The Key Point of Taibbi’s Reporting Regarding the Twitter

Glenn Greenwald: "They don't understand the key point Taibbi's story: Twitter's "foreign govt hacking" pretext for censoring was a lie, and they knew it."

Greenwald continues: The reason these people insist Taibbi's story is trivial is they will not and cannot recognize any scandalous or improper behavior by leading Dem politicians. Ask them to name any. Any critique of leading Dems is automatically, to them, a fraud, a "nothingburger." They're Dems.... The most pitiful part of their attack is the utter lack of self-awareness. They claim Taibbi serves power.The hegemonic force in DC, Hollywood, academia, the US Security State, and corporate media is DNC liberalism: *them*. Their lives are about nothing but servitude to power....Their lives are only about serving the Dem Party. That's the only metric they know for "good journalism."

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Eric Weinstein Schools Ben Collins on Cookie Cutter Talking Points Employed by Elitists Pretending to be Journalists

Eric Weinstein Points out a big problem for Ben Collins and others pretending to be journalists of Legacy Media Outlets:

Ben Collins protests too much:

Weinstein then inserts the dagger (click this image to let it scroll for the full effect):

Collins is such a joke, not a journalist.

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Illustrative Debate of Whether We Should Trust Mainstream Media.”

I have long enjoyed listening to Malcolm Gladwell's podcasts and reading his books. However, my respect for him fell precipitously after reading the words he spoke at the Recent Munk debate in Toronto [Munk Transcript] Tara Henley reports, in her article, "An astonishing Munk debate in Toronto, Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray's landslide, Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg's mendacity - and five reasons why trust in the mainstream media is so low":

At the beginning of the event, the crowd was split 48 percent to 52 percent in favour of the resolution. By night’s end, a full 67 percent agreed that the mainstream media should not be trusted and only 33 percent disagreed. This is a 39 percent vote gain.

So, what exactly happened here?

Let’s unpack the specific tendencies that Gladwell and Goldberg exhibited that I believe swayed the audience — that, in fact, show up regularly in the mainstream press.

The first of these tendencies is mendacity.

The public is not stupid, and people get it when arguments are made in bad faith....

The second tendency on display is self-absorption.

While both Taibbi and Murray focused their arguments on the impacts of media failures on society as a whole, it was telling that Malcolm Gladwell largely focused his arguments on himself....

The third tendency is a demonstration of ideological capture.

The fact that Malcolm Gladwell fell back on arguments around a lack of diversity in the press — on a stage occupied by Taibbi, a Black man, a gay man, and a woman — signaled allegiance to a particular political project....

The pervasiveness of this political ideology within the press corps is a problem, and something that I hear complaints from the public about constantly.

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Americans Who Approve of China’s Ghastly Lockdown . . .

Nellie Bowles writes:

China’s obsession with Zero-Covid: Chinese authorities have taken a brutal stance on Covid: They have welded people into their own apartments and locked building exit doors. Last week, an apartment fire killed 10 in China’s Xinjiang province, and many say the dead were locked in their building and fire trucks were slowed by road blocks that were the result of the draconian Covid rules. The result has been unprecedented protests across the country. In Beijing, people chanted “no to Covid tests, yes to freedom.”

Some on the American left were quick to defend the CCP. Being welded into your apartment, having all the exits locked in a fire, these are just the price of safety. One particularly wild example: When the Washington Post ran a news story about the CCP’s flawed Zero-Covid response, the paper’s most famous reporter, Taylor Lorenz, slammed her employer’s phrasing and defended the CCP. “Choosing not to kill off millions of vulnerable people (as the US is doing) isn’t a ‘critical flaw,’” Lorenz wrote.

I do have good news for America’s Pandemic Forever advocates: You’ve won. Yes, a few people still go to the movies, and you can always tweet about how selfish and evil they are. But take a look at this chart . . .

→ Americans’ staggering loneliness: We were already spending more and more time alone each year. Then Covid hit, and our isolation grew much deeper. Our social lives haven’t bounced back.

I got emphatic pushback when I agreed with Glenn Greenwald (in August 2021) that our COVID policies need to be based on sober cost-benefit analyses, the same type of analyses we use when we discuss traffic safety. I think it's clear that Taylor Lorenz has convinced many people that more lockdown is the best policy, but she (and her ilk) are ignoring the exponentially greater damage that lockdowns have caused.

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Continued Silence by Democrats Regarding Julian Assange of Wikileaks

Glenn Greenwald:

That you can't find one national Dem politician willing to do defend Assange the way Lula does -- you have to go to GOP politicians for that -- shows what a fraud and joke is the mainstream US left. . . . Someone try to get AOC, Bernie or any Squad member to say anything like this -- let alone standard Democratic Party officials -- and tell me what happens. Everyone who has tried thus far has failed.

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