I learned about this 2017 speech by Van Jones from an article by Jonathan Haidt. We need a lot more of this and a lot less ideological fragility.
There are two ideas about safe spaces: One is a very good idea and one is a terrible idea. The idea of being physically safe on a campus—not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse, or being targeted specifically, personally, for some kind of hate speech—“you are an n-word,” or whatever—I am perfectly fine with that.
But there’s another view that is now I think ascendant, which I think is just a horrible view, which is that “I need to be safe ideologically. I need to be safe emotionally I just need to feel good all the time, and if someone says something that I don’t like, that’s a problem for everybody else including the administration.”
I think that is a terrible idea for the following reason: I don’t want you to be safe, ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe, emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different.
I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym. You can’t live on a campus where people say stuff you don’t like?! And these people can’t fire you, they can’t arrest you, they can’t beat you up, they can just say stuff you don’t like- and you get to say stuff back- and this you cannot bear?! [audience applause]
This is ridiculous BS liberals! My parents, and Monica Elizabeth Peak’s parents [points to someone in the audience and greets her] were marched, they dealt with fire hoses! They dealt with dogs! They dealt with beatings! You can’t deal with a mean tweet?! You are creating a kind of liberalism that the minute it crosses the street into the real world is not just useless, but obnoxious and dangerous. I want you to be offended every single day on this campus. I want you to be deeply aggrieved and offended and upset, and then to learn how to speak back. Because that is what we need from you in these communities. [applause]
It wasn't that long ago that Democrats were suspicious (if not hostile) to the CIA and America's other spy agencies. There was good reason for that, given the long history of propaganda, lies and manipulation by the CIA, FBI and NSA. Perhaps the peak of this DNC anti-spy state feeling occurred during Edward Snowden's revelations.
But then something happened. The Spy State became useful to the DNC, driven by their mutual hostility to Donald Trump. This was brought on by Trump himself by his ridicule of the spies. This makes for terrible political strategy, as highlighted in this short interview from 2017, Rachel Maddow interviewing Chuck Schumer: "When you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you." The CIA and NSA have immense resources for getting back at you by fueling campaigns of disinformation:
We know remarkably little about the nature of the nation’s intelligence spending, other than its supposed total, released in a report every year. By now, it’s more than $80 billion.
This brings us to Glenn Greenwald's most recent article about the bubbly friendship involving the spy state, the DNC and the DND-allied "news" media. Corruption doesn't happen in the abstract. Rather, it is furthered by the conduct of real-life human beings, often by people who willingly betray the principles that should be guiding them in exchange for money and career advancement. CNN's Natasha Bertrand is one for those people. Greenwald's article is titled: "CNN's New "Reporter," Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist and Scandal-Plagued CIA Propagandist: In the U.S. corporate media, the surest way to advance is to loyally spread lies and deceit from the U.S. security state. Bertrand is just the latest example."
Glenn Greenwald continues to be a lightning rod for abuse from many political directions. These ad hominem attacks stem from his reporting because he has a problem: he follows facts where they lead, regardless of who this pisses off. His resulting and undeservedly untarnished reputation makes many people (including many of my FB "Friends") viscerally hostile to Greenwald and hesitant to read or believe what he has written. Here is the solution to that (unwarranted) hostility: Greenwald's article contains numerous links allowing you to read the underlying evidence and weep. Here is an excerpt, but I urge you to read the full article, to follow Glenn Greenwald at his Substack account and, further, to financially support his courageous journalism.
Natasha Bertrand has spent the last five years working as a spokesperson for the alliance composed of the CIA and the Democratic Party, spreading every unvetted and unproven conspiracy theory about Russiagate that they fed her. The more loyally she performed that propagandistic function, the more rapidly she was promoted and rewarded. Now she arrives at her latest destination: CNN, not only Russiagate Central along with MSNBC but also the home to countless ex-operatives of the security state agencies on whose behalf Bertrand speaks.
Once again we see the two key truths of modern corporate journalism in the U.S. First, we have the Jeffrey Goldberg Principle: you can never go wrong, but only right, by disseminating lies and propaganda from the CIA. Second, the organs that spread the most disinformation and crave disinformation agents as their employees are the very same ones who demand censorship of the internet in the name of stopping disinformation.
I've long said that if you want to understand how to thrive in this part of the media world, you should study the career advancement of Jeffrey Goldberg, propelled by one reckless act after the next. But now the sequel to the Goldberg Rise is the thriving career of this new CNN reporter whose value as a CIA propagandist Goldberg, notably, was the first to spot and reward.
Yeah, I’m picky. I'd like to see modern news outlets carefully determine that they have evidence upon which to base their splashy headlines. I also expect that when they get the facts wrong on an important national issue, that they will clearly and loudly apologize. That's what I want, but that's not what we are getting.
Remember how Officer Brian Sicknick died during the Capitol riot after someone savagely bashed his skull with a fire hydrant? See the video. The problem is that there was never any evidence for this claim. Further, it has now been proven completely untrue based on a recently released autopsy report. Why does this matter that there was never any evidence to support this widely promulgated claim? Glenn Greenwald points out that without an intentional bludgeoning of Sicknick, the DNC-aligned media (as opposed to FOX, which is the GOP-aligned media) had no claim that the Trump mob killed anyone, which they sorely craved. Take a look at the "news":
[T]he new “norms” in the business have disincentivized traditional outlets to care about accuracy, leading to huge quantities of mistakes. When news agencies see their jobs as being primarily about politics, they become more concerned with being directionally right than technically accurate, knowing among other things that their audiences will forgive them for being wrong, so long as they’re wrong about the “right” targets.
Many of our biggest media outlets have signed up to be cheerleaders for their favorite political team. They have assumed the role of nannies to serve the cravings of their followers. They choose narratives that their respective teams will approve, then they concoct stories based news sources like these: “some believe,” or “sources say” and other creative dissemblings. By using vapor-sources like these, lies can be quickly converted into "news" stories that will sell ads and make their team's readers happy. Many of our biggest media outlets are co-dependent and co-captured in this way, as repeatedly documented by Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Walter Cronkite must be crying in his grave that our major media outlets are fully invested in what Taibbi terms bombholing:
This technique of using the next bombshell story to push the last one down a memory-hole — call it Bombholing — needed a polarized audience to work. As surveys by organizations like the Pew Center showed, the different target demographics in Trump’s America increasingly did not communicate with one another. Democrats by 2020 were 91 percent of the New York Times audience and 95 percent of MSNBC’s, while Republicans were 93 percent of Fox viewers. When outlets overreached factually, it was possible, if not likely, that the original target audience would never learn the difference.
This reduced the incentive to be careful. Audiences devoured bombshells even when aware on a subconscious level that they might not hold up to scrutiny. If a story turned out to be incorrect, that was okay. News was now more about underlying narratives audiences felt were true and important. For conservatives, Trump was saving America from a conspiracy of elites. For “liberal” audiences, Trump was trying to assume dictatorial power, and the defenders of democracy were trying to stop him.
If you still have a smidgeon of trust in our major media outlets, watch this video by Matt Taibbi to the end, where you will experience more bombholing per second than you ever before thought imaginable:
Where am I going with this post? I'm frustrated, actually disgusted, with what used to be a proud industry, the only industry mentioned in the U.S. Constitution: the press. As discussed by Felix Salmon, here's what Americans now think about the traditional news media.
When we catch our big modern monied “news” outlets running such garbage, it impeaches their character. It tells us that that we should not trust them in the future. It should also concern us about what they are suppressing. What they are hiding from us from our own good? What, in addition to the (true) story that the laptop did belong to Hunter Biden (a story that says more about the partisanship of U.S. spy agencies and news media than anything else? What else is being suppressed? How about the nationwide problem that school and university professors are being forced to either proclaim allegiance to neo-racist Woke ideology or to completely shut up at Evergreen College, Smith College, University of Vermont, USC, UCSD and (most recently) Grace Church School in Manhattan. This same Woke ideology also spills into numerous corporations and cultural institutions. There are many other examples. I have spoken to many of these teachers and attorneys who verify these stories, yet these stories are intentionally uncovered by the DNC-aligned media, with the rarest of exceptions.
Second take. What are my expectations regarding the modern media? News outlets should be at least as principled as high school newspapers, given that we rely upon them for information we use to decide who to run the country. I expect that editors will reject stories for which there is no evidence.
I lean strongly to the left on most political issues, but there are a lot of self-proclaimed progressives who despise people like me who question the “progressive” canon. Their solution for people like me: they try to hurt my feelings by calling me a “conservative.” I've seen it over and over. It is laughable. These are the many people for whom thinking has become a team sport, who are afraid to allow facts to fall where they will and only THEN concoct opinions. These are the victims we were warned about by the excellent documentary, "The Social Dilemma." They have lost their ability to think critically, both by silo-inducing social media and also by politically corrupted legacy media.
I obtained the factual bits of this story by reading Glenn Greenwald, who self-publishes at Substack in order to escape the reach of editors and co-workers who think their jobs are to swear allegiance to a particular political party. He points out in his piece the hatred toward him by many of those in the legacy media for his crime of pointing out these problems.
Because of its centrality to the media narrative and agenda, anyone who tried to point out the serious factual deficiencies in this story — in other words, people trying to be journalists — were smeared by Democratic Party loyalists who pretend to be journalists as "Sicknick Truthers,” white nationalist sympathizers, and supporters of insurrection.
I need to mention, Greenwald takes massive abuse for reporting for the sake of getting the facts right, and the social venom to which he is subjected seems to make dig in even harder to set the record straight.
I will end with one more excerpt from Greenwald's article to demonstrate the extreme levels of hypocrisy the Sicknick story illustrates. The title of Greenwald’s article: “The Media Lied Repeatedly About Officer Brian Sicknick's Death. And They Just Got Caught. Just as with the Russia Bounty debacle, they will never acknowledge what they did. Their audience wants to be lied to for partisan gain and emotional pleasure.”
Truth matters. Noble lies are never justified no matter the cause, especially in journalism. But these employees of corporate media outlets have been taught the exact opposite model: that their primary obligation is to please and flatter the partisan agenda and political sensibilities of their audience even if it means lying or recklessly spreading unproven theories to do it. That is their profit model. And they have trained their audiences to want and expect this and that is why they never feel compelled to engage in any self-critique or accountability when they get caught doing this: their audiences want to be lied to — they are grateful for it — and would prefer that they not admit they did it so that their partisan interests will not be undermined.
What is most depressing about this entire spectacle is that, this time, they exploited the tragic death of a young man to achieve their tawdry goals. They never cared in the slightest about Officer Brian Sicknick. They had just spent months glorifying a protest movement whose core view is that police officers are inherently racist and abusive. He had just become their toy, to be played with and exploited in order to depict the January 6 protest as a murderous orgy carried out by savages so primitive and inhuman that they were willing to fatally bash in the skull of a helpless person or spray them with deadly gases until they choked to death on their own lung fluids. None of it was true, but that did not matter — and it still does not to them — because truth, as always, has nothing to do with their actual function. If anything, truth is an impediment to it.
For many people it is an interesting fact that the co-founder of organization Black Lives Matters has gone on a expensive home buying spree. Hasn't this story been told hundreds of times over the years when famous people do some expensive signaling? It sometimes raises interesting questions about where these people got all of that money. In this case, it was determined by the New York Post that Patrisse Khan-Cullors bought four houses worth $3.2M. In a country that values free speech, information should flow and people can make of these stories what they want. For some people it won't be a big deal. For others, these purchases are controversial, because it suggests that money that should be going to a non-profit cause is being siphoned off into luxury.
Facebook has barred users from sharing a New York Post report from last week about the controversial property acquisitions by Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors.
Users of the social media giant noticed on Thursday they could not share the link to a story that shed light on Cullors' multi-million-dollar splurge on homes. Fox News can confirm that an error message appears whenever users try sharing the article on their personal Facebook page or through the Messenger app.
When users attempt to send the link, an error message alleges that the article "goes against our Community Standards."
The New York Post published this follow-up story today, where Khan-Cullors claimed in a strangely narrowly-tailored defense: "“I have never taken a salary from the Black Lives Matters Global Networks Foundation,” she also said Thursday."
Again, this real estate buying spree could be an interesting story for many people, especially for those who wonder whether their donations to BLM (and its many affiliates) are really helping struggling black people. The NYP adds: "But in insisting she did not take a salary from the organization’s non-profit foundation, Khan-Cullors left unsaid whether she was paid through BLM’s network of similarly named for-profit entities." Shouldn't people be able to freely share this information and make up their own minds about whether it is interesting?
Numerous Facebook users, however, were blocked from sending the NYP story. One of those people, Abigail Shrier, was blocked from sending it as a private message on FB Messenger. Outraged, she wrote: "Facebook will not allow you to post this NY Post story or even to message it to another person. (I just tested it). So Facebook is now effectively opening your mail and reading the contents for ideologically objectionable material."
A woman was interested to know how many inmates in Washington state identify as transgender, and how many of those transgender identified inmates have been given transfers to go from men's prison to women's prison, and the reverse. To get this information, she filed a Freedom on Information Act request. Instead of getting the information she requested, she got sued by the ACLU.
Here's a copy of the public records request filed by the citizen:
Why did this woman seek this information?
"I started requesting information about what is happening in US prisons after learning about cases abroad where violent male offenders were housed in women's prisons," the woman who made the request told The Post Millennial, "including a case where a woman became pregnant as a result. Due to the shameful lack of impartial media reporting on this issue, the public can't trust the institutions we've come to rely on to get accurate information.
The ACLU responded by sending the woman this letter:
We must seize every opportunity to protect and advance our civil rights and liberties — in legislatures, the courts, and our communities. Join us in holding our leaders and institutions accountable to fulfill the promise of democracy. With your support, we can lead freedom forward.
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