Nord Stream Story Further Exposes the Washington Post as U.S. Propaganda Partner

For those of you who think that the Washington Post is a credible news source, please notice that today's WP article on the destruction of the Nord Stream Pipeline, purportedly by Ukrainians, fails to mention: A) shortly before its destruction, Joe Biden promised that he would make sure that the pipeline was no longer operational B) Much decorated investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published a detailed account that the United States destroyed the pipeline and C) Immediately after the destruction of the pipeline, Victoria Nuland, working for the U.S. Secretary of State celebrated celebrated that the Nord Stream pipeline "is now a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea."

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New Study Regarding Tribalism in Politics

New study by Bernstein, Zambrotta, Martin, & Micalizzi on political tribalism. Disturbing and not surprising to anyone who has eyes and ears. Title is: "Tribalism in American Politics: Are Partisans Guilty of Double-Standards?"

Here is the discussion section:

Across experiments, we found strong evidence for the existence of political tribalism and the application of double-standards. In Study 1, we found that tribalism occurs for the perceived legitimacy of hypothetical election outcomes. When asked whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden would be the legitimate president under three different scenarios, Republicans viewed Trump as more legitimate than Biden while Democrats viewed Biden as more legitimate than Trump. Similarly, in Study 2 Part 1, Republicans supported identical presidential policies and actions more under Donald Trump than Barack Obama while Democrats supported identical policies and actions more under Barack Obama than Donald Trump.

A noteworthy element this study is that each item was, in fact, true under both Presidents, which highlights the study’s real-world importance and is an important contribution over prior experiments. In Study 2 Part 2, we showed that Republicans viewed identical statements attributed to Bill Clinton as more bigoted than those attributed to Donald Trump while Democrats viewed the statements as more bigoted when attributed to Trump instead of Clinton. Further, Republicans viewed a statement advocating colorblindness to be generally not racist when attributed to either Dr. Martin Luther King (MLK) or Donald Trump (though racism scores were slightly higher in the latter condition); Democrats also viewed the statement as low in racism when attributed to MLK, but the racism score increased drastically when attributed to Trump. Taken together, these studies suggest that tribalism permeates many aspects of political life and discourse. Policy agreement differs according to the person enacting the policy. Perceptions of racism and xenophobia depend on the person who utters the statement. Alarmingly, even the perceived legitimacy of elections is dependent upon the winner; that is, people assign different standards for election legitimacy depending upon whether their preferred candidate wins or loses. Moreover, some of these effects are rarely seen in the social or cognitive sciences (e.g., Fs>250 when sample size <150), which suggests that tribalism plays a large role, at least in certain contexts.

Our main interest was in documenting if bias exists among each side of the political aisle. However, the study does invite us to ask which side exhibits greater tribal bias . . . To the degree that our results can help weigh in on this question, there was some indication that bias is higher among Democrats, which we call “left-leaning asymmetry”

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Groups Claiming to Fight “Disinformation” Hide What They Are Doing

At Public, Michael Shellenberger writes:

The people who say they are fighting disinformation appear to be transparent and trustworthy. Groups like Stanford Internet Observatory and the Atlantic Council put photos, bios, and contact information for their staff and board members on their websites. They record videos that explain their work. And they regularly write for mainstream media publications.

But of the 50 top ”anti-disinformation” governmental and nongovernmental groups in the world, which Matt Taibbi’s investigative team at Racket identified, only one has agreed to answer our questions, and only 10 even bothered responding to our repeated requests for an interview.

It’s reasonable to wonder if this low response rate has something to do with the fact that I have repeatedly called for all of them to be defunded and dismantled because they are violating a fundamental human right.

But the key “disinfo” censorship groups are not giving substantive interviews to other independent journalists. Indeed, over the last several weeks, they have increasingly gone quiet....

Two weeks ago, BBC heavily promoted the launch of its own “anti-disinfo” program called “Verify,” but has refused to answer questions about it or make its 27-year-old host, whose role is apparently to fact-check all of the news, available for an interview.

And now, the lead censorship organization, Stanford Internet Observatory, is refusing to respect a House Judiciary Committee subpoena for records in the form of “tickets” from the Jira project management software system...

Why? What are Stanford Internet Observatory, Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, BBC, and other pro-censorship organizations hiding?

Stanford Internet Observatory says it was simply “flagging” disfavored views to Twitter and Facebook, not demanding that they be censored, and not acting on behalf of the government.

But the de facto leader of the SIO, and the rest of the Censorship Industrial Complex, Renee DiResta, openly boasted that the Virality Project existed to act as a proxy for the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security in demanding censorship by social media platforms of true vaccine side effect information.

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Exposing the Pretendians

Peter Boghossian Reports on the "Pretendians." An excerpt from Peter's article:

There is an epidemic of primarily white people—and white women in particular—who are pretending to be Native Americans for professional gain. Dubbed “Pretendians,” these individuals are predominantly active in academia and hold tenured faculty positions or even department chairs.

To be sure, this is a cultural oddity. It is not, however, particularly surprising given the career advantages the academy confers on Native Americans. What is bizarre is that once a university finds out that one of its faculty is pretending to be Native American, they do nothing about it. Nothing.

I invite you to ponder this: The same institutions that start meetings with land acknowledgments, champion Native American history, obsess over equity-based racial solutions to contemporary ills, and perseverate on historical tragedies, completely ignore known instances of fraud by white people who are pretending to be indigenous and who receive direct financial reward as a result. I cannot believe that the Pretendian scam is not a bigger story. It is a clear example of staggering hypocrisy on multiple levels.

Here is Peter's interview with Jacqueline Keeler, a Native American author and journalist who has explored the phenomena of Pretendians.

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