The mainstream media is now mostly just a social engineering enterprise

Two of the last remaining journalists in American face off against the histrionic dummies of the Democratic establishment, valiantly attempt to save free speech

Earlier this week, I wrote a Substack inspired by an email I received from a reader by the name of Kim. By yesterday, however, there was so much crazy news breaking I decided to postpone my original newsletter, which is is about the drugging of children and young people, and as such — unfortunately — is evergreen.

This week saw the release of previously unseen Jan. 6 footage and the collapse of Silicon Valley’s primary bank, two really huge stories that I am very interested in. But what I feel compelled to speak on is the absolutely disgraceful treatment of journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger by a handful of Democratic apparatchiks at the United States congressional subcommittee on the weaponisation of the federal government.

The subcommittee convened on Thursday with Taibbi and Shellenberger as witnesses, due to their roles in releasing the Twitter files.

In the nearly three hour grilling they endured, these two centre-left, independent journalists confirmed what I have long suspected about the journalism-think tank ecosystem. The journalists and policy analysts whose cooperation is supposed to ensure that the public remain well-informed about matters of public interest, are actually neither journalists nor analysts. They are social engineers. And in spite of their lofty self-regard as some kind of priestly gatekeepers of The Truth, these social engineers do little other than the bidding of their paymasters in the federal government.

What a disgrace.

In fairness to corporate journalists everywhere, the way the Democratic women, in particular, treated Taibbi and Shellenberger , it is no wonder that the vast majority of journalists have turned themselves into toadies for establishment power. The gaslighting, sniping, rude behaviour of Wasserman, Plaskett and Garcia was hard to watch. Political debate is often rancorous, tempers run high and adversaries rip each other to shreds. But what was truly remarkable about the Democratic questioning was just how low-quality it was. The tone Democratic lawmakers took with Taibbi and Shellenberger reminded me of a wine-swilling golf club wife lambasting a husband who has run off with his secretary. It was all low blows, bitter insinuations, and character assassination.

The classic signs of dishonest communication were everywhere. Stacey Plaskett sent the signal early on, with her outrageously hyperbolic statement: “Mr. Chairman, I am not exaggerating when I say that you have called before you two witnesses who pose a direct threat to people who oppose them.”

The only people who Taibbi and Shellenberger pose a direct threat to are the liars in government and the media, but I’m guessing that’s not what Plaskett meant.

I watched all 2 hours and 51 minutes of testimony, and I share this with you because despite being under fire from bad faith actors, Taibbi and Shellenberger said some extremely useful things that you can use in your everyday lives, any time you come into contact with mainstream media lies and misrepresentations. Or the people who are still falling for them.

1. The term misinformation actually means “anything I don’t agree with,” and is otherwise meaningless except for its function as a smear. Therefore anyone in a position of prestige or authority who uses it can be written off — immediately— as a bad faith actor. I have been saying this for a while now, but Shellenberger put it beautifully when he said there is now in operation a “censorship-industrial complex” that has devolved into “fight[ing] domestic misinformation, which is just saying we need to fight people who are saying things we disagree with online. That’s all that means. It’s not a slippery slope. It’s an immediate leap into a terrifying mechanism that we only see in totalitarian societies.”

2. Never fall for guilt by association. In my opinion, this is one of the gravest sins one can commit in public discourse, because what matters is the truth and/or accuracy of a statement, not the personality, beliefs or opinions of the person saying it. I believe this is a fundamental part of being a sentient adult. Sadly, Taibbi confirmed that basically no one in media lives by this basic principle any longer. Showing he has far more generosity and circumspection toward the government than I do, Taibbi mentioned a study on Russian disinformation by US State Department propaganda outlet Global Engagement Centre (lol). The study, he said, was in part legitimate and evidence-based. Until it broadened out its beady, panopticon eye to include not just the primary agents of Russian spin, but those non-Russian sites that shared the Russian point of view. “This is just another word for guilt by association, and this is the problem with trying to identify which accounts are actually the Russian Internet Research Agency, and which ones are just people who follow those accounts, or retweeted them.” This mission creep is the adult version of teen girl clique behaviour — no one in the cool friend in-group is allowed to engage in any way with anyone in the out-group, under any circumstances, or risk social death. It’s now how adults should be conducting the business of public debate.

3. The establishment (by which I mean the fetid swamp of government, think-tanks and media) created this idea of misinformation in order to conduct a campaign of disinformation against its own people. And their end goal? To hide any reality FROM THE PUBLIC that they deem inconvenient. Taibbi mentioned a Tweet from something called the Virality Project, run out of Stanford Internet Observatory. “They talked explicitly about censoring stories of true vaccine side effects and other true stories that they felt encouraged hesitancy…They used the word ‘true’ three times... What’s notable about this is that it reflects the fundamental misunderstanding of the whole anti-disinformation complex, they believe that ordinary people can’t handle difficult truths. So they believe they need minders, to separate out the things that are difficult or controversial for them.”

So here’s my primer on the information landscape we live in: there is disinformation, which are lies or spin spread by a government or other organisation to secretly advance its own interests or defeat an enemy; there are facts and truth, which— whether we like it or not— can be used for good or ill, for us or against us; and then there are opinions, beliefs, and points of view, which we all have, and which are all protected by freedom of expression. Even the ones we hate.

It’s really as simple as that. Liberals and progressives need to free themselves from the mind prison created by the massively sophisticated disinformation war that has been waged upon them by their once trusted representatives. Taibbi and Shellenberger’s testimony was an important moment in that war.

As Shellenberger said: “I’ve never worked on an issue where so frequently while doing it I just had chills go up my spine because of what I was seeing happening. I never thought that in my own country that freedom of speech would be threatened in this way, and it’s just frightening.”

I only hope the liberals wake up before they drag us all down with them.