Key detail in this @NYMag story on the pro-censorship movement inside NYT by its own employees: NYT tech reporters were angry that the anti-censorship posture of NYT editors would impede their campaign to pressure Silicon Valley to censor more robustly:
The role that mainstream **journalists** have played, of all people, in taking the lead to demand that Silicon Valley oligarchs more aggressively control and censor the internet -- the greatest threat to a free and open internet after mass surveillance -- cannot be overstated.
Just ponder the warped mentality of someone who chooses journalism as a career, then devotes themselves to trying to silence the ability of others to be heard by converting themselves into petulant tattletales who demand that Facebook, Twitter & Google censor dissenting voices.
This is absolutely the key fact to understand about media trends over the last 4 years: most corporate & "independent" outlets explicitly aligned themselves with one political faction -- out of both conviction and profit -- and it contaminated everything, principally the "news."
The stat that tells it all: NYT is now every bit as partisan and ideologically insular as Fox and MSNBC, talking only to hard-core Democrats, with CNN and NPR very close behind, leaving these institutions financially dependent on never reporting things that anger their audience:
Isn't this the exact generational divide over censorship and related issues at the NYT and other papers that @bariweiss infamously noted, for which she was roundly accused of lying by her former colleagues? Now, they're the ones anonymously telling the NY Mag that this is true:
Note how these post-2016 efforts to diversify the NYT newsroom when they realized they were completely out of touch have no mention of class. Were these new reporters also from wealthy & professional backgrounds with Ivy League or similar pedigrees? Is NYT now more in touch??
A key fact about the national media, which efforts at maximizing diversity -- at least the ones with which I'm familiar -- are not geared toward rectifying. Until it is, the "out-of-touch" problem will never be improved:
"It is difficult to think of many businesses that have benefited more from Donald Trump’s presidency — aside from the Trump-family empire — than the Times."
Huh - you don't say? Too bad none of them were brave enough to speak up when she was being hung out to dry for saying what everyone knows is true: huge number of newsroom employees abuse HR and union processes to try to censor & control journalism. They say it explicitly:
Anyway, definitely read the NY Mag article. Wittingly or otherwise, it reveals the internal fights plaguing not just most newsrooms like the NYT but political groups all over the country about what can and cannot be said, for what reasons and by whom:
Yale's "Fascism expert" Jason Stanely -- Yale's "Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy" (does anyone now who that is?) -- explains why he's fleeing the US in fear withYale's Timothy Snyder and his wife Marci Shore -- to Canada, which he calls "the Ukraine of of North America."
He says Canada is Ukraine beacaue it's a bastion of freedom and nobility threatened an by authoritarian neighbor.
The absolute narcissism and melodrama of these people: there are those whose civil liberties are threatened. Celebrated, rich Yale professors are not among them.
Extra gross that Snyder is very wealthy by heralding himself the world's leading warrior against fascism. His book implores others not to "anticipatorily obey" Trump.
2 months into Trump's term, he flees the US as if he's an underground #Resistance leader in occupied France.
If Joe Biden had announced that any private universities that allow criticism of him or Dems shall immediately lose all federal funding -- while keeping the funding if they allow criticisms of Trump -- would that have been constitutional since no school has the right to funding?
How about if Biden cut off all federal funding to universities that deny the validity of the trans identity or the existence of multiple genders -- on the ground that such teaching incites violence against trans people and is hate speech?
Would that have been constitutional?
The only tactic needed to induce support for censorship is train people to believe the views they hate are violence.
Anti-trans activists are inciting violence and calling for genocide, etc.
Opponents of Israel's war on Gaza are calling for genocide and must be censored, etc. etc.
During the Dem primary campaign, one of RFK Jr.'s core issues was free speech and opposing censorship. Then he became known for wanting to combat chronic disease.
So what does he use his first month for? Threatening universities which allow protests against Israel on campus:
Note: you're free to protest the US on campus. You can protest any country or group: just not Israel.
And of course this censorship - like all censorship - is justified the name of stopping hate speech and keeping one group "safe": as if they're being relentlessly attacked.
Every government in the world -- including the most repressive and tyrannical -- "protects free speech" for the views they like.
It's the views they most hate that are targeted. And the most sacred issue for many in the Trump Admin is Israel: that is what's therefore shielded.
There's nothing stopping Germany or the EU from funding war in Ukraine until the end of eternity if they wish, or sending their citizens to Ukraine to fight Russia.
But the German Greens -- the worst of the worst -- are emblematic of European liberals: all posturing, no action.
British pundits prance around as if they're Churchill, and Macron walks around like he's a tough guy, and German Greens and other vague Berlin liberals posture as if they're the paragon of compassion: all while they rely on the US to finance wars, fight and protect them.
Zelensky begged and begged Westerners to get off line and stop tweeting with their blue-yellow emojis and instead go to Ukraine to help them fight the Russian Army, knowing he couldn't win without non-Ukrainians volunteering to fight. Very, very few did.
For a long-time, harsh critiques of US foreign policy and interventionism were found on the populist right. Listen to Pat Buchanan (who worked for Nixon and Reagan) as well as Ron Paul on US policy toward Israel. Very, very few Dems now speak this way:
In February 2021 -- more than a year before Russian troops entered Ukraine en masse -- the inspiring democrat, President Zelensky, banned 3 popular opposition TV networks by accusing them of spreading Russian disinformation.
It'd be as if Biden banned Fox or Trump banned CNN:🇺🇦
In 2014 -- after Victoria Nuland, @ChrisMurphyCT, John McCain etc. used NED to fund protests in Kiev to remove the democratically elected leader and replace him with an unelected pro-US puppet -- Kiev began bombing ethnic Russian civilians in Donbas:
@ChrisMurphyCT It's bizarre to watch history re-written in real time to serve war propaganda: how Azov Battalion was described as neo-Nazi by western elites, only to be turned into heroic warriors the minute we armed them.