Andrew Sullivan: David Frum Moves the Goalposts on Russian “Collusion”

Andrew Sullivan, responding to David Frum's latest defense of Trump's alleged collusion with Russia. The title to Sullivan's article: "It Wasn't A Hoax. It Was Media Overkill: Parsing the truths in the "collusion" narrative."

I agree with almost everything David writes — which he does with his usual concision and pellucidity. There is no question that Trump had countless conflicts of interest in Russia, with his Moscow hotel plans high among them, and had been money laundering for Russian oligarchs for years. No question that he was absolutely willing to accept Russia’s — or any country’s — illicit support, and no doubt he actually asked for it. I saw him do it, on national television, in the campaign. We all did.

The Russians also tried to corrupt the election through online shenanigans; and Manafort’s delivery of polling data to Moscow was deeply shifty. And everyone lied about almost everything. There’s equally no doubt that Trump obstructed justice in trying to stymie the Russia investigation. Again, he told us so on television. More pertinently, people have been prosecuted and gone to jail for their misdeeds in this whole miasma of near-treasonous sleaze.

But this was not what the MSM tried to sell us from the get-go. What they and the Democrats argued — with endless, breathless, high-drama reporting — was that there was some kind of plot between Trump and Russia to rig the election and it had succeeded. Investigating this was hugely important because it could expose near-treason and instantly remove Trump from power via impeachment. This was the dream to cope with the nightmare. . . .

So David now moves the goalposts to “cooperation.” What’s with all these progressively less culpable c-words? But who wouldn’t have Trump “cooperated” with to get elected? He was an all-round huckster, with no ethics, no sense of propriety, and essentially a thug, who got a boner watching human beings being crushed by tanks in Tiananmen Square. And do we have any evidence ever of Trump having the brains, the discretion, the attention to minute detail, or the competent staffing that would have been needed to pull off such a scheme? Please.

Glenn Greenwald has pointed out that Frum should have learned from the other time he was duped in a major way: Iraq WMD.

Here's Greenwald after the Muller Report explaining that Democrat obsession with "collusion" has been costly to the Democrats and helpful to Trump.

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Another Lament about Fake News

Several years ago, I distrusted the phrase "fake news." It was often uttered by Donald Trump, for whom I have almost no respect.

I’m convinced that the great majority of us act rationally based upon the information to which we expose ourselves. If we are exposing ourselves only to false information, however, we will believe and act “rationally” based on that false information. Once upon a time, I heavily relied upon NYT/WP/NPR/MSNBC, but am no longer able to freely trust these sources. These are big organizations with high-paid reporters, editors and purported fact-checkers. Over the past few years, despite all of this high-paid talent, I have seen each of these organizations blatantly and proudly trumpet false information. I’m not claiming that everything these outlets publish is false. Far from it. They are all big tents and they all publish many excellent articles. That said, they have failed so thoroughly and dramatically on so many high-profile stories in the past few years (including basic facts concerning Kyle Rittenhouse and Russiagate) that I have reset my default setting to “Suspicious” on their high-profile news stories, especially when the story could effect a national election.

And not only have each of these outlets published steady streams of false stories, each of them has intentionally suppressed important stories that run counter to their chosen narratives. Some of the biggest lies are told by writing statements that are completely true while simultaneously suppressing evidence that will put these “true” facts into a completely different frame (e.g., following the death of George Floyd, the above outlets refused to publish Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer’s 2019 statistical analysis on police shootings (Discussed by Sam Harris here), statistics that run counter some of the main narratives of the “defund the police” crowd. This is my introduction to Andrew Sullivan’s recent article, “When all the Media Narratives Collapse: In case after case, the US MSM just keep getting it wrong.” I have expanded on Sullivan’s article with my own.

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WP: Now that We Think About it . . . There’s No Evidence that Rittenhouse was a White Supremicist

The WP apparently trying to mitigate damages in the libel suit they are now apparently worrying about. Responsible professional journalism would have been evidence-based from the very beginning. I probably need to add that I'm no fan of Kyle Rittenhouse. He is not any sort of hero to me. I write this as someone who has seen the widespread decline in the the ability of legacy news outlets that I formerly trusted.

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Niall Ferguson Explains Why He is Helping to Create a New College

Niall Ferguson's article at Bloomberg is titled, "I'm Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken: Institutions dedicated to the search for truth have ossified into havens for liberal intolerance and administrative overreach."

In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented them from saying things they believed, up from 55% in 2019, while 41% were reluctant to discuss politics in a classroom, up from 32% in 2019. Some 60% of students said they were reluctant to speak up in class because they were concerned other students would criticize their views as being offensive.

Such anxieties are far from groundless. According to a nationwide survey of a thousand undergraduates by the Challey Institute for Global Innovation, 85% of self-described liberal students would report a professor to the university if the professor said something that they found offensive, while 76% would report another student.

. . . . The number of scholars targeted for their speech has risen dramatically since 2015, according to research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE has logged 426 incidents since 2015. Just under three-quarters of them resulted in some kind of sanction — including an investigation alone or voluntary resignation — against the scholar. Such efforts to restrict free speech usually originate with “progressive” student groups, but often find support from left-leaning faculty members and are encouraged by college administrators, who tend (as Sam Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College demonstrated, and as his own subsequent experience confirmed) to be even further to the left than professors. There are also attacks on academic freedom from the right, which FIRE challenges.

Continue ReadingNiall Ferguson Explains Why He is Helping to Create a New College