I invite everyone to take a trip in Matt Orfalea's Lab Leak Time Machine. While on your journey, notice the sneering tone of voice of these dozens of wanna-be journalists. This is how "the news" is often announced these days. Fact-free and sprinkled with condescension for those who dare to stray from the official narrative.
Sharyl Attkisson is a five-time Emmy Award winner and recipient of the Edward R. Murrow award for Investigative Reporting. She's the author of two New York Times bestsellers including “The Smear How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What you Think and How you Vote.” For 30 years Attkisson was a correspondent and anchor at CBS News, PBS, CNN and local news and she is now the host of a weekly show, “Full measure,” which focuses on investigative and accountability reporting. Excerpt from her discussion with Steve Kirsch.
Steve Kirsh: How are people being misled and how can we tell when people are telling you the truth?Sharyl Attkisson : I think some important trends started in the past 15 to 20 years and have become more visible as time has gone on. Now you have to dig deeper. When you hear a prevalent narrative on the news, if you understand how the news has been co opted--like virtually every source of information that we use--you have to almost think two layers beyond what they're trying to tell you.
Number one, you have to assume that when everybody's on the same narrative, typically, if they're using the same language, interviewing the same experts all on board saying everybody knows something, then that's your cue that there's probably a really important piece of the puzzle that's being hidden by some important interest that would suffer if we knew the truth. So as you hear these narratives, your first thought should be "Who wants me to believe this and why?" And I know that ordinary people, including me, when I'm just leading my normal life, we don't have time to deeply research, every question that arises. We are used to counting on the news to help us do that. But I'm telling you today, you kind of have to rely on yourself, because there are very few sources you can go to where you can trust the information as being unfettered and dual-sided, presenting all viewpoints.
A lot of it is just purely strategic for the past five or six years, dishonest, not just even out of context, but completely false. But you'll never know if you're trusting your traditional source that we used to look to for such things.
This has never been truer than when we look at the COVID pandemic and the vaccines. And I certainly didn't know at the front end of the pandemic, what the truth was any more than anybody else did about how effective the vaccines might be, how bad the pandemic would be. But as time went on, this began to take on hallmarks of every other scandal that I've covered, including many non-medical scandals, where there are important interests, trying very hard to shape and censor information, trying to control the landscape where we get all of our information online, on the news, any source that we have. And I think it resulted in a lot of harm, number one, but number two, maybe irreparable damage to the credibility of the institutions that we rely on political institutions, medical institutions, law enforcement, whatever you're looking at, Department of Justice, media. People, by and large as a good chunk of the population, don't believe--nor should they--take at face value, what comes out of their mouths in terms of advice, and their fact checks, and so on.
Steve Kirsch: So what is your trusted sources that you rely on today?
[More . . . ]
Steven Pinker was asked to name one thing wrong with the world that he would change. His answer (excerpt):
Too many leaders and influencers, including politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and academics, surrender to the cognitive bias of assessing the world through anecdotes and images rather than data and facts.
Our president assumed office with a dystopian vision of American “carnage” in an era in which violent crime rates were close to historical lows. His Republican predecessor created a massive new federal department and launched two destructive wars to protect Americans against a hazard, terrorism, that most years kills fewer people than bee stings and lightning strikes. In the year after the 9/11 attacks, 1,500 Americans who were scared away from flying perished in car crashes, unaware that a Boston-LA air trip has the same risk as driving 12 miles.
One death from a self-driving Tesla makes worldwide headlines, but the 1.25 million deaths each year from human-driven vehicles don’t. Small children are traumatized by school drills that teach them how to hide from rampage shooters, who have an infinitesimal chance of killing them compared with car crashes, drownings, or, for that matter, non-rampage killers, who slay the equivalent of a Sandy Hook and a half every day. Several heavily publicized police shootings have persuaded activists that minorities are in mortal danger from racist cops, whereas three analyses (two by Harvard faculty, Sendhil Mullainathan and Roland Fryer) have shown no racial bias in police shootings...
People are terrified of nuclear power (the most scalable form of carbon-free energy) because of images of Three Mile Island (which killed no one), Fukushima (which killed no one; the deaths were caused by the tsunami and a panicked, unnecessary evacuation), and Chernobyl (which killed fewer people than are killed by coal every day).
Almost impossible to overstate how wrong so many news corporations were on the science of covid: - lab leak as conspiracy - efficacy of lockdown - harmlessness of school closures - recovered immunity - toddler masking - vax mandates A perfect record of anti- science failure.
During this conversation with Helen Joyce, Jordan Peterson explained by girls as so much more at risk of harm at the hands of those who peddle transgender ideology. I transcribed the following excerpt:
There's no difference between being self-conscious and being miserable, technically, but here's something else. Self-consciousness among females is much more associated with body dysmorphia. Now there's a bunch of reasons for that. We don't know all of them. But here's a couple. First of all, at puberty, women start to experience more negative emotion on average than men. And that is not true of boys and girls, but it does seem to kick in at puberty. And that's likely because you get size dimorphism developing. And so it's reasonable for women to be a little bit more timid about the physical environment than men. But also women are sexually vulnerable. And also, they have to care for infants. So being threat-sensitive, makes sense, okay? And in any case, those are three possible reasons, but it definitely kicks in at puberty.
Now, it also is the case that anxiety among women tends to take the form of bodily self-consciousness. And I think the reason for that is likely--this is a speculation, although the others are merely observable facts--it's likely because girls and women are judged more comprehensively on their physical appearance than men. So it makes sense that if they're going to be self-conscious, it's going to be more broadly focused. And that's particularly rough. Then the third contributing factor is girls hit puberty earlier than boys. So now what you have is a perfect storm there.
So now you have a girl. And she's feeling a lot more anxious and confused than she did before, because she hit puberty. Plus, her body is doing 50 weird things. Plus, she's getting all sorts of strange attention from adults that she never got before. Plus, she doesn't know how to fit in on the social front. And she's trying to make that transition from childhood to adulthood. And then you have people additionally torturing them about the fact that any deviation from the norm on the stereotypical front is actually an indication that she doesn't exist in the correct body while she doesn't really feel like she's in the correct body to begin with. So it's a perfect storm for young girls.
When Canada came out with its compelled pronoun law 2016, I talked to the Canadian Senate, I said, you idiots, in your legislation, you think you're going to free up kids? You're going to produce a psychogenic epidemic among young women, because they're preferentially susceptible to psychogenic epidemics, which is why we had a bulimia epidemic and an anorexia epidemic, all of which were spread by social media--and a cutting epidemic. And then there's a history of such epidemics going back 300 years: Freudian hysteria, which was very widespread in the Victorian times, although disappeared afterwards, or mutated, was also a psychogenic epidemic that preferentially affected young women.
So I just wanted to lay out some of the reasons why that's the case, higher levels of negative emotion, and more broadly focused self-consciousness. And so then you add to that a kind of unpopularity, because maybe a given girl isn't that sophisticated at manifesting--what would you call it? Socially acceptable feminine traits. It takes a fair bit of sophistication to be a well put-together woman and you're going to be pretty damned awkward at that if you're kind of a clunky tomboy when you're 12.
So now you're providing them with, first of all, a uni-dimensional reason why they're miserable. It's pretty damned convenient. And no wonder an adolescent wants that. It's like, do I have 50 problems? Or do I have one? And then you also entice them with the additional social status that they're going to receive by announcing that they're special, and having every bloody teacher in the entire world--plus the world at large--focus on that narcissistic grandiosity that goes along with the insistence of a special identity. And the only price you have to pay is enforced sterilization and surgical mutilation. Fine deal for our teenagers!
I think there are another couple of things about teenage girls that we don't pay as much attention to but the very fact of physical development in teenage girls means your body is sort of ballooning. You know, breasts here, hips here, bottom there. And you lose that sort of gender-neutral body that gives you so much freedom in childhood. And so what girls experience in puberty is moving from being a free kind of person into being an object because to some, her body is public property. And as you say, it's commented on. Everyone has a right to comment on it. She may, you know, she'll get comments in the street. She'll look all around her and become aware of the objectification of women throughout society.
Now, I think this is happening to boys much more that over the past decade in kind of, certainly objectification of the male body, and in some cases, kind of sexual objectification of men. And this generation are used to seeing those really exaggerated images of femininity so the feminine female heroes have huge breasts and tiny waist and-Kim Kardashian. And the male heroes have a ripped six pack . . . it's all about how you look. So it's happening more for men, and interestingly, boys experiences of things like anorexia have increased, but not as much as girls….
