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Eli Lake at Bari Weiss' The Free Press
He lays out in simple, clear language how the FBI has held double and triple standards when it comes to investigating or protecting powerful political figures. I believe this piece is downstream of more original reporting from the likes of Taibbi, Shellenberger, etc, ultimately stemming from Elon Musk's release of The Twitter Files.
These feel like bombshell revelations to me, but there is also a sickening feeling of two movies on one screen. This stuff is worthy of coverage in global mainstream media, right? Not just "bloggers on substack"?
I don't have a NYT or WaPo subscription. In the last five years, I have completely lost faith in mainstream media. Is this FBI stuff getting the coverage it deserves? Shouldn't something like this make a career for a scrappy Berenson type at the NYT? Are they salivating or putting their (and our) heads in the sand?
Once you start looking into what actually happened in a lot of these cases the sheer amount of lies is just staggering. Once you learn that the Russiagate scandal was started by people who knew the charges were false, you have to throw out almost all mainstream media coverage of the Trump era and admit that the conspiracy theorists were right. So much of this stuff is connected that if you give ground on even the most undeniable positions it leads to a chain-reaction that leaves you saying the same thing those dumb Trumpist RethugliKKKan conspiracy theorists were and admitting they were correct. That's just not something that most people are willing to do for a variety of reasons, like being able to come to to family dinners, exist in elite social circles, stay employed, get laid, etc. The media are entirely captured of course, and they can't admit any of this because it would be a massive self report - can you really see Jeff Bezos Presents The Washington Post printing an article with a headline like "We've been knowingly lying to you for the past several years to advance our political goals"? That's what actually admitting to even the most anodyne and minor bits of truth would mean, and they are going to burn the reputation of their organisation and industry to the ground rather than admit it (although as I'm sure a lot of people have noticed, that fire has been raging for quite a while already).
Oh, yeah, I guess we throw out trump's pardons of scammers and criminals, including one Jewish conman who, after being freed, started up yet another Ponzi.
We'll also throw out the dozens of incoherent and false claims he made about the 2020 election, and asking election officials to throw out votes.
Again, [left-leaning media] doing some bad things does not indicate that [right-leaning media] isn't doing the same. When people switch teams in politics, their newfound realization that [new outgroup] lies all the time, is, for whatever reason, accompanied by either outright forgetting, or just ... deemphasizing ... the lies of [new ingroup].
??? I don't understand the relevance of this.
I'm sorry if I was unclear - when I said that the conspiracy theorists were right, I meant on this topic specifically (I don't think there actually are lizardmen running the world or that 5G towers give you COVID). You're totally right when you say that one side lying doesn't mean that the other side isn't doing the same, but for this specific case we know that the other side was actually correct and the Russian collusion didn't happen.
The main point that I was trying to make is that a lot of these lies and deceptions are inextricably connected and linked. For a specific example, look at how the FBI used the media to launder the Steele dossier. In order for the outlets involved to actually report on the broader story accurately, they would have to run a story talking about how they were tricked by intelligence agents and lied to the public in order to change the outcome of the election, and then kept on lying in order to cover up their original mistake. That's the big problem here - the media was so actively involved in the story itself that they're unable to correct course even on blatantly obvious lies because of how many other big lies they've told to people. Jeff Bezos Presents The Washington Post (and yes I will refer to it like that every time) isn't going to run a story saying "Oh the Russian collusion story was entirely fictitious and we've been gaslighting the entire population for the last half a decade". Are they going to go hand back the Pulitzer prize they got for what we now know was pure, unadulterated fiction designed to manipulate the outcome of an election? No, they're not, and that's what actually reporting this case accurately would imply.
I was specifically responding to the phrase "you have to throw out almost all mainstream media coverage of the Trump era".
The phrase 'almost all mainstream media coverage of the trump era the trump era' doesn't read like "on this topic specifically". Also, "The media are entirely captured". But people overstate things sometimes, if you meant this topic then whatever.
My broader point is that all kinds of media have been tied up in all kinds of lies for centuries, and your reaction doesn't really make sense with that context. Because it won't burn the industry's reputation to the ground (it didn't the last ten times). The media isn't entirely captured (WaPo regularly negatively reports on Bezos, many MSM journalists publish substacks now and didn't change their line at all, and substack simply isn't exerting editorial pressure as we can see from their hosting Moldbug's monthly "Coup All Democracies" articles).
When I said "almost all mainstream media coverage of the Trump era" I was referring to anything which talks about the Russian conspiracy theory or any of the countless other debunked claims about that entire affair, including reporting that is actively being put out to this day. I believe that this covers the vast majority of mainstream media reporting on Trump during that era.
And my point is that this represents a unique escalation of said lies and media involvement. The Trump/Russia story wasn't just breathlessly shouted about and reported on by the MSM at all times despite many people involved knowing it was false, the MSM was actually a direct participant in what happened - in order to launder the Steele dossier, the intelligence agents who wanted to spy on the Trump campaign leaked it to several media outlets and then used that reporting to justify a warrant when the Steele dossier itself would be incapable of doing so. You're right when you say that there have always been lies and I can think back to multiple times in my life where they just outright lied, but each time they eventually issued a mea culpa or accounted for it. This particular case is unique and novel because the direct media involvement and overwhelming promulgation of the Russiagate conspiracy theory means that they can't actually apologise or report accurately on these events in the future. If Jeff Bezos' Washington Post wanted to release an accurate story about what's happened, they would have to not just return a Pulitzer prize but admit that they have been lying to the public for several years, in many cases knowingly, and got major details in extremely important cases wrong. The NYT doesn't have a problem admitting that they got the Iraqi WMD story wrong, but they invested far more time, energy and credibility in the Trump/Russia collusion conspiracy and I don't believe they're ever going to admit their mistake unless they're forced to because it would represent such a stunning loss of credibility and prestige.
None of this constitutes an actual argument against my point. Negative reporting on Bezos is utterly immaterial (suppressing it would be worse for his PR than allowing that reporting to happen) when his newspaper's reporting actively advocates for and advances his stated political position (fuck Trump). Similarly, the idea that MSM journalists publish the same dreck they did before on Substack doesn't constitute an argument against my position at all, unless you think Substack qualifies as mainstream media. When I say "capture" I don't just mean the more direct professional incentives, but the softer and more cultural ones as well. A journalist who admits to any of the stuff that we now know is incontrovertibly true is going to become a pariah in their social circle in very short order, which means they just aren't going to do that unless they have to.
I don't think it was, and I think there are a large number of obvious examples of this. WMDs in Iraq, for instance, I think is more important.
Right, that eventually happened in every case. Hardly immediately! Often after a lot of investigation and debate. There have already been very limited walkbacks and apologies - this, or this or this or reporting on the durham report. And what will happen is - with time, the emotional and partisan valence of this will decrease, and organizations and people involved will become more willing to admit their mistakes. As happened with the iraq war!
I do not see how this is different from the WMDs situation, where fault was eventually admitted.
It's an argument against corporate power modifying the incentives of MSM journalists. Instead, the same kinds of people who weren't contrarian in the past continue to not be so on Substack, while the kinds of people who were perpetual contrarians against the establishment in the past, often at real outlets, (taibbi, greenwald, etc, and there are of course many different ways to be contrarian) continue to be so on substack.
The media was not an active and important part of the Iraqi WMD story, but they actually are a very important player in the Russiagate story. Specifically, they were involved with the corrupt origination of the Carter Page FISA warrant. At the same time, I think that the magnitude of reporting on the Russiagate conspiracy (including the stories where it was just mentioned) was far greater than that of the Iraqi WMDs story. If there's actually a transcript of all MSM tv news coverage out there we'd actually be able to settle this objectively but I'm not sure that such an archive is available to the public.
We're still seeing stories talking about the Trump/Russia collusion case this month.
https://time.com/6294254/biden-helsinki-trump-putin-nato/
They are STILL LYING! It has been close to 7 years now and not only have they not admitted fault/apologised, they are actively continuing to create the false impression that Trump colluded with Russia. I do agree that they eventually gave up and admitted fault on Iraq, but I am not so sure they were continuing to lie for quite this long, and I definitely don't believe that they kept on implying Saddam had WMDs after all the facts had actually come out.
I don't believe that it is corporate power exclusively that is modifying those incentives. There are multiple different ways in which the media was captured - continuing access to government agents who wish to leak information, cultural mores and memes (in the Dawkins sense rather than the 4chan one) among journalists, the complicated web of social connections that allow people to get hired... corporate influence is a part of that capture but absolutely not the entirety of it.
Because it works. First impressions count. Especially when you hear what you really want to be true, you will remember it for the rest of your life and do not listen to any rebukes or apologies.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-poll-idUSKCN1R72S0
Remember, as late as 2015, 51% of Republicans (and 32% of Democrats) believed that WMDs were found in Iraq.
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/poll-republicans-wmds-iraq-114016
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The Jewish (and thus Christian) creation myth tells us man was born into the Garden of Eden - paradise, a bountiful land of harmony, where lions and rabbits and man live in peace - until lies and betrayal by men destroyed it. The Bible is said to be an inerrant source of divine truth, passed down through generations from Jesus to us - yet one that many alive today seek to pervert for their own ends. Our ancestors were at one with nature, had tight-knit religious communities that supported their members, and had respect and virtue that we lack today. And public discourse used to be sane, perceptive, and subtle - but polarization, the media, and the internet ruined it. And what could've caused this universal decline - nothing but The Adversary himself! Or...
Yet the past is in every way as corrupted as the present. Our actual ancestors, from amoebas to subsistence farmers, lived hard and confused lives filled with disease, war, and (among humans) delusions, superstitions, and rumors that make today's look sane. Christian doctrine (like doctrine everywhere) was a political compromise influenced by whoever had power at the time. Violence and struggles over status and resources existed in the smallest of small farming towns and hunter-gatherer camps. And popular politics and 'the media' has always been suffused with lies.
If everyone is an angel but (outgroup) are demons, your rant might be justified. But is Trump an angel? Fox News? Republican politics, at the state or national level? Are they even better? Was Hilary better (benghazi)? Dubya (afghanistan/iraq)? Bill Clinton? ... Where will we find less corruption if we roll the clock back? If someone dumps a barrel of crude oil and lies into your drinking water, sure, scream about it. If the water has been dirty since time immemorial, and that 'someone' poisoning your water was just the river, that's quite different. Drinking nothing, or drinking mud out of a ditch, isn't going to help you.
Politics has always been filled with lies. It's the business. When you tie political power to 'convincing a bunch of dumb people to vote for you' ... what else can you do? Beg the masses to do expected value calculations or read an economics textbook? And if you conscientiously object, simply refuse to participate - that doesn't bring paradise, nor does it bring votes - you simply cede power to the slightly-less-scrupulous.
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is it actually surprising?
Surprising, no. Scandalous, yes. The foundation of justice in this country is based on rule of law, as opposed to rule of man. Obviously, that's an ideal that we do not always meet. But the cavalier attitude towards abandoning this principle is very, very concerning.
That makes sense and I agree with it.
It is just that
etc were surprising to me: it is obvious that if I would have boxes of top secret documents I would not get treatment like Trump or Obama got.
Do you hold (or have ever held) a clearance? I'm not aware of any cases of people without a prior NDA being charged for mere possession of classified documents with maybe a few exceptions of obvious spycraft. The New York Times had copies of all the Snowden files and nobody ever came at them.
Good point, though I expect that regular clearance holder would receive far worse treatment then former presidents got.
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The New York Times, Washington Post, and the FBI are all on the same side here. They're not going to publicize this stuff. And if they don't publicize it, it doesn't matter.
Why not?
Because it does not enter the public conversation and word of it doesn't spread outside online dissident spaces. When ideas acquire the reputation of being popular among The Bad People, the good people hesitate to bring those ideas up and discuss them until they don't have a choice anymore. The power of the media to make people believe incorrect things is fairly substantial, but their ability to define the bounds of conversation is even more powerful.
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The deep state (as in, the organs of government with their own political agendas) has their thumb firmly on the scale of american democracy (such as it ever was). The Praetorian Guard has appeared, and now (partially) controls the selection of candidates for public office.
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