For me, one of the most disturbing stories over the past five years is how cheerleading news outlets have gotten things so wrong so often. Here is Matt Orfalea's latest mashup, featuring the Trump "Alpha Bank" scandal. This is not a scandal about Trump (a despicable human in my opinion), but a scandal concerning the Clinton campaign and our "news" industry.
https://rumble.com/embed/v13pa8u/?pub=4
Are there any modern institutions that are so strongly bolstered with hallowed traditions and fortified with well-crafted first principles that they are immune from attack by trendy ideologies? Sincerely. I'm asking.
Nazis marching at Skokie now seems like an ancient happening that is so old that it has faded into irrelevance at the new cash-flushed ACLU.
What follows is an excerpt of from a new article written by Lara Bazelon, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she directs the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Law and Racial Justice Clinics. The title: "The ACLU Has Lost Its Way: The organization now seems largely unable or unwilling to uphold its core values."
Progressive causes are near and dear to my heart. I am a feminist and staunch Democrat. As a federal public defender turned law professor, I have spent my career trying to make change in a criminal legal system that is riven with racism and fundamentally unfair to those without status and financial resources. Yet, as someone who understands firsthand that the fundamental rights to free speech and due process exist only as long as competent lawyers are willing to vigorously defend extreme positions and people, I view the ACLU’s hard-left turn with alarm. It smacks of intolerance and choosing sides, precisely what a civil-liberties organization designed to defend the Bill of Rights is meant to oppose.
I used to be a proud card-carrying member of the ACLU. Today, when its fundraising mailers and pleas to reenroll arrive in my mailbox, I toss them in the recycling.
I posted a Tweet of Glenn Greenwald on Facebook today (and see here):
I added some additional commentary by Glenn Greenwald:
The amazing thing is it's the same people, it's David Frum and Nicolle Wallace and Matthew Dowd and Bill Kristol and Max Boot," Greenwald said. "All these neocons back then who were doing this and made themselves the enemy of the country. They ended up in complete disrepute by the end of the second Bush-Cheney term, are now back in the saddle doing it on behalf of Democrats on their cable networks, on their newspapers' op-ed pages. And it's like people have no historical memory, they cheer for these people because they rehabilitated themselves by opposing Trump and that's all they know.
Right on cue, I received this comment:
The invasion of Ukraine is NOT like Vietnam,Korea, etc. and equating it with that is aPutin-friendly talking point. Do you work for FOX now?
To which I responded:
Are you suggesting that because I'm against a war with no stated end-game and no stated benefit to ordinary Americans, a war that is enriching America's vast military-industrial complex, a war that pushes us ever closer to the trigger point of an already extremely dangerous risk of nuclear holocaust, and a war that is sucking up massive financial resources that should be helping desperate Americans,, that I'm pro-Putin and that I work for FOX?
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Nellie Bowles, writing at Common Sense points out one of many deranged articles about Elon Musk, this one at the New York Times (image of the NYT headline below). Nellie's comments:
Pretty bad that baby Elon Musk didn’t solve apartheid: The Times has a new profile of Musk, who grew up in apartheid South Africa until he was 17, then emigrated to Canada so he wouldn’t have to serve in the military.
No matter, the Times’ effort is to smear him literally because he happened to be born into a country with a reprehensible government. Here’s what the reporter wrote: “Elon Musk grew up in a South Africa that saw the dangers of unchecked speech: Apartheid government propaganda fueled violence against Black people. Musk didn't experience that. He grew up in a bubble of white privilege.”
The word the Times was searching for to describe information flow in apartheid-era South Africa the exact opposite of “unchecked speech. It’s censorship. Newspapers blacked out their own columns in protest of government censorship. So determined are these writers to smear Musk and jam history into our modern language, they are literally rewriting apartheid as a problem of misinformation and too much free speech.
I enjoy listening to Tara Henley's podcasts, even though she unable to get along well with her former employer, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Here is how Bari Weiss describes her departure from CBC:
The story of Tara Henley is the story of countless liberals. Until recently, they were the ones pushing everyone else to be more tolerant, more understanding, more open-minded, more compassionate. Then, something happened — call it ideological succession or institutional capture or the new illiberalism — and, all of a sudden (or so it felt to them), they found themselves to the right of their friends and colleagues. Their crime? Refusing to abandon their principles in the service of some radical, anti-liberal dogma. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know well what we’re referring to. (See under: Paul Rossi or Maud Maron or Dorian Abbot.)
And so it was with Henley, an accomplished Canadian journalist whose book, “Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life,” kind of says it all. Last week, she resigned in style from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and struck out on her own here on Substack.
Henley's most recent article offers a list of many of the issues that left-leaning news media currently refuse to cover. The title to her article is "Meet the press: Why much of the media looks and sounds much the same."
Here’s a good place to start: Ask yourself how many liberal media pieces you’ve seen over the past two years that, say, interrogate COVID restrictions critically (especially early on, with school closures, lockdowns, and mask mandates). Or evaluate Black Lives Matter as a political movement, assessing its strengths and weaknesses. Or offer opposing viewpoints on transgender athletes in women’s sports; or mass immigration; or diversity, equity, and inclusion philosophies, trainings, or policies. Or acknowledge the excesses of #MeToo, or prejudice against the white working class. Or present critiques of identity politics. Or explore downsides of puberty blockers and gender transition surgery for teens; or delve into the growing censoriousness on social media and in education, Hollywood, the arts, and NGOs. Or probe inner city gun violence. Or reflect the positive sides of masculinity. Or talk about God. Or reference anything that’s currently deemed a conspiracy theory in non-derogatory terms (see: the lab leak theory). Or express genuine curiosity on the reasons behind the rise of independent media, whether that’s Joe Rogan or Substack.
This, I would argue, is the no-fly list. These are the tripwires.
I’ll admit that, months after leaving legacy media, I still feel an instinctive trepidation even running down this list — that’s how ingrained this is.
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