A conservative perspective

[Parihaka]

Trump acting Defense Secretary Miller says he 'did not' authorize Milley China calls, says he should resign

EXCLUSIVE: Former acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, who led the Pentagon from the period after the 2020 election through Inauguration Day, said that he "did not and would not ever authorize" Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley to have "secret" calls with his Chinese counterpart, describing the allegations as a "disgraceful and unprecedented act of insubordination," and calling on him to resign "immediately."

[TopHatter]

Trump acting Defense Secretary Miller says he 'did not' authorize Milley China calls, says he should resign

This was already covered in the American Politics thread:

Report: Fmr. SECDEF Esper ordered secret message to China before Milley’s secret call

According to the outlet, Sec. Esper was concerned China’s misinterpretation of “bad intelligence” could lead to violent international conflict.

“I think they [the Chinese] were getting bad intelligence…a combination of ‘wag the dog’ conspiracy thinking and bad intel from bad sources,” one of the sources said.

As a result, Esper ordered his policy office to send a secret message to Chinese officials to reassure the communist nation that the United States did not intend to seek a military confrontation.

“Don’t over-read what you’re seeing in Washington; we have no intention to attack; and let’s keep lines of communication open,” the message reportedly stated.

The backchannel communication was executed several levels below Esper, one of the sources told Axios. After the initial communication, Milley followed up with a direct call to one of China’s top generals to reiterate Esper’s message, two of the sources confirmed.

Side note: Esperanto, unlike Miller, was actually confirmed by Congress.

[Parihaka]

2018

As the political world anticipates an internal Justice Department review of misconduct by James Comey’s FBI related to the Trump campaign probe, hundreds of American parents await another report: Why Comey’s FBI delayed an investigation into one of the country’s most notorious child sex abusers, former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar. The Michigan State University osteopathic physician now is serving a 100-year minimum prison sentence for numerous crimes, including sexual assault of minors, sexual assault, and possession of child pornography.

[Parihaka]

2020

Tom Elliott on Twitter: ".@Simone_Biles: "We suffered and continue to suffer because no one at @FBI or U.S. AG or USOPC did what was necessary to protect us. We have been failed and we deserve answers. Nassar is where he belongs but those who enabled him deserve to be held accountable." https://t.co/fnfWU8RhCw" / Twitter
...

[zraver]

This was already covered in the American Politics thread:



Side note: Esperanto, unlike Miller, was actually confirmed by Congress.

Both were legally SecDef and the second call was not authorized. The talks about nuclear release were patently illegal per the JCS own website that lists the relevant law. Not that you care, you're a statist at heart.

[TopHatter]

Not that you care, you're a statist at heart.

Fascinating delusions as always.

I already said something similiar in the American Politics thread and I'll say it here too: If I was a statist, I'd be a Trump supporter like you.

[Parihaka]

Anyhoo, back to topic

apropo Durham's indictment

The 26-page indictment of former cybersecurity attorney and Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann by special counsel John Durham is as detailed as it is damning on the alleged effort to push a false Russia collusion claim before the 2016 presidential campaign. One line, however, seems to reverberate for those of us who have followed this scandal for years now: “You do realize that we will have to expose every trick we have in our bag.”

That warning from an unnamed “university researcher” captures the most fascinating aspect of the indictment in describing a type of Nixonian dirty tricks operation run by — or at least billed to — the Clinton campaign. With Nixon, his personal attorney and the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) paid for operatives to engage in disruptive and ultimately criminal conduct targeting his opponents. With Clinton, the indictment and prior disclosures suggest that Clinton campaign lawyers at the law firm of Perkins Coie helped organize an effort to spread Russia collusion stories and trigger an investigation.

Durham accuses Sussmann of lying to the general counsel of the FBI in September 2016 when Sussmann delivered documents and data to the FBI supposedly supporting a claim that Russia’s Alpha Bank was used as a direct conduit between former President Trump's campaign and the Kremlin. According to Durham, Sussman told the FBI general counsel that he was not delivering the information on behalf of any client. The indictment not only details multiple billings to the Clinton campaign as the data was collected and the documents created; it claims Sussman billed the campaign for the actual meeting with the FBI. At the time, Perkins Coie attorney Marc Elias was general counsel for the Clinton campaign. Both men have since left the firm.

The big trick in 2016 was the general effort to create a Russia collusion scandal with the help of Justice Department insiders and an eager, enabling media.

It was only last October, for instance, that we learned that then-President Obama was briefed by his CIA director, John Brennan, on an intelligence report that Clinton planned to tie then-candidate Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” That was on July 28, 2016 — three days before the Russia investigation was initiated. NOTE: See next post

The problem was that both the Steele dossier and the Alpha Bank allegations fell apart soon after being fed to the FBI. A key source for dossier compiler and former British spy Christopher Steele was viewed by American intelligence as a Russian agent, and it was believed that the Clinton campaign and the dossier were being used by Russian intelligence to spread disinformation.*

According to Durham, the Alpha Bank allegation fell apart even before Sussmann delivered it to the FBI. The indictment details how an unnamed “tech executive” allegedly used his authority at multiple internet companies to help develop the ridiculous claim. (The executive reportedly later claimed that he was promised a top cyber security job in the Clinton administration). Notably, there were many who expressed misgivings not only within the companies working on the secret project but also among unnamed “university researchers” who repeatedly said the argument was bogus.

The researchers were told they should not be looking for proof but just enough to “give the base of a very useful narrative.” The researchers argued, according to the indictment, that anyone familiar with analyzing internet traffic “would poke several holes” in that narrative, noting that what they saw likely “was not a secret communications channel with Russian Bank-1, but ‘a red herring,’” according to the indictment. “Researcher-1” repeated these doubts, the indictment says, and asked, “How do we plan to defend against the criticism that this is not spoofed traffic we are observing? There is no answer to that. Let’s assume again that they are not smart enough to refute our ‘best case scenario.’ You do realize that we will have to expose every trick we have in our bag to even make a very weak association.”

“Researcher-1” allegedly further warned, “We cannot technically make any claims that would fly public scrutiny. The only thing that drives us at this point is that we just do not like [Trump]. This will not fly in eyes of public scrutiny. Folks, I am afraid we have tunnel vision. Time to regroup?”

Clinton herself discussed the allegations as if they were the product of independent sleuths. Right before the 2016 election, she tweeted, “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”

The indictment details an operation that parallels the notorious Steele dossier, which also featured a pattern of working with FBI insiders while denying connections to the campaign.

The Clinton team denied involvement in the creation of the Steele dossier throughout the 2016 campaign despite direct media inquiries. It was only after the election that mysterious expenses for its legal counsel led reporters to discover the truth. The payments for the dossier were masked as “legal fees” among the $5.6 million paid to the law firm. According to New York Times reporter Ken Vogel, Elias categorically denied involvement in the anti-Trump dossier; when Vogel tried to report the story, he said Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’” Times reporter Maggie Haberman later wrote that “folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”

According to the indictment, Sussman told the truth — and contradicted what he’d originally told the FBI general counsel — when interviewed under oath in December 2017 before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, telling them he did not hold the meeting of his own volition but at the request of a client.

Notably, another Clinton figure pushing the Alpha Bank conspiracy was Jake Sullivan, who now weighs intelligence reports for President Biden as his national security adviser. Sullivan, a senior policy adviser to Clinton, declared in an official campaign press statement that the Alpha Bank allegation “could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow” and portrayed it as the work of independent experts: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia. ... This line of communication may help explain Trump’s bizarre adoration of Vladimir Putin.”

So the “very useful narrative” was delivered to the media and the FBI and, along with the dossier, was used to launch the Russia investigation, which led to the appointment of former special counsel Robert Mueller. The “bag of tricks” was supposed to be buried with the involvement of the Clinton campaign — until Trump Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham as a second special counsel.

Durham’s indictment of Sussman seems to have revealed quite a bit about how scandals are manufactured and manipulated in Washington.From CREEP to Clinton, lawyers discovered themselves in legal jeopardy when special prosecutors found them holding a "bag of tricks." A dirty trick in politics can be a thing of beauty for a campaign — until it boomerangs on the tricksters.

[Parihaka]

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified notes of former CIA Director John Brennan showing that he briefed former President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s alleged “plan” to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” My interest in this story is not simply the serious underlying allegation but the lack of coverage by major networks or media outlets. This was clearly released at this time for political purposes, but that does not make it a non-story. We have often discussed concerns over the active effort by many in the media to downplay stories that would either help President Donald Trump or hurt the Democrats in the upcoming elections. This would seem such a case. Whether this is true or a complete fabrication, it should be major news. In the meantime, the responses from Clinton allies have not addressed the substance of the document and have simply dismissed the entire story as groundless.



Brennan’s handwritten notes would seem extremely serious on their face. It certainly indicates that Brennan considered the issue sufficiently serious to brief the President of the United States on July 28th. The notes state

“We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]. . . CITE [summarizing] alleged approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”

There is also a notation reading “Any evidence of collaboration between Trump campaign + Russia” and margin references to “JC,” “Denis,” and “Susan.” If Brennan thought this was serious enough to brief the President, shouldn’t the media consider this sufficiently serious to investigate and report?

While it would be dangerous to release documents without redactions, there is an obvious value to understanding the truth about these briefings and the underlying allegations.

This release further supports a newly-declassified document with the Senate Judiciary Committee revealing that, in September 2016, U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral on Hillary Clinton purportedly approving “a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections” in order to distract the public from her email scandal.

When asked about this referral involving a candidate for the presidency, then-FBI Director James Comey insisted that it “didn’t ring a bell.”

Once again, my initial interest is in the utter blackout on the story. This would seem a major story regardless of the ultimate findings. If these notes have been fabricated or misrepresented, it would show a breathtaking effort to lie to the voters before the election. If these notes are genuine, it would indicate that the FBI was aware of an effort by the Democratic presidential candidate to tag Trump with a Russian collusion scandal. We know that Clinton’s campaign funded the Steele dossier and that Steele shopped the dossier with the media to try to generate coverage to influence the election.

Throughout the campaign, and for many weeks after, the Clinton campaign denied any involvement in the creation of the dossier that was later used to secure a secret surveillance warrant against Trump associates during the Obama administration. Journalists later discovered that the Clinton campaign hid the payments to Fusion as a “legal fees” among the $5.6 million paid to the law firm. New York Times reporter Ken Vogel at the time said that Clinton lawyer Marc Elias had “vigorously” denied involvement in the anti-Trump dossier. When Vogel tried to report the story, he said, Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’” Times reporter Maggie Haberman likewise wrote: “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.” Even when Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was questioned by Congress on the matter, he denied any contractual agreement with Fusion GPS. Sitting beside him was Elias, who reportedly said nothing to correct the false information given to Congress.

Later, confronted with the evidence, Clinton and her campaign finally admitted that the dossier was a campaign-funded document that was pushed by Steele and others to the media.

Making things worse is the fact that we know know American intelligence flagged Steele’s main source as a Russian agent and warned that the dossier was suspected of containing Russian disinformation from Russian intelligence agencies.

Yet, even with this latest disclosure in Brennan’s own writing, we hear the familiar sound of crickets. It seems that journalism is suspended until after the election when reporters might be allowed a modicum of curiosity on such stories.

So Brennan and the Clinton campaign continued to push the fake narrative, despite Brennan briefing Obama that it was fake, and both continued to use material when it was "believed that the Clinton campaign and the dossier were being used by Russian intelligence to spread disinformation." * from previous post

[Parihaka]

From impeaching incitement to canceling conservatism

It wasn’t just President Trump’s detractors who felt a sudden sense of relief when they heard that Twitter was blocking his feed after the storming of the Capitol and the disruption of the reading of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6. While Trump’s exact words to the crowd on the Ellipse didn’t constitute a criminal incitement, they were uttered with a reckless disregard for the possibility they’d provoke violence that any reasonable person could find impeachable.

But a moment’s reflection should have left any believer in free speech feeling queasy about a private firm censoring the president of the United States and preventing him from effectively communicating with citizens over a chosen medium of universal reach. And especially queasy, since a large body of opinion sees this suppression of free speech by Big Tech monopolies not as a one-time exception but as the new rule.

Oliver Darcy of CNN wants its cable rivals to be held “responsible for the lies they peddle.” Law professors are surprisingly open to speech suppression, as Thomas Edsall reported in his New York Times blog. Yale’s Robert Post lamented that “the formation of public opinion is out of control”; California, Irvine’s Rick Hasen lamented “a market failure when it comes to reliable information voters need”; Columbia’s Tim Wu suggested “the weaponization of speech” makes the First Amendment jurisprudence “increasingly obsolete.”

Democratic worthies have been singing the same tune. Michelle Obama took the lead in urging the permanent ban on Trump, which Twitter promptly promulgated. Presidential candidate Andrew Yang called for cable news channels to be required to air competing views. Biden press aide Bill Russo wants Facebook to censor “misleading” information.

The law professors leave it ambiguous who would “control” information and decide what is “reliable information.” But Democrats obviously expect the decisions to be made by folks on their side of the political divide.

The speech restrictions and speech suppression by Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Google, including the expulsion from the cloud of Twitter competitor Parler, are all intended to benefit the Left and penalize the Right. These firms come as close as nongovernment actors could to canceling if not criminalizing at least certain strands of conservatism.

Many, if not most, believe that it is legal and praiseworthy to suppress “hate speech” in the U.S. But hate speech, unless it directly and explicitly incites violence, is protected by the First Amendment under long-standing Supreme Court precedent. Europeans, as Harvard law professor Noah Feldman points out, are comfortable banning “hate speech,” and it’s understandable that post-World War II Germany banned Nazi writing and images.

So, it’s interesting that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, no pal of Trump’s, called Twitter’s permanent ban of Trump “problematic” and that President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico, where the dominant TV network Televisa slavishly toed the government line for years, criticized Facebook’s blocking of the outgoing U.S. president, and that the Portuguese analyst Bruno Macaes thinks it’s “time to start a debate in Europe whether we want to stay tightly connected to a US internet where repression of speech will keep growing.”

“Yesterday,” wrote the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher late last week, “I predicted that the Left and the liberal Establishment would use the Beer Belly Putsch as an opportunity to begin to implement the rudiments of a social credit system, and to otherwise marginalize and suppress right-of-center discourse and people. Well, here we go.” The reference is to China’s system of surveillance and supervision, which uses consumer data, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and GPS tracking to identify regime critics and deny them access to everything from airline seats to bank credit. You don’t have to surf very long on your device to find self-described liberals calling for some such restrictions on Trump supporters or for major corporation CEOs delighted to go along.

Are such fears exaggerated? Big Tech assures us it stands for free expression. “Access to information and freedom of expression, including the public conversation on Twitter, is never more important than during democratic processes, particularly elections,” Twitter tweeted this week. But that was about providing information about an election in Uganda. In the U.S., not so much. Twitter joined other Big Tech firms in effectively suppressing the New York Post’s stories about Hunter Biden’s dodgy business dealings.

Big Tech suppression of speech, at one party’s urging but not government order, technically doesn’t violate the First Amendment. But, as CNN commentator Mary Katharine Ham tweeted, “It feels creepy and authoritarian.” It threatens to be the most effective speech suppression here since Democratic postmasters in the antebellum South deep-sixed anti-slavery material. That speech suppression didn’t ultimately prevail. How long the speech suppression by Big Tech and its liberal friends will prevail is unclear.

[Parihaka]

You might also recall me talking about the subversion of MSM, or legacy media, or whatever else you might wish to call it.

I recalled this one from the Tablet. It talks of vacine hesitancy but equally applicable for any of the other state approved narratives. and just as true for the Anglosphere as it is for the US.


Why Don’t They Believe Us?

You’re struggling to understand where all this vaccine hesitancy comes from. Let me help you.


Imagine you’re a normal person. The year is 2016. Rightly or wrongly, you believe most of what you see in the media. You believe polls are broadly reflective of public opinion. You believe doctors and scientists are trustworthy and independent. You’re a decent, reasonable person who follows the rules and trusts the authorities.

Imagine your shock, then, when Brexit, which you were assured couldn’t happen because it was a fringe movement led by racists for racists, happens. The polls, which widely predicted it wouldn’t happen, were wrong. The experts and pundits who told you day after day that it wouldn’t happen were also wrong. “Oh well,” you say, “these things happen.”

Imagine that soon after Brexit, Donald Trump is running for president. You are told by the most trustworthy media outlets that he is going to lose. Some experts say his opponent has a 99% chance of winning. Imagine waking up the morning after the election to discover that the pollsters, experts, and politicians you still trusted were wrong again. Now the racist monster who you were told would never get near the White House is the leader of the free world.

“How did this happen?” you ask yourself. How could everyone I rely on for good information be so wrong? “It was the Russians,” they tell you. “The Russians did Brexit, and they got Trump elected too.” Imagine that for the next three years, day after day, the media and politicians you still trust keep you up to date on this story of Trump’s collusion with Russia. They tell you the how, when, where, and why: the dossiers, the whistleblowers, the peeing prostitutes. Imagine your desperation for things to somehow make sense again.

Here comes the Mueller report. Hard evidence of foreign meddling in Brexit and the 2016 U.S. election is coming to set the world right again.

Imagine your shock, then, when you discover that Brexit had little to do with foreign meddling, and Robert Mueller has very little to report about Trump and the Russians. The collusion story, which dominated your news intake for the better part of three years, slowly dies down. Then it’s gone. No one talks about it anymore. Imagine that bit by bit, you’re starting to feel that the events you were told would not and could not happen not only happened, but happened without some sort of malign interference. Instead, millions of your fellow citizens simply voted for them. In the American case, it turns out many of your fellow citizens who simply voted for Trump come from states that have been devastated by an opioid epidemic enabled by a corrupt system of incentives involving the Food and Drug Administration, doctors, and Big Pharma. (You might want to take note of this. It will come up again later.)

Again, you ask, “How could this happen?” And again, the media outlets and political representatives you’ve always trusted have the answer: racism.“Your country is racist,” they tell you. If you’re white, this may seem strange to you. Other than a handful of idiots, you’ve never met a racist. If you’re an ethnic minority immigrant like me, this seems even stranger. Why would people in one of the most welcoming, tolerant countries in the world want to convince themselves their country is racist when it’s so obviously not?

But the evidence is right there on your TV screen. Imagine your horror as a famous and beloved gay African American actor is assaulted by MAGA hat-wearing thugs who racially abuse him and put a noose around his neck. In a prime-time interview, he cries while talking about it.

Imagine your outrage as you see news reports of a bunch of MAGA hat-wearing kids from a religious school contemptuously confront a Native American elder. Professional, adult commentators on TV tell you the kid has a “punchable face,” and while you abhor violence, it’s hard to disagree. Imagine that for days you watch coverage of these events, with expert after expert, pundit after pundit, sharing and fueling your outrage. Maybe your country really is racist. Maybe you’re racist. Were you always just blind?

Imagine that soon after, however, the Jussie Smollett story turns out to be an attention-seeking hoax: He made it all up. Imagine you also quickly discover that the Native American elder was the one who confronted the kids, and not the other way around. “If this is such a racist country,” you ask yourself, “why would they need to make up stories of racism?” As you ponder this, you remember that for years now, you’ve been expected to go along with other, more elaborate make-believe stories.

You’re expected to understand that gender is not as binary as school, your eyes, and your own experience have led you to believe. Whatever you learned about biology growing up is not only wrong, it’s pathological and harmful, according to the American Psychological Association. You no longer know how many genders you’re expected to be able to recognize. You do know that asking questions is dangerous.

Imagine that you still want to believe the experts and the commentators, but now that requires you to believe your country is racist, that men are bad, and that gender is a social construct, which is an idea you still don’t really understand.

It’s at this point that a pandemic breaks out in China.

You are initially unconcerned, but as terrifying scenes increasingly emerge from Italy and other countries closer to home, it is clear that something big is happening. You watch nervously as politicians give press conference after press conference, flanked by experts, to explain the situation.

President Trump shuts down travel to the United States from China. He has been widely condemned as a racist repeatedly in the past, and the same explanation is given this time. It’s not just Americans who tell you Trump is racist for calling a virus that emerged in China a “Chinese virus.” In response, the mayor of Florence advises Italian citizens to fight Trump’s anti-Chinese bigotry by “hugging a Chinese person.” Shortly after, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the most respected and powerful Democrats in the country, visits Chinatown in San Francisco to explain that “there’s no reason tourists or locals should be staying away from the area because of coronavirus concerns.”

“Thank God there are some sensible, nonracist people who aren’t overreacting,” you say to yourself. Imagine watching as Trump doubles down on his racism by claiming the virus may have come from a lab in Wuhan. “Nonsense,” you think. You’re more concerned with how best to protect yourself and your family from this deadly disease than with its origins at this point anyway. You consider buying surgical masks, or using homemade ones—you’ve seen visitors and tourists from Asian countries wear them, and they’ve been through things like this before, so maybe it’s best to follow their lead.

But the country’s chief medical experts tell you not to wear masks, and to focus on washing your hands instead. As lockdowns are introduced around the world, you diligently follow all the rules. You stay at home. You only go out once, and live off savings or government grants. You do your best to keep your hands clean, to not touch other surfaces that other people touch. Some political representatives make the solemn decision to shut down beaches, parks, and playgrounds, encouraging everyone to stay indoors.

You are proud to be doing your part. Thanks to you and millions of your fellow citizens, the first wave of the pandemic overwhelms certain hot spots, but it does not devastate the health care system at a national level. While thousands sadly die, you’ve helped to protect those around you.

Imagine your confusion as the same people who spent three months telling you not only that masks don’t work, but that there are several reasons you shouldn’t wear or purchase them, suddenly introduce mask mandates. We’re “following the science,” they tell you. This seems to make little sense, but a pandemic is no time for questions. And who knows, maybe our understanding of the science evolved?

As you cautiously go to the supermarket, you notice that masks have made people less likely to socially distance. You remember reading somewhere that bicycle helmets work similarly: They give the wearer more confidence, and the result is often more accidents and injuries, not fewer. “Silly people,” you say to yourself. “If only they would follow the experts.”

You turn on your TV and learn that shoppers at your local supermarket aren’t the only ones who have been ignoring the rules. Nancy Pelosi arranged for a salon, shutdown by government decree, to open privately for her—then publicly blamed the business owner for violating the lockdown. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is seen eating dinner at one of the most expensive restaurants in America with a large group of unmasked people indoors. In the U.K., Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist whose projections were used as the basis for lockdowns, appears to have broken his own rules to get some action with his married lover. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, drove halfway across the country to ensure he had a better place to isolate. The journalists who berate him for this are later found to have attended an unmasked, indoor birthday party in breach of the rules. The lockdowns continue.

Then a man is killed in Minneapolis by a police officer arresting him for a petty crime. The man is African American. The officer is white. The arrest and murder are captured on video, which quickly goes viral around the world. Imagine your horror as you watch an officer of the law kneel on another man’s neck until he passes out and later dies. “This is disgusting,” you say to yourself. “I hope they throw the book at him.” Overnight, a huge campaign for racial justice springs up around the world.

No one explains what racism had to do with the incident, but they don’t need to. As you know by now, the West is racist, America is racist, and police are racist. Therefore any time a crime has a white perpetrator and an African American victim, there is only one possible motive. The fact that an identical incident led to the death of a white man named Tony Timpa in Dallas in August 2016 is never mentioned for context.

While the lockdown rules remain in place, the protests against injustice spill out into public spaces. Tens of thousands of people crowd into the streets of major cities. Few of them wear masks, and social distancing is nonexistent. Clashes with police ensue, and in the United States, protesters loot stores, destroy businesses, attack residents, and start fires. A retired African American police officer from St. Louis named David Dorn is among dozens of people who are murdered in the chaos.

Attempts to discuss the negative impacts of lockdowns on health and mental well-being, especially that of children barred from going to school, are suppressed.

The media describes these events as “mostly peaceful protests,” as broadcast reporters stand in front of burning buildings. After months of harsh restrictions, the media and political class offer no criticism of protests that violate every element of lockdown policy. After months of telling you to stay at home to avoid spreading COVID, doctors explain that rather than being a potential form of super spreading, “protest is a profound public health intervention.”

Big tech companies go into overdrive to stop the spread of what they call disinformation. Alternative points of view regarding the efficacy of masks and lockdowns, as well as the origins of the virus itself, are increasingly blocked, flagged, and censored. Attempts to discuss the negative impacts of lockdowns on health and mental well-being, especially that of children barred from going to school, are suppressed. As the year runs on, with a pivotal U.S. election looming, Trump promises a huge push to develop a vaccine. Then-Sen. Kamala Harris, running for vice president, says that if Trump advised people to take a vaccine, she wouldn’t take it.

On the eve of the election, a major media outlet releases a damaging report about Hunter Biden, son of presidential candidate Joe Biden. The story alleges corruption that may implicate his father, as well as drug use, paying for prostitutes, and more. Twitter and other social media platforms immediately prevent the story from being shared. The media lines up commentators to claim the story was, yet again, “Russian disinformation.” Once Hunter’s father wins the election, it becomes clear that several key elements of the story are likely accurate, and the laptop from which the information was recovered is not in fact a Russian decoy, but Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Meanwhile, in the U.K., the publicly available number of COVID patients and deaths nationwide turns out to have been inaccurate. For some time, any British citizen who died at any point for any reason after having tested positive for COVID was counted as dying from COVID, even if it was from a car crash. The official figure is later revised again. The number of people who are in hospital because of COVID also turns out to be incorrect.

Now that a bigot is no longer president of the United States, closing national borders to visitors from other countries is no longer considered xenophobic. In fact, it is widely advocated in the media. Likewise, it is no longer considered racist to detain people at the border, to put them in holding cells, to deport them, or to simply turn them away.

The supposedly racist conspiracy theory that the virus came from a lab in Wuhan is now also open for discussion. It even looks like the most credible explanation of the origins of the virus. Imagine your horror as you learn that the reason thousands of people died in the first wave of the pandemic was that elderly patients with COVID were allowed, and sometimes compelled, to be released back into nursing homes. In fact, it was a personal decision by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, brother of CNN anchor Chris Cuomo. Gov. Cuomo’s publisher later suspends promotion of a book he wrote in the meantime. It’s about his leadership during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Texas and Florida, which largely remained open and avoided draconian lockdowns, seem to have made out OK. Kids have been going to school, businesses have stayed open. You look at COVID death rates by state, and neither Florida nor Texas cracks the top half.

It is at this point that vaccines become the main focus of government policy and media commentary.

The same people who told you Brexit would never happen, that Trump would never win, that when he did win it was because of Russian collusion but also because of racism, that you must follow lockdowns while they don’t, that masks don’t work, that masks do work, that social justice protests during pandemic lockdowns are a form of “health intervention,” that ransacking African American communities in the name of fighting racism is a “mostly peaceful” form of protest, that poor and underserved children locked out of shuttered schools are “still learning,” that Jussie Smollett was a victim of a hate crime, that men are toxic, that there is an infinite number of genders, that COVID couldn’t have come from a lab until maybe it did, that closing borders is racist until maybe it isn’t, that you shouldn’t take Trump’s vaccine, that you must take the vaccine developed during the Trump administration, that Andrew Cuomo is a great leader, that Andrew Cuomo is a granny killer, that the number of COVID deaths is one thing and then another … are the same people telling you now that the vaccine is safe, that you must take it, and that if you don’t, you will be a second-class citizen.

Understand vaccine hesitancy now?

[Parihaka]

Feeding the Liberal Flock: The Real Reasons for the Congressional 1/6 Committee

Underlying so much of the anger and resentment surrounding 1/6 is the complete dissonance between the narrative fed to the citizenry by Democrats and their media allies on the one hand, and the legal realities on the other. It must be infuriating and baffling to a large sector of the population to have been convinced that what happened on January 6 was an unprecedentedly dangerous insurrection perpetrated by an organized group of seditious traitors who had plotted to kidnap and murder elected officials, only for the Biden DOJ to have charged exactly nobody with any criminal charges remotely suggesting any of those melodramatic claims.

This was the same frustration and confusion that beset a large portion of liberal America when they were led to believe for years that Robert Mueller was coming to arrest all of their political enemies for treason and criminal conspiracy with Russia, only for the FBI Superman to close his investigation without charging a single American with criminal conspiracy with Russia and then issuing a report admitting that he could not find evidence to establish any such crime. How to keep the flock loyal when the doomsday prophecies continue to be unfulfilled, as the World-Ending Date comes and goes without so much as a bang, let alone an explosion?

Adam Schiff's new book — which essentially claims that Mueller is senile and was suffering from pitiful dementia — is obviously intended to provide some solace or at least a framework of understanding for disappointed liberals to keep the faith, but deep down, they know what they were expecting. The endorphin-producing fantasies on which they fed for years — of Trump and Trump, Jr. and Jared and Bannon and Ivanka being frog-marched out of the White House by armed, strapping FBI agents — were way too viscerally arousing for them to simply forget that none of it happened.

A repeat of this disorientation and disillusionment when it comes to 1/6 could be quite dangerous for Democrats. It could be devastating to the media outlets which survive on serving the Democrats’ messaging and feeding dramatic conspiracy theories to the beleaguered liberal flock. In the days and weeks following 1/6, liberals really thought that dozens of members of Congress — from Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene — would be not just expelled from Congress but summarily imprisoned as traitors by a newly righteous Justice Department. They were led to believe that, with Bill Barr out of the way, Trump and his mafia family would finally pay for their crimes.

Instead, they have been served a tepid, cautious, and compartmentally conservative Merrick Garland who seems barely able to send the Evil Insurrectionists — many of whom are just hapless and impoverished lost souls — to prison for more than a few months. The harsh reality is yet again destroying their cravings for promised vengeance and retribution, and something must be done, lest the cult loyalty be lost forever.

That is, at bottom, what the 1/6 Committee is really for. The House Democrats have smart lawyers who are fully aware of all the above-discussed case law and other limitations on congressional power. That is why they purposely structured their third-party subpoenas to ensure nobody can challenge them in court: they know those subpoenas vastly exceed the limits of their authority and cannot withstand judicial scrutiny.

This congressional committee is designed to be cathartic theater for liberals, and a political drama for the rest of the country. They know Republicans will object to their deliberately unconstitutional inquisitions, and they intend to exploit those objections to darkly insinuate to the country that Republicans are driven by a desire to protect the violent traitors so that they can deploy them as an insurrectionary army for future coups. They have staffed the committee with their most flamboyant and dishonest drama queens, knowing that Adam Schiff will spend most of his days on CNN with Chris Cuomo comparing 1/6 to Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust; Liz Cheney will equate Republicans with Al Qaeda and the Capitol riot to the destruction of the World Trade Center; and Adam Kinzinger will cry on cue as he reminds everyone over and over that he served in the U.S. military only to find himself distraught and traumatized that the real terrorists are not those he was sent to fight overseas but those at home, in his own party.

But the manipulative political design of this spectacle should not obscure how threatening it nonetheless is to core civil liberties. Democrats in politics and media have whipped themselves into such a manic frenzy ever since 1/6 — indeed, they have been doing little else ever since Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015 — that they have become the worst kinds of fanatics: the ones who really believe their own lies. Many genuinely believe that they are on the front lines of an epic historical battle against the New Hitler (Trump) and his band of deplorable fascist followers bent on a coup against the democratic order. In their cable-and-Twitter-stimulated imaginations, shortly following this right-wing coup will be the installation of every crypto-fascist bell and whistle from concentration camps for racial and ethnic minorities to death or prison for courageous #Resistance dissidents. At some point, the line between actually believing this and being paid to pretend to believe it, or feeling coerced by cultural and friendship circles to feign belief in it, erodes, fostering actual collective conviction and mania.

And when fanatics convince themselves that their cause is not only indisputably just but an imperative for survival, then any doubts or questions about methods and weapons can no longer be acknowledged. The war they are fighting is of such overarching importance and righteousness that there is no such thing as unjust or excessive means to achieve it. Just a cursory examination of liberal discourse is enough to see that they have long ago arrived at and flew past this point of sectarian zealotry. And that is what explains their overwhelming support for state and corporate censorship of the internet, increasing reverence for security state agencies such as the CIA and FBI, love for and trust in corporate media, and a belief that no punishment or level of suffering is excessive when it comes to retaliation against their political enemies, including but not only those who participated in any way in the 1/6 protests.

This is, after all, a movement that has long opposed the death penalty and whose more left-wing factions spent 2020 rioting in cities to protest police violence and chanting "Defund the Police!," yet their only lament about Ashli Babbitt seems to be that she was the only pro-Trump "fascist" shot and killed by noble police officers on that day. They have pranced around for decades as criminal justice reformists, denouncing harsh prosecutorial strategies and judicial punishments, yet are indignant that people who put their feet on Nancy Pelosi's sacred desk or vandalized the sacred halls of American power with their dirty and deplorable presence are not spending decades in a cage. They spent 2020 depicting police officers as racist savages, only to valorize the Capitol Police as benevolent public servants whom only barbarians would want to harm, then gave them an additional $2 billion to intensify their surveillance capabilities and augment their stockpile of weapons. Their fury that Trump officials did not end up spending decades in cages due to vague associations with Russians is exceeded only by their rage that pro-Trump protesters at the Capitol are being sentenced to months rather than years or decades in prison.

A political movement that operates from the premise that its cause is too important to be constrained is one that inevitably becomes authoritarian. That such authoritarianism is the defining feature of American liberalism has been evident for several years. And an investigative congressional committee that they control, aimed squarely at their political enemies, accompanied by demands that anyone resisting it be imprisoned, can only lead to very dark and dangerous destinations.

[DOR]

I rewrote the opening sentence to make is more reflective of actual conditions in this country.

Underlying so much of the anger and resentment surrounding 1/6 is the complete disregard for elections, democracy, the rule of law, and a peaceful transition of power that was displayed by not only those who invaded the Capitol building, but by those who egged them on. It is both infuriating and baffling to a large sector of the population to have to witness such an act of disrespect for American values and institutions as was on display that day.

[zraver]

I rewrote the opening sentence to make is more reflective of actual conditions in this country.

Underlying so much of the anger and resentment surrounding 1/6 is the complete disregard for elections, democracy, the rule of law,

You mean like the zuckbucks hiring partisans and the unconstitutional changing of election law without the consent of the state legislatures?

and a peaceful transition of power

You mean like the 4 years of viva la resistance, Pelosi tearing up a pubic record (SOTU) on national television, HRC16 taking back her concession and calling DJT illegitmate based on the her proven false foreign sourced opo research?

that was displayed by not only those who invaded the Capitol building,

Nancy Pelosi said occupying capital buildings was democracy in action

but by those who egged them on.

With bail funders, suggestions that that take to the streets, confront friends and relatives over Thanksgiving, labeling half the population clingers and deplorables and answering every reasoned argument with: you're a racist.

It is both infuriating and baffling to a large sector of the population to have to witness such an act of disrespect for American values and institutions as was on display that day.

Why do you think so many conservatives travelled to DC? I know you catagprically reject that the previous 12 years had anything to do with. The IRS stomping all over thier applications when they were the Tea Party, POTUS calling them clingers, HRC calling them deplorables, the Left refusing to accept the peaceful transition of power from Obama to Trump including contesting the certification of the electors and a full blown campaign to get electors to become faithless...... None of that had anything to do with stoking the fires. RTo you its just a a bunch of racist trumpites who sprung fully formed from the head of Zues.

Of Course the DC Bar refusing to take the law license of Clinesmith and Garland giving McCabe back the pension he had stripped when Horowitz documented over a dozen times he lied to investigators is sure to reduce tensions by demonstrating that that rule of law applies equally and fairly to all...

[zraver]

DoR, you don't actually believe in the rule of law, neither does your party. Hence calling riots mostly peaceful, the open borders, planes loads of cash money to Iran in violation of US law....I could go on and on but you are part of the lawless party.

[Parihaka]

The New York Times entered the digital era under duress. In 2011, the Times erected a paywall in what it called a ‘subscription-first business model’. The gamble was that readers would want to pay for quality journalism. It was a risk, and at first it didn’t seem to be paying off: after a challenging 2014, the company shed 100 people from the newsroom in buyouts and layoffs.

A.G. Sulzberger, who was getting ready to replace his father as publisher, commissioned an in-house report, its title ‘Innovation’. The report made it very clear who was to blame. A journalist’s job, the report said, no longer ended with choosing, reporting and publishing the news. To compensate for the ‘steady decline’ in advertising revenue due to digitisation, ‘the wall dividing the newsroom and business side’ had to come down. The ‘hard work of growing our audience falls squarely on the newsroom’, the report said, so the Times should be ‘encouraging reporters and editors to promote their stories’.

Of course, journalists have always been aware who their readers are and have catered to them, consciously and unconsciously. But it was something else entirely to suggest that journalists should be collaborating with their audience to produce ‘user-generated content’, as the report put it. ‘Innovation’ presaged a new direction for the paper of record: become digital-first or perish.

The Times invested in new subscription services like NYT Cooking and NYT Games, and introduced live events, conferences and foreign trips. The paper hired an ad agency to work in-house and began allowing brands to sponsor specific lines of reporting. Journalists were asked to accompany advertisers to conferences and were pushed to collaborate more closely with the business side, something many of the old-school editors were loath to do. The executive editor at the time, Jill Abramson, resisted strenuously. She was given the boot.

And then came Trump. As a candidate, Trump attacked the press as ‘the enemy of the people’, used the term ‘fake news’ and called the Times the ‘failing New York Times’. But the relationship between the press and Trump was symbiotic: Trump capitalised on the widespread feeling that the journalists chronicling American life looked down on regular people (he was not wrong). As he trashed the class norms of politesse that the press expected from a presidential candidate, the liberal media couldn’t get enough of him.

Trump’s antics in the 2015-16 campaign were catnip for a flailing industry. Trump is estimated to have received free coverage worth around $2 billion, six times more than any of his rivals in the Republican primary received. This coverage planted the seeds of Trump’s 2016 victory — but he was not the only one to profit from it.

CBS’s executive chairman, Les Moonves, said that the Trump campaign ‘may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS’. In 2016, MSNBC was set to take a 30 per cent hit if Hillary Clinton was elected; that hit was avoided when Donald Trump won. Leaked tapes revealed that the president of CNN, a channel that made a big show of opposing Trump, encouraged Trump to run and even offered him tips on how to win a CNN-sponsored debate.

Hating Trump drove massive amounts of engagement to previously floundering publications, channels and shows. And individual journalists didn’t need to be told by their bosses to promote Trump’s name: they could see firsthand how their opposition generated likes, retweets and exploding pageviews. With the incentives thus aligned, there was no need to break down the remains of the wall between advertising and editorial. It happened on its own.

The New York Times played a prominent role in the liberal media’s justification for its Trump strategy, pointing out over and over that he was not a ‘normal’ president. When Trump won, liberal media, sequestered in the most left-leaning districts in America, simply could not fathom that many Americans felt that Donald Trump was a better option than Hillary Clinton. So they came up with alternative explanations for his victory.

On November 16 2016, a BuzzFeed report found that in the last three months of the campaign, false news reports had generated more Facebook engagement — over a million more shares, reactions and comments — than the New York Times, Washington Post, the Huffington Post and NBC News combined. It was the perfect story for the liberal news media: it confirmed that those who disagreed with them were not only wrong but stupid, believing all kinds of nonsense. They were less keen to report that two out of three Democrats believed that Russia tampered with vote tallies on election day, something for which there exists no evidence whatsoever.

Russia would figure prominently in the coverage in other ways. Type the words ‘Trump’ and ‘Russia’ into the New York Times search bar and you’ll get over 15,000 results since 2015. At the Washington Post, this search will bring up 27,000 entries since 2015. The much-hyped narratives — that Trump was hostage to Russian kompromat showing him cavorting with escorts; that a group called Cambridge Analytica was selling ‘psychological profiles’ of Americans to the highest bidder; and even, as promised by the Times, that Trump’s tax returns would show deep ties to Russia and conflicts with national security — would just keep coming. All turned out to be either false or deeply misleading.
'Hating Trump drove massive amounts of engagement to previously floundering publications' (Photo: Getty)
This was journalistic malpractice, but it was manna from heaven for the bottom line, especially at the New York Times. During the last three months of 2016, the Times added 276,000 digital subscribers: nearly 100,000 up on 2015. In 2017, the paper gained $340 million in online subscriptions: 46 per cent up on 2016. Forty-six per cent growth is what Facebook boasts, and double Google’s growth rate. In 2019, the Times added more than one million net digital-only subscribers, reaching a total of 5.2 million. Thanks to Trump, the company met its $800-million digital revenue target for 2020 a year early.

Trump allowed the Times to lean in to the business model pioneered by Facebook. In May 2020, the paper announced it would no longer use third-party marketing data, because it just didn’t need third parties anymore. The Times now holds enough first-party data (on age, generation, educational and marital status, interests, business industry and level, income and assets) to sell it directly to advertisers.

There was another equally important way that the Times was successfully imitating Facebook. In 2018, high on the success of the Trump era, the Data Science Group at the Times launched a project to understand and predict the emotional impact of the paper’s articles. They asked 1,200 readers to rate their emotional responses to articles, with options including boredom, hate, interest, fear, hope, love and happiness. These readers were young and well-educated — the target audience of many advertisers.

What the group found was perhaps not surprising: emotions drive engagement. ‘Across the board, articles that were top in emotional categories, such as love, sadness and fear, performed significantly better than articles that were not,’ the team reported. To monetise the insight, the Data Science Group created an artificial intelligence machine-learning algorithm to predict which emotions articles would evoke. The Times now sells this insight to advertisers, who can choose from 18 emotions, seven motivations and 100 topics they want readers to feel or think about when they encounter an ad.

‘By identifying connections between content and emotion, we’ve successfully driven ad engagement 6X more effectively than IAB benchmarks,’ the Times’s Advertising website proudly declares. ‘Brands can target ads to specific articles we predict will evoke particular emotions in our readers,’ it pitches. ‘Brands have the opportunity to target ads to articles we predict will motivate our readers to take a particular action.’ As of April 2019, Project Feels had generated 50 ad campaigns, more than 30 million impressions, and strong revenue results.
Russiagate was journalistic malpractice, but it was manna from heaven for the bottom line, especially at the New York Times
If you want to know what makes America’s educated liberal elites emotional, you only have to open the Times. Judging by the coverage of recent years, two things make them more emotional than anything else: Trump and racism.

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, books like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy soared to the top of the bestseller list as blindsided liberals sought to understand how people could have voted for Trump. For a brief period, it seemed like the American mainstream might truly grapple with the question of class. But this quickly disappeared in favour of an easier explanation: Trump voters were racists.

Liberal news media pushed study after study allegedly ‘proving’ that the class narrative — that Trump’s voters had chosen him out of economic anxiety — was false. They were simply racists, we were told by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic and Vox. You could feel the relief seeping through the repetition: if Trump’s voters are racists, we no longer have to care about them! This line absolved journalists of the inner twinge of doubt that must come to any honest reporter when they realise that they are afflicting the afflicted. There is only one problem. It’s just not true.

Many of the white voters who proved most decisive for Trump had voted for President Obama, the first black president, in both 2008 and 2012. As the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi pointed out, if these voters were motivated by racism, why did they vote for Obama twice?

In fact, Trump failed to motivate whites to turn out in 2016. He won a smaller share of the white turnout than Mitt Romney had in 2012. And Trump did better with Hispanics and Asians than Romney had, and won the largest share of the black vote of any Republican since 2004. All these trends sustained a steep upward trajectory in 2020.

Trump’s racism was not a deal breaker for his supporters, many of whom expressed discomfort with the president’s ranting and raving. Polling from 2020 shows that even the most diehard Trump fans — those who believe that the 2020 election was stolen from him — would prefer ‘a hypothetical Trumpist politician with more respect for liberal democracy’ to Trump himself in 2024 as their candidate.

The truth is, the reasons people gave for voting for Trump were numerous —and legitimate. His promise to appoint conservative justices was a major motivating factor for antiabortion evangelicals. Others were swayed by his commitment to religious liberty, which gave him a lot of support in the Orthodox Jewish community. Independents especially appreciated his anti-war position. Lower-income voters were impressed by his opposition to America’s disastrous trade deals.

Anyone who talked to Trump voters knew their reasons for voting for him. But journalists at America’s leading publications did not know any Trump supporters socially, and that made it easy to caricature and misrepresent them. When New York Times reporters did venture into Trump country, they inevitably found some reason to tar the people they interviewed as racist.

This penchant was part and parcel of a larger dynamic that preceded Trump, in which liberal news media, increasingly reliant on digital advertising, subscriptions and memberships, have been mainstreaming an obsession with race, to the approval of their affluent readers. And what was once a business model built on a culture war has over the past few years devolved into a full-blown moral panic.

Any journalist working in the mainstream American press knows this, because the moral panic is enforced on social media in brutal shaming campaigns. They have happened to many journalists, but you don’t actually have to weed out every heretic to silence dissent. After a while, people silence themselves. Who would volunteer to be humiliated by thousands of strangers, when they could avoid it by staying quiet? The spectacle alone enforces compliance.

Once upon a time, telling the truth ‘without fear or favour’ was the job description of a New York Times journalist. Today, doing the job that way could very well cost a journalist his or her job. The people who are supposed to be in charge of the nation’s most august publications now routinely capitulate to the demands of the Twitter mob.

An early example occurred in September of 2018 when the guest list for the New Yorker magazine’s annual festival was announced. The roster included Hollywood celebrities Jim Carrey, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Judd Apatow — and Steve Bannon, the mastermind behind Trump’s 2016 victory, and the man who infamously bragged that his media outlet, Breitbart, was the platform of the racist, nativist ‘alt-right’.

‘I have every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation,’ David Remnick, the New Yorker’s editor in chief, told the Times. He would not get the chance. Within 30 minutes of a Times article announcing Bannon’s invitation, Apatow, Carrey and many others announced on social media that they would be boycotting the event in protest. Remnick cancelled Bannon’s appearance less than 12 hours after it had been announced. The reaction on social media and the disapproval of staff members, Remnick explained in an in-house email, was just too intense.

The Economist disagreed. The day Remnick rescinded Bannon’s invitation, its editor in chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, announced that Bannon would still be speaking at the magazine’s Open Future festival. ‘Mr Bannon stands for a world view that is antithetical to the liberal values the Economist has always espoused,’ Beddoes wrote. ‘The future of open societies will not be secured by like-minded people speaking to each other in an echo chamber, but by subjecting ideas and individuals from all sides to rigorous questioning and debate.’

But in American journalism, a dam had been broken. It is now normal for editors at legacy publications to capitulate to outrage not only from their readers, but from their own staff. That’s what’s so shocking about this censorious development in American journalism. It’s not that online activists would try to use their power to enforce their views. It’s that older journalists — people who should, who do, know better — now surrender to the pressure.

George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020 put this moral panic on steroids. Since then, liberal media outlets have fired writers, editors and even their founders to placate the woke left. The limits of acceptable discourse have shrunk. People have been fired for the crime of disagreeing with a person of colour on Twitter, or for not promoting enough black women. In February 2021, the New York Times pushed out long-time science reporter Donald McNeil after staffers found out he had used the ‘n-word’ in response to a question from a student about whether it’s OK to use the ‘n-word’ as a joke. Instead of fighting for McNeil’s job, the NewsGuild, the Times’s staff union, observed that ‘there’s never a moment when harmful racist rhetoric is acceptable’.

The Washington Free Beacon, reporting how the union had failed to fight for McNeil’s job, noted how many Times staffers come from wealthy backgrounds and how few actually rely on the job security the union provides. It concluded that ‘defending workers has given way to defenestrating them, especially when they violate the taboos of well-to-do progressives’. It isn’t just a culture war anymore, between antiracist wokesters and the last old-school journalists committed to objectivity. It’s a class war between highly educated young elites and their older middle-class colleagues who offend their woke sensibilities and thus, they think, deserve to be fired.

Or take Bari Weiss. The Times hired her in 2017 with an explicit mandate: find and publish conservatives and heterodox voices. But over the course of the three years Weiss wrote and edited for the Times, this mandate became not just impossible but verboten. What changed was wokeness: an obsession with identity politics and a very narrow way of talking about it.

‘Identity is the only lens that there is and everything, no matter how unrelated, needs to tie back to race and gender,’ Weiss told me. Hired to challenge that orthodoxy, she faced social censure at the Times. Some colleagues refused to speak to her. Others would ‘subtweet’ her — publish tweets that were obviously about her without mentioning her name — from a few desks away. The censure escalated to outright bullying. Her colleagues called her a liar on Twitter. In Slack, an online workplace messaging board, someone posted an axe emoji next to her name.

And then came the Tom Cotton op-ed.

After George Floyd’s death, the streets filled with millions of protesters, horrified by the brutality they had witnessed. But that righteous horror quickly morphed into something else — a moral panic around race. Just as parents in the 1980s were convinced that the neighbour’s kid who played Dungeons & Dragons in their basement was actually a Satanist, so today’s affluent white liberals are persuaded by ‘experts’ like Robin DiAngelo that a deep-seated racism hides behind the smiles — and tears — of white people attending diversity, equity and inclusion seminars as they desperately try to prove they aren’t racists.

In fact, it was precisely because of the millions of Americans on the streets that the moral panic around race was possible. A moral panic, after all, is a form of mass hysteria that happens when people come to believe that some hostile force threatens their values and safety. But it requires some level of consensus about the evil represented by the hostile force. In other words, it was our newfound consensus about how evil racism is that turned wokeness from a cultural front to a moral panic.

The wall-to-wall disgust at the evil of Derek Chauvin’s actions, and his conviction for murder and manslaughter on all counts, are proofs of our new consensus — but the media drew the opposite conclusion. This should not surprise us: the media have always played a key role in moral panics by invention, exaggeration and distortion.

This bears repeating: there can be no moral panic without the media and the social consensus they create. The power of the press — despite its unpopularity — is still immense. And it has used that power over the past decade, and with exponential intensity over the past few years, to wage a culture war on its own behalf, notably by creating a moral panic around racism.

Nor is it surprising that the New York Times played an outsized role in shaping our moral panic. Its business model is deeply bound up with the mores of affluent white liberals. Inevitably, in the spring of 2020, it turned its wrath on its own. By the time the dust settled, five people would no longer work at the Times.

The George Floyd protests started out peacefully, but in late May they took a violent turn. Images of riots, looting and arson began to flood social media. On the nightly news you could catch devastating interviews of weeping business owners standing next to the burned-out buildings that were the remains of their life’s work. On May 31, a Sunday night, the rioting escalated violently across the nation. Early on June 1, reports emerged that even President Trump had been briefly taken to an underground bunker.

Around 8:30 the next morning, Sen. Tom Cotton, a Trump ally, went on Fox News to discuss the mass destruction. Cotton acknowledged how disturbing the footage of George Floyd’s death was, and insisted that he respected the right to peaceful protest. He also said that ‘we should have zero tolerance for anarchy and rioting and looting’, and that President Trump ‘should use the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty military forces to these cities, to support our local law enforcement and ensure this violence ends today’. Later, Cotton tweeted, ‘Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight’ and ‘Whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.’

The parallel to Jan 6 rhetoric is so consistent it's as though Cottons words have become a bible for the left

Cotton’s ‘whatever it takes’ language was harsh, but the majority of Americans — including a large share of black Americans — agreed with him. This is why the Times’s Opinion section, which planned to run an editorial and two opinion columns opposing the use of the Insurrection Act, was also on the lookout for a piece defending it. When Cotton pitched an op-ed about how Twitter was threatening to lock him out of his account, a senior editor suggested he write up his thoughts on the Insurrection Act instead.

Cotton’s first draft was deemed strong by two senior editors at the Times. He excoriated defences of looting as ‘built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters’. He insisted that the majority ‘who seek to protest peacefully’ shouldn’t be ‘confused with bands of miscreants’. He argued that the president had the authority to use the Insurrection Act to send in US troops if governors couldn’t quell the rioting and looting on their own.

Cue FBI tasked with investigating school board meetings and vilifying protestors at those meetings

The draft went through a series of edits — fact checks, line edits, clarifications and copyedits. There were several phone calls to the senator’s office. A few lines were deleted and some language clarified. By the time the piece was ready for publication, no fewer than seven editors had worked on it. Having been approved one final time by a senior Opinion editor, the piece was published on the Times website on June 3.

All hell broke loose. On Slack, a group called Black@NYT decided to say the column ‘endangered’ black staff members; language designed to ‘focus on the work’ of woke racial activism, Ben Smith reported. They began tweeting a screenshot of the Cotton op-ed along with a caption: ‘Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.’ Journalists from every New York Times department followed suit, tweeting the screenshot of Cotton’s headline along with the mantra. The NewsGuild later advised staffers that language that focused on workplace safety was legally protected.

Times journalists were joined on Twitter by thousands of others. Anyone who defended the Times’s decision to publish the op-ed had their Twitter mentions fill up with brand-name writers angrily calling them racist. More than a thousand Times employees signed a letter of protest to the Times’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger. The newspaper suffered its highest-ever number of editorial cancellations in a single hour. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demanded answers.

People whose job it is to decipher fact from fiction, to think independently and make up their own minds based on the merits of a case, all joined in lockstep to tweet the exact same sentence — a sentence designed not to describe reality but to carefully circumvent workplace rules. The country’s most powerful and important journalists had completely ceded their critical-thinking skills to higher powers — the NewsGuild and the Twitter mob. By the time thousands of white reporters had retweeted these posts, zombie-like, on their own timelines, the distance from ‘This is union-approved language used to express our dissent’ to ‘This is the truth: Black journalists will die because of this op-ed’ shrank until it disappeared.

James Bennet, the chief of the editorial page, tried to explain the op-ed to his colleagues the next day, and then during an excruciating town hall meeting held over Zoom.

‘We published Cotton’s argument in part because we’ve committed to Times readers to provide a debate on important questions like this,’ Bennet wrote. ‘It would undermine the integrity and independence of The New York Times if we only published views that editors like me agreed with, and it would betray what I think of as our fundamental purpose — not to tell you what to think, but to help you think for yourself.’

The reactions on Twitter were brutal: ‘If he had written “Stop the N***ers” would you have published that?’ ‘Resign and advocate for a Black woman to take your place.’ ‘Where does this principle end? Would the Times publish an op-ed explaining the policy rationale for genocide?’ ‘We’re going to publish this op-ed entitled “Mein Kampf” by an up and coming politician so that our readers can be shown the counter-argument they so desperately need.’

The slippage from fact to delusion bled into the Times’s own coverage of the brouhaha in an article full of errors. The piece misstated the thesis of Cotton’s op-ed by claiming he wished to send in the military ‘to suppress protests,’ and failing to mention that he advised this only in cases where ‘the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined’. A 25-year-old junior editor was named as the sole editor of the piece: ‘The Op-Ed was edited by Adam Rubenstein, according to staff members in the editorial department... Several of them said they had not been aware of the article before it was published.’

The Times strung up Rubenstein as a lone malefactor, dangling his name like bait in front of the mob. The mob knew exactly what to do with that bait: the backlash against him was severe, and quickly descended into antisemitic slurs. The faulty Times report led to him being named in piece after piece as the sole editor behind the Cotton op-ed. For days, not one of the multiple senior editors who had signed off on it stood up for Rubenstein. It was a breathtaking dereliction of ethics — and the Times kept making it worse.

‘We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication,’ a Times spokeswoman claimed in a statement. ‘This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards.’ The fantasy that the piece contained errors, rather than the truth — that it simply put forth an opinion people didn’t like — grew from a lie into a mass delusion.

A.G. Sulzberger, the Times’s publisher, had initially stood by the piece. But he caved to the pressure during a town hall with his staff and apologised profusely to them. Dean Baquet, the executive editor, claimed to be proud of the solidarity the Times staffers had shown one another. A vast editor’s note was affixed to the top of Cotton’s piece: ‘After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process,’ it began. ‘Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.’

By that evening, Bennet no longer worked at the Times. His deputy, Jim Dao, was moved to another department. Rubenstein left the Times six months later. The message was stark: publish opinions the left disagrees with at your own risk. Though six in 10 American voters, and 37 per cent of black Americans, may agree, if the journalists on Twitter disagree, you will find yourself out of a job. Cotton may have been closer to the president who would decide whether or not to send in the troops, but Times staff will now decide whether a senator’s opinion should be published in what was once the paper of record. And if they had to force hundreds of thousands of people to affirm a fantastical version of reality as not only true but as a moral precept, that’s how it would go down.

The harm is not to those with the opinion that the military should invade our cities to assist police who are overwhelmed by rioters, but rather to the public sphere and the journalists whose job requires they have the humility to submit to the pursuit of fairness and truth. It’s public debate that bears the brunt of the damage. We are being denied the chance to hash out a controversy rather than hide from it.

These values are crucial not just to journalism but to democracy and to freedom. They used to be the values of the New York Times. Not anymore. The contretemps over Cotton’s op-ed ushered in a new era. He would be the last Republican official to grace the pages of the Opinion section for a long time. For the six months leading up to what the New York Times repeatedly said was the most important election of our lifetimes, we would not read a single op-ed by someone explaining why they were voting for Trump. Such an op-ed, a person familiar with the section told me, would now ‘face an insurmountable hurdle’.

In July 2020, Bari Weiss quit the Times with a blistering resignation letter. ‘Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,’ Weiss wrote. ‘Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.’ After describing the vicious bullying she’d faced from colleagues, Weiss concluded, ‘Nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back.’

And the hunt for insufficiently antiracist Americans has become its own genre. The Times has run articles declaring that wine and surfing are racist, and that it’s time to ‘decolonise botanical collections’ by ridding them of ‘structural racism’. It even ran an article about a 15-year-old girl who used the ‘N-word’ when she bragged about passing her driving test in a private video to a friend — which another student got his hands on and saved for three years until he could use it to get her kicked out of college.

Stories like this seem to attract an unlimited audience in the way stories of crime once did for Joseph Pulitzer’s papers. That’s because articles that offend the woke person are crime stories for the affluent: stories of people just like themselves who commit crimes of thought or speech, and lose everything when they fall on the wrong side of the reigning orthodoxy. As the Twitter mob pursues small infractions as avidly as it does large ones, and as the etiquette keeps shifting, who dares trust their own ability to judge right from wrong?

It’s how you know we’re in a moral panic: only the mob has the right to judge you. And too many journalists have ceded them that right. Indeed, a huge number of the mob are journalists — journalists from the most important newspapers in the country and the world, all tweeting the exact same meaningless sentence repeatedly. People who had been hired to think for themselves now mindlessly repeat a dogma like their jobs depended on it.

Well, they do.