This past week I continued to watch as the three independent post-progressive journalists who I’ve been closely focused on since last summer have been at least subtly scrambling to deal with the world since 10/7. First up is Matt Taibbi on Friday’s America This Week with sidekick Walter, where they spend more than half the show talking about and around Ukraine, without ever getting to Gaza yet again. Late in the discussion they’re talking about some censorship law, somewhere in Europe, I think:
As always, they go Orwellian on this stuff, so they can traffic in quasi-fiction and not quite reality. And of course they know the lines they shouldn’t cross and can’t cross, and they don’t even have to think about it most of the time. They do seem to have thought about it related to Gaza, though, because that avoidance is evidence of strategy and not instinct.
Then they get into political correctness as self-censorship, but again it’s spun in this spooky Orwellian - or Soviet here - way, and not in terms of the realities of Cultural Marxism. And at the end Walter tries to establish that they aren’t playing these games. “The gender fluidity issue”?? Christ almighty…
Further on, where they talk about state media:
Let's first note the high level of “theyism” practiced here - who are they even talking about? “Them, of course!” The fear and loathing of the Them that plague us.
So why is all this, the state media and messaging, so subtle? Under a conventional dictatorship you know exactly who is in charge, and what is expected of you. But when you are under (((covert))) rule you don’t really know, and if you ever start to think you do, you erase that from your mind immediately. In part because of all that political correctness self-censorship training that you’ve been receiving for the last 30 years or so.
I don’t think it’s even possible for Walt to assess the level of self-censorship he engages in, because it’s so fundamentally imbedded in his thinking - it’s in his DNA at this point. And it serves him no practical purpose to do so; it can only fuck up his sweet life.
Matt too, and so when he got to the point of needing to place a narrative on top of his Twitterfile detailed work (much of which was worthwhile, it has to be said), he went to the acceptability shelf and pulled off the “national security state” paradigm, guessing correctly that would work perfectly.
And when 10/7 happened he knew he had to say something, so they did that dark night of the soul podcast. But he also knew that lingering on this topic couldn’t do him much good, so he deftly stepped around that steaming pile. After getting a bit on his shoe anyway, with that hospital misfire business…
Btw, just for the record, in that last clip they started with NPR and Terry Gross as the voice of state media:
Gross was born in Brooklyn, New York City, and grew up in its Sheepshead Bay neighborhood, the second child of Anne (Abrams), a stenographer, and Irving Gross, who worked in a family millinery business, where he sold fabric to milliners. She grew up in a Jewish family, and all her grandparents were immigrants, her father's parents from Tarnów, Poland, and her mother's from the Russian Empire. When she was young, people would often ask where Gross came from, assuming that her lack of a heavy Brooklyn accent meant she grew up elsewhere.
Regarding the misdirection censorship-industrial complex paradigm that Matt played a major role in building, Glenn Greenwald had an opportunity this week to build on that further:
Note that he says they “attempted to document” on that show; as I showed in my piece, their attempt was pretty much a complete failure. But he says here that his thesis that the CIA and Biden administration took over content moderation of TikTok to propagandize America’s youth, just as they did with Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Page & Brin’s Google, was confirmed by his show being permanently banned from the platform. So what evidence does he present of that?
Greenwald always strawmans this matter by framing many in his audience as believing that TikTok is Chinese propaganda, which I have a very hard time believing. Unless his audience is a bunch of GOP Trumptards, that is. In his segment he spends half of it going over his two past video takedowns that he had covered previously, the communication over the account ban, and then this:
Unfuckingbelievable. He provides ZERO evidence of what he claims, that the CIA and/or the Biden administration either ordered TikTok to take down his channel or did it themselves. He provides zero evidence that they have taken over content moderation on TikTok. Then he promotes himself as the world’s most-awarded journalist, promotes his employer Rumble as the only free-speech platform on the internet, and then says he doesn’t ever engage in conspiracy theory! What the fuck is this besides conspiracy theory??
Then he says he’s spent the last two months critiquing the “war” in Palestein, which of course includes giving equal time to cold-blooded Zionist Jews like Ungar-Sargon, Siegel and Abrahms. Barely audible in there he mentions that he criticized TikTok, the one reason that actually makes sense - he only uses that platform to promote his work on Rumble, so why would they tolerate his floating of evidence-free conspiracy theories about them as state propaganda? American and not Chinese, of course.
And after that he slips in, “So who knows why” - exactly, Glenn, that should have been your lead if you were a real journalist. And not a Jewrnalist. 🤭 That was a joke, btw… kind of…
The other thing that runs through this is money - he’s talking about the effect on his income and that of people like him as much as the effect on free speech for all. The Infotainment-Industrial Complex at the heart of the disinformation industry.
I’ve already torn plenty of holes in neo-conman Greenwald’s post-10/7 shtick, but here's a brief moment during Grayzone’s livestream this week where Max goes after one of Glenn’s co-ethnic Zionist scumbag friends that he's been disingenuously foisting on his audience:
Note what Max said about the Palestine Solidarity Movement and wokeness, because he’ll get back to that below.
So Glenn called the 92 Dems who voted “present” on the anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism resolution cowards, but he also presented this Zio-Jewess in a friendly interview with very little pushback, the first in a series of such interviews.
It's really tough to be a good Jew - meaning a manipulative hateful liar, I guess - and also maintain broader credibility, isn't it, Glenn?
Here's a bit of the kind of stuff he thinks is valuable to his audience:
So this guy doesn’t really care about Israel, he cares about the war on terrorism. This sort of sounds like the early neocons in the 1970s-80s, who weren’t targeting hated mother Russia and the reverted anti-semitic USSR, rather were philosophically opposed to communism, the previous grand fear-based paradigm. Even though the Father of Neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, was a Trotskyite in the 1930s, and he wasn’t the only one.
But this week Greenwald appeared to make partial amends by presenting a Gaza debate between Ungar-Sargon and Palestinian-American activist Omar Baddar. I’m not going to get into that, but I think Glenn’s intentions were basically Rodneyan - why can’t we all get along? I don’t know anything about Baddar, but he didn’t seem all that inflamed, and that’s very much Ungar-Sargon’s surface style. And Gleenwald really seemed to manage the discussion (you cannot accurately call this a debate). The whole point was clearly to show how even this matter can be subject to respectful discussion, even among people who have skin in the game.
Which ultimately makes the Israelis and the Jews look better, and by that I mean better than they deserve. Greenwald’s approach/intentions plus Ungar-Sargon’s relentless niceness means she effectively wins. Her essential argument is that the atrocities of 10/7, which never get questioned/disputed, justify destroying Hamas, and that’s what Israel is doing; collateral damage is horrible but inevitable, unavoidable. But after this it’s still possible to kiss and make up, once essentially all the men of fighting age in Gaza are dead. They’re dead because they had agency, and decided to do something truly horrible that justifies all of this. And she says all this while valley-girling and smiling broadly.
Btw, I happened to look at the comments under his TikTok podcast, and as one might expect everyone was sucking his weenie. So against my better judgement I responded to one of them, which elicited the expected response (before it turned ugly - “Nazi!”) - a number of down-votes and comments, all which called me a fed except one that called me a deep state shill. It reminded me of how baked-in the CIA thing is, and how much mindless root-of-all-evil resistance there is to government, sheeple who will “drink the sand because they don’t know the difference”.
That makes Greenwald’s brand of storytelling so easy to do, because his audience comes in pre-manipulated (and pre-Holocausted, btw). Don’t get me wrong, he’s genuinely good at this, no doubt having honed the skills as a lawyer and then taking his inspiration and justification from his roots as a Holocausted Jew.
What he has ended up doing since 10/7 is playing both sides - he continues to maintain his principled anti-Israel position on the Palestinian issue, while subtly undermining that by creating a kind of undeserved legitimacy around the Zionist position. That same basic tactic plays out regarding censorship and freedom of speech - he’s still declaredly and proudly a free speech absolutist, but the specific framing of that absolutely maintains Jewish dominance of the town square. Speech is money and money dominates speech, while in his narrative the biggest opponents to this free speech are the Dems - who are dominated by Jewish money. It really doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t have to. All it has to do is sound good.
It's a kind of high-wide act he’s doing, but we can say the same about Taibbi and Blumenthal, the other two in this tryptic that I’ve been closely watching since long before 10/7. Taibbi is whistling past the graveyard, hoping that his audience won't notice that he's simply not reporting on the biggest news story of the last couple months, really the biggest story of the year. He got spanked by his audience on instinctively supporting the Israeli hospital misfire BS and so he's not going to make that mistake again, by clamming up completely.
So he continues instead to build on the false ethno-cleansed conclusions of the Twitterfilers' censorship-industrial complex, manufacturing the ammunition that gets used by self-identified Jews like Greenwald and Jacob Siegel and Jenin Younes as well as GOP congressmen in DC. Good work, Matt.
While Blumenthal tries to do activist journalism on the other side, providing opposition to the giant blue wall that dominates the media in its entirety. His difficulty (in his mind) is not going too far and setting off the next genocide by telling too much truth about Big Blue. So he has to make his effort to maintain he own version of the separation between Jewishness and Zionism, a distinction without much of a difference in reality. Again we're back to what E. Michael Jones said in the clip in my last piece, the distinction between “the Jews” and “all Jews” - Zionism is “the Jews” while Max is trying to play the “not all Jews” card. Without that much conviction, it must be said.
Maybe this is a good time to go back a decade and watch Max struggling to deal with the same thing, when he was put to the test by co-ethnic future employer Paul Jay:
Back to the present, when this pot has come to a full boil, and this is how it gets expressed:
You can see how time and events have changed Max, matured him, and evolved his worldview. In this podcast video his view of wokeness as fashion and manipulation has advanced by all appearances, and his view of antisemitism has changed as well. It’s not brilliant, but at least it’s now nuanced. And better overall. Bravo.
But what he puts on Zionists, this desire by leadership to manipulate the Jewish masses with fear to stay the abnormal non-assimilative iso-cultural behavior really applies to Jewish behavior for centuries. This is not Zionism, it’s Jewish evolutionary strategy to maintain separation and therefore existence. Minorities who live in other people’s lands eventually assimilate out of existence, but not the Jews, who have found creative and unique ways to sustain themselves for thousands of years. One of those ways is by fomenting hate, on both sides. Friction does not lead to assimilation.
I don’t know why he picks on Episcopalians here, I suppose they are generic protestants in many ways, but as an offshoot of Anglicans they also have this connection to the Catholic Church tradition, so in some sense they are representative of all Christians. And Max can’t help but to take a shot at them here, saying Jews would be funnier and more interesting - latent Jewish superiority, I guess.
Jews would never be “normalized” by simply rejecting Zionism, there’s much more to Jewish culture than that which creates the separation. Just to start with, Holocaustism and the belief in and weaponization of victimhood. Holocaustism is a much bigger issue than Zionism, for all of us. Well, maybe not the Palestinians. Maybe.
In any case, some get better, some get worse, and some check out completely…
Mirrors on the ceiling
The blue champagne on ice
And she said, "We are all just prisoners here
Of our own device"
And in the master's chambers
They gathered for the seder feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can't kill the goyishe beast
Last thing I remember
I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
"Relax," said the “white” man
"We are programmed to deceive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave"