Jeffrey Sachs Discusses the Death of the Washington Post

Jeffrey Sachs:

I had a chat with a longtime friend and actually a classmate of mine from Harvard from decades ago, who was a senior reporter at one of the most important newspapers. I said, "You know what? I think the US did it." And he said, "Of course, the US did it. Who else?" And I said, Hmm, maybe your paper could mention something like that, but just today said "The Russians did it." He said, "Come on, Jeff, come on!" I said, "Are you kidding? Could we have a serious discussion of this?" And he said to me, "You know, the editors not so interested in that."

This is a friend from decades. I said, "You know, when I was young, I turned to your newspaper, because of Watergate, because of the Pentagon Papers. And I loved it. And he said to me, "That paper is so dead and gone, Jeff, you have to understand that."

This a really talented guy. A lead journalist and he's telling me the paper that I love is dead and gone.

If you asked me why, I really cannot figure it out why your paper doesn't want to beat the government over the head when it tells ridiculous stories like "Nord Stream was was was blown up by six people on a boat," like they tried for one day. Okay, come on. This was this was put out by serious media because it was almost a joke from the intelligence agency. Why these media are so in line with official narratives? I don't fully understand. I know all the theories, money, advertising, power and many other things. But the truth is, it's dreadful compared to what it was 40 years ago. Dreadful. And it's gotten a lot worse.

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“No One is Safe”: The Many Stages of the COVID Messaging Campaign.

Matt Orfalea offers a new collection of the many stages of the Covid-19 messaging campaign, including a collective roar against “asking questions” or “doing your own research.”

Matt Taibbi follows up with this article: "Looking Back on the Sadism of the Covid-19 Shaming Campaign: As Matt Orfalea's new video shows, Apologies are due for the media campaign against "the unvaccinated," which unveiled open cruelty as public policy strategy." An excerpt:

I got the shot and never advised people not to get vaccinated. I couldn’t imagine an area where I was less qualified to give advice. But this is the point: the same people Orf shows picking up torches and railing with bloodcurdling certainty against “the unvaccinated” are nearly all people who knew as little as me, and whose beliefs about the vaccine were at best secondhand.

You’re disgusted at those who “do their own research”? What do you think journalism is? None of us do lab experiments. The job is always an imperfect effort to figure out which sources are most trustworthy, and because even the most credentialed often screw up, we always need to leave room for consensus proving wrong.

In this case one didn’t need a microbiology degree to recognize something about Covid-19 messaging was off. From flip-flops about masks (an “evolving situation,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said) to unwillingness to be frank in discussing natural immunity or risks to children, even casual news-readers saw confusion in the ranks of senior officials. Later, a series of reversals on key questions — first about whether the vaccine prevented contraction, then about whether it prevented transmission — left even people who wanted to follow official advice unsure of what to do.

I hope Matt’s video survives as a warning. There is still a lot of investigation to be done, in particular about the origins of the pandemic — certain segments of the national audience may still be in for a shock or two there — but as Matt shows, we already see a cautionary tale about faulty information being used to gin up real hatred.

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How the Gay Rights Agenda was Commandeered by Transgender Ideology

Andrew Sullivan points out that consequential decisions were made with regard to gay rights without his advice or consent.

When you examine the other issues at stake — public schools teaching the concepts of queer and gender theory to kindergartners on up, sex changes for children before puberty, the housing of biological males with women in prisons and rape shelters, and biological males competing with women in sports — you realize we are far beyond what the gay rights movement once stood for. It’s these initiatives from the far left that are new; and the backlash is quite obviously a reaction to the capture of the gay rights movement by queer social justice activists.

These activists, marinated in critical gender and queer theory, have picked several unnecessary fights and, especially since the convulsions of 2020, have pushed and pushed a woke revolution until a dangerous backlash was inevitable.

The core belief of critical queer theorists is that homosexuality is not a part of human nature because there is no such thing as human nature; and that everything is socially constructed, even the body. Because heterosexuality is the overwhelming norm, and homosexuality the exception, and because society is nothing but a complex of oppression, homosexuals are defined by their rejection of heteronormativity. To be queer is inherently to exist on the margins; to be odd, peculiar, weird, queer, hated, oppressed, and in revolt and rebellion. To be queer is to be dedicated to subversion, to mock conventions, to deconstruct language, to dismantle the human body, to defy “nature” and, above all, to liberate humankind from the prison of gender.

To be homosexual, in contrast, is merely to be attracted to the same sex, and gays and lesbians run the gamut of tastes, politics, backgrounds and religions. Some are conservative, some radical, some indifferent. Some gays are queers. But most aren’t. And queers now run what was once the gay rights movement. (For a longer, piercing reflection on the takeover, read historian Jamie Kirchick’s new essay in Liberties. For a discussion of the homophobia of the new queer activism, see Ben Appel’s excellent essay in Spiked.)

No one held a news conference and announced that from 2015 on, after Obergefell, the gay rights movement had changed its entire rationale. But they sure gave hints. The Human Rights Campaign, once a relatively moderate group, replaced “gay” and “lesbian” with the acronym “LGBTQ+” and expanded the word “queer” to describe anyone gay, lesbian, transgender, or even straight who defied heteronormativity. They changed the flag from a simple rainbow, to one that included some races (only black and brown — no Asians or whites) and transgender ideology. Their building in DC is festooned with a massive banner declaring their mission: “Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter.” Their new head is a woman who calls herself “queer,” not lesbian.

Then they quietly changed the meaning of the word “gay” so that it no longer referred to same-sex attraction, but to same-gender attraction; and changed the word “men” to include people with vaginas and uteruses, and the word “women” to include people with dicks and balls. Checkmate for the gays! We are all now just bigots with “genital preferences,” just like the Christianist right used to claim. Just to add to the confusion, hundreds of new “genders” were adopted — because some teens on Tumblr once invented them and queer theorists loved them.

Go to The Weekly Dish to read Sullivan's full article.

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The Durham Report Should Destroy all Remaining Beliefs that Trump Colluded with Russia–But it Won’t

The Confirmation Bias is strong. Almost none of the millions of people who spent years convincing themselves that Donald Trump colluded with Russia is willing to read the 12-page Executive Summary of the Durham Report, which methodically dismantles their cherished world view. They would much rather ingest the soft-pedaled versions of the report offered by corporate media outlets that lavished themselves with awards for for engaging in journalism malpractice. I don't actually know all these millions of people, of course, but based on several conversations I've recently had with "True-Blue" people, they want to continue believing what they believe.

Those of us who have been following independent media (e.g., Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi) are not surprised by the conclusions of the 316-page Durham Report.

One more thing . . . at Racket News, Susan Schmidt summarizes the main points of the Durham Report. Here article is titled: "Eight Takeaways From the Durham Report" Perhaps the overall headline could have been "U.S. Intelligence Agencies Attempt to Tip the Election in Favor of Hillary Clinton, Whose Campaign Paid for and Received False Intelligence to Lead the Way." Something like that. Here are Schmidt's eight takeaways:

1. There was no valid predicate for the investigation, and the FBI knew it.

2. “There’s nothing to this, but we have to run it to ground.”

3. “It’s thin”; “There’s nothing to this.”

4. The Trump campaign investigation was premised on “raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated intelligence,” and U.S. intel agencies possessed no “actual evidence of collusion” when the probe began

5. Sensational stories published in the New York Times in February and March 2017 claiming Trump associates were in contact with Russian intelligence agents were false.

6. FBI Director James Comey pushed heavily for an investigation of Carter Page, starting in April 2016 when Page was a government witness in an espionage investigation of Russian diplomats in New York.

7. At the direction of the FBI, confidential human source Stefan Halper recorded lengthy conversations with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, in which each denied the campaign had any involvement with Russian officials.

8. Durham was highly critical of the FBI’s “startling and inexplicable failure” to investigate the so-called “Clinton Intelligence Plan.”

[More . . . ]

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Durham Report Findings Unsurprising to Those Who Have Had their Eyes Wide Open

The conclusions of the Durham report are not surprising to those of us who follow independent new media. For years, we've seen shoddy story after shoddy story revealing that the driving motivation of the two dominant flavors of corporate media is to serve as the PR Departments of the two dominant political parties. It has also long been clear (e.g., from the Twitter Files and the coverup regarding Hunter Biden's laptop) that the FBI & CIA are partisan organizations. Many people I know don't mind being played. They would rather think about short-term results than the long term damage that continues to be inflicted on American institutions. No matter who you prefer to be president, these revelations should be immensely disturbing.

From the National Review: "This was one of the dirtiest political tricks in American history. The damage it has done to American trust in the FBI and our intelligence agencies is incalculable."

Here is another straight-forward account from The National Review, a conservative leaning media outlet that vigorously opposed Donald Trump: "FBI Lacked ‘Any Actual Evidence of Collusion’ between Trump Campaign, Russia When Crossfire Hurricane Launched, Durham Finds":

The Department of Justice and the FBI did not have “any actual evidence of collusion” between Russian officials and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and began their Crossfire Hurricane probe of Trump’s campaign based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” according to a report released on Monday by special prosecutor John Durham.

Durham scolded federal law enforcement and counter-intelligence officials for failing to “uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law” as part of their investigation.

He wrote that at least one FBI agent criminally fabricated language in an email that was used to obtain a FISA surveillance order. And he accused FBI leaders of displaying a “serious lack of analytical rigor” and relying significantly on “investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents,” referring to staffers and allies of Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic presidential nominee, whose campaign funded the Steele dossier through its law firm Perkins Coie.

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