The Presidents’ Respective Children
Here is yet more evidence that the two political parties have two separate sycophant news teams. They cover the dysfunctional children of former President Trump and President Biden in starkly different ways.
Do you remember how the left-leaning news media hid the Hunter Biden laptop discovery? And then Twitter blocked the account of the New York Post as the election drew near? As Glenn Greenwald stated, the story was newsworthy for the corruption angle.
"Pretending that the Biden laptop story was about sex or drugs is utterly deceitful. A person's addiction struggles [and] consensual adult sex is not news. The story was (and is) about financial corruption. And there's *zero* doubt the docs were authentic," Greenwald wrote on Twitter.Hunter Biden has never denied that it was his laptop. In this CBS interview Hunter Biden stated that it could have been his laptop.
If this laptop and big paycheck (to a person lacking any credentials to merit that kind of pay) had been about any of Trump's degenerate children, the media would have been all over it. I thought about this disparity further while watching excerpts from Russell Brand's recent interview with Glenn Greenwald.
But now there is more about Hunter, yet you will not see any of this in the NYT/NPR/WaPo side of the media:
Really and truly, people are talking about paying Hunter Biden $500K for paintings that look like this. The NYT did comment on Biden's interest in painting, but never mentioned the big money it is anticipated he would be paid, allegedly, for his paintings.
Some people who have been in high places are noting the stench in the air:
President Barack Obama's ethics chief on Monday slammed Hunter Biden's 'shameful and grifty' sale of his art pieces for up to $500,000 to anonymous buyers as part of an upcoming exhibition that has already sparked bribery and potential money laundering fears.Walter Shaub, the former Office of Government Ethics director, also warned that it could be a way for 'influence seekers' or foreign governments to funnel money to the Biden family.
Shaub, who last week called out Biden administration officials for hiring a slew of family members to a variety of positions, has urged Hunter and his art dealer Georges Berges to reveal the identity of the buyers so the public can see if the buyers are trying to get access to the White House.
But there is yet more Hunter Biden news that the left-leaning legacy outlets has ignored. Only a few days after his father delivered a speech on the topic of racism at Tulsa, Hunter is hurling racial slurs in texts directed to his attorney, in the context of his attorney's $88K bill for work done regarding Hunter's joint venture with a large Chinese Oil Company. One can debate how newsworthy his foul language is, but if any of the Trump kids had written these texts, they would be all over the left-leaning media.
I don't claim to know anything substantive about these deals, including the $50K/month Hunter was being paid by Burisma. Greenwald commented on that back when the story broke in October 2020:
After the Post’s first article, both that newspaper and other news outlets have published numerous other emails and texts purportedly written to and from Hunter reflecting his efforts to induce his father to take actions as Vice President beneficial to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board of directors Hunter sat for a monthly payment of $50,000, as well as proposals for lucrative business deals in China that traded on his influence with his father.
A few days ago, Hunter Biden is reported to have used additional slurs against Asians.
My concern is, once again, that we have two media teams. They only report "news" that fits their narrative. The left-leaning legacy news never hesitated to maul the philistine and despicable Trump children, but it is hands-off when it comes to Hunter Biden, even though big amounts of suspicious money are connected with his exploits. And even though his moral character with regard to race relations conflicts sharply with the stated positions of his father, Joe Biden. On the other hand, the right wing media, such as the Daily Wire, is happy to heavily criticize Hunter Biden.
I'm convinced that many people don't actually want to be well informed. They choose their news sources so that they hear only those sorts of stories that make them feel like the world is the way they want it to be. This is true on the political left and the political right, and it doesn't seem like anything is going to change anytime soon. That said, can we at least start referring to the news media in a different way? Can we start referring to the two news teams as "news filters"? What news filter do you use? "I use the FOX news filter" or "I use the NPR/MSNBC/NYT/WaPo news filter. Doing this would make me feel 1% less bad about this rampant partisanship.
The Political Left’s Problem is not Joe Rogan. It’s in the Mirror.
Krystal Ball's commentary is spot. The Left constantly ignores Joe Rogan's many left-leaning positions and it's to their own detriment. One problem is that Joe is too damned independent and doesn't pass the left's political purity tests. Krystal also suggests a time-of-genesis and a motive for this dysfunction: Joe's words in support of Bernie Sanders during the primary.
The New Partisan ACLU
This change of de facto mission has been obvious for years. The ACLU is now unapologetically partisan, which is in sharp conflict with its stated principles. This NYT new coverage of this change is better late than never.
"It was supposed to be the celebration of a grand career, as the American Civil Liberties Union presented a prestigious award to the longtime lawyer David Goldberger. He had argued one of its most famous cases, defending the free speech rights of Nazis in the 1970s to march in Skokie, Ill., home to many Holocaust survivors.Mr. Goldberger, now 79, adored the A.C.L.U. But at his celebratory luncheon in 2017, he listened to one speaker after another and felt a growing unease.
"I got the sense it was more important for A.C.L.U. staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,” he said in a recent interview. “Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.”
The A.C.L.U., America’s high temple of free speech and civil liberties, has emerged as a muscular and richly funded progressive powerhouse in recent years, taking on the Trump administration in more than 400 lawsuits. But the organization finds itself riven with internal tensions over whether it has stepped away from a founding principle — unwavering devotion to the First Amendment."
The NYT piece offers this compelling evidence in support:
Since Mr. Trump’s election, the A.C.L.U. budget has nearly tripled to more than $300 million as its corps of lawyers doubled. The same number of lawyers — four — specialize in free speech as a decade ago.
As I've pointed out many times, the legacy media take-over by social justice/woke partisanship mirrors the take-over of the ACLU. Good to see the NYT finally look into the mirror and ask itself some simple questions about its own mission. That had to happen in order for this ACLU article to find the light of day.
Matt Taibbi: The Horseshoe Theory is Now a Real Thing
This is what I am seeing too. It is based on our Americhean (American + Manichean) zeitgeist. Matt Taibbi calls it the "horseshoe theory." He has unlocked his entire article, which I highly recommend, mostly for people who (mostly) will refuse to read it, but who need to read this. The title is "Congratulations, Elitists: Liberals and Conservatives Do Have Common Interests Now." Here is an excerpt:
The American liberalism I knew growing up was inclusive, humble, and democratic. It valued the free exchange of ideas among other things because a central part of the liberal’s identity was skepticism and doubt, most of all about your own correctitude. Truth was not a fixed thing that someone owned, it was at best a fleeting consensus, and in our country everyone, down to the last kook, at least theoretically got a say. We celebrated the fact that in criminal courts, we literally voted to decide the truth of things.
This new elitist politics of the #Resistance era (I won’t ennoble it by calling it liberalism) has an opposite view. Truth, they believe, is properly guarded by “experts” and “authorities” or (as Jon Karl put it) “serious people,” who alone can be trusted to decide such matters as whether or not the Hunter Biden laptop story can be shown to the public. A huge part of the frustration that the general public feels is this sense of being dictated to by an inaccessible priesthood, whether on censorship matters or on the seemingly daily instructions in the ear-smashing new vernacular of the revealed religion, from “Latinx” to “birthing persons.”
In the tone of these discussions is a constant subtext that it’s not necessary to ask the opinions of ordinary people on certain matters. As Plato put it, philosophy is “not for the multitude.” The plebes don’t get a say on speech, their views don’t need to be represented in news coverage, and as for their political choices, they’re still free to vote — provided their favorite politicians are removed from the Internet, their conspiratorial discussions are banned (ours are okay), and they’re preferably all placed under the benevolent mass surveillance of “experts” and “professionals.”
Add the total absence of a sense of humor and the inability of “moral clarity” politics to co-exist with any form of disagreement, and there’s a reason why traditional liberals are suddenly finding it easier to talk with old conservative rivals on Fox than the new authoritarian Snob-Lords at CNN, MSNBC, the Daily Beast or The Intercept. For all their other flaws, Fox types don’t fall to pieces and write group letters about their intolerable suffering and “trauma” if forced to share a room with someone with different political views. They’re also not terrified to speak their minds, which used to be a virtue of the American left (no more).
From the moment Donald Trump was elected, popular media began denouncing a broad cast of characters deemed responsible. Nativists, misogynists and racists were first in line, but from there they started adding new classes of offender: Greens, Bernie Bros, “both-sidesers,” Russia-denialists, Intellectual dark-webbers, class-not-racers, anti-New-Normalers, the “Substackerati,” and countless others, casting every new group out with the moronic admonition that they’re all really servants of the “far right” and “grifters” (all income earned in service of non-#Resistance politics is “grifting”). By now conventional wisdom has denounced everyone but its own little slice of aristocratic purity as the “far right.”
They’re wrong on the ideology, but right about one thing: they’ve created a brand of imperious elite politics so revolting that it has the potential to unite even this Balkanized wreck of a country. If they keep this up, liberals and conservatives may start talking for real, and maybe even fix a thing or two.