Got Paranoia? More Stone

 

Brooks Brothers Riot of November 22, 2000. Photo by Colin Braley/Reuters, via Wikipedia.

A gold nugget of fact I had no idea of in a segment on my favorite radio show that was mainly about the Dominion Election Systems settlement with Fox News, but it goes back to a big New York Times report of 2019 on the whole history of the Rupert Murdoch enterprise, by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, that puts an awful lot of things together on Rupert's early days in the US, after he'd bought the New York Post:

In 1980, he met Roy Cohn — the former adviser to Senator Joseph McCarthy and a Trump mentor — who introduced him to Gov. Ronald Reagan’s inner circle. It was a group that included Roger Stone Jr., another Trump confidant and the head of Reagan’s New York operations, who said in a later interview that he helped Murdoch weaponize his latest tabloid purchase, The New York Post, on Reagan’s behalf in the 1980 election. Reagan’s team credited Murdoch with delivering him the state that year — Murdoch gave Stone an Election Day printing plate from The Post over a celebratory meal at the 21 Club — and his administration subsequently facilitated Murdoch’s entry into the American television market, quickly approving his application for American citizenship so he could buy TV stations too.

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

Got Paranoia? Everywhere Except Pennsylvania

The most chef's-kiss thing on the internet today is this Republican forgetting to log into his fake Twitter account before claiming to be a "black gay guy" who supports Trump. I can't believe this gaggle of dipshits is going to take down US democracy. https://t.co/7YLYG0ncCP

— David Roberts (@drvox) November 10, 2020

I Was Proved Fucking Right department:

HARRISBURG (KDKA) — For months, there has been talk swirling that if Joe Biden wins Pennsylvania, Republicans in the state legislature could bypass the popular vote and appoint electors who are favorable to President Trump....

On Friday, State Senate majority leader Jake Corman said Republicans will honor the wishes of the voters.

“Our role is to monitor the process, our role is to provide oversight and call out questions where they might need asked, but certainly want to stay with the tradition of the popular vote winner getting the electors,” Senator Corman said.

Corman says the vote is certified by the state and the governor appoints the electors.

He says the legislature will follow the law. (KDKA TV Pittsburgh)

Yes, some Republicans in the General Assembly are calling for a "legislative audit" of the election results to be completed before secretary of state Book—some sources say it's a "bipartisan call"

but they don't seem able to name any of the non-Republicans involved in the move, and others reporting the same occasion disagree:

Got Paranoia? General Services Administration

My screenshot from video via the Independent, 4 February 2017.

Can we please jail Emily Murphy, the GOP political hack running the General Services Administration, who has apparently decided to single-handedly kneecap the Biden transition?

The administrator of the General Services Administration, the low-profile agency in charge of federal buildings, has a little-known role when a new president is elected: to sign paperwork officially turning over millions of dollars, as well as give access to government officials, office space in agencies and equipment authorized for the taxpayer-funded transition teams of the winner.

It amounts to a formal declaration by the federal government, outside of the media, of the winner of the presidential race.

But by Sunday evening, almost 36 hours after media outlets projected Biden as the winner, GSA Administrator Emily Murphy had written no such letter. And the Trump administration, in keeping with the president’s failure to concede the election, has no immediate plans to sign one. This could lead to the first transition delay in modern history, except in 2000, when the Supreme Court decided a recount dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush in December.

Which ended after the Supreme Court intervened on the Bush campaign's instance to stop the recount of Florida ballots, and Vice President Gore conceded on 12 December:

Blog in the Strict Sense of the Term

 

The Angel Mom decided to post this tweet (since deleted) promoting a thread on the vast conspiracy led by Soros and Rothschilds and the Elders of Zion to enslave all the "goyim" the day of her planned appearance on the soft and feminine night of the Republican convention, but she got canceled, not by cancel culture but by the Trump campaign. She later claimed not to have read the thread herself, or at least not all of it, but it wasn't exactly inconsistent with her own writing, like this from June 2019 on invading caravans of Central American migrants:

“These are the violent types of people that SOROS, the ROTHCHILDS (sic) and the United Nations have NO problem using as pawns and uprooting them and bringing them to the USA to accomplish their ONE WORLD GOVT!” Mendoza tweeted. (via Daily Beast, collected before she put her account under protection)

She also is or was a member along with Kris Kobach, Erik Prince, Tom Tancredo, and ex-sheriff David Clarke, of the board of the We Build the Wall scam, which collected money ostensibly for the private construction of a wall on the Mexican border to keep out those same violent pawns but in fact to enrich the chairman, Stephen Bannon, and founder Brian Kolfage and a couple of their associates who covered up their misdeeds by "creating sham invoices and accounts to launder donations and cover up their crimes" and are now under indictment in the Southern District of New York.

My objection to the whole concept of "angel families", Americans united by having experienced the tragic loss of a child because of the actions of an undocumented immigrant, mostly in road accidents, is that thousands of Americans lose children every year, and it's just as tragic when the killer is an American citizen or permanent resident, as it is in the overwhelming majority of cases. "If that man hadn't come illegally into the country my baby would still be alive!" Well, maybe, and maybe if we had adequate public transportation so people wouldn't have to drive home from bars. Or maybe if the guy in question hadn't been rushing to make a late delivery and avoid getting fired from the job that feeds his six children, what do I know? But the only thing that would have a particular application to undocumented immigrants would be for a driver in one of the 35 states where the undocumented can't get a learner's permit, let alone a license, and who therefore didn't have any training. In which case it's the state's fault for crazy misplaced priorities (licensing is supposed to be for safety, not for a system of rewards and punishments). 

I have much the same problem with people who don't want undocumented immigrants, or in some cases any immigrants, to have help getting access to affordable health care. What part of public health don't you understand?

Meanwhile young people are getting killed by doctors and pharmacists running pill mills, all of them legal residents. Focusing on the very small number of bad drivers who are undocumented immigrants seems insane, given how many truly terrible drivers there are altogether. And such an odd narcissism, anyway, in the implicit claim, "My pain is worse than anybody else's because it involved an illegal border crossing."

I'm not sure what I'm trying to tell you here, but I think these things all hang together, the misinformation, the racism, the paranoia expressing itself in conspiracies, and the extreme egocentrism.

That's the show. Here's the reality https://t.co/VjEzvzQXQ9

— Yas, Semite! (@Yastreblyansky) August 26, 2020

Got Paranoia? Street Fighting Edition

One thing that's not being said sufficiently on the subject of the ongoing protests over the Minneapolis murder of George Floyd: nonviolence isn't easy. It's a discipline, and it takes serious training such as used to be offered in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Council. It's also been a policy from the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, but commentators don't always seem to have gotten that, for some reason suggested by Touré in 2017:

If BLM being described as nonviolent sounds strange to you, then you’re probably watching too much Fox News. The movement has been wildly misunderstood partly because of how it’s caricatured and demonized by right-wing media. “We absolutely don’t consider Black Lives Matter a hate group,” says Heidi Beirich, the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence project, which tracks hate groups. “Black Lives Matter is not a racist group; anyone can join. It’s a movement to expand civil rights for the oppressed in this society. It’s a peaceful protest against oppression. There’s simply no equivalence between Black Lives Matter and a hate group. It’s truly offensive to equate them.”

The policy of nonviolence is shared by BLM activists around the country. “I refuse to cede the moral high ground to the supremacy we fight,” says Brittany Packnett, an activist and co-founder of Campaign Zero, which aims to end police violence. “We don’t need to become that which we are fighting.”

Also, BLM isn't necessarily organizing this week's demonstrations, and even when it is, as in Los Angeles on Thursday, it isn't necessarily in control of the enormous crowds of untrained sympathizers. Including, I'm sorry to say, an awful lot of white kids with good-hearted intentions who don't know what they're doing or how to do it and who consistently seem to be getting overexcited and breaking and burning things, and giving evidence to a rightwing suspicion that "Antifa" is in charge (they can't imagine any of the black participants being in charge) or dark allegations, reminiscent of Ross Barnet or George Wallace, of "outside agitators".

Douthat: Q Is Right!

Ding dong, the Bilderberg is dead!

And here's Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, at his weirdest, with an agenda I want to try unpacking ("The End of the New World Order"): it starts off with a mysterious warning that some rightwing conspiracy theories, while false, may be sort of true in a way that overrides their particular falsehood:

This is as true in the Trump era as in any other. Extraterrestrials are probably not among us, but we keep being handed new evidence that the U.F.O. phenomenon is real. QAnon is a landscape of fantasy, but the fact that powerful sexual predators have ties to presidents, popes and princes is a hard post-Jeffrey Epstein truth....

The phrase “New World Order” was lifted by the conspiracy-minded from the optimistic rhetoric of George H.W. Bush, and since then the paranoia and the facts have always existed symbiotically. The fantasy is looming totalitarian control, black helicopters descending, secret Bilderberg plots. But it’s been encouraged by various undeniable realities — the growth of transnational institutions, the manifest power of a global overclass, the often undemocratic expansion of the European Union and the rise of digital surveillance and the ties binding China and the U.S. into “Chimerica.”

I'm not so sure about this whole perspective. It's like if you read about the myths of Zeus or Thor and came away with the idea you'd found proof that thunder goes back at least 3000 years. That's not the point! We have independent reasons for believing that thunder is millions of years older than that because that's how Earth weather works! They made up stories about it 3000 years ago because they didn't know that, but we do; the myths tell us more about the people than about the natural phenomenon.

Horowitzmas

Via.

Glad to see I called it (19 November):

A lot of faithful Trumper paranoids have been looking to this report [Inspector General Horowitz's report] to prove to the world that the Trump-Russia investigation was actually a conspiracy among the "angry Democrats" who are naturally in charge of the FBI's counterintelligence activities to take down Trump's presidency (it had to wait for Trump to become president to go into real action, though you'd think it would be more efficient to just stop him from winning, but apparently the sinister cabal was expecting Hillary to win, like everybody else, and this conspiracy roping together the forces of the FBI, CIA, intelligence services of UK, Italy, and Australia, and possibly the White House, was just an "insurance policy"), and they've been waiting for this thing to come out with increasing excitement.

Not that any of this is going to happen. As with his report on Andrew McCabe, Horowitz will make an attempt to be pissy about some of the people Trump is after but nobody is going to be anywhere near locked up, because they didn't do anything wrong (Marcy Wheeler has suggested there may have been cut corners in the warrant on Dr. Page, but added that whatever they did has been done much more abusively to many, mostly Muslims, in recent years, and it's kind of ridiculous to single out this particular case of somebody who obviously needed to be watched and who had practically no remaining connection with the Trump campaign at this point anyway).

Well, almost. Actually the FBI did 17 things wrong, apparently, by the (just possibly a tad self-serving) account of former director James Comey:

You Can't Douthat

Cypress-Tupelo Swamp, via Tulane University.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street (who seems to have quietly replaced David Brooks in the Tuesday slot—last time Brooks produced a Tuesday column was 2 September) writes a piece on "The Corruption Before Trump" with the sole purpose, as far as I can tell, of equating the fortune Dick Cheney earned running the war machine at Halliburton between his two stints as defense secretary (estimated between $19 million and $86 million) to "the extraordinary post-presidential buckraking of the Clinton family and their foundation’s global funding stream", meaning making a comparable amount of cash on the paid-speech circuit, writing best-selling books, and establishing a really pretty successful charitable organization with their earnings, in paragraph 5; and mentioning in paragraph 9 that "Hunter Biden’s sinecure at a Ukrainian energy conglomerate represents the crassest form of this mentality".

Adding in paragraph 11 that

the strongest defense of Trump’s possibly impeachable conduct vis-à-vis Hunter Biden and his father isn’t some sort of careful “no quid pro quo!” parsing of the president’s words. It’s the more straightforward argument that, as Dan McCarthy wrote for The National Interest over the weekend, this was what Trump was elected to do — to “use all legal means at his disposal to strike at business-as-usual among the political elite,” even if that requires trampling over norms that would normally prevent a U.S. president from encouraging a foreign investigation into his rival and his rival’s family.

Although young Biden is in fact the only business-as-usual practitioner Trump has actually attempted to strike at, and isn't even especially rich by today's Hypergilded Age standards, so I don't think that amounts to a lot of evidence that this is Trump's plan (shaking off the dew pooled in a water lily leaf on the surface of the swamp is not draining the latter).

Unleashed Kraken

Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in George Cukor's Gaslight, 1944, via Vox.

If you were startled to hear Big Donald tossing out dark hints of an unusually vast international conspiracy against him—

“So what I’ve done is I’ve declassified everything,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday before leaving on a trip to Japan.

“[Attorney General Barr] can look and I hope he looks at the UK and I hope he looks at Australia and I hope he looks at Ukraine.

“I hope he looks at everything, because there was a hoax that was perpetrated on our country.”

—I may be able to help. We're actually contemplating two different and equally idiotic conspiracy theories, one for UK and Australia and one for Ukraine.

The latter is Rudolph Giuliani's developing hypothesis that Ukrainian authorities after the Euromaidan revolution didn't have any reason to investigate how Paul Manafort got himself a $66-million cut of the pillaging of Ukraine by the pro-Russia Yanukovych regime—why on earth would they want to know anything about that?—but only did it because the sneaky Democratic National Committee tricked them into it, to harm the Trump campaign (as we briefly noted a couple of weeks ago).

The Paranoid Style, 2019

Experiment in trying to imagine the workings of the minds of the Republican conspiratorialists, now led by Attorney General Barr, with a scene from the FBI investigation as Fox News might imagine it, if they tried to imagine it in any detail, and the consequences of trying to believe simultaneously that (a) FBI agents worked to prepare an "insurance policy" to make sure they could depose Trump in the unlikely event he was elected; (b) everything in Christopher Steele's "dossier" is fake; (c) the FBI conspirators were completely dependent on Steele's work to commence their investigation (though it had already begun); and (d) everybody agreed that the best way to get started was by putting a FISA order on Carter Page, Ph.D.

US Embassy, Rome, photo by DPA.

Early August 2016. Tracking shot follows two men with briefcases and upscale water bottles, Gaeta and Steele, down a corridor in the US Embassy in Rome, Gaeta, FBI’s man in the post, in a rumpled American suit, Steele British, ex-MI6 and now a freelancer, rather more expensively dressed; they enter a small meeting room where two Washington-based agents, McCabe and Strzok, and an FBI lawyer, Page, are concentrated around the middle of a long table, and Gaeta performs the introductions:

GAETA

Andy, Pete, Lisa, this is Chris Steele, who I met in London early July. As I was saying, he’s heard you’re looking for an insurance policy.

STRZOK

Just in case our candidate doesn’t work out and that guy wins the election and we need to overthrow him, like the FBI usually does in these situations, as you know.

STEELE (shaking hands)

Of course, understood. Delighted to meet you.

MCCABE

You’ve been doing some research, we understand?

STEELE

Yes, on behalf of your candidate, I’m told, for Mr. Simpson, who kindly asked me to help out with the Russian government angle.

MCCABE

And you’ve discovered something useful?

STEELE

Heavens no, I just make stuff up. What do you take me for, a spy?

Got Paranoia? Barr's Narratology

Would you buy a used funeral from this man? Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images via Time.

I should be writing an "I told you so" post on the revelation showing up in The New York Times last night that Mueller's staffers are starting to complain that Barr's letter made Trump look less implicated than he actually is:

WASHINGTON — Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations....

The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation.

But it strikes me as coming a little late. Barr has already succeeded in shaping the discourse in a way that may end up being really hard to remedy. I'm talking about that that weirdly incommensurate treatment of the two chosen aspects of the criminal investigation:

Got Paranoia? Puppet Puppet

Via Truiceman.

We're hearing a lot about Andrew McCabe's story, as retailed on CBS Sixty Minutes, of Trump telling his intelligence briefers, "I believe Putin", which doesn't seem like news to me at all—he's been telling us all himself for at least a couple of years. But NPR's interview with McCabe helpfully laid out the context, from which I think we can learn something new, and possibly a whole lot: I think we can tell exactly when and where Putin could have told him this, on an extremely significant day, and in that way corroborate that the story is true and fill in some important details of the conspiracy hypothesis, if you'll follow along:

Exhibit A: an FBI briefing with Trump that had "gone completely off the rails from the very beginning."

McCabe said the topic was supposed to be how Russian intelligence officers were using diplomatic compounds inside the U.S. to gather intelligence on American spy agencies. Those compounds were closed as part of the long diplomatic chill between the two countries.

"Instead the president kind of went off on a diatribe," McCabe told NPR, explaining that Trump changed the subject to his belief that North Korea had not actually launched any missiles because Russian President Vladimir Putin told him that the U.S. intelligence assessment was wrong and that "it was all a hoax."

The diplomatic compounds, officially home-away-from-home dachas for Russian diplomats missing their own dachas, were closed on a very specific occasion, on 28 December 2016, as part of the new sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration as retribution for Russia's interference in the presidential election, along with the expulsion of 35 personnel.

Got Paranoia? Disclaimer

Ecuadorian Embassy, Knightsbridge, AP Photo/Sang Tan, August 2012. Funny to think it's really been that long.

I should have emphasized—and didn't even really mention—that Luke Harding's Assange story hasn't yet been corroborated by any other news organization, except for one compelling detail on the Ecuador angle:

CNN contributor Carl Bernstein reported Tuesday that Mueller's team has been investigating a meeting between Manafort and Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno in Quito in 2017 and has specifically asked if WikiLeaks or Assange was discussed in the meeting, according to a source with personal knowledge of the matter.

That's an important exception, because quite a bit of the story seems to have been sourced in Ecuador, in particular these—

Got paranoia? Manafort and Assange

Photo via The Mermaid's Tale.

This Guardian story, on Paul Manafort's previously unreported visits to Julian Assange's quarters in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, has colossal implications for my understanding of the whole history of Russia's engagement in the Trump campaign:

Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.

In March 2016, to be precise, at some point in the sequence in which

Literary Corner: Epic

Study the Late Joseph McCarthy

by Donald J. Trump

The Failing New York Times wrote
a story that made it seem
like the White House Councel had TURNED
on the President, when in fact
it is just the opposite - &
the two Fake reporters knew this.

This is why the Fake News Media
has become the Enemy of
the People. So bad for America!

Some members of the media are
very Angry at the Fake
Story in the New York Times.
They actually called to complain
and apologize - a big step forward.

From the day I announced, the Times has been
Fake News, and with their disgusting
new Board Member, it will only
get worse! Study the late
Joseph McCarthy, because we are now in period with Mueller and his gang that make Joseph McCarthy look like a baby! Rigged Witch Hunt!

Study for Mast (for Ingmar Bergman), 1988, by Robert Motherwell. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

The Failing New York Times wrote a story

That's Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman, of course, "White House Counsel Has Cooperated Extensively With Mueller’s Obstruction Inquiry," bringing us word of the 30 hours of interviews Counsel Don F. McGahn has had with the investigation since last November or so, detailing particularly, Schmidt and Haberman believe, his observations on the president's obstuction of justice since the Inauguration:

It rhymes

Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, Manhattan. The FBI Field Office is on the 23rd floor. Photo via Zimbio.

On James Comey and the Russian-produced Wasserman Schultz letter—

The Russian intelligence material related to a purported email exchange between then-Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and a Clinton campaign operative who suggested then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch would help quash the FBI’s investigation.

According to CNN, Comey used the purported emails in part to justify his decision to publicly announce that no charges would be brought against Clinton, in a remarkable address [on July 5] that also accused her of being “extremely careless” in how she handled classified information on her private server. Comey did not consult with Lynch beforehand, and the speech broke FBI protocol to never comment on closed cases where no charges are brought.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the purported emails originated from a dubiously sourced Russian intelligence document, the veracity of which was never confirmed by the FBI. Officials aware of Comey’s actions told CNN that he knew that the document was bogus, but still factored it into his handling of the case. (Talking Points Memo)

There's a weird little relationship—history not repeating itself but rhyming as they say—between that story and the one from the end of October where Comey sent a remarkable letter to House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz to inform him "out of an abundance of caution" that the investigation wasn't in fact closed, and that the FBI was looking at some possibly fresh material, which turned out to be Anthony Weiner's laptop and emails to Hillary Clinton that Huma Abedin had downloaded there (apparently to make print copies for the boss because, sadly, Clinton, like Donald J. Trump, prefers paper) (that beloved story is actually false; the emails were on Weiner's computer as an automatic backup arrangement with Abedin's phone; h/t Jesse at NMMNB).

In both cases, Comey is said to be making these unusual public disclosures out of fear for his agency's and his own reputation.

(Longish read below the jump.)

Dense networks

Guido Georgio Lombardi and friend, from his North Atlantic League website.

A truly bizarre profile in Saturday's Times by Jason Horowitz of a Trump friend, fellow resident of Trump Tower and Palm Beach, George Guido Lombardi, aka Guido George Lombardi, aka Count of Canevaro (he's got that one wrong—the Canevaro nobility was awarded to Giuseppe Canevaro, a 19th-century guano king, I'm not making this up, who was ennobled by King Victor Emmanuel II—conte di Zoagli e duca dei Castelvari—for his part in transporting Napoleon III's army to Genoa helping the Risorgimentisti conquer Lombardy from Austria), interviewed at Mar-a-Lago

as he sat next to a whirring Boca Freeze soft ice cream machine in the Mar-a-Lago beach house as Secret Service agents lounged outside, looking out over the Atlantic.

That's poetry!

Somebody's going to have to stop me from quoting the entire thing, which treats this guy as a sort of ambassador to all the rightwing nativist mobs of Europe, the Lega Nord and the Beppe Grillo movement, Viktor Orbán, Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen (“I told her right away, ‘Marine, dump your dad. He is just a dead weight. And anyway you have to make a choice. You are either with the Jews or you are with the Muslims. You can’t be with both.’” He's fond of Jews, “‘our curly friends,’ he said referring to the orthodox party that had rented Mar-a-Lago out that afternoon”). And the husband of the former Gianna Lahainer, who when her first husband died in 1993 at the outset of the Palm Beach social season had his body put into cold storage at the local funeral home instead of shipping it back to Italy so she wouldn't be compelled to miss any of the parties.

Alex sez: Don't push dark things through super bowels

This is really the greatest moment in the history of Twitter. Screenshot; original is here if he hasn't deleted it, which I bet he hasn't.

Douthat on the Great Facebook Massacre

Image via Michael Ferry at First Draft.

So apparently deep in the subterranean regions of the Facebook world, the News Curators toil, unseen and unappreciated, writing their headlines and teasers for the trending topics in the upper right of your timeline, and a little bit more. It turns out that the Trending Module algorithm doesn't work quite as well as advertised, or, more to the point, as well as Twitter's, and it needs to be goosed from time to time, and one of the things they do is to "inject" stories that fail to trend on their own into the mix, from the front pages of ten different big-time sources (CNN, the New York Times, BBC, and the like), or just stories that seem so serious that it's embarrassing not to have them (the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, the killings of the Charlie Hebdo staff, Syria stories, #BlackLivesMatter). They're also empowered to switch a story from its coverage in a less respectable source like RedState or Breitbart to a more trustworthy one, or deactivate it altogether, if not enough sources are covering it.

Perhaps because their backgrounds are more literary than techie, they're not regarded as real Facebook people but "disposable outsiders". They're not employees but contract workers, like proofreaders or Uber drivers, supplied by a temp agency, a dozen or more squeezed into makeshift quarters in the New York offices. Though they have fancy degrees from Ivy schools and résumés from the New York publishing scene, they are not invited into the Facebook world. If there's an 8:00 happy hour for the proper employees, the News Curators aren't invited; they keep working, into the night. The turnover is pretty high. They believe that their real function is to train the algorithm—one day it will know how to do their jobs and they'll all be fired.