Sep
5
2024

Strategery!

One must have a heart of stone to read the tweets of Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Hal Corley without laughing:

"Help! I was annoyed by a Bret Stephens column clearly marked 'Opinion'!"

The little things add up: Corley claims to have "no effing words left', although I count 19 of 'em, including the only racial/sexual dismissive slur you can use in polite company: "white male". And one cannot imagine what grand "strategy" Ben-Ghiat thinks the NYT is operating under.

Problem: Kamala's a nitwit, and if you're a partisan hack, this is something that must not even be hinted at in a medium that voters might notice.

Similar to pointing out Joe Biden's cognitive woes pre-June 24.

I'd imagine a similar response to a different NYT article, as reported by James Freeman: New York Times Discovers That Democrats Aren’t Always Truthful.

Politics can be a grim business and those of us who cover it can always use a little comic relief. Not a moment too soon the New York Times rides to the rescue by publishing this breaking news from Stuart Thompson and Tiffany Hsu:

For years, the discussion about misinformation online has focused on falsehoods circulating on the American right. But in recent weeks, a flurry of conspiracy theories and false narratives have also been swirling on the left.

It’s an interesting question raised by the Times scoop. What would it do to our politics if this allegedly new phenomenon of falsehood on the political left, which according to the Times may already be weeks old, were to exert a significant influence on political media coverage?

Hard as it may be to imagine, consider for a moment if left-leaning journalists were to swallow whole a bogus story fed to them by anonymous sources suggesting that a Republican candidate had colluded with Russia to rig a U.S. presidential election. Imagine that as part of the misinformation campaign a left-leaning FBI official was caught fabricating evidence against an associate of this Republican candidate and that even after conviction the left-leaning FBI criminal was not sentenced to even a single day in prison and the story was largely ignored by left-leaning journalists. What would it do to our politics if to this day millions of voters believed the false claim that the Republican candidate had colluded with Russia and millions more voters remained infuriated because they knew the collusion tale was false? Then imagine that when this candidate ran for re-election, many of the same left-leaning media outlets fell for his left-leaning opponent’s false claim of ignorance about foreign enrichment schemes, and this false claim was supported by CIA contractors falsely suggesting that evidence of the scheme was also from Russia. Now imagine that it worked so well that the opponent persuaded much of the media industry to suppress true stories about millions of dollars of foreign money flowing into his family’s accounts.

If you're an NYT-only reader, I would assume you would have no idea what Freeman is talking about.

Also of note:

  • Shut up, they explained. In the current print Reason, J.D. Tuccille considers The Soft Totalitarianism of the Political Class.

    It's no secret that governments around the world are chiseling away at people's liberties. Rights advocates document a nearly two decade decline in freedom. Civil liberties activists warn of a worldwide free speech recession. And while American restrictions on government power hold the line better than pale equivalents elsewhere, the political class seems determined to end-run those protections and impose creeping totalitarianism by leveraging the authority of allies in other countries.

    "Obrigado Brasil!" Keith Ellison, Minnesota's attorney general, wrote this week to thank that country's authoritarian Supreme Court for its recent ban on the X social media platform.

    The court demanded X censor political views it called "disinformation" and appoint a new legal representative to receive court orders—after threatening the previous one with arrest. Importantly, the ban threatens ordinary Brazilians with hefty fines if they evade the prohibition on the social media network. Nevertheless, demand for blockade-piercing VPNs surged in Brazil after the court decision.

    Ellison serves alongside Minnesota's Gov. Tim Walz, who is the Democratic candidate for vice president and has falsely claimed "there's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech." He's also not the only prominent politician to have a real hate-on for X and its CEO, Elon Musk.

    Don't worry, J.D. Tuccille gets to J.D. Vance as another bad example further along.

  • But there's also… Jonathan Turley notes that possibly the next POTUS is no fan of people saying stuff: “That Has to Stop”: Harris Denounces Unfettered Free Speech in 2019 CNN Interview.

    I previously wrote how a Harris-Walz Administration would be a nightmare for free speech. Both candidates have shown pronounced anti-free speech values. Now, X owner Elon Musk and former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have posted a Harris interview to show the depths of the hostility of Harris to unfettered free speech. I have long argued that Trump and the third-party candidates should make free speech a central issue in this campaign. That has not happened. Kennedy was the only candidate who was substantially and regularly talking about free speech in this election. Yet, Musk and Kennedy are still trying to raise the chilling potential of a Harris-Walz Administration.

    In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss how the Biden-Harris Administration has proven to be the most anti-free speech administration since John Adams. That includes a massive censorship system described by one federal judge as perfectly “Orwellian.”

    In the CNN interview, Harris displays many of the anti-free speech inclinations discussed earlier. She strongly suggests that X should be shut down if it does not yield to demands for speech regulation.

    What is most chilling is how censorship and closure are Harris’s default positions when faced with unfettered speech. She declares to CNN that such unregulated free speech “has to stop” and that there is a danger to the country when people are allowed to “directly speak[] to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight and regulation.”

    You think that the mainstream media might have taken a slightly greater notice if she had spoken this way about newspapers or TV networks?

    And I hasten to point out: in her recent interview with Dana Bash, Kamala averred not once, not twice, but thrice, that her values have not changed. Simply because she flipflopped on so many issues.

  • Potholes on the Road to Serfdom? Speaking of things that didn't get a lot of MSM attention, Jeff Jacoby says Most climate policies have something in common: They don't work.

    IN SEPTEMBER 1945, the classical liberal scholar (and future Nobel laureate) Friedrich Hayek published "The Use of Knowledge in Society." One of the most influential articles in modern economics, it explained that far-reaching government policies often fail because policy makers invariably lack all the knowledge required to understand a problem well enough to solve it. Consequently, government policies frequently backfire, trigger unintended consequences, or simply prove unavailing.

    Examples of Hayek's insight, often called "the knowledge problem," abound. Urban renewal tore apart once-vibrant communities, displacing tens of thousands of residents or relocating them into housing projects that became centers of poverty and crime. The war on drugs resulted in mass incarceration, yet drugs remain widely available and overdose deaths are at or near an all-time high. Crop subsidies have routinely led to overproduction, distorted markets, and the enrichment of agribusiness giants at the expense of small farmers. Minimum wage laws, intended to boost the earnings of vulnerable workers, invariably cost many of those very workers their jobs.

    Time and again, reality makes hash of the misbegotten assumption that politicians and regulators have sufficient information to plan or fine-tune complex economic systems. The bigger and more complex the system, the more likely that government policies designed to control it will turn out to be ineffective. And what system could be bigger or more complex than planetary climate change?

    Jacoby goes on to mention the Science story that we looked at a few days ago.

  • In our "you gotta laugh to keep from crying" department… In hopping over to NESN last night, I noticed that Jordan's Furniture CEO Eliot Tatelman is pushing his store's summer promotion:

    If the Red Sox win the World Championship, anything you buy now through September 8th will be free!

    Uh, well… According to this morning's Wild Card Standings, the Red Sox are a solid 5.5 games out of wild card contention. They are at an even 0.500 for the season, they've lost five straight, and their last-10 game record is 3-7.

    The one bit of good news: they are hosting the woeful Chicago White Sox for three games over the weekend.

    But then it's three games with the Orioles and three with the Yankees. OK, stranger things have happened, but…