Sanjay Gupta is one of the good guys. During the pandemic, he has provided a lot of good information regarding COVID. That said, Joe Rogan had him on the ropes as Gupta tries to defend the misconduct of CNN, Gupta's employer. Well worth watching and excellent analysis by Krystal and Saagar.
Two related things of note. First, Glenn Greenwald notes that Democrats are falling in love with America's Deep State:
What the fuck is happening to Democrats? We have tons of recent evidence telling us that the deep state exists and that it comprises anti-democratic poison coursing through our country's arteries.
Six or seven years ago, “Deep State” was a term you would only see in left-leaning media. Bill Moyers explored the theme on his site from time to time, and when The Nation asked Edward Snowden about it, he said, “There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there.”If this is not enough to make you cry a river, Taibbi reminds us that the liberal news media is infested with spooks:The “deep state” was on the liberal left’s front burner then because a spate of horrendously ugly revelations put it there. We learned via Snowden that the NSA was collecting the communications of people all around the world in secret (Carollo might want to mark down that congress wasn’t informed) in a program the U.S. Court of Appeals just last year declared illegal.
We found out top intelligence officials like CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to congress, among other things about the warrantless surveillance program, and got away without perjury charges despite a furious outcry from legislators (another useful factoid for Carollo, on the oversight front). We learned about the CIA’s systematic use of torture techniques, ranging from anal feeding to threatening to rape and murder relatives to induced hypothermia, another fun set of pastimes the agency decided not to burden congress with knowledge of. . . . Pre-Trump, all of this spoke to the worst nightmares of American liberalism. Millions of Boomers and Gen-Exers alike had grown up worshipping at the altar of Miranda and Mapp v. Ohio, believing the ideas of due process and transparency inviolable. . . .
Young or not, the average commentator now is both committed to forgetting the sordid history of agencies like the CIA, and perfectly equipped mentally to keep that commitment. . . .
Then Trump arrived. Almost immediately, it was obvious his historical destiny was to be the best thing that ever happened to the secret services. In the same way hydroxychloroquine became snake oil the instant Trump said he was taking it, the “Deep State” became a myth the moment Trump and his minions started talking about it. Deep state warriors like Brennan, Clapper, and former CIA chief Michael Hayden, held in near-universal disdain before as some of the world’s most loathsome people, people so morally ugly it showed on their hideous faces, became immediately respectable by rebranding themselves as Trump critics. The early Trump years, in fact, made heroes of every tumescent peeping-Tom creep and spook in the federal register, now cast in the press as democracy’s infantry, saving the world through intercepts, informants, and leaks.
In a flash, programs that terrified American liberals previously, like FISA, became weapons of Holy War, in the ongoing campaign to Oust Trump via a succession of investigations and impeachment bids. When it came out that a known FBI informant spied on presidential candidate Trump, pundits not only cheered, they refused outright to call it spying.
. . . .
The cultural memories of the coming wave of media professionals extend back a few years at most. Most have read thousands more tweets than book pages. Their opinions come mainly from the dung-pile of popular news and are in sync with most Democrats, whom polls consistently show to have strong majority favorable views of the CIA and the FBI, a dramatic turnaround from the pre-Trump years. In fact, now that the War on Terror has ostensibly been reconfigured to target gun owners, white supremacists, and “insurrectionists,” they can scarcely remember why they ever felt negatively about the NSA or the folks at Langley, which of course makes them perfect for their jobs. In a dystopia, a good memory is just an inconvenience.
Now, just like any other tinpot third-world country, we get our news directly from secret agents. I made a list once:
On September 29th, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) published a letter addressed to President Joe Biden, requesting “Federal Assistance to Stop Threats and Acts of Violence Against Public Schoolchildren, Public School Board Members, and Other Public School District Officials and Educators.” NSBA's dishonest request to President Biden resulted in Attorney General Merrick Garland's Oct 4 misguided memorandum, stating that the Justice Department “is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate.”
FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism) offers this detailed and much-needed point-by-point rebuttal to NSBA's dishonest letter to President Biden.
FAIR is a grassroots nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing civil rights and liberties for all Americans, and promoting a common culture based on fairness, understanding and humanity.. See FAIR's recent announcement for more information on the purpose of FAIR and recent efforts of FAIR to combat Woke racism.
Here is a quick link to FAIR's October 13, 2021 Point-by-Point rebuttal to NSBA's letter to President Biden.
Katie Couric now admits that she censored Ruth Bader Ginsburg's comments regarding kneeling during the national anthem to "protect" RGB. Here is an excerpt from the NY Post:
Couric, being a “big RBG fan” and feeling protective of her and the controversy the comments would likely embroil her in, wrote in the book that she “lost a lot of sleep” and felt extremely “conflicted” over deciding whether she should include Ginsburg’s full thoughts on the matter.
In her new book Couric claims that she withheld the full quote (which would have been highly newsworthy) because RBG “was elderly and probably didn’t understand the question.”
What did RBG actually say in 2016? Here are a few screen shots from the New York Post:
Note that for Couric, RBG was too old to understand Couric's question but not too old to serve as a high-functioning Justice on the Supreme Court.
Here's what is really going on: RBG's statement simply didn't fit the preconceived media narrative Couric was serving up. That was the real problem. Modern journalism is both what they tell you and what they withhold from you. They are not content to tell you facts so that you can think for yourself. They want to tell you how to think and they do this by misleading you.
BTW, this is not the first left-leaning institution that refused to accurately report the words of their hero, RGB. Remember what the ACLU recently did?
This Tweet by Christopher Rufo summarizes what too often passes for journalism in the left wing media. This misconduct by NSBA and the AP are apparently behind Merrick Garland's unwarranted letter suggesting (without offering any examples) that parents passionately complaining at school board meetings about Woke Ideology and masking mandates for children are acting as domestic terrorists.
What's really going on? Reason sums it up:
Has some great number of teachers, principals, and district leaders come under violent attack? Of course not. What both the Justice Department and the concerned school boards are really talking about it is the increased number of recent community meetings that have featured angry feedback from parents. These parents are sick of COVID-19 mitigation efforts that have relegated actual students to afterthought status within the education department: the farce of virtual learning, mandatory closure when asymptomatic cases are detected, ceaseless masking. Young people who have the least to fear from the pandemic—the severe disease and death rate for the under-18 crowd is extremely low—have been forced to make tremendous educational and social sacrifices to bend the curve of COVID-19. Families are fed up with a public education system that puts the needs of students last, and they are speaking up about it.
Many parents are also increasingly concerned about the curriculum in their schools. Garland's memo garnered widespread attention in conservative media circles yesterday after it was shared on Twitter by Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who works to expose what he has termed "critical race theory." As I wrote previously, whether or not CRT is literally being taught in many K-12 schools hinges in part on a semantics argument. CRT, the obscure academic theory positing that the structures of U.S. society are racist to their core—and thus it is impossible to separate or ignore racism when confronting other issues—is not exactly sweeping U.S. kindergartens; but CRT—the tendency to reduce individuals to crude racial stereotypes that is pushed by divisive and misguided anti-whiteness gurus like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi—has certainly become an important component of corporate and university diversity training, and is, to some extent, trickling down to K-12 instruction.
The above explanation by Reason anticipates the deception offered by the NYT version of the Garland letter:
The attacks faced by educators, the organization wrote, include verbal attacks for approving Covid-19 safety policies such as masking, as well as physical threats stemming from false allegations that schools are teaching “critical race theory,” a legal framework primarily taught in graduate school that examines racism as a social construct embedded in policies and institutions. In recent months, some parents and politicians have invoked the phrase in seeking to restrict teaching about racism in public schools.
[Emphasis Added]
Whatever you'd like to call it is beside the point, but Critical Race Theory" is often used and for good reason. Contrary to the NYT assertion, it is not a "false allegation." Many parents are justifiably angry that many schools are doubling down on race essentialism and many other simplistic, divisive and destructive racial training teaching K-12 students, for example, that all black students are oppressed and all white students are oppressors.
The NSBA tactics and the AP false claim that it fact checked the NSBA are entirely predictable. Rather than face the fire of understandably outraged parents, NSBA would rather shut the parents up with claims that they are "terrorists" rather than have meaningful conversations.
One more thing about the nomenclature. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has it right about "Critical Race Theory":
Ayaan Hirsi Ali notes:
[R]egardless of which trendy three-letter term you prefer to describe the latest iteration of America’s obsession with race, the goal in each case is the same: to shift away from meritocracy in favour of an equality of outcome system.
James Lindsay would summarize the Woke strategy as two-fold:
