Lee Fang Exposes 60 Minutes’ Disinfo “Expert” as Partisan Hack. PLUS: The Atlantic Targets Pro-Palestine Stanford Students with Nepo Baby Theo Baker
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Fake Experts, Fake Expertise (7:32)
Interview with Lee Fang (37:58)
The Atlantic Doxxes Pro-Palestine Student (1:01:34)
Outro (1:22:03)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, There is a group of people in the United States who have really become convinced that they are qualified to decree what is true and what is false, not in any one particular area of expertise that they have spent a lot of years of their life studying, say, cardiology or archaeology or physics, but they believe they are somehow competent to identify truth and falsity in general to act as floating arbiters Of what is true and false.
And more than just being somehow qualified to identify truth and falsity in general, they have really come to believe that they are entitled to have their judgments be binding on others.
That when they pronounce something to be false or inaccurate, it means it should no longer be permitted to be expressed or to be heard.
Such people now call themselves disinformation experts.
This is a completely fraudulent credential.
It was invented out of whole cloth following the dual 2016 disasters of Brexit in the UK and Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton in the United States.
Seemingly out of nowhere, overnight, there descended upon the United States this creepy new group of self-anointed experts who proclaimed to the world that they were able to identify falsity and deceit where nobody else could.
And as a result of this unique insight that they insisted that they and they alone possess, not just the ability to identify a falsity, but the ability to do so with apolitical neutrality, they have demanded the power to dictate the limits of our political debates and have purported to impose on the largest tech companies in the West the obligation to enforce their pronouncements.
Now it should be and it would be very easy to scoff at such people and to dismiss them the way one laughs at people who materialize on the street and proclaim themselves to be the messiah and then demand that everybody obey and follow them.
Yet these people are often financed by the most powerful and politically interventionist billionaires in the West.
The country's largest media outlets routinely treat them as the prophets they claim to be.
Often they're backed by the United States intelligence agencies and increasingly in the West The force of law is being wielded to bestow upon their judgments an unquestioning shield of truth.
Over the weekend, the television program 60 Minutes featured a woman named Kate Starbird, and she was presented as one of our nation's most important and prestigious disinformation experts.
60 Minutes found it quite scandalous, as did Starbird herself, that Twitter and other platforms have failed in many instances to remove political speech that Starbird has told them is false and should be removed.
This 60-minute segment really shines a light into how these people think, and since Starbird herself has worked with some of the most menacing state and private sector institutional actors that are attempting to police our political discourse, understanding her is vital to understanding the institutional weapons being unleashed to control political speech online.
One of the journalists who has done some of the best work on all of this is the independent reporter, Lee Fong.
He was not only one of the lead journalists working on the Twitter files that exposed many of these institutional relationships, but has reported specifically on Starbird and the organizations that employ her.
And he'll join us to talk about what makes her and all of this, this whole system, so truly threatening to our core freedoms.
Then the term tattletale journalism is a phrase I first used back in 2021 to describe a new and deeply rooted mentality that now dominates much of corporate journalism.
Rather than focus journalistic resources on investigating and exposing institutions of authority and individuals that wield actual power, which is always my understanding of journalism was supposed to be.
Instead, the nation's largest media corporations often focus on targeting private citizens who have little to no power.
And then drag them into the public light for shaming and even reputational destruction.
All as punishment for their having, in the eyes of these media figures, bad political opinions.
Last night, The Atlantic, which is a magazine owned and funded by one of the richest people on the planet, Steve Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, used its vast resources not to target the CIA or Wall Street or the Pentagon, but instead 22-year-old college students at Stanford who have made what the magazine considers to be intemperate remarks about Israel and their war in Gaza.
The editor-in-chief of The Atlantic is Jeffrey Goldberg, who used to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces as a prison guard overseeing prisons that held Palestinian prisoners.
And for this article, he commissioned the 19-year-old son of Peter Baker, who is the New York Times Washington bureau chief, as well as Susan Glasser, the longtime writer at Politico and the New Yorker, where she befriended Goldberg, who then hired her college son to write this article attempting to destroy who then hired her college son to write this article attempting to destroy the reputation of several students at Stanford for the crime of excess Now, in so many ways, this article reveals the rot at the heart of American corporate journalism.
And so, with great reluctance, we will wade into it for that reason.
Before we get to all of that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
By far, By far, one of the most significant features of American political life over the last decade has been the emergence of an institutionalized form of online censorship that is wielded one of the most significant features of American political life over the last decade has been the emergence of an institutionalized They're often found inside the U.S. Constitution.
government, including Homeland Security.
There was a major scandal last year when Homeland Security tried to create what basically was a Ministry of Truth within Homeland Security.
And although that caused quite a scandal just because of how poorly it was handled from a PR perspective, none of those efforts have receded at all.
And they often work with outside groups that are funded by a small handful of neoliberal billionaires, as well as U.S.
security state agencies, and they're often embedded In academic institutions and central to this entire framework of online censorship is an attempt to suggest to you that when certain views are declared off limits or certain viewpoints are declared to be too false, to be permitted, to be heard, to be circulated, to be expressed, it's not because they're censoring politically, oh no, perish the thought, it's instead because they have found
hiding under rocks somewhere these people who just materialized out of nowhere seemingly overnight a group of people who possess superior wisdom and not just superior wisdom but the ability to distinguish truth and falsity unmotivated by political agendas or ideology or anything else other than just a noble desire to understand truth and falsity
and for some reason these people are so vested in competence and in superior character and That it isn't just that people should be guided by what they say or people should listen to them to try and sort out truth and falsity.
Obviously, a lot of people report to be able to offer that kind of assistance and a lot of people are able to offer that.
That's what free speech is for, to enable people to listen to other people, to be persuaded about what to believe and what not to believe.
These people have no interest in that.
What they want instead is the ability to have their decrees about truth and falsity being binding
So that once they declare one of your views to be false or inaccurate or unsupported, it means that the big tech companies that are the monopolistic entities controlling the flow of online information and opinion are supposed to ban those views from being heard on the grounds that they now constitute disinformation or misinformation, or even a creepy new term called malinformation, which means that there's information that's true,
And yet it's deployed for deceitful ends, meaning that they not only believe they have the right to censor false information as they've determined it, but even true information if it's deployed for a purpose that they regard as false.
And one of the most alarming aspects of all of this is that as Orwellian as this sounds, as instinctively repulsive as you think this would be and should be to American citizens who are inculcated from birth with the virtues of free expression, It really is no longer true.
There's a huge group in our society that now believes not only that we ought to tolerate this kind of systemic censorship, but that we ought to encourage it.
We ought to cheer it.
We ought to applaud it.
Here, for example, is just one poll of many that demonstrates how alarmingly true this has become.
It's from Pew Research from August of 2021.
And it asked two different questions.
First, here is the percentage of Americans who say that the U.S.
government should take steps to restrict false information online, even if it means limiting freedom of information.
So they polled Americans and they said, do you want the government controlling and limiting the flow of information online in the name of keeping you safe from disinformation, even if it means limiting free speech?
And 65% of Democrats said yes, they want the government to perform that function.
And 28% of Republicans, obviously a much lower number, but still one out of every four, want the government performing this function.
As for the second question, which is, do you think tech companies should take steps to restrict false information online, even if it means limiting freedom of information?
The results are even more alarming.
76% of Democrats, three out of every four, Want big tech to censor political views or political expression in the name of preventing disinformation?
And 37% of Republicans, a very substantial and robust minority, also want them to do so.
Now, the obvious question becomes, if we're going to have a system in which the internet is controlled by some combination of tech companies and the state, And of course, we now have a case pending before the Supreme Court that grew out of the fact that the state and tech companies were acting in concert.
In fact, the state, the government, the Biden administration to be particular, to be specific, was dictating to big tech companies which information ought to be removed from the internet on the grounds that it was false.
And a lower court and then an appeals court both found this to be a grave violation of the First Amendment.
That case is now pending before the Supreme Court.
We reported on the oral argument that was held two weeks ago.
In the appeal of this case, the Biden administration has taken to the Supreme Court.
But what we know for certain, based not only on that case, but also on the Twitter files, we're going to talk to one of the reporters involved in the Twitter files in just a few minutes.
is that this system is well underway, that there is a systemic attempt on the part of the U.S.
government to work with Big Tech to determine which information should and should not be removed on the grounds that it constitutes, quote, disinformation.
And the question, of course, becomes who is capable, who is competent to identify disinformation, not just for the sake of persuading you, but for the sake of preventing you From expressing certain views or hearing your fellow citizens express those views.
And this phrase, disinformation expert, that is now being tossed about to signify the group of people that we're told are supposed to make these decisions, is a brand new, newly minted expertise that did not exist until about seven seconds ago.
There's still no industry standard for how you become a disinformation expert.
There's no field of discipline or department in academic institutions designed to bestow this expertise onto somebody.
Obviously, we do have experts.
We've always had experts in particular fields.
If you have a certain sickness, like cancer, you go to an oncologist because they're an expert.
If you have a problem with your automobile, you take it to a trained mechanic.
If you want to understand past events, you consult with historians or people trained in the culture and time period of whatever you want to study.
There is such a thing as actual expertise, but it's generally not brought to bear, at least not in a democratic and free country.
As a means of coercion, it's meant as a means of persuasion.
It's something that you consult with in order to better understand something that you want to better understand, yet it has become something far more coercive and menacing than that.
It is now a group of people who are bestowed with this title, disinformation expert.
Even though they're not experts in any particular field, they just claim to be experts in identifying disinformation in general.
60 Minutes on Sunday Night featured One of the new stars of this field and lamented the fact that big tech companies sometimes heed their warnings and obey their decrees, but not always.
And it's really fascinating that, as I've said many times, it is now journalists, media outlets Employees of media outlets who have the HR title journalist who are now taking the lead in demanding that our political discourse be more censored.
And here is a profile of this person from 60 Minutes and gives you a really good insight into how our corporate media now thinks about the dangers of what they call unfettered political speech online.
As in this case, a tweet in 2022 from Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene falsely claiming that there were extremely high amounts of COVID vaccine deaths.
I have not misled anyone.
I have not put out misinformation.
Twitter eventually banned Greene's personal account for multiple violations of its COVID policy.
Facebook and YouTube also removed or labeled posts they deemed misinformation.
Big tech's out to get conservatives.
That's not a suspicion.
That's not a hunch.
That's a fact.
Confronted with criticisms from conservatives, like Congressman Jim Jordan, that the social media companies were censoring their views, and because of cost-cutting, platforms began downsizing their fact-checking teams.
So today, social media is teeming with misinformation.
Now, first of all, if you notice there, they frame this as a conservative versus a liberal debate.
Only conservatives, say 60 Minutes, are concerned about the fact that a consortium of state agencies and the government and Very well-funded, newly materialized organizations that purport to identify disinformation are now working with big tech companies to impose limits, not just even on ordinary citizens, but even on elected officials.
And every time they cite an example of disinformation, as they just did, it is always somebody, not even who's just a Republican, but somebody who is an anti-establishment conservative, somebody outside of the boundaries of establishment thought, because that is really what this is aimed at doing, is to enforce the prerogatives of establishment authority, institutions of authority, to do what they've always done, which is to centralize information.
The internet has taken that away from them and the only way they can get it back is if they can regain control over the flow of information.
As we well know, and you can believe it was well-intentioned or not, there were all sorts of claims made just as part of the COVID pandemic.
That ended up being false.
That came not from people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and other people who were censored online, but that came from Dr. Fauci and from the leading experts who we were told to believe.
And anybody who disagreed with their pronouncements, even though they turned out to be false in many cases, even though they contradicted themselves many times.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci told everybody not to wear masks, that wearing masks as a means to protect yourself against COVID was unscientific and counterproductive.
Then a month later, he said anybody who doesn't wear a mask is acting irresponsibly.
They contradicted themselves.
They issued all sorts of statements that proved to be untrue.
And it wasn't just people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, by the way, is an elected member of Congress, who was censored online, but also people with the highest amounts of scientific credentials, including people like Jay Bhattacharya, who is an epidemiologist and a professor of medicine at Stanford, and is one of the plaintiffs in that lawsuit I just referenced whose Political expression was limited and censored online during the pandemic because it deviated from the scientific establishment.
This is censorship as grave as it gets.
And it in some way, unfortunately, is true that only conservatives have objected.
And we just looked at the data showing that Democrats overwhelmingly, in fact, three out of four believe in this framework of censorship in the name of disinformation.
Here's 60 Minutes going on with their view of what this system not only is, but what it should be.
Like these posts suggesting tanks are moving across the Texas-Mexico border.
But it's actually footage from Chile.
Alright, now let me just go back here.
images of, well, see for yourself.
With social media moderation teams shrinking, a new target is misinformation academic researchers. - All right, now let me just go back here.
This was an example of completely random people online who posted a video of tanks rolling across the southern border And when in fact, as she said, it wasn't really that.
And then here was a image and obviously false image of Joe Biden and Donald Trump standing next together, next to one another.
And again, it was a completely false image.
And if you look down at the bottom, you see that it was liked by a grand total of two people.
So they're kicking out these extremely inconsequential instances of disinformation to try and claim that the culprits are American citizens.
These are the same media outlets that lied the country into a major war, the invasion of Iraq, by spreading disinformation far more damaging and egregious than anything they're showing on the screen.
That the government of Iraq secretly possessed nuclear weapons and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda.
They misled people into believing that Saddam Hussein had participated in the 9-11 attack, something they knew they needed to do to convince Americans to invade Iraq as a response to 9-11.
They're the people who lied to the American public in 2016 that Donald Trump had colluded with and worked with the Russians to hack into the DNC emails in 2020.
Again and again and again, these are the people from whom the far more consequential disinformation is emanating.
And what they do constantly to shield themselves and distract you from that is they want you to look at your fellow citizens and think, oh, it's your fellow citizens, the people with no platforms.
Here we are spreading fake pictures that are being liked by two people.
This is the reason we need censorship.
This is the reason we're being misled.
Not by them!
but by your fellow citizens.
...images of, well, see for yourself. With social media moderation teams shrinking, a new target is misinformation academic researchers who began working closely with the platforms after evidence of Russian interference online in the 2016 election. Are researchers being chilled?
Kate Starbird is a professor at the University of Washington, a former professional basketball player, and a leader of a misinformation research group created ahead of the 2020 election.
Alright, so let's review that.
She is an academic.
She's at Stanford University.
She's part of a consortium of people who are calling themselves misinformation researchers or disinformation experts.
She's being featured on 60 Minutes as some kind of a heroic battler and crusader against disinformation.
And yet you're about to hear how she's being victimized, how she's being unfairly targeted, how people are criticizing her.
And for some reason, this is some sort of terrible event that we all need to lament.
She's trying to protect us.
From hearing false claims and instead of everybody applauding her and thanking her for it, people instead are questioning whether or not this is a function that Kate Starbird has the right to perform in 60 Minutes regards this criticism of her, someone so noble and benevolent and wise, as some kind of a national emergency.
These people shouldn't be criticized or questioned, they should be applauded and heralded.
We were very specifically looking at misinformation about election processes, procedures, and election results.
And if we saw something about that, we would pass it along to the platforms if we thought it violated one of their policies.
Here's an example.
A November 2020 tweet saying that election software in Michigan switched 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden.
The researchers alerted Twitter that then decided to label it with a warning.
I understand that some of the researchers, including you, have had some threats against them.
Death threats.
I have received one.
Sometimes they're threats with something behind them and sometimes they're just there to make you nervous.
She received a grand total of one death threat, she says.
I'd like to see that death threat.
A lot of times when people like this want to victimize themselves and they claim they've received death threats, what they really mean are people who write to them and say, oh, it'd be better off if you were to die or I'm hoping for your death.
It's not actually a real death threat.
I've actually received not just random emails, but threats so serious as a result of my journalism that governments have concluded that security measures are necessary for myself and for my family.
I understand the difference between angry messages that come from random people online who are angry about your work and actual death threats, but if you're going to Undertake work that's going to affect the public.
Sometimes you're going to be criticized and sometimes there's going to be deranged people who are going to criticize you.
That's not unique to Kate Starbird or her colleagues who want to censor online.
But you notice that every single time, this is something of course that media elites do all the time, they depict themselves as somehow being uniquely targeted with some kind of a threat.
In order to suggest that there are people out there who are dangerous and are threatening to them.
There's almost nobody in public life on every side of the political spectrum who expresses political opinions of any kind for whom this isn't true.
And yet they very selectively highlight which people are and which people aren't in order to try and induce not just sympathy for you, but to suggest that the people she's opposed to are the dangerous people who need policing.
Now, again, they, in that example that 60 Minutes chose, they picked some tweet that was a very limited impact right before the 2020 election.
A far more consequential lie told before the 2020 election that spread far and wide By the allies of 60 Minutes and Kate Starbird was that the reporting that was done by the New York Post based on documents found on Hunter Biden's laptop should be regarded disregarded because it was quote Russian disinformation a lie that came from 51 former members of the intelligence agencies.
The reason that lie is not being highlighted by Kate Starbird or by 60 Minutes It's because this is, at its heart, not a project that it's apolitical or devoted to finding truth.
It is a deeply politicized project aimed at suppressing anti-establishment ideologies by labeling it disinformation, by pretending that they're engaged in some sort of neutral scientific endeavor to determine truth and falsity by people who don't care about politics, when in fact, these are the most political people on the planet.
You're allowed to discredit researchers.
You're allowed to question Kate Starbird.
This campaign against you is meant to discredit you.
So we won't believe you.
Absolutely.
It's interesting that the people that pushed voter fraud lies are some of the same people that are trying to discredit researchers that are trying to understand the problem.
You're allowed to discredit researchers.
You're allowed to question Kate Starbird.
You're allowed to ask why it is that these people are any more entitled than anybody else to perform this role of dictating what is true and what is false, why they should have any special prerogative to advise big tech what should be removed and what shouldn't.
And yet they act as though the very act of questioning their competence, their intentions, why they should wield this power is itself inherently immoral, that it's proof that you must be devoted to the spread of disinformation if you would dare question any of these people.
That is what they do constantly.
This is a newly resurrected framework.
They're even doing that with that woman Nina Yankovich, who was such a crazed resistance fanatic, that if you looked at her tweets, she sounded like Taylor Lorenz on PCP.
Like the most steroid-intense version of the most fanatical resistance extremist.
They wanted to put her in charge of Holland Security's Ministry of Truth, the disinformation office.
And when people objected and said that's not a function of government, they turned around and they started using what they called the attacks on Nina Yankovic as proof That disinformation experts are more needed than ever because the experts themselves are now being questioned.
That's what this is all about.
Did your research find that there was more misinformation spread by conservatives?
Absolutely.
I think not just our research, research across the board looking at the 2020 election found that there was more misinformation spread by people that were supporters of Donald Trump or conservatives.
And the events of January 6th kind of underscore this.
USA!
USA!
The folks climbing up the Capitol building were supporters of Donald Trump and they were misinformed by these false claims and that motivated this action.
I'd be willing to bet that there is not a single disinformation expert, self-proclaimed disinformation expert, who has any sentiment for Donald Trump other than pure contempt and hatred and that's because this is, at its core, a deeply political project.
They are afraid that if the internet is free, They can no longer control how the public votes, how the public thinks, how the public reasons, how the public decides.
They know that people have lost trust and faith in these kinds of people, in the Kate Starbirds and 60 Minutes of the World, and for good reason.
Here is the Guardian at the beginning of this year trying to turn her into a victim.
Quote, the stakes are really high, said the Guardian.
The misinformation researcher changes task for 2024 U.S.
election.
Quote, Kate Starbird says attacks on her have made research difficult and claims of bias arise because of the prevalence of lies from the right.
Do you see how they claim on the one hand that it's central to their project, that they're just apolitical?
They have no political agenda.
They're just trying to identify what is true and false.
And yet in every instance, their attacks are on the populist right, the movement that supports Donald Trump.
There is never a lie that they identify or combat that comes from the Washington establishment, even though that's where lies come from more than any other.
The Guardian goes on, quote, "Starbird, a misinformation researcher, herself became the subject of an ongoing misinformation campaign, but said she would not let that deter her Look how brave she is.
She's getting criticized and she's going to keep persisting in her work.
Her team wasn't the only target of the conservative campaign against misinformation research.
She noted, "Researchers across the country "have received subpoenas, letters, and criticism." Let me just tell you once again what these people are getting that makes them the victim of extreme attacks and intimidation campaigns.
They're receiving subpoenas, letters, and even criticism.
What kind of monsters do we have in the United States?
That target our lofty misinformation experts with criticism and subpoenas and requests for information.
All attempting to frame misinformation research as partisan and as censorship, because that's what it is.
"One practice that especially upset Jim Jordan and his colleagues was when researchers would flag misleading information to social media companies who would sometimes respond by amending fact checks or taking down false posts entirely.
Nor is it just Congress attacking anti-misinformation workers.
A federal lawsuit from the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana alleges that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment by colluding with social media companies to censor and suppress speech.
A new lawsuit from the state of Texas and two right-wing media companies takes aim at the Global Engagement Center, a State Department agency that focuses on how foreign powers spread information.
Now, I don't know if the Guardian didn't have space for this or if they just didn't think it was relevant, but they forgot to mention that the lower district court and the court of appeals, four different federal judges, unanimously ruled that the program they referenced, where the government was picking up the phone and coercing Facebook and Google and Twitter to remove disinformation identified by the Kate Starbirds of the world as false,
Was actually unconstitutional.
It was a grave attack on the First Amendment because it was, in fact, being directed by the government.
Now, the fact that it's somehow a vicious, violent campaign to question Kate Starbird and her objectivity and to question whether or not she's really apolitical is laughable and inherently, of course, these people should be questioned.
Given that they want to censor the internet.
But the fact that Kate Starbird, of all people, is trying to hold herself out as apolitical, given her history, is an insult to your intelligence.
Here she was on Facebook on October 31st, 2018, right before the midterm election in 2018.
And this is what this apolitical, neutral, seeker of the truth wrote to her followers on Facebook.
Quote, vote like you understand that a Dem majority in the House and Senate means that we can begin to hold this president and his friends and family accountable for things like corruption and collusion.
So here was this disinformation expert accusing Donald Trump in 2018, as the Mueller investigation proceeded along, of collusion, something for which Donald Trump, according to Robert Mueller, had not engaged in, or at least there was no evidence to establish that he had.
That it will help stop his racist, anti-LGBT agenda from adding to the damage already done.
Vote, she said.
Like, you understand what the word nationalism coming out of the mouth of the President of the United States signals.
That it doesn't mean patriotism, that its undertones are white supremacy and ethno-nationalism.
Vote, she said, like you understand deep down that the lies this president tells over and over and that current Republican Congress people don't push back against are not frivolous or funny but intentional and strategic.
Vote, she said, like you understand the rise of fascism and white nationalism is happening all over the world.
And that if we cannot stop it here, it won't be stopped.
Vote because our country, our values, and even our freedom depend on it.
Your children's lives depend on it.
And if you cannot see these, then because I promise you that as an LGBT person, my rights depend upon it.
Now, let me ask you a question.
Having just read her stirring manifesto, Written before the 2018 election, do you think that Kate Starbird should be trusted as an apolitical, politically neutral expert to differentiate and dictate what truth and falsity is and that big tech companies should be bound by her pronouncements?
One of the complaints that 60 Minutes made was that only 30% of the time, Twitter was responding to her Request to remove information.
And even that made no sense because X, now under Elon Musk, doesn't rely on a system of having specially credentialed and disinformation experts dictate what is false.
They use a community-based system called community notes that relies on the people and by consensus to determine when a particular statement deserves context or correction because it's false.
One of the people who has been investigating all of this, who has been looking into the way in which this system works and the organizations that are behind it, is the independent journalist Lee Fong.
He was formerly my colleague at The Intercept.
He was one of the lead reporters on the Twitter files that looked into a lot of this, and he did a lot of work about not just Kate Starbird, but also the organizations with which she worked in trying to censor The internet.
Lee, it's great to see you as always.
Thank you for joining us.
Thanks for coming on talk to us.
Great to see you.
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
So I want to talk to you about this deeply apolitical, ideological neutral expert, Kate Starbird.
And in particular, I want to begin with work that she has done with an organization called CISA, which is the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee.
And here we're gonna put this on the screen.
This is a organization that is on the government's website.
And there you see the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee.
And one of its members is Dr. Kate Starbird, who is listed as an associate professor of human centered design and engineering at the University of Washington.
She has also worked with what is called the Center for an Informed Public, part of the Election Integrity
Project that they describe as a group that has joined with three other partners, the Stanford Internet Observatory, Grafica, and the Atlantic Council's DFR Lab to form a nonpartisan and misinformation research consortium to detect and mitigate the impacts of attempts to prevent or deter people from voting in the 2020 US elections or to delegitimize election results.
And there she is listed As part of that organization as well.
So these are the vehicles that Kate Starbird uses to try and influence and even dictate to big tech companies what information they should and should not be permitted to be expressed and to be heard.
What can you tell us about these organizations and how they function?
I first became acquainted with Kate Starbird and really started writing about CISA in the fall of 2022.
That's when I still worked at The Intercept, and in the process of writing a really lengthy story about CISA, the DHS, FBI, and its
Massive operation in terms of pressuring social media companies on content related decisions and the history of that and the kind of the documents showing their plans to expand that operation to include other topics beyond the pandemic or the 2020 election to the US involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war on racial justice on many other topics.
In the process of writing this story that I published with Ken Klippenstein, I noticed this CISA advisory panel on which Kate Starbird worked and that she was making recommendations and kind of engaging in monthly meetings about the scope and focus of the DHS and FBI in this regard.
And I filed a records request to her research institute, something I do on a fairly routine basis.
That's how I do a lot of my work.
It's based on original source documents, you know, documents that I can obtain through court order or from records requests.
And in a dynamic that you've made very clear in the earlier part of your segment, she tweeted just the following day or two days later that she was under attack from a right wing harassment campaign.
And this is at a time that I worked at The Intercept, which is far from a right wing outlet.
But a right wing harassment campaign that included overly broad record requests that were tantamount to a denial of service attack, a form of a DDoS attack, a form of cyber attack that's basically akin to overloading a target a form of cyber attack that's basically akin to overloading a target computer so it That's not what I did.
I asked for a fairly targeted records request for her communications with the major platforms in terms of how she was making content censorship recommendations and how she was communicating with the government to help shape government policies.
Now, I was not asking for what she had for breakfast that morning or something just to bog her down with trivial records requests.
This is something that I do on powerful figures and important researchers around the country on a range of topics on a routine basis.
So she positioned herself as kind of a victim here, and I find it a little bit ironic that she's constantly appearing in these legacy media outlets.
You know, this is kind of all coalescing around the Supreme Court looking at this issue.
The New York Times had a big story depicting any kind of fight for transparency or free speech on social media as a Trump instigated right-wing conspiracy or, you know, you looked at the 60 Minutes segment.
It's very similar.
And, you know, she was featured in the 60 Minutes segment and quoted by the New York Times.
And, you know, I find it a little bit interesting because, you know, after I received the documents from that record request that that I obtained after that story was published, it showed just so many more details.
The fact that she was working closely with a portal funded secretly by Pierre Omidyar, the former funder of The Intercept, but a major Democratic donor for the work to help shape content decisions around the 2020 election.
This is a person who is allied with some of the largest foundations in the country, working hand in glove with both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in terms of shaping content decisions, not just on Twitter, but on Facebook and other social media platforms.
So, you know, this whole kind of Effort to position herself as the victim, to say that any kind of scrutiny of the folks who claim to be disinformation experts is harassment, I think is an effort just to dodge scrutiny of her work and to look kind of under the hood.
Because the public really has not known until very recently, with a little bit more journalistic inquiry and congressional oversight, how these content decisions have been made for years.
That there's this whole kind of Yeah, but you know, in so many ways, like the whole project of being able to believe about yourself that you are somehow someone who has ascended to this position of kind of like floating expertise, somebody who can opine in an apolitical and a politically neutral way, whereas most other people can't.
It almost inherently means about yourself that you do believe that you ought to be insulated from questioning or attack because you've reached this kind of superior position and this has now become like a very common refrain in establishment journalism.
You know, the Guardian article that we reviewed, there was this line that struck me.
Where it said her team, meaning Kate Starbird's team, wasn't the only target of the conservative campaign against misinformation research, she noted.
And then the article went on to say, That researchers across the country have quote received subpoenas, letters, and criticisms.
Like you would expect in that sentence to find they have received nail bombs, death threats, And pistols pointed at their heads.
But instead, what they're getting are subpoenas, letters, and criticisms.
I'm sure, at least partially in mind, she has some of the investigative work that you were trying to do to inform the public about who these people are.
But what also strikes me about this, Lee, is The Guardian describes this as a conservative campaign Against misinformation research, and this is for people who don't know, you and I first became acquainted with one another, at least first had our very first interaction.
Thinking back in 2008 or 2009, at the time I was a writer at Salon.com, which was very much considered a left-liberal online political outlet, and at the time you had written an article in The Nation, which is most definitely a left-wing magazine, and we were having a back and forth about certain views that I had expressed that were
Pretty much paid attention to solely by the left-wing segment of the political spectrum and certainly the whole idea that the internet should be free of government and state control.
It was a very pervasive view on the American left for a long time, among American liberals.
It certainly was never a right-wing idea.
How did we arrive at the point where there's now this common theme that any questioning of these people is a harassment campaign, and not just a harassment campaign in general, but a right-wing conservative harassment campaign in particular?
Yes, if you just use the kind of principles that Kate Starbird and these other disinformation researchers have professed, you are engaging in a harassment campaign of me by simply disagreeing with my views on Twitter.
It's a little bit ridiculous.
This is a jujitsu move, basically, to parry any legitimate criticism And reposition these researchers as victims of a gigantic conspiracy.
Looking just broadly at the last few decades on the left, free speech, and in particular criticism of the Department of Homeland Security, has been a non-controversial part of what liberals have believed.
It's really just a recent phenomenon with the Trump election, with concerns around Russian interference on Social media, that the only reason that conservatives ever win elections is because of misinformation or disinformation.
You know, these voters must be stupid or confused.
It's kind of a diversion tactic rather than to confront the material reasons that people might be disaffected from the left or disaffected from Democrats.
This is kind of the perfect scapegoat issue.
And just in particular, the Department of Homeland Security, I mean, this is an agency formed after 9-11, a national security agency that for a very long time, Democrats on Capitol Hill were leading the efforts to investigate and subpoena this agency, to look at this agency's overreach into politics.
It was once very common among Democrats to say, hey, the Department of Homeland Security is kind of putting its thumb on the scales to help the Bush administration politically.
That, you know, it was raising the terror alert in the 2004 presidential election in a way that was designed to help Republicans in the elections that year.
Maybe this agency would be spying on Americans, that would be engaging in surveillance that was very inappropriate, that would have a chilling effect on Americans' political speech.
I mean, Democrats even worked with Republicans.
In fact, there was a bipartisan effort Back in 2012, not ancient history, not that long ago, to convene a hearing on Capitol Hill to look at the Department of Homeland Security and demand answers.
Why?
Because the Department of Homeland Security had engaged just a social media monitoring firm to monitor speech on Twitter.
Now, look what's happened in the last few years.
They're working with these researchers, these other kind of security firms, to actually censor speech, to attach warning labels, or to actually remove speech, or to ban users because they've engaged in a wrong thing.
And again, let's put aside the constitutional arguments.
Maybe this is a constitutionally protected form of speech.
I don't think so.
I think there's a legitimate debate there.
Just putting that aside, if you look at the evidence that's been gathered around how the DHS and other agencies have intervened in speech-related decisions during elections, they've done so in a very partisan way.
You see basically the same argument being made by conservatives that maybe don't trust vote-by-mail, don't trust absentee ballots.
You'll see conservatives being censored in the 2020 election for making that argument.
You look at the exact same tweets, essentially the same tweets from Democrats.
Howard Dean and Eric Holder, you know, major Democratic voices saying don't trust vote by mail because Trump controls the post office.
Go vote in person.
I mean, we have these tweets.
We know that Twitter reviewed them.
And those tweets were not censored.
That's essentially the same argument of these conservatives saying don't trust vote by mail.
Now, why were some tweets censored and others not, even though it was essentially the same argument?
It looks like these censors were very partisan.
It's exactly what you were saying earlier in the segment, that people like Kate Starbird present themselves as neutral experts, but they're essentially just partisan warriors.
Well, and here's the other thing, Lee.
Like, I'm not somebody who discounts the importance of expertise.
You know, if I am going to listen to a debate about the perils or benefits of artificial intelligence, I'm going to be more inclined just personally to want to listen to people who have studied that field or maybe who are linguists or have some actual studied expertise to bring to bear on that topic.
If I want to hear about debates concerning COVID and how best to deal with epidemics, I probably do want to hear more from epidemiologists and people trained in medicine and infectious disease than I do say people who've studied law or political science their whole life.
So I believe in expertise in terms of like as a persuasive instrument, not as an instrument of censorship.
And a lot of people who are censored actually were people often who did have credentials.
Like I said, Jay Bhattacharya, whose credentials can't be questioned, was one of the people censored because he deviated.
But in terms of this group, this CISA group that's trying to purport to kind of be this floating expertise, one of the things, for example, that they talk a lot about was disinformation about the 2020 election or election integrity in general or the COVID pandemic Those were two of the major sources of quote-unquote disinformation regarding the Internet.
If you look at Kate Starbird's expertise or her credentials, she's an associate professor of human-centered design and engineering.
At the University of Washington, and you look at these other people on the CISA advisory board, you have two people who are officers of major corporations, the senior vice president and chief counsel of Walmart, and then the vice president of corporate information and security at Apple.
You have the Illinois Emergency Management Agency Director, which is a political appointee in a blue state.
You have the general partner of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, which is a partner in a law firm.
You know, you have Nicole Perloff, who is a cybersecurity journalist who used to work at the New York Times.
Where do these people have any greater expertise in, say, identifying disinformation about COVID, Or voting.
They're not even political scientists.
They're not trained in any identifiable expertise or field.
On what basis are these people reporting to be able to just go around opining about what is and is not disinformation?
Two points on that topic.
One is, you know, for any of these debates, being a journalist is a very humbling experience.
I don't have a monopoly on the truth, right?
I'm constantly gathering facts, talking to experts, looking at documents, presenting evidence, you know, trying to be fair-minded.
But still, you know, I'm not the end-all be-all when I write about any subject.
But I at least have to kind of gather my sources and present them to readers and let readers decide You know, for these disinformation experts, for them to be the arbiters of truth, to decide, you know, in concert with the government, what is true and what is not, and to censor their opponents, I think that's just, it's just, it's so bold, you know, it's claiming an authority that they simply don't have.
If they believe something is misinformation or disinformation, and of course there is, there are a lot of organized lying, lies on the internet, One big problem in this whole dynamic is that there's no transparency.
They're making these decisions, claiming to know the truth, without presenting the facts to the public.
I've reported on many instances on my sub stack where they were Allegations of misinformation, accounts censored because of that, and the tweets or the information turned out to be true.
The Department of Homeland Security ended up censoring even a New York Times journalist who was reporting on the 2020 election and a delay in the vote count, thinking that was election misinformation.
It turned out he was not wrong, you know, this was truthful information, but he was wrongfully censored.
Many other instances around that And secondly, as you kind of alluded to, there is a big conflict of interest issue.
Some of the documents that we reported on in terms of the CISA panel, they were looking at really widely expanding the scope of this operation, even to include financial misinformation.
People who might say something about the stock market or banks That could be quote-unquote dangerous to the system, to the financial system.
Well, if you have banks and other financial institutions advising this operation, of course they don't want criticism, you know?
Of course they don't want people or journalists or others to criticize their behaviors or their business We see this many times in the Twitter files.
Many of the NGOs, or at least one NGO that was helping Twitter censor pandemic-related information, public good projects, was fully funded by the biopharma industry, by a lobbying group that represents Pfizer and Moderna.
They were the ones making recommendations to Twitter on who to censor.
Now some of the tweets were Definitely misinformation, disinformation, stuff like microchips, but other areas were kind of legitimate areas for public debate.
They considered criticism of vaccine passports, you know, this kind of policy where you had to be vaccinated for you to go out and engage in commerce or travel.
No, they're legitimate civil liberty questions around these policies.
But this is another topic that they flagged as dangerous misinformation, disinformation.
This is a vaccine industry lobby group that's essentially outlawing or suppressing criticism of their industry.
Yeah, you know, I think what you put your finger on before was, at least to me, the key, which is the idea of humility.
I mean, there are a lot of political opinions or just, like, viewpoints in general or causes in which I believe very passionately and very vehemently.
I believe very definitively that I'm right about certain views that I have.
But I have never in my life gotten to the point where I became so convinced in the righteousness of my view that I actually thought that anyone who sees things differently or has a different opinion ought to be prohibited from expressing it.
And, you know, at the end of the day, I think we can agree that there are statements that can be identified as factually false, you know, just like there are probably views that you can identify as hateful.
And ultimately, the question always is, do you think it's more dangerous to allow free speech and with it some kind of hate speech and some kind of disinformation or to vest the power in the hands of people, sometimes unseen people, the people who are not just these disinformation agents but the ones who are financing them,
the interests that are uniting in order to create the interests that are uniting in order to create these organizations to vest power in their hands to determine which kind of speech is and is not permissible.
And I thought we had settled that question, you know, 230 years ago that we would rather be a society that lives with the harms of free speech than with the dangers of centralizing power in the hands of institutions to dictate to us what views we can and can't hear.
And yet this is nothing short of an attempt to All right, Lee, before I let you go, just I know you feel so uncomfortable doing this because of how humble you are, but let people know where they can find your excellent reporting because you are an independent journalist and you do depend on subscribers and the support of people, and I hope people will really take a look at your work.
Glenn, I really appreciate you having me on.
I write primarily on Substack at LeeFong.com, reader-supported.
So, again, thank you so much for having me.
Absolutely, and we will add the link as well.
Always great to see you, Lee.
Keep up the great work.
Thanks so much.
Good to see you.
Okay.
As we've talked about many times, we are very proud to be on this platform of Rumble because they are one of the very few platforms left on the internet that can reach a large number of people and at the same time are truly devoted to fighting for people's free speech rights.
And there's a lot of things that Rumble is attempting to do to fortify themselves as a platform, especially given the Rumble Relentless attacks that the platform is under for people trying to, for media outlets trying to sully the reputation of the platform to drive away their corporate advertisers.
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It's a way that you can really support the mission of free speech by not just watching the programs here and supporting individual journalists, but also by being open-minded about the products that Rumble offers.
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If you're buying coffee anyway, and a lot of people don't love their coffee but like their coffee, I hope you will strongly consider 1775coffee.com, both because of its high quality and its connection to Rumble.
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One of the issues about journalism that I think is elusive but that is so important is what is supposed to be the function of journalism.
We often talk about bad reporting, or bad journalists, or bad stories, but you have to go to the first principle of what journalism is supposed to be, the reason there was supposed to be a free press in the first place, of why the American founders at the founding of the Republic decided that part of the Bill of Rights ought to be a guarantee, not just a free speech and the free exercise of religion, but also a free press.
There was a reason for that.
And the reason was very clear.
If you read the Federalist Papers, if you look at the debates at that time, if you look at how the citizens of the colonies and in the American Republic use the printing press, The value of it was that it was a means of holding powerful institutions accountable.
It was one of the ways that they communicated with one another about the abuses of the British King.
The printing press was then used as a way of debating what the founding principles of the republic should be about why there should be a federal republic in the first place.
And they understood that it was very important that that press, the ability and the right to use the press, be free, not just for the sake of it, But because of the importance in holding powerful institutions accountable in being able, when someone with a great deal of power stands up and makes a claim or an institution makes a claim, to be able to counter it, to disagree with it, to expose it as deceitful.
To be able to warn people about the abuses of those who wield power.
The idea of a printing press was not that you were supposed to be able to expose the secrets of your neighbor, who was just an ordinary citizen.
It wasn't the purpose of a printing press.
It might inform people if you go and tell everybody about the dating life of your neighbor.
Looked at an article in New York Magazine that was about the very popular podcaster Andrew Huberman and criticized it heavily, not because it was necessarily false, but just because it didn't expose any wrongdoing by anybody in power.
It was about Andrew Huberman's dating life.
So even though it might have been factually true, and I'm not even saying it was, let's just assume hypothetically it was, it was still a Pathetic report because it didn't in any way hold anyone powerful accountable.
Andrew Huberman is a legitimate topic of journalistic inquiry because of the influence he wields, but it just didn't reveal anything in the public interest.
Usually that's the purpose of journalism.
So The Atlantic is a political magazine that is one of the most well-funded political magazines in the country because it's owned now by Steve Jobs' widow, Lorraine Powell Jobs, who needless to say is an extremely wealthy woman, a multi-billionaire.
She was the inheritor of Steve Jobs' Apple fortune.
And it is a very old magazine.
The Atlantic is a very well-known media brand.
It has fallen into disrepute for a lot of different reasons.
It has become just yet another liberal political outlet.
It was ground zero for all of the most insane Russiagate fanaticism.
It's led by Jeffrey Goldberg, who, as we've reported many times before, is probably the reporter who did the most to deceive the American public.
About the Iraq War, when he was at the New Yorker, he wrote stories that won national magazine awards and other top journalism awards for telling the public that Saddam Hussein was in an alliance with Al Qaeda and helping convince Americans that Saddam Hussein had participated in the 9-11 attack.
But he has advanced and ascended as a result of those lies to run the Atlantic.
And in addition to being a fanatical supporter of the Iraq War, Jeffrey Goldberg is also arguably the most fanatical supporter of Israel in all of the American mainstream media.
I would probably put him right next to Ben Shapiro in terms of pro-Israel fanaticism.
And in fact, Jeffrey Goldberg, though he's an American citizen, actually fought in the Israeli Defense Forces or at least joined the Israeli Defense Forces and served as a prison guard in a prison that held Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
That's how devoted he is to that foreign country.
He actually joined its army, its military.
And now Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and over the weekend they published an article that was entitled, quote, The War at Stanford.
And the sub-headline was, I didn't know that college would be a factory of unreason.
And the topic of this article or one of the subjects or targets of this article is not the institution of Stanford University, which would be a legitimate subject of journalistic scrutiny.
Stanford University is certainly a powerful institution.
And it did talk in some aspects about Stanford as an institution, but one of its main focuses was the political views of the classmates of the 19-year-old Stanford student who Jeffrey Goldberg got to write this article.
Now, that person, the person who And I want to be respectful of their pronouns, which is he, they.
Not, to be honest, entirely sure how one uses those pronouns, he, they.
But the person's name is Theo Baker.
And Theo Baker is a 19-year-old student at Stanford University.
And you may wonder, how is it that a 19-year-old student at Stanford ended up being able to write a major article in a magazine as well-financed and as mainstream and as well-known as The Atlantic?
And the reason is that Theo Baker is basically the classic Nepo baby when it comes to American journalism.
Theo Baker's father is Peter Baker.
Peter Baker is the bureau chief, the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times.
Doesn't get more mainstream than that in American journalism.
Theo Baker's mother is Susan Glasser.
Susan Glasser has been a longtime writer at the New Yorker.
She was at the New Yorker when Jeffrey Goldberg was at the New Yorker.
She then was one of the founders of Politico magazine and she now works for Politico.
So Theo Baker's mom and Theo Baker's dad are extremely well entrenched within the highest levels of national American media corporations.
That's how you end up being a 19-year-old who gets to write an article for The Atlantic.
But it's not just like any 19-year-old.
Even when your mom and dad are big, important, influential figures in American journalism who are good friends with Jeffrey Goldberg, that would not be enough.
What you also need to do in order to get published in The Atlantic is make sure that you are aligned with and willing to serve The Political Agenda and the Most Important Political Causes of the Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, which, as I just demonstrated based on his biography, based on his advocacy, certainly at the top of that list is advocacy of and support for the foreign country of Israel.
And one of the main purposes of this article, written by this 19-year-old son, of two very prominent American journalists was to basically tattle on his classmates who he came to learn have political opinions that in all likelihood would reflect poorly on them certainly in certain sectors of American political life as they get older and he decided to use his platform in the Atlantic
Not to expose the secrets or report on corruption inside powerful institutions, but instead to basically tattle on his classmates and forever pin political views that obviously are inflammatory and you could even say are intemperate to their name by ensuring that they got recorded in the Atlantic.
Not because those people chose to go write their opinions in the Atlantic, But because Theo Baker decided to quote them saying certain things that he knew would probably be very harmful to their political careers, certainly in the circles in which Theo Baker's parents and Jeffrey Goldberg circulate, namely the American mainstream media.
So here is how this article began that was published in The Atlantic.
Quote, One of the section leaders from my computer science class, Hamza El-Bodaly, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed.
Quote, I'm not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should.
The 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month, quote, I'd be happy if Biden was dead.
He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it.
Quote, I'm not calling for a vigilante to do it, he later clarified.
But quote, I'm saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be.
And we all know terrorists with darker skin are typically bombed in drone strike by American airplanes.
Al-Bedouli has also said that he believes that Hamas's October 7th attack was a justifiable act of resistance and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government, though he clarified later that he, quote, doesn't mean Hamas is perfect, end quote.
When you ask him what his cause is, he answers peace.
Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford released Milquetoast statements making, quote, the moment of intense emotion, marking the moment of intense emotion, and declaring, quote, deep concern over, quote, the crisis in Israel and Palestine.
So this article began with a very in-depth explanation of the political views of somebody named Hamza al-Budali.
He is not a member of Congress.
He is not in Joe Biden's cabinet.
He's not an official in a major American corporation.
He's not an official in the US security state.
He doesn't wield any identifiable political or journalistic or economic power the way Theo Baker does, given who his parents are and the access that he has to the Atlantic.
He's just a random 23 year old student at Stanford.
Who has political views that Jeffrey Goldberg and apparently Theo Baker, and I'm sure his parents, find offensive.
And for whatever reason, they decided that the Atlantic's vast resources, owned by Lorraine Powell Jobs, should be used to expose this 23-year-old student to public scrutiny and public attack because of his political views.
This is not a case where Hamzi al-Baduli is committing a crime.
He's not actually planning to kill Joe Biden.
He's not calling, as he said, on anyone to go and kill Joe Biden.
He's engaging in this sort of philosophical inquiry that, at least when I went to college, and I would bet when everybody went to college and when everybody was this age, was the kind of very common philosophizing you do.
Namely, well, if we think that it's justified to kill the leader of a terrorist organization, or we think it's justified to kill Saddam Hussein, If we really believe, as many Americans have been arguing, that Joe Biden is the president of the country arming and funding and financing and empowering a genocide, then wouldn't it mean that Joe Biden is a legitimate military target?
Now, you don't have to agree with that.
You don't even have to think that that's a legitimate political view, but it's the sort of dorm room philosophizing that's extremely common that takes place on political campuses all over the place.
If it's legitimate for the American military to kill Saddam Hussein, why isn't it legitimate for the Palestinians to kill Joe Biden?
After all, Joe Biden is the one providing the bombs to be dropped on Palestine.
Why wouldn't Joe Biden be?
This is the sort of thing that college students talk about all the time.
And there are thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of college students all over the United States.
Polls show this.
That believe that Israel is engaged in a genocide and that vehemently oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza.
In fact, there was just a poll out that a majority of Americans, 75% of Democrats, something like 60% of Independents, 30% of Republicans, oppose the Israeli war in Gaza.
These are not views that are wildly out of the mainstream.
The view that what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide.
There's a formal Judicial proceeding pending before the world court brought by the country of South Africa and supported by other governments around the world.
Accusing Israel formally of committing genocide.
Why remotely is it of journalistic value to use the pages of the Atlantic to try and find these single most inflammatory statements some random 23 year old Student at Stanford said, and I say 23, not because he's a child, he's an adult.
He's absolutely an adult.
He's just an adult who nobody outside of maybe 100 people had heard of until the Atlantic decided to use its pages, which they turned over to a 19-year-old child And I just am avoiding the word son just because of this gender issue.
I don't want to misgender the person, but the child of two prominent American journalists who obviously is able to access The Atlantic for that reason.
Now, in defense of Theo Baker, they are somebody who has a history of having done college journalism That was commendable.
Here at the Washington Post, profiled Theo Baker last year, meet the student who helped boot the president of Stanford College Journalists, Theo Baker's reporting paved the way for Mark Tessier-Levine's resignation, and it talked about the work they did at Stanford University.
But obviously, even that, the fact that you get a profile in the Washington Post, that you get access to the Atlantic, is obviously very related to who his parents are.
But the fact is that the main reason is because it aligns with the Atlantic's political agenda of defending Israel and then wanting to vilify people who are critics of Israel, trying to ruin this college student's reputation and his future career prospects by taking statements that he made among friends at a protest and Trumpeting it to the entire country in the first paragraph of a major article in the Atlantic.
This is what I mean by telltale journalism, an inversion of the kind of journalistic values that we previously had.
Here in February of 2021, When I was at Substack, I wrote an article featuring Tell Lorenz and others of her type, who typically take the resources of major American media outlets and turn that journalistic lens not on powerful institutions, but just on random individuals.
And the headline of that article is the journalistic tattletale and censorship industry suffers several well-deserved blows.
And I talked about how often journalism is now being used as a weapon or mechanism of punishment, not to attack powerful institutions, but to attack ordinary citizens who are their critics.
In 2019, an ordinary citizen had posted anonymously a meme that made fun of Nancy Pelosi, depicted Nancy Pelosi as inebriated, and the Daily Beast went and found out this person's identity and published their name.
It was like a truck driver.
Punished this person for the crime of having published a meme of Nancy Pelosi that a lot of liberals judge to be excessively mean or whatever.
And Columbia Journalism Review published an article, should the Daily Beast have exposed the man behind the quote, drunk Pelosi video.
It kind of altered a video to make Nancy Pelosi look very drunk.
And Columbia Journalism Review said the following, quote, a story by the Daily Beast, Kevin Paulson, Reported the original the original uploader is a 34 year old day laborer.
A quote Donald Trump super fan and occasional sports blogger from the Bronx named Sean Brooks.
The story described Brooks as a quote proud member of Trump's razor thin African American support base and mentioned that he is on probation for domestic battery charge against his ex-girlfriend and that some of his Instagram posts appear to be misogynistic.
So the Daily Beast used its journalistic resources to drag into the light an anonymous citizen who was a day laborer, a black day laborer, who supported Donald Trump to punish him for the crime of having made fun of Nancy Pelosi.
That's journalism, not holding powerful institutions to account, but serving powerful institutions by going after their critics.
And that's exactly what The Atlantic did here.
The position of the American government is to support the Israeli government and its war in Gaza.
It's a policy supported by both political parties.
Supporting Israel has been bipartisan, overwhelming consensus on Washington for decades.
That's the reason Israel has received more aid by far than any other country and the reason Joe Biden continues to finance and arm Israel's war with very little opposition of Washington.
And so the Atlantic decided to use It's massive resources provided by a billionaire not to investigate the Pentagon or the war machine or anybody else with any power, but to try and destroy the reputation of random students who just have the misfortune of going to school with
The child of two extremely influential and powerful American journalists who therefore got access to the Atlantic to vent their frustration and anger at their fellow college students for criticizing Israel in a way they regard as intemperate.
This is the sort of journalistic mindset that has become extremely common.
It is there to serve establishment dogma, never to investigate or rarely to investigate truly powerful institutions or to expose their wrongdoing or divulge their secrets, but instead to act as their
Bulldogs and to attack ordinary citizens in the public for the crime of dissenting from or criticizing in excessive ways or in temperate ways the most powerful people in the country and in this case the people who are responsible for US financing of and arming of the Israeli war in Gaza and That is the mission of corporate media.
They destroy people's reputations, they censor dissent, and they exist to serve the most powerful actors in society.
The traditional ethos of American journalism was supposed to be afflict the powerful and comfort the powerless.
And as you see over and over, those values have been completely inverted.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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