The Trump ascendancy is really the most significant and fascinating phenomenon of our time.
Once he scored the upset win, and after the Berkeley-Brooklyn-Brookline axis dried its tears and exited their safe spaces, they swore that all sorts of horrible terrible things were about to happen: the incipient fascism of corporate and government consolidation, the criminalization of dissent and Otherization of half the country, the destruction of all sorts of social precedents, an unleashed torrent of hatred, a totalitarian government and weaponized FBI out to punish dissidents etc etc.
And they were right! But it never crossed their minds that it could be them and their side that would be guilty of committing all these offenses.
There just seems to be something very ugly that happens to humans (most esp humans in groups) when they become convinced that they're opponents are so Evil that anything and everything is justified in defeating them.
It looks like Team Social Justice is delivering the same fate to America that the American military did to Vietnam: they are going to destroy the country in order to save it.
far from it. Abraham Accords. Funding for black universities. Lowest ever unemployment, lowest unemployment for blacks, hispanics, non college educated males. There's lots to consider.
The Abraham Accords are an overblown nothing burger. Were Dubai and Israel ever actually at war? The Saudi royal family has always had back-door ties to Israel. The Gulf states who were signatories are not border states with Israel and never went to war against them. Meanwhile Syria and Lebanon are not signatories.
It's also kind of interesting that all the nations who Israel is "at war" with are secular "dictatorships" (according to the same people who call trump a fascist). Dictatorships with Parliamentary democracies, no less, while all the Arab countries who are signatories are conservative islamic, totalitarian theocratic dictatorships. But that's neither here nor there.
Funny, but the signatories of the Accords, as well as many pundits, don't agree with you. As well, the Accords were seen as a diplomatic success that could lead to further inroads into the mess that has been the Middle East.
I disagree, the Abraham Accords were a major turning point because the various ties between Israel and Arab states were legitimized by the Accords. And the increasing willingness of Arabs to tie themselves to Israel and vice-versa indicated Iran was the primary enemy of Arabs and Israelis, and that the US was not the central arbiter of ME politics anymore. These are pretty substantial changes.
The Abraham Accords were only started, and like anything else, with willing partners. They were meant to be continued with more Arab States, but without leadership have not.
The Abraham Accords are an agreement between several countries that violate human rights because they are opposed to a common enemy which also violates human rights. The tacit alliance already existed.
Citation please. Sorry, but I don’t accept your opinion. Nor do any of the signatory to the accord, just to be clear. And I think they likely know better than you.
I've been seeing your crap here, and frankly, I think you're a fool after reading some of it. Explain for us, please, just how Trump allowed China to do this.
Since you cannot, I'll thank you to shut up and not bother me again with your foolishness.
Trump inherited an economy that was in the midst of the most low growth, stagnant period in history. Also inherited a nuclear DPRK and a looming disaster in Iran. Those are just a few examples… he also inherited a political situation where half of congress and the senate was trying to impeach him from the time he took the oath of office, aided and abetted by a mainstream media ecosystem that lost its mind and threw all standards out the window, to the point of routinely running completely baseless stories that were nothing but smears.
False, Gene. Trump inherited a stagnant, low-growth economy from Obama/Biden, who had spent years promising the "Summer of Recovery" but the damn economy wouldn't budge due to their crap leftist policies. Despite the fusillade against him, Trump cleared regulations and the economy was in perhaps the best shape since Reagan left office. Trump was taking on the Chinese as well on all fronts.
Thank you for inadvertently confirming that COVID was, indeed, a bioweapon, brought to us courtesy of Anthony Fauci. Of course Trump couldn't stop the release of a virus, no man could stop that. You'd have to be a complete fool to think such a thing, Gene.
The question I always ask myself about anything when one or the other party controls the White House is if in this case, if Hillary Clinton was President, what would have been different with CV-19?? Same thing with 911. As an example, Al Gore while VP had met with the airlines way back much before 911 and the airlines resisted cabin-door reinforcement measures, etc. So that never took place. Obviously we had our warning shot with the WTC truck bombing in 1993 and nothing really changed.
yeah the GOP was ripe for a hostile takeover, esp after the Romney/Ryan plutocrats' dream ticket...but at least Trump's depantsing of the 2016 field was hilarious and well-deserved...him kneecapping Jeb! was comedy gold.
I always thought trump just wanted power and adapted his belief system to the opportunity that existed. In 2015 he realized that the Democratic party was in firm control of the Obama/Clinton team but no one was using the Republican party, so he took it over. The funny thing was that having adopted their issues to win, he felt compelled to deliver on them. something no serious Republican would ever consider.
I don’t think he was that calculating, honestly. I think Trump thinks about Trump. I’ll give him his due credit: he had his instinctive finger on the pulse of (understandable) white working class anger. Dems helped him a lot by failing to deliver what old school Dems used to; they became the party of wealthy elites versus caring about the working class.
Watch his Oprah interview from 25 year ago. Most people are wrong about Trump in terms of his beliefs driving his politics and not some opportunist changing his stripes to please his handlers like Biden.
It was. Too bad the party takeover never materialized.
I dearly hope Trump wins again so the globalist faction of the RP decamps, is driven out by America-First populists who can end this constant bleeding out of treasure for a global fraud (global warming) and end the US proxy war in Ukraine by brokering a settlement instead of perpetuating that stupid slaughter.
Although there is a lot to like with DeSantis, he strikes me as Chris Christie, part 2. If he does go for the nomination in 2024, I wouldn't be surprised in the least to see him heavily moderate just as Christie did.
Deep State Gene (and his wingman Fedspar) are not trying to make sense, they are trying to disrupt the conversation we are having here...and with a fair degree of success, unfortunately.
AND he pulled the covers off the corporate press, revealing them to many more people as the pack of lazy, venal, climbing schmoozers rubbing up against the politically powerful that they have always been. Their humiliation at being wrong about his election prospects led them to go all in as the propaganda wing of the Democratic Party.
Not always. Jimmy Dore just showed some clips of journalists commenting on Joe Biden when he first got into politics and they were doing their jobs then. The good old days
I use the term more broadly than an academic would. "The Left" = democrats, identity groups, ESG investors, environmentalists, the MSM, feminists, academia, the administrative state, K-12 education, the DEI Industrial Complex, hollywood, madison avenue, social media moderators, Big Tech etc.
The Left = The Borg.
Real leftists usually quibble with this, but it is what it is. The Borg needs a name, and it has been dubbed "The Left."
In other words, a meaningless term for everybody you don't like. Thanks for helping strip all the meaning out. Granted, it was always pretty vague.
It's never legitimate to name your opponents, because that's just propaganda.
On ther other hand, we really need a new name for the "real left." You'll just have to take a Green's word for it that the Dems are not - in fact, they're a right-wing, neoliberal party closely allied with the Repubs, except for competing with them for the big money.
but the problem is, as I stated below, that everything is a binary. In some cases that broad brush works, but it has become insane. because Taibbi is no longer singing from the same book he is, not only banished, he is now a conservative, (you hav to admit, that's funny.) But it has allowed the establishment to divide the world between th pro and anti Trump with the stipulation that anyone who agrees with a single Trump policy is pro and thus outcast.
Hate tp tell you friend, but Democrats are now run by "the Left"...them and the corporate globalists. There are few if any "liberals" remaining in the party. A bitter truth, but true nonetheless. And I say that as a (former) lifetime Dem.
You've got it backwards. The liberals are running the Democratic Party, and they aren't "the Left." Chris Hedges calls them "the liberal elite" or "the liberal class."
Actually I would say the rank and file of the democratic party is filled with traditional liberals who continue to support the party either out of inertia, revulsion, (real and/or imagined) of the Republicans, or just blind loyalty. Anecdotally I see it all over my family who, willfully, never connect the dots, complain about the insanity that is occurring, and then faithfully vote blue on every ballot down the line.
The Dems are pro-war, pro-crony capitalism, anti free speech, anti-choice when it comes to toxic experimental gene therapy. In what universe are those leftist positions? If the Left runs the DNC, how do you explain their reaction to Bernie Sanders's platform?
Because your modern Leftist is "pro-war, pro-crony capitalism, and anti free speech, etc." Bernie, the pro-war Socialist-with-three houses is exhibit A of what I am talking about. AOC is exhibit B. Both pro-war and anti-free speech. Wake up, it's 2022, not 2016. Much has changed in a very little time.
Leftists are not pro-war and anti-free speech, though liberals are. It’s a matter of definition though. Leftists have always used “liberal” as a term of derision.
and Taibbi is not a conservative jorno but these days its a binary, you are one or the other. Fluidity only exists in the sexes in the genders it seems
Once an elite establishes its power, no horrifyingly awful behavior it pukes, oozes, or ejaculates is necessary to understand outside the context of the continued maintenance of that power. The alleged fundamental ideology is a complete pretense.
Our country was founded upon the concept of restraining government power. One side still wants that, the other wants totalitarianism in the name of socialist revolution.
But I agree that DC Republicans do little if anything to restrain government power now.
The Party apparatus sole purpose is to accumulate and retain power. Can't blame if for being what it is. The two Parties take turns venturing too far outside the norm. Currently it is the Democrats' turn; they seem unwilling to cede their ignoble turf, and instead press ever outward, intent on dragging the rest of us in their direction. They appear to be mostly successful.
It's possible Democrats have perfected the Art of the Deal. Instead of merely starting at a ludicrous position and then meeting your opponent halfway between you and the mean, they instead raise the stakes higher every time anyone says No, and label them a racist for their impertinence.
David, absolutely! I made this point to my formerly liberal friends on Trump's Inauguration. Too much of what's happening now in US politics is shadow projection and then fighting those shadows. "Shadow boxing the Apocalypse" as the Grateful Dead once sang. As an amateur astrologer, much as I've heard all the quick dismissals of astrology, we all knew that the US was going through its Pluto Return from 2016-2024, which meant we knew the shadows were going to surface and to not waste time in fighting them, but rather to expect a very deep dive into the American psyche, facing all of its collective demons and the many projections from those unwilling to face them.
I can’t find it online, but I would love to go and rewatch that leaked video of the google executives bitterly complaining about the election result to their employees. One certainly gets the impression that just the core mission of all these supposedly profit-maximising, publically owned social media giants post 2016 became to stop Trump or anyone like him ever being elected again, screw the profits. The best obvious example of foresaking profits was on YouTube where the wrong voices were demonetised at some cost to shareholders as well as the creators. But twitter hiring thousands of hall way monitors (as did Facebook I guess) to rub out conservative/wrong views is another example. They all did their bit, as did the mainstream media.
This should have been a lawsuit. There is no way you could be a Trump supporter there and have a safe working environment while your colleagues weep and rend their garments over your candidate.
I was waiting for Subhar to say that he was an immigrant and a refugee after Sergey Brin did.
I waited to subscribe until I had familiarized myself with your blog, and I didn't, because you are not just comparing apples with oranges, and you haven't just made fruit salad with them like many people do, but you seem to have put them in a blender and made a congee!
You indiscriminately mix progressives, liberals, the Democrats, and others together in a word soup. You need to clarify your thoughts.
Of course, you probably have a devoted following that agrees with you, so you won't.
That was a great comment. The reason why Trump is such a lightning rod is because he hijacked one of the two captive parties that has been used for decades to cement control over the US electoral system. And he did so as a "populist" and while openly declaring war against the nearly concensus interests massed to resist him. Politically Trump was an existential threat to the swamp aka status quo. It was a death match and it isn´t quite over. His supporters were necessarily punished to teach them to never try that shit again! We are witnessing the lengths that the SQ will go to to keep a grip on power. Now we get to see how badly Americans want their country back.
Yes. Well said. Beyond the left/right narrative are The Exhausted Masses. We’re all sick of the bullshit toxic duo. Sanity again! MAKE AMERICA SANE AGAIN!!!
If we don't get off our lazy keisters and vote for Trump or whoever gets to run against Dementia Joe, we deserve to be slaves to the globalists. We need to vote in such overwhelming numbers no vote fraud can make a difference.
The DP has played out its hand. The only card they have left is vote tampering. However, challenging results has now become meaningless as both parties bitch about it whenever they lose, despite the reality or falsity of individual instances, and anyone from either party who challenges a count is immediately labeled as a "paranoid conspiracy theorist."
Well stated, as someone here previously said, this discussion thread would indeed make a fine substack article in itself. Perhaps I'm revealing my own tribalism in concurring.
I dunno. I think a lot of folks know...they just ALSO know they have no access. We've seen this before with Snowden & Assange. Which is why Greenwald, Taibbi, Mate, Gabbard, even Weiss are so damned important!
"they are going to destroy the country in order to save it"
They already have. The bloodshed may continue but the war for the most part is lost. The cancer of woke and of Marxism has metastasized into all of the vital organs of American governance. The long march through the institutions is complete.
That's my view as well. All companies like Twitter et el accomplished was the start of the parallel economy and the creation of new social media sites for refugees of "wrong think" effectively creating echo chamber's, where idea's are not throughly challenged or debated.
I'm familiar with Marxist theory and history but am still dissatisfied with the myriad definitions of "woke" that I have solicited from others (in good faith) and subsequently received.
Indeed, one definition often covers terrain completely uncharted by another---I just hope I'm "woke" if it's a good thing, hoping I'm not if it's a bad thing.
I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....
Marxism is the idea that the government should control the means of production. What we have now is an oligarchy who controls everything which is about as far from Marxism as it gets.
Not to overpraise out of turn, but your comment stream by itself would make a hell of a Substack.
I guess our brains are still wired to overvalue tribalism-based emotion over rational thought, just like enough human beings are smart, lucky, and avaricious enough to lower the quality of life for 99.9999 percent of the planet for no reason other than succumbing to the instinct to hoard more resources than the rest of the monkeys. They are not representative of the kindness and generosity I still believe is foundational to the human ape, else we probably would have gone extinct a while ago instead of, eh, soon.
Well stated Kevin. Some would argue that the loss of the belief in a higher being that has contributed to our current state of affairs. Or, a loss of a moral compass as a society.
Either way our tribalism has become more acute since Trump got elected.
Lol. Weird, isnt it? Remember when Stanford was the bastion of Conservatism? Hoover Inst, et al? And San Jose/SC County/Peninsula were the 'red' parts ofvthe Bay Area at large? Much like OC down south. Now the wealthy enclaves hold water for the Business Class, but wear a blue tie. Wasnt that long ago.
The preponderance of the wealthy, in the Bay Area or any other enclave in this much-damned country of ours, don't wear "blue" ties, chum. And the monied cats who do, PMC democrats and a smattering of corporate types, are a thin minority at any white tie cocktail party---despite what you're told by Newsmax editorialists, make-up padded, long-haired blonde correspondents and influencers who patrol twitter, fist-gaveling substackers, James Lindsay, Ron DeSantis, Randy Quaid, et al.
Any sort of perceived self-identification with the scraps and scrawls of the so-called "woke" is purely designed to strengthen the bottom line, or at the very least maintain it. Period. They don't give a fuck about the woke, the anti-woke, antifa, the Mormon Church, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the local Rotary club, Kim Kardashian's 64 million twitter followers, or the sociopaths occupying the mansion next door.
In other words, "the gloves came off." All semblance of a two party democracy (whatever you think of it) was out of the picture. The Left declared war.
And it's not just "othering" by announcing pronouns, or even the demand to acknowledge the bullshit it is. (Thank you Elon for mocking this). It's the declaration that all of us must do so as well.
I think what happened is that the establishment, the elites, the swamp, the deep state or however you choose to describe them decided to join forces with the left. It's like they concluded that their enemy's enemy is their friend.
I supported the people with money most of my life because I thought it was either that or support bigger government. That was a lesser of evils choice. Now, it appears that big money and big government are on the same side against me. I think Trump brought that about somehow.
Daryl, for most of your life the people with money have either been busy sucking the government dry, or busy organizing it into a fully owned subsidiary of whatever enterprise they happen to be engaged in.
Right. I was a little slow to open my eyes to it. Actually it wasn't people with money I supported. It was businesses who built things, created jobs, etc, etc. But big businesses kept buying little businesses and getting bigger, and then buying politicians to the point that big business and government are now merged and operating against the individual. The other reason there's a right wing populist movement.
The emergence of a right wing populist movement scared the shit out of the rich global elites who meant to centralize all power and forced them to show their cards. The WEF strategy doesn't account for much individual choice.
An illogically common (and tiresome) refrain from those American citizens who harbor grievances, some legitimate and others not so legitimate, and who ascribe those grievances to epistemological differences they might have with such ephemera as the U.S. mass media, politicians of a certain stripe, fellow citizens of different "persuasions," loudmouth entertainers, ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, bad weather, and the 600 million or so "leftists" and "Marxists" who evidently call "America" home.
To anyone remotely paying attention, the curtain-less stage show "America" predates Donald Trump by at least several hundred years. The same grievances have been around just as long.
Asking to be called by one’s preferred pronouns is declaring war? You are easily triggered.
It’s just a respect thing and of course you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. You might be considered rude but it doesn’t seem like that matters to you.
Stop with the coyness. Changing a name is a far cry from changing language itself. Not to mention destroying 'social constructs'. (As if social constructs dont provide important and NECESSARY norms). Pronouns and gender are just proxies for the real issue: does subjectivity take precedent over objectivity, no matter the costs.
Wow. And all this time I thought pronouns were just pronouns and gender just gender. It's, like, my car loan payments and Range Rover are just proxies for the real issue: does the subjectivity of my new Range Rover take precedent over the objectivity of my bank's attitude toward the 10 months of late payments on the Range Rover?
My guess is that tow truck outside in the driveway is motivated by all things objective.
Their hegemonic activities were a reaction to what the left perceived to be the opposition's power structure to be.
The problem came from the erroneous perception, and it is now the left that is holding onto the fascist expressions of political power. The Twitter files represent the smoking guns.
Sadly, I hold no belief that there is anyone in our Department of Justice, certainly not the current Attorney General, who will see and act to hold the state actors in this melodrama to account in a court of law.
This whole mess may not end up being swept under the rug, but then again, it very well may. Those of us who believe in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights must stand firm in defense of our freedoms when they are challenged. And the ARE being challenged by this nefarious activity.
The new Republican House of Representatives will have a House subcommittee investigating the excesses of the FBI and other agencies here. According to the WSJ they plan to call it "The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government" which is an unnecessarily politicized name but at least they are looking into it.
Imagine a 4-hour movie with all the elements of Duck Soup and The Poseidon Adventure and then some. Groucho Marx and Ernest Borgnine, both FBI agents, vie for Shelley Winters' affection, unaware that she is a republican sponsored "honeypot" trained and programmed by Tesla and Twitter engineers...with all the algorithms fit to print.
Or "Casablanca" and "Joker?" Humphrey Bogart and Paul Henreid both "come out" but stay in Casablanca and turn Rick's Place into a gay-friendly bed-and-breakfast that does double-time as a refuge for rogue FBI agents on the run from the republican congressional committee. Meanwhile, Joaquin Phoenix and Ingrid Bergman, now married and registered libertarians, are "turned" by Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, and willingly, under oath, expose the "dirty deeds" unfolding at Rick's Place.
It is politicized for sure. But from that which has been so far revealed in the Twitter File, the name and the aim would seem to be well within reason.
Yes, it was a profoundly stupid remark. I'm sure most of Vito Genovese's phone calls were quite benign, and ordering hits was just occasional. So that made it OK? Did the FBI have Hunter Biden's laptop for a year and apparently fail to authenticate tens of thousands of the emails, a task that a junior programmer who understood DKIM could easily have accomplished? I find that hard to believe. The FBI was intentionally lying or extraordinarily stupid. Take your pick, Nate, and stop babbling about irrelevancies.
Marvin Miller merely pulled back the curtain, with an assist from Peter Seitz, exposing what colossal cheap fucks the owners were. They were operating a profoundly insidious monopoly, screwing the players through the "reserve clause" for almost a century.
Successful businessmen, aggressive capitalists all, pay the going rate in any market. Do I like the fact that baseball players make $50 million a year? No. But do you know why they get paid that much? Because other people, the owners, exist in a very competitive market who can afford to pay them that much. Take away the billions, and you ain't got the millions.
To Nate's credit he has displayed autonomy of thought, especially as related to COVID. That said, 538's editorial section has become unreadable under his leadership
Yes, Matt is a true American. Doing lovely activities with his children, like seeing the giant redwoods. Hope the General still stands. Bullit great movie. I lived in San Fran back in the day. Two blocks over from the Haight. Worked at the free medical clinic. Ah nice trip down memory lane. Thanks Matt!
There are few things sadder than being (comparatively) young and realizing that San Francisco and New York City used to be interesting places that you didn't have to be a doubleplus-millionaire or homeless to live in. A lot of us missed that bus.
San Francisco is still interesting especially if you are young and you don’t have to be rich to live here. You just have to do what we did when we were young and that is live in a big house with roommates.
Did you also need to avoid winos shitting in the streets and meth heads masturbating in public? Were stores closing because the cops wouldn't bust shoplifters? How often were your cars broken into?
The romance of partying and surviving in an urban hellhole usually fades by age 30.
My car has never been broken into. If you avoid the Tenderloin and nearby areas you won’t ever see people shooting up and shutting on the streets.
Both of my kids are in public schools which are very good. The oldest is in Lowell, which is one of the best public schools anywhere. The ride the excellent public transit everywhere which gives them a personal freedom most suburban kids don’t have.
It’s a beautiful and quirky city with many great cultural institutions. You should come visit and see for yourself. It is generally regarded as one of the most livable cities in America. It’s a lot like Amsterdam. If cities aren’t your thing, that’s fine. Good that we have choices!
"You just have to do what we did when we were young and that is live in a big house with roommates."
This is something like my particular idea of Hell, as according to Sartre and Charlie Brooker's DEAD SET, but I sincerely do thank you for the response. I have found that roommates are not too good about cleaning the bathroom and the refrigerator. As HST put it, "Nobody washes a rental car."
Since I actually got some likes on this comment -- and against the titular wise guidance -- I will foolishly, as is my habit, elaborate.
The DIRTY HARRY corpus is an unironic love letter to San Francisco and the Bay Area at a particular place and time. It is about how a lot of different people from a lot of different economic and cultural backgrounds were dumped there and had to find a way to survive in close proximity, as much as they may have disliked each other. (Pauline Kael's characterization of DIRTY HARRY as a "hard-hat THE FOUNTAINHEAD" is not altogether inaccurate, if bitchy.)
Despite the frequent characterization of John Milius as "right-wing" (whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean any more, and whatever the fuck it meant in the 1970s, he had a much freer hand in the screenplay than in DIRTY HARRY and it shows) MAGNUM FORCE may possibly be the most aggressively and wonderfully intelligent/stupid anti-fascist political screed dumped into pop-culture trash fiction prior to Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (sp). Harry be like, "Kids, just because *I* run around breaking the rules and doing this shit, please do not institutionalize it, it's a bad idea."
Thing I like the best about MAGNUM FORCE is that Harry shoots his qual course with .44 Specials instead of .44 Magnums and makes no pretensions about doing so.
Good stuff, Grisha. I was always partial to DIRTY HARRY but you make me want to check out MAGNUM FORCE again. What was the third one called, I can't remember. Kind of an urban version of John Ford's cavalry trilogy, with Clint Eastwood in the lead instead of John Wayne.
"What was the third one called, I can't remember."
THE ENFORCER! Sadly I think it kind of sucks, but I should probably check it out again and look for the virtues instead of the detriments. If I remember correctly the villains are hirsute 1970s leftists with bazookas and his partner is Tyne Daly and she gets killed, according to the running gag that Harry's partners always get killed.
Whats back in the day? By the 90s, Cole Valley was the next Noe Valley, etc. Divisadero and the Lwr Haight defined gentry. By the early 2000s, the real SF was all but disappeared (although Richmond/Outer Sunset still remain somewhat).
…and let Hillary off the hook (“no reasonable prosecutor…”) for crimes specified by Comey himself; and allowed a private company to conduct the forensic analysis of the hacked DNC server, never proving that the Russians were the culprit…
Which administration is irrelevant. They’re all corrupt. The crimes are bigger than that and much more institutionalized in the permanent bureaucracies.
Great work , what is infuriating is that other journalist organizations should be attacking this at every angle forcing the censors into a corner so that all of the work wouldn’t be on a handful of journalists
But they obviously aren't going to do that, because somewhere out there there's an ABC files, and a CBS files, and an NBC files -- and those places are still taking their lead from government.
Know what my initial reaction was, and what I would think would be the initial reaction of all journalists?
“LET ME SEE THE FILES, TAIBBI!”
The very little of that I saw was from people who were banned from social media or part of a major news story. Crickets from the ‘media’.
But that’s no surprise at all. The story is about government directing its preferred narrative via controlled media outlets. The media isn’t going to cover it because — you should already know this one! — government is directing its preferred narrative via controlled media outlets!
It’s sad that the bulk of today’s journalists don’t see themselves as outsiders who challenge official pieties, but as members of an elite caste who circulate amongst the highest circles in Washington and greater society, hobnobbing with the very people they’re tasked with covering. They’re monoculture-worshipping liberal shills, and this has never been more clear based on how they’re treating this story and Taibbi.
All you have to do is look at the resumes of the heads of these media companies, along with quite a few big name mefia personalities. You'll quickly find they're entrenched in the DNC political machine.
absolutely, even the phrase new prom was gross. As if these people were that smart because they had enough political knowledge to understand the difference between a safe state and a battleground.
Yes, it was a different work culture. Before Woodward and Bernstein journalists were “reporters” who dug for real scoops and considered it part of the job to get fancy doors slammed in their faces. For the younger generations:  so much easier (and lucrative) just to take the talking points from FBI guys disguised in garages or just “in their day-to-day operations“ or Pharma PR firms for that matter.
Why is it sad, Brad? Yesterday's journalists were no different and tomorrow's journalists will be no different. The substance of most arguments on these threads are immediately rendered pointless by this sort of childish and recurring theme of paradise lost.
The world is a hellscape by definition, Brad. Don't fret over it. Embrace it. Even the Manichean Heresy constitutes cornball spiritual and social uplift under the current regimes in these troubled and misinterpreted times.
It's self-defeating for you or anybody else to imagine halcyon days that never existed and never will. It's depressing. Cut it out.
And I urge caution and a second thought for all those all-you-can-eat buffets out there---most of them are managed not by the Deep State, but the DEEP STATE. Here the DEEP STATE has built a network of feeding grounds designed and coordinated to thwart resistance of any kind to the regime's dictats---in brief, to induce such an overwhelming sense of lethargy in the populace that anything other than a two-hour nap is out of the question...
Thanks for your candor, Fedspar, sharing some agency tradecraft with us masses...not that we didn't already know this grim truth, but you put it so well it reminds us what we are dealing with.
Hey, maybe we can flip you. What other nuggets do you have to share?
"...it takes a combined effort to take on the vast power of the state"
Yes, the keyboard is mightier than the waterboard! Let's hope that's true, otherwise some of us on this site are going to wind up as bunkmates in the gulag.
I’d like to see the 2 gap years & or why Matt skipped. . Starting March 2020? 2019 a lot of folks I know destroyed for pandemic, event 201, world military games in Wuhan etc
Imagine how the MSM would have reacted if it came out that the FBI was forcing the social media companies to bury a negative Mitt Romney story in the last days before the 2012 election.
It is funny that the worst thing anybody can find about Trump's boys (other than being related to Trump, an obvious crime) is that some of them enjoy big game hunting in Africa, like Theodore Roosevelt or Ernest Hemingway.
It would be about the same, or even less of a story to them. Now, if say Obama lost, and then the scenario applied, it would be a media firestorm highlighting the scandal it would have been.
A complete silence of corporate media illustrates that they are equally in or more penetrated by FBI and other state “security” agencies.
We should be eternally grateful to Elon Musk for slowing down US slide into brutal fascism. Internationally it has been bipartisan fascist for decades.
I am very much in agreement. That is really the iceberg of which this is the very tip! I don’t know how the respective advertising dollars compare, but my guess is the “corporate media” compliance was even greater than what we are reading about; they were and are far more desperate!
I am not sure what qualifies as “corporate” media here but the Wall Street Journal has been covering it, reasonably well. The Washington Post has run an editorial or two and the New York Times has been conspicuously quiet. Fox News has written extensively about it and they are about as corporate as they come.
LOL we don't care what percentage of internal Twitter communications were requests from government to stifle the legal speech of Americans -- we only care that it happened. Nate is trying to "93% of the protests were peaceful!" this, and it looks just as bad as when they tried it back then.
To use Matt's legal discovery analogy, Nate's argument would be like arguing in court "Yeah, they've found documents proving fraud. But... but... look at all of those other documents showing instances in which we WEREN'T engaging in fraud. There're a lot of those documents. So... not liable! Amirite?"
Donald Trump was the Commander and Chief and in charge of the FBI when this media manipulation happened. Right? Am I remembering this wrong or was he the President from 2016-2020?
He was, but his FBI was rogue. Peter Strock’s insurance policy was Crossfire Hurricane, Surveillance during campaign. Alfa Bank scandal, Steele Dossier. Suddenly they are going to drop their schemes to be subordinate employees?
Maybe. It’s hard to say what was going on here. The FBI kind of does what it wants but it still has to report to the President. My guess is that Trump probably had an inkling of what was going on but was more interested in other things. The FBI certainly had an interest in keeping Trump’s nose out of their business.
I doubt we are ever going to get that kind of data dump that we just got from Twitter of the emails between the various chiefs and the president. Not in my lifetime anyway.
It's really not that difficult to say what was going on there. They were actively trying to find anything they could to oust him, and they were not under his control. They are lifetime government bureaucrats who didn't like him (or care about his authority like you seem to think they did).
You know it too. You just refuse to acknowledge it.
Why are you banned from Twitter? You believe the FBI "Reports to the President?" How do you mean? Like how Comey reported that a news bombshell was going to ignite the whole Russia firestorm in a meeting that created the pretense to normalize the Steel Dossier? Or Christopher Wray's incompetence? Who else from the FBI reports to the President? And don't they actually report up through DOJ, which gets filtered through Cabinet and subsequent appointments? Trump's Cabinet was not always forthright; why do you think Trump had a direct line to the FBI? Strok was very obviously adversarial, as were many others in positions of actual authority in the Bureau.
Trump appointed the FBI director who approved the Mar-a-Lago raid! It makes me wonder exactly how much control the Director has over the rank-and-file.
I wonder the same thing about the CIA, the agency with a proven record of rogue action and compartmentalized deceit. Hell, MK-Ultra and Air America are just two operations that we know about. Never mind the suspicions surrounding the JFK assassination. Think about what remains hidden. They're even more internally secretive and compartmentalized than the FBI.
Trump has a history of being screwed by his appointments. Trump is a bad judge of character or he's surrounded by climbing careerists, or both.
It’s possible that this was all rogue, but I doubt it. Trump most likely knew the broad outlines of what was going on and didn’t care.
People say that suppressing Covid debate was an attempt to bring him down but I don’t see that at all. Perhaps the Biden laptop story being suppressed was. I certainly hope some reforms to domestic information suppression with the media comes out of it. We will see. I doubt Congress will act though. Both the Democrats and the Republicans want the people in the dark about the actions of the government.
With all due respect, how is my comment in anyway related to Trump or Biden or any other President? It wasn’t…. That’s something you read into it.
The fact is that this all started under George W. Bush and his criminal side-kick, Dick Cheney in response to 9/11. Remember Edward Snowden? He exposed all this during Obama’s admin. And what was Obama’s reaction? Did Obama work to end domestic surveillance? No, Obama (like his predecessor) stepped it up and went after journalists who worked to expose how the Security State had changed its mission from criminal enforcement to cyber snooping on all Americans, which is where we stand today (and even worse). Remember James Rosen, NY Times reporter who Obama spied on to find out what Rosen knew and who Rosen was working with?
Why did Obama and the Deep State hate General Flynn? Simple - Flynn had worked for Obama and was totally against their tricks. Flynn planned to expose them, but the Deep State managed to get Flynn broomed and in short order. How convenient, don’t you think?
The Deep State is now clearly involved in narrative control. It actively works to discredit any and all narratives that differ from the official party line.
You clearly think Trump was a clown and in many ways, he was, but the message that Trump was an illegitimate President, SURPRISE!, was the official narrative. Did you buy into it? You were supposed to. It was the “insurance policy” - remember that?
No I think Trump won the election fair and square. I don't know why you would believe otherwise. I also think he lost "fair and square" though I have to admit the Biden laptop revelations are troublesome. It's impossible to know if the suppression of the story gave the election to Biden or not. In such a close election you can point to almost anything as the tipping point. Politics is about coalition building and Biden did a better job at that. Billionaires buy elections all the time and no one seems to have any problem with that.
It's funny, as a leftist I have always known that the government and media have worked together to present a propaganda narrative to the American public. Check out any of Caitlin Johnstone's excellent, though admittedly hyperbolic, essays about this. She is on my list of Substack subscribers.
I am glad that there is a more widespread understanding and outrage about this. And I do think that "everyone does it" in the sense that both the Democratic Party and Republican Party are complicit. There are a very few people like Rand Paul and Barbara Lee who have consistently spoken out against it, but they are generally dismissed as cranks.
Does social media fundamentally change the landscape of discourse so that there is a need for better moderation? I think so, but it should not come from the government, it should be decided by the people who own the companies not the government.
You need to get reacquainted with the constitution and the separation of powers that were brilliantly designed to prevent these abuses of power. In which our representative government and armed forces have sworn an oath to preserve and protect. The current iteration of the executive branch has gone beyond that. Problem is that many people like you think that the President is all powerful. Its in that belief or ignorance that dooms this constitutional republic.
Indeed, That's the idea, not the common practice these days. The real question is, where to lay the blame? The low information voters or a deeply flawed nature of humanity? Is it positions of power that only attract on the whole corrupt people? Should people only be allowed to exercise their constitutional right to vote , if they have demonstrated reasonable understanding of our constitution?
I believe the approved language is "gun safety" now. "Gun control" somehow proved unpopular with most of the American public despite 90 years of the would-be controllers pushin' it at the federal level.
Myself, I like a positive, redundant gun safety, as on a John Browning design. Still uncomfortable with Glocks despite their many virtues.
Troll…Really? Sanders would run this country into the ground? With the Trillions spent on war and all its ugly siblings? C’mon I ought not to waste my time on you Troll bot. The intellectual and political high caliber of the readers and posters here ought to have made you skidaddle; But nooooo here you are in all your algorhytmic idiocy.
Eleven Republican senators voted against final passage of the bill: Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, John Boozman of Arkansas, Mike Braun of Indiana, Mike Crapo of Idaho, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Mike Lee of Utah, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.
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I don't see Bernie's name anywhere on that list. I'm sure he'd totally stand up to the warmongers if he was president and not just winning vote #75 on a massive warmongering package to Ukraine.
I know he’s not good on FOREIGN POLICY, ( He did refuse to go to the AIPAC Gathering and changed him mind on Israel after dozens of us harassed him mercilessly at a Town Hall ) but yeah the money spent on murder and mayhem is a horrible moral stain on us and somehow all of us we will pay the unspeakable price, one way or another. Yemen is horrible, a scandal, and one can only stand so much outrage fatigue.
The US Senate voted on Thursday to pass a funding bill which includes $12 billion in additional military and economic aid for Ukraine. Twenty-two Republicans joined their Democrat colleagues to pass the bill, which comes after the US has already allocated around $55 billion to Kiev since February.
Sanders is the biggest political whore to come down the pike since Hubert Humphrey. Sanders is worse, in fact. He's proven himself willing to reverse himself and sell out the "Bros" whenever it's to his political advantage.
Really? Getting him elected wouldve meant nothing or worse? He is yes, being realistic a sl careerist b c one can only fight huge power so far without OVERWHELMING support from other sectors. The corporokleptcrats were never again going to let an even ersatz FDRin power. But I am not so cynical as to think he would ‘ve caved and rotted like the so called squad had enough of regular humans supported him. My 2 cents. Sorry you are so angry. Not good for the old ticker. Just sayin’
The idea that this isn’t news simply blows my mind. Your “priors” should be squarely opposed to the idea that whoever Elon Musk may or may not be has anything to do with the perpetual erosion of American society that begun in earnest after 9-11. Mate Silver is my age, he should know better because he’s had longer to see how twisted the media landscape has been for most of our lives. I have been betting against mainstream news narratives since the mid 90’s and consistently seem to be beating the odds of knowing shit faster and better than my friends.
I find it difficult to believe this won’t eventually become a major political issue (same with FTX) but I can certainly understand why some organizations would do everything possible to prevent it from happening. What’s hard for me to believe is that there isn’t total skepticism across the board. Like, the instant you hear that ex-CIA/FBI/DHS officials are regular contributors and hosts to news programs, you reaction should be, ‘holy shit is that true?!’ Not, “so what.”
One would hope. But then again I would have believed that Jeffrey Epstein’s list would have been made public after the conviction of his associate. The media is similarly unmotivated to flip that rock over.
The conspiracy theorist in me says that the only reason why it’s still being held under wraps is Donald Trump‘s name is NOT on that list.
I think someone could reasonably assume that if his name it was on that list, it would be already leaked. But we shall see. ...
I've been avoiding mainstream narrative since the 1960s.
And you are right about the disintegration of American society after 9/11. I thought it was a false flag to get us into another war in the Middle East, but I now think that there were circles within circles: the 2nd Persian Gulf War was a false flag to distract our attention while they pushed through the Patriot Act.
It seems that modern history will be written in two phases, before internet and after internet. It’s that deep. The breadth and depth of digital storage and surveillance is staggering. Bill Binney spoke of the density of digital data this way: “Ten years worth of emails and phone metadata could fit into a small hotel room. The NSA is building a facility in Utah of over one million square feet.” It’s not about email and metadata it’s about complete domination of the people. Complete control. But things have a way of backfiring and surveillance can be turned around.
Matt Taibbi, and others, are the fulcrum between the surveillance state and the people. I think nothing will prove more critical in today’s world than the work he’s doing. We need to do everything we can to grow the audience for this before the zombies at MSM can label it a ‘conspiracy theory’. What a gift we have. Let’s not keep it wrapped up.
Thanks, sounding more Camus than Orwell the more I hear about it. I bet you have a new appreciation for what Assange was doing to massage datasets into something useful for research. Can't tell you how much I appreciate your efforts and role in all this, glad you were able to get together with your family. All the best for the New Year.
"it’s a beautiful city as long as you don’t look down."
Oh yeah.
Twain said the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. He might actually have been talking about the weather though. I don't think so given that he was from Missouri.
"'We can give you everything we're seeing from the FBI and USIC agencies,' he wrote. 'CISA will know what is going on in each state.'"
Once again, ad nauseam; what the Actual FUCK are "USIC agencies" doing in conducting domestic surveillance and influence operations? Shit has been totally illegal at least since the Church Committee but we, the NYT/WaPo-reading public, are supposed to worry more about the alleged proposition that a national election which was visibly hinky to anybody with a 4th-grade reading level and ratiocination system, was not, in fact, hinky, and anybody who might ask questions about it is Bad, Wrong, and A Traitor?
The Trump ascendancy is really the most significant and fascinating phenomenon of our time.
Once he scored the upset win, and after the Berkeley-Brooklyn-Brookline axis dried its tears and exited their safe spaces, they swore that all sorts of horrible terrible things were about to happen: the incipient fascism of corporate and government consolidation, the criminalization of dissent and Otherization of half the country, the destruction of all sorts of social precedents, an unleashed torrent of hatred, a totalitarian government and weaponized FBI out to punish dissidents etc etc.
And they were right! But it never crossed their minds that it could be them and their side that would be guilty of committing all these offenses.
There just seems to be something very ugly that happens to humans (most esp humans in groups) when they become convinced that they're opponents are so Evil that anything and everything is justified in defeating them.
It looks like Team Social Justice is delivering the same fate to America that the American military did to Vietnam: they are going to destroy the country in order to save it.
Trump goaded the left into letting the mask slip. That was a public service; now we know what we are dealing with.
"Trump goaded the left into letting the mask slip." True. It, arguably, is Tump's most significant achievement.
His only positive achievement
far from it. Abraham Accords. Funding for black universities. Lowest ever unemployment, lowest unemployment for blacks, hispanics, non college educated males. There's lots to consider.
Killed off TPP & revised NAFTA with good results for the Mexican labor force.
...and after consideration dismiss...
The Abraham Accords are an overblown nothing burger. Were Dubai and Israel ever actually at war? The Saudi royal family has always had back-door ties to Israel. The Gulf states who were signatories are not border states with Israel and never went to war against them. Meanwhile Syria and Lebanon are not signatories.
It's also kind of interesting that all the nations who Israel is "at war" with are secular "dictatorships" (according to the same people who call trump a fascist). Dictatorships with Parliamentary democracies, no less, while all the Arab countries who are signatories are conservative islamic, totalitarian theocratic dictatorships. But that's neither here nor there.
Funny, but the signatories of the Accords, as well as many pundits, don't agree with you. As well, the Accords were seen as a diplomatic success that could lead to further inroads into the mess that has been the Middle East.
Anyone using the phrase "nothing burger" is a brainwashed propaganda drone.
*Writing in notes* "Iran is secular". Got it!
I disagree, the Abraham Accords were a major turning point because the various ties between Israel and Arab states were legitimized by the Accords. And the increasing willingness of Arabs to tie themselves to Israel and vice-versa indicated Iran was the primary enemy of Arabs and Israelis, and that the US was not the central arbiter of ME politics anymore. These are pretty substantial changes.
Iran is secular? Wow!!!!!!!
The Abraham Accords were only started, and like anything else, with willing partners. They were meant to be continued with more Arab States, but without leadership have not.
Most of the good stuff he did has already been reversed. Except the inflation he helped cause.
OK genius, explain to this economist how Trump caused inflation. I’ll wait, because this is going to take you a while
The Abraham Accords are an agreement between several countries that violate human rights because they are opposed to a common enemy which also violates human rights. The tacit alliance already existed.
Citation please. Sorry, but I don’t accept your opinion. Nor do any of the signatory to the accord, just to be clear. And I think they likely know better than you.
I've been seeing your crap here, and frankly, I think you're a fool after reading some of it. Explain for us, please, just how Trump allowed China to do this.
Since you cannot, I'll thank you to shut up and not bother me again with your foolishness.
Trump inherited an economy that was in the midst of the most low growth, stagnant period in history. Also inherited a nuclear DPRK and a looming disaster in Iran. Those are just a few examples… he also inherited a political situation where half of congress and the senate was trying to impeach him from the time he took the oath of office, aided and abetted by a mainstream media ecosystem that lost its mind and threw all standards out the window, to the point of routinely running completely baseless stories that were nothing but smears.
False, Gene. Trump inherited a stagnant, low-growth economy from Obama/Biden, who had spent years promising the "Summer of Recovery" but the damn economy wouldn't budge due to their crap leftist policies. Despite the fusillade against him, Trump cleared regulations and the economy was in perhaps the best shape since Reagan left office. Trump was taking on the Chinese as well on all fronts.
Thank you for inadvertently confirming that COVID was, indeed, a bioweapon, brought to us courtesy of Anthony Fauci. Of course Trump couldn't stop the release of a virus, no man could stop that. You'd have to be a complete fool to think such a thing, Gene.
The question I always ask myself about anything when one or the other party controls the White House is if in this case, if Hillary Clinton was President, what would have been different with CV-19?? Same thing with 911. As an example, Al Gore while VP had met with the airlines way back much before 911 and the airlines resisted cabin-door reinforcement measures, etc. So that never took place. Obviously we had our warning shot with the WTC truck bombing in 1993 and nothing really changed.
Deep State Gene is (again!) in the house!
Deep State Gene ain't no fool, he is a Deep State professional!
DeepState Gene, stop your deep statin.'
I guess this must still be a free country since you (meaning Gene Frenkle) are still here. :(
Right...Trump funded gain-of-function viral research...
Then how did he get Fauci and his virology allies to use cut-outs to bury the research in other, less threatening research?
Do you mean to say it's no longer racist to suggest a lab leak?
"Allowed"? Was he in the CDC/Wuhan lab loop with Fauci?
Or are you referring to his efforts to fast-track the M-RNA shots that have proven to be so effective and safe?
Mr. Deep State Mouthpiece. Executive Glowie.
allowed? The virus was around the world before it was recognized. And was Trump backing Fauci's gain of function research?
Ask Lizzard Cheney about that.
True. Although I think Trump also revealed the emptiness of the right as well. Both.
yeah the GOP was ripe for a hostile takeover, esp after the Romney/Ryan plutocrats' dream ticket...but at least Trump's depantsing of the 2016 field was hilarious and well-deserved...him kneecapping Jeb! was comedy gold.
I always thought trump just wanted power and adapted his belief system to the opportunity that existed. In 2015 he realized that the Democratic party was in firm control of the Obama/Clinton team but no one was using the Republican party, so he took it over. The funny thing was that having adopted their issues to win, he felt compelled to deliver on them. something no serious Republican would ever consider.
I don’t think he was that calculating, honestly. I think Trump thinks about Trump. I’ll give him his due credit: he had his instinctive finger on the pulse of (understandable) white working class anger. Dems helped him a lot by failing to deliver what old school Dems used to; they became the party of wealthy elites versus caring about the working class.
Watch his Oprah interview from 25 year ago. Most people are wrong about Trump in terms of his beliefs driving his politics and not some opportunist changing his stripes to please his handlers like Biden.
I agree. What i was describing is the tactical approach, I do not think three was a long term strategic plan other than to expand the Trump brand.
Yes, the liberal values I grew up with went missing. Democrats no longer embraced them.
It's quite possible for a narcissist who thinks only about himself that he could be calculating; in fact, it's one of their symptoms.
Good point. It is theatre and good comedy! And the mainstream media should really cut DJT a fat check.
not to mention the late night "comedians"
a lot of the supposed opposition ate very well off the Donald, they will miss him when he's gone.
It's interesting that the current crop of late night comedians all got put in place in 2015, just in time to cheerlead Her into office.
True!!
It was. Too bad the party takeover never materialized.
I dearly hope Trump wins again so the globalist faction of the RP decamps, is driven out by America-First populists who can end this constant bleeding out of treasure for a global fraud (global warming) and end the US proxy war in Ukraine by brokering a settlement instead of perpetuating that stupid slaughter.
Trump and the far-righties are idiots. So are the radical lefties. Perhaps DeSantis can save us from ourselves?
I doubt it.
Frankly, I feel much more at home these days with the "far-righties." The radical lefties have ruined American Liberalism.
Although there is a lot to like with DeSantis, he strikes me as Chris Christie, part 2. If he does go for the nomination in 2024, I wouldn't be surprised in the least to see him heavily moderate just as Christie did.
Careful, Bull, the previous "America-First" iteration came with a Nazi-endorsed certificate of approval.
Poor choice of slogan. Henceforth I will use "isolationist."
This comment really underscores the extent to which you have no idea what you’re talking about
Deep State Gene (and his wingman Fedspar) are not trying to make sense, they are trying to disrupt the conversation we are having here...and with a fair degree of success, unfortunately.
i would use the term impotence.
🔥💯
A lesson well-learned.
I agree if by “right” you mean the GOP. The uniparty revealed itself like a cheap stripper.
AND he pulled the covers off the corporate press, revealing them to many more people as the pack of lazy, venal, climbing schmoozers rubbing up against the politically powerful that they have always been. Their humiliation at being wrong about his election prospects led them to go all in as the propaganda wing of the Democratic Party.
Not always. Jimmy Dore just showed some clips of journalists commenting on Joe Biden when he first got into politics and they were doing their jobs then. The good old days
Quite true.
is very true
job well done. he can leave now.
I agree. he did his part. let’s pray he leaves now. he can only damage us further
Democrats are not the Left.
I use the term more broadly than an academic would. "The Left" = democrats, identity groups, ESG investors, environmentalists, the MSM, feminists, academia, the administrative state, K-12 education, the DEI Industrial Complex, hollywood, madison avenue, social media moderators, Big Tech etc.
The Left = The Borg.
Real leftists usually quibble with this, but it is what it is. The Borg needs a name, and it has been dubbed "The Left."
Well said, Brent. What we call "the Left" has always been evolving--in its current iteration, it looks pretty much like you describe.
But yes, self-apponted "real Leftists" will not doubt continue to quibble with you.
In other words, a meaningless term for everybody you don't like. Thanks for helping strip all the meaning out. Granted, it was always pretty vague.
It's never legitimate to name your opponents, because that's just propaganda.
On ther other hand, we really need a new name for the "real left." You'll just have to take a Green's word for it that the Dems are not - in fact, they're a right-wing, neoliberal party closely allied with the Repubs, except for competing with them for the big money.
I didn't come up with the term. It is the name the Borg has been given.
but the problem is, as I stated below, that everything is a binary. In some cases that broad brush works, but it has become insane. because Taibbi is no longer singing from the same book he is, not only banished, he is now a conservative, (you hav to admit, that's funny.) But it has allowed the establishment to divide the world between th pro and anti Trump with the stipulation that anyone who agrees with a single Trump policy is pro and thus outcast.
I think the Borg will get more and more repulsive to normies and it eventually people will leave it.
Not until things are FUBAR.
Hate tp tell you friend, but Democrats are now run by "the Left"...them and the corporate globalists. There are few if any "liberals" remaining in the party. A bitter truth, but true nonetheless. And I say that as a (former) lifetime Dem.
You've got it backwards. The liberals are running the Democratic Party, and they aren't "the Left." Chris Hedges calls them "the liberal elite" or "the liberal class."
Sorry, I see very few (if any)"liberals" of a traditional sort left in the Dem party. Who, specifically, would you place in that category?
Actually I would say the rank and file of the democratic party is filled with traditional liberals who continue to support the party either out of inertia, revulsion, (real and/or imagined) of the Republicans, or just blind loyalty. Anecdotally I see it all over my family who, willfully, never connect the dots, complain about the insanity that is occurring, and then faithfully vote blue on every ballot down the line.
You could not possibly be more wrong.
The Dems are pro-war, pro-crony capitalism, anti free speech, anti-choice when it comes to toxic experimental gene therapy. In what universe are those leftist positions? If the Left runs the DNC, how do you explain their reaction to Bernie Sanders's platform?
Because your modern Leftist is "pro-war, pro-crony capitalism, and anti free speech, etc." Bernie, the pro-war Socialist-with-three houses is exhibit A of what I am talking about. AOC is exhibit B. Both pro-war and anti-free speech. Wake up, it's 2022, not 2016. Much has changed in a very little time.
You wouldn't recognize a modern Leftist if one passed you on the sidewalk. BTW, we look a lot like the old-fashioned leftist.
What you have created is a picture in your mind of what "a Leftist" looks like, according to you.
Leftists are not pro-war and anti-free speech, though liberals are. It’s a matter of definition though. Leftists have always used “liberal” as a term of derision.
and Taibbi is not a conservative jorno but these days its a binary, you are one or the other. Fluidity only exists in the sexes in the genders it seems
How about this binary: Pro- or anti-establishment? In this political moment, that one works for me.
I put it this way - your focus is what you inevitably create in your life. Democrats created all the evil behaviors they were projecting onto Trump.
Jung's concept of shadow projection is a key one to understand the otherwise inexplicable behavior we're seeing among the illiberal elite.
Once an elite establishes its power, no horrifyingly awful behavior it pukes, oozes, or ejaculates is necessary to understand outside the context of the continued maintenance of that power. The alleged fundamental ideology is a complete pretense.
I’d agree with this: It’s ultimately power they’re after, on both the right and left.
Our country was founded upon the concept of restraining government power. One side still wants that, the other wants totalitarianism in the name of socialist revolution.
But I agree that DC Republicans do little if anything to restrain government power now.
DC Republicans have always voted for bloated defense budgets, more power for the CIA and FBI and more and longer jail times.
The Party apparatus sole purpose is to accumulate and retain power. Can't blame if for being what it is. The two Parties take turns venturing too far outside the norm. Currently it is the Democrats' turn; they seem unwilling to cede their ignoble turf, and instead press ever outward, intent on dragging the rest of us in their direction. They appear to be mostly successful.
It's possible Democrats have perfected the Art of the Deal. Instead of merely starting at a ludicrous position and then meeting your opponent halfway between you and the mean, they instead raise the stakes higher every time anyone says No, and label them a racist for their impertinence.
Well said Mike!
David, absolutely! I made this point to my formerly liberal friends on Trump's Inauguration. Too much of what's happening now in US politics is shadow projection and then fighting those shadows. "Shadow boxing the Apocalypse" as the Grateful Dead once sang. As an amateur astrologer, much as I've heard all the quick dismissals of astrology, we all knew that the US was going through its Pluto Return from 2016-2024, which meant we knew the shadows were going to surface and to not waste time in fighting them, but rather to expect a very deep dive into the American psyche, facing all of its collective demons and the many projections from those unwilling to face them.
Also, Trump is a Gemini with Leo rising. 'Nuff said.
https://www.glamour.com/gallery/presidents-zodiac-sign
He was also born on an eclipse day. So was I. Makes us a bit, umm, touched. But it’s a matter of how you use those energies.
Agree. Well said.
"Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks."
I can’t find it online, but I would love to go and rewatch that leaked video of the google executives bitterly complaining about the election result to their employees. One certainly gets the impression that just the core mission of all these supposedly profit-maximising, publically owned social media giants post 2016 became to stop Trump or anyone like him ever being elected again, screw the profits. The best obvious example of foresaking profits was on YouTube where the wrong voices were demonetised at some cost to shareholders as well as the creators. But twitter hiring thousands of hall way monitors (as did Facebook I guess) to rub out conservative/wrong views is another example. They all did their bit, as did the mainstream media.
I have you covered, friend:
https://euphoricrecall.substack.com/p/googlegov-part-2
Brad on the spot!
Saving that is a great public service!
This should have been a lawsuit. There is no way you could be a Trump supporter there and have a safe working environment while your colleagues weep and rend their garments over your candidate.
people are leaving. staff is crying. wow. that was an hour of amazing BS..
Brilliant.
Thanks!
I was waiting for Subhar to say that he was an immigrant and a refugee after Sergey Brin did.
I waited to subscribe until I had familiarized myself with your blog, and I didn't, because you are not just comparing apples with oranges, and you haven't just made fruit salad with them like many people do, but you seem to have put them in a blender and made a congee!
You indiscriminately mix progressives, liberals, the Democrats, and others together in a word soup. You need to clarify your thoughts.
Of course, you probably have a devoted following that agrees with you, so you won't.
You feel better now, Susan?
Not just conservative voters; they didn't like those who aren't into regime change wars, US global hegemony, and heavy-handed social rule enforcement.
They were rewarded with Coronavirus lockdowns and the resulting boom of digital commerce that resulted.
That was a great comment. The reason why Trump is such a lightning rod is because he hijacked one of the two captive parties that has been used for decades to cement control over the US electoral system. And he did so as a "populist" and while openly declaring war against the nearly concensus interests massed to resist him. Politically Trump was an existential threat to the swamp aka status quo. It was a death match and it isn´t quite over. His supporters were necessarily punished to teach them to never try that shit again! We are witnessing the lengths that the SQ will go to to keep a grip on power. Now we get to see how badly Americans want their country back.
Yes. Well said. Beyond the left/right narrative are The Exhausted Masses. We’re all sick of the bullshit toxic duo. Sanity again! MAKE AMERICA SANE AGAIN!!!
absolutely!!
If we don't get off our lazy keisters and vote for Trump or whoever gets to run against Dementia Joe, we deserve to be slaves to the globalists. We need to vote in such overwhelming numbers no vote fraud can make a difference.
The DP has played out its hand. The only card they have left is vote tampering. However, challenging results has now become meaningless as both parties bitch about it whenever they lose, despite the reality or falsity of individual instances, and anyone from either party who challenges a count is immediately labeled as a "paranoid conspiracy theorist."
First they laugh at you
then we take back free speech
then we win
Well stated, as someone here previously said, this discussion thread would indeed make a fine substack article in itself. Perhaps I'm revealing my own tribalism in concurring.
Berkeley-Brooklyn-Brookline axis...first time I've ever heard that one! Hilariously on point! Well done!
thanks!
was gonna go w Axis of Sanctimony but didnt wanna gild the lily.
That may be even better!
This is really the story of the last several years of American politics. And 1/2 the country has no idea it’s happening.
Sad but true.
I dunno. I think a lot of folks know...they just ALSO know they have no access. We've seen this before with Snowden & Assange. Which is why Greenwald, Taibbi, Mate, Gabbard, even Weiss are so damned important!
"they are going to destroy the country in order to save it"
They already have. The bloodshed may continue but the war for the most part is lost. The cancer of woke and of Marxism has metastasized into all of the vital organs of American governance. The long march through the institutions is complete.
That's my view as well. All companies like Twitter et el accomplished was the start of the parallel economy and the creation of new social media sites for refugees of "wrong think" effectively creating echo chamber's, where idea's are not throughly challenged or debated.
I'm familiar with Marxist theory and history but am still dissatisfied with the myriad definitions of "woke" that I have solicited from others (in good faith) and subsequently received.
Indeed, one definition often covers terrain completely uncharted by another---I just hope I'm "woke" if it's a good thing, hoping I'm not if it's a bad thing.
If that's the case then it's time to get off these threads and find a job.
He said, without irony.
But, but, Phisto---this is my job...
I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....I AM THE CANCER OF WOKE AND OF MARXISM....
And I'm fixin' to metastasize on your ass...
My mistake. As you were.
Marxism is the idea that the government should control the means of production. What we have now is an oligarchy who controls everything which is about as far from Marxism as it gets.
Not to overpraise out of turn, but your comment stream by itself would make a hell of a Substack.
I guess our brains are still wired to overvalue tribalism-based emotion over rational thought, just like enough human beings are smart, lucky, and avaricious enough to lower the quality of life for 99.9999 percent of the planet for no reason other than succumbing to the instinct to hoard more resources than the rest of the monkeys. They are not representative of the kindness and generosity I still believe is foundational to the human ape, else we probably would have gone extinct a while ago instead of, eh, soon.
Well stated Kevin. Some would argue that the loss of the belief in a higher being that has contributed to our current state of affairs. Or, a loss of a moral compass as a society.
Either way our tribalism has become more acute since Trump got elected.
100%
Perhaps the cause & effect were reversed. The pendulum always swings; 2016 was premature, but the populace was ripe for it.
Beautifully said, Kevin. You might like my stack, where I write about this often :)
"Sincere American Writing"
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
Thank you!
It really was a surreal reaction. A riot at the Inauguration, Thanksgiving discussing the 25th Amendment.
Another excellent comment. Yes, they felt they had to nullify the First Amendment in order to save "our democracy".
So well said!
thanks!
Very well said.
thanks!
Great comment. But you misspelled the Palo Alto-Brooklyn-Brookline axis.
Lol. Weird, isnt it? Remember when Stanford was the bastion of Conservatism? Hoover Inst, et al? And San Jose/SC County/Peninsula were the 'red' parts ofvthe Bay Area at large? Much like OC down south. Now the wealthy enclaves hold water for the Business Class, but wear a blue tie. Wasnt that long ago.
The preponderance of the wealthy, in the Bay Area or any other enclave in this much-damned country of ours, don't wear "blue" ties, chum. And the monied cats who do, PMC democrats and a smattering of corporate types, are a thin minority at any white tie cocktail party---despite what you're told by Newsmax editorialists, make-up padded, long-haired blonde correspondents and influencers who patrol twitter, fist-gaveling substackers, James Lindsay, Ron DeSantis, Randy Quaid, et al.
Any sort of perceived self-identification with the scraps and scrawls of the so-called "woke" is purely designed to strengthen the bottom line, or at the very least maintain it. Period. They don't give a fuck about the woke, the anti-woke, antifa, the Mormon Church, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the local Rotary club, Kim Kardashian's 64 million twitter followers, or the sociopaths occupying the mansion next door.
Cut back on the huffing is sound advice. Chum.
Yes exactly right 💯🔥❤️🫰
In other words, "the gloves came off." All semblance of a two party democracy (whatever you think of it) was out of the picture. The Left declared war.
And it's not just "othering" by announcing pronouns, or even the demand to acknowledge the bullshit it is. (Thank you Elon for mocking this). It's the declaration that all of us must do so as well.
I can't stand those otherfuckers...
The Left has always been at war.
I think what happened is that the establishment, the elites, the swamp, the deep state or however you choose to describe them decided to join forces with the left. It's like they concluded that their enemy's enemy is their friend.
It’s always been money vs. working folks and for a long time the Right supported the people with money.
The real war on the American people accelerated when The Supreme Court declared that money was speech and it was legal to buy any politician.
“The Left” doesn’t support big companies or the FBI but liberals sure do. We probably just define the term differently.
I supported the people with money most of my life because I thought it was either that or support bigger government. That was a lesser of evils choice. Now, it appears that big money and big government are on the same side against me. I think Trump brought that about somehow.
Daryl, for most of your life the people with money have either been busy sucking the government dry, or busy organizing it into a fully owned subsidiary of whatever enterprise they happen to be engaged in.
Ask Taibbi---if blood funnels were horses...
Right. I was a little slow to open my eyes to it. Actually it wasn't people with money I supported. It was businesses who built things, created jobs, etc, etc. But big businesses kept buying little businesses and getting bigger, and then buying politicians to the point that big business and government are now merged and operating against the individual. The other reason there's a right wing populist movement.
Trump pulled back the curtain.
The emergence of a right wing populist movement scared the shit out of the rich global elites who meant to centralize all power and forced them to show their cards. The WEF strategy doesn't account for much individual choice.
"Trump pulled back the curtain."
An illogically common (and tiresome) refrain from those American citizens who harbor grievances, some legitimate and others not so legitimate, and who ascribe those grievances to epistemological differences they might have with such ephemera as the U.S. mass media, politicians of a certain stripe, fellow citizens of different "persuasions," loudmouth entertainers, ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, bad weather, and the 600 million or so "leftists" and "Marxists" who evidently call "America" home.
To anyone remotely paying attention, the curtain-less stage show "America" predates Donald Trump by at least several hundred years. The same grievances have been around just as long.
You've got the establishment, the elites, the swamp, the deep state and the left on the other sideline, Deryl.
That's a lot of social, political and economic kick-assery, Deryl. Bad mouthing them on a public forum might be ill-advised.
Bending over doesn't lead to any acceptable conclusion either.
Asking to be called by one’s preferred pronouns is declaring war? You are easily triggered.
It’s just a respect thing and of course you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. You might be considered rude but it doesn’t seem like that matters to you.
I don't respect anyone who thinks they have to tell me up front how to address them.
No one is forcing you to. Though if I told you I had changed my name to Jamie I can’t see how that is any skin off your back.
It's not. Just don't de-platform me or unperson me if I don't address you as you please.
Stop with the coyness. Changing a name is a far cry from changing language itself. Not to mention destroying 'social constructs'. (As if social constructs dont provide important and NECESSARY norms). Pronouns and gender are just proxies for the real issue: does subjectivity take precedent over objectivity, no matter the costs.
Wow. And all this time I thought pronouns were just pronouns and gender just gender. It's, like, my car loan payments and Range Rover are just proxies for the real issue: does the subjectivity of my new Range Rover take precedent over the objectivity of my bank's attitude toward the 10 months of late payments on the Range Rover?
My guess is that tow truck outside in the driveway is motivated by all things objective.
Yeah I remember when hating gay marriage with the thing too.
Their hegemonic activities were a reaction to what the left perceived to be the opposition's power structure to be.
The problem came from the erroneous perception, and it is now the left that is holding onto the fascist expressions of political power. The Twitter files represent the smoking guns.
Sadly, I hold no belief that there is anyone in our Department of Justice, certainly not the current Attorney General, who will see and act to hold the state actors in this melodrama to account in a court of law.
This whole mess may not end up being swept under the rug, but then again, it very well may. Those of us who believe in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights must stand firm in defense of our freedoms when they are challenged. And the ARE being challenged by this nefarious activity.
The new Republican House of Representatives will have a House subcommittee investigating the excesses of the FBI and other agencies here. According to the WSJ they plan to call it "The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government" which is an unnecessarily politicized name but at least they are looking into it.
Imagine a 4-hour movie with all the elements of Duck Soup and The Poseidon Adventure and then some. Groucho Marx and Ernest Borgnine, both FBI agents, vie for Shelley Winters' affection, unaware that she is a republican sponsored "honeypot" trained and programmed by Tesla and Twitter engineers...with all the algorithms fit to print.
Or "Casablanca" and "Joker?" Humphrey Bogart and Paul Henreid both "come out" but stay in Casablanca and turn Rick's Place into a gay-friendly bed-and-breakfast that does double-time as a refuge for rogue FBI agents on the run from the republican congressional committee. Meanwhile, Joaquin Phoenix and Ingrid Bergman, now married and registered libertarians, are "turned" by Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, and willingly, under oath, expose the "dirty deeds" unfolding at Rick's Place.
It is politicized for sure. But from that which has been so far revealed in the Twitter File, the name and the aim would seem to be well within reason.
Nate Silver seems to have a habit of reminding people he's no intellectual titan.
Yes, it was a profoundly stupid remark. I'm sure most of Vito Genovese's phone calls were quite benign, and ordering hits was just occasional. So that made it OK? Did the FBI have Hunter Biden's laptop for a year and apparently fail to authenticate tens of thousands of the emails, a task that a junior programmer who understood DKIM could easily have accomplished? I find that hard to believe. The FBI was intentionally lying or extraordinarily stupid. Take your pick, Nate, and stop babbling about irrelevancies.
Is Nate Silver so thrilled with his unlikely membership in the elite media establishment, that his brain has turned off?
Turning off his brain was Nate's price of membership in the elite media establishment.
To his credit, he’s a great fit.
Yeah but his PhD-style language is so seductive, almost as good as a Malcolm Gladwell book.
The myth of Silver's brilliance is just that, a myth.
He's a former baseball analytics whiz, not the same thing.
Ruined the game. Now he's helping ruin the country.
I thought Marvin Miller ruined the game.
For a while, he did. But look at all the major sports. The going rate for an elite star is $50m/yr. The union couldn't have gotten here on its own.
Marvin Miller merely pulled back the curtain, with an assist from Peter Seitz, exposing what colossal cheap fucks the owners were. They were operating a profoundly insidious monopoly, screwing the players through the "reserve clause" for almost a century.
Successful businessmen, aggressive capitalists all, pay the going rate in any market. Do I like the fact that baseball players make $50 million a year? No. But do you know why they get paid that much? Because other people, the owners, exist in a very competitive market who can afford to pay them that much. Take away the billions, and you ain't got the millions.
To Nate's credit he has displayed autonomy of thought, especially as related to COVID. That said, 538's editorial section has become unreadable under his leadership
You’re a true American in the best sense of the word. Thank you for all your hard work exposing this unethical and unconstitutional corruption.
Yes, Matt is a true American. Doing lovely activities with his children, like seeing the giant redwoods. Hope the General still stands. Bullit great movie. I lived in San Fran back in the day. Two blocks over from the Haight. Worked at the free medical clinic. Ah nice trip down memory lane. Thanks Matt!
Hey, I lived on Ashbury Street, a half block from Haight back in the day. And the free clinic saved my life once!
There are few things sadder than being (comparatively) young and realizing that San Francisco and New York City used to be interesting places that you didn't have to be a doubleplus-millionaire or homeless to live in. A lot of us missed that bus.
San Francisco is still interesting especially if you are young and you don’t have to be rich to live here. You just have to do what we did when we were young and that is live in a big house with roommates.
Did you also need to avoid winos shitting in the streets and meth heads masturbating in public? Were stores closing because the cops wouldn't bust shoplifters? How often were your cars broken into?
The romance of partying and surviving in an urban hellhole usually fades by age 30.
"The romance of partying and surviving in an urban hellhole usually fades by age 30."
I did this in Detroit before I was 30 and it was fucking awesome. To your point,
...but I could not have afforded New York, San Francisco, or probably even LA at the time.
My car has never been broken into. If you avoid the Tenderloin and nearby areas you won’t ever see people shooting up and shutting on the streets.
Both of my kids are in public schools which are very good. The oldest is in Lowell, which is one of the best public schools anywhere. The ride the excellent public transit everywhere which gives them a personal freedom most suburban kids don’t have.
It’s a beautiful and quirky city with many great cultural institutions. You should come visit and see for yourself. It is generally regarded as one of the most livable cities in America. It’s a lot like Amsterdam. If cities aren’t your thing, that’s fine. Good that we have choices!
"You just have to do what we did when we were young and that is live in a big house with roommates."
This is something like my particular idea of Hell, as according to Sartre and Charlie Brooker's DEAD SET, but I sincerely do thank you for the response. I have found that roommates are not too good about cleaning the bathroom and the refrigerator. As HST put it, "Nobody washes a rental car."
Touché
Tell me about Paris.
Good to know, Susan. A lot of lives were saved at the clinic. Peace
BULLITT's good. MAGNUM FORCE is great. "A man's got to know his limitations."
Since I actually got some likes on this comment -- and against the titular wise guidance -- I will foolishly, as is my habit, elaborate.
The DIRTY HARRY corpus is an unironic love letter to San Francisco and the Bay Area at a particular place and time. It is about how a lot of different people from a lot of different economic and cultural backgrounds were dumped there and had to find a way to survive in close proximity, as much as they may have disliked each other. (Pauline Kael's characterization of DIRTY HARRY as a "hard-hat THE FOUNTAINHEAD" is not altogether inaccurate, if bitchy.)
Despite the frequent characterization of John Milius as "right-wing" (whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean any more, and whatever the fuck it meant in the 1970s, he had a much freer hand in the screenplay than in DIRTY HARRY and it shows) MAGNUM FORCE may possibly be the most aggressively and wonderfully intelligent/stupid anti-fascist political screed dumped into pop-culture trash fiction prior to Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (sp). Harry be like, "Kids, just because *I* run around breaking the rules and doing this shit, please do not institutionalize it, it's a bad idea."
Thing I like the best about MAGNUM FORCE is that Harry shoots his qual course with .44 Specials instead of .44 Magnums and makes no pretensions about doing so.
Good stuff, Grisha. I was always partial to DIRTY HARRY but you make me want to check out MAGNUM FORCE again. What was the third one called, I can't remember. Kind of an urban version of John Ford's cavalry trilogy, with Clint Eastwood in the lead instead of John Wayne.
"What was the third one called, I can't remember."
THE ENFORCER! Sadly I think it kind of sucks, but I should probably check it out again and look for the virtues instead of the detriments. If I remember correctly the villains are hirsute 1970s leftists with bazookas and his partner is Tyne Daly and she gets killed, according to the running gag that Harry's partners always get killed.
The Peoples' Liberation Front! Lol. They cop the Moscone character on the L.O'Doul Bridge. Ahh...nostalgia...
Cannot believe I forgot this line.
HARRY: "If they all shot like that, I wouldn't care if the whole damned department was gay."
Nice!! Former bay area native here as well ❤️
Whats back in the day? By the 90s, Cole Valley was the next Noe Valley, etc. Divisadero and the Lwr Haight defined gentry. By the early 2000s, the real SF was all but disappeared (although Richmond/Outer Sunset still remain somewhat).
To answer your question, the 1960’s
The FBI during the Trump Administration and under his direction took control of Twitter. Why are you ignoring this obvious fact?
The same FBI that cooked up the Crossfire Hurricane plot, Alfa Bank plot to do him in? FBI had another master since 2016.
…and let Hillary off the hook (“no reasonable prosecutor…”) for crimes specified by Comey himself; and allowed a private company to conduct the forensic analysis of the hacked DNC server, never proving that the Russians were the culprit…
"Under his direction" is really stretching it at best and gaslighting at worst.
What does that have to do with my comment?
Which administration is irrelevant. They’re all corrupt. The crimes are bigger than that and much more institutionalized in the permanent bureaucracies.
We're not ignoring the fact that you are a deep state mouthpiece doing your glowie best to discredit all opposition to the deep state.
I just don’t understand how the point is germane. It shocks me to hear this trope pulled out and I agree that it fundamentally is gaslighting.
If the assertion is true, wouldn’t the outcomes that Matt & others are uncovering run in the opposite direction?
In the words of the greatest moral philosopher of our time: “Come on man!!”.
Under his direction??? He was subverted by them for his entire term. How can you not see that???
Great work , what is infuriating is that other journalist organizations should be attacking this at every angle forcing the censors into a corner so that all of the work wouldn’t be on a handful of journalists
But they obviously aren't going to do that, because somewhere out there there's an ABC files, and a CBS files, and an NBC files -- and those places are still taking their lead from government.
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/its-no-surprise-medias-ignoring-the
Know what my initial reaction was, and what I would think would be the initial reaction of all journalists?
“LET ME SEE THE FILES, TAIBBI!”
The very little of that I saw was from people who were banned from social media or part of a major news story. Crickets from the ‘media’.
But that’s no surprise at all. The story is about government directing its preferred narrative via controlled media outlets. The media isn’t going to cover it because — you should already know this one! — government is directing its preferred narrative via controlled media outlets!
It’s sad that the bulk of today’s journalists don’t see themselves as outsiders who challenge official pieties, but as members of an elite caste who circulate amongst the highest circles in Washington and greater society, hobnobbing with the very people they’re tasked with covering. They’re monoculture-worshipping liberal shills, and this has never been more clear based on how they’re treating this story and Taibbi.
All you have to do is look at the resumes of the heads of these media companies, along with quite a few big name mefia personalities. You'll quickly find they're entrenched in the DNC political machine.
and the NGO's, think tanks and don't leave out there spouses as well.
There was something wrong starting over 30 years ago, when they would show up to the annual Washington correspondents dinner in fancy tuxedos...
absolutely, even the phrase new prom was gross. As if these people were that smart because they had enough political knowledge to understand the difference between a safe state and a battleground.
Yes, it was a different work culture. Before Woodward and Bernstein journalists were “reporters” who dug for real scoops and considered it part of the job to get fancy doors slammed in their faces. For the younger generations:  so much easier (and lucrative) just to take the talking points from FBI guys disguised in garages or just “in their day-to-day operations“ or Pharma PR firms for that matter.
Its how the Clinton/Gore ticket got elected. And here we are.
Why is it sad, Brad? Yesterday's journalists were no different and tomorrow's journalists will be no different. The substance of most arguments on these threads are immediately rendered pointless by this sort of childish and recurring theme of paradise lost.
The world is a hellscape by definition, Brad. Don't fret over it. Embrace it. Even the Manichean Heresy constitutes cornball spiritual and social uplift under the current regimes in these troubled and misinterpreted times.
It's self-defeating for you or anybody else to imagine halcyon days that never existed and never will. It's depressing. Cut it out.
The Deep State loves to foster a sense of hopelessness...makes their job of controlling the population so much easier.
And I urge caution and a second thought for all those all-you-can-eat buffets out there---most of them are managed not by the Deep State, but the DEEP STATE. Here the DEEP STATE has built a network of feeding grounds designed and coordinated to thwart resistance of any kind to the regime's dictats---in brief, to induce such an overwhelming sense of lethargy in the populace that anything other than a two-hour nap is out of the question...
Thanks for your candor, Fedspar, sharing some agency tradecraft with us masses...not that we didn't already know this grim truth, but you put it so well it reminds us what we are dealing with.
Hey, maybe we can flip you. What other nuggets do you have to share?
I agree!
🔥🔥
Exactly right
true, but sad since it takes a combined effort to take on the vast power of the state.
"...it takes a combined effort to take on the vast power of the state"
Yes, the keyboard is mightier than the waterboard! Let's hope that's true, otherwise some of us on this site are going to wind up as bunkmates in the gulag.
🔥🔥🫰🫰
I’d like to see the 2 gap years & or why Matt skipped. . Starting March 2020? 2019 a lot of folks I know destroyed for pandemic, event 201, world military games in Wuhan etc
Pandemic will be the Fauci files which I dont believe Matt is on.
Imagine how the MSM would have reacted if it came out that the FBI was forcing the social media companies to bury a negative Mitt Romney story in the last days before the 2012 election.
2012 seems like a weirdly distant memory at this point, doesn't it? A decade is 100 years.
Yes!!!
Or that the laptop from hell had instead belonged to one of Trump's boys?
It is funny that the worst thing anybody can find about Trump's boys (other than being related to Trump, an obvious crime) is that some of them enjoy big game hunting in Africa, like Theodore Roosevelt or Ernest Hemingway.
Hunter has been known to engage in skank hunting.
So have I. I don't care about the skanks, I care about the cuts to The Big Guy.
Yes. We should also care that some things get amplified (new buzzword), and some get genuinely suppressed.
even better, imagine if it was 2004 and w Bush.
It would be about the same, or even less of a story to them. Now, if say Obama lost, and then the scenario applied, it would be a media firestorm highlighting the scandal it would have been.
As you apply this context, it just highlights exactly how hated Hillary must have been even among her circle of alleged "friends."
I bet. She was a far worse narcissist than Obama ever dreamed of being. I'm surprised anyone even liked working for her.
Did anyone like working for her?
This is just me talking, but one should treat one's employees as oneself would want to be treated.
Sure. Except that those organizations arent stocked with journalists any longer.
A complete silence of corporate media illustrates that they are equally in or more penetrated by FBI and other state “security” agencies.
We should be eternally grateful to Elon Musk for slowing down US slide into brutal fascism. Internationally it has been bipartisan fascist for decades.
I am very much in agreement. That is really the iceberg of which this is the very tip! I don’t know how the respective advertising dollars compare, but my guess is the “corporate media” compliance was even greater than what we are reading about; they were and are far more desperate!
I am not sure what qualifies as “corporate” media here but the Wall Street Journal has been covering it, reasonably well. The Washington Post has run an editorial or two and the New York Times has been conspicuously quiet. Fox News has written extensively about it and they are about as corporate as they come.
Yes -- all is rosy in the US -- we should "fight" for freedom and democracy in China, moon and Ukraine... ;-))
It's for that reason sadly, that they must destroy him.
LOL we don't care what percentage of internal Twitter communications were requests from government to stifle the legal speech of Americans -- we only care that it happened. Nate is trying to "93% of the protests were peaceful!" this, and it looks just as bad as when they tried it back then.
To use Matt's legal discovery analogy, Nate's argument would be like arguing in court "Yeah, they've found documents proving fraud. But... but... look at all of those other documents showing instances in which we WEREN'T engaging in fraud. There're a lot of those documents. So... not liable! Amirite?"
hahahah exactly!
"Your honor, our client also emailed a request for his secretary to pick up lunch, so we should ignore the emails about bribing the regulators!"
90% of the time I was in Iraq and Afghanistan, I wasn't getting shot at, so it wasn't really a warzone!
The bottom line is the US govt (security state) found a way to exert influence on civic discourse….
That is a violation of their constitutional authority…
The govt exists only because we (the citizens) allowed it to exist…
But now, the govt demands that we serve its interests…
Donald Trump was the Commander and Chief and in charge of the FBI when this media manipulation happened. Right? Am I remembering this wrong or was he the President from 2016-2020?
He was, but his FBI was rogue. Peter Strock’s insurance policy was Crossfire Hurricane, Surveillance during campaign. Alfa Bank scandal, Steele Dossier. Suddenly they are going to drop their schemes to be subordinate employees?
Maybe. It’s hard to say what was going on here. The FBI kind of does what it wants but it still has to report to the President. My guess is that Trump probably had an inkling of what was going on but was more interested in other things. The FBI certainly had an interest in keeping Trump’s nose out of their business.
I doubt we are ever going to get that kind of data dump that we just got from Twitter of the emails between the various chiefs and the president. Not in my lifetime anyway.
It's really not that difficult to say what was going on there. They were actively trying to find anything they could to oust him, and they were not under his control. They are lifetime government bureaucrats who didn't like him (or care about his authority like you seem to think they did).
You know it too. You just refuse to acknowledge it.
Why are you banned from Twitter? You believe the FBI "Reports to the President?" How do you mean? Like how Comey reported that a news bombshell was going to ignite the whole Russia firestorm in a meeting that created the pretense to normalize the Steel Dossier? Or Christopher Wray's incompetence? Who else from the FBI reports to the President? And don't they actually report up through DOJ, which gets filtered through Cabinet and subsequent appointments? Trump's Cabinet was not always forthright; why do you think Trump had a direct line to the FBI? Strok was very obviously adversarial, as were many others in positions of actual authority in the Bureau.
The emerging fact pattern does not support your assertion. That’s about as kind as I can put it....
Trump appointed the FBI director who approved the Mar-a-Lago raid! It makes me wonder exactly how much control the Director has over the rank-and-file.
I wonder the same thing about the CIA, the agency with a proven record of rogue action and compartmentalized deceit. Hell, MK-Ultra and Air America are just two operations that we know about. Never mind the suspicions surrounding the JFK assassination. Think about what remains hidden. They're even more internally secretive and compartmentalized than the FBI.
Trump has a history of being screwed by his appointments. Trump is a bad judge of character or he's surrounded by climbing careerists, or both.
It’s possible that this was all rogue, but I doubt it. Trump most likely knew the broad outlines of what was going on and didn’t care.
People say that suppressing Covid debate was an attempt to bring him down but I don’t see that at all. Perhaps the Biden laptop story being suppressed was. I certainly hope some reforms to domestic information suppression with the media comes out of it. We will see. I doubt Congress will act though. Both the Democrats and the Republicans want the people in the dark about the actions of the government.
El Monstro,
With all due respect, how is my comment in anyway related to Trump or Biden or any other President? It wasn’t…. That’s something you read into it.
The fact is that this all started under George W. Bush and his criminal side-kick, Dick Cheney in response to 9/11. Remember Edward Snowden? He exposed all this during Obama’s admin. And what was Obama’s reaction? Did Obama work to end domestic surveillance? No, Obama (like his predecessor) stepped it up and went after journalists who worked to expose how the Security State had changed its mission from criminal enforcement to cyber snooping on all Americans, which is where we stand today (and even worse). Remember James Rosen, NY Times reporter who Obama spied on to find out what Rosen knew and who Rosen was working with?
Why did Obama and the Deep State hate General Flynn? Simple - Flynn had worked for Obama and was totally against their tricks. Flynn planned to expose them, but the Deep State managed to get Flynn broomed and in short order. How convenient, don’t you think?
The Deep State is now clearly involved in narrative control. It actively works to discredit any and all narratives that differ from the official party line.
You clearly think Trump was a clown and in many ways, he was, but the message that Trump was an illegitimate President, SURPRISE!, was the official narrative. Did you buy into it? You were supposed to. It was the “insurance policy” - remember that?
Dear friend, we are ALL! being played….
No I think Trump won the election fair and square. I don't know why you would believe otherwise. I also think he lost "fair and square" though I have to admit the Biden laptop revelations are troublesome. It's impossible to know if the suppression of the story gave the election to Biden or not. In such a close election you can point to almost anything as the tipping point. Politics is about coalition building and Biden did a better job at that. Billionaires buy elections all the time and no one seems to have any problem with that.
It's funny, as a leftist I have always known that the government and media have worked together to present a propaganda narrative to the American public. Check out any of Caitlin Johnstone's excellent, though admittedly hyperbolic, essays about this. She is on my list of Substack subscribers.
I am glad that there is a more widespread understanding and outrage about this. And I do think that "everyone does it" in the sense that both the Democratic Party and Republican Party are complicit. There are a very few people like Rand Paul and Barbara Lee who have consistently spoken out against it, but they are generally dismissed as cranks.
Does social media fundamentally change the landscape of discourse so that there is a need for better moderation? I think so, but it should not come from the government, it should be decided by the people who own the companies not the government.
You are remembering it wrong.
Trump was President from January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021. Lots of bad stuff (for Trump) took place in 2016 and even early January 2017.
Excellent to remind us of this, Michael888...it started before Trump was inaugurated, or even elected.
You need to get reacquainted with the constitution and the separation of powers that were brilliantly designed to prevent these abuses of power. In which our representative government and armed forces have sworn an oath to preserve and protect. The current iteration of the executive branch has gone beyond that. Problem is that many people like you think that the President is all powerful. Its in that belief or ignorance that dooms this constitutional republic.
What a quaint idea, that our elected officials care anything about the Constitution!
Indeed, That's the idea, not the common practice these days. The real question is, where to lay the blame? The low information voters or a deeply flawed nature of humanity? Is it positions of power that only attract on the whole corrupt people? Should people only be allowed to exercise their constitutional right to vote , if they have demonstrated reasonable understanding of our constitution?
Keep telling the truth, keep telling the truth, god bless you.
Socialists nationalize the private sector, fascists co-opt the private sector.
walks like a duck, talks like a duck...
Fascists are just socialists who are smart enough to realize they would run the private sector into the ground.
The maddening thing is that it doesn't even dawn on them that they are the fascists.
They're defending democracy, you see.....even if that means overriding the will of the people.
Especially if it means overriding the will of the people.
The people clearly do not know what is good for them.
true democracy is gun control, fighting climate change , non stop funding for Ukraine and abortion on demand, everyone knows that.
"true democracy is gun control"
I believe the approved language is "gun safety" now. "Gun control" somehow proved unpopular with most of the American public despite 90 years of the would-be controllers pushin' it at the federal level.
Myself, I like a positive, redundant gun safety, as on a John Browning design. Still uncomfortable with Glocks despite their many virtues.
It's true, but the term has been bled of all meaning by the left, especially by antifa and their sympathizers.
They’re just following orders.
Troll…Really? Sanders would run this country into the ground? With the Trillions spent on war and all its ugly siblings? C’mon I ought not to waste my time on you Troll bot. The intellectual and political high caliber of the readers and posters here ought to have made you skidaddle; But nooooo here you are in all your algorhytmic idiocy.
Bernie Sanders has the same position on war as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/19/politics/senate-vote-ukraine-aid-package/index.html
The final tally in the Senate was 86 to 11.
Eleven Republican senators voted against final passage of the bill: Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, John Boozman of Arkansas, Mike Braun of Indiana, Mike Crapo of Idaho, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Mike Lee of Utah, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.
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I don't see Bernie's name anywhere on that list. I'm sure he'd totally stand up to the warmongers if he was president and not just winning vote #75 on a massive warmongering package to Ukraine.
Like when he helped stop the war in Yemen?
Oh, right. Fuck Sanders.
I know he’s not good on FOREIGN POLICY, ( He did refuse to go to the AIPAC Gathering and changed him mind on Israel after dozens of us harassed him mercilessly at a Town Hall ) but yeah the money spent on murder and mayhem is a horrible moral stain on us and somehow all of us we will pay the unspeakable price, one way or another. Yemen is horrible, a scandal, and one can only stand so much outrage fatigue.
https://www.rt.com/news/563760-senate-passes-ukraine-aid/
The US Senate voted on Thursday to pass a funding bill which includes $12 billion in additional military and economic aid for Ukraine. Twenty-two Republicans joined their Democrat colleagues to pass the bill, which comes after the US has already allocated around $55 billion to Kiev since February.
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1172/vote_117_2_00351.htm
Sanders (I-VT), Yea
Sanders is the biggest political whore to come down the pike since Hubert Humphrey. Sanders is worse, in fact. He's proven himself willing to reverse himself and sell out the "Bros" whenever it's to his political advantage.
Really? Getting him elected wouldve meant nothing or worse? He is yes, being realistic a sl careerist b c one can only fight huge power so far without OVERWHELMING support from other sectors. The corporokleptcrats were never again going to let an even ersatz FDRin power. But I am not so cynical as to think he would ‘ve caved and rotted like the so called squad had enough of regular humans supported him. My 2 cents. Sorry you are so angry. Not good for the old ticker. Just sayin’
Now the private sector are co-opting the government.
The idea that this isn’t news simply blows my mind. Your “priors” should be squarely opposed to the idea that whoever Elon Musk may or may not be has anything to do with the perpetual erosion of American society that begun in earnest after 9-11. Mate Silver is my age, he should know better because he’s had longer to see how twisted the media landscape has been for most of our lives. I have been betting against mainstream news narratives since the mid 90’s and consistently seem to be beating the odds of knowing shit faster and better than my friends.
I find it difficult to believe this won’t eventually become a major political issue (same with FTX) but I can certainly understand why some organizations would do everything possible to prevent it from happening. What’s hard for me to believe is that there isn’t total skepticism across the board. Like, the instant you hear that ex-CIA/FBI/DHS officials are regular contributors and hosts to news programs, you reaction should be, ‘holy shit is that true?!’ Not, “so what.”
One would hope. But then again I would have believed that Jeffrey Epstein’s list would have been made public after the conviction of his associate. The media is similarly unmotivated to flip that rock over.
The conspiracy theorist in me says that the only reason why it’s still being held under wraps is Donald Trump‘s name is NOT on that list.
I think someone could reasonably assume that if his name it was on that list, it would be already leaked. But we shall see. ...
It’s like the ambivalence about the origins of covid, Biggest story of the 21st century and the media doesn’t seem to care
Oh, they cared - but only enough to call people racist for questioning Covid’s origins. Like a Chinese lab is racist, but a Chinese wet market is not.
I've been avoiding mainstream narrative since the 1960s.
And you are right about the disintegration of American society after 9/11. I thought it was a false flag to get us into another war in the Middle East, but I now think that there were circles within circles: the 2nd Persian Gulf War was a false flag to distract our attention while they pushed through the Patriot Act.
How about subscriber suggestions? For giggles I’d like to know if gamergate was subject to suppression on twitter...
In that same vein, I'd like to know how #LearnToCode got deemed hate speech.
That one is easy -- journalists started getting fired. It wasn't hate speech when miners were the ones out of work.
Sure, but did Twitter execs just go off whiteknighting for journos, or did media execs reach out and request the banhammer? I want deets.
That’s another good one!
Someone mentioned were resources used to squash sanders and or the Green Party.
Radical gender ideology purification
Also keyword search Pepe and the_Donald
Great comment! Sure wish the gamergaters would spring back into action
You are an awesome journalist! Thank you
It seems that modern history will be written in two phases, before internet and after internet. It’s that deep. The breadth and depth of digital storage and surveillance is staggering. Bill Binney spoke of the density of digital data this way: “Ten years worth of emails and phone metadata could fit into a small hotel room. The NSA is building a facility in Utah of over one million square feet.” It’s not about email and metadata it’s about complete domination of the people. Complete control. But things have a way of backfiring and surveillance can be turned around.
Matt Taibbi, and others, are the fulcrum between the surveillance state and the people. I think nothing will prove more critical in today’s world than the work he’s doing. We need to do everything we can to grow the audience for this before the zombies at MSM can label it a ‘conspiracy theory’. What a gift we have. Let’s not keep it wrapped up.
Thanks, sounding more Camus than Orwell the more I hear about it. I bet you have a new appreciation for what Assange was doing to massage datasets into something useful for research. Can't tell you how much I appreciate your efforts and role in all this, glad you were able to get together with your family. All the best for the New Year.
Having lived in SF for about 5 too many years, it’s a beautiful city as long as you don’t look down.
And really, twitter is turning out to be the ultimate disinfectant. The infection is not new, it’s just diagnosed now.
"it’s a beautiful city as long as you don’t look down."
Oh yeah.
Twain said the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. He might actually have been talking about the weather though. I don't think so given that he was from Missouri.
❤️❤️
Growing up in the Bay Area, I would always say..."San Francisco is a beautiful city, it's just that the people ruin it." That was 30 years ago, btw.
"'We can give you everything we're seeing from the FBI and USIC agencies,' he wrote. 'CISA will know what is going on in each state.'"
Once again, ad nauseam; what the Actual FUCK are "USIC agencies" doing in conducting domestic surveillance and influence operations? Shit has been totally illegal at least since the Church Committee but we, the NYT/WaPo-reading public, are supposed to worry more about the alleged proposition that a national election which was visibly hinky to anybody with a 4th-grade reading level and ratiocination system, was not, in fact, hinky, and anybody who might ask questions about it is Bad, Wrong, and A Traitor?