Yesterday I wrote a post about the latest WaPo fake Trump quote incident. In the post, I looked into the history of Jordan Fuchs, who was the paper’s informant. Fuchs, along with her mentor and promoter Raffensperger, has been defending the Georgia voting system she helped set up in 2020, and dissing those who criticize it. For example, there’s this gem:
Republicans fell into a trap by expecting Brad Raffensperger and Brian Kemp to cheat for them.
It appears that Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, was not only the anonymous source of the Washington Post story — claiming that Trump pressured Georgia election investigator Frances Watson to “find the fraud,” and that if she did, she’d be a “national hero” — but she publicly “confirmed” the story to NBC News on the same day the Washington Post story broke…
…[I]n “confirming” the Post story for which she was the anonymous source, she did not clarify that the comments allegedly made by Trump were not direct quotes. Instead, her “confirmation” appeared to validate the original — and fake — story. This gives credence to the theory that she intentionally deceived the public at President Trump’s expense.
Fuchs wouldn’t be the first, and she wont be the last. Anyone paying attention since 2015, when Trump threw his hat into the presidential ring, should be aware that reports of fake quotes (or in some cases quote paraphrases) have been the Trump opposition’s meat-and-potatoes.
The reason is that they work. The accretion of so many has poisoned the minds of half of America against Trump, and so even if one were to be debunked it doesn’t make a dent in the vast edifice that goes to make many people’s highly negative mental picture of the man and what he’s about.
Most of these reports aren’t even corrected by the media – in the case of this one, for example, it was only a public information request that brought it to late by exhuming it from the cellphone trash folder where it had been placed. And when such a story is corrected, it’s usually done in a stealth manner (no new story, just a change at the old one, and usually the change isn’t highlighted in any way except on the right), and with plenty of “the story was fake but accurate” excuses.
Then on to the next inaccurate story[ies] designed to hurt the right. It’s constant and pervasive – and, as I said, it works. Will the majority of the public ever realize what’s going on? Many years ago I used to think that would happen, if things got bad enough and blatant enough. I still think that, actually, although my definition of “enough” has moved to a much more extreme position, and I believe it may already be too late for any such realization to make a difference even if it were to occur.
There’s no room in our classrooms for things like Critical Race Theory. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.”
I mentioned this Glenn Greenwald article in a previous post today. But I want to highlight it in case you missed it. The title and subtitle are as follows:
How Do Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods? The Washington Post’s media-spread error about Trump’s Georgia call shows the deceitful playbook first invented to undermine Trump and promote Russiagate.
Media’s Entire Georgia Narrative Is Fraudulent, Not Just The Fabricated Trump Quotes: The fake quotes, bad as they were, are just one of many ways the media have done a horrible job of covering election disputes in the state.
In a stunningly rare discovery, dozens of 2,000-year-old biblical scroll fragments have been excavated from Judean Desert caves during a daring rescue operation. Most of the newly discovered scroll fragments — the first such finds in 60 years — are Greek translations of the books of Zechariah and Nahum from the Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets, and are written in two scribal hands. Only the name of God is written in Hebrew in the texts.
The fragments from the Prophets have been identified as coming from a larger scroll that was found in the 1950s, in the same “Cave of Horror” in Nahal Hever, which is some 80 meters (260 feet) below a cliff top. According to an Israel Antiquities Authority press release, the cave is “flanked by gorges and can only be reached by rappelling precariously down the sheer cliff.”
Along with the “new” biblical scroll fragments from the Books of the Minor Prophets, the team excavated a huge 10,500-year-old perfectly preserved woven basket — the oldest complete basket in the world — and a 6,000-year-old mummified skeleton of a child, tucked into its blanket for a final sleep.
Photos at the link.
This is part of an Israeli drive to find more such artifacts before thieves find them.
…as a result of the civil suit settlement in the Floyd family’s case against the city of Minneapolis. The two stated that they knew of the settlement and “would no longer be able to be fair and impartial jurors.”
The Minneapolis City Council is either dumb as a bunch of rocks or knew that this settlement would prejudice a jury (even those members who, unlike the two who were dismissed, assert that they can remain objective). I think that the Council meant for the announcement to be prejudicial. After all, the chosen jurors are not sequestered and therefore not protected from prejudicial stories and events at this point – although there have already been so many prejudicial stories prior to this that it’s hard to believe they haven’t already been deeply affected, no matter what they claim.
As far as the settlement goes, as I chronicled in this comment to a previous post, Minneapolis delayed its payment in the Noor case until the criminal trial of former police officer Noor was over. I believe that was because the Council didn’t want Noor, a Somalian immigrant who wrongly killed a white woman, to be found guilty. And so they held off announcing the settlement until a few days after the verdict.
Not this time.
This case should be moved out of Minneapolis, but so far that’s not happening, although it still could happen.
The WaPo and the rest of the MSM use many methods to write propaganda, but one common approach is to play a game of telephone. By “telephone” I mean the child’s game you may have played when young, which illustrates how things get garbled when the message isn’t from the original source.
Using uncorroborated anonymous sources, particularly those that are not the primary source of the information but are getting it second-hand, is not the way a reputable newspaper used to source its articles. But of course we know that taking that sort of care was jettisoned by most in the press quite some time ago, when politically expedient to benefit the left. I first wrote a post about the spread of the use of the anonymous source back in 2005 (re-posted here in 2017). As long as the MSM has some tenuous report from someone who heard something from somebody who said something-or-other, and that “something” can hurt the right and especially Donald Trump, it seems it’s good to go.
And these stories have legs. The Democrats have used the report I’m writing about now, as well as the false story about the demonstrator throwing a fire extinguisher on January 6th that caused the death of Officer Sicknick, to impeach Trump. There was no independent corroboration for either other than this game of journalistic telephone, which I believe the reporters all know (or should strongly suspect) is phony at the outset. It’s a cynical and mendacious political ploy, and yet plenty of members of the voting public are still fooled by it.
And they remain fooled, because probably only a small percentage of them are aware even now of these facts [emphasis mine]]:
An official in the Georgia secretary of state’s office was the only source for at least one story that falsely claimed former President Donald Trump told an investigator with the office to “find the fraud.”
Jordan Fuchs, deputy secretary of state, relayed details of the conversation to The Washington Post, an official with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger confirmed to The Epoch Times.
Fuchs was not on the call herself. She was told about the conversation by Frances Watson, the investigator.
So, the person on the phone call relayed its contents to Fuchs, who then relayed them to the WaPo. Fuchs never heard the call at all.
That’s some source.
I’d also like to know what Raffensperger knew and when he knew it. He’s been involved in blocking investigations into possible fraud in Georgia for quite some time, and despite being a Republican (one of those Republicans whose name will live in infamy on the right) he has a vested interest in squelching inquiry, because he’s the one who oversaw the election in that state and agreed to some of the lax rules. Therefore it’s been CYA time for Raffensperger (I suggest reading this article by Mollie Hemingway to get an overview of the history of the 2020 vote in Georgia).
A recording of the call recently emerged from a records request, showing that the Post and a slew of other outlets had falsely reported Trump uttering several phrases.
The office of Raffensperger, a Republican, says Fuchs did not present details of the conversation as verbatim.
And yet they were presented by the WaPo as direct quotes, and I am relatively sure they thought no one would ever be the wiser. That phone call recording was in Watson’s trash folder on her phone, where it would have remained but for that “records request.” And if either Fuchs or Watson felt that she’d been misquoted when the WaPo held the words out to be Trump’s exact phrases, why did neither open the mouths to correct the record?
Note also, how that article I just linked in the above paragraph spins the whole thing as just more proof of “Trump’s extraordinary efforts to push false claims of widespread voter fraud and influence Georgia election officials as they certified the state’s election results.” To agree with that sentence, one must accept the idea that such claims were known to be false and that Trump was in fact pressuring Watson by making a request that she investigate (she denies feeling pressured).
[The WaPo] also outed Fuchs as its source, after previously describing her as an individual familiar with the call.
Hey, WaPo, want to interview me? I’m familiar with the call, after all – I read about it in the WaPo.
In the case of the Trump “quote,” the grapevine was far-reaching and intertwined:
The Associated Press in its correction used similar wording in explaining that it “erroneously reported” that Trump pressured Watson to “find the fraud,” and that if she did, she would be a national hero.
CNN offered an editor’s note in stating that its initial version “presented paraphrasing of the President’s comments to the Georgia elections investigator as direct quotes.”
The Associated Press and the Post declined to answer questions about the reporting, such as whether they would commit to no longer using Fuchs as a source. CNN, ABC News, NBC News, and Reuters didn’t return inquiries. Among the outlets, all have updated their original articles except for Reuters.
All of the outlets reported on the conversation by relying on a single source, who appears to have been Fuchs in every case.
It’s bad journalistic practice, but it’s become standard because it works for their purposes, which is not to tell the truth but to act as though they are:
Several generations ago, reporters couldn’t pursue stories without at least two sources, Andrew Schotz with the Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Committee told The Epoch Times.
The rise in competition and the Internet has led news outlets to value immediacy and being first over making sure things are correct, he added.
But the idea that this practice is driven by valuing immediacy is just garbage. For example, if immediacy were the goal, isn’t it curious that no one except the right-leaning NY Post was the least bit interested in reporting, immediately or ever, on Hunter Biden’s laptop? The only stories the MSM jumps to cover quickly are the ones that can hurt the right:
That sentiment was echoed by news outlets in their updates: most offered editor’s notes instead of corrections and painstakingly outlined how Trump had uttered phrases similar to what they had originally reported, indicating journalists felt their initial stories were largely correct.
The MSM clearly has no intention of stopping this sort of thing or admitting they did much of anything wrong here. Glenn Greenwald – no Trump supporter – once again has the guts to call them out on this. But he no longer writes for the MSM or even his own site The Intercept – too much truth-telling from Glenn for them to stomach.
[ADDENDUM: More on Fuchs here and also here. She is very young (30), was appointed by Raffensperger, and was active on Twitter in a rather junior high school way against Lin Wood (who had attacked her inexperience, and who’s got his own problems). She’s written things like this:
Republicans fell into a trap by expecting Brad Raffensperger and Brian Kemp to cheat for them.
Is she a Republican, even if In Name Only? Raffensperger is at least nominally one, and so apparently is Fuchs. Like Raffensperger, she was involved prior to the election in defending some of the changes there (including Dominion).She also is quoted as having said this, post-election:
“Trump and U.S. senators have refused to condemn these death threats,” she told Reuters. “In fact, he continues to support those who are actively calling for elections officials to be shot.”
Now, there’s an unbiased source.
She previously was Raffensperger’s campaign manager. Are they both moles? Seriously, this is all quite strange.]
Recently I discussed the strange “Emperor’s New Clothes” feel of the Biden presidency, in which we watch the media assert over and over that the man is demonstrating wonderful qualities he simply does not exhibit.
In light of that, it’s interesting to read this [my emphasis]:
…[T]he very assertion of pseudo-reality demoralizes all who are pressed into engaging with it by the mere fact of being something false that must be treated as true. We should never underestimate how psychologically weakening and damaging it is to be forced to treat as true something that is not true, with the effect strengthening the more obviously false it is. Despite the fact that obviousness of the pseudo-real distortion concentrates its demoralizing power, pseudo-reality is only pseudo-real when the distortion is not immediately and wholly transparent and also when it is sufficiently widely socially accepted to become a socially constructed pseudo-truth. Whether or not the distortion is apparent, however, the situation it creates is most demoralizing for those who see through it because making the distortions of a pseudo-reality apparent to those who do not already see them is always exceptionally tedious and will be vigorously resisted not only by adherents but by useful idiots…
Normal people do not tend to recognize that a broken logic and twisted morality is being used to prop up an ideological vision—a pseudo-reality—and that the mental states of the people within it (or held hostage by it) are not normal. Some among them, particularly the very but not exceptionally smart, thus skillfully reinterpret the absurd and dangerous claims of the pseudo-realist ideologues into something reasonable and sensible when, in fact, they are not reasonable or sensible. This, in turn, renders the pseudo-reality more palatable than it actually is and further disguises the distortions and underlying will to power presented by the ideological pseudo-realists. All of these features, and others, advantage the ideologue who, like some modern-day Zarathustra, speaks a pseudo-reality into existence, and all of these confer power upon that ideologue while stealing it from every participant in their social fiction, willing or not…
Liberalism may, for example, be construed as an ideology, but it would not qualify as a cult ideology because, for any shortcomings it may have, it makes itself subordinate to the truth. (Indeed, this together with its incorrect general assumption of the normality of all people is why liberal systems are so susceptible to ideological pseudo-reality and thus so desperately need a vaccine against them.) That liberalism subordinates itself to an external, or objective, truth is obvious from the first principles of liberalism, which arises in the context of favoring rationalism and deferral to the greatest degree of objectivity in any circumstance it seeks to understand or dispute it aims to solve. It also explicitly sides with due processes in service to these objectives and explicitly denies any “ends justify the means” rationales. Accordingly, it exhibits none of the psychopathic tendencies that arise quite regularly in the context of ideologies that depend upon the production and maintenance of some useful but bogus pseudo-reality…
The Utopian vision hiding at the heart of all (cult) ideologies provides the rationale beneath and means by which an ideological pseudo-reality is created. The pseudo-reality [of leftism, on the other hand] is a construction that misunderstands actual reality as compared against the imagined Utopia that resides at the end of the ideological rainbow…[A]ny injustice in the present and near future can be justified against a vision of perfection for fictitious people a thousand years hence…
Given the fact that they are the tool of manipulative people who exhibit high thirst for power and linguistic savvy, pseudo-realists tend to target the (bourgeois) upper-middle class whose livelihoods depend most upon their credentialing and acceptance by a group of peers, particularly the highly educated, though not most brilliant, among them. An abnormally high proportion of such individuals are employed in education, media, politics, and especially academia.
There’s a lot there. It’s not that these are new thoughts, but I think the most basic insights there are two: (1) the personal (as opposed to the obvious societal) cost of watching pseudo-reality take hold (2) the distinction between today’s leftist Democrat Party and the liberalism often exhibited by Democrats when I was young, which was still somewhat tethered to reality and interested in truth, and did not believe that ends justify the means.
Solzhenitsyn had something to say about all of this in his famous essay “Live Not By Lies.” An excerpt:
…[V]iolence ages swiftly, a few years pass—and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally—Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.
And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!…
Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world.
And thus, overcoming our temerity, let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries? And from that day onward he:
· Will not write, sign, nor publish in any way, a single line distorting, so far as he can see, the truth;
· Will not utter such a line in private or in public conversation, nor read it from a crib sheet, nor speak it in the role of educator, canvasser, teacher, actor;
· Will not in painting, sculpture, photograph, technology, or music depict, support, or broadcast a single false thought, a single distortion of the truth as he discerns it;
· Will not cite in writing or in speech a single “guiding” quote for gratification, insurance, for his success at work, unless he fully shares the cited thought and believes that it fits the context precisely;
· Will not be forced to a demonstration or a rally if it runs counter to his desire and his will; will not take up and raise a banner or slogan in which he does not fully believe;
· Will not raise a hand in vote for a proposal which he does not sincerely support; will not vote openly or in secret ballot for a candidate whom he deems dubious or unworthy;
· Will not be impelled to a meeting where a forced and distorted discussion is expected to take place;
· Will at once walk out from a session, meeting, lecture, play, or film as soon as he hears the speaker utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda;
· Will not subscribe to, nor buy in retail, a newspaper or journal that distorts or hides the underlying facts.
Much more at the link.
[NOTE: For some reason, my spam folder seems to often flag comments that have the name “Solzhenitsyn” in them. This is not new; it’s been going on for a long long time. So if you use his name in a comment, I suggest you abbreviate it and write something like “Solz.” That might work better.]
Actually, I’m not sure I ever was fully with the program, even when I was young. But in the last couple of years, as I watch the world from my perch here at a computer in New England, I’ve become more and more estranged from whatever passes for public opinion these days, particularly with the younger generation. Increasingly, it feels as though we are speaking from such different basic premises that it’s almost as though we’re not using the same language.
In particular, what so many young people seem to find offensive is very different from what I find offensive. Tiny little slights that my generation would shrug off are considered nearly hanging matters. It’s easy to call them “snowflakes” and other pejorative labels, but that’s the easy way out. Something deeper has gone on: a re-ordering of priorities, definitions, and values. And that’s in addition to, and connected with, their tolerance of leftism and all that goes with it.
It’s not that we haven’t discussed all of this before on this blog; we have. And it’s not that everyone in the younger generation has gone over to the other side on this, either. But so many have, and they are so often the ones who in earlier times would have been – at least, might have been – the best and the brightest. Now they are going, or have already gone, down the Red Guards path. Do they even know that piece of history? If they do, can they connect it to themselves now? And if they did connect it, would they care, or would they consider that this time their cause is so obviously righteous that any resemblance is illusory?
I’ve already lost a few friends of my generation, too, although most have stuck by me. For some who are still friends, I feel their increased discomfort around me. I don’t think I’m imagining it. It’s a source of tension and grief for me. And of course, there’s a gulf between the younger generation and me that’s similar. No one in that group has stopped talking to me altogether, but the gap is widening day by day and whatever ways I’ve attempted to bridge the gap, they don’t seem to have altered things significantly.
But it’s not just about family and friends. It’s about the culture at large. A lot of older people say they don’t care about that because in a while they won’t be around. I don’t have that attitude. However long I will or won’t be here, I care deeply. I care what happens to this country, to the world, to the human race.
And since music seems to be on my mind often lately, here’s the song these reflections conjure up for me. I have little doubt that Simon and Garfunkel are not on the political right (Simon wrote it, but in this clip they both perform it). But how far to the left they fall on the political spectrum is irrelevant to me in terms of this song, which seems to fit either side of the political realm at the moment. I doubt very much that was the original idea; Paul Simon has said of the song, “I don’t write overtly political songs, although American Tune comes pretty close, as it was written just after Nixon was elected.” But one of the good things about art is that its meaning and purpose is not limited to what may have been in the creator’s mind at the time:
That line “we can’t be forever blessed” makes me think of this quote attributed to various 19th Century thinkers: “It has been said that a special Providence watches over children, drunkards, and the United States.”
When it’s a stealth correction, way after the fact. And that’s the way it’s usually done, if it’s done at all.
This kind of mistake is beyond serious. There's zero accountability in major corporate media anymore, yet they continually insist they're the ones holding the line on the truth. And always remember what should scare you about the media is what *doesn't get exposed." pic.twitter.com/ceBaApCZQ8
