Tag: news

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in The Hill newspaper on the continued effort to ignore the obvious and catastrophic decision of the House leadership to rush the impeachment vote by Christmas rather than complete the record against President Donald Trump. This denial continues despite the fact that, after saying that they had no time to seek witnesses or favorable court orders, the House leadership then waited a month before released the articles of impeachment. Clearly, the record would have been stronger if the House waited and sought to compel witnesses. It also would have kept control of the record and the case. I encouraged them to vote in March or April, which would have given them plenty of time to secure additional testimony and certainly a number of favorable court orders. However, recognizing this obvious blunder would take away from the narrative that the case failed only because the Republicans were protecting Trump in the Senate.

Here is the column:

NBC host Chuck Todd recently asked guests on his show if supporters of President Trump just want to be lied to. It is a question that many in the media would never ask about Democrats, even in the face of overtly false claims. This week is an example. After the Senate rejected witnesses and effectively ended the impeachment trial on Friday, the media ignored the primary reason for the defeat, which is the insistence of House leaders to impeach Trump by Christmas. Critics of the president simply do not want to hear that the blind rush to impeach guaranteed not only an acquittal but an easy case for acquittal. It is after all important for some members of the media to maintain that fools dwell only in Republican red states.

When I appeared before the House Judiciary Committee in November, I opposed four proposed articles of impeachment as legally flawed and explained that two would be legitimate if they were proven. The House Judiciary Committee rejected the challenged articles and accepted the two articles on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. That left one fundamental area of disagreement. I warned the panel that it was rushing to a failed impeachment by insisting on a vote by Christmas. This was the shortest impeachment investigation in American history. It was also the narrowest grounds and thinnest record for trial. I have previously noted that witnesses like former national security adviser John Bolton indicated that they were willing to testify if subpoenaed, and that a couple months would have likely secured more testimony and supportive court orders.

Indeed, in the impeachment case of President Nixon, it took only a few months to go all the way to the Supreme Court for the final decision. So absent such a delay, the impeachment of Trump was guaranteed to fail, due to an incomplete and insufficient record. Yet the House insisted this was a “crime in progress” and there was no time to delay a submission to the Senate. It then immediately contradicted its rationale by waiting more than a month to submit articles of impeachment to the Senate. The House simply could not have made it easier on the president and his legal team.

The media ignored the obvious catastrophic blunder by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership. The media instead suggested that it was all some grand and brilliant scheme. They even credited the strategy with Bolton eventually coming forward to say he would testify with a subpoena, even though the same offer was made during the House investigation. The media also ignored the unexplained decision by the House to withdraw a subpoena for top Bolton aide Charles Kupperman, who went to court as a prerequisite for testimony, the same position taken by Bolton. Before the courts could even rule, the House mooted the case by withdrawing the subpoena. That made no sense, and the court dismissed the case after concluding that the House appeared to have no interest in the witness.

No harm would have come from pursuing testimony by Kupperman. Yet lead House manager Adam Schiff offered a facially dubious explanation that Kupperman had said he would litigate the issue. If Kupperman truly wanted to drag out litigation, he could have refused to appear before the House and waited for it to seek to compel his testimony. Instead, he said he just wanted a court order in favor of testifying for his own protection. Moreover, House Democrats continued to seek to compel the testimony of former White House counsel Donald McGahn, despite his continued litigation. It won that case as the House was voting on impeachment.

As these blunders by the House became more and more obvious, all the efforts to excuse them became more and more absurd. One main defense heard in the media was that it did not matter, given the Senate Republican majority. Yet if the House was certain to lose on that record, why end the investigation prematurely with a case that would be so easy to defeat? By waiting only a few months, the record would have been stronger. Instead, House Democrats surrendered control of the record to the opposing party and adopted a ridiculous strategy of demanding concessions to end with this trial that Senate Republicans loathed. That strategy failed miserably.

This is not Monday morning quarterbacking. This very series of events was expressly laid out before the vote, and House Democrats made a decision to choose certain failure over completing their impeachment case. There was no reason to expect Senate Republicans to assist House managers in making their case, particularly in calling witnesses not subpoenaed by the House. Democrats had opposed any witnesses in the impeachment trial of President Clinton and voted as a bloc for a summary acquittal. There was no reason to expect Republicans to adopt an entirely different approach.

We will never know how this impeachment trial would have unfolded if the House had waited to secure additional testimony and court orders. One thing, however, is certain. The case against the president could only have become stronger. The vote for witnesses failed by one for a tie and by two for a majority. A more complete record could well have tipped the balance and certainly would have made the vote against witnesses more difficult for some senators. Instead, the House submitted an incomplete record and failed to subpoena important witnesses like Bolton, making it quite easy for the Senate to refuse to do what the House had never even tried.

None of the explanations offered by House Democrats make any logical sense. That, however, does not matter. As Todd said of supporters of the president, people “want to be lied to sometimes” and “do not always love being told hard truths.” The hard truth is that House Democrats lost this case the minute they rushed an impeachment vote, and they knew it. With the approaching Iowa caucuses, they chose a failed impeachment rather than taking a few more months to work on a more complete case against Trump, a case more difficult to summarily dismiss. That is the hard truth.

A new leaked recording of an audio log between an Iranian air-traffic controller and an Iranian pilot who witnessed the nearby downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 proves that authorities in Tehran knew immediately after the Jan.8 disaster what had actually happened, despite initially announcing it was an accident based on a likely mechanical failure. It further took days of denials before the Islamic Republic finally admitted the IRGC mistakenly launched missiles which destroyed the civilian aircraft, killing all 176 people aboard.

“A series of lights like… yes, it is missile, is there something?” the pilot is heard calling out in Farsi to the controller after witnessing bright flashes in the distance. “No, how many miles? Where?” the controller asks, according to the stunning audio transcript.

Ukraine’s 1+1 TV channel published the leaked audio and transcript Monday, which President Volodymyr Zelenskiy subsequently acknowledged as authentic, according to the AP. The head of the Iranian investigation team into the tragedy also said the recording is authentic. 

Publicly available radar tracking data shows that the pilot of a nearby medium-sized Iranian Aseman Airlines jet was close enough to see the downing unfold. 

According to the transcript, the pilot insists to a confused controller: “It is the light of a missile.”

“Don’t you see anything anymore?” the controller asks.

“Dear engineer, it was an explosion. We saw a very big light there, I don’t really know what it was,” the pilot responds.

The controller then tries to no avail to establish contact with the Ukrainian Boeing 737.

Civilian officials within the Iranian government claimed they were initially unaware that an IRGC surface-to-air missile had shot the plane down, given the IRGC is only answerable to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The doomed aircraft had crashed a mere eight minutes after takeoff from Tehran en route to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.

Zelensky said of the new audio that it “proves that the Iranian side knew from the start that our plane was hit by a missile.”

“Everything is audible there,” Zelensky told the Ukrainian broadcaster. “Everything is recorded.”

He added: “He says that ‘it seems to me that a missile is flying’, he says it in both Persian and English, everything is fixed there.”

The Iranian investigative team which had handed the recording over the Ukrainians condemned it’s being published to the world as “unprofessional” — given it was handed over as part of a confidential report, but then was quickly leaked to Ukrainian media.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

The coronavirus outbreak that is raging all over China right now has been making headlines on a daily basis all over the globe, and rightly so.  At this point we don’t know if it will ultimately become a horrifying global pandemic that will affect tens of millions of people, but what we do know is that the virus spreads very easily and the number of cases has been rising at an exponential rate.  Meanwhile, three other plagues have also been marching across Asia, and most people in the western world don’t even realize that this is happening.  What I am about to share with you in this article is quite chilling, and the months ahead will be very dark if these plagues continue to spread.

Long before we ever heard of this new coronavirus, African Swine Fever was devastating pork farms from one end of China to the other.  There is no vaccine for “pig ebola”, there is no cure, and once it hits a farm the only thing that can be done is to kill every single pig so that it won’t spread anywhere else.  But even though draconian measures have been implemented, it has just kept spreading, and at this point “about two-thirds of China’s swine herd has been lost”…

Video of people fighting over pork at Chinese meat counters will likely become more common as the fallout from the African swine fever outbreak in China progresses.

Brett Stuart, president of the market research and analysis firm Global AgriTrends, estimates that about two-thirds of China’s swine herd has been lost to the disease and contrary to official government reports of recovery, more pigs are dying every day as ASF continues to spread.

Prior to this crisis, approximately half of all the pigs in the entire world lived in China, and they would usually slaughter about 700 million a year.  But now pork production has absolutely plummeted, and this is driving pork prices in China through the roof…

In China itself, pork prices are at an all-time high at just under $300 per hundredweight and the country outbids Japan, which is usually the top bidder. Food inflation is soaring and some Chinese people have been unable to buy pork in six months.

Unfortunately, this insidious disease has also been devastating farms in many other nations all over the planet.  In particular, Cambodia, North Korea, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines have been hit particularly hard.

It has been estimated that one out of every four pigs in the entire world has already died, and this crisis is far from over.

Fortunately, African Swine Fever does not affect humans, but this new coronavirus seems perfectly suited to be transmitted from person to person.  Johns Hopkins has put up a map that is continually updated, and according to the latest official numbers there are now 14,637 cases and the death toll has risen to 305.  But by the time you read this article those numbers are likely to be even higher.

Of course many are extremely skeptical that the official numbers coming out of China are accurate, and this is something that I have written about repeatedly.  There have been multiple reports that indicate that China has been falsely categorizing the deaths of many of the victims to keep the death toll down, and it is also suspicious that so many corpses are being taken “directly to the crematorium”…

Radio Free Asia (RFA) has tweeted a disturbing video on its Twitter account on Saturday morning detailing how those who died of coronavirus in Wuhan, the outbreak area in China, were loaded up on a bus and taken “directly to the crematorium.”

RFA said (in a translated tweet): “[Latest Situation of Wuhan Fifth Hospital] Some Wuhan citizens entered Wuhan Fifth Hospital on February 1st and found many patients who died of pneumonia. The corpses were packed directly to the crematorium. Paramedics are busy rescuing the dying patient.”

RFA’s video is in line with our report from Friday that said those who died of the deadly virus were hauled off to a crematorium in Wuhan by Chinese authorities.

At this point we don’t know how bad this outbreak will ultimately become, but we do know that the very first death outside of China has now been confirmed…

The Philippine Department of Health said a 44-year-old Chinese man from Wuhan was admitted on Jan. 25 after experiencing a fever, cough, and sore throat. He developed severe pneumonia, and in his last few days, “the patient was stable and showed signs of improvement, however, the condition of the patient deteriorated within his last 24 hours resulting in his demise.”

The man’s 38-year-old female companion, also from Wuhan, also tested positive for the virus and remains in hospital isolation in Manila.

Meanwhile, there has been a very alarming resurgence of the H5N1 bird flu in China.

According to the Daily Mail, more than 17,000 chickens have been culled in an effort to keep this new outbreak from spreading further…

China has reportedly seen an outbreak of a ‘highly pathogenic’ strain of H5N1 bird flu which has already killed 4,500 chickens.

The outbreak was initially reported at a farm in Shaoyang city in the southern province of Hunan, south of the epicentre of the Coronavirus in Wuhan.

According to the Reuters report, Chinese authorities have already culled 17,828 poultry in the wake of the outbreak.

Unlike African Swine Fever, humans can become infected by the H5N1 bird flu.

And according to the World Health Organization, the mortality rate for human cases is approximately 60 percent.

So let us hope that this current outbreak remains limited to chickens.

Alarmingly, the H5N1 bird flu has also popped up at a facility in India…

Authorities in an eastern Indian state will start culling chickens and destroying eggs from Tuesday to contain a bird flu virus of the H5N1 strain, a government statement said on Monday.

The samples collected from a poultry breeding and research farm of a veterinary college in Odisha state tested positive, the statement said.

We haven’t heard much about the H5N1 bird flu in recent years, but this is an extremely deadly disease, and so we will want to monitor these developments very carefully.

On top of everything else, the H1N1 swine flu is starting to spread once again.  In fact, more than 100,000 people in Taiwan “sought medical treatment for flu-like symptoms at hospitals across the country over the past week” and there have been 13 confirmed deaths…

At a time when the world is panicking over a 2019-nCoV coronavirus outbreak, the H1N1 flu virus is actually posing a greater threat in Taiwan, claiming 13 lives in the country in just one week, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

At a weekly meeting Friday, CDC Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥) said 116,705 people sought medical treatment for flu-like symptoms at hospitals across the country over the past week, including 61 more confirmed flu cases.

Not too long ago, the H1N1 swine flu caused mass panic all over the globe, and I personally knew someone that was killed by it.

So the truth is that all of these outbreaks are very concerning.

And never before have we seen so many alarming outbreaks occur simultaneously.  Could it be possible that we have entered a period of time when mass pandemics are going to become “the new normal”?

Hopefully none of these current outbreaks will end up killing millions of people all over the globe.

But we have been warned for a long time about how vulnerable we are, and the experts assure us that it is just a matter of time before a mass pandemic brings death to every corner of the planet.

Amidst the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, there has been plenty of skepticism about the World Health Organization’s handling of the epidemic thus far. That skepticism has now grown into a call for the WHO Director General to resign, in the form of a petition with over 200,000 signatures. 

Notably, the World Health Organization engaged in a press conference last week where WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus praised China repeatedly for the job they were doing in containing the virus.

To some on social media, the conference immediately smelled like the WHO carrying the party line for China’s government instead of exercising real world cautions about the quickly spreading epidemic.

WHO DIRECTOR TEDROS “LET ME BE CLEAR THIS DECLARATION IS NOT A VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE IN CHINA”

Next guy to speak immediately says numbers in China are their concern

— Quoth the Raven (@QTRResearch) January 30, 2020

Declaring a public health emergency, then says it’s “not because of China”

This guy is a fucking TRIP

— Quoth the Raven (@QTRResearch) January 30, 2020

And the WHO wasn’t the only organization claiming that China was handling the outbreak well. Early last week the Washington Post claimed  that China was working well with the WHO to contain the outbreak.

“Chinese leader Xi Jinping defended his country’s handling of the coronavirus epidemic as ‘open, transparent, responsible’ on Tuesday in a meeting with World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, even as the Chinese mayor at the epicenter of the outbreak apologized for withholding information from the public,” The Post wrote. 

But it is looking like that is less and less the case. Just days later, for instance, the NY Times ran an article saying the Chinese government put secrecy ahead of transparency. 

Perhaps this is why a newly created petition on change.org has accrued more than 200,000 signatures asking for Ghebreyesus to resign. 

The petition states: “On January 23rd, 2020. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declines to declare China virus outbreak as a global health emergency. As we all know, the Coronavirus is not treatable at the moment. The number of infected and deaths has risen more than ten times (infected from 800 – close to 10,000) within only 5 days.”

The petition also claims: “Part of it is related to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus under estimated the coronavirus. We strongly think Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is not fit for his role as WHO Director General.  We call for the Immediate Resignation of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.”

It continues: “A lot of us are really disappointed, we believe WHO is supposed to be political neutral. Without any investigation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus solely believes on the death and infected numbers that the Chinese government provided with them.”

“On the other hand, Taiwan should not be excluded from WHO for any political reasons. Their technologies are far more advanced than some of the countries on the “selected WHO list”. Please help the world to gain faith to the UN and WHO again,” it concludes.

Recall, back in 2017, Ghebreyesus was accused of covering up epidemics – a story that was also picked up by the New York Times. 

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Michael Bloomberg paid for and anti-gun ad during the Super Bowl, and while that isn’t all that surprising, what’s even less shocking is how bad he bungled the statistics. He was off by 73%, which amounts to a straight-up lie.

Michael Bloomberg’s Super Bowl ad, which presents the Democratic presidential contender as a brave advocate of public safety who is not afraid to take on “the gun lobby,” claims “2,900 children die from gun violence every year” in the United States. This is far from the factual truth. That number includes young adults as well as minors, and it includes suicides as well as homicides.

Bloomberg’s campaign cited Everytown for Gun Safety, a Bloomberg-backed group, as the source of the number used in the ad. “Annually,” the organization said in June 2019 fact sheet, “nearly 2,900 children and teens (ages 0 to 19) are shot and killed.” The ad changed “children and teens” (including young adults) to “children,” presumably because that makes the deaths more shocking, strengthening the emotional case for the gun control policies Bloomberg favors.

According to to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, FactCheck.org notes, the average number of firearm-related deaths involving Americans 17 or younger from 2013 through 2017 (the period used by Everytown for Gun Safety) was about 1,500, roughly half the number cited by Bloomberg. Furthermore, nearly two-fifths (40%, or 600) of those deaths were suicides, meaning the number of minors killed each year by “gun violence,” as that term is usually understood, is about 73 percent smaller than the figure cited in Bloomberg’s ad.-Reason

The real number is about 900, not 2900, based on the statistics made available by the very same people who want to disarm everyone.

The case highlighted by the TV ad does not actually fit into any of these categories, either. It is most accurately described as voluntary gang violence, although it was made to appear that the person shot was a random victim. The ad features Calandrian Kemp, whose 20-year-old son, George, was shot to death in 2013 at a park in Richmond, a Houston suburb, during a confrontation that a Texas appeals court described as “gang-related.” According to the court, “two groups of young men, most of them teenagers, had met that night for a fight.” Two of them, including an 18-year-old, Corey Coleman, fired the handgun rounds that struck Kemp. Coleman was convicted of murder and sentenced to 34 years in prison, according to Reason. 

Bloomberg’s gun law plans would also have little to no effect on the gang-related activity that killed Kemp. Bloomberg wants to ban “assault weapons” (Kemp was shot with a handgun), raise the minimum age to buy a gun to 21 (Coleman and other gang members are not buying their guns in places where ID is needed) and passing more “red flag laws” (gang members aren’t going to tattle on each other.)

To read more about Bloomberg’s plans to eliminate private gun ownership stop “gun violence” click here. 

Impeachment manager Adam Schiff (D-CA) argued on Monday during closing remarks that if President Trump isn’t removed from office, he “could offer Alaska to the Russians in exchange for support in the next election or decide to move to Mar-a-Lago permanently and leave Jared Kushner to run the country, delegating to him the decision whether they go to war.”

Adam Schiff:

If Trump isn’t removed he “could offer Alaska to the Russians in exchange for support in the next election or decide to move to Mar-a-Lago permanently and leave Jared Kushner to run the country, delegating to him the decision whether they go to war.” pic.twitter.com/VBzkonqpmH

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) February 3, 2020

Last week, Schiff enraged Republicans after he claimed that Trump was threatening to put their ‘heads on a pike’ if they voted to impeach him – a claim that was immediately refuted by GOP lawmakers.

Because the strongest arguments require lies, innuendo and ‘parody’ to sell to your audience, right?

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via EasyDNS.com,

On Friday night (Jan 31), a few days  after my  new book about deplatforming and cancel culture came out, the news broke that Twitter had permanently suspended Zerohedge for breaking the platform’s policies. The move was taken in response to an article penned by Buzzfeed writer Ryan Broderick which falsely accused Zerohedge of “doxxing” a Chinese coronavirus researcher. We have not amplified the false account by linking to it.

Excerpt from the Buzzfeed hit piece

Buzzfeed, which describes itself as a global news organization has 11 million likes on Facebook and more than 7 million followers on Twitter is run by Jonah Perretti, a Huffington Post co-founder and repeat-offender engaging in identity theft. The site has a long history of promulgating discredited Russian collusion narratives, multiple instances of plagiarism, and has been the subject of myriad defamation and copyright violation lawsuits.

Over the weekend the article’s author, Ryan Broderick, had his own social media effluences undergo a crowdsourced purity review and he didn’t exactly pass with flying colours. Old tweets surfaced, he’s the one doing the doxing in this one, tweeting out a Pastebin link inciting targeted harassment (a violation of Twitter rules, btw)

Someone put together a pastebin of contact info on Amy’s Bakery Company http://t.co/VvZjX1indv for prank calls http://t.co/C94YFpfalP

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) May 16, 2013

…and another revealing himself to be a self-professed hebephile (a hebephile is an adult with a sexual predilection toward pubescent adolescents, aged 11-14)..

Mr. President, can you please pass legislation legally defining the difference between us good-natured hebephiles and amoral pedophiles?

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) August 29, 2012

…not to mention several entries in an old Tumblr which are…. disturbing. I don’t know… is it racist to say “All black people smell like cocoa butter” ? You tell me, and you have to decide without looking at whether the Twitter profile has a blue check mark.

Normally I wouldn’t pile on to highlight any individual’s mental kinks, but given the tendency on the part of the cancel culture crowd to stake a claim on the moral high ground as the basis for their rationale on who should have a platform and who shouldn’t, it somehow seems relevant.

This reason Broderick’s article and then Twitter’s using it as a basis for deplatforming Zerohedge is of concern is because…

Zerohedge is an easyDNS client.

This alone is not newsworthy. We have all sorts of clients from across the range of discourse. Both Antifa and BLM had their DNS here for years. Had either one of them faced a takedown like this, our response below would be the same (we did receive numerous requests to take down both sites over the years and they all received variations of our standard issue “go to hell” response).

But in the case of Zerohedge, that site routinely runs my own Guerrilla Capitalism posts, and before that several articles from my old Rebooting Capitalism blog.

I started following Zerohedge in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis because they were the only clueful financial / economic outlet that was not simply regurgitating CNBC / Bloomberg talking points. In these 10+ years since the financial crisis, there is a growing awareness outside of the mainstream financial press that the policy response was wrongheaded and harmful. It exacerbated wealth inequality via Cantillon Effects, the banker bailouts were a travesty whose consequences are only beginning to be felt, and it set the global economy up for another, even bigger credit crisis.

It is by definition contrarian to hold these views, and to do so publicly earns one derision and scorn. Zerohedge has been one of the main outlets giving a platform to these renegade views on economics and it’s no surprise to me that the mainstream media and finance/political/globalist establishment wouldn’t mind so much if Zerohedge somehow “went away”.

More than once, topics that mainstream pundits have dismissed as “conspiracy theory” on Zerohedge’s part have turned out to be, in reality, prescient calls which were then minimized as irrelevant by those same pundits.

Examples include

• the rampant fraud in home foreclosures after the GFC

• precious metals price rigging

•  LIBOR rate rigging

I’ll admit, when Zerohedge ventures outside of economics / finance / markets they are outside their circle of competence and they tend to veer toward sensationalism (in a way that, say, Buzzfeed, CNN, Fox, HuffPo never sensationalize, amiright?)

However, nobody is perfect, and not getting everything exactly right is not a valid reason to deplatform them.

Big Tech platforms seek to insulate themselves from their decisions by cloaking subjective judgement calls in methodical sounding processes, like Facebook’s distinctly Maoist-sounding charge of “Inauthentic Behaviour” or Patreon’s asinine “Manifest Observable Behaviour”.

In the video Patreon CEO Jack Conte pleads his case that they’ve dreamed up a system which removes all subjectivity from the platform/deplatform equation. However, as I lay out in the book, it’s impossible to remove subjectivity from an abuse / AUP judgement call. It’s hard enough to get it right with respect to what is happening on your own system; that to expand your so-called “jurisdiction” to what happens off your platform is an act of hubristic grandiosity.

The reality is that nobody can remove their subjectivity from any process that involves a judgement call. A lot of these tech platforms seem to think it’s incumbent upon them to judge what is the mind of others, the intent of others, the possible outcome of other people’s actions. Not to mention that when they do, they are frequently, in essence, adjudicating international law.

In this case, Twitter suspended the account based on either an uninformed take of Zerohedge’s off-platform article (they never bothered to look to see that they didn’t dox anybody) or a completely subjective and kneejerk response to it.

Additionally, Twitter then removed the #FreeZerohedge hashtag from the trending list, as it hit #2 position.

It’s disturbing to consider the logical extensions that would arise in a world where all manner of private entities are taking it upon themselves to render judgement and level sanctions on others. If Twitter is any indication, it would occur with a complete absence of due process combined with a prevalence of favouritism and two-tier hypocrisy. One set of rules for the Blue Checks, and another set for the nobodies. It would quickly devolve into a dystopia even worse than that “Nose Dive” episode of Black Mirror.

The antidote to stopping the flow of “fake news”

Given the obvious hurdles of granting the power to literally define truth to an unelected, unaccountable clique of well connected and exceedingly wealthy mavens, the answer is simple, but not easy. There has to be a renewed refocus on teaching the lost art of critical thinking to all members of society, starting in school (at the latest) and continuing throughout.

When I combed through Ryan Broderick’s Substack and Medium posts, I found it entirely devoid of substance or critical thought. It was mostly self-referential pop-culture quips that deign to make newsworthy the incessant, never-ending brain farts that everybody experiences, but that more refined intellects aspire to attenuate.

I don’t like it when midwits like this have the ability to impact what I see in my social media intake. Neither should you.

Zerohedge unscathed. Deplatform backfires.

It’ll be interesting to see if Twitter reinstates Zerohedge’s account, especially after these revelations of hebephilism and racist tropes surrounding the original author have emerged. But in any case, Zerohedge will be largely unscathed by this. Over the weekend they confirmed to us that traffic their website was up markedly, over 40%, as a response to the increased publicity.  The number of hits from Twitter is higher now than before the ban. Exactly as one might have predicted after reading Chapter 4 of my book, “Does Deplatforming Even Work?“, to which the short answer is…. mostly, it doesn’t.

We have also suggested to them moving their microblogging feed to a Mastodon instance which would feed into Twitter, either via a reinstated official Zerohedge account or by anybody who so desires to create accounts there to syndicate the Mastodon feed.

All of the above, the increased traffic after the suspension, the ability to keep there core outlet (their website) unscathed, the move to a decentralized microblogging platform out of the control of woke messianic personalities is in line with the blueprint and approach outlined in Unassailable.

You may be thinking, “But Mark, shouldn’t you, the libertarian, recognize the right for companies to lord over their property?”

You would be right, and this is something I’ve wrestled with. Personally I’m wary of anyone who doesn’t wrestle with cognitive dissonance and who doesn’t constantly test their own beliefs with difficult edge cases. I mention this as well in the epilogue of Unassailable.

Where I eventually landed on this is: I don’t think this is the type of thing that mandates further government intervention as these incumbent entities are, once again, incentivizing their own disruption. If there’s one thing this era has taught us, it’s that no matter how large and entrenched any given 800 pound gorilla is, they can be swept aside into irrelevance with ever increasing speed.

If governments were to intervene, it would be more likely in the form of increasing regulatory burdens that increase the incumbents’ defensive moats than to guarantee freedom of expression for all.

*  *  *

Learn more about Mark E. Jeftovic’s second book Unassailable: Protect Yourself From Deplatform Attacks, Cancel Culture and other Online Disasters by clicking here, or pick up a copy from your preferred bookstore below.