Russian Spies Hiding Behind Every Tree

Truly, Russian Spies are EVERYWHERE!!!

I understand that many people have grown up reading and trusting NPR/MSNBC/NYT/WaPo, so their instinct is to keep reading and trusting. To be fair, there is still a lot of good information to be had in these places, but objective eyes will find huge swaths of fact-free insanity about Russia, including the apparent belief that every serious thinker who crosses Democrat Party Orthodoxy is a Russian spy or at least paid by the Russians. It's stunning that so many people paid to be "journalists" spout these claims in the absence of any facts. The ends apparently justify the means, however, so lies and censorship are deemed to be warranted to support one's team. These are very sad days for "journalism" in America.

Greenwald:

This is the mental illness with which liberal media outlets and liberal pundits have contaminated millions of American minds. They are trained to believe that, lurking everywhere, there are Americans with whom they disagree because they're paid and controlled by the Kremlin...All of these liberal journalists and pundits -- none of whom has ever broken a significant story, by the way -- know that a large percentage of their followers suffer from this mental illness of paranoia, believing that everyone with whom they disagree is a paid Kremlin spy.

Not a drop of proof is needed to make this false claim, even if you are paid to be a "journalist." Same problem with the "Russian Interference in the 2016 election." Do any of these cheerleaders for the Democrats care about the minimal extent of Facebook ads during that campaign?

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Trust in News Sources “at an All Time Low.”

Here is what Americans think of two of their main news sources, newspapers and television news:

This Country's Founders had a love/hate relationship with the newspapers, but I wonder whether so many Americans ever distrusted news providers as much as they do today. Here are a few excerpts from an article discussing the views of the Founders regarding the free press:

Founders spoke glowingly about the press as a pillar of democracy and guarantor of liberty. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, famously wrote in 1787 that "were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

George Washington framed the issue of free expression in almost apocalyptic terms: "If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter."

Yet discussing the free press of their day, the Founders also could often sound like those who are decrying "fake news" in 2020.

Under a barrage of criticism from newspapers published by his political opponents, Washington painted journalists as "infamous scribblers." Benjamin Franklin, himself a very successful newspaper publisher, described the press of his time as a resentful, vicious institution comparable to the Spanish Inquisition.

Jefferson frequently condemned the press as passionately as he had advanced their right to publish freely. "I deplore ... the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them," he wrote in 1814. "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper," he complained in a letter to another friend.

One more quote about the free press, this one by James Madison:
To the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

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Eric Weinstein Schools Ben Collins on Cookie Cutter Talking Points Employed by Elitists Pretending to be Journalists

Eric Weinstein Points out a big problem for Ben Collins and others pretending to be journalists of Legacy Media Outlets:

Ben Collins protests too much:

Weinstein then inserts the dagger (click this image to let it scroll for the full effect):

Collins is such a joke, not a journalist.

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Illustrative Debate of Whether We Should Trust Mainstream Media.”

I have long enjoyed listening to Malcolm Gladwell's podcasts and reading his books. However, my respect for him fell precipitously after reading the words he spoke at the Recent Munk debate in Toronto [Munk Transcript] Tara Henley reports, in her article, "An astonishing Munk debate in Toronto, Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray's landslide, Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg's mendacity - and five reasons why trust in the mainstream media is so low":

At the beginning of the event, the crowd was split 48 percent to 52 percent in favour of the resolution. By night’s end, a full 67 percent agreed that the mainstream media should not be trusted and only 33 percent disagreed. This is a 39 percent vote gain.

So, what exactly happened here?

Let’s unpack the specific tendencies that Gladwell and Goldberg exhibited that I believe swayed the audience — that, in fact, show up regularly in the mainstream press.

The first of these tendencies is mendacity.

The public is not stupid, and people get it when arguments are made in bad faith....

The second tendency on display is self-absorption.

While both Taibbi and Murray focused their arguments on the impacts of media failures on society as a whole, it was telling that Malcolm Gladwell largely focused his arguments on himself....

The third tendency is a demonstration of ideological capture.

The fact that Malcolm Gladwell fell back on arguments around a lack of diversity in the press — on a stage occupied by Taibbi, a Black man, a gay man, and a woman — signaled allegiance to a particular political project....

The pervasiveness of this political ideology within the press corps is a problem, and something that I hear complaints from the public about constantly.

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Americans Who Approve of China’s Ghastly Lockdown . . .

Nellie Bowles writes:

China’s obsession with Zero-Covid: Chinese authorities have taken a brutal stance on Covid: They have welded people into their own apartments and locked building exit doors. Last week, an apartment fire killed 10 in China’s Xinjiang province, and many say the dead were locked in their building and fire trucks were slowed by road blocks that were the result of the draconian Covid rules. The result has been unprecedented protests across the country. In Beijing, people chanted “no to Covid tests, yes to freedom.”

Some on the American left were quick to defend the CCP. Being welded into your apartment, having all the exits locked in a fire, these are just the price of safety. One particularly wild example: When the Washington Post ran a news story about the CCP’s flawed Zero-Covid response, the paper’s most famous reporter, Taylor Lorenz, slammed her employer’s phrasing and defended the CCP. “Choosing not to kill off millions of vulnerable people (as the US is doing) isn’t a ‘critical flaw,’” Lorenz wrote.

I do have good news for America’s Pandemic Forever advocates: You’ve won. Yes, a few people still go to the movies, and you can always tweet about how selfish and evil they are. But take a look at this chart . . .

→ Americans’ staggering loneliness: We were already spending more and more time alone each year. Then Covid hit, and our isolation grew much deeper. Our social lives haven’t bounced back.

I got emphatic pushback when I agreed with Glenn Greenwald (in August 2021) that our COVID policies need to be based on sober cost-benefit analyses, the same type of analyses we use when we discuss traffic safety. I think it's clear that Taylor Lorenz has convinced many people that more lockdown is the best policy, but she (and her ilk) are ignoring the exponentially greater damage that lockdowns have caused.

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