Matt Orfalea’s New Mashup on the “Lab Leak Conspiracy Theory”

My faith that legacy media outlets will take journalism seriously has plummeted in recent years. Matt Orfalea's "conspiracy theory" mashup explores one issue (of many recent issues) where media coverage has been abysmal.

The news outlets kept claiming that the virus could never ever have emerged in a lab, yet they avoided this Peter Daszak video like kryptonite. Whenever they pompously trumpeted that the lab leak was a conspiracy theory, they NEVER mentioned this 2016 video featuring Peter Daszak, president of Eco-Health.

Continue ReadingMatt Orfalea’s New Mashup on the “Lab Leak Conspiracy Theory”

David Sachs’ Response to “Big Tech are Private Companies” and “Go Invent Your Own Internet”

Bari Weiss recently interviewed David Sachs on Common Sense, Bari's Substack. It is an excellent discussion of issues you will not see in legacy media outlets, who would like to see alternative media competition crushed. Here's an excerpt:

BW: The criticism that I hear a ton in response to what you're saying is: David, these are private companies. If I invent YouTube and I pay for the servers of YouTube and I've set up the whole architecture of the company, why can't I do what I want? Same with Facebook. Why don't I get to decide that I don't want some kind of clickbait or fake news or whatever on my thing? I'm going to police it. Who are you to tell me I can't?

DS: I think it's a very disingenuous argument. The same people who say that these social media companies, these big tech companies, should be free to do whatever they want because they're private companies are the same people pushing six bills through Congress right now to restrict and regulate those companies because they see them as monopolies. So they don't even believe their own argument. They all start making these libertarian arguments when these big tech companies are restricting speech in a way that they like. When they agree with the outcome, they want to give these companies the freedom to produce that outcome.

We need to fundamentally understand that free speech in our society has been privatized. The town square has been privatized. When the Constitution was written, the internet didn't exist. Back then, the town square was a physical place that you could go to, and there was a multiplicity of town squares all over the country. There were thousands of them and anybody could put their soapbox down and speak, and anyone could gather around and listen. That’s why, if you look at the First Amendment, it doesn't just protect freedom of speech and of the press. It also protects the right to peaceably assemble.

Well, where do people assemble today? They assemble in these giant social networks that have these gigantic network effects. That is where speech, especially political speech, occurs. And if you are shut out of that digital town square, to what extent do you still even have a First Amendment? To what extent do you have a right to speech? Well, I don't think you do. If you were to grab your soapbox today and go on the courthouse steps, they'll think you're a lunatic. You have no free speech right in this country if you are kicked off of these social networks.

So, I don't think it's good enough to say, well, these are private actors and, therefore, they can do whatever they want. Those private actors have too much power. They have the power to decide whether you, as an American, have an effective free speech right in this country. I think that's unacceptable. I think the Founders, the Framers of the Constitution, would never have permitted that.

...

BW: What do you say to the people who argue: If you don't like the way YouTube conducts itself, if you don't like the way Facebook conducts itself, no problem. Go make another one. Why is that not an acceptable solution to this problem?

DS: This is what you heard when Twitter and Facebook banned Trump. Their argument was: Go to a different app. And then Apple and Google banned Parler, which was the different app. And then the argument was, Well, that's not censorship. Just go create a website. And then Amazon Web Services started banning websites. So, at some point, when are you going to say this is an undue imposition on free speech? What am I supposed to do? Go create my own internet? All I wanted to do was post a tweet. Let’s not be obtuse to the power of these monopolies. I think people are being selectively oblivious to the network effects.

BW: We hear that phrase a lot: network effects. What does it mean?

DS: A network-effect business is one where the value of the service increases with the number of users. So if you think about Twitter or Facebook or the phone company, the more people who are on the service, the more value it has to everybody else. The value actually increases exponentially because the number of connections that can be made increases exponentially every time someone joins the service. If you or I want to create our own Twitter clone, it'll be very, very hard to do that because nobody else will be on it. So you have this huge chicken and egg problem. This is why these social networks are so powerful. They’ve got these huge network effects based on the fact that everybody is already on them, and it gets very, very hard to try and create a competing one.

Continue ReadingDavid Sachs’ Response to “Big Tech are Private Companies” and “Go Invent Your Own Internet”

Shamed News Media Elites Refuse to Come Clean Regarding Hunter Biden’s Laptop

What more proof do we need that Left-leaning "news" media thinks that its main job is to get particular people elected? See Matt Orfalea's mashup on Hunter Biden's Laptop. Then See Matt Taibbi's new article: "The Media Campaign to Protect Joe Biden Passes the Point of Absurdity: A development in the infamous laptop story further proves the "Russian Disinformation" tale was itself disinformation, shaming a herd of craven media stenographers."

Now consider this excerpt from Matt Taibbi's article:

In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless media stooges, many starring in Matt Orfalea’s damning montage above (the Hunter half-laugh is classic, by the way). All cooperated with intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s abandoned laptop and his dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma as “Russian disinformation.” They tossed in terms thought up for them by spooks as if they were their own thoughts, using words like “obviously” and “classic” and “textbook” to describe “the playbook of Russian disinformation,” in what itself was and still is a wildly successful disinformation campaign, one begun well before the much-derided (and initially censored) New York Post exposé on the topic from October of 2020.

Not to be petty, but — well, yes, let’s be petty, just a little, and point out that many of the people who were the most pompous about this story turned out to be the most wrong, including the conga line of Intercept editors and staffers who essentially knocked Glenn Greenwald all the way to Substack over the issue. There are more important things going on in the world, but for sheer bootlicking conformist excess and depraved journalist-on-journalist venom the “Russian disinformation” fiasco has no equal, and probably needs recording for posterity before it’s memory-holed via some creepy homage to Severance, or a next-gen algorithmic witch-hunt, or whatever other federally contracted monstrosities are being readied for deployment somewhere far up the anus of Silicon Valley.

Continue ReadingShamed News Media Elites Refuse to Come Clean Regarding Hunter Biden’s Laptop

Ukraine, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Problem with Whataboutism

I'll start by saying that Putin is a bad actor who is acting aggressively and killing innocent people. But I also need to add that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals. Is there really a problem saying both of these things? Turns out that I'm going light on the United States here. As Noam Chomsky recently stated, the United States thinks that it owns the entire world.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Except in today's tribal crazed environment, where the U.S. is entitled to protect its borders through its militarily-enforced hyper-extended sphere of influence but Russia is not allowed to resist NATO's death machines from being parked on its own borders, "because Putin is Hitler." End of Argument. Freddie DeBoer expands on a story about mass hysteria, fact-denial and hypocrisy that risks getting all of us physically roasted in a nuclear holocaust:

The people who say “whataboutism” don’t want to talk about carpet bombing in Cambodia. They don’t want to talk about death squads in El Salvador. They don’t want to talk about reinstalling the Shah in Iran. They don’t want to talk about the murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. They don’t want to talk about giving a hit list to rampaging anti-Communists in Indonesia. They don’t want to talk about the US’s role in installing a far-right government in Honduras. They don’t want to talk about US support for apartheid in South Africa. They don’t want to talk about unexploded ordnance that still kills and maims in Laos. They don’t want to talk about supporting the hideously corrupt drug lord post-Taliban regime in Afghanistan. They don’t want to talk about aiding literal Nazis and Italian fascists in taking over the government in Albania. They don’t want to talk about giving support to the far-right government’s “dirty war” in Argentina. They don’t want to talk about the US-instigated far-right coup in Ghana. They don’t want to talk about our illegal bombing of Yugoslavia. They don’t want to talk about centuries of mistreatment of Haiti, such as sponsoring the coup against Aristide. They don’t want to talk about sparking 36 years of ruinous civil war, and attendant slaughters of indigenous people, in Guatemala. They don’t want to talk about our drone war in Pakistan. They don’t want to talk about how much longer this list could go on. So when do we talk about that stuff, exactly? . . .

Well, OK, fine: I denounce Putin. I denounce his invasion. I support neither and have never suggested I did. Now will you, dear reader, denounce the oceans of blood the United States has spilled in pursuit of its own selfish interests, in the past century? Or do you have some jury-rigged excuse for every American crime I listed above and all the ones I didn’t have space to fit?

If you want the world to operate under the principle of self-determination of countries, you need to start with the country that is the indisputably most powerful and influential country on earth. And if you’re American your first priority and greatest influence lies in America’s government. I will repeat myself in saying that, if you don’t want to acknowledge our role in the world, it’s so much better simply to say, “I’m an American, I think America comes first, I don’t care about the wrong we do, love it or leave it.” That’s not a very enlightened attitude, but it has the benefit of a certain grim integrity, of plainfaced honesty. To insist that you care about self-determination and the principles of non-interference, and to maintain that the United States has the moral authority to opine about them, and to ignore our bloody history… for me, personally, it’s a bridge too far.

Continue ReadingUkraine, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Problem with Whataboutism

Has Russiagate Nudged Us to the Brink of Nuclear War in Ukraine?

Glenn Greenwald warned us about this risk of Russiagate several years ago.

Now that the U.S. is actively engaged in high-stakes brinksmanship with Russia over Ukraine, I can't rule out that Russiagate hysteria has been a significant factor. Admittedly, Russiagate is not the only factor. We are risking civilization-annihilating nuclear war for other reasons too.  For instance, decades of U.S. warmongering and profiteering.  Also, conflict pornography by our "news" networks, right and left wing, which constantly feature war-obsessed military officials and members of the spy state, often without disclosing their conflicts of interest. There is a profit-motive behind this media behavior too.

Equally troubling is the failure of our "news" outlets to offer viewpoints criticizing the dominant pro-war narrative. For instance, where are the voices advocating strongly for negotiation and peace?  Viewpoints like those of Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky: "This is part of the concept that [the United States] owns the world"

And how about our ignorance of history? The United States has a well-established track record of using our military to "save" countries by launching invasions that end up destroying countries financially, politically and socially. This is the sad state of U.S. foreign policy and the "news" industry that enables it, IMO.

Continue ReadingHas Russiagate Nudged Us to the Brink of Nuclear War in Ukraine?