"What a blast from the past! The New York Times hasn’t pulled out the infamous 'beer test' for a political candidate since May 22, 2015..."

"... when it ran ['Finding a Candidate You’d Like to Have a Beer With.'] The 'beer test' was once a massively overused campaign reporting cliché. It grew out of a Sam Adams ad campaign in the 2000 race, and from Bush-Gore through the 2016 cycle it was nearly impossible to escape 'beer test' coverage. Then Donald Trump won the 2016 beer test by default — it was hard to imagine Hillary Clinton having a beer at all — leading even Slate to pronounce 'there has never been and perhaps never will be a candidate you’d be more eager to have a beer with than Donald Trump.'

That's Matt Taibbi, in "Cliché Alert: Return of the 'Beer Test'/The New York Times reverts to old form, thanks to a blue-party schism" (Racket).

Here's the NYT article that set Taibbi off: "He’s Not a Democrat. Democrats Love Him Anyway."

"The Russiagate scandal has long been one of the most convoluted, hard-to-follow news stories of all time...."

"Those of us who covered the story from the start had a difficult time explaining to audiences what it was, as we ourselves didn’t know. Now we do.... Finally, it seems, we can explain.... It wasn’t the start of a corruption story about Trump, but the cover-up of a still-unresolved Hillary Clinton scandal. This is purely a Clinton corruption story.... With the help of the declassified Durham material, we can explain the whole affair in three brushstrokes. One, Hillary Clinton and her team apparently hoped to deflect from her email scandal and other problems via a campaign tying Trump to Putin. Two, American security services learned of these plans. Three — and this is the most important part — instead of outing them, authorities used state resources to massively expand and amplify her scheme.... Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it...."

Writes Matt Taibbi, in "No Doubt Left: Russiagate Was a Cover-Up/The most infuriatingly complex scandal of all time has just been reduced to a page or two, thanks to another declassified release" (Substack).

More from Taibbi at "The New York Times Can't Stop Sucking/How many times can one newspaper screw up a story?" (Substack).

ADDED: This post is really a place-holder. It marks my own nonfollowing of the story. Notice what I am quoting — Taibbi's acknowledgment that the story is too hard for people to follow. And it's not as though he's solving the problem for us. The quoted material is conclusory assertion. For someone who isn't already pro- or anti-Trump, you still have no way to sort out what's true. I also read The New York Times, and here's Taibbi telling me The New York Times is systematically screwing it up. Maybe. How am I supposed to know? 

Crosshairs!

I see Matt Taibbi has a piece titled "Barack Obama Now Squarely in Russiagate Crosshairs/New disclosures from a Tulsi Gabbard-led working group point directly to the top, as the legacy of 'Hope and Change' begins a plunge to the ocean floor."

I do not like the overheated metaphor, especially the evocation of assassination.

And the use of "begins" before "plunge to the ocean floor" shows how silly it is. What is the beginning of "a plunge to the ocean floor"? Breaking the surface? It calls to mind a tumble from a paddleboard. How far down is "the ocean floor"? 8 feet?

Absurd prank.

I'm reading "State Department Defies Congress, Revives Infamous Censorship Office in Absurd Prank" by Matt Taibbi.

"You are dead to me. Please get off Twitter and just stay on Substack."

Tweeted Elon Musk at Matt Taibbi, reported at Mediaite.

Taking stochastic terrorism seriously.

I'm reading "Trump Floats the Idea of Executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley The former president is inciting violence against the nation’s top general. America’s response is distracted and numb" (Brian Klass, in The Atlantic)(analyzing Trump's Truth Social post that said Milley’s call to China on l on January 6, 2021, was 'an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH'):

Trump loves to hide behind the thin veneer of plausible deniability, but he knows exactly what he’s doing.... The suggestion is clear, and it comes from a man who has one of America’s loudest megaphones—one that is directed squarely at millions of extremists who are well armed, who insist that the government is illegitimate, and who believe that people like Milley are part of a “deep state” plot against the country. 

Academics have a formal term for exactly this type of incitement: stochastic terrorism.

"Class-not-race became code for an increasingly infamous form of racism... 'color-blindness.'"

"Once considered an aspirational positive, a would-be 'color blind' pol like Sanders who focused on 'class-not-race' was understood to be denying the realities of discrimination, probably out of secret racism. As the use of 'working class' on its own began to carry more penalties even for politicians like Sanders whose entire raison d’etre was supposedly class politics, new entrants to the electoral scene were encouraged to refer instead to the 'white working class,' perjoratively. This was soon described as a voting bloc that basically existed to make irrational/moronic demands.... Most importantly, it votes for Donald Trump, which means whatever it thinks about anything can safely be ignored... [A] phrase that was coined to express a specific political idea — that connections between people of a certain economic class are meaningful — once again came to mean more or less the exact opposite, i.e. that the only 'working class' that really exists is fractious and separated by ethinicity. White working class, black working class, Latinx working class (really!), and so on. Workers of the world, split up!"

Writes Matt Taibbi, in "Tracking Orwellian Change: New Meanings of 'Deep State' and 'Working Class'/When left/liberal fixations fall out of establishment favor, they're re-christened as conservative menaces" (Substack).

Let's just drop in for a moment on the massive squabble between Matt Taibbi and Elon Musk.

1. Substack links were never blocked. Matt’s statement is false.

2. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.

3. Turns out Matt is/was an employee of Substack.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 8, 2023

If this be humor, make the most of it.

 

Link.

"The corporate media's ability to — overnight — turn anyone who dissents in anyway into some sort of fascist or even Hitler-like figure, and then have millions of their followers go around mindlessly repeating it...."

The corporate media's ability to -- overnight -- turn anyone who dissents in anyway into some sort of fascist or even Hitler-like figure, and then have millions of their followers go around mindlessly repeating it, is both impressive and chilling: https://t.co/SIMYWnAHQw

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 15, 2023

Matt Taibbi talks to Joe Rogan about the Twitter Files.

It's all interesting, but let me highlight the part that begins around 10 minutes in, when Taibbi explains Twitter's "glorification of violence" policy, which he says is "the speech version of stochastic terrorism":

Stochastic terrorism is... this idea that you can incite people to violence by saying things that are not specifically inciting but are statistically likely to create somebody who will do something violent even if it's not individually predictable. 

That's what they did with Trump. They basically invented this concept that yes, he may not have actually incited violence, but the whole totality of his persona is inciting, so we're going to strike him. So they sort of massively expanded the purview of things they can censor, just in that one moment.

In The Twitter Files, you see people, in real time, devising this policy and deciding that it's the right idea. 

"The FBI and other law enforcement organizations treated Twitter as a 'subsidiary,' flagging numerous accounts for purportedly harmful 'misinformation'..."

"... since January of 2020, according to the sixth installment of the 'Twitter Files' released Friday. Independent journalist Matt Taibbi described the FBI’s relationship with Twitter as having a 'master-canine quality' with 'constant and pervasive' contact between the bureau and the social media giant.... Friday’s Twitter Files also revealed that the company participated in monthly meetings with not only the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, but also with the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.... Instead of chasing child sex predators or terrorists,' Taibbi summed up in a tweet following the file drop, 'the FBI has agents — lots of them — analyzing and mass-flagging social media posts. Not as part of any criminal investigation, but as a permanent, end-in-itself surveillance operation. People should not be okay with this.' The FBI told the Post on Friday that it... 'regularly engages with private sector entities... [which] independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them'...."

The NY Post reports.

ALSO: There's this other article in the NY Post: "Twitter’s top ranks riddled with ex-FBI employees" ("More than a dozen former feds flocked to the company in the months and years prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of the social network in October").

"The 'Twitter Files' Is What It Claims to Expose."

Asserts Eric Levitz at Intelligencer. 

All right. We have seen the "nothingburger" response to the Twitter Files. This is the I'm-rubber-you’re-glue response: You are the very thing that you denounce.

Let's see how we'll this argument works. I'll cut as close to the core as I can for this excerpt:

Matt Taibbi is back with another set of tweets, this time focusing on Donald Trump.

Start here.

1. THREAD: The Twitter Files/THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP/Part One: October 2020-January 6th....

4. This first installment covers the period before the election through January 6th. Tomorrow, @Shellenbergermd will detail the chaos inside Twitter on January 7th. On Sunday, @BariWeiss will reveal the secret internal communications from the key date of January 8th.

ADDED:

The New York Times finally put up a story about the Twitter files. (Really, it's a story about the reaction to the release of the files.)

This went up yesterday. It doesn't have a time stamp, but I believe it went up in the evening, that is, 2 days after the files were released:

"Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, and a Very Modern Media Maelstrom/A release of internal documents from Twitter set off intense debates in the intersecting worlds of media, politics and tech," by Michael M. Grynbaum.

Let's do a close read: 

It was, on the surface, a typical example of reporting the news: a journalist obtains internal documents from a major corporation, shedding light on a political dispute that flared in the waning days of the 2020 presidential race. But when it comes to Elon Musk and Twitter, nothing is typical. The so-called Twitter Files, released Friday evening by the independent journalist Matt Taibbi, set off a firestorm among pundits, media ethicists and lawmakers in both parties.

Even more atypical was the way the NYT contributed nothing at all.

"A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution."

Wrote Donald Trump, at Truth Social, quoted in "White House rebukes Trump’s suggestion to suspend Constitution over 2020 election" (WaPo).

The post came a day after Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, claimed he would expose how Twitter engaged in “free speech suppression” in the run-up to the 2020 election. But his “Twitter Files” did not show that the tech giant bent to the will of Democrats. 

Trump's "truth" is so hyperbolic and disrespectful of the rule of law that it's idiotic clickbait, only worthy of attention because the man is running for President, and apparently, as polls go, the leading candidate. Sorry, I'm not going to spend every day agonizing over that. We will move on... I hope... I trust... He's so over-criticized that I don't see the point of jumping on him one more time. That doesn't work, and it drives some dedicated believers more deeply into his sphere.

I want to move on to the link in the indented quote — on "did not show" — which goes to "Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ ignite divisions, but haven’t changed minds/The company’s new chief executive detailed Twitter’s decision-making around a controversial story" (WaPo). 

Yesterday morning, I was critical of The Washington Post for not having an article on the "Twitter files," but by the end of the day, they had that. Let's read:

How elite media is covering Elon Musk's dumping of information about how Twitter helped the Democratic Party in the 2020 election.

First, let me say, I would like a well-written, organized, comprehensive piece of writing explaining this material. Alternatively, show me everything — all the raw material.

Instead, Elon Musk directed us to the Twitter account of Matt Taibbi, and we were expected to receive a long series of tweets and to puzzle through it. Was that to drive massive traffic to Twitter? Was it supposed to be better all fragmented like that?

It certainly wasn't a way to get quick updates to news that was suddenly breaking. It's an old story: Twitter was skewed to favor Democrats. Now, presumably, there's impressive proof. Present the proof in a clear organized fashion!

Musk enlisted Matt Taibbi, so why couldn't Matt Taibbi create a readable document and then just tweet a link to that document?

"The mess began last Friday, February 11th, when National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan gave an address warning American citizens to evacuate Ukraine...."

"... American reporters began telling audiences a curiously detailed story about upcoming Russian invasion plans. PBS NewsHour’s Nick Schifrin cited 'three Western and defense sources' in saying Vladimir Putin had already made up his mind to invade. He then cited six sources — 'US and Western officials' — who told him the U.S. expected an invasion of Ukraine the following week. These voices left little to the imagination, saying the invasion would be a 'horrific, bloody campaign,' with two days of aerial bombardment, followed by electronic warfare and possible regime change.... That afternoon of the 11th, Politico cited 'a person familiar'.... reporting that Joe Biden held an hourlong call with Western leaders pegging February 16th as a possible invasion date.... It should be clear to any reporter that a national security source who whispers not only the alleged date of a coming invasion, but the number of days of aerial bombardment and the war’s expected level of horror and bloodiness, is either yanking your chain with a fairy tale, or using you, or both."

Writes Matt Taibbi, in "Another All-Time Media Faceplant/After the Biden administration and the press wrongly predicted a Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 16th, they kept compounding the error in spectacular fashion" (Substack).

"By all rights, Russiagate should be dead as a serious news story. But as the Real Time episode showed, 'collusion' is still alive for some..."

"... and the bulk of the case essentially rests now upon the characterization of one person from the above passage as a Russian agent: a former aide to Paul Manafort named Konstantin Kilimnik...."

Writes Matt Taibbi in "Konstantin Kilimnik, Russiagate's Last Fall Guy, Speaks Out/The Senate Intelligence Committee, the Treasury, and even Robert Mueller pointed fingers. But none bothered to question him" (Substack).

Matt Taibbi is annoyed by the repetitiveness and thinness of Robin DiAngelo's new book "Nice Racism."

I'm reading "Our Endless Dinner With Robin DiAngelo/Suburban America's self-proclaimed racial oracle returns with a monumentally oblivious sequel to 'White Fragility.'" 

Fortunately, Matt Taibbi  keeps his book review super-short and even so, he's risking committing the same writerly sin as DiAngelo — saying the same thing over and over. And it would be especially bad to say over and over that some other writer keeps saying the same thing over and over. 

DiAngelo's main point is something I myself believe: Lots of people who think of themselves as good people — because they think of themselves as good people — are — obliviously — racist.

DiAngelo has cashed in with this insight, and who can blame her for slapping together another book? Taibbi dismisses it as "the booklike product released this week by the 'Vanilla Ice of Antiracism,' Robin DiAngelo."  

DiAngelo presents herself — her past self — as an exemplar of the self-loving liberal who views racism as a sin that afflicts those other people — those awful people over there. She writes:

My progressive credentials were impeccable: I was a minority myself—a woman in a committed relationship with another woman…I knew how to talk about patriarchy and heterosexism. I was a cool white progressive, not an ignorant racist. Of course, what I was actually demonstrating was how completely oblivious I was.

It's an important insight, but how do you make it into a book and then another book? There isn't really any new material, just a need to bonk complacent liberals on the head again, and this new book is offered for that purpose.

Matt Taibbi cries out in pain:

Reading DiAngelo is like being strapped to an ice floe in a vast ocean while someone applies metronome hammer-strikes to the the same spot on your temporal bone over and over. You hear ideas repeated ten, twenty, a hundred times, losing track of which story is which....