As the Twitter files were being released and we got details on how “shadow-banning” , which both the media and the official folks at Twitter INSISTED was not happening, worked I got a tweet from one of the first people who followed me when I started to write back in 2008:
You have to remember something I’m a very small fish in the pond, Despite early stories on Epstein that predated most of the national media’s coverage and in person coverage of congressional, senatorial and even presidential campaigns, including questioning Donald Trump twice at press conferences I never managed to even 3500 followers on twitter.
Yet like Youtube which banned me last month and denied my appeal based on unequal treatment Twitter apparently found me dangerous to their narratives to keep my tweets from getting out to followers
I must admit I’m flattered and honored.
Closing thought, It was in the last few years that I decided I wasn’t going to be bigger than I was and decided to not push harder in terms of trying to make this my primary living. I wonder how many hits on the web site and how many tip jar hits I missed thanks to the efforts of the not so good folk at twitter that made that decision necessary?
The 2nd batch of Twitter files dropped showing that the folks at Twitter pre-musk were lying though their teeth concerning shadow-banning and manipulating trends.
To conservatives this is no surprise, to the left now that denial is no longer an option have started calling it “Old News” but I suspect the endgame it what I predicted a while back deciding to say it’s justified and celebrate it.
This is what happens when you throw out the whole “Thou shalt not bear false witness” business.
Yesterday I speculated concerning the reaction of parents at the Francis W. Parker school over the Project Veritas revelations:
Now in fairness this is Chicago land of the left so it is possible that the school administration and the parents while wanting to avoid the drugs, guns and the lack of an actual education in the public schools, might pine for the indoctrination to the liberal/gay agenda that they kids are missing so it is very possible that they might be all on board with this kind of thing.
It hits me now that the school has publicly defended the Dean in question that even parents who are not onboard on this stuff might find themselves not only keeping silent but leaving their children in the school due to peer pressure, after all as part of the liberal Chicago elites who can afford to spend $40K annually for a private school they are part of an elite club and might get a lot of pushback socially for doing so.
Parents of courage and integrity will willing to pay the price for the sake of their kids, but for those who know this is wrong and stay silent, I say to them I have more respect for those who actually support this monstrosity than for you, at least they are acting according to their warped beliefs that it is right.
Social status or your kids welfare, choose one.
Of course if the funding dries up from Alumni all this will be moot as they’ll drop these folks like a hot iron.
Yesterday with the help of the Saudis and others the Biden Admin managed to get Brittany Griner back from Russia in exchange for a rather dangerous Russian operative.
To say the optics of the trade and the White House spin are bad is an understatement but I won’t begrudge the release of any American being held in a Russian prison for a trivial crime.
What I’m more interested in seeing is how Grimes who has not had a lot of kind words to say about her home country reacts the next time the Anthem is played at a WNBA game she is in.
There is nothing like being in a Russian jail cell to give a person perspective on the relative merits of one’s country vs another. One hopes Griner has gained said perspective through her ordeal but we will see.
There is a lot of fuss being made about Senator Kristin Sinema leaving the Democrat party. There should not be.
As long as Sinema is caucusing with the Democrats it will make no difference in control of the senate nor is it likely to make a difference in how she votes on issues.
The only reason for this change is to eliminate the need for her to run in a Democrat Primary.
What’s really going to be fun is to see her try to pull off a Murkowski but I suspect Charlie Schumer is going to be a lot less forgiving of this renegade incumbent than Mitch McConnell was of his.
After all for the left politics is their religion and they have no mercy for apostates.
Finally my first oil delivery and bill of the season came in. It’s double what it was back in the days of Trump.
A lot of people who happily voted for Biden in the Northeast are going to get an education on the principle that you get the government you deserve over the next few months.
And just wait till they get their local property tax bills because every single city and town is paying more for their oil and gas too and that’s going to be passed on in terms of limited services and higher tax bills.
Of course that’s not much comfort to me as I’m in the same boat despite warning them about it.
As Ben Franklin said: “Experience keeps a dearSchool, butFoolswill learn in no other, and scarce in that” I don’t expect them to learn from this, because that would involve admitting they were wrong. They’d rather pay and buy blankets than face that horror.
On Friday night Substack journalist Matt Taibbi released the first installment of the Twitter Files, which outlined the efforts by Twitter, with assists from the Democratic National Committee, to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020. It’s a dynamite story–a political party worked behind the scenes with a Big Tech company to suppress a damaging news story about a presidential candidate, in this case Joe Biden, so he could defeat the incumbent, Donald J. Trump.
That tale of intrigue is something that you would think that you would find only in political thrillers. You know, the stuff of books, movies, or TV series. Except the Twitter scandal really happened. In response, the elitist mainstream media chose one of three tactics, or a combination of them, to confront this scandal: ignore, bury, or insult. In this post I’m going to discuss the first one in depth, and I’ll get to that in a moment.
But first a look back at an incident from 2005, the year I started my own blog, Marathon Pundit. What was then called the blogosphere was a relatively happy place. In comment threads and in behind-the-scenes emails, there was regular communication between conservative and liberal bloggers and journalists, even some camaraderie, at least here in Illinois. Politically our two camps didn’t agree on much–but there was one subject where we were in unison. All of the Illinois bloggers and mainstream media reporters hated the Reverend Fred Phelps and his twisted house of worship, the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas.
Some background: Phelps, who died in 2014, would bus in the few dozen members of his church, which then, as it does now, consisted only of the extended Phelps family, and protest at the funerals of soldiers and sailors killed in action in Iraq or Afghanistan. They held signs that read, among other things, “God Loves Dead Soldiers.” Phelps, who probably was in need of intensive psychiatric care, based his opinion on God and US military deaths on America’s acceptance of the gay lifestyle.
Back to Illinois: There was a Phelps protest in East Peoria, Illinois in 2005 at the funeral of a US Marine gunnery sergeant, who was killed in Iraq, which the local paper, the Peoria Journal Star reported on, but it left out the Westboro Church protest. And that infuriated Bill Dennis, who wrote the now-inactive Peoria Pundit blog.
More than once, I’ve read the opinion that the media shouldn’t give Phelps and his people any “publicity.” Whether or not any particular groups gets publicity from news covering isn’t important. The news media needs to cover the news, whether or not it’s news we want to hear. It’s not the media’s job to keep us from having to hear ugly messages. The people who work in the information business need to reject the notion that the public is better off when it is kept in the dark. We wouldn’t tolerate the government doing that to us. Why does the media think it has the right to keep unpleasant news away from us?
It’s the news media’s job to answer questions, not to turn their head and pretend they didn’t hear the question.
The media’s opinion of what information should be provided to its consumers has now become dangerous. Big Tech, meaning of course Twitter, and as well as Google and Facebook, as well as traditional sources such as the legacy newspapers and broadcast networks, actively worked to suppress or ignore the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was revealed in October 2020 by the New York Post, as the presidential election season was underway. Yes, season–voting was already underway just about everywhere. Those media villains–I believe it’s fair to include those three Big Tech behemoths are part of the media–committed election interference. Think of a football game where the beat reporter for an NFL team is standing on the sidelines when the opposing team is about to score a touchdown–who then runs on to the field and tackles the player carrying the ball. Let’s call that wronged player “Trump.”
That’s what happened in 2020.
What is the slogan of the Washington Post, which has so far has written just one story about the Twitter Files? Oh yeah, “Democracy dies in darkness.” At least the most recent time Clay Travis checked, which was this morning, the New York Times hasn’t reported on Taibbe’s Twitter revelations. Travis Tweeted a few hours ago, “It has now been two days since @twitter & @elonmusk posted actual emails & correspondence of internal documents relating to the Hunter Biden laptop censorship in 2020. The @nytimes has still not covered the story at all.”
It has now been two days since @twitter & @elonmusk posted actual emails & correspondence of internal documents relating to the Hunter Biden laptop censorship in 2020. The @nytimes has still not covered the story at all.
In a story published today CBS news barely mentions Taibbi’s scoop–but it attacked Twitter owner Elon Musk. Oh yeah, attacking. A whole bunch of leftist journalists, propagandists really, went into that attack mode I discussed earlier, vilifying Taibbi for performing superb journalism.
And in regard to that Phelps story from ’05, it wasn’t just the Peoria Journal Star committing the sin of omission. You remember I said that back in the day conservative and liberal bloggers and journalists used to interact regularly about stories. I can’t find the email I sent so long ago, but I reached out to a big shot left-wing Chicago newspaper columnist about what the Peoria Pundit and I saw as media malpractice. His polite reply to me was something like this, “But if we report on Phelps and his hateful protests, then we are only doing what he wants–giving him publicity.”
No, Mr. Newspaper Columnist, it is your job is to report the news. Not hide it, shape it, or twist it.
Democracy dies in darkness. So does the truth.
John Ruberry regularly blogs from the Chicago area at Marathon Pundit.
One might be amazed how many reporters on the left spent yesterday on twitter attacking Musk and Matt Taibbi for releasing these documents, at least one would if you didn’t realize that these folks paychecks depend on them objecting.
This goes to show the difference between social media and standard media. For standard media a Friday night dump would be all about burring a story. However for a story that will spread via social media a Friday night weekend dump means more regular people will be free to read and spread it around, which is the whole point.
All that Musk has done has been about raising the profile of twitter. This document dump will do the same. That’s good news for all those advertisers who didn’t heed the left’s call to leave the platform but bad news to all who played along and lost their exposure to all those eyeballs.
This combined with the under oath testimony of an FBI agent being deposed is Missouri on their attempts to use big tech to swing the last election goes a long way in explaining why they went all in on stealing that election. If they fail and Trump wins then it’s bound to have been leaked to someone in the admin which might have resulted in a special prosecutor and/or investigation that would have been damning.
It’s very much worth noting that there were Democrat members of congress worried about this but their primary worry was what it would mean to section 230 defanging the friendly tech folks elsewhere at Facebook and Google and Youtube. In other words they were worried about not the acts but the Consequences they might lead to. A real test of the new GOP congress will be how deep they investigate this. If I’m McCarthy worried about getting the speakers chair I’d put out a statement at once saying I would name a committee at once and promise to load it with fire-eaters on the right.
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