Matt Taibbi’s List of 21 False Claims About Russia by News Media

I'm still occasionally hearing people claim that the "stories" about "Russia" were "proven."

This article by Matt Taibbi was so well researched that I want to repost it, so you can have it ready to share. Written on March 18, 2021, the article is titled, "Master List Of Official Russia Claims That Proved To Be Bogus: The Director of National Intelligence releases a report, and the press rushes to kick the football again."

There were 21 such false stories, to which Taibbi cites, chapter and verse.

Taibbi himself tweeted the above article today, probably in response to this feeble tweet by the Seattle Independent:

Here is Volume I of Robert Mueller's March 2019 Report.

I've still occasionally hear from some people (informally, and on the street) that "Trump conspired with the Russians to interfere with the 2016 election."  When you next hear that claim, refer them to page 1 of Mueller's report and ask them whether, if Mueller had concluded the opposite, whether they would have believed that:

As set forth in detail in this report, the Special Counsel’s investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election principally through two operations. First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton Campaign and then released stolen documents. The investigation also identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign. Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

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John McWhorter Discusses Anti-Racism with Bill Maher

Linguistics Professor John McWhorter sat down with Bill Maher on a recent episode of Real Time to discuss "anti-racism." McWhorter describes himself as someone who is hearing things that don't make sense and his quest is to try to obsessively make sense of things like "anti-racism."  The interview was as intense as it was fast-moving. Several take-aways:

A) "Anti-racism" condescends to people who identify as "black," infantilizing them.

B) There is a great diversity of thought among those who identify as black, almost two-thirds of whom are middle class (or even higher earning), the majority of whom do not live in ongoing fear of being harassed or shot by the police,

C) None of this is to suggest that there isn't still racism, which needs to be addressed.

D) Wokeness is a religion where "whiteness" functions as "original sin" that afflicts even babies, a religion where Robin DiAngelo's misguided book, White Fragility is mistakenly being treated as "research" instead of second-rate literature that advocates for victimization;

E) People pretend to "atone" for "white privilege" by posting on FB that they are "doing the work." This solves nothing.

F) White Fragility is not representative of "the general black view of things."

G) There is no one "black view" of things - Also, "'Yes we can't'" has never been the slogan for black America and it's not now."

H) In the religion of Wokeness, advocates pretend that "racism has never been worse" than today, even in the 1960's and even during the 1850's. These are palpable untruths to any person who knows even a tiny bit of history. "Why is it un-black to address degree?"

I) It is childish for anyone to shut down opposing views to protect themselves from never being told that they are wrong. This "cathartic" approach will never change anything. We need meaningful engagement.

J) Social media has everyone "peeing in their pants," afraid to defer even minimally from Woke orthodoxy, which is making "mendacity" ubiquitous.

K) The fear of being honest and the fear to even tell a joke is "becoming almost everywhere. The only exceptions are people who are "weird like us and you don't mind being hated. But most people are not going to have that disease, and so we are stuck where we are."

If you'd like to follow John McWhorter, you can find him on his own Substack Website, It Bears Mentioning.   Also, McWhorter often joins Glenn Loury for conversation at The Glenn Show on Patreon. 

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Ben Fainer’s Bracelet

Ben Fainer inspired me. With his wonderful Irish-Polish accent, he consistently spoke of the need to love and forgive others, despite the horrors he had been through. This included long perilous years during the holocaust, including time at the concentration camp at Buchenwald.  I was so glad Ben allowed me to tell his story. He sat patiently in his living room as I asked him lots of questions. I just noticed today that my video interview of Ben has now been viewed by almost 100,000 people.

And now, Ben's daughter Sharon Berry has a new story. It has been determined that while in captivity, Ben created a metal bracelet that was recently discovered on the grounds of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Apparently my video helped to make this determination. I invite you to "meet" Ben by watching his video, which I filmed in his living room in 2012, a few years before he died. For more about Ben's bracelet, see also this article from today's edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 

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About the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Over the years, I have heard many references to the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), but I never stopped to really understand the extent to which China was thrown into upheaval by mostly young people who sought to purify the country. Here are some websites (and here) and short videos that are among the materials I reviewed tonight.  As I studied these materials, I was repeatedly tempted to draw comparisons to the contagion, humiliation and the rhetoric used by the Woke as they try to purify colleges and other American sense-making institutions in modern times. To be clear, is my belief and my hope is that we will not face widespread violence as a result of Woke ideology--there are massive historical and cultural differences between 1960's China and 2020's U.S. My comparison of Wokeness to the Chinese Cultural Revolution thus is quite limited in scope, though it is compelling in some ways.

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Jodi Shaw Describes the Racially Hostile Environment of Smith College

Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster invited Jodi Show onto their show to describe her experiences at Smith College. The details show the extent to which Critical Race Theory and Woke ideas have infected the culture of Smith College.

An excerpt of Jodi Shaw's discussion from the 18 min mark:

I started sending emails and asking for definitions because clearly we were using different dictionaries at this point I well understood that my definition of racism was not consistent with um smith college's definition and nor was my definition of what i think of with equity and inclusion, so I started asking for definitions and I wasn't able to get those. Instead I got referred to Ibram X. Kendi’s book. I got sent an essay called Me and White Supremacy . . .

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