DiResta-Harris Nexus Postscript

A few more thoughts on these two evasive ethno-operatives, including about neo-centrism and the art of Jew'splaining

While doing my browser cleanup yesterday after publishing my piece on Renee DiResta, I ran into a name that I didn’t include in the piece, but is worth addressing - Gilad Lotan, who appears in multiple places in material on DiResta’s work.

One was in her wiki, in the section on Vaccinate California: “Following an outbreak of Measles in the U.S., DiResta began research into misinformation around vaccines. Along with data scientist, Gilad Lotan, DiResta identified that on Twitter, 25% of anti-vaccine information came from 0.6% of users, in a phenomenon DiResta described as similar to automation.”

Another was near the beginning of an article titled Renee DiResta Connecting Politics, Anti-Vaxxers & Social Media from July 2017: “In 2015 when we started working on the law to eliminate vaccine opt-outs in California, it became pretty obvious that there was an asymmetry of passion on social channels that was pretty much the opposite of actual public opinion (which is 85% in favor of vaccination requirements for school). I reached out to Gilad Lotan and we decided to map the network, to look at message dissemination techniques.”

[Btw, in the vid I linked at the end of my last post DiResta says 67% favored a vaxx requirement and 85% thought vaccines worked or weren’t a problem, so she needs to get her facts straight.]

That article doesn’t say anything about New Knowledge which she surely was already working for by then, but she does talk about her involvement using tech to benefit a political campaign, that of James Thompson of Kansas, which you can see here, including DiResta as team leader: James Thompson | Tech For Campaigns Thompson was a former Republican who ran as a Dem to fill the seat of Mike Pompeo in a special election.

So who is Gilad Lotan? He’s the VP of Data Science at BuzzFeed and was hired there in 2016. Part of what he was hired to do was to help “sell” BuzzFeed (basically a Jewish operation - see Jonah Peretti, Ken Lerer, Ben Smith) on platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and Youtube. What should be clear already is that these people aren’t just data researchers, people doing “science”, they are working to use what they find for fulfilling an agenda.

Lotan is also a Jew, as you might have guessed, a Jew living in New York City, and a Jew living in New York City who was born in Israel, where his family lives. So he’s an Israeli, and I haven’t seen anything which says he’s also an American citizen. There is also stuff you can find online that says he was born in NYC, which I think is probably machine-generated false info.

If you look at this page on his GlobalVoices work you can see he confirms he was born in Israel: Gilad Lotan · Contributor profile · Global Voices You can also see his work there (up to to 2014), which is all about Israel. If you look at the latest article, titled Israel, Gaza, War & Data – The Art of Personalizing Propaganda, you’ll see it’s about mapping microdata on the web and news coverage, showing what is described as a world media bias favoring the Palestinians versus an Israeli media bias favoring the Israelis:

“Network graphs are mathematical tools used to model relations between objects, and are incredibly helpful when working with social data. Analyzing their structure helps us gain insight into our culture and society. In this case, we see a clear separation between the two sides. On the right, a clearly ‘pro-Palestinian’ group of activists (in green) as well as a variety of media outlets and journalists (in gray). The gray cluster of bloggers, journalists and international media entities is closely connected with the group of pro-Palestinian activists, which means that information is much more likely to spread amongst the two. This structural characteristic of the graph reinforces general Israeli sentiment regarding international media bias. Alternatively, on the other side we encounter the ‘pro-Israeli’ groups, including media outlets, Israeli public personas, and various American zionists (light blue), as well as American conservatives and Tea Party members (dark blue).”

This mapping visualization is the same kind of thing that you saw in that DiResta video I linked at the end of my piece on her. His conclusion to the piece includes this, after earlier saying, “Ha’aretz does cover the story, but Ha’aretz also has less than 10% readership, as it is considered to engender extreme liberal views.”:

“We need to be more thoughtful about adding and maintaining bridges across information silos online. In the Twitter example above, Ha’aretz is clearly positioned well in the network to make important impact on both sides, yet due to that, Ha’aretz also struggles to find its core audience, hence secure enough budget to operate and grow. If you made it this far down the article, you clearly care about the topic. There are two ways you can help: 1) Help make Ha’aretz financially stable by paying for an online subscription(less than $10 per month). 2) Donate to 972mag.com (and its Hebrew counterpart — Mekomit.co.il), both provide fresh, original, on-the-ground reporting on events in Israel and Palestine, with a strong commitment to human rights and freedom of information.”

So he is clearly advocating a position on this, but a centrist position (leftish in Israel, but not in world terms), and in the case of Ha’aretz, he seems to be suggesting it’s an “extreme liberal” position, at least in Israel. Is that how you see Ha’aretz, regarding matters of “the security of Israel”? It's like saying fight injustice by subscribing to the NY Times.

And is what he’s talking about here and elsewhere in his work really a center position? Imagine asking an Israeli if such a center position would have been admirable had one taken it between the Nazis and the Jews 80 years ago - “Okay, let’s split the difference and agree that you can kill 3M Jews”. Western (US) media is obviously not biased in favor of the Palestinians, we all know that, you can only take that viewpoint if you’re a committed pro-Zionist. But his chart suggests that, which just shows how the analysis and presentation of data itself can be a manipulation, without even getting into the manipulation of groupings shown within it (like Tea Partyers, white nationalists, etc.), which I think have a chicken-or-egg aspect to them - are they really that or are they called that because of where they land in the mapping and the characteristics assigned to them by the mappers?

In another more recent article by Lotan, published on JFK Day 2016, a couple weeks after the 2016 US election, titled “Fake News Is Not the Only Problem: Bias, propaganda, and deliberately misleading information are much more prevalent and do more damage”, he dives into the US political scene and on a predictable side. The article goes into detail on all this data mapping “science” regarding the “Hillary fainted!” health issue and meme as the specific problem. But then his second case presented is about another Jew-Palestinian incident involving two 13-year-olds and stabbings, and in that he links the piece I just talked about. Again, we have this kind of presumed center position on Israel, a center position which of course doesn’t really exist in the Hillary-Trump story, that’s all early pre-Russiagate anti-Trump fake news stuff.

But earlier in this story a tweet is embedded, by DiResta, saying, “Mark Zuckerberg is talking about ‘hoaxes’. The rest of us are talking about *propaganda*. The two are not the same.” This is in the middle of a bit by Lotan on incomplete or biased news as propaganda. So what about his incomplete or biased “science”? Remember how DiResta defined propaganda: information with an agenda. Lotan doesn’t have one? Fundamentally the same one as his partner DiResta?

DiResta and Lotan may still be working together - here is a bit from a (paywalled) NY Times article The Anti-Vaxx Movement’s New Frontier earlier this year: “According to an analysis by DiResta and Gilad Lotan, a data scientist, there had not been much overlap between what they call ‘Tea Party conservative’ and ‘antivax’ Twitter before 2015…”

One other Lotan piece I want to touch on before moving on to co-operative Sam Harris. It’s also at GlobalVoices from 2011 and is about a WaPo opinion piece done by some US judge named Goldstone, walking back some previous criticism of Israel. Another middle-of-the-road-that-shouldn’t-exist deal for the most part from him, but at the end he uses a term I find interesting: “Dahlia Scheindlin asks if Israelis are missing the point? That even the best of ‘hasbara’ (a.k.a ‘PR’) won't end their international woes.”

And then he quotes from the bit to end his piece, including this: “But maybe this latest development will finally prove something Israelis keep missing: even the most vindicating ‘hasbara’ in the world won’t end Israel’s international trouble. It’s the policy, stupid.”

You probably know what hasbara is if you’re reading this, but here’s part of the wiki, which is under Public diplomacy of Israel in English:

“Public diplomacy of Israel is the use of public diplomacy in favor of the State of Israel, i.e. efforts aimed at communicating directly with citizens of other countries to inform and influence them so that they support or tolerate the Israeli government's strategic objectives… Hasbara was formally introduced to the Zionist vocabulary by Nahum Sokolow. Hasbara has no direct English translation, but roughly means ‘explaining’. It is a communicative strategy that ‘seeks to explain actions, whether or not they are justified’. As it focuses on providing explanations about one's actions, hasbara has been called a ‘reactive and event-driven approach’. Today, Israeli practitioners tend to label their communicative efforts ‘public diplomacy’, not hasbara, indicating a shift in strategy. They consider a focus on ‘explaining’ too defensive and prefer to actively determine the agenda by being less reactive and more proactive, moving to a more comprehensive, long-term strategic approach.”

So what it means, plainly put, is Jew’splaining, and Lotan chooses to define it as public relations. But remember DiResta in her defining of propaganda said back in Bernays’ day that propaganda and public relations were interchangable. Not today though, when propaganda is much worse, much more serious, more manipulation and deception and not just promotion. So given the choice of these two (three?) Lotan takes the least offensive course.

Max Blumenthal has talked about how Hasbara in Israel, who work the internet like demons, have a special unit dedicated to Wikipedia. An example of something they perhaps had a hand in: Haim Saban was the Clintons’ biggest donor and one of the biggest Dem donors in this century. In his wiki there used to be a bit on a talk he gave in Israel (he’s a dual citizen) where he addressed the three ways to influence the US government in favor of Israel - donations to candidates, media outlet ownership/control, fund/manage think tanks. Saban does all three, in a big way.

These are three of the five domains of power that Jeff Gates wrote about in his book Guilt by Association, which is about Jews and Jewish influence leading America to war in the middle east, and perhaps that was just a little too much reality, because this section, even though it was sourced and footnoted, was “chambered” and is gone today. So was that Hasbara’s doing? If not, almost certainly the victim of Jewrasure in any case.

But Lotan addresses hasbara as simply a way of managing bad policy decisions and not what it actually is, full-on, no-holds-barred propagandizing. In other words, the same kind of manipulation of foreign populations that Russia is accused of doing, except on a whole different order of magnitude.

My impression from digging around in this over the last week is that there is a very small group of people who are likewise digging around in this “data science” on the web and particularly social media, and DiResta and Lotan are two of them. And it seems to me that their work product is highly manipulatable. And do I need to get into their co-ethnicity and his (their?) “dual loyalty”? What am I saying, if he's not American he surely has singular loyalty, and it ain't to us. Another strike against DiResta as an American fighting for freedom, democracy and the greater good…

Switching targets of my wrath, let’s get into Samuel Benjamin Harris (with a name like that you don't think his mother was a self-identified Jew?) and his version of Jew'splaining. In my piece I said of him, ”Where he gets really slippery is on Israel”, and what I had in mind is his second-ever podcast, done in July 2014 and titled Why Don’t I Criticize Israel? Let me quote the beginning of that before I start tearing it apart scientifically:

“I was going to do a podcast on a series of questions, but I got so many questions on the same topic that I think I’m just going to do a single response here, and we’ll do an #AskMeAnything podcast next time.

“The question I’ve now received in many forms goes something like this: Why is it that you never criticize Israel? Why is it that you never criticize Judaism? Why is it that you always take the side of the Israelis over that of the Palestinians?

“Now, this is an incredibly boring and depressing question for a variety of reasons. The first, is that I have criticized both Israel and Judaism. What seems to have upset many people is that I’ve kept some sense of proportion. There are something like 15 million Jews on earth at this moment; there are a hundred times as many Muslims. I’ve debated rabbis who, when I have assumed that they believe in a God that can hear our prayers, they stop me mid-sentence and say, ‘Why would you think that I believe in a God who can hear prayers?’ So there are rabbis—conservative rabbis—who believe in a God so elastic as to exclude every concrete claim about Him—and therefore, nearly every concrete demand upon human behavior. And there are millions of Jews, literally millions among the few million who exist, for whom Judaism is very important, and yet they are atheists. They don’t believe in God at all. This is actually a position you can hold in Judaism, but it’s a total non sequitur in Islam or Christianity.

“So, when we’re talking about the consequences of irrational beliefs based on scripture, the Jews are the least of the least offenders. But I have said many critical things about Judaism…”

So let’s go through this bit by bit. First the title itself is kinda misleading, because the questions and answer are about both Israel and Judaism. Then he surely misrepresents the questions of his listeners, which surely weren’t that absolute - “always, “never”. Then he rolls his eyes at the very questioning, as if it’s simply illegitimate. Then he says he has criticized them (some), which is only meaningful if the question really was as absolute as he framed it.

Then we get to the numbers game, that 15M Jews surely can’t be anything like as big of a problem as 1.5B Muslims, just based on those numbers alone. As if 100 Muslims living in the jungles of Indonesia are a bigger socio-political problem for the world than, say, George Soros.

Where he gets increasingly slippery comes next: “I’ve debated rabbis who, when I have assumed that they believe in a God that can hear our prayers, they stop me mid-sentence and say, “Why would you think that I believe in a God who can hear prayers?” So there are rabbis—conservative rabbis—who believe in a God so elastic as to exclude every concrete claim about Him—and therefore, nearly every concrete demand upon human behavior.”

I think what he’s really talking about is a debate that he had with the Hollywood rabbi David Wolpe, who has repeatedly said his concept of God isn’t someone/thing who one can engage directly through prayer. But Sam takes that and runs with it as evidence that even rabbis “believe in a God so elastic as to exclude every concrete claim about Him”. So he’s trying to tell you that among Jews even rabbis don’t actually believe in God - do you believe that? And if that was actually true, what does that really tell you about Jews, their faith and deception?

Then the next bit, which gets to what a Jew actually is:

“And there are millions of Jews, literally millions among the few million who exist, for whom Judaism is very important, and yet they are atheists. They don’t believe in God at all. This is actually a position you can hold in Judaism, but it’s a total non sequitur in Islam or Christianity.”

So what is he saying there? He is really saying being a Jew isn’t about being a practitioner of a religious faith, it’s about being a member of an ethnicity, specifically a matter of blood. The basic definition of a Jew is someone with a Jewish (ethnically) mother, because Jewishness is matrilineal. The religion (mostly) and the ethno-state both say this. So Harris and the other two most-visible neo-atheists back in the day, Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens (New Atheism was a pre-IDW cultural neoconservatism operation), could all emigrate to Israel rather easily, because their mothers were all Jews - even though none were raised Jewish religiously and they were/are atheists (Maher and Hitchens were raised Catholic; Sam was “raised in a secular household”). But a goy convert to Judaism wanting into the promised land? They’d have to go through a grilling in front of a board of rabbis on their faith, at minimum.

But he doesn’t actually come out and say it, rather again seems to want you to believe that one can be a believer within Judaism and not believe in God. Where all this really hits the slippery slope is a little later, when he says this:

“I don’t think Israel should exist as a Jewish state. I think it is obscene, irrational and unjustifiable to have a state organized around a religion. So I don’t celebrate the idea that there’s a Jewish homeland in the Middle East. I certainly don’t support any Jewish claims to real estate based on the Bible. [Note: Read this paragraph again.]”

The part in brackets was added to the podcast transcript btw. He says Israel shouldn’t exist, but then says it’s horrible to organize a state around a religion. But Israel is a state BASED ON ETHNICITY, ON BLOOD, and not religion, at least not primarily, not nearly as much as some Islamic states, which also don’t really have a blood component. So he’s arguing against the existence of something that doesn’t actually exist, a state based on Judaism. And how does he really feel about a state based on the Jewish ethnicity, a state which does exist? We don’t really know, do we?

He also doesn’t accept the claims on land based on the (Jewish) bible, but does he accept those claims based on something else? Like the Zionist desire for a Jewish homeland legitimized by antisemitism and the Holocaust? When he asks you to read that paragraph again, is he doing so while smirking and winking? The next paragraph starts with this:

“Though I just said that I don’t think Israel should exist as a Jewish state, the justification for such a state is rather easy to find. We need look no further than the fact that the rest of the world has shown itself eager to murder the Jews at almost every opportunity. So, if there were going to be a state organized around protecting members of a single religion, it certainly should be a Jewish state.”

So he doesn’t think Israel should exist, it's a horrible thing, but its existence is justified - and by Holocaustism (the real faith of the contemporary Jew, the almost-religious belief in the murderous antisemitism of the gentiles) at that - okay, Sam, gotcha.

The last part of the opening bit is this: “So, when we’re talking about the consequences of irrational beliefs based on scripture, the Jews are the least of the least offenders.” When he opens with “So” that means it’s based on what he’s already said here, which is that Jews really don’t believe in God. But he also said you don’t have to believe to be a Jew, which means religion is a secondary concern.

And the primary concern is about being a member, a self-identified member, of an ethnicity, with all their other belief systems and culture and history. So does Harris defend the Jewish ethnicity based on those, does he say ethnic Jews “are the least of the least offenders” in the secular world, the real world? No, he doesn’t touch that, not with a ten-foot gefilte fish. He's a militant atheist attacking religion (supposedly) and culture is simply off the table.

This is a classic lesson in sophistry, and perhaps even a great example of Ashkenazi high verbal intelligence. It’s almost as if from the very beginning of his podcasting Harris was declaring, “I am a self-identified Jew and I am going to be presenting many matters of Jewish concern here, and in the course of that I am going to manipulate, deceive and lie to you, over and over again.”

What he’s really saying is, in summary, “There are too few Jews to matter, they don’t even believe in God so their religion doesn’t matter, and I’m sure as fuck not going to talk about culture beyond religion.” Ergo, Jews don't matter socio-politically. This is classic Jew'splaining.

Oh, and nowhere in this podcast does he ever even admit to being Jewish, which is the fulcrum of this whole question. Wtf dude - the people who are asking are asking because they know you’re a fucking Jew, Sam, so ‘fess up. Christ, clinging to crypsis like a drowning rat in a flood clinging to a two-by-four…

…Which gets us back to Phil Giraldi, neocons and rat poison, but we don't wanna go there. 😉

These three (incl Lotan) are also about neo-centrism, the cultural neoconservativism project I discussed in my last piece. I was just reminded of that when a new comment brought me to a two-year-old video of mine about JQ-deniers on the anarchical/anti-collectivist extreme right on Bitchute, and I saw another comment there which said, “there seems to be some sort of strange centrist movement going on to keep evil shit in place so they can keep creeping degeneracy on the public”. Yes, in fact there very much is.