The NYT Presents the “News”

This paragraph from an article in the New York Times speak for itself:

Mr. Kennedy has singled out Froot Loops as an example of a product with too many artificial ingredients, questioning why the Canadian version has fewer than the U.S. version. But he was wrong. The ingredient list is roughly the same, although Canada’s has natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots while the U.S. product contains red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1 as well as Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, a lab-made chemical that is used “for freshness,” according to the ingredient label.

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What People are Missing if They Aren’t reading X (Twitter)

It's wild out there in the lands of Politics and Culture. I've been doing some collecting and I'd like to offer some of the things that especially caught my attention recently.

Glenn Greenwald is on fire. Here he is once again pointing out DNC/Corporate Media Hypocrisy:

I've lost count of the people who have told me that they don't know what Robert F. Kennedy actually says and they don't want to find out. And then They claim that he is "anti-vax" and a "conspiracy theorist," as though saying that is a substitute for knowledge. Michael Shellenberger comments:

This really happened. How could EVERYONE in the corporate media forget?

The Ukraine war (which has killed 600,000 Ukrainians so far) must must must go on because . . . trust us . . . says Anthony Blinken, neocon in Joe Biden's cabinet and one of the architects of the Iraq War.

Tulsi Gabbard was really put on this list this year after she expressed a political position in support of Trump. Everything else here is absolutely true. Does this sound like America?

It's guaranteed won't hear these things about Matt Gaetz at your favorite corporate media outlets. Independent journalist Lee Fang will tell you:

If really you'd like to learn RFK, Jr's positions on important topics (and you should want to know them), here are some of his main points, succinctly set out and annotated:

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What it is Like to Start Seeing the Progressive Left for What it is.

Fascinating video. This woman recently started seeing the DNC and progressive left for what they are. She describes the experience of scales falling from her eyes.

I created a transcript of her 3-minute video:

I feel like I have a unique perspective with this whole election thing. Because I used to be very, very far left, like I was one of the people having a fucking mental breakdown in 2016 when he won, right? And I didn't even like him up until six months ago, when it became very obvious that they were staging a coup and tried to assassinate him. And then some shit started clicking. So I'm still very new to this whole side of things. But the thing is, when I was very far left, like, radically far left, I thought I knew what was going on. I genuinely believed I was informed. I thought I knew better than everybody else, and that's what these people think, too. And the thing is I would get so triggered and so angry when people would question me because I didn't actually know what the hell I was talking about. I thought I did, but really I didn't actually know any policies. I didn't actually know any politics. All I actually knew was what I had seen online, in mainstream media, and because everybody was saying, I just assumed it had to be right, right. And I think where a lot of this comes from is like, people just don't want to be wrong. Like, it's humbling and it's embarrassing to acknowledge that you were wrong or that you didn't know as much as you thought you did, but I would get so defensive and fly off the handle when and whenever somebody would question me, because I didn't actually have any talking points, and the talking points I did have were inaccurate.

But I didn't want to be wrong so I just kept fucking regurgitating. I just kept echoing the same shit that I was hearing over and over again, and that's what people are still doing. And I I don't blame them. I'm not mad at them, because really, I mean, if you're only exposed to that, then that's what you're gonna believe.

But it's crazy to be on the other side of it for this election and see just how misinformed people are, and they will argue with you, and I won't have a card, because they will argue with you till they're blue in the face because they are just so convinced that they're right, and I was one of those people, and the fear they're feeling is very real. I'm not invalidating the fear. I'm just it's just that the fear is not founded in anything factualbecause it's not the things that they're scared about. It's not going to happen. It didn't happen last time, it's not going to happen this time.

And it's just it's so crazy. It's like being the sober person at a party full of drunk people.

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Hollywood’s Struggles with Wokeness

Michael Shellenberger's article at Public. "We Are Only Now Starting To Recover From The Madness

Its political power has broken, but Wokeism is still ruining the culture."  Excerpt:

“Complete intolerance became almost a religion,” wrote [actress Justine] Bateman, “and one’s professional and social life was threatened almost constantly. Those that spoke otherwise were ruined as a warning to others.”

Hollywood is not only one of the most status-obsessed neighborhoods in the world, it is also one of the most Woke. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Pictures mandated racial quotas. CBS required that 50% of its writers’ rooms be non-white. And a culture of fear of saying the wrong thing spread.

“This was the era of trying to exercise control over those who dd not want to follow the crowd,” wrote Bateman, “and has their own ideas about what they needed to do.”

At this point, Bateman circles back to the demands of the SAG actors union, which protested studios efforts to replace them with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

“This dampened our culture and innovation, bringing people to even think that generative #AI, a regurgitation of the past, was actually our cultural future. When you starve a society of those called to be independent thinkers and cultural and intellectual innovators, you rob that society of any forward movement.”

What Bateman is saying is that Wokeism had so destroyed cultural innovation in Hollywood that many of its leaders, executives, and creative geniuses had become resigned to AI taking over the role of real humans.

Bateman isn’t alone in her assessment. “Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” the writer and director of HBO’s “The White Lotus” told fellow Gen Xers Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik of The Free Press.  “We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma.”

Bateman put her finger on the essential status-obsessed nature of Wokeism, which had been taken up most vigorously by Millennials but enabled by the “Me” generation of Baby Boomer liberals.

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Democrats Embracing the Warmongers

This wasn't on my Bingo card either . . .

The NYT did a mea culpa for its Iraq war lies:

But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge.

But now the NYT is back to lying with vigor:

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