RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/the-medias-russia-collusion-mess-was-no-error/

Emails show that one journalist actually shared his raw copy with Fusion GPS.

Special Counsel John Durham, pursuing a case against Democratic Party lawyer Michael Sussmann for lying to the FBI in a conspiracy to push the Russia “collusion” swindle, recently shared communications involving Fusion GPS and various reporters. Durham says he is in possession of “hundreds of emails in which Fusion GPS employees shared raw, unverified, and uncorroborated information — including their own draft research and work product — with reporters.”

One of these exchanges concerns a breathless piece from Slate in 2016, tying the Trump Organization’s email server to the Russian Alfa Bank. You may remember that the story dropped only a week before the 2016 presidential election. One of the first big Russia-hoax pieces, it would become the template for many others to come. In one email, Franklin Foer, then at Slate, passes on his raw copy to Fusion GPS, which was working for Hillary at the time, and asks the outfit to look it over for “omissions and errors.” Once the information was repackaged into a news story, Hillary sent out a release claiming that “computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”

We shouldn’t kid ourselves. This is how politicians launder oppo info. In movies, precocious reporters stake out office buildings, rummage through garbage, flip through piles of documents, and uncover dusty folders in the back of old cabinets. For the most part, that’s a fantasy. It’s about access. Most big scoops are handed to reporters — whose greatest skill is being lucky enough to have landed in powerful positions — by the political opposition. And, in my book, there’s nothing unethical about passing along info that’s true, no matter who the source is.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-hilarious-wailing-at-elon-musk-twitter-purchase-progressives-robert-reich-ari-melber-11651006771?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

My, what a progressive panic Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter has inspired. MSNBC host Ari Melber warns that Mr. Musk could hack the political debate by having the website “secretly ban one party’s candidate” or “turn down the reach of their stuff, and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the election.”

Uh, hello? Twitter has banned President Trump. A month before the 2020 election, it moved to “turn down the reach” of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Those actions weren’t secret, but Mr. Melber’s alarm echoes what conservatives have been saying for years about big tech’s censorship. As long as the usual Silicon Valley overlords controlled all of social media, progressives didn’t mind. But Elon Musk buys Twitter, and suddenly freer speech is a national crisis.

“Musk and his apologists say if consumers don’t like what he does with Twitter, they can go elsewhere,” tweeted former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “But where else would consumers go to post short messages that can reach millions of people other than Twitter?” Yet conservative critics of Twitter have long been told to build their own sites. We’ll friend you later on ReichBook.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/elon-conquers-the-twitterverse?token

Three weeks ago, a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Elon Musk, billionaire Shitposting God of Silicon Valley, had acquired over 9% of Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder and setting in motion a chain of events that led, ultimately, to yesterday’s outright purchase of the now $44 billion company. In a press release, Elon shared his goals for the platform, which echoed the goals he’s shared all month: 

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”

“Freedom,” “open source technology,” and “man, I really hate these spam bots.” The media’s reaction to these ambitions was instant and apoplectic. They were akin, we were told, to literal Nazism. 

Welcome to the Clown World. Boy, do we have ground to cover. 

The social internet is always a Dalí painting—surreal and horrifying and beautiful. A million crazy people screaming over nonsense, with funny jokes or anecdotes mixed in, fortune cookie observations, legitimate political happenings, and “words are violence” hall monitors from The Washington Post waging daily information war on trolls and Russian bots and okay actually just a lot of regular people with whom they disagree, or simply don’t like. 

But even by the gutter standards we’ve come to accept from media, this has been a month for the books.