For the Record: The Twitter Files

There's just so much news flooding in before I can absorb it, I'm thinking maybe I just have to resign myself to being a week or so behind on everything. I don't want to let go of the efforts of Mr. Musk's Kancelculture Kids to expose the woke leftist FBI's brutal censorship efforts at Twitter, where they succeeded in silencing the entire NewsCorp organization for [checks notes] a full day before Twitter changed its mind and its policy, in October 2020, nearly spoiling Rupert's special October Surprise revelations of Shirtless Hunter. 

Installment #7 of "The Twitter Files", by noted plastic straw advocate Michael Shellenberger, showed up on Tuesday to defend the story he, Weiss, and Taibbi have been developing: 

It's not at all clear that it's "wholly accurate" https://t.co/6uLpGTzSMv https://t.co/qEEXqxJzrM

— Yas is at post.news/yastreblyansky but still here (@Yastreblyansky) December 20, 2022

I mean, for one thing, the story of the blind computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac turning the laptop over to the FBI was dodgy enough, the way Mac Isaac told it:

No Foul, No Harm

 

Vintage Space Jam T-shirt via.

I've been thinking about sports lately, partly no doubt because it's that one time in a quadrennium when I start following a sport myself with some assiduity (maybe should be twice in a quadrennium now that I've found out about the women's game), and wanting to say something about how Republican politics relates to sports, but it wasn't coming together until this remarkable series on Mark Meadows texts from the effort to overturn the 2020 election began coming out at Talking Points Memo, and then something Hilzoy said (Hilzoy is the philosopher Hilary Bok, one of the great bloggers until she quit blogging in 2009, and still a really valuable presence on Twitter) crystallized it for me:

... and the point is not to reflect people's actual will but to see whether, if you torture the rules badly enough, you can see, or pretend to see, a way that YOU can win.

— hilzoy (@hilzoy) December 14, 2022

Narratology: From the #TwitterFiles

 The Republican noise machine, including this putz, a former reporter who got fired from BuzzFeed in 2014 after 41 of his stories were busted for plagiarism, now reinvented aa a podcaster for "God, Family, America", with gigs on NewsMax, Parler, and Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA (coincidentally I just removed him from my Twitter yesterday in my #ProjectMute program, which is why I know all this at the moment), is shocked! shocked! to learn that Twitter's Trust and Safety officers were meeting regularly with the FBI during the 2020 election campaign. 

This from the #TwitterFiles "investigation" being carried out by famous independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss ("investigation" in scare quotes because the investigating seems to consist basically of reading the stuff Mr. Musk gives them and trying to squeeze it into some kind of narrative arc).

Pretty sinister, huh? And Twitter's deputy general counsel at the time, Jim Baker, used to be

Literary Corner: Giant Girl

 

Fee, fie, foe, fudd
Bari Weiss has smelt our blood

Be we asleep or be we woke
She'll flame us into ash and smoke

— Woke Mob Values (@Yastreblyansky) June 3, 2022

Wrongthink

Siri, show me a stupid person's idea of a smart person.

It's the Intellectual Dark Singularity! Where on the same strange Tuesday, Andrew Sullivan gets the sack from New York Magazine

The underlying reasons for the split are pretty self-evident, and I’ll be discussing the broader questions involved in my last column this Friday.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 14, 2020

the young throwback artist Bari Weiss, representing the liberalism of the good old days of Woodrow Wilson and Alan Dershowitz, takes her departure from the New York Times editorial board, to an extremely gloomy response from National Review's Rich Lowry

They warned Trump would bring fascism to America even as they implemented their own exquisite system of thought control https://t.co/D6HITsn7bp

— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 14, 2020

and Squeaky Ben Shapiro the Straw Man King has emeritated hinself from the helm of the alleged publication he's been associated with, "The Daily Wire" (I have to admit while I haven't seen any proof it exists, I haven't looked very hard)

In which I agree with Bari Weiss

Photo by Robert Cherny for The Frisc.

Sort of. "From the left," as you might say, with Weiss's views ("San Francisco Will Spend $600,000 to Erase History") on

the San Francisco school board’s unanimous decision on Tuesday night to spend at least $600,000 of taxpayer money not just to shroud a historic work of art but to destroy it.

By now stories of progressive Puritanism (or perhaps the better word is Philistinism) are so commonplace — snowflakes seek safe space! — that it can feel tedious to track the details of the latest outrage. But this case is so absurd that it’s worth reviewing the specifics.

It's about the 13 fresco murals painted in 1936 inside George Washington High School in San Francisco by Victor Arnautoff, a Communist student of Diego Rivera, under the auspices of the WPA, depicting a less sanitized version of the life of George Washington in which the Father of Our Country is shown managing the enslaved workers on his tobacco plantation at Mount Vernon (not cotton, as too many reports including Weiss's claim), and as a land speculator pushing the colonization of the frontier literally over the dead body of a murdered Native.

Hi, it's Stupid: Bari Weiss

2008 edition of a work originally published in 2001, whose authors "had the ability to take an everyday menu of spaghetti and waffles and transform biblical, practical wisdom into a word picture that has encourage, equipped, and inspired couples worldwide." I haven't read it, but I think the idea of the central metaphor is that we guys are furnished with many tiny pockets in which butter and syrup collect, whereas for helpless gals it just runs off their backs, which explains why they have to do what we tell them to do or go without butter and syrup altogether, because that's how God planned it.

Hi, it's Stupid to suggest Bari Weiss in her notorious piece about those outlaw intellectuals was really writing about her own grievance at the way mean leftists have been treating her since she ascended to The New York Times—

Opinion 

Meet the Renegades of the Journalismic Dark Web

By Skari Speiss

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Journamalismic Dark Web: Both sides do it. Just because a president is ignorant, narcissistic, and venal, that doesn't mean we shouldn't give him credit for the numerous things he's doing right. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.” 

Though nobody actually calls it "dark" except the five or six members of the J.D.W. themselves, who made it up because they thought it was funny. Still, if people reading this sure-to-be-controversial article start using the term, that will be chilling.

A decade ago, as the situations in Afghanistan and Iraq and New Orleans seemed to be on the point of stabilizing, though the U.S. economy was in free fall, none of these now-dark ideas would have seemed even surprising. Today, people like the members of the J.D.W. who dare venture into this “There Be Dragons” territory on the intellectual map have met with outrage and derision — even, or perhaps especially, from people who pride themselves on openness, such as powerful bloggers, late-night television comics, and J-school professors.

And yet I have a feeling she was, in a way. As we know, the official subject was not Times journalists but intellectuals much worse off than she is, so abject and marginalized by the scorn of the majority that they can't even get Times gigs, and are forced to squeeze by on the charity of well-wishers—