Paywalled.

In late 2018 and early 2019, before the release of the Mueller report, I sometimes felt fear that if I didn’t get out of the legacy press soon, I might go on a tri-state killing spree, ending up a young father gunned down on the Taconic Parkway. I thought those feelings were past, but a clip of Ezra Klein chuckling to former Buzzfeed chief Ben Smith about Russiagate brought them all back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwXoZ1dF3G4

Smith, whose decision to publish the loony Steele Dossier in full despite obvious factual problems struck me as nuts at the time, and later doubled down on the decision multiple times (including in a long Atlantic piece in 2023), now smiles and speaks of regrets. Echoing former New York Times editor Dean Bacquet, who after the collapse of the Mueller probe complained of pressure on Russia from “[our readers who want Donald Trump to go away](h

In his interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ezra Klein repeatedly—over and over again—launders the ongoing genocide by blaming Palestinians for it. He does this through the term "agency," the favorite liberal and pseudo-intellectual buzzword used to justify all their genocidal mania.

This is the magic of "agency": it turns everything into whatever you want while pretending you are making an objective, fair, and reasonable analytical point. It allows you to posture as intellectually honest and serious. That is who Ezra Klein is. He is the paragon of moral virtue, the quintessential New York Times liberal. He determines what is just and unjust for the world today and throughout history. The Ezra Kleins embody virtue.

So, are Palestinians being subjected to genocide by Ezra Kleins? That, in their moral framework, is virtue. That is moral necessity. That is the height of morality itself.

Why? Because "agency," a pseudo-intellectual concept I have [thorough

In this public News Brief, we discuss the media and high-profile Democratic Party leaders and 'Free Speech' crowd's muted—or, in many cases, completely silent—response to the greatest attack on free speech in recent memory: Trump's kidnapping and disappearing of Palestinian solidarity students.

I’d never heard of the “Harper’s letter”: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

The AI feature, called Insights, is, for some reason, designed to evaluate the political orientation of opinion articles and then artificially generate countervailing points for the reader’s consumption. As my former boss, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, explains in his introduction to the feature, Insights “offers an annotated summary of the ideas expressed in the piece along with different views on the topic from a variety of sources.”

In this case, the AI responded to a piece by my former columnist colleague Gustavo Arellano, which argued that his hometown of Anaheim shouldn’t forget the KKK’s reign of terror there. The AI Insight then informed readers that, actually, as the New York Times’ Ryan Mac pointed out, the Klan may simply have been “respondin

Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October, whose final episode airs this Monday, is such a travesty, so discredited by the very historical events it promises to explain, that it earns a glowing, five-star review from the Guardian.

It “speaks to everyone that matters”, the liberal daily gushes. And that’s precisely the problem.

‘Honest broker’ fiction

The United States is the star of the show, of course. Its officials tell a story of Washington desperately trying to bring together the two parties, Israel and Fatah (the third party, Hamas, is intentionally sidelined), but finds itself constantly hamstrung by bad luck and the intransigence of those involved.

Yes, you read that right. This documentary really does res

President Trump’s decision to cut funding to USAID revealed the extent to which the US government has been financing media, protests and other means to hijack civil society around the world. In Ukraine, USAID had a key role in toppling President Yanukovych in 2014 and has since financed between 85-90% of Ukrainian media to ensure narrative control. The Georgian Prime Minister has also been warning that Western NGOs have been activated to topple the government and convert Georgia into a second front against Russia. There is also overwhelming evidence that the US government established “non-governmental organisations” (NGOs) since the 1980s that are financed by the US government, staffed with people linked to the US intelligence community, and pursue US geopolitical interests under the guise of promoting democracy and human rights. One of these “NGOs” is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) established by Reagan to take over some of the tasks of the CIA. These organisations are in

This is part of a much larger media regime that, above all, must assume good faith from those in power, no matter their past lies, far-right ideological beliefs, or brash and illegal behavior. Let us call it the “Inverse Power-Skepticism Principle, which can be seen here:

There are simply different editorial standards for people like Musk, who can spend the better part of five years posting white nationalist memes, libeling and lashing out at critics, promoting racist conspiracy theories, and mocking trans people, but still is presented by Respectable Media Outlets, as someone concerned with deficits who would simply wants to “reduce waste” and “find savings.” Meanwhile, those far from the halls of power, Official Enemy States and activists are assumed to be inherently ideological and motivated by political ends. Take, for example, a [Times report](

In this News Brief, we detail the Trump's administration's strategy of trying to terrorize migrant communities, why it's not working as planned, how The New York Times is manufacturing a pro-mass deportation consensus and how migrant communities and their allies are fighting back.

We are joined by Chris from the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths.

This is a common convention of the “extreme weather” genre as climate chaos makes these destructive events more and more common: simply report the human suffering and sensational images, and make no mention of the human causes of the horrors people are seeing on their screen. Strip what is fundamentally a political story of all politics, and index the trauma squarely into the Oh, Dearism genre of passive reporting.

These devastating wildfires are not random acts of God. They are fueled and made far more likely by human-made climate change, a dynamic that will only get worse if those in power fail to act and reverse the US’s record fossil fuel production. But why would politicians and CEOs feel any pressure to respond to these catastrophic events when so few in the media center the role of

I saw a rant from Mehdi Hasan the other day complaining that the way Elon Musk constantly says the media are corrupt and dishonest “has a massive effect not just on trust and polarization in society, but on election outcomes and political messaging.”

Hasan said that Musk, Trump and their ilk “have cynically created an unpenetrable [sic] bubble around their followers, primed them against a reality-based universe, [and] pre-emptively undermined any negative stories about themselves.”

Hasan is of course correct that the people who listen to Trump and Musk have largely been herded into fact-resistant echo chambers of cult-like loyalty, but it’s worth pointing out that Musk’s claims about the media are absolutely correct as well. The media are corrupt and untrustworthy, and do indeed promote lies and propaganda all the time. Just because Elon Musk says it doesn’t mean it’s false.

One great challenge of our time is that while

This is an “unlisted” YouTube video because it’s for paid subscribers. https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/victoria-nuland-preemptively-warns

“It’s the third election in a row,” says Rachel Maddow with a told-you-so grin, “in which Russia has tried to interfere to try to get Trump into the White House.”

“He’s at it again,” responds former State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, the same smile on her face (it seems they’re struggling to hide their joy this time around). Nuland, who has worked for both George Bush and Dick Cheney, has become a go-to warrior for Dems as a leading pusher of stolen election claims as well as a driving force behind the Ukraine-Russian War. “This time [Putin’s] not even trying to hide his hand, and he has far more sophisticated tools.”

Russia’s so-called tools in the past amounted to, as evidenced in the Mueller report and an FBI investigation, a few thousand dollars spent on social media posts, such as the ‘buff Bernie’ meme. This time, Nula

I expect no better from a lying war criminal.

In fact, as we’ll unpack further below, this tech-bombing was even worse than you imagined. The military wing of Hezbollah does not use pager or walkie talkies. They’ve used their own fiber optic network since 2006, and otherwise rely on couriers. These devices were in the hands of civilian Hezbollah workers, such as members of its large social services effort. Yes, military members may have been hurt too, but that was dumb luck, like being in proximity to blown-up pager-user or picking up a ringing device on behalf of someone else.

Needless to say, this also means that the device attacks were pure terrorism, with no remotely colorable military purpose whatsoever. Remember, the press has brayed that Israel has been working on this caper for 15 years. But Hezbollah moved its military comms to fiber optic before that. And Israel surely knew that. So that means this entire enterprise was from its outset a terrorist scheme and never a military operation.