Russell Brand, as animated as ever, showcases the corrupt history of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as he simultaneously advocates for free speech. Brand didn't appreciate that Wasserman-Schultz called Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger "so-called reporters." Got him a bit riled up. I had the same reaction when I watched the hearings live . . .
Whatever the story of the day, it will immediately hit the "go" button, causing the two corporate media tribes to roll up their sleeves to reverse-engineer what happened, turbo-charging certain convenient facts and suppressing other inconvenient facts. That is what has happened in the case of 28-year old Audrey Hale, who murdered six people at a Nashville Christian school. In a perverse way, it inspires a feeling of awe to behold the contortionist work product of the two well-oiled media machines. Oh, to be a fly in the wall in the back offices of those two teams!
As a citizen who is not naive, you might be thinking "But what actually happened? Just tell us the facts, please." Instead of becoming well-informed, however, you will be presented with an intensely processed/sterilized/lede-burying/contorted story that will give you, at best, about half of what happened. When we see this results of this process, story after story, week after week, it should challenge all of us to stop trusting any one "news" account. It should remind us that they are preaching to us, not teaching us about the real world. It should deeply insult us that they are coddling, as though we are children. They are convinced that we can't deal with the raw data, the who/what/when/where/why and how of the real world. Even worse, they are motivated by hubris; they think that they are so uniquely intelligent and courageous that only they can deal with harsh reality and that they are protecting us, commandeering the American Project to mold it into their own image and likeness. That has always been the mindset of censors. They self-appoint themselves because they convince themselves that they much smarter than the rest of us. They do this even though censorship is antithetical to free speech and even though, thoughout history, censorship has never worked. That is the central lesson of Robert Corn-Revere's 2022 book: The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder, well summarized at Reason.
The only solution is for each of us to start piecing together what happened bit by bit, from a wide variety of sources from a wide variety of perspectives. That is our plight, yet most people don't have the time to cull through this mess. We have jobs and families and for months, we have put off fixing that leaky faucet in the bathroom. Most of us thus give up in one of two ways. A) We pick our favorite corporate news shop, assuming it to be credible, perhaps out of habit or perhaps because it is comforting to read that version of of news, thus feeding the confirmation bias. Or B) We give up on spending time to independently figuring out what is true, thus giving up on being informed citizens, meaning that we will be blindly throwing darts on Election Day, if we vote at all. By giving up entirely, we either avoid "political discussions" or we mutter something like: "It's all a bunch of bullshit." The fact that so many Americans keep picking one of these two paths is reason to believe that the 39 long-dead signatories to the 1787 Constitutional Convention constantly spin in their graves.
Most of us feel this dysfunction with corporate media, as shown by surveys:
Where to turn? One of my favorite writers is Nellie Bowles, who publishes TGIF at The Free Press. Week after week, she does a great job of crystallizing the hypocrisy that runs through the veins of America's news corporations. She does this, writing with aplomb and more than a touch of humor. In today's TGIF, she does what she does best:
An inconvenient killer: The killer, Audrey Hale, was a biological female who identified as a man. My takeaway from this is murderous lunatics come in all shapes and sizes. And it seems likely that this person had some special animosity toward the religious school where they’d been a student.
But the mainstream media became obsessed with obscuring the situation and denying that the killer was trans.
Here’s the Reuters headline: “Former Christian school student kills 3 children, 3 staff in Nashville shooting.” Hmm. Or: “CBS News is still working to confirm Hale’s gender identity.” From the NYT: “The suspect appeared to identify as a man in recent months.” Appeared to identify!According to the New Rules, followed strictly by the Times in all other cases, you’re actually not allowed to say someone “appears to identify as a woman.” The person simply is a woman. At worst, if you’re feeling heretical, you say they are a trans woman. Hale had his pronouns in hisbio, for godsake (he/him). But the NYT throws all that out, distancing the shooter from anything trans-related.
Eli Erlick, one of America’s most prominent trans activists, argued that sometimes shooters only take on a trans identity for convenience: “The Colorado shooter only temporarily took on the identity to avoid hate crime charges.” Weird to see Eli admitting that some people might take advantage of gender self-ID for their own nefarious purposes. Now, let’s talk about a 45-year-old male convict who suddenly identifies as a woman. . . wait, where are you going, Eli?
Others blamed Nashville for bringing the slaughter on themselves. Here’s New York Times contributor Benjamin Ryan on the situation: “Nashville is home to the Daily Wire, where @benshapiro & @mattwalshblog have led an ideological war against trans people.” Many deranged people online echoed this notion that Nashville had it coming. A few hours after the Nashville shooting, Arizona governor Katie Hobbs’ press secretary, Josselyn Berry, posted an image of a woman wielding two guns and wrote: “Us when we see transphobes.” She’s since resigned, though I’m sure she will pop up with a much better-paying job soon.
Anyway, the most important thing to happen in an inconvenient situation is to suppress it quickly. And that’s what has happened. Soon after the shooting, it had fallen from the top story slot. And within a day or two, it was all about gun control efforts and how Republicans were getting in the way.
Bad timing for your Day of Vengeance: It was very awkward that this week is the planned Trans Day of Vengeance. Days before the Nashville school shooting, leftist media personality Cenk Uygur had encouragedtrans people to get tons of guns: “If anyone should get guns, it should be trans Americans.”
How do we break out of these silos? Jonathan Haidt urges us to reach out to those with whom we disagree in order to to have a more robust understanding of what is going on around us.
More . . .
Yes, Jen Psaki will do well at MSNBC. "Doing Well" means saying whatever it takes to please her corporate masters, who also pull the strings at the DNC.
Whether it's FOX on the right or left-leaning corporate media, the product is the viewers, who are being played. BTW, here is a list of dozens of countries where the United States has interfered with democratic and constitutional election choices by the citizens of those other countries.
Psaki is no longer at the White House, but she will do what it takes to succeed at MSNBC, which is promoting her as follows:
Those who really know Nicolle Wallace know that this comparison is vicious. Wallace was the focus of a 2022 article by Glenn Greenwald: "The Typhoid Mary of Disinformation": Nicolle Wallace. Nobody Spreads it More Relentlessly: From her days as Bush/Cheney propagandist, to her stint on The View, to her role as beloved-by-Democrats MSNBC host, Wallace has perfected the art of sociopathic lying. Watch our original video."
Wallace has employed those personality traits in service of the most toxic and insidious of all tasks: a happy, relentless purveyor of official disinformation. When the CIA wants the American public contaminated with its lies and disinformation, Nicolle Wallace's lips begin moving. She delivers the anonymous disinformation campaigns of the U.S. security state with a tone of empathy, compassion, and liberal elegance, all in the language and with the affectations which affluent liberals most admire.
She has an unsurpassed ability to broadcast to audiences outright lies whispered to her by Deep State operatives — one after the next — without flinching or betraying the slightest sense of a conscience or moral compass. She lies like only a sociopath can: exuding charm and warmth yet utterly vacant on the inside, except for a soul festering in rot. Over the last twenty years — from her perches at the White House, on The View, and now at MSNBC — nobody has made liberals eat up Pentagon and neocon war propaganda more eagerly and uncritically than Nicolle Wallace.
There is literally not a single liberal/CIA disinformation campaign over the last six years that she did not fully and uncritically embrace. Each time the U.S. Security State and Democratic Party fabricated blatant lies and embarked on injecting their poisonous brew into the American bloodstream, Nicolle Wallace was at the forefront. Using the skills she harnessed to help lead Americans into one of its most destructive and immoral wars in U.S. history — the invasion and 15-year destruction of Iraq — the former Bush/Cheney shill, now a DNC and CIA shill, has played a starring role in virtually every lie American liberals have been led to believe.
I’m worried about the people who censor us. Who protects THEM from dangerous information? Who keeps THEM safe from words? They are constantly subjected to misinformation. We need censors for the censors!
My above attempt to mock the censors carries an important point: Censors think of themselves as immune from the danger of bad words and ideas. How could that possibly be? I'm sure they believe that they are intellectual superior or else they wouldn't risk their mental health and their LIVES to protect us. I suspect they don't worry at all about workplace self-contamination. It's much more likely that they laugh at what what they are paid to do: pretending to protect the rest of us. They think of us as rubes, as the hoi polloi. Just keep those paychecks coming! As Matt Taibbi recently stated in his Congressional testimony, they are part of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. They think they are super-smart, certainly smarter than the rest of us because they are being paid to be full of shit and anti-American.
The belief of censors that they are immune to the dangerous ideas they filter for us is a classic case of myopic, one-level reasoning. It is as bad as the traditional theologian "tennis without a net that many people have tried to jam down my throat my entire life. It goes like this:
Everything must have a cause.The universe must have had a cause.
God caused the universe!
[At this point they are finished and they stare are you smugly]
Normal people should then speak up: "Hey, I thought your first premise is that EVERYTHING must have a cause, right? Who caused "God"?"
That's when they claim that "God" doesn't need to have a cause or some similar BS. Or they change the topic.
Censors who claim to be immune to the effects of dangerous words and cause-less causers are classic cases of motivated reasoning, social intuitionism, emotional security blankets dressed up in fancy words.
The story of one of the greatest tragedies and deceptions of all time is finally coming out. You won't find it in the corporate media yet, because the message has been controlled upstream through the powerful incentive structure of billions of $ of scientific research funding and Machiavellian pinpoint control of three historically prestigious science journals upon which corporate media outlets rely. But the narrative is starting to crumble thanks to recent Congressional hearings and this excellent article by Ashley Rindsberg. Once this entire story works its way into wider public understanding, Anthony Fauci will not be invited to throw any more ceremonial opening day pitches.
Here are a few excerpts from Rindsberg's article at Tablet,"Treason of the Science Journals: How Anthony Fauci manufactured consensus on the origins of COVID-19 with the help of science writers and the media."
At the government level, pandemic preparedness is as much about protecting critical supply chains as it is about administering medical treatments. What the COVID-19 pandemic showed is that the flow of information, which may be the single most vital resource in the supply chain, is utterly broken. In many cases, it was actively undermined by senior public health officials including the former chief medical adviser to the president, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
New emails released in a congressional probe show that Fauci helped direct the publication of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” an influential scientific paper published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, that claimed COVID-19 could not have leaked from a laboratory. Fauci then cited the paper—in effect quoting himself, since he coordinated the article behind the scenes and was given final approval before it published—as if it was an independent source corroborating his assertions that COVID could only have come from a bat and not from a lab.