The left has decided that Joe Rogan must go – and it certainly doesn’t stop there

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t watch Rogan, but I’ve certainly read about what he does in his podcasts. With a background as a comedian, he basically interviews a wide variety of people, lets them speak at length, and actually listens to them. That’s about it. He’s attracted an enormous number of viewers. And that kind of liberty and openness is a huge threat to our insect overlords, so at a certain point the word must have gone out that this could no longer be countenanced.

Initially the attack had to do with his supposed COVID “misinformation,” and it focused on banning him from Spotify. That didn’t work, and perhaps the people behind it were surprised. Then various Spotify personalities – mostly of my generation, the somewhat long-in-the-tooth one – pulled out of Spotify. That didn’t work, either, although perhaps it was just meant to be personal virtue-signaling on their part.

Now it has segued into an attack on Rogan for using the n-word quite a few years ago. The utterances – some or most taken out of context, apparently – have been compiled and shown, along with further demands that Rogan be gone:

The video compilation of Rogan saying the n-word was dropped by @patriottakes 6 days ago. You see the video in the tweet in pic 1, and patriottakes takes credit for “republishing” the information in pic 2…

As you can see in their bio, @patriottakes is partnered with @MeidasTouch. And this is where it gets interesting. Who is Meidastouch? Well, they are a professional political organization. In fact, they are a Democrat “Super PAC”…run by 3 brothers…

Patriottakes is bragging about their millions of views and how they made the video the center of the national conversation. They are bragging about their CLOUT Rogan is the one guy the leftists can’t cancel. If a group could cancel Rogan it would be a MASSIVE show of power.

Woke people and legacy media groups have been trying to cancel Rogan for ages because he steals their audience and doesn’t play by their rules.

He also influences people and even encourages them to think for themselves. And he is massively popular.

A new development:

Rogan has taken the ill-advised step of apologizing to the mob and promising to bring on more leftwing guests, which has only emboldened them further. By contrast, Dave Portnoy is much better at playing this game, himself having been the target of many cancellation attempts in the past.

So when it was announced that he was going on a live stream with the three brothers who run MeidasTouch, one of the groups at the forefront of trying to destroy Rogan, there was some question as to whether Portnoy was getting in over his head. It was going to be three-on-one, after all. Portnoy had something up his sleeve, though…

Apparently, instead of going into the situation empty-handed, he had in his possession a text message from one of the brothers using the n-word in 2014…

Portnoy continued the fireworks by lighting into his hosts for taking things out of context to attack him, including accusations of sexism. The entire podcast is worth a watch just to see the MeidasTouch guys squirm. Hypocrisy on the left is a way of life and these three brothers fully embody that.

I tried for a while to discover what Rogan had really said in terms of his use of the n-word and the full context, but it’s not been easy. As far as I can tell, it was mostly a decade ago or more when he was doing comedy, and this seems to have been the worst offense:

The apology video on Rogan’s profile is captioned: “There’s been a lot of s**t from the old episodes of the podcast that I wish I hadn’t said, or had said differently.”

Over the course of five minutes and 46 seconds, Rogan addresses his past controversial opinions and statements.

“It’s not my word to use,” Rogan said, referring to the n-word racial slur, in the almost six-minute long video shared to his Instagram account.

“I am well aware of that now, but for years I used it in that manner.”

Rogan continued: “I never used it to be racist because I’m not racist.”

He went on to address the 2011 podcast episode, saying: “I was trying to make the story entertaining, and I said we got out and it was like we were in Africa.

“It’s like we were in ‘Planet of the Apes.'”

Doesn’t sound the least bit funny, and it does sound somewhat offensive, but people used to think it was cutting edge and both funny and trendy to use the n-word like rappers did. If Rogan hadn’t ruffled the feathers of the left, it would stay in the vaults, ignored, just as it has been all these years till now. If Rogan was the darling of the left, it would be forgiven. But he’s not.

As one might expect, Glenn Greenwald – a libertarian – has been active on the Rogan story. Here are some of his tweets that focus on the blatant and cynical hypocrisy of the left in particular:

And this is the key to what the media often does – it counts on the fact that most people have neither the time nor the inclination to check things out for themselves:

Here Greenwald gives one example of a fuller context for one of Rogan’s supposed offenses:

And Greenwald also points out that current left darling Howard Stern has used the n-word in far worse ways than Rogan ever did, and yet there’s no attempt to cancel him.

Here is a longer piece from Greenwald that describes in greater depth how the left now uses censorship of its opponents as its main tool:

American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by “liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).

For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of “hate speech” to mean “views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis…

Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.

I will add that both approaches have now been used against Rogan: first the “misinformation” accusation and then the “hate speech” video. At the moment, he’s still standing. What will come next?

Greenwald points out that disinformation does not disturb the left at all when it’s their disinformation (Russiagate, the denial of the possible lab origins of COVID, etc.).

There’s so much more at the link that I’m tempted to just go on and on excerpting it, including the fact that (of course) the platform on which Greenwald writes, Substack, has been attacked by the cancellation forces as well. But I’ll just add this:

Democrats overwhelmingly trust and love the FBI and CIA. Polls show they overwhelmingly favor censorship of the internet not only by Big Tech oligarchs but also by the state…

Democrats are not only the dominant political faction in Washington, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, but liberals in particular are clearly the hegemonic culture force in key institutions: media, academia and Hollywood. That is why it is a mistake to assume that we are near the end of their orgy of censorship and de-platforming victories. It is far more likely that we are much closer to the beginning than the end. The power to silence others is intoxicating. Once one gets a taste of its power, they rarely stop on their own…

Beyond the personal interest in avoiding vilification, corporate executives can be made to censor against their will and in violation of their political ideology out of self-interest. The corporate media still has the ability to render a company toxic, and the Democratic Party more now than ever has the power to abuse their lawmaking and regulatory powers to impose real punishment for disobedience, as it has repeatedly threatened to do. If Facebook or Spotify are deemed to be so toxic that no Good Liberals can use them without being attacked as complicit in fascism, white supremacy or anti-vax fanaticism, then that will severely limit, if not entirely sabotage, a company’s future viability.

The one bright spot in all this — and it is a significant one — is that liberals have become such extremists in their quest to silence all adversaries that they are generating their own backlash, based in disgust for their tyrannical fanaticism…

In sum, censorship — once the province of the American Right during the heyday of the Moral Majority of the 1980s — now occurs in isolated instances in that faction. In modern-day American liberalism, however, censorship is a virtual religion. They simply cannot abide the idea that anyone who thinks differently or sees the world differently than they should be heard. That is why there is much more at stake in this campaign to have Rogan removed from Spotify than whether this extremely popular podcast host will continue to be heard there or on another platform. If liberals succeed in pressuring Spotify to abandon their most valuable commodity, it will mean nobody is safe from their petty-tyrant tactics. But if they fail, it can embolden other platforms to similarly defy these bullying tactics, keeping our discourse a bit more free for just awhile longer.

Those in power flex their muscles against the Freedom Convoy

The New Neo Posted on by

You’ve probably read about some of the developments in the ongoing saga of the Canadian government verus the people – that is, the Freedom Convoy. You can get up to semi-speed on the crackdowns by reading this as well as this (the latter article also delving into the “Trudeau is Castro’s son” meme going around).

The leftist leaders who for so many years pretended to be for the working class and “the people” never really were, as anyone who studies history knows. Or rather, they were for the people as long as they got to tell the people exactly what to do and what not to do.

The BLM/Antifa riots, which actually were destructive and violent – unlike the Freedom Convoy – didn’t really threaten those in charge. But those in charge are quite aware that the convoy and what it represents is a very direct threat – and a nonviolent one – to their power. They fear a general strike, although the way they’re treating the truckers and their supporters just might be the best way to precipitate one.

In the history of this sort of thing, a turning point usually comes when the police and/or army refuse to do the government’s bidding and refuse to clamp down on the people. We certainly haven’t reached that point. And I don’t know whether this will all fizzle out in the face of pressure and threats of January 6th type arrests, or whether it will grow. I do think that resentment will grow, however – even in a relatively polite place like Canada.

Christa Ludwig disagrees with Leonard Bernstein about tempo

The New Neo Posted on by

I had no idea why YouTube decided I would like this video called “Vocalist Disagrees With Bernstein’s Tempo.” But they recommended it, and I idly clicked on it and watched it:

“It doesn’t matter; who can hear the words anyway?” asks Bernstein. But according to several commenters on that thread, Bernstein and Ludwig were actually very friendly and had great professional respect for each other.

It turns out that YouTube knows me better than I know myself, because – even though I know very little about opera – I was surprised and pleased to see that the “vocalist” arguing with Bernstein was a singer of whom I’m aware and who is a great favorite of mine, Christa Ludwig. The reason I know about her is that, during the years when I developed a passion for the opera “Hansel and Gretel” (see NOTE below), I discovered that she was the most fabulous Hansel and Gretel Witch of all time. And believe me, I listened to many renditions.

Ludwig somehow manages to be simultaneously scary and funny. She spits out the lyrics with remarkable clarity and force, taking incredible delight in sharply enunciating the sounds of the words (in German, of course), fairly smacking her lips with mock-evil glee. Since the subtext of the Hansel and Gretel story is hunger and even starvation, her delivery adds an added dimension.

It got to the point that I couldn’t bear to listen to any other version of the Witch but Christa’s.

It would help if you were familiar with the opera “Hansel and Gretel,” and it would help a lot if you were familiar with German. But even if you’re not, maybe this will appeal. It’s the scene where the Witch puts a spell on Hansel and Gretel:

You can find the complete opera in the following video. But since I’m highlighting Christa Ludwig’s Witch today, I’ll cue that part up. Here’s the part towards the end where she’s trying to get Gretel to bend over in front of the oven so that the Witch can easily push her into it, but Gretel turns the tables on her. The segment ends with Hansel and Gretel celebrating the Witch’s demise:

Looking it up now, I see that Christa Ludwig died last April at the age of 93; RIP. Her repertoire was vast, but in that entire Wiki article it doesn’t even mention this particular role. But she was superb.

I’ll close with…[quote from “Inside Opera” deleted because the story in it turns out to be untrue – thanks, readers!]

[NOTE: I’ve already written at length about other aspects of the opera “Hansel and Gretel,” which you can find here as well as here (that one featuring the wonderful Prayer Song), and also here.]

The internet has become a tool for government oppression

The New Neo Posted on by

And not just a tool for government oppression – a remarkably comprehensive and efficient tool. Companies such as Spotify and Twitter and GoFundMe and so many others have helped to centralize communication in the public square, which is increasingly the internet, and they increasingly do the leftist governments’ bidding.

In its early days, the internet was supposed to facilitate free expression of ideas around the world. Great! Fab! But over time it has featured platforms that have centralized that information and grown to huge size, allowing their private owners to have tremendous power to censor and to affect politics around the world as they see fit.

We certainly saw that during the Trump years. The process is now close to Orwellian in scope even though it’s not usually the government doing it directly. And as a telescreen-equivalent, the internet isn’t forced on people but is instead involuntary. We have forged our own chains – or at least, we’ve put them around ourselves.

At the moment, alternatives to big companies with leftist-based censoring such as Twitter or GoFundMe are allowed to exist online (although remember how Gab was closed down for a while?). How long will these alternatives be allowed? Even when they exist, however, they are smaller and weaker than their well-established and more powerful rivals who have already been building their user bases for many years while holding themselves out as welcoming nearly all and then later coming down hard on the right.

The internet has also greatly facilitated the ability to spy on people – in other words, to collect vast storehouses of information on them and to search it for whatever the government or the company is seeking. For example, GoFundMe has the personal information of everyone who donated to the truckers convoy; do you think they would protect that infomation if the government wanted it? I sure don’t. In fact, it’s likely that the government already has access to it. And such goings-on also discourage people from contributing to conservative causes in the first place, because they fear the government will retaliate. That’s one of the goals of this entire process, too – to induce fear and avoidance behavior.

Enormous amounts of information are on computers, far more than paper and pen could afford in the olden days, unless a person was a diarist suffering from OCD. Computers track what people read, buy and sell, wonder about, watch for entertainment, write, and financially transact. It all can be stored easily (none of the pneumatic tubes and paper archives of Orwell) and – perhaps most important of all – it can be accessed easily. A search for a certain word in all of someone’s correspondence – that would take years with paper – now takes seconds and can be expanded without much trouble at all to encompass many millions of people.

The internet is potentially (and perhaps already actually) the greatest totalitarian tool ever invented.

[NOTE: At the moment, the EARN IT bill has been introduced in the Senate by Blumenthal and Graham. It is supposedly meant to give the government the tools to investigate online-mediated child abuse, and if you read the material at that link, nothing about it sounds bad. But – although I’m not going to write a post about this right now – I’ve seen assertions online that it will give the government the power to scan all of our online communications. I have to say I’ve suspected it was already doing that.]

Olympics politics, now and then

The New Neo Posted on by

But isn’t that the Olympics’ history?

There was 1936, when Hitler was the host:

Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler saw the Games as an opportunity to promote his government and ideals of racial supremacy. The official Nazi party paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, wrote in the strongest terms that Jewish people and Black people should not be allowed to participate in the Games. However, when threatened with a boycott of the Games by other nations, he relented and allowed Black people and Jewish people to participate, and added one token participant to the German team—a Jewish woman, Helene Mayer. At the same time, the party removed signs stating “Jews not wanted” and similar slogans from the city’s main tourist attractions. In an attempt to “clean up” the host city, the German Ministry of the Interior authorized the chief of police to arrest all Romani and keep them in a “special camp”, the Berlin-Marzahn concentration camp.

United States Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage became a main supporter of the Games being held in Germany, arguing that “politics has no place in sport”, despite having initial doubts.

And then in 1972 – which I believe was the next time that the Olympics were held in Germany – Olympic athletes from Israel were massacred by Palestinian terrorists, and the hostage-taking began in the Olympic Village itself. Astoundingly enough, Brundage was still in charge. There was only a slight pause, and the show went on:

In the wake of the hostage-taking, competition was suspended for 34 hours, for the first time in modern Olympic history, after public criticism of the Olympic Committee’s decision to continue the games. On 6 September, a memorial service attended by 80,000 spectators and 3,000 athletes was held in the Olympic Stadium. IOC President Avery Brundage made little reference to the murdered athletes during a speech praising the strength of the Olympic movement and equating the attack on the Israeli sportsmen with the recent arguments about encroaching professionalism and disallowing Rhodesia’s participation in the Games, which outraged many listeners…

Many of the 80,000 people who filled the Olympic Stadium for West Germany’s football match with Hungary carried noisemakers and waved flags, but when several spectators unfurled a banner reading “17 dead, already forgotten?” security officers removed the sign and expelled those responsible from the grounds. During the memorial service, the Olympic Flag was flown at half-staff, along with the flags of most of the other competing nations at the request of Willy Brandt. Ten Arab nations objected to their flags flying at half-staff and the mandate was rescinded.

On a personal note – I stopped watching the Olympics years ago, although now and then there are certain sports I check in on, such as ice skating. Haven’t even done that in recent years, and I used to love the Olympics. The political tone-deafness is part of it, I suppose, but for me it really started to go downhill when it stopped being limited to amateurs and became a glossy production number.

Out of the goodness of its heart, GoFundMe now says it will return the Convoy donations without the need for special requests

The New Neo Posted on by

How nice of them.

Last night I wrote a post describing how GoFundMe – apparently with the gentle urging of the Canadian government – has decided that the peaceful Canadian Freedom Convoy is actually not peaceful enough [see *NOTE below] and will be curtailing its ability to get donations through GoFundMe, and giving donors’ money to other charities unless the donor makes a specific refund request.

This apparently raised more of a hue and cry than GoFundMe expected, with donors threatening to do things such use credit-card charge-backs, which would cost GoGundMe money, and perhaps to even sue. This seems to have focused the minds of GoFundMe’s powers that be, who have now decided to refund people’s money automatically. How incredibly magnanimous of them.

Of course, they’re not saying it’s because they stood to lose some money themselves. They’re saying it’s actually to “streamline” and “simplify” the process of getting refunds. But it was always glaringly obvious that automatic refunds would streamline and simplify the process; somehow the giants of GoFundMe just figured that out? I don’t see how anyone could believe such claptrap.

I hope that, in the future, movements on the right understand that GoFundMe is not the place to raise money for anything. There are other platforms with which I’m unfamiliar, but I imagine that a search on something like DuckDuckGo for “conservative alternative to GoFundMe” would lead to some.

[*NOTE: In fact, the only violence I’ve seen reported has apparently been against the convoy.]

GoFundMe tells the Canadian Freedom Convoy and its donors to GoFundThemselves

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s come to this:

Over the past weeks, the GoFundMe account supporting the Canadian Freedom Convoy has raised over $9 million from small donors. Today, at the request of the Trudeau dictatorship, that account was shut down. To add injury to insult, GoFundMe has decided to repurpose the donations, sending them to a charity that has the approval of that corporation rather than returning them to the donors. You have to submit an “application” to get your money back. Here is GoFundMe’s statement:

“Following a review of relevant facts and multiple discussions with local law enforcement and city officials, this fundraiser is now in violation of our Terms of Service (Term 8, which prohibits the promotion of violence and harassment) and has been removed from the platform.”

Violence? I’ve read a lot about this demonstration, and it’s been remarkably peaceful, not just “mostly peaceful” like the Antifa riots. Then again, since “words are violence” if they’re the wrong words coming from the wrong side, and violence isn’t violence if it comes from the right side (which would be the left), I guess the truckers are inherently violent just by having a demonstration at all.

And by scaring poor Prime Minister Trudeau, who felt he had to flee Ottawa and go into hiding due to fear. Or due to pretend fear; I really don’t know which, but I think he really is afraid of some sort of general strike starting.

I can just imagine the pressure that was put on GoFundMe to do this. Then again, they’re the same folks who did the following:

…GoFundMe deactivated the account raising money for Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal defense while leaving in place the funding effort to bail out BLM rioters. They have an active fundraising page for Gaige “Lefty” Grosskreutz, a felon who brandished a firearm at Rittenhouse. Don’t use these people. Ever. Don’t contribute to fundraisers on their site and let the organizers know why.

Ah, but consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. And the minds of the people who run GoFundMe are anything but small.

What was that definition of “fascism” in the economic sense again?:

Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it.

Historical fascism actually went further than that in terms of explicit government control of private industry. But the underpinnings – that private companies do the government’s bidding while preserving the appearance of autonomy – are now present in Canada.

And not only in Canada. The US isn’t far behind.

COVID: hope and fear

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Rufus T. Firefly” writes:

I’ll admit I had a bias. My bias was hoping that COVID-19 would not be as terminal as predicted. I followed any reasonable, valid sign that gave credence to that hope. And, most all of us eventually saw it would be nowhere near as fatal as WHO and CDC predictions. Thank goodness!!

But people like the woman you have been debating with have the opposite hope. She wants it to be deadly. She wants people to remain frightened, and masked. She latches onto any sign she can find that it is worse than it is.

What does that say about who she is? Yikes!

I have a few ideas on that – not about this particular woman being discussed, but about the phenomenon in general. There’s always the “she’s just evil and wishing people harm” spin, but let’s leave that aside and imagine other possibilities.

First we have the traditional split between the optimist and the pessimist. Rufus is hoping for the best and the other person is fearing the worst. One can entertain both thoughts simultaneously, of course, but in most people one side or the other tends to dominate. The reasons are hard to know, but perhaps it has something to do with the atmosphere of the person’s family of origin, or even some genetic tendency towards joy versus depression.

Some people even try to ward off the worst by imagining the worst. Sometimes it’s even a learned cultural/ethnic thing: “Don’t be too optimistic and you won’t be disappointed – don’t tempt fate!”

Then there’s the phenomenon of not wanting to be proven wrong. If one has cast one’s lot early on with the doom and gloom crowd – on COVID or anything else – some people will be happy to hear that it’s not as bad as all that and will eagerly accept the more hopeful news. Others will be reluctant to admit they were wrong and/or reluctant to give up a point of view for which they’ve read plenty of evidence already. This works both ways at times; in other words, the formerly optimistic can be loath to give that perspective up in the face of data that points to a more negative situation.

Another problem that sometimes occurs is that many people are bad at math and/or science and have no idea how to evaluate data. Granted, most studies do require a certain amount of math to understand, and a grounding in the scientific method as well. If a person doesn’t have a halfway decent background in those things, it’s much easier to be swayed by emotion and talk on social media, the MSM, or elsewhere.

Is it the case that such people “want it to be deadly”? I assume there are some such people. But I think they’re very much a minority of the group that we’re talking about. People who work in the MSM, however, have reason to want it to be deadly – maybe not consciously and certainly not to anyone they know personally. But if it bleeds, it leads.. That’s been true of the news business for a long long time.

Now that the Democrats are being hurt by it, the MSM knows it’s time to let up a little. But it’s a habit that’s hard to break.

[ADDENDUM: Several people in the comments brought up the idea that some people just want to be afraid – such as, for example, people who like to watch scary movies.

I don’t think people who like to watch scary movies or ride on scary rides want to be afraid. Not actually afraid. At least, not most of them. They want the frisson of fear; a soupçon of fear rather than the real anxiety of fearing a disease hitting them or their loved ones. They are playing at fear and playing with a slight and exciting feeling of fear as a game.

People who are truly afraid of horror movies or thrill rides do not tend to watch them or ride them (more than one time, anyway) unless someone forces them in some way, by threats or bullying, or unless they work with a behaviorial psychologist to de-sensitize themselves to them.

There probably are people who like to actually be afraid in the real sense of fear, but I don’t think they are common. Most of the people who are really afraid of COVID either have a reason for it (they have lots of co-morbidities, for example, and are very old) or have more general problems with anxiety disorder.

Many of the people I know who actually are afraid don’t seem to want to be afraid at all. Some of them have those previously-mentioned factors (OCD would be another predisposing factor).

That’s a generalization, of course, but that’s what I see.

There also are people who seem to get off on telling others what to do and on scaring other people if they can. They’re not necessarily the same people who are themselves afraid.]

The tangled web: Jeff Zucker and Andrew Cuomo and Chris Cuomo and CNN and…

The New Neo Posted on by

The degree of caring I’ve been able work up about this is tiny – and yet it’s a big story. So I’ll just link to and quote this on the Zucker affair and why he’s left CNN:

A familiar (and pathetic) theme being echoed in certain corners of the low-rated cable news network and other cable TV shows is that because Zucker and Gollust were engaging in a “consensual relationship” (both had gotten divorces in recent years) that he (and she) did nothing wrong…

Except the issue goes way beyond their “consensual relationship,” as we previously reported, a relationship that was allegedly an “open secret” for years in media circles even as the two were married to other people. Zucker admitted to his “evolving relationship” with Gollust during CNN’s investigation into the Chris Cuomo situation, and along with that admission came questions about whether favoritism was shown to Gollust. More importantly, the conflict of interest situation was very real considering for a period of several months in late 2012 and early 2013, Gollust worked as the comms director for then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

As far as media observers are concerned, it was Gollust’s connection with Andrew Cuomo and Zucker’s with Chris Cuomo as well as Andrew that is at the heart of what makes this “consensual relationship” in the workplace especially scandalous and deeply unethical.

Remember, Cuomo was forced out at CNN late last year after transcripts of his testimony during NY AG Tish James’ investigation into the allegations of sexual harassment against Andrew Cuomo revealed that Chris Cuomo was far more involved in advising his brother on how to handle the allegations than he (and CNN) had previously acknowledged.

Obviously, the disgraced former CNN “Prime Time” anchor isn’t taking his ouster laying down, which is what is making all of this even more intriguing. Wednesday, we reported that Chris Cuomo appears to be on a revenge tour, with Puck News founder Matt Belloni noting that “I’m told CNN received a litigation hold letter recently from Chris Cuomo lawyers, demanding, among other things, preservation of all communications between Zucker, comms chief Allison Gollust, and Andrew Cuomo.”

Further adding to the high drama was a New York Post report filed earlier that alleged that not only were Zucker and Gollust behind those cutesy “interview” segments between the Cuomo brothers during the pandemic and at a time when questions were being raised elsewhere about the nursing home scandal but that they also helped Gov. Cuomo with his pandemic response briefings:

CNN is a mess. I never watch it and I rarely watch any TV news. I’m not ordinarily interested in newspeople’s personalities, their foibles, and even their corruption (which I pretty much assume). I suppose I should be, because they most certainly have an influence on so many people’ perceptions of events, and that ends up affecting us all. But what interests me is the lies they tell about events, not their own personal behind-the-scenes smarminess, and the fact that they’re all interconnected with each other and with the Democrat politicians they assist.