that millions of people are going to read that - and they're going to believe it, too.
The problem is.. they aren't actually going to read it. They are going to see it, absorb it, see it as the way they are supposed to think to be good people and then tell their friends about it.
Reminds me of my lib friends on social media in 2020 repeating all the pro-lockdown slogans as if they had come up with them, or even understood them at all.
It's a hell of a thing to live in fear... And, this represents a large part of what represents the left populace IMO. Articles like this seem to be a regular part of the corporate media playbook, forget that the article is disingenuous on its face, that was on purpose, look at the underlying intention, it's meant to foment fear.
My 80 y/o father - who gets his "news" from PBS and The View - is the poster child. Phone conversations (as I bite my tongue because it's wasted energy trying to argue with him) are excruciating.
Our local talk radio guy (T.J. Harris) complains that his mama insists on watching The View whenever she visits him, so he just has to put up with it out of respect. Apparently, his mom loves Whoopie.
Great article Matt. The US federal government has antiquated computer systems going back decades. These are starting to get updated and as we know from the corporate world and the current world of data systems, no longer do entities need to have 3 or 4 different databases or in the US government 20 or more databases. Time to have 1 or 2 and save some money and people. If there is one thing Elon and his team can do is upgrade US computer systems and bring them into the 21st century. And it’s going to threaten several people and departments because it’s change.
The ironic article by The NY Times made me laugh since the fabricated Russian hoax. Plus all the government oversight exposed by the Twitter Files. Thanks Matt!
The spy agencies have always had a problem of too much data, going back to the simple days of tapping wires.
Now they're finally implementing the the systems so that they can work as intended.
For a bank or other company to rationalize its Frankenstein tangle of systems for efficiency is one thing, I'm not ready to celebrate the spys becoming super efficient.
“DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Reportedly” is a miracle word. You could write literally anything you want, and just by inserting this wildcard, it magically makes your statement accurate enough to run it in a of paper of record.
“DOGE employees are reportedly two-foot tall Oompa Loompas who get paid in Everlasting Gobstoppers.”
“The New York Times reportedly offered Taylor Lorenz a job because they thought having a clout-chasing crybaby sobbing on TikTok would grow their reader base.“
There. Now, all three statements are equally true.
And that video of Biden bragging about holding up US aid to Ukraine until they fired the prosecutor investigating his son's new employer, is STILL up, last time I checked.
Biden was one of the most corrupt politicians we've ever had, and most of that corruption was right out in the open -- but was studiously ignored by all the right people.
+1, underscoring the depth of media corruption and lack of any semblance of integrity. If nothing else, Trump's involvement in national politics has revealed this corruption to the point where "journalists" don't even try to disguise it anymore.
Who's worse: the crook, or the cop (or judge) who takes the bribe and/or looks the other way?
But didn’t you know he controls the weather, managed massive fraud in 2016 and 2024 ( but somehow failed that in 2020) and caused anything bad that happened over the past 8 years? The many obviously has magical powers.
This time travel ability to change things in the past to benefit the present was attributed to Bush as well. The claims of Iraqi WMD's were just made up by Bush was at odds with the fact that I/we were ordered to get anthrax shots, under penalty of courts martial, for our Persian Gulf deployments in the late 90's. No one has been able to explain how the then governor of Texas was able to do that. Fast forward to 2009 when the Obama team largely absorbed the people that promoted the WMD's and the issue largely disappeared.
I want to scream, “are you shitting me!” Unfortunately, I already know the answer. American political history apparently began in 2016 despite everything I remember before.
And people say, 'where are all the women/real left/political opposition to 'wokeness' et al- they were all purged off of social media between 2015 and 2018. Many had livelihoods and families threatened IRL. Some were even arrested for wrongthink (especially in UK and Eur). Many still cannot get back onto 'twitter' or 'facebook' even now even though their supposed 'crimes' were fabricated and spurious.
This all happened under everyone's noses. And now the NYT (who also purged voices) is pretending that it didn't.
The NYT could run an article on Wednesday about how the DHS and NSA etc are weapons no President should be allowed to wield, that they constantly infringe upon civil liberties while not even fulfilling their stated purpose, and how every Admin has utilized them to snoop on their enemies; and then the NYT could run an article on Thursday saying the Trump admin is considering abolishing the DHS and NSA while claiming that this would be an unconstitutional assault on the federal govt, another sign of creeping fascist authoritarianism, and all its subscribers and commenters would scream and weep over the poor hard-working patriotic employees there and how evil Trump is for considering dismantling this crucial tool that maintains our Safety and Democracy™.
Nothing exists anymore but an eternal present and the needs of the Party, which change back and forth depending upon the day, the weather and the demands of the news cycle and the apparatchiks and bottom-feeding media parasites that feed off it.
The NYT is cross bw Pravda and a cult, dispensing nutritious pellets of self-reinforcing Party dogma for the angry and anxious lost souls of the Internet Age, few of which have any connection to reality. Our most lauded epistemic institutions—prestige media and prestige universities—have given themselves an ideological lobotomy, have destroyed their own credibilty and sanity, and will be the absolute last ones to realize it.
NYT has a parliamentarian department that keeps historical facts on the paper’s internal processes on what has been allowed since the paper’s conception. Included would be how many times can various stories with the same lie can be done within a specific time frame; and how many paragraphs must be used in a pseudo story prior to inserting a line of truth, does printing an article have to for an agency nod and which are those agencies. There must be hundreds of norms by which it operates, of course, any can be over-ridden when there is a dire need.
Would be great if someone who still has a NYT subscription - I canceled mine after they put Sarah Jeong on the editorial board and I misunderstood her tag #CancelWhitePeople to mean I should cancel my NYT subscription - would link to this article (with Matt’s blessing) in the NYT comment section.
Gee, not even a mention of the fact that, in 2012, Obama gave 17 "private contractors" access to the NSA's 702 (FISA) database allowing them to obtain "from/to" or "about" information on the electronic fingerprint and communications of any American or that a 2016 audit of their use of the database revealed that, during only a six month period, tens of thousands of database queries were made by the "private contractors" and that 85% were illegal. Bet y'all never read about that in the NYT even though it was the subject, in part, of a 99 page, April 26, 2017, Opinion by then Presiding Judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Rosemary Collyer.
None of our media except the online "The Conservative Treehouse" covered it. And it isn't tinfoil hat conspiracy theory stuff witness that Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion and the fact that now former NSA diector Admiral Rogers ordered the audit and in April 2017 ended these contractors' database access. I have tried to interest several journalists in pursuing the story to no avail. No one I am aware of has pursued it even though it would appear to have been one of, if not THE, biggest warrantless intrusion into the privacy of American citizens in our history. No one has even asked for the identities of the "private contractors" or what use was made of the information extracted from the database. In this regard, in March 2013, Congresswoman Maxine Waters revealed in a video interview that Obama was assembling the largest political database in history. When last I looked this part of the interview was still posted on YouTube. It's only one minute and nine seconds long so it isn't too painful to watch and listen to. Whether the two things are related is unknown. But, again, no one seems to be interested in looking into it.
P.S. I suppose someone could let him know about it on 'X'. I would except I'm not on the platform. But anyone who is able and interested in passing along to him my comments certainly has my permission to do so.
Beats me. It is hard for me to believe someone as well-informed on the privacy issue as he is hasn't stumbled across the story already. I have nothing professionally to do with the issue and I know about it. Nobody seems interested.
Orwellians gonna Orwellian. "He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future." "Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
Ok, enough with the terrifyingly-accurate famous quotes.
The mental illness-as-ideology crowd happily gaslights itself into believing whatever belief the moment requires. What it bragged about yesterday never happened, if today requires that it did not. Every mundane act that threatens the Left is a Constitutional Crisis, undemocratic and white supremacist. Every appalling left-wing act is basic decency and "Be(ing) Kind".
This is what you get when you have no principles. I mean that literally. When you preach that Truth is Subjective, as left-wing movements always have, you derive that morality is just one more "social construct". Of course one can tell "noble lies". Words are just "power constructs"; they serve only to manipulate others into serving your interests. There are no real "principles"; only people stupid enough to buy into others' propaganda!
This is a war between people who have principles (any principles at all; we don't even have to have the same ones) and those who believe that principles are for silly children.
Ironically, the latter can be counted on to behave like toddlers.
Sadly, the brain-deadness of elite ideologues may be with us to the end of time. CS Lewis, in the voice of the security state goon Miss Hardcastle wrote in 1945:
“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”
Perfect quote for this article. Sometimes it seems that those who protest the loudest are looking in a mirror like a cat who takes a swipe at his own image in the mirror because he thinks it’s another cat and he must defend his territory. A lot of projection going on with our media.
They're invested (too much) in the downfall of Trump and Musk and will not rest until they find something meaningful to tear them apart.
Follow the NGO money...right into the publisher offices of most major newspapers being operated as PR arms of the DNC.
No more allowing the Marc Elias's of the world to claim 501C3 status for his political weaponization of the law.
It’s sad really if your entire focus is to find something to damage someone else instead of focusing on the positive changes you can make or help make happen.
About now I'd be happy if Team Trump and DOGE focused on damaging the corporate boards, dangerous bureaucrats, the lying media, and especially the New York Times. These folks tried to kill him, and will stop nothing to hang onto power. Right now their demise and accountability is all the positive change I need.
Mind-boggling.
NYT "We're the goodies TM"
Great quote from a great source. I thank you for posting it.
WOW.. How Prophetic. Thank you for this.
You cannot go wrong with CSL.
Excellent. CS was on top of thing, had a grasp on humanity.
That is the perfect quote to explain those who see the NYT and the cbc as “trusted” sources. They get sucked in with flattery at being the smart ones.
Like, what do you think the primary purpose of the public schools are? To indoctrinate you in the world view of the ruling classes, duh! How else could a few ruling classes and their comprador officer classes could control the masses without a large police force powerful enough to take power from them. Old saying "One Priest is better than 100 police and soldiers, cheaper and more effective". The same applies to the schools and the media.
Every single time it’s the well educated! Thanks for that quote. It’s much more accurate than my explanation which is “Trump broke them.” SMH
I have an aunt who has lived in NYC for over 60 yrs. She was an attorney, sold real estate in NYC, still sits on the board of a big charity organization etc she’s no dummy.
I visited many times and got many of my old time liberal views from her and her circle of friends. Little things like free speech, the importance of dialogue to explore beliefs esp when discussing issues w others who might not have the same beliefs. The willingness to explore “keep your options open,” etc.
The first Trump presidency was pre Covid. Imo , obv not a novel idea, that shut it down and feed them msm propaganda also was a huge assist to the govt.
I went to see her last fall. She was dead serious as she expressed how afraid she was and how she felt like he was evil. Ofc she’s unable to state any facts to back up her feels. She asked me early in Pres Trump rd 2 if I approved of all of the fast moves being made. I was just a little overzealous w answer
>I voted for this!
Later I saw an article in the NYP about the work being done by DOGE. Sent it to her
>after essentially looking down her nose
>I usually read the TIMES
her comment “I hope it’s true.”
Forgot that I also forwarded the DOGE website which, to my knowledge she has never opened.
Being "educated" is not a bad thing. There is a huge distinction that should be referenced whenever "educated" is mentioned. Institutional education is very different from an education acquired from actual experience. One is a basic indoctrination syllabus of questionable intent and the other (in my mind, preferable)is simply an accumulation of information based on critical thought, analysis, and "hands-on" applications in conjunction with trusted, successful mentors.
In ancient times (the early 60s) when I entered college, we were told that the goal was to learn how to think, not what. Holding a contrary opinion, if you could defend it, resulted in conversation and debate, not coventry.
Indeed. And Lewis, having the “pedigree” of a fine institutional education, but also having the deepest of wisdom and insight into the human condition arrived at through his own deep introspection and close friendships with people like Tolkien, would add that the two types of education are not mutually exclusive. However, the institutionally educated may deceive themselves into believing that such schooling is a substitute for introspection, wisdom, critical thinking, and developing consistent principles that guide one’s life.
Smart dogs are easier to train.
That’s wonderful, thanks
I would add that every appalling left-wing act is inclusive.
That Hideous Strength is in my top-50 list of best novels of all time. Frighteningly prescient.
Well spotted!
Too bad all the Democrats who read 1984 in high school decided it now serves as a how-to guide for governance.
No rules, only weapons.
"He who controls the spice..." Oh wait.
At this point, after we've been hearing endlessly how this or that person is a Nazi or Hitler or is an existential threat it's hard not to immediately judge whoever is delivering the message. So much, "the sky is falling", or, "crying wolf"... WTF, didn't any of these people pay attention at storytime? I doubt highly any of them know what an allegory is.
As for the article, it's meant to sway those who don't follow or pay attention to history, or as you have said have chosen to engage in "mental illness-as-ideology".
Another example of what Michael Crichton called Gell-Mann amnesia, in his “Why Speculate?” speech. People see repeated examples of the “news” being wrong, but believe the next report anyway.
I think the issue is... so few of us have principles anymore. The world truly is "Clowns to the left of me, and jokers to the right." What is left in the middle here with you?!?!? 5%? 10%?
The wingnuts control it all, and they drag a great horde of the center along with them. Sun Tzu would be in heaven walking his armies right up the gut.
What most don't notice is that MAGA is essentially centerist. The New York Times labels him far-right, but Trump is basically a New Deal Democrat who hijacked the GOP. Many of his followers (and the people in his cabinet!) are old-school liberals who are sick of the far left rhetoric of the establishment and media. Also note that neocons like Dick Cheney and the Bushes have joined the dark side.
Yes. You state the simultaneously overtly but also subconsciously denied yet completely obvious fact: the Trump/MAGA agenda is absolutely not "far right".
Rule of law: the most glaring violation of which for years has been the flouting of immigration law.
Personal freedom: most importantly, freedom of speech.
Reducing bureaucracy and excessive regulation. Trump is pro-environment in that he's pro American health. That's why RFK Jr. is at HHS along with other key appointments.
Really, Trump/MAGA represent respect for the Constitution, America-first (i.e., foreign policy does not dictate domestic, it's the other way around), and basic..."common sense".
Hardly "far right".
But epithets, slogans and name-calling sell to the weak-minded. Just ask Katherine Maher, PBS/NPR and the Wikimedia Foundation.
For them, logical consistency and factual basis are irrelevant.
It is notable that all Left-wing policies, action, rhetoric, legislation, taxes, are to serve the interests of things, abstractions, institutions, diversity, multiculturalism, equality, inclusivity, equity, Paganesque worship of the environment, the rain forests, animals, the fish, the seas, the environment, the planet, the climate, etc. And the casualty is always Human beings who must suffer immiseration and impoverishment for “the greater good” as determined by the self-righteous.
Not a single thing is intended to serve the interests of people, rather designed to harm them, and they will instinctively react to oppose by all means anything that will advance the social and economic progress of Mankind.
It is indeed pathological immorality… wicked, debauched, spiteful, evil.
I'm not exactly clear on who you think "the left" is. Certainly not the DNC as represented by Obama, Biden, Pelosi, or Clinton (either of them).
Taibbi's claim in his request that we recommend his site to others is that it's "molded after I.F. Stone's Weekly". Izzy was a self-described liberal and this post of Taibbi's is one I'm sure Izzy would have applauded; I think the people you find objectionable are neoliberals, a completely different species. A subspecies, in fact, of homo-oligarchus, just not the one in power at the monement
Your NeoLiberals and the NeoConservatives are what we call the UniParty.
They're the ones that took us from $5 trillion in debt in 2000 to $37 trillion today.
And they are not happy about being exposed.
The very nature of a bureaucracy is self-preservation.
As Elon said...we can either in a bureaucracy or democracy.
If it's the former...I'm moving to Montenegro or Hungary.
When I was in college majoring in economics in the early 1990s, I was very much a globalist and believer in free trade and immigration. Over time, I came to realize that these policies didn't work as they were advertised in many ways and even to the extent they did, they came at enormous cost to wages, stability, and security for a large part of the country. I came as I grew older to understand that there are other important values beyond aggregate national wealth and the "free market". I didn't and haven't become what then would have been called a "liberal" but I have come to understand that the liberals back then had a point and I have moderated my views on these issues a lot.
Today it seems every Democrat and self described liberal I know supports trade and immigration policies that would have warmed the heart of my former libertarian leaning right wing self. Meanwhile, I find that I am the one making impassioned appeals about things like security, equality, opportunity, and the interests and welfare of all Americans rather than just the rich and information and government classes who benefit from these policies to the near exclusion of everyone else.
So, I ask you. Just who is the "left" these days, because I can't tell anymore. No one I know who claims to be on the left seems the slightest bit concerned about any of the things I always thought were the hallmark of what the left was.
I suspect the transnational neoliberal oligarchical classes sent the old left into bonkers-land, via the universities where they increasingly study ideas that are untethered to reality. In other words….they neutralized the threat.
It's a fair question to ask who is left these days since the DNC is clearly antagonistic to them. To a first approximation, they've gotta be seriously for a decent minimum wage, universal health care, and a tax structure that actually targets American oligarchs. This immediately rules out Clintons, Obama, Pelosi, and Biden.
Bernie calls himself a socialist but my take is in terms of domestic politics he's an FDR liberal w/o the racism or sexism of that era. Try Norman Solomon and Frank Thomas as examples. I think I'd put Senator Wyden in that camp too.
To be clear, I do not see myself as a liberal. As a child of the 1960s, I'm well to the left of the boundaries of the nation's Overton Window. It's just that liberals actually do care for and attempt to attend to the needs of the working class and poor. And not by the mythical "tide" that "raises all boats."
For your amusement you might go back and listen to Phil Ochs' "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cdqQ2BdgOA0)
So you raise valid points. The de facto deal that was struck with American workers was that America’s capitalist class would off shore production and in exchange: we would 1) invest massively as a country in re-training workers 2) We would migrate to a service economy , which would generate new jobs, and 3) we would all benefit from cheaper stuff. That deal was broken. Obviously there was no retraining… programs were either slashed or eliminated by GOP cuts and those that existed were hopelessly outdated and inefficient. We did largely migrate to a service economy, millions of new jobs were generated and the American public became avid globalist by buying cheap junk in massive amounts. The world economy grew exponentially which only generated more wealth and growth. THE PROBLEM is: labor never had a seat at the table and never managed to obtain concessions from their huge sacrifices. Many areas either did not benefit or got a raw deal. But to add insult to injury the class that pocketed the historic windfall from offshoring — the capitalist class, received massive tax cuts which coincided with the largest transfer in wealth in US history. And now the irony is that that same class that pushed for offshoring in the first place now is coming in sheep’s clothing saying they will be the saviors of the working class. Don’t believe it. They want to use tarrifs in a fantasy world where we will go back to the 1890s and not have an income tax, and eliminate any semblance of government services (eg health and education). So if you truly care about US workers, sure use tarrifs sensibly, but you are pissing in the wind if you think those jobs are coming back in a massive way and unless hou talk seriously about clawing back those ill-gotten gains form the billionaire class.
Great revisionist history all around. We couldn't have lost the steel industry unless everyone involved helped, and it took years of bad decisions from all involved including the knuckleheaded union leaders and denialist management. From Selena Zito in today's PG:
"Black Monday and its aftermath was brought about by a combination of bad trade deals, newer plants in China and Japan that had better technology, owners here who stubbornly refused to upgrade their plants and a union leadership who wrongly thought the parade would never end."
My retelling doesn’t deny any of that. But are you willing to concede 1) that the factory owners came out like bandits by pocketing the lower costs combined with massive GOP tax cuts 2) that anybody who has ever bought a flat screen TV for $100 is complicit 3) great wealth was generated. In my worldview workers got shafted, but they will get screwed twice over if they think Trump is their savior.
Bringing industry back can help but they also have to do something about immigration. Wages of engineers and other technical fields haven't risen since the 1980s. That is entirely because of the explosion and total misuse of the H1B VISA program. The people you are talking about would never dream of ending that.
Democrats claim to be leftists, but those of us who actually ARE the Left must not let them get away with that lie.
That may be true, but your Real Left walks in lockstep with the Democrats, so the distinction is largely meaningless. Leftists put up zero resistance during the 4 years that the braindead potato was in office, and didn't come out until January 2025. So does it really matter if Democrats aren't actually the left? Because it doesn't seem to matter to the left.
Words matter. Ideology matters. If you let Democrats colonize the TERM leftist, if we allow them to distort and pervert the political and historical TRUTH of leftism, you’re taking us that much further down the road to totalitarianism.
The election results would not have been possible without a sizable cohort of leftists voting against the Dems. So no, not all of us are hypnotized, and not all of us are playing along.
Yeah, Matt is like just Izzy Stone, that is if Izzy had gone to an ultra elite prep school, all expenses paid by daddy, spent time in post Soviet Union Russia behaiving like a drunken frat boy, binge drinking and cavorting while the country went into free fall, and now writes weekly columns telling us Trump ain’t that bad, while attracting legions of rightwing reactionaries… just like Izzy.
Can you please help me with the spelling of "Yawn!"...
Incidentally, Matt has discussed how, when not writing, or chasing wild women in Russia, he also worked in construction, but I guess that wouldn't fit with your prep school, frat boy, nepo baby narrative.
And where are these "legions of rightwing reactionaries" in the comment section here? I seem to have missed them.
Poor Wright Stuff.
Still busy countering all that "lucrative right wing disinformation" . . .
I compare Matt's resume with the standard issue Columbia journalism graduate at the Times or WP (or any other ivy journalist). Misbehaving at summer camp in the Adirondacks is pretty weak stuff, not to mention almost misgendering the DEI counselor, compared to dodging bullets in Moscow, playing baseball in Mongolia and all the other things that prepared Matt for this part of his writing life.
What I wouldn't give to have another beer with Jimmy Breslin.
What I see from Matt is a talented writer from a super privileged background. The irony is he’s convinced himself that he has escaped the shackles of his class when he is merely reverting to form, which explains perfectly why he appears to see Trump’s second presidency as some deserved retribution, and every week he cheers it on as such. It’s the world of privilege he grew up in where there are no consequences for the misdeeds of the rich. His recent work has been sophomoric— he finds everything ‘amusing’ and ‘funny’ (his words) that is happening in the second Trump term. That is the language of extreme privilege of someone who has not lost his job due to DOGE or been targeted for their politics by Trump.
What do you care about Matt’s background? You seem to be fixated on the fact that he was born into a family with higher income than you were.
Get over it already!
For crying out loud, how old are you? I’m 66, and I don’t give a crap how much money anyone was born into, or has accrued. It has absolutely no impact on my life. I was born into the working class & have wound up back there, due to a series of unfortunate events.
Life is beautiful!
We’ll all go on — no matter how much money Matt Taibbi or Elon Musk has.
One of the best things about Matt’s writing is his quirky sense of humor, and we should all be happy that he is able to point out the absurdities of life so we can all share in the joke. That’s the best attitude to have.
Your answer is telling, especially today, on May 1st. Americans are one of the few countries in the world who tell themselves that class is either irrelevant or a 'temporary situation caused by a series of unfortunate events.' It is no accident that the US has the highest level of income inequality among developed nations. It is also no accident the US consistently ranks very poorly among other major developed countries when it comes to protecting workers' rights, wage policies, worker protections, and the right to organize. Ask yourself why that should be the case in the wealthiest nation on earth. So I don't particularly care about Matt's earnings, except in so far as it explains his inability to address the elephant in the room — 40 years of massive tax cuts for the super wealthy. Perhaps you are right and this has nothing to do with his class. It think it does. Happy May Day.
And I used to think that Trump was a clear and present danger to my civil liberties, you know, with undercover agents arresting people for thought crimes and all and with DOGE hovering the private data of millions without
any legal authorization to do so. Now that I’ve read Matt, I’ve learned to relax, not to fuss, and that things could be a lot worse. I’ve learned that Trump is just retribution for the sins of the past and to celebrate the new regime and to hope things get better. Thanks, Matt!
Well said except, they aren't behaving like toddlers. They are behaving like rabid ideologues.
"H.R. 4310, known as the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013, was signed into law in January 2013. This legislation authorized essential support for service members and their families, renewed vital national security programs, and included provisions that allowed the government to use propaganda domestically, effectively repealing the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. The act has been a subject of controversy, particularly regarding its implications for domestic propaganda."
You nailed it.
Your argument is the perfect circle and it makes sense. The unprincipled will inevitably fail, because they're unprincipled. They're not fighting for anything except the moment, and it will pass. This is not to say the unprincipled can't cause havoc, but once the principled make it too unpleasant, they'll head back to the Starbucks.
I agree, except you're not describing leftism: you're describing a certain type of unhealthy personality [strongly consonant with cult-susceptibility features] that intrinsically latches onto then distorts & leverages certain elements of ACTUALLY PRINCIPLED, authentically "enlightenment-centric" sentiments & positions, via purposeful misrepresentations, pathological self-serving sophistry, intellectual dishonesty as a given-standard mode of discourse, &/or vulnerability to such pathological entrenchment of anchor bias as to flatly mute any & all cognitive dissonance.
[All the best features of narcissism, pathological liars, and borderline personality disorder all wrapped up in one neat package👌🤣🤣🤣.]
But: similarly to the old mic drop "Not all Republicans are racist but if you're racist you're probably a Republican" (ouch!), TODAY it's "Not EVERY Democrat's political 'opinions' consist of parroting VERBATIM media-wide lockstep-coordinated daily messaging blurbs, but if yours do? You're DEFINITELY a Democrat."
And in a "my, how the turns have tabled" twist, NOW, today, if you're preoccupied with racial identity, you're DEFINITELY a Dem. (Also stole the Tea Party's self-assumed unimpeachable moral-scold superiority, utter humorlessness, & achingly unfunny / cringe-y humor / satire / PR misfires, the 🤬 varlets.😡)
“We’re told that billionaires never held dominant roles in domestic politics, civil liberties never faced systematic threats, and most preposterously now, we never deployed a “sprawling domestic surveillance system” using centralized databases of “those who protest.’”
In order to work at the New York Times, you have to get a lobotomy first. Or have been in a coma since 2001. Every day is year zero for the leftists as they erase history to serve their narrative. If the news is fake, imagine how fake the history is. Heather Cox Richardson is a “historian” the same way Biden was sharp as a tack.
Trump is the focus or fulcrum, the scapegoat that is responsible for all the BAD in the Establishment's revisionist history going back to the Founding Fathers.
No one else in American history has ever had such influence.
All the way back to Christopher Columbus!
All the way back to Neanderthals!
All the way back to Adam and Eve.
Trump is the dog that ate my homework - Adam Townsend
Yuri- love the comparison about “historian” HCR!!!
Very perceptive. Several professor friends recommended her, and I thought they were kidding. Glad I’m not the only nonbeliever.
The history of now!
Just so I understand this: The author of the op-ed wrote a book a decade ago that basically outlined decades in the growth of government surveillance across all agencies, but Trump is now singularly violating the law by creating a surveillance state that we've never seen before. My head's spinning. It's five o'clock somewhere ...
Once Google bought DoubleClick...the game was over with a real firewall between Personally Identifiable Information and digital information (cookies, tags, beacons, device ID's, MAID's, etc..).....gone.
Now Meta, Alphabet and Amazon have massive Identity Graphs on every US consumer.
If someone is naive enough to think that the US government hasn't tunneled into those Data Centers...I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
You only think you own those bridges.
The only way it makes any sense is if you turn off your critical thinking skills, and disregard the past.
It’s stunning dishonesty. She might as well say, ignore what my book says!
Look up “Cognitive dissonance” for an explanation.
That was hard to take, agreed.
Only Trump would force the government to fabricate an elaborate story in order for the FBI to spy on his campaign! Doesn't he have any shame whatsoever?
"Look what you made me do!" is a favorite trope of the abuser.
I just love you so much I can't control myself sometimes......
The left is frantically trying to deny what they have become. They can’t admit that this is exactly where their philosophy ends up, every single time.
That’s the major problem. It’s all projection and no self reflection. There might be hope for us as a nation if the Democrats looked hard in the mirror and at the abuses that came out of the Biden administration.
My dear, the only abuse was Biden showing up in public for a debate which ruined the Dem's chances of a another fantastic B term in office.
All the real abuses to the country were premeditated by the Dem which Biden offered on a silver platter in keeping with the OWG you know.
Yeah he was just fine ….
sharp as a tack even….
One day it just happened…..
On the day of that debate.
Now Jake Tapper & someone else>have a book coming out in May
>about the Media covering up JaBiden’s obv mental decline
>from the guy who just spent the last 4 + yrs gaslighting us about JaBiden awesome mental health.
Up the thread someone said these peeps have no principles, opinions go the way of the wind.
And here it is….again.
Oh and how could I forget Aretha Franklin.
https://vault.fbi.gov/aretha-franklin/Aretha%20Franklin%20Part%2001%20%28Final%29/view
Just her and Trump.
And Martin Luther King, Jr.
Also that guy who once spoke out at that school board meeting against masking 2nd graders.
BUT OTHER THAN THAT when has the FBI ever been used as a weapon?
Billie Holiday.....Leonard Peltier......Clyde Boone.....The FBI moniker has nothing to do with Fidelity Bravery or Integrity.
Maybe the worst one was when Trump when back in time and used the CIA to spy on Congress before he was president. So dastardly.
https://www.npr.org/2014/08/01/337034368/inquiry-shows-cia-spied-on-senate-panel-that-was-investigating-the-agency
Inquiry Shows CIA Spied On Senate Panel That Was Investigating The Agency
August 1, 2014
Or this one...
https://youtu.be/nsmo0hUWJ08?si=NoSuog-giEboGUNE
Who knew Trump's tentacles ran so deep and feo so long!
James Lee Burke's characters call them "Fart, Barf and Itch," which is a better descriptive for them, IMO.
WTF? The Queen of Soul? How long, O Lord, how long?
lol!
So the NYTimes is blaming Trump for stuff that happened before he was born!
WHAT CAN TRUMP NOT DO! He is amazing!!
I was a lifelong NY Times reader until I got banned a few years ago after I accused DiBlasio of a Covid double standard: having the cops shut down the funeral of a beloved rabbi in Brooklyn, but letting the Floyd protests proceed unabated.
Still I enjoy the puzzles, and they cost $1 a month to subscribe. Fuck it. They can have my $1. But when I go to the home page, I literally close my eyes and scroll to the bottom so I don’t have to infect my eyeballs with the drek on the home page.
Sadly the Times is still delivered to my residence (not my choice, and I pick my battles). The blue bags are great for picking up my dog's sidewalk business, on the bright side. I do need to get another dog so the sum of their sidewalk business at least equals the crap in the bag when the paper is delivered.
That’s when they lost half the country. They couldn’t really be serious about social distancing and shut downs if yelling and screaming in crowds was somehow allowed, but attending Church and going to school was a death sentence.
Forget about the puzzles. Don't even give them a dollar.
I've always assumed the "$1 a month" was a teaser price and they would automatically increase it without notice after a while. And then you have to go through a long and painful
process to cancel your subscription.
Yes, I can personally attest to the difficulty of cancelling a subscription when the $1 offer ended and I was billed $25.
Because they make all their money by selling ads.
I would never subscribe to the NYT rag, but like you, I do love the puzzles and have a NYT games subscription on my phone! LOL
Many libraries have subscription for free to NYT. I only use it to play Wordle. Gotta the every 3 days. Pretty easy, and I don't give them a dime.
When there is a random reason to read an article, or research something from an old paper, I download the free library version.
The “guest editorial” is a tried-and-true means for media to wedge in a new “narrative”. Next come staff editorials, “analysis” pieces, and before you know it, We’ve always been at war with Oceania.
And maybe an "open letter."
Nooooo!
Not another "open letter."
Softening up the crowd…
Well.. It's the New York Times audience, so they'll eat it up like candy. The "Highly" "Educated" are all for eating up stories that solidify their feelings. I'd like to say this story surprises me, or is shocking in it's stupidity, but I am well beyond shock and surprise at how dumb the party I was once a part of is now.
Every time a republican takes the office of president (yes, especially Trump) it's as if all of my liberal friends awaken from a rip-van-winkle-esque slumber and are suddenly very concerned about all of the wrongdoings of the government. But soon enough--as soon as the next presidential election-- they'll drift back to sleep.
I mean... I was the same way at one point. The difference for me is that I saw what the Cheney admin did, and then I was all on the Obama train until he derailed Occupy using... yup.. what Cheney advanced (I wont' say created because that gives Dick too much credit). The Obama Admin was literally the most corrupt administration in the history of this country and I voted for him twice.
Yep, the Obama administration was awful in too many ways. I voted for him once too. A constitutional scholar and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize!
Of course, as Matt notes, Angwin and the NYT aren't necessarily wrong and could even be right about Trump, at least on some matters. But the hysteria and hyperbole are reminiscent of 2016-2020. There are waaaay too many hypothetical what-might-happen fright headlines in the press these days.
I will add for good measure that too many conservatives who were all fired up about the first amendment and authoritarianism during the past four years now seem all too comfortable, even pleased, with some of the Trump administration's constitutional shortcuts. Spitting cousins with the true blue partisans.
The argument I always remember about this stuff is don’t let it happen, in case a despot gets in power. It’s immaterial now if Trump is that despot, since the ground has already been laid by multiple previous administrations and a complicit Congress.
I saw the light when Holder went after the CA medical marijuana clinics and when press was not allowed to visit and report on oil spills, oh, and let's not mention the mess "arming the rebels" in Syria created. Still, which POTUS has not caused most of us to gasp at the errors of their ways?
Would you provide examples of conservatives abandoning free speech? I’d like to make sure I understand your argument.
There are a bunch egregious rules and laws against criticizing Israel.
Pardon me, but did I specifically mention free speech?
No, I pointed to the Trump administration's "constitutional shortcuts" and was referring to sweeping people of the streets and sending them to a foreign prison without due process. If you have any questions, I refer you to Judge Wilkinson's opinion declining to grant a stay of the federal district court's ruling in the Abrego Garcia case.
Wilkinson is a Reagan-appointed judge in the Fourth Circuit and was a conservative darling. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca4.178400/gov.uscourts.ca4.178400.8.0.pdf
And flipshod is right. Too many conservatives have gone totally woke on Israel. Like BLM with a much louder bullhorn. Raising good faith questions about the war in Gaza is verbotten as somehow "antisemitic." Having an honest discussion on the topic is almost impossible--that's the objective of the woke right, just like it was for the woke left re racism, trans people, etc.
It's like kosher DEI.
People who cheer the new campus speech codes that prohibit any criticism of Israel.
A bunch of hypocrites.
Bro, sadly, my bio, too. Better late than never?
I had one big foot out the door in 2004. I was starting to figure out that if Bush-Cheney hadn't existed the Dems would have had to invent them, coz on the NSC transition to O was seamless. In hindsight, I'm glad he won, the alternatives were worse.
FWIW, I forgive you.
Into a stuporous legal psychiatric drug induced doze.
The latest line I've seen is, "Remember when you didn't have to worry about what the president was doing?" It says a lot about them that they weren't paying attention to a senile person doing radical things.
This made me LOL. God it’s so true
I opened that article this morning as just seeing the headline made me think "C'mon, nobody could be that disingenuous." Then I read the opening paragraph, thought "wow, I guess they can," closed my browser, and sat at my desk bemused by the idea that millions of people are going to read that - and they're going to believe it, too.
The problem is.. they aren't actually going to read it. They are going to see it, absorb it, see it as the way they are supposed to think to be good people and then tell their friends about it.
After they pop their anti-depressant and anti-psychotic and Vyvanse.
Side effects include………
Well, usually stroke and exploding diarrhea are involved …….
I have a senior friend who is scared to death Trump is going after her investments in CDs. Give me a break. 🙄🤣🤣🤣.
Trump kinda is, lol--interest rates may get lower so that is one way Trump may go after her foolish senior citizen investments in "CDs".
Reminds me of my lib friends on social media in 2020 repeating all the pro-lockdown slogans as if they had come up with them, or even understood them at all.
It's a hell of a thing to live in fear... And, this represents a large part of what represents the left populace IMO. Articles like this seem to be a regular part of the corporate media playbook, forget that the article is disingenuous on its face, that was on purpose, look at the underlying intention, it's meant to foment fear.
I feel sorry for them, because they live in a constant state of fear and or/rage.
They are obviously miserable.
My 80 y/o father - who gets his "news" from PBS and The View - is the poster child. Phone conversations (as I bite my tongue because it's wasted energy trying to argue with him) are excruciating.
Wow.
You have my sympathies.
Our local talk radio guy (T.J. Harris) complains that his mama insists on watching The View whenever she visits him, so he just has to put up with it out of respect. Apparently, his mom loves Whoopie.
Go figure.
Great article Matt. The US federal government has antiquated computer systems going back decades. These are starting to get updated and as we know from the corporate world and the current world of data systems, no longer do entities need to have 3 or 4 different databases or in the US government 20 or more databases. Time to have 1 or 2 and save some money and people. If there is one thing Elon and his team can do is upgrade US computer systems and bring them into the 21st century. And it’s going to threaten several people and departments because it’s change.
The ironic article by The NY Times made me laugh since the fabricated Russian hoax. Plus all the government oversight exposed by the Twitter Files. Thanks Matt!
The spy agencies have always had a problem of too much data, going back to the simple days of tapping wires.
Now they're finally implementing the the systems so that they can work as intended.
For a bank or other company to rationalize its Frankenstein tangle of systems for efficiency is one thing, I'm not ready to celebrate the spys becoming super efficient.
“DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Reportedly” is a miracle word. You could write literally anything you want, and just by inserting this wildcard, it magically makes your statement accurate enough to run it in a of paper of record.
“DOGE employees are reportedly two-foot tall Oompa Loompas who get paid in Everlasting Gobstoppers.”
“The New York Times reportedly offered Taylor Lorenz a job because they thought having a clout-chasing crybaby sobbing on TikTok would grow their reader base.“
There. Now, all three statements are equally true.
Wait, Trump was responsible for the so-called "Patriot Act"? That rascal, Trump, made the NSA spy on us?
I am hardly a Trump fan, but that one seems to attribute superpowers (time travel and mind control) to the man that I don't think he possesses.
Don't underestimate the evil that can be attributed to Trump by State Media.
He gets a slightly different treatment than Joe Biden, who was a statesman for all of his 50+ years in and about DC.
And obviously NEVER voted for ANY of this "surveillance state" stuff the NYT just discovered.
And a legal scholar, NFL material, and Puerto Rican to boot!
And that video of Biden bragging about holding up US aid to Ukraine until they fired the prosecutor investigating his son's new employer, is STILL up, last time I checked.
Biden was one of the most corrupt politicians we've ever had, and most of that corruption was right out in the open -- but was studiously ignored by all the right people.
+1, underscoring the depth of media corruption and lack of any semblance of integrity. If nothing else, Trump's involvement in national politics has revealed this corruption to the point where "journalists" don't even try to disguise it anymore.
Who's worse: the crook, or the cop (or judge) who takes the bribe and/or looks the other way?
But didn’t you know he controls the weather, managed massive fraud in 2016 and 2024 ( but somehow failed that in 2020) and caused anything bad that happened over the past 8 years? The many obviously has magical powers.
Putin was just really tired in 2020.
This time travel ability to change things in the past to benefit the present was attributed to Bush as well. The claims of Iraqi WMD's were just made up by Bush was at odds with the fact that I/we were ordered to get anthrax shots, under penalty of courts martial, for our Persian Gulf deployments in the late 90's. No one has been able to explain how the then governor of Texas was able to do that. Fast forward to 2009 when the Obama team largely absorbed the people that promoted the WMD's and the issue largely disappeared.
Because we know that Trump and Dubya are very very clever.
I want to scream, “are you shitting me!” Unfortunately, I already know the answer. American political history apparently began in 2016 despite everything I remember before.
you can scream, but nobody will hear...cause sound does not travel in a vacuum. :/
The new age of leftist insanity began in 2016.
And people say, 'where are all the women/real left/political opposition to 'wokeness' et al- they were all purged off of social media between 2015 and 2018. Many had livelihoods and families threatened IRL. Some were even arrested for wrongthink (especially in UK and Eur). Many still cannot get back onto 'twitter' or 'facebook' even now even though their supposed 'crimes' were fabricated and spurious.
This all happened under everyone's noses. And now the NYT (who also purged voices) is pretending that it didn't.
There is no history, we live in “immediate” time.
The NYT could run an article on Wednesday about how the DHS and NSA etc are weapons no President should be allowed to wield, that they constantly infringe upon civil liberties while not even fulfilling their stated purpose, and how every Admin has utilized them to snoop on their enemies; and then the NYT could run an article on Thursday saying the Trump admin is considering abolishing the DHS and NSA while claiming that this would be an unconstitutional assault on the federal govt, another sign of creeping fascist authoritarianism, and all its subscribers and commenters would scream and weep over the poor hard-working patriotic employees there and how evil Trump is for considering dismantling this crucial tool that maintains our Safety and Democracy™.
Nothing exists anymore but an eternal present and the needs of the Party, which change back and forth depending upon the day, the weather and the demands of the news cycle and the apparatchiks and bottom-feeding media parasites that feed off it.
The NYT is cross bw Pravda and a cult, dispensing nutritious pellets of self-reinforcing Party dogma for the angry and anxious lost souls of the Internet Age, few of which have any connection to reality. Our most lauded epistemic institutions—prestige media and prestige universities—have given themselves an ideological lobotomy, have destroyed their own credibilty and sanity, and will be the absolute last ones to realize it.
NYT has a parliamentarian department that keeps historical facts on the paper’s internal processes on what has been allowed since the paper’s conception. Included would be how many times can various stories with the same lie can be done within a specific time frame; and how many paragraphs must be used in a pseudo story prior to inserting a line of truth, does printing an article have to for an agency nod and which are those agencies. There must be hundreds of norms by which it operates, of course, any can be over-ridden when there is a dire need.
Right again - not an atom of self-awareness or common sense in the whole sorry crew.
Would be great if someone who still has a NYT subscription - I canceled mine after they put Sarah Jeong on the editorial board and I misunderstood her tag #CancelWhitePeople to mean I should cancel my NYT subscription - would link to this article (with Matt’s blessing) in the NYT comment section.
Getting more context out there can’t hurt.
Sounds like you understood her tag perfectly.
Because anti white racism is always okay.
It's not racism, according to a definition the left absolutely did not just make up for their own benefit.
Gee, not even a mention of the fact that, in 2012, Obama gave 17 "private contractors" access to the NSA's 702 (FISA) database allowing them to obtain "from/to" or "about" information on the electronic fingerprint and communications of any American or that a 2016 audit of their use of the database revealed that, during only a six month period, tens of thousands of database queries were made by the "private contractors" and that 85% were illegal. Bet y'all never read about that in the NYT even though it was the subject, in part, of a 99 page, April 26, 2017, Opinion by then Presiding Judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Rosemary Collyer.
WTF?! Why do I not know this? I suspect there will be a lot of grumbling, escalating to cursing, in my future.
None of our media except the online "The Conservative Treehouse" covered it. And it isn't tinfoil hat conspiracy theory stuff witness that Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion and the fact that now former NSA diector Admiral Rogers ordered the audit and in April 2017 ended these contractors' database access. I have tried to interest several journalists in pursuing the story to no avail. No one I am aware of has pursued it even though it would appear to have been one of, if not THE, biggest warrantless intrusion into the privacy of American citizens in our history. No one has even asked for the identities of the "private contractors" or what use was made of the information extracted from the database. In this regard, in March 2013, Congresswoman Maxine Waters revealed in a video interview that Obama was assembling the largest political database in history. When last I looked this part of the interview was still posted on YouTube. It's only one minute and nine seconds long so it isn't too painful to watch and listen to. Whether the two things are related is unknown. But, again, no one seems to be interested in looking into it.
I'd like to see Matt Taibbe comment on this, how do we draw his attention other than this comments section?
P.S. I suppose someone could let him know about it on 'X'. I would except I'm not on the platform. But anyone who is able and interested in passing along to him my comments certainly has my permission to do so.
I'm on X. I'll spend some time following up on your info trails, then maybe I'll send it to him. Thanks for the information and comments.
Beats me. It is hard for me to believe someone as well-informed on the privacy issue as he is hasn't stumbled across the story already. I have nothing professionally to do with the issue and I know about it. Nobody seems interested.