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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32037 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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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.

You’ll recall that those scoops weren’t as big a news story as was the fact that Facebook and Twitter banned users from sharing the story on the theory that it was the fruit of Kremlin fakery intended to sway the presidential election. It turns out that the FBI officials who warned social media companies that the laptop story might be part of a Russian scheme to mislead voters themselves knew that the laptop was real. And they knew so as early as December of 2019.

But instead of clarifying that the FBI had verified its contents, the bureau instead allowed a falsehood about its provenance to linger. Savor the irony. In an effort to counter Russian disinformation, the FBI actively allowed American disinformation to spread.

It’s also Russiagate—Trump’s alleged (and never proven) collusion with Russia—which was fueled by a Democrat-funded opposition research sheet known as the Steele Dossier. The FBI knew by early 2017 (at the latest) that the whole thing was junk. But like the Russian disinformation lie about the laptop, the bureau let the dossier falsehood linger while the Steele Dossier was hyped like Watergate by the legacy press and Democratic Party in 2017 and 2018.

Then there is the double standard the bureau applied to pursuing foreign influence investigations into Trump’s campaign and the campaign of Hillary Clinton. That was one of the primary conclusions of a report released in May from U.S. Special Counsel John Durham. For Trump, the FBI opened a full investigation on the thinnest of pretexts. For Clinton, the bureau delayed investigations into potential foreign influence and offered defensive briefings to her lawyers.

Here it is useful to examine the other major event of last week: the serious allegations raised by two career IRS investigators who led the team probing Hunter’s tax violations. On Wednesday the two agents, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, testified in open session before the House Oversight Committee.

Ziegler and Shapley painted a picture of a long-standing probe that began in 2018 into Hunter Biden’s income that was stymied and delayed at nearly every turn. The delays were significant—so significant that eventually the statute of limitations ran out. Ziegler said that the probe did not follow normal procedures. Prosecutors, he said, “slow-walked the investigation, and put in place unnecessary approvals and road blocks from effectively and efficiently addressing the case. A lot of times, we were not able to follow the facts.” Ziegler and Shapley also said there were times when prosecutors informed Hunter’s lawyers about investigative steps, such as a search warrant.

All of that would be bad enough. But the event that led Ziegler and Shapley to eventually blow the whistle was when, in October of last year, the U.S. attorney in charge of the case, David Weiss, privately told them that it was not his decision to charge Hunter in districts outside of Delaware. That directly contradicted the pledge that Attorney General Merrick Garland made to Congress that there would be no restrictions placed on Weiss in his investigation of Hunter.

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?

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"?

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).

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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