foxnews | CNN medical contributor Dr. Leana Wen suggested Saturday that life needs to be "hard" for Americans who have not received a COVID-19vaccine and individuals who refuse to get shots should perhaps face weekly testings.
"It
needs to be hard for people to remain unvaccinated," Wen, the former
Planned Parenthood president, said. "Right now, it's kind of the
opposite."
Unvaccinated people, she fretted, can at the moment go about their lives as normal without any consequence.
"But
at some point these mandates, by workplaces, by schools, I think it
will be important to say, ‘Hey, you can opt out, but if you want to opt
out, you have to sign these forms, you have to get twice weekly
testing,’" Wen said. "Basically, we need to make getting vaccinated the
easy choice."
Wen's comments piggyback off an op-ed she wrote in the Washington Post urging
President Biden to mandate vaccinations nationally and scolding him for
not more aggressively using his platform. She argued the White House
Independence Day event would have been a perfect opportunity to share
that message.
"The
celebration could have been a chance to show that vaccination isn’t
just an individual decision, but one that affects the health of others —
including those already vaccinated," Wen wrote.
CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner also suggested Friday it was time to mandate vaccines.
mediaite | CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner told Erin Burnett
Thursday that he believed it was “time to start mandating vaccines” —
and recognizing that while the government could not do so, he applauded
efforts by employers, colleges, and other private organizations to
require the Covid-19 vaccine.
Burnett introduced the segment by mentioning the news that Pfizer would be filming for emergency use authorization for a third booster shot, in part to increase efficacy against the highly contagious delta variant.
“There’s still a third of the population in the United States that
hasn’t got a single dose” of the vaccine, said Burnett, and the Biden
administration has said that “it’s not their role to mandate people get
vaccinated,” instead going for a persuasive message. She played a
montage of President Joe Biden and several members of his administration
urging Americans to “please get vaccinated now.”
“Given where things are going, is it time to move on from saying please to mandating?” Burnett asked.
“I do think it’s time to start mandating vaccines,” Reiner replied.
“And I think that the private industry and private organizations will do
that. At GW university where I work, starting in fall, you can’t be on
campus unless you’re fully vaccinated.”
Currently, Reiner said, 75 million adults in the U.S. have chosen not
to get vaccinated. “That choice has consequences. Now, we can’t force
you to take a jab in the arm. But there are many jobs, perhaps, that can
prevent you from working if you decide not to get vaccinated. So I
think we need to be more proactive and we will see industry take the
lead in this.”
privacytogo | In 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt created Google Ideas. In typical Silicon Valley newspeak, Ideas was marketed as a “think/do tank to research issues at the intersection of technology and geopolitics.“
Astute readers know this “think/do” formula well – entities like the
Council on Foreign Relations or World Economic Forum draft policy papers
(think) and three-letter agencies carry them out (do).
And again, in typical Silicon Valley fashion, Google wanted to
streamline this process – bring everything in-house and remake the world
in their own image.
To head up Google Ideas, Schmidt tapped a man named Jared Cohen.
He couldn’t have selected a better goon for the job – as a
card-carrying member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Rhodes
Scholar, Cohen is a textbook Globalist spook. The State Department
doubtlessly approved of his sordid credentials, as both Condoleeza Rice
and Hillary Clinton enrolled Cohen to knock over foreign governments
they disapproved of.
More recently, the role of Google Ideas in the attempted overthrow of Assad in Syria went public thanks to the oft-cited Hillary Clinton email leaks.
Why scrap all that hard work when you can just rebrand and shift your regime change operations to domestic targets?
The four subheaders on Jigsaw’s homepage, Disinformation, Censorship, Toxicity, and Violent Extremism demonstrate this tactic at work.
There is no greater source of media disinformation than MSM and the information served up by Google search engines.
Big Tech are at the forefront of destroying free speech through heavy-handed censorship, Google among them.
Psychological manipulation tactics used by the social justice crowd doubtlessly instill toxicity in those subjected to them.
And
Google’s well-documented history of participating in bloody regime
change as described in this article are textbook cases of violent extremism.
Yet Jigsaw markets itself as combating these societal ails.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, just as Google’s
former company tag-line of “Don’t Be Evil” was a similar reversal of
reality.
And yes, regime change aficionado Jared Cohen is still the CEO of Google Jigsaw. In fact, Jigsaw, LLC was overtly brought back in-house as of October 2020.
NYTimes | The Substack model has no shortage of
skeptics. “A robust press is essential to a functioning democracy, and a
cultural turn toward journalistic individualism might not be in the
collective interest,” Anna Weiner argued
in The New Yorker last year. “It is expensive and laborious to hold
powerful people and institutions to account, and, at many media
organizations, any given article is the result of collaboration between
writers, editors, copy editors, fact-checkers and producers.” Most of
the journalism that thrives on Substack is commentary, which is often
cheaper than news to produce.
But that doesn’t mean that traditional news organizations are somehow safe from the competition. As Will Oremus writes
in Slate, commentators have historically acted as subsidies for the
more expensive and less glamorous work of local reporting — and, I would
add for news operations like this one, international coverage.
“The Times’s digital success has been built partly on a major expansion of its opinion section; magazines such as The Atlanticand
Mother Jones have relied on their best-known columnists to support
their originally reported features and investigations,” Oremus writes.
“It’s those personalities that Substack is going after and poaching.”
As a result, the paid subscription newsletter business is likely to favor writers who already have a national platform. “If you visit Substack’s website,” Clio Chang wrote
for The Columbia Journalism Review last year, “you’ll see leaderboards
of the top 25 paid and free newsletters; the writers’ names are
accompanied by their little circular avatars. The intention is
declarative — you, too, can make it on Substack.
But as you peruse the lists, something becomes clear: The most
successful people on Substack are those who have already been well
served by existing media power structures.”
It’s
doubtless a good deal for that small coterie of writers. But whether
the citizenry will benefit in the long run is another question. Sarah
Roberts, a professor at the School of Education and Information Studies
at the University of California, Los Angeles, has gone so far as to call
Substack “dangerous” and a “threat to journalism.”
“People
not inside journalism or media may not know the specifics, but they
often have a nebulous sense that there are norms — independence,
disclosure of compromise, editorial oversight and vetting of the
reporting,” she tweeted
in February. By decamping to an independent newsletter, “An
investigative reporter who has earned her bona fides in a newsroom and
under both strict editorial and journalistic principles, has just cashed
out and turned herself into an opinion writer.”
nymag | Between 2008 and 2019, the number of newsroom jobs in the United States fell by 26,000, according to the Pew Research Center. Over that same period, roughly 15,000 journalism majors
were graduating into the U.S. labor market every year. In addition to
making the competition for writerly employment exceptionally brutal,
these developments also raised the barriers to merely entering that competition: Since regional newspapers have collapsed faster than national outlets, what jobs remain are now (even more) heavily concentrated in a handful of extremely high-cost cities.
Faced
with a superabundant supply of underemployed writers, and increasingly
thin to nonexistent profit margins, all manner of media companies in
such cities have made a common practice of paying poverty wages for entry-level work.
Applicants accept these terms because the outlets offer (potentially,
eventually monetizable) “prestige,” and/or because they sought to
emulate the success of that publication’s star writers, and/or because
they had no other options, and/or because class privilege shielded them
from the worst consequences of their underpayment.
Like
the vast majority of the writers who create Substacks, the vast
majority of the interns who take unpaid to barely paid positions in
journalism will never attain the financial security of their
publications’ big-name writers. And those big-name writers — and the
interns who are able to approximate their success — are typically beneficiaries of an uneven playing field
tilted in favor of the upper-middle class. My own path to a decent job
in journalism was eased by parental subsidies, which made it possible
for me to accept $8-an-hour internships in New York City without
suffering malnutrition. The “advances” that most consequentially bias
who gets to write for a living and who does not derive from accidents of
birth.
The resurgence of labor organizing in media has
mitigated the industry’s exploitative treatment of entry-level workers
and the class bias inherent to it. And this is one of the many reasons
why unionizing newsrooms is a vital project. But labor unions alone
cannot solve the underlying problem of mass underemployment within the
industry. America does not have more competent journalists than it
needs. But it does have far more of them than media firms are capable of
profitably employing, amid the erosion of the ad-supported business model.
Which is one major reason why there are so many writers willing to provide Substack with content free of charge.
There
may be something distasteful about the fact that Substack benefits from
journalists’ financial desperation. But ultimately the core problem
here is not that a newsletter platform is helping cash-strapped writers
squeeze some tips out of their Twitter followings. The problem is that
legions of talented journalists are going underemployed, even as
statehouses across the country are going under-covered. Forcing Substack
to disclose every contract that it has ever offered will not free us
from the scam that is the modern media industry. Only publicly financing the Fourth Estate can do that.
The FBI submission to the Grand Jury in December of 2017 was four
months after congressman Dana Rohrabacher talked to Julian Assange in
August of 2017: “Assange told a U.S. congressman … he can prove the
leaked Democratic Party documents … did not come from Russia.”
(August 2017, The Hill Via John Solomon)
Julian Assange told a U.S. congressman on Tuesday he can prove the
leaked Democratic Party documents he published during last year’s
election did not come from Russia and promised additional helpful
information about the leaks in the near future.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who is friendly to
Russia and chairs an important House subcommittee on Eurasia policy,
became the first American congressman to meet with Assange during a
three-hour private gathering at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where
the WikiLeaks founder has been holed up for years.
Rohrabacher recounted his conversation with Assange to The Hill.
“Our three-hour meeting covered a wide array of issues, including the
WikiLeaks exposure of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] emails
during last year’s presidential election,” Rohrabacher said, “Julian
emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking
or disclosure of those emails.”
Pressed for more detail on the source of the documents, Rohrabacher
said he had information to share privately with President Trump. (read more)
Knowing how much effort the Intelligence Branch put into the false
Russia collusion-conspiracy narrative, it would make sense for the FBI
to take keen interest after this August 2017 meeting between Rohrabacher
and Assange, monitor all activity, and why the FBI would quickly gather
specific evidence (related to Wikileaks and Bradley Manning) for a
grand jury by December 2017.
Within three months of the EDVA grand jury the DOJ generated an indictment and sealed it in March 2018.
The DOJ sat on the indictment while the Mueller/Weissmann probe was ongoing.
As soon as the Mueller/Weissmann probe ended, on April 11th, 2019, a
planned and coordinated effort between the U.K. and U.S. was executed;
Julian Assange was forcibly arrested and removed from the Ecuadorian
embassy in London, and the EDVA indictment was unsealed (link).
As a person who has researched this fiasco; including the
ridiculously false 2016 Russian hacking/interference narrative: “17
intelligence agencies”, Joint Analysis Report (JAR) needed for Obama’s anti-Russia narrative in December ’16; and then a month later the ridiculously political Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in January ’17; this timing against Assange is too coincidental.
It doesn’t take a deep researcher to see the aligned Deep State
motive to control Julian Assange. The Weissmann/Mueller report was dependent on Russia cybercrimes for justification, and that narrative was contingent on the Russia DNC hack story which Julian Assange disputes.
♦ This is critical. The Weissmann/Mueller report
contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central
element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election. This
claim is directly disputed by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as outlined
during the Dana Rohrabacher interview, and by Julian Assange
on-the-record statements.
The predicate for Robert Mueller’s investigation was specifically due to Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The fulcrum for this Russia interference claim is the intelligence
community assessment; and the only factual evidence claimed within the
ICA is that Russia hacked the DNC servers; a claim only made possible by
relying on forensic computer analysis from Crowdstrike, a DNC and FBI
contractor.
The CIA holds a self-interest in upholding the Russian hacking claim;
the FBI holds an interest in maintaining that claim; the U.S. media
hold an interest in maintaining that claim. All of the foreign countries
whose intelligence apparatus participated with Brennan and Strzok also
have a self-interest in maintaining that Russia hacking and interference
narrative.
Julian Assange is the only person with direct knowledge of how
Wikileaks gained custody of the DNC emails; and Assange has claimed he
has evidence it was not from a hack.
This “Russian hacking” claim was ultimately important to the
CIA, FBI, DOJ, ODNI and U.K intelligence apparatus, it forms the corner
of their justification. With that level of importance, well, right
there is the obvious motive to shut Julian Assange down as soon as
intelligence officials knew the Weissmann/Mueller report was going to be
public.
CTH | The contrast of ideological alignment between the HPSCI, SSCI and
Intelligence Branch is crystal clear when viewed through the prism of
cooperation. You can see which legislative committee holds the power
and support of the Intelligence Branch. The SSCI facilitates the
corrupt existence of the IC Branch, so the IC Branch only cooperates
with the SSCI. It really is that simple.
♦ The Intelligence Branch carefully selects its own members by
controlling how security clearances are investigated and allowed (FBI).
The Intelligence Branch also uses compartmentalization of intelligence
as a way to keep each agency, and each downstream branch of government
(executive, legislative and judicial), at arms length as a method to
stop anyone from seeing the larger picture of their activity. I call
this the “silo effect“,
and it is done by design. I have looked the at stunned faces when I
present silo product from one agency to the silo customers of another.
Through the advise and consent rules, the Intelligence Branch uses
the SSCI to keep out people they consider dangerous to their ongoing
operations. Any appointee to the intelligence community must first pass
through the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, before they get a
full Senate vote. If the SSCI rejects the candidate, they simply refuse
to take up the nomination. The president is then blocked from that
appointment. This is what happened with President Trump over-and-over
again.
♦ Additionally, the Intelligence Branch protects itself, and its
facilitating allies through the formal classification process. The
Intelligence Branch gets to decide unilaterally what information will be
released and what information will be kept secret. There is no entity
outside the Intelligence Branch, and yes that includes the President of
the United States, who can supersede the classification authority of the
Intelligence Branch. {Go Deep} and {Go Deep} This is something 99.9% of the people on our side get totally and frustratingly wrong.
No-one can declassify, or make public, anything the Intelligence
Branch will not agree to. Doubt this?… ask Ric Grenell, John Ratcliffe,
or even President Trump himself.
♦ The classification process is determined inside the
Intelligence Branch, all by themselves. They get to choose what rank of
classification exists on any work-product they create; and they get to
decide what the classification status is of any work-product that is
created by anyone else. The Intelligence Branch has full control over
what is considered classified information and what is not. The
Intelligence Branch defines what is a “national security interest” and
what is not. A great technique for hiding fingerprints of corrupt and
illegal activity.
[For familiar reference see the redactions to Lisa Page and Peter
Strzok text messages. The Intelligence Branch does all redactions.]
♦ Similarly the declassification process is a request by an
agency, even a traditionally superior agency like the President of the
United States, to the Intelligence Branch asking for them to release the
information. The Intelligence Branch again holds full unilateral
control. If the head of the CIA refuses to comply with the
declassification instruction of the President, what can the president do
except fire him/her? {Again, GO DEEP}
How does the President replace the non-compliant cabinet member?… They
have to go through the SSCI confirmation… See the problem?
CTH | Here we pick up the intelligence issues as they manifest after
9/11/01, and highlight how the modern version of the total intelligence
apparatus has now metastasized into a fourth branch of government. If
we take the modern construct we can highlight how and why the oversight
or “check/balance” in the system has become functionally obsolescent.
Factually, the modern intelligence apparatus uses checks and balances
in their favor. The checks create silos of proprietary information
that works around oversight issues. That’s part of the problem.
Ironically the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was
created in the aftermath of 9/11/01 expressly to eliminate the silos of
information which they felt led to a domestic terrorist attack that
could have been prevented. The ODNI was created specifically upon the
recommendation of the 9/11 commission.
The intent was to create a central hub of intelligence information,
inside the executive branch, where the CIA, NSA, DoD, DoS, and DIA could
deposit their unique intelligence products and a repository would be
created so that domestic intelligence operations, like the DOJ and FBI
could access them when needed to analyze threats to the U.S. This,
they hoped, would ensure the obvious flags missed in the 9/11 attacks
would not be missed again.
The DNI office created a problem for those who operate in the shadows
of proprietary information. You’ll see how it was critical to install a
person uniquely skilled in being an idiot, James Clapper, into that
willfully blind role while intelligence operatives worked around the
office to assemble the Intelligence Branch of government.
♦ The last federal budget that flowed through the traditional
budgetary process was signed into law in September of 2007 for fiscal
year 2008 by George W Bush. Every budget since then has been a
fragmented process of continuing resolutions and individual spending
bills.
Why does this matter? Because many people think defunding the IC is a
solution; it ain’t… not yet. Worse yet, the corrupt divisions deep
inside the U.S. intelligence system can now fund themselves from
multinational private sector partnerships (banks, corporations and
foreign entities).
CTH | That video of James Comey being questioned by Elise Stefanik was the
first example given to me by someone who knew the background of
everything that was taking place preceding that March 20, 2017,
hearing. That FBI reference point is a key to understand how the
Intelligence Branch operates with unilateral authority above congress
(legislative branch), above the White House (executive branch), and even
above the court system (judicial branch).
After four days of research and meetings in DC during 2020; amid a
town that was serendipitously shut down due to COVID; I found a letter
slid under the door of my nearly empty hotel room with an introduction
of sorts. The subsequent discussions were perhaps the most important.
After hours of specific questions and answers on specific examples I
realized why our nation is in this mess. That is when I discovered the
fourth and superseding branch of government, the Intelligence Branch.
The intelligence branch is an independent functioning branch of
government, it is no longer a subsidiary set of agencies within the
executive branch as most would think. To understand the intelligence
branch we need to drop the elementary school civics class lessons about
three coequal branches of government, and replace that outlook with the
modern system that created itself.
The intelligence branch functions, much like the State Dept, through a
unique set of public-private partnerships that support it. Big Tech
industry collaboration with intelligence operatives is part of that
functioning; almost like an NGO. However, the process is much more
important than most think. In this problematic perspective of a corrupt
system of government, the process is the flaw – not the outcome.
There are people making decisions inside this little-known,
unregulated and out-of-control branch of government that impact every
facet of our lives.
None of the people operating deep inside the Intelligence Branch were
elected; and our elected representative House members genuinely do not
know how the system works. I know this because I have talked to House
and Senate staffers, including the chiefs of staff for multiple House
committee seats. They are clueless. That is part of the purpose of me
explaining it, with examples, in full detail and sunlight.
unherd |The extraordinary spread in recent
months of what has become known, in the writer Wesley Yang’s phrase, as
“the successor ideology” has encouraged all manner of analysis
attempting to delineate its essential features. Is it a religion, with
its own litany of sin and redemption, its own repertoire of fervent
rituals and iconography? Is this Marxism, ask American conservatives,
still fighting yesterday’s ideological war?
What does this all do to speed along
policing reform, ask bewildered African-Americans, as they observe
global corporations and white celebrities compete to beat their chests
in ever-more elaborate and meaningless gestures of atonement? What kind
of meaningful anti-systemic revolution can provoke such immediate and
fulsome support from the Hollywood entertainment complex, from the
richest oligarchs and plutocrats on earth, and from the media organs of
the liberal state?
Composed with a feverish,
hallucinatory clarity, Althusser’s essay aimed to elucidate the manner
in which ideology functions as a means to prop up the political order,
observing that “no class can hold state power over a long period without
at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the Ideological
State Apparatuses”.
What are these ISAs? Contrasted with
the Repressive State Apparatuses — the police, the army, and so on — the
ISAs are the means by which the system reproduces itself through
ideology: Althusser lists the church, the media and the education system
along with the family, and the legal and political system and the
culture industry as the means through which the ideology of the
governing system is enforced. Althusser here develops Gramsci’s thesis
that the cultural sphere is the most productive arena of political
struggle, and inverts it: instead of being the site of revolutionary
victory, it is where the system reasserts itself, neutering the
possibility of political change through its wielding of the most
powerful weapon, ideology.
It is through ideology, Althusser
asserts, that the ruling system maintains itself in power: “the ideology
of the ruling class does not become the ruling ideology by the grace of
God, nor even by virtue of the seizure of state power alone,” he
states, “it is by the installation of the ISAs in which this ideology is
realised and realises itself that it becomes the ruling ideology.”
caitlinjohnstone | As someone whose life's work before his imprisonment was combing
through documents of an often classified nature, he'd have been in a
prime position to know. He'd have seen time and time again how a
nation's citizenry are not under the slightest threat from the secret
information in the documents that had been leaked to him from around the
world, but that it could damage the reputation of a politician or a
government or its military.
As the persecution of the WikiLeaks
founder continues to trudge on with the UK government's granting the
Biden administration permission to appeal a declined extradition request,
claiming that it can safely imprison Assange without subjecting him to
the draconian aspects of America's prison system which caused the
initial dismissal, it's good to keep in mind that this is being done
entirely for the purpose of controlling public access to information
that is inconvenient for the powerful.
Nothing WikiLeaks published endangered the American people, it
endangered a globe-spanning empire's ability to control our
understanding of what's happening in the world. This was a most
egregious offense as far as our rulers are concerned, and it could not
be allowed to stand.
So an example is being made. In less polite
times Assange would have been tortured and drawn and quartered in the
town square while the king looked on sipping from a goblet of mead. In
the days of polite liberal democracy our rulers must remain hidden, and
they must publicly torture dissidents to death in the name of national
security concerns.
Beneath all the spin and excuses, this is all being done to show everyone what happens to you if you reveal embarrassing truths
about the most powerful people on earth. If you compromise their
political security. It's telling the world, "If you ever try to
interfere in our control over the dominant narratives, this is what we
will do to you."
And, whether we fully understand what's really
happening or not, that's the message that is being ingested here.
Journalists who find themselves in a position to publish such things
going forward will find themselves thinking thoughts about what happened
to Julian Assange.
sootyempiric | In circles I run in one will often see people advised to read black
authors or engage with black thought. I take it the reason I see this so
often is that in the bits of philosophy I mix in it is i) seen as good
to be broad minded and well read in one's thought, and especially to be
in touch with wha people from marginalised groups are thinking -- and
ii) rare to actually be as much. This got me thinking about what this
means, what sort of tendencies of thought or theory one might expect to
encounter upon doing so.
For that reason I decided to categorise
some of the tendencies of black political thought that I often
encounter, and share that here. Each group is not much more than a loose
affinity group, united by a theme. But I tend to think I can recognise
instances of members of these groups when I see them - by what they
stress, how they argue, what sort of things they think possible or
impossible, or relevant or irrelevant. So I have tried to briefly
summarise the thematic links I am picking up on, and then link some
examples of each tendency to give the reader an idea of the sort of work
or theorising I would expect from each group.
To be clear, the following is highly idiosyncratic. I am not - not
- claiming that this in fact exhausts what's going on. In fact, I think
there are ways in which my experience is clearly going to be
unrepresentative, most obviously because I am not a political
philosopher or theorist of any sort, and so am not going to be properly
tapped into the right channels. This is a very me-centric look at
things, no pretences to the contrary. Nor am I claiming that these
categories are neatly distinct, lots of people I will mention could
fairly be said to participate in another of the named traditions. All I
am claiming is that here are some distinctive currents of black
political philosophy that I sometimes find myself interacting with or
responding to.
I don't want to delay the main event any further,
so below is my taxonomy and after that I will reflect a bit on what I
would take away from it.
Just got a seven day Facebook ban for quoting the declaration of Independence: pic.twitter.com/pDCvdA3VkK
Before
closing I really do wish to stress that there is a lot of very
interesting work that does not fit neatly into this categories, that
wasn't just a disingenuous disavowal of responsibility I can think of
specific instances of good work outside this. There have been a few
things exploring ideas about or around the notion of "post-racialism" (e.g.) or interpersonal relationships (e.g.). There continues to be work from some of our leading scholars on abiding issues related to colonialism or police racism that I do not think can be neatly categorised, and likewise with up and coming scholars working on wholenewissues.
Further, plenty of the people listed above cross categories - I
mentioned the case of the elder TáÃwò already, but I could also add that
Cornell West, Angela Davis, and Brittney Cooper all do public
intellectual work that could reasonably fit them in the liberal
tradition. Likewise Nikole Hannah Jones, Appiah, and Chris Lebron have
done work that would fit in the culturalist tradition. I couldn't and
wouldn't want to circumscribe black political philosophy in any silly
little list - there's a lot out there that this doesn't purport to
include, and one should not be too rigid about things.
Rather, I
see the value gained from the exercise to be this: there is a tendency,
even among friends, to treat black thought as monolithic. Having a ready
to hand taxonomy, along with some exemplars and notes about the
different habits of mind that characterise them, will help one discern
sources of difference, disagreement, and debate, internal to black
political thought. One should not insist upon everyone fitting into all
and only one box, but one should be on the look out for how different
authors lay emphasis on different themes and where that is likely to
pull them apart from other black political thinkers.
WSWS |New York Times Magazine staff writer and 1619 Project
creator Nikole Hannah-Jones announced in an exclusive interview on “CBS
This Morning” with co-host Gayle King that she was rejecting an offer of
tenure from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).
Instead,
Hannah-Jones explained that she would accept a tenured professorship at
Howard University in Washington D.C. as the Knight Chair in Race and
Reporting at the Cathy Hughes School of Communication.
Hannah-Jones will join writer Ta-Nehisi Coates (who wrote We Were Eight Years in Power
about the Obama administration) in founding the Center for Journalism
and Democracy at Howard. The center will be financed with $20 million
from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation
and an anonymous donor.
According to a university press release,
the new center “will focus on training and supporting aspiring
journalists in acquiring the investigative skills and historical and
analytical expertise needed to cover the crisis our democracy is
facing.”
The 1619 Project was published by the New York Times
in August 2019 and has been promoted with millions of dollars in
funding and a school curriculum developed by the Pulitzer Center on
Crisis Reporting. It falsely roots American history in an enduring
racial conflict between blacks and whites.
Hannah-Jones’ lead
essay, for which she won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, argued
that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery against the
British monarchy and that President Abraham Lincoln was little more than
a garden-variety racist.
The response of preeminent American historians Gordon Wood, James
McPherson, James Oakes, Clayborne Carson, Victoria Bynum and others
exposed the New York Times' effort to reinterpret American history. The World Socialist Web Site,
in addition to interviewing these historians, has thoroughly refuted
the falsifications of the 1619 Project and the lead essay written by
Hannah-Jones.
Her other writings have descended into outright
racism against whites. The historical falsifications which she promotes
and her limited journalistic record since beginning to write for the Times in late 2014—just 23 articles—would certainly qualify as red flags in her application for tenure.
WSWS | On August 14, 2019, the New York Times unveiled the 1619
Project. Timed to coincide with the four hundredth anniversary of the
arrival of the first slaves in colonial Virginia, the 100-page special
edition of the New YorkTimesMagazine
consisted of a series of essays that present American history as an
unyielding racial struggle, in which black Americans have waged a
solitary fight to redeem democracy against white racism.
The Times
mobilized vast editorial and financial resources behind the 1619
Project. With backing from the corporate-endowed Pulitzer Center for
Crisis Reporting, hundreds of thousands of copies were sent to schools.
The 1619 Project fanned out to other media formats. Plans were even
announced for films and television programming, backed by billionaire
media personality Oprah Winfrey.
As a business venture the 1619
Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical revision it has
been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in large
measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site,
with the support of a number of distinguished and courageous historians,
which exposed the 1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy
journalism, careless and dishonest research, and a false,
politically-motivated narrative that makes racism and racial conflict
the central driving forces of American history.
In support of its claim that American history can be understood only
when viewed through the prism of racial conflict, the 1619 Project
sought to discredit American history’s two foundational events: The
Revolution of 1775–83, and the Civil War of 1861–65. This could only be
achieved by a series of distortions, omissions, half-truths, and false
statements—deceptions that are catalogued and refuted in this book.
The New York Times
is no stranger to scandals produced by dishonest and unprincipled
journalism. Its long and checkered history includes such episodes as its
endorsement of the Moscow frame-up trials of 1936–38 by its Pulitzer
Prize-winning correspondent, Walter Duranty, and, during World War II,
its unconscionable decision to treat the murder of millions of European
Jews as “a relatively unimportant story” that did not require extensive
and systematic coverage. [3] More recently, the Times was
implicated, through the reporting of Judith Miller and the columns of
Thomas Friedman, in the peddling of government misinformation about
“weapons of mass destruction” that served to legitimize the 2003
invasion of Iraq. Many other examples of flagrant violations of even the
generally lax standards of journalistic ethics could be cited,
especially during the past decade, as the New York Times—listed
on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of $7.5
billion—acquired increasingly the character of a media empire.
The “financialization” of the Times
has proceeded alongside another critical determinant of the newspaper’s
selection of issues to be publicized and promoted: that is, its central
role in the formulation and aggressive marketing of the policies of the
Democratic Party. This process has served to obliterate the always
tenuous boundary lines between objective reporting and sheer propaganda.
The consequences of the Times’ financial and political
evolution have found a particularly reactionary expression in the 1619
Project. Led by Ms. Nikole Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine
editor Jake Silverstein, the 1619 Project was developed for the purpose
of providing the Democratic Party with a historical narrative that
legitimized its efforts to develop an electoral constituency based on
the promotion of racial politics. Assisting the Democratic Party’s
decades-long efforts to disassociate itself from its identification with
the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal to Great Society era, the
1619 Project, by prioritizing racial conflict, marginalizes, and even
eliminates, class conflict as a notable factor in history and politics.
The shift from class struggle to racial conflict did not develop within a vacuum. The New York Times,
as we shall explain, is drawing upon and exploiting reactionary
intellectual tendencies that have been fermenting within substantial
sections of middle-class academia for several decades.
The
political interests and related ideological considerations that
motivated the 1619 Project determined the unprincipled and dishonest
methods employed by the Times in its creation. The New York Times
was well aware of the fact that it was promoting a race-based narrative
of American history that could not withstand critical evaluation by
leading scholars of the Revolution and Civil War. The New YorkTimes Magazine’s editor deliberately rejected consultation with the most respected and authoritative historians.
Moreover, when one of the Times’
fact-checkers identified false statements that were utilized to support
the central arguments of the 1619 Project, her findings were ignored.
And as the false claims and factual errors were exposed, the Times
surreptitiously edited key phrases in 1619 Project material posted
online. The knowledge and expertise of historians of the stature of
Gordon Wood and James McPherson were of no use to the Times.
Its editors knew they would object to the central thesis of the 1619
Project, promoted by lead essayist Hannah-Jones: that the American
Revolution was launched as a conspiracy to defend slavery against
pending British emancipation.
greenwald | The politics of this debate have become fascinating. There are key
members in both parties who seem loyally devoted to shielding Facebook,
Google and others from any meaningful reform, while an increasingly
vocal bipartisan coalition — led by Cicilline and Buck — is clearly
serious about using their legislative power to usher in more competition
and reform.
I spoke with Rep. Buck earlier today about his trajectory when it
comes to fighting Big Tech, why so many Republicans and conservative
think tanks remain so captive to Silicon Valley monopolies, and whether
the ideological and partisan scrambling visible on this issue is
reflective of a broader realignment or at least ideological scrambling
that is changing the nature of coalitions on foreign and economic policy
as well.
Buck has become one of the most informed and thoughtful
Congressional voices on the dangers posed by Silicon Valley, and, as a
result, I found our 30-minute discussion quite illuminating.
yanisvaroufakis | This is how
capitalism ends: not with a revolutionary bang, but with an evolutionary
whimper. Just as it displaced feudalism gradually, surreptitiously,
until one day the bulk of human relations were market-based and
feudalism was swept away, so capitalism today is being toppled by a new
economic mode: techno-feudalism.
capitalism has
undergone extreme makeovers at least twice since the late nineteenth
century. Its first major transformation, from its competitive guise to
oligopoly, occurred with the second industrial revolution, when
electromagnetism ushered in the large networked corporations and the
megabanks necessary to finance them. Ford, Edison, and Krupp replaced
Adam Smith’s baker, brewer, and butcher as history’s prime movers. The
ensuing boisterous cycle of mega-debts and mega-returns eventually led
to the crash of 1929, the New Deal, and, after World War II, the Bretton
Woods system – which, with all its constraints on finance, provided a
rare period of stability.
The
end of Bretton Woods in 1971 unleashed capitalism’s second
transformation. As America’s growing trade deficit became the world’s
provider of aggregate demand – sucking in the net exports of Germany,
Japan, and, later, China – the US powered capitalism’s most energetic
globalization phase, with a steady flow of German, Japanese, and, later,
Chinese profits back into Wall Street financing it all.
To
play their role, however, Wall Street functionaries demanded
emancipation from all of the New Deal and Bretton Woods constraints.
With deregulation, oligopolistic capitalism morphed into financialized
capitalism. Just as Ford, Edison, and Krupp had replaced Smith’s baker,
brewer, and butcher, capitalism’s new protagonists were Goldman Sachs,
JP Morgan, and Lehman Brothers.
While
these radical transformations had momentous repercussions (the Great
Depression, WWII, the Great Recession, and the post-2009 Long
Stagnation), they did not alter capitalism’s main feature: a system
driven by private profit and rents extracted through some market.
Yes,
the transition from Smithian to oligopoly capitalism boosted profits
inordinately and allowed conglomerates to use their massive market power
(that is, their newfound freedom from competition) to extract large
rents from consumers. Yes, Wall Street extracted rents from society by
market-based forms of daylight robbery. Nevertheless, both oligopoly and
financialized capitalism were driven by private profits boosted by
rents extracted through some market – one cornered by, say, General
Electric or Coca-Cola, or conjured up by Goldman Sachs.
Then,
after 2008, everything changed. Ever since the G7’s central banks
coalesced in April 2009 to use their money printing capacity to re-float
global finance, a deep discontinuity emerged. Today, the global economy
is powered by the constant generation of central bank money, not by
private profit. Meanwhile, value extraction has increasingly shifted
away from markets and onto digital platforms, like Facebook and Amazon,
which no longer operate like oligopolistic firms, but rather like
private fiefdoms or estates.
theatlantic | After the lunch
with Balsamo, Barr and Levi went to the White House for a previously
scheduled meeting with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. After talking
briefly with Meadows, they went upstairs to White House Counsel Pat
Cipollone’s office. As they were conferring, one of the counsel’s aides
knocked on the door and told Cipollone that the president wanted to see
him and then, pointing to Barr, the aide said, “And he is looking for
you.”
Barr, Levi, and
Cipollone walked to the president’s personal dining room near the Oval
Office. Trump was sitting at the table. Meadows was sitting next to him
with his arms crossed; the White House adviser Eric Herschmann stood off
to the side. The details of this meeting were described to me by
several people present. One told me that Trump had “the eyes and
mannerism of a madman.”
He went off on Barr.
“I think you’ve noticed I haven’t been talking to you much,” Trump said to him. “I’ve been leaving you alone.”
Barr later told others that the comment was reminiscent of a line in the movie Dr. Strangelove,
in which the main character, Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, says, “I
do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.” Trump,
Barr thought, was saying that he had been denying him his essence.
Trump brought up Barr’s AP interview.
“Did you say that?”
“Yes,” Barr responded.
“How the fuck could you do this to me? Why did you say it?”
“Because it’s true.”
The president, livid, responded by referring to himself in the third person: “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.”
Barr thought that the president
was trying to control himself, but he seemed angrier than he had ever
seen him. His face was red. Barr’s AP interview was dominating every
cable news channel except the one Trump was watching. The television in
the room was tuned to the right-wing, pro-Trump network One America
News, which was broadcasting a committee hearing of the Michigan
legislature. The hearing featured disproven allegations of massive
election fraud, including the testimony of a woman named Melissa Carone,
who had worked at the counting location in Detroit and told the
committee, “Everything that happened at the TCF Center was fraud. Every
single thing.” The next day, Carone would testify again, next to Rudy
Giuliani, during which time she slurred her words and appeared to be
drunk. (Carone later denied that she had been drunk.)
“They saw the boxes going in!” Trump yelled, referring to the stories about boxes of illegal ballots being counted.
“You
know, Mr. President, there are 662 precincts in Wayne County,” Barr
said. Trump seemed taken aback that he knew the exact number. “It’s the
only county with all the boxes going to a central place, and you
actually did better there this time around than you did last time. You
keep on saying that the Department of Justice is not looking at this
stuff, and we are looking at it in a responsible way. But your people
keep on shoveling this shit out.”
I decided to analyze and dissect this
conflict not in order to narrate everything that happened here or to
arbitrate who is right and wrong with respect to every disagreement
these parties are having. Instead, it is worth examining because the way
this nasty exchange unfolded provides such a vivid and illuminating
case study of two metastasizing cancers at the heart of liberal
discourse. Both of these weapons are ethically repugnant and corrupt —
obviously so — yet somehow have become as common and accepted among
Democratic Party followers as they are toxic and reprehensible.
From
Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean to Rachel Maddow and countless other
liberal cable hosts, casually and falsely smearing people as paid
Russian agents is now completely normalized behavior in liberal culture.
And the list of people whose reputations have been destroyed from
evidence-free and cynically deployed sexual harassment allegations or
other vague accusations of sexual misconduct is too long to
comprehensively chronicle. I examine these two issues in the format of
video, which can be watched on the player below, because that is where
so much of it has played out and because it seemed that is how the
severity and magnitude of these abuses could be most effectively
conveyed:
pnas | There has been growing concern about the role social media plays in
political polarization. We investigated whether out-group animosity was
particularly successful at generating engagement on two of the largest
social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter. Analyzing posts from news
media accounts and US congressional members (n = 2,730,215), we
found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted
about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term
referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social
media post being shared by 67%. Out-group language consistently emerged
as the strongest predictor of shares and retweets: the average effect
size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of
negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of
moral-emotional language—both established predictors of social media
engagement. Language about the out-group was a very strong predictor of
“angry” reactions (the most popular reactions across all datasets), and
language about the in-group was a strong predictor of “love” reactions,
reflecting in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. This out-group
effect was not moderated by political orientation or social media
platform, but stronger effects were found among political leaders than
among news media accounts. In sum, out-group language is the strongest
predictor of social media engagement across all relevant predictors
measured, suggesting that social media may be creating perverse
incentives for content expressing out-group animosity.
According to a recent article in the Wall
Street Journal, a Facebook research team warned the company in 2018 that
their “algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to
divisiveness.” This research was allegedly shut down by Facebook
executives, and Facebook declined to implement changes proposed by the
research team to make the platform less divisive (1).
This article is consistent with concerns that social media might be
incentivizing the spread of polarizing content. For instance, Twitter
CEO Jack Dorsey has expressed concern about the popularity of “dunking”
(i.e., mocking or denigrating one’s enemies) on the platform (2).
These concerns have become particularly relevant as social media
rhetoric appears to have incited real-world violence, such as the recent
storming of the US Capital (3).
We sought to investigate whether out-group animosity was associated
with increased virality on two of the largest social media platforms:
Facebook and Twitter.
A growing body research has examined the potential role of social media in exacerbating political polarization (4, 5).
A large portion of this work has centered on the position that social
media sorts us into “echo chambers” or “filter bubbles” that selectively
expose people to content that aligns with their preexisting beliefs (6⇓⇓⇓⇓–11). However, some recent scholarship questions whether the “echo chamber” narrative has been exaggerated (12, 13).
Some experiments suggest that social media can indeed increase
polarization. For example, temporarily deactivating Facebook can reduce
polarization on policy issues (14).
However, other work suggests that polarization has grown the most among
older demographic groups, who are the least likely to use social media (15),
albeit the most likely to vote. As such, there is an open debate about
the role of social media in political polarization and intergroup
conflict.
Other research has examined the features of
social media posts that predict “virality” online. Much of the
literature focuses on the role of emotion in social media sharing.
High-arousal emotions, whether they are positive (e.g., awe) or negative
(e.g., anger or outrage), contribute to the sharing of content online (16⇓⇓⇓–20).
Tweets expressing moral and emotional content are more likely to be
retweeted within online political conversations, especially by members
of one’s political in-group (21, 22). On Facebook, posts by politicians that express “indignant disagreement” receive more likes and shares (23), and negative news tends to spread farther on Twitter (24).
Moreover, false rumors spread farther and faster on Twitter than true
ones, especially in the domain of politics, possibly because they are
more likely to express emotions such as surprise and fear (25).
Yet,
to our knowledge, little research has investigated how social identity
motives contribute to online virality. Group identities are hypersalient
on social media, especially in the context of online political or moral
discussions (26).
For example, an analysis of Twitter accounts found that people are
increasingly categorizing themselves by their political identities in
their Twitter bios over time, providing a public signal of their social
identity (27). Additionally, since sharing behavior is public, it can reflect self-conscious identity presentation (28, 29). According to social identity theory (30) and self-categorization theory (31),
when group identities are highly salient, this can lead individuals to
align themselves more with their fellow in-group members, facilitating
in-group favoritism and out-group derogation in order to maintain a
positive sense of group distinctiveness (32). Thus, messages that fulfill group-based identity motives may receive more engagement online.
medium | I
rage against all of you, white, Christian nationalists; against
Republicans who think voter suppression is somehow good for America. I
rage against anyone who thinks that talking about how our country’s 245
years of hating on Black people is somehow divisive.
Why
wasn’t red-lining divisive? Why wasn’t segregation divisive? Why wasn’t
Trump’s support for white nationalists divisive? Why aren’t the
suppressive laws designed to prevent minorities from voting divisive?
How can asking these questions be divisive?! How can you melt so
readily, snowflake, when all we do is ask these questions?
I
know how: because my fellow white brothers and sisters are weak. They
are whiners and spoiled. They are sore losers. The Republican Party
builds its power base on divisiveness and hate because it is a failed
political movement. It is intellectually bankrupt offering absolutely
zero for the solving of our most pressing problems.
Many
of my more hateful white brothers and sisters are suffering
economically; and, while Democrats try to, say, slow the concentration
of wealth that causes debilitating income inequality, the Republicans
obstruct them thus preventing any legislation, or programs, from passing
that might actually help Main Street. Then, rather than blame their
failed polices for the suffering of their constituents, policies which
only benefit the super rich, they say things like “racism against white
Americans” is the cause. They blame critical race theory, which really
no one but Fox, and the dumbest of the dumb in the Republican Party, is
talking about.
I
am raging. I rage against ignorance and my fellow white brothers and
sisters who choose hate over love. No Black person is taking your job.
Your refusal to think makes you feel they are. You insistence on voting
for Republicans makes you think they are. If you dared to challenge the
lies of the Republicans, of Fox News, you would see that what you suffer
from is not related to race. It is related to class.
The
problem is, they have you so perfectly worked up into a hateful froth
that you are blinded. You are destroying us. You are embarrassing the
rest of us white folks.
Turn
off your Fox News and dare to think for yourselves white people before
evolution decides we are not needed and made obsolete.
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