Elon Musk slams NY Times for ignoring his exposé of how Twitter censored Hunter Biden laptop - as woke outlets including Washington Post, CBS News and ABC all avoid the story too
Elon Musk attacked The New York Times on Saturday for not covering his exposé of how Twitter executives were urged by Biden staff to delete tweets relating to the damaging contents of Hunter Biden's laptop.
Other left-leaning outlets including CBS News, ABC and The Washington Post are also yet to cover the 'Twitter Files', despite their contents causing a sensation among American conservatives and free-speech advocates.
In response to the alleged lack of coverage from the Times, Musk described the newspaper as an 'unregistered lobbying firm for far left politicians'.
The comment came in response to a tweet from conservative radio host Clay Travis, who said, 'There is not one single article about @elonmusk or the @twitter email release last night on @nytimes app this morning.'
Musk responded: 'That is because The New York Times has become, for all intents and purposes, an unregistered lobbying firm for far left politicians'.
On Friday Musk promoted a Twitter thread by journalist Matt Taibbi in which, among other things, he published correspondence between Twitter staff in 2020.
In it they discuss censoring a New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop and allude to requests from Biden's team to do so - something Twitter went on to do.
'Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be 'unsafe.'
'They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography,' Taibbi said in one tweet that was part of the thread.
Notably, in one exchange one Twitter executive emailed another a list of tweets with the instruction, 'More to review from the Biden team.'
The other executive responded: 'handled these'.
Publications that have covered the story include POLITICO, NBC and CNN. The latter dampened the news by suggesting the leaked emails 'corroborated what was already known about the incident'.
The Daily Beast echoed that sentiment but discussed the Twitter Files in a story headlined: ''Deeply Underwhelmed': Right-Wingers on Musk's Overhyped 'Twitter Files''
Although the New York Times is yet to write about the thread, it did publish two different stories relating to Musk and Twitter on Saturday, the day after it was posted.
The first of those stories, 'Hate Speech's Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find' criticized Musk for a rise in hate speech since his takeover of the social media company.
The other, 'Twitter Keeps Missing Its Advertising Targets as Woes Mount', was also critical of Musk's management of the platform and suggested that its current ad revenue in the US is 80 percent below internal expectations.
The Washington Post followed a similar trend. The lead story on its website on Saturday night, 'Surging Twitter antisemitism unites fringe and encourages violence, officials say', similarly cited sources who suggested that anti-Semitic speech on Twitter had been on the rise since the Musk takeover.
POLITICO was a major publication that did address the Twitter Files as early as Friday night. Although it did not delve into Taibbi's specific allegations it did link to his 35-tweet thread.
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Left-wing journos attack reporter Matt Taibbi for exposing Musk’s Twitter files
I have always had some time for Taibbi. He always seemed to have an ability to think outside the guardrails -- a rare thing in a Leftist
“Matt Taibbi…what sad, disgraceful downfall,” Daily Beast columnist and New York Times contributor Wajahat Ali posted. “Selling your soul for the richest white nationalist on Earth.”
On Friday, billionaire Elon Musk — who vowed to give the social media giant a free-speech overhaul when he bought it last month — released to Taibbi a shocking collection of inside correspondence proving that Democrat insiders leaned on Twitter’s censors to suppress The Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
While Ali was hitting send, Dem pollster Matt McDermott tweeted a nearly identical put-down.
“Matt Taibbi always was, and still remains, a fraud,” McDermott wrote. “Doing PR for the richest person in the world should come as no surprise.”
The Democrat’s words appeared to have been cut-and-pasted from a tweet NBC’s Ben Collins had posted moments before.
“Imagine throwing it all away to do PR work for the richest person in the world,” Collins wrote. “Humiliating s–t.”
Conservatives on Twitter pummeled Collins, who has made a specialty of attacking Republicans.
“You have so much bitterness and contempt against other people,” wrote independent journalist Andy Ngo. “I hope you find healing in your life.”
“Please keep tweeting,” GOP rapid response staffer Jake Schneider told Collins. “Your meltdown is hilarious.”
Dozens of journalists — including MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny, and the New Republic’s Jacob Silverman — and Democrat partisans piled on, drawing the scorn of investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald.
“The whole sleazy, in-group liberal gang from NBC, Daily Beast, etc — all the censorship advocates who think censorship advocacy is somehow compatible with journalism — are furious that the the acts of their Dem Party allies in getting the Biden story censored are being exposed,” Greenwald posted.
Meanwhile, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety who left the company when Musk completed his takeover, accused the site’s new owner of endangering the censors.
“Publicly posting the names and identities of front-line employees involved in content moderation puts them in harm’s way and is a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do,” Roth posted Friday on Mastodon, the Twitter-like site where many Musk opponents have decamped.
Roth admitted Wednesday that the social media giant “has interfered in elections.”
https://nypost.com/2022/12/03/journos-attack-reporter-matt-taibbi-for-exposing-musks-twitter-files/
***********************************************Olivia Wilde was wrong: Jordan Peterson is not 'insane' and is a hero to many young men from all walks of life because of ONE simple reason
On Saturday night I braved the hordes of 'incels' who flocked to worship their 'hero', the psychology professor turned online superstar Jordan Peterson.
Incel stands for 'involuntary celibate', and according to actress Olivia White the label fits the angry sexually deprived young men who idolise 'this insane man' Peterson, and who regard him as their 'pseudo-intellectual hero'.
The tweeted accusation brought Peterson to tears when he discussed it with Piers Morgan on his talk show Uncensored in September. 'I thought the marginalised were supposed to have a voice?' Peterson said.
'People have been after me for a long time because I have been speaking to young men, what a terrible thing to do.'
For a close up look at who Peterson's audience actually is, I attended his 'Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life' national speaking tour in Sydney.
The bulk of his audience were young men but it certainly wasn't exclusively so, there were a substantial number of women plus some distinguished older looking attendees.
After talking to many, the main theme behind their devotion to Peterson was based on his courage ' to say things that are meant to be said'.
Ben, 22, said he was there after reading Peterson's 2019 bestseller '12 Rules for Life'. 'I did think it motivated my own personal life and I think for today’s society he's a good role model. I think he's someone people my age or adolescents should be looking up to,' Ben said.
'Especially for males in our age, he makes us be more accountable for our day-to-day lives in little things and simply just cleaning up your own act, in your own house and then broadening that out to the wider range of society.'
Ben did not think he was an 'incel' or that Peterson's audience was predominantly 'incels'.
'I think there are a lot of different people here, there are a diverse group of people, you just can't put up an umbrella over all these different people because they like Jordan Peterson,' he said.
Connor, 25, said he had been a Peterson fan for a couple of years after discovering him on YouTube, which has been the Canadian academic's springboard to global fame.
'His (Peterson's) first book is a great message – clean yourself up, get your basic variables in order try to maximise them before you go out into the world,' Connor said.
'There's a lot of traps that young men can fall into and I think that’s really great advice to counter those ideas.'
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Transgender Surgeries Are No ‘Cure’ for Distressed Youths, Doctor Says
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—Surgically removing body parts and destroying healthy human function “violates one of the most fundamental principles of plastic surgery,” Dr. Patrick Lappert testified, explaining why he refuses to remove breasts from females who seek to appear male.
Lappert took the stand on Nov. 29 in federal court here as a witness for the state of Arkansas, which is defending a legal attack on a law banning transgender medical procedures for minors.
Those measures include hormones and surgeries, such as double mastectomies that “gender-affirming care” proponents champion as a cure for girls who are distressed over their bodies’ female attributes.
Earlier this year, Lappert testified in favor of a similar bill in Alabama, where he is based.
The Arkansas trial began in October but recessed for a month before resuming with testimony intended to support the Arkansas Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act. That law has been on hold while the legal battle, which started right after its passage in April 2021, continues.
Judge James Moody Jr. will decide the case known as Brandt v. Rutledge; it is the nation’s first legal test of such a law.
Attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) want the law struck down as unconstitutional. One of their main contentions: it’s discriminatory for the state to prohibit medical procedures for transgender purposes yet allow them for other reasons.
But Lappert testified that in his private surgery practice he refuses to perform certain procedures depending on the intended purpose—a nod to the law that seeks to forbid procedures for gender-transition purposes.
It’s acceptable to enhance breasts for a grown woman who has finished her childbearing years; it’s not appropriate to do that for a teen who isn’t finished growing and may jeopardize her future ability to breastfeed an infant, he said.
Inside the Patient’s Mind
As a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, Lappert said he must dabble in psychology, too. It’s essential to consider the patient’s reasons for wanting the surgery, along with the form and function of the body parts that the patient wants to surgically alter, he said.
For example, there’s a difference between breast augmentation surgery for a woman who just finds that look “aesthetically” pleasing, versus one who thinks having bigger breasts would prevent her from losing her intimate partner, Lappert said.
Likewise, it’s one thing to remove breasts from a cancer patient; it’s another, he said, to do double mastectomies on young patients who believe that body alteration will cure them of distress over their transgender identity.
Yet that is among the procedures labeled “gender-affirming care”—procedures that the SAFE Act seeks to outlaw.
Surgeons are responsible for ferreting out patients who harbor unrealistic beliefs about the benefits of the surgeries they seek, Lappert said. These patients have “an expectation of happiness that is not achievable through plastic surgery,” he said.
They may blame their sorrows on a physical attribute “because they don’t want to look at the actual cause of their sorrow,” Lappert said.
These patients are seeking a surgical solution to an internal conflict, he said.
As Lappert pointedly stated in a written court filing: “You cannot heal a psychological wound with cosmetic surgery.”
Dismissing such concerns and giving patients what they want in the pursuit of happiness is unethical, Lappert said. “You’re abusing the patient.”
Because after an initial period of post-surgery euphoria and novelty wears off, such a patient “is left with the same sorrow and a bill for plastic surgery, and their hopes have not been realized,” Lappert said.
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Conservatives who have not moved with the times
What George Will and Karl Rove Get Wrong About Current Conservatism
Are modern conservatives just unthinking rubes who want to be angry?
That was the tenor of a discussion Wednesday on the “future of conservatism” featuring former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove and columnist George Will, who announced that he’d left the Republican Party in 2016.
The event was sponsored in part by the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, a curious choice to discuss the future of conservative ideas. Johnson was the architect of the Great Society, the largest expansion of the federal government in our history alongside the New Deal.
Rove said that many of the conservative “touchstones” of the past, such as federalism and limited government, have been diminished and replaced by populists and European “blood-and-soil-style” conservatism.
Will acknowledged that “the Democratic Party used to be the party of the New Deal, [and] now it’s the party of new genders.” But the veteran columnist saved most of his fire for Republicans and the Right.
Will said the country is crying out for Ronald Reagan’s cheerfulness, patriotism, and economic dynamism.
“If that’s zombie Reaganism, sign me up,” he said.
Will later said that viewers of Fox News “only feel alive when they are angry.”
Will also took a shot at my employer, The Heritage Foundation, saying that it is “taking the think out of think tank” because by urging more scrutiny of Ukraine aid packages, Heritage is leading the U.S. toward “isolationism.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
That “isolationism” charge is just lazy. Being skeptical about money and resources that the U.S. sends abroad—even for causes we Americans believe in—isn’t isolationism, it’s prudence.
‘Dystopian’ Right?
Aside from that shot at Heritage, Will and Rove launched a more serious broadside at the Right.
First, they charged that conservatives have abandoned the principles and character of Reagan. Second, that the Right is now angrier than in Reagan’s day and angry populism isn’t “conservative” at all.
Finally, Will and Rove advocated returning to a type of court conservatism that they attribute to Reagan, but that actually has a lot more in common with the governing philosophy of former President George W. Bush.
Rove said that many on the Right now sound like the Left because they reject the optimism of Reagan and paint a dark, “dystopian” picture of America.
For those who continually harp on the “angry” tenor of our age in relation to Reagan’s cheerfulness, we should consider a few things. In his own day, Reagan often was ridiculed and denounced as an affable but radical right-winger. He certainly was by the Republican establishment of the time.
“This country needs a new administration, with a renewed dedication to the dream of America—an administration that will give that dream new life and make America great again.”
That wasn’t Donald Trump in 2016, that was Reagan in 1980, making his final appeal to American voters as a presidential candidate that year.
“The populism that we have today … is based on a belief that the whole system is rigged, that the elites have rigged the entire system against ordinary Americans,” Rove said.
Perhaps Rove should consider that the populists have a point.
The daily reality of conservatives across the country is that of fighting an onslaught of powerful institutions, both public and private, arrayed against beliefs that even 10 years ago would be considered basic and foundational.
A Distorted ‘Normality’
Today’s citizen has no reason to believe that his news outlets will report the truth, his child’s school will teach anything good about his country, or that any potential legal accusations will be adjudicated without regard to political perspective. He has every reason to be afraid that exercising his constitutional right to freedom of speech by voicing beliefs completely ordinary by the standards of his countrymen—but contrary to the new dogmas of the elite class—will result at least in Big Tech censorship, and if he is unlucky, losing his job or even access to important private services such as banking.
If that’s not a rigged system, what, in Rove’s estimation, qualifies?
Rove said that what the country wants is “what we thought we’d get with [President Joe] Biden—normality.” The hard reality is that “normality” is now dictated by institutions wholly captured by the radical ideology of the hard Left.
So, what would that return to normality even look like now?
The brand of “conservatism” that Rove and Will argue for is one that tacitly concedes that the institutions and levers of power in American society will be free to take the country in an implicitly left-wing and radical direction.
The Left’s long march through the institutions is complete. Defenders of a rote and milquetoast “conservatism” offer no answer to reversing or even slowing down that march into the lives and homes of the American people.
A “conservatism” that has no solution to this crisis other than gauzy appeals to free trade, markets, and the opportunity society is not conserving anything at all.
In Reagan’s day, Super Bowl ads were full of American flags and appeals to patriotism to sell everything from beer to cars. Today, corporate America has become one of the key pillars of institutional wokeness. The most powerful corporations in the world often are in lockstep enforcing left-wing cultural orthodoxy, trusting to the common faculty-lounge politics of most of their competitors’ workforces and c-suites to hold conservative consumers as a captive audience. They often do this in collusion with the federal government, but this isn’t just a government problem.
Confronting the Left
This left-wing, institutional, hybrid, public-private takeover provides a challenge that hadn’t yet reached its crescendo in Reagan’s time. These new cultural values are ruthlessly enforced internally and externally.
As activist-journalist Christopher Rufo has demonstrated time and again, the cult of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” preaches noxious racialism and disturbing, farcical gender ideology behind closed doors at the largest corporate entities in America, and gets paid well to do it.
The Right must confront the power of Google and Amazon while the Left spends its time trying to destroy a small-time Christian baker in Colorado because they worry that somebody, somewhere isn’t going along with the program.
Serious challenges to left-wing control of institutions are taken to be apocalyptic events, worthy of pulling out every stop to counter.
Take, for instance, the current panic about billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s taking over Twitter. Musk isn’t an orthodox conservative by any stretch, and really has committed only to making the social media platform more amenable to free speech without censorship. But that’s apparently a bridge too far.
Not only has the corporate media treated Musk’s Twitter deal as the end of the world, but the Biden administration made threatening statements about “keeping an eye” on “misinformation” from the platform. Half of Twitter’s top advertisers immediately pulled their ads.
That’s the kind of overwhelming institutional grip the Left has on corporate America. Musk may survive that onslaught, but he will do so as the richest man on the planet. What are average Americans, those of us who don’t have billions of dollars, teams of lawyers, and a legion of lobbyists at their disposal, to do?
Will and Rove also repeated the usual tiresome litany of complaints that populist conservatives have disappointed them on issues such as immigration, same-sex marriage, and foreign policy.
Will quipped that “if Donald Trump were ever to build his wall, he would have had to do it with immigrant labor.”
Ah yes, the people stink.
Things Have Changed
Maybe instead of just calling for replacing unemployed Americans with foreign workers, conservatives’ goal should be to create the conditions where more Americans will seek and find meaningful work so they can strengthen themselves, their families, and their country too.
Just a little over a decade ago, President Barack Obama said he believed marriage should be between a man and a woman. We are now transitioning to an America in which believing that will provoke an investigation by the Justice Department.
The conservatism that Will and Rove are advocating is effectively a return to the foreign policy of George W. Bush, an abandonment of foundational cultural issues, and policies that foster unrestrained immigration. Worst of all, it doesn’t address the radical transformation of our institutions.
This is no way forward. Their nostalgia for the sunny optimism of the Reagan era is built on the false premise that we are living in the Reagan era. But the country and the world have changed, and we do a disservice to ourselves—especially as conservatives—if we don’t acknowledge that.
In Reagan’s farewell address, he spoke about tax cuts and foreign policy but saved his most important message for the end.
Reagan celebrated the new spirit of patriotism in America and the economic prosperity unleashed during his presidency. However, he warned that what we needed was “informed patriotism,” and that the nation was losing its institutional, cultural support for the kind of love of country he had grown up with. The world was changing.
“Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children,” Reagan said. “And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it.”
We still haven’t. That’s not Reagan’s fault, but we must acknowledge that it’s why the country is in crisis and why a healthy dose of populism is a healthy counterweight to institutions and an elite class that not only have lost their way but are actively harming our society.
The Corrupted Elite
Here is Irving Kristol, one of the godfathers of neoconservatism no less, writing in 1985 that “populism” was perhaps the best, commonsense response to the country’s unthinking elites:
To put it simply: The common sense—not the passion, but the common sense—of the American people has been outraged, over the past 20 years, by the persistent un-wisdom of their elected and appointed officials. To the degree that we are witnessing a crisis in our democratic institutions, it is a crisis of our disoriented elites, not of a blindly impassioned populace.
Kristol hit the nail on the head as far as where the corruption and failure is coming from in America and in other Western societies. If anything, the corrupted elite has amassed more power and is even less thoughtful today.
It’s the elites who are our age’s Jacobins. They are the ones overturning and perverting American institutions. They are the ones who’ve accepted that America was built on a legacy of “white supremacy” and justify racialized policies under the false idea that the system is “rigged” by institutional racism.
It’s our elites who say nonsense like “free speech is a danger to democracy,” and suppress the truth because it doesn’t conform with their approved narratives.
It’s our elites who not only stood by while our history was being torn down by mobs, but also often openly embraced and furthered the project. When the National Archives is reorienting itself to portray celebration of the Founding Fathers as “structural racism,” that should be a DEFCON 1 alert that there’s something fundamentally wrong.
To push back against these forces, a daunting task, requires conservatives—if they want anything decent left to conserve at all—to recognize what is arrayed against us and fight back, not to mindlessly pledge loyalty to the exact program that made sense in 1983 while looking contemptuously at voters pointing out the five-alarm fire in our midst.
A little populist anti-elitism and anger at the destruction of the American way of life may be exactly what our ailing republic needs.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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