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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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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Judiciary and Intelligence Committees: CIA and Biden’s own Campaign Interfered with 2020 Election

From the WSJ article, "Biden’s CIA Assist in the 2020 Presidential Election: The agency, not only retirees, turns out to have worked on the Hunter excuse letter."

Even new habits are hard to break, and that’s the case with a federal intelligence apparatus that can’t keep its fingers out of elections. It seems President-elect Biden on Nov. 4, 2020, owed thanks not only to a cabal of former intelligence officials, but to the Central Intelligence Agency.

That’s the big takeaway of this week’s interim report from House committees detailing the origins of the October 2020 disinformation letter about Hunter Biden’s laptop. An earlier release revealed that Joe Biden’s campaign helped engineer a statement from 51 former U.S. spies that claimed the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” That letter provided Democrats, journalists and social-media companies the excuse to dismiss and censor evidence of Hunter’s influence peddling, removing an obstacle from his father’s path to victory.

Now we find out that, according to a written statement supplied to the committee, an active CIA official joined the effort to solicit more signers to the letter. The campaign to elect Joe Biden extended into Langley.

The report (issued jointly by the Judiciary and Intelligence committees and the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government) tells the sordid story of the letter, beginning with a call from Biden campaign official Antony Blinken to former Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell three days after the New York Post published its laptop scoop. Mr. Morell told the committees that Mr. Blinken wanted his “reaction” to the laptop news, but another signer said Mr. Morell put it to him bluntly: the Biden campaign “asked” for the letter.

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It’s Friday. It’s Time for Nellie Bowles to Discuss Gas Stoves at TGIF

It's Friday, which means Nellie Bowles is writing things like this at TGIF, at Free Press:

I thought banning gas stoves was a conspiracy theory? Now, hold on. I was told just in January of this year that the gas stove ban was a fake right-wing culture war thing.

NYT: “No One Is Coming for Your Gas Stove Anytime Soon”

Time: “How Gas Stoves Became the Latest Right-Wing Cause in the Culture Wars”

Salon: “Rumors of a gas stove ban ignite a right-wing culture war”

MSNBC: “No, the woke mob is not coming for your gas stove.”

AP News: “FACT FOCUS: Biden administration isn’t banning gas stoves”

The Washington Post: ​​“GOP thrusts gas stoves, Biden’s green agenda into the culture wars”

Which is why it’s so weird because just this week, New York state lawmakers banned gas stoves from all new construction. So it definitely does seem like Dems are coming for gas stoves, in that they just banned them in one of America’s most populous states.

There’s usually a slightly longer lag between when the mainstream press tells us something is a crazy lie and when the press says okay, fine, it’s not a lie, it’s actually true, and also it’s a good thing—so this is surprising. I’ll be over here huffing carbon oxides and vapors.

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The Annual Love-In with the White House and “Journalists”

Have you recently visited any of the left-leaning corporate media outlets to try to find one thing, anything, that they write that is critical of Joe Biden and Democrats? What are the odds that even your favorite politician can do no wrong for 2 1/2 years? But it happens over and over. With only a few notable exceptions (e.g., Tucker Carlson), it also happens on the right.

Well, it's time for those journalists to celebrate with the country's centers of power and you will never hear Glenn Greendald heap such scorn upon other human beings. It's because they are proudly abandoning their mission to be adversaries of the White House, not buddies seeking to get even more friendly. The net result is what you don't see: News accounts that **** badly on the White House. Here's an transcript from Glenn's Rumble show, System Update:

s repulsive as it is to watch corporate journalists make this pilgrimage to the White House that they make every year under the guise of the White House Correspondents Dinner, where they pretend to celebrate their commitment to press freedom and the important role they play in safeguarding our democracy, it actually is important to look at because it is one night where they let the mask drop and reveal who and what they really are. It's become kind of like the Oscars, in the sense that – in many senses, actually, but one important one is that it is not just one night, but many days leading up to it, where they have all kinds of parties that are the buzziest of the ones that they get to attend. But they also spend a lot of time before the event trying to justify to the American people why it is that these people who claim to be our watchdogs, the people who are safeguarding our basic rights, who are holding our government accountable, are instead dressing up like it's the Oscars, in gowns and tuxedos, and appearing with celebrities and the politicians they supposedly hold accountable at the gaudiest and sleaziest event you can possibly imagine held at the White House hosted by Joe Biden, the person whom they're supposed to be adversarially covering.

And so, in the days leading up to the event, they spend a lot of time trying to justify what it is that they're doing and within those justifications reside a great deal of insight into how they actually think. As I said, it's a mask-dropping event. They know what it makes them look like, but they do it anyway because they're so desperate for the self-importance that it provides. It's really why they do their job – to be around power or to be accepted by power, to feel as though they're part of the Royal Court – and so, it's way too valuable to their sense of purpose and self-identity to relinquish it, even though they know that it's one of the most revealing lights that ever get shined on them.

You can view the entire episode here, at Rumble.com

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