Tag: media

It’s clear that the media executives believe that if there is one thing the US public simply cannot do without, it is advice from Jews who can’t keep their fat little hands off their own genitals:

 An international team of amateurs cracked the thin white-coated wall of silence that professional scientists were maintaining, with the full collusion of the mainstream media, to hide the fact that the coronavirus was a man-made bioweapon:

When the pandemic happened to break out on the doorstep of the lab with the largest collection of coronaviruses in the world, fueling speculation that the WIV might be involved, Daszak and 26 other scientists signed a letter that appeared in The Lancet on February 19, 2020. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” it stated.

We now know, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, that Daszak orchestrated the letter to squelch talk of a lab leak. He drafted it, reached out to fellow scientists to sign it, and worked behind the scenes to make it seem that the letter represented the views of a broad range of scientists. “This statement will not have the EcoHealth Alliance logo on it and will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person,” he wrote in his pitch to the co-signatories. Scientists whose work had overlapped with the WIV agreed not to sign it so they could “put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration.”

At the time, however, there was no hint of Daszak’s organizing role. The letter helped make Daszak a ubiquitous presence in the media, where he called a lab-leak “preposterous,” “baseless,” and “pure baloney.” He also attacked scientists who published evidence pointing to the lab. Part of the reason the lab theory made no sense, he argued, was because the Wuhan lab wasn’t culturing any viruses remotely similar to SARS-CoV-2. (Daszak has not responded to Newsweek’s request for comment.)

For a long time, Daszak was astonishingly influential. Few in the media questioned him or pointed out that his career and organization would be deeply damaged if it turned out his work had indirectly played a role in the pandemic….

By early 2020, The Seeker was beginning to question that viewpoint. He had begun to interact with people who were poking holes in the conventional wisdom. One important piece was an extensive Medium post by the Canadian longevity entrepreneur Yuri Deigin that discussed RaTG13, a virus Shi Zhengli had revealed to the world in a February 3 paper in the journal Nature. In that paper, Shi presented the first extensive analysis of SARS-CoV-2, which had seemed to come from nowhere—the virus was unlike any that had been seen before, including the first SARS, which had killed 774 people from 2002 to 2004. In her paper, however, Shi also introduced RaTG13, a virus that is similar in genetic makeup to SARS-CoV-2, making it the only known close relative at the time.

The paper was vague about where RaTG13 had come from. It didn’t say exactly where or when RaTG13 had been found, just that it had previously been detected in a bat in Yunnan Province, in southern China.

The paper aroused Deigin’s suspicions. He wondered if SARS-CoV-2 might have emerged through some genetic mixing and matching from a lab working with RaTG13 or related viruses. His post was cogent and comprehensive. The Seeker posted Deigin’s theory on Reddit, which promptly suspended his account permanently.

That early whiff of censorship piqued Seeker’s curiosity, so he read more of the Twitter group’s ideas. “I found a lively group of people eager to debate and explore the topic,” he told Newsweek by email.

It was an eclectic group. There were entrepreneurs, engineers, and a microbiologist from the University of Innsbruck named Rossana Segreto. None of them had known each other in advance; they gravitated to the forum after independently concluding that the conventional wisdom of the origins of COVID-19 didn’t make sense. Conversations were kept on track by a wisecracking coordinator living somewhere in Asia who went by the pseudonym Billy Bostickson, and whose Twitter icon was a cartoon of a beat-up lab monkey.

The Seeker fit right in. “They helped me catch up on the debate, and I started to educate myself,” he says. “Before I knew it, I got hooked into the mystery.” He was driven in part by curiosity, but also by a growing sense of civic duty. “COVID has taken the lives of countless people and devastated so many others. But it has also left so many clues that haven’t been followed up. Humanity deserves answers.”

The Seeker and the rest of the group became increasingly convinced that RaTG13 might hold the key to some of those answers. In a crackling thread, half a dozen participants hashed out its mysteries, combing the internet and the WIV’s previous papers for clues.

If there is a moment when the DRASTIC team coalesced into something more than its disparate parts, it would be this thread. In real time, for all the world to see, they worked through the data, tested various hypotheses, corrected each other, and scored some direct hits.

The key facts quickly came together. The genetic sequence for RaTG13 perfectly matched a small piece of genetic code posted as part of a paper written by Shi Zhengli years earlier, but never mentioned again. The code came from a virus the WIV had found in a Yunnan bat. Connecting key details in the two papers with old news stories, the DRASTIC team determined that RaTG13 had come from a mineshaft in Mojiang County, in Yunnan Province, where six men shoveling bat guano in 2012 had developed pneumonia. Three of them died. DRASTIC wondered if that event marked the first cases of human beings being infected with a precursor of SARS-CoV-2—perhaps RaTG13 or something like it.

In a profile in Scientific American, Shi Zhengli acknowledged working in a mineshaft in Mojiang County where miners had died. But she avoided connecting it to RaTG13 (an omission she had made in her scientific papers as well), claiming that a fungus in the cave had killed the miners.

That explanation didn’t sit well with the DRASTIC group. They suspected a SARS-like virus, not a fungus, had killed the miners and that, for whatever reason, the WIV was trying to hide that fact. It was a hunch, and they had no way of proving it.

At this point, The Seeker revealed his research powers to the group. In his online explorations, he’d recently discovered a massive Chinese database of academic journals and theses called CNKI. Now he wondered if somewhere in its vast circuitry might be information on the sickened miners.

Working through the night at his bedside table on phone and laptop, fueled by chai and using Chinese characters with the help of Google Translate, he plugged in “Mojiang”—the county where the mine was located—in combination with every other word he could think of that might be relevant, instantly translating each new flush of results back to English. “Mojiang + pneumonia”; “Mojiang + WIV”; “Mojiang + bats”; “Mojiang + SARS.” Each search brought back thousands of results and half a dozen different databases for journals, books, newspapers, master’s theses, doctoral dissertations. He combed through these results, night after night, but never found anything useful. When he ran out of energy, he broke for arcade games and more chai.

He was on the verge of calling it quits, he says, when he struck gold: a 60-page master’s thesis written by a student at Kunming Medical University in 2013 titled “The Analysis of 6 Patients with Severe Pneumonia Caused by Unknown Viruses.” In exhaustive detail, it described the conditions and step-by-step treatment of the miners. It named the suspected culprit: “Caused by SARS-like [coronavirus] from the Chinese horseshoe bat or other bats.”

This is a failure of scientistry as much as it is a failure of the media. Remember this in the future: neither the mainstream media nor the professional scientific community can be trusted to tell you the truth in any way, about anything. They will not even hesitate to directly lie to you, and will afterwards go to great lengths to mislead, to redirect, and to cover their tracks.

Daszak and every other signatory of that February letter in The Lancet should have their funding pulled immediately. This illustrates why science is not only not the enemy of Christianity, but to the contrary, is dependent upon it. The method doesn’t mean a damn thing when the man utilizing it is corrupt.

The fringes of the SJW media would like nothing better than to generate another Ruby Ridge out of Owen Benjamin’s Beartaria:

A group of nine of Benjamin’s neighbors have grown concerned about the prospect of Benjamin’s fans trekking out to the property, which they say is zoned for agricultural or forest uses.

In an email to county officials, one neighbor pointed out that the property isn’t serviced by utilities, raising the threat that inexperienced campers could start forest fires in their attempts to have campfires. The property is connected to a narrow, crude road, according to the neighbors, whose meager maintenance amounts to residents adding rocks to it every year.

Benjamin’s neighbors have also become alarmed over the possibility of organized military training at the property.

“This poses a clear and present danger,” a Vietnam War veteran who lives near Benjamin told the Kootenai Valley Times. “This is a commercial enterprise offering training in weapons and tactics and not a use allowed in this zone. There is no conceivable reason to allow this use. If we wait too long, it will be too late.”

Benjamin told The Daily Beast no guns have been fired on the property since he purchased it. But his attempts to downplay the possibility of guns at Ursa Rio have been undermined by his habit of describing grandiose plans for the land in hours-long livestreams several times a week, with the most incendiary statements archived and analyzed by his online detractors.

For example, Benjamin has often referenced having a paramilitary force at his property, saying he is “friends with, basically, a paramilitary group” in Idaho.

“If you try to squat on my land when I offer you campgrounds, I have my own paramilitary squad,” Benjamin said in one video, warning off “Bears” who might try to live on the land permanently.

“I’d have my own private paramilitary force, which is always a good thing,” Benjamin said in another video.

Benjamin insists he was just joking about the paramilitary.

“I do not have a paramilitary squad,” Benjamin told The Daily Beast in an email. “I was making a joke as a comedian. Unless you consider my goats and chickens a military.”

In his videos, Benjamin has also discussed the prospect of guns at “Beartaria.”

“Shooting range?” Benjamin said in one video, describing his plans for a bear-themed community in Idaho. “Yes! Will there be a gun range? Yes!”

By his own accounts, Benjamin does not come off as an ideal neighbor. In several videos, he relates stories where he berates store employees or fellow customers who asked him to wear a face mask. In one incident, according to Benjamin, he called an elderly man in a post office who asked him to wear a mask a “crusty old hunchback” and accused him of being a pervert, saying that masks are only used by criminals or perverts.

After a reporter in the area covered the controversy over Benjamin’s property, the comedian baselessly accused the reporter during a livestream of being a pedophile and mocked him for using a wheelchair.

The entire article is nothing but a series of baseless accusations. Notice that not a single one of these “concerned neighbors” is named. But it’s a good idea to keep this article in mind if you think you’re ever going to escape the conflict simply by moving and minding your own business. Once the media decides you are dangerous to it – and the defeat of Patreon in court by Owen’s Bears combined with the retreat from arbitration on the part of every Big Tech company from Amazon on down is probably what alarmed the media – they will always look to find a way to sic some sort of authority on you.

And unfortunately, unlike in Europe where defamation laws are still enforced to the point that a well-known television celebrity is now facing bankruptcy for a single tweet falsely accusing a woman of having had an affair, the US media can still expect to get away with nonsense like this. So remember, everything you say and write will be used against you in the court of public opinion.

Knowing Owen, he’ll befriend those frightened neighbors before the end of the summer, at which point the Daily Beast will be forced to invent some other fake controversy. But Owen really needs to up his media game. He really should have known the correct way to address the reporter’s alleged idiosyncracies was to say that “a group of the reporter’s neighbors have grown concerned about the prospect of the reporter being a pedophile and fear that he might run over their children’s toes with his wheelchair.”

I’d heard some of the rumors talking about an August timeframe for a Trump return to the White House, so it’s interesting to see that they have now entered the mainstream narrative:

But hey, if you’re going to sell out, at least make sure you get something valuable for your soul:

For the past six years of OutKick radio, Julie Talbott, Don Martin and Scott Shapiro, the best bosses I’ve ever had, have supported me 100{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6}. Not once have I ever gotten a call asking me to avoid a topic or to be careful about what I was saying on a sensitive issue. All three of them have been absolutely fantastic. My wife, whose counsel I trust more than anyone on the planet, said upon meeting Julie and Don for the first time six years ago, “These people barely know you and they already treat you better than anyone you’ve ever worked for.” She, as usual, was right.

Several months ago, Julie Talbott called me with a question: What did I think about the idea of moving to the Rush Limbaugh time slot? Note, she didn’t say, “What do you think about replacing Rush Limbaugh?”

So beginning in June, instead of hearing me daily on Fox Sports Radio nationwide, you will be hearing me from 12-3 Eastern every day, on the largest radio show network in the country. And I’ll be joined by co-host Buck Sexton, whom I believe many of you will come to love as well. This is a secret both of us have been keeping quiet for months now. We’ve even done secret mock shows with each other in addition to the daily shows we’ve been doing. Trust me on this, Buck is fantastic, and we are going to have the best daily conversations anywhere on radio. I’m 100{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6} confident of this fact.

His cluelessness is actually kind of cute. 

These wonderful people treat me so well and say such nice things to me! They gave me lots of money, they never tell me what do to or say, and now they’re giving me the biggest microphone in the country!

Congratulations, Clay. Now try saying “Free Palestine” or talking about Ann Frank’s ballpoint pen on that big microphone and you’ll see their other face.

If you want to know where the next batch of cuckservative talking heads can be found, they’re pupating in the swamp of the controlled fake opposition at Newsmax:

As the two fringe cable TV outlets battle for former President Donald Trump’s affections, several high-profile One America News staffers have jumped ship to Newsmax—not just in pursuit of a larger audience, insiders said, but also as a respite from OAN’s increasing extremism.

Already known for its cartoonishly bonkers MAGA propagandizing, OAN in recent months has veered even further into unhinged right-wing territory. And Newsmax—which is often just as obsequiously pro-Trump in its commentary—has pulled back on its wildest election conspiracy theories while hoovering up some of OAN’s top on-air talent: news anchor Alex Salvi, correspondent Jenn Pellegrino, and reporter Amanda Brilhante. Those moves followed Newsmax poaching OAN’s White House correspondent Emerald Robinson last year.

Pellegrino, who served as a White House correspondent and on-air host for OAN, abruptly left the far-right channel earlier this month, only for Newsmax to announce her debut as co-anchor of a 9 p.m. ET program called Cortes and Pellegrino, co-hosted by former Trump campaign senior adviser Steve Cortes.

In late March, meanwhile, Salvi—one of OAN’s rare “straight news” anchors—revealed during his media-focused show After Hours that he was exiting the network after hosting since 2019. A few weeks later, Salvi quietly showed up on Newsmax, revealing his new role as a Rome-based foreign correspondent with the network. Brilhante, who’d been with OAN since graduating college in 2017, was hired away in February to be Newsmax’s breaking news reporter.

Newsmax is literally the most bogus operation with which I have ever have had the misfortune of working. I have more respect and affection for both GT Interactive and Indiegogo, and we all know how those relationships turned out. Some longtime readers may recall the brief period when VP featured ads, which were small and wouldn’t have been distracting if they hadn’t so often mentioned CELEBRITY FEET! or other ridiculous topics that still puzzle me as to how they qualify as a variety of clickbait.

Anyhow, I was paid for the ads, and the contract specified a significant boost once the blog got to a certain level of traffic, which might have been one million monthly pageviews. Like I said, this was a while ago, probably 2014. Once I’d hit that target which they’d specified, I let them know, along with a screenshot proving that the target had been legitimately hit. Newsmax’s response? They immediately terminated the target and never paid the previous two months that they’d owed.

About 18 months later, they came back and tried to pitch me on working with them again. Let’s just say that I actually laughed before declining in no uncertain terms.

So, I’ve known they were shady for some time now. But as AC points out, in light of the CEO’s million-dollar donation to the Clinton Foundation and the way they are now throwing out tickets to those willing to take them, it’s pretty clear that they go well beyond shady.

Fred Rogers’s children’s ministry wasn’t exactly what one would call conventional, and he certainly didn’t win his war against the wicked medium of television. But he fought a much better fight, and fought it for far longer, than most Christians in these latter days of the latest iteration of The Empire That Never Ended. This is the 1998 article upon which the movie I mentioned on a recent Darkstream was based; it’s intriguing to see both how much the movie relied upon it and where the movie departed from it in the interests of drama:

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of sneakers. His name was Fred Rogers. He was starting a television program, aimed at children, called Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. He had been on television before, but only as the voices and movements of puppets, on a program called The Children’s Corner. Now he was stepping in front of the camera as Mister Rogers, and he wanted to do things right, and whatever he did right, he wanted to repeat. And so, once upon a time, Fred Rogers took off his jacket and put on a sweater his mother had made him, a cardigan with a zipper. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of navy-blue canvas boating sneakers. He did the same thing the next day, and then the next…until he had done the same things, those things, 865 times, at the beginning of 865 television programs, over a span of thirty-one years. The first time I met Mister Rogers, he told me a story of how deeply his simple gestures had been felt, and received. He had just come back from visiting Koko, the gorilla who has learned—or who has been taught—American Sign Language. Koko watches television. Koko watches Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and when Mister Rogers, in his sweater and sneakers, entered the place where she lives, Koko immediately folded him in her long, black arms, as though he were a child, and then … “She took my shoes off, Tom,” Mister Rogers said….

The first time I called Mister Rogers on the telephone, I woke him up from his nap. He takes a nap every day in the late afternoon—just as he wakes up every morning at five-thirty to read and study and write and pray for the legions who have requested his prayers; just as he goes to bed at nine-thirty at night and sleeps eight hours without interruption. On this afternoon, the end of a hot, yellow day in New York City, he was very tired, and when I asked if I could go to his apartment and see him, he paused for a moment and said shyly, “Well, Tom, I’m in my bathrobe, if you don’t mind.” I told him I didn’t mind, and when, five minutes later, I took the elevator to his floor, well, sure enough, there was Mister Rogers, silver-haired, standing in the golden door at the end of the hallway and wearing eyeglasses and suede moccasins with rawhide laces and a flimsy old blue-and-yellow bathrobe that revealed whatever part of his skinny white calves his dark-blue dress socks didn’t hide. “Welcome, Tom,” he said with a slight bow, and bade me follow him inside, where he lay down—no, stretched out, as though he had known me all his life—on a couch upholstered with gold velveteen. He rested his head on a small pillow and kept his eyes closed while he explained that he had bought the apartment thirty years before for $11,000 and kept it for whenever he came to New York on business for the Neighborhood. 

I sat in an old armchair and looked around. The place was drab and dim, with the smell of stalled air and a stain of daguerreotype sunlight on its closed, slatted blinds, and Mister Rogers looked so at home in its gloomy familiarity that I thought he was going to fall back asleep when suddenly the phone rang, startling him. “Oh, hello, my dear,” he said when he picked it up, and then he said that he had a visitor, someone who wanted to learn more about the Neighborhood. “Would you like to speak to him?” he asked, and then handed me the phone. “It’s Joanne,” he said. I took the phone and spoke to a woman—his wife, the mother of his two sons—whose voice was hearty and almost whooping in its forthrightness and who spoke to me as though she had known me for a long time and was making the effort to keep up the acquaintance. When I handed him back the phone, he said, “Bye, my dear,” and hung up and curled on the couch like a cat, with his bare calves swirled underneath him and one of his hands gripping his ankle, so that he looked as languorous as an odalisque. There was an energy to him, however, a fearlessness, an unashamed insistence on intimacy, and though I tried to ask him questions about himself, he always turned the questions back on me, and when I finally got him to talk about the puppets that were the comfort of his lonely boyhood, he looked at me, his gray-blue eyes at once mild and steady, and asked,

“What about you, Tom? Did you have any special friends growing up?”

“Special friends?”

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe a puppet, or a special toy, or maybe just a stuffed animal you loved very much. Did you have a special friend like that, Tom?”

“Yes, Mister Rogers.”

“Did your special friend have a name, Tom?”

“Yes, Mister Rogers. His name was Old Rabbit.”

“Old Rabbit. Oh, and I’ll bet the two of you were together since he was a very young rabbit. Would you like to tell me about Old Rabbit, Tom?”

It’s not unusual that a child with a difficult experience growing up will transform that experience into strength, or even into something resembling a psychological superpower. But it’s very rare to see that sort of strength utilized in such a kind, positive, and focused manner. 

Clay Travis celebrates being bought by the Murdoch Cube:

So how do you get kids, who have tremendous advantages you didn’t have, to work hard and compete in the future? That’s what I’m going to spend the next 10-15 years working on with my boys. And it’s a new concern that I’m grappling with right now.

But after we signed the papers to sell OutKick, I turned to my wife and told her there would never be any kids, grandkids or great-grandkids who had to worry about money during our lifetimes. (They all may blow it after we die.) And that was a pretty incredible moment to have as parents, and hopefully future grandparents and great-grandparents too.

I also told my wife that since she’s going to live to be over 100 years old and I think I’m probably going to die around 51 years old from working too much that she’s going to be a really rich widow for a long time.

On the one hand, you can’t fault an entrepreneur for living the dream. Selling out is the original objective for most startups. On the other hand, if you’re preaching about the importance of independent media, being your own boss, and the evils of the corrupt mainstream media, then how on Earth can you justify selling out to the very people responsible for the problem in the first place? It’s not merely hypocritical, it’s outright wrong.

Anyhow, I thought this graphic below was an interesting comparison. Note that SimilarWeb seriously underestimates VP’s pageviews – which according to Google were over 8 million in January – but I assume it does the same for everyone, so it’s the relative aspect that matters. Fortunately, no media company is interesting in acquiring VP and I have absolutely no interest in taking any tickets. Among other things, I know how fast what appears to be “generational money” can vanish, even during the founder’s lifetime. You may be able to outkick the coverage, but once you take it, you can’t outkick the ticket.

Gandhi’s Law: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Drudge’s Addendum: After which they buy you out and undo everything you accomplished.

The Drudge Report’s drift from its original Internet rebelliousness took another step into mainstream irrelevance with a purge this week of links to pioneering conservative sites The Gateway Pundit, World Net Daily, Free Republic, Daily Wire and Western Journal, and Lucianne.com. Also reportedly gone are links to the late Rush Limbaugh’s site and columnist David Limbaugh.

Infowars and ZeroHedge survived the purge, however one report observed ZeroHedge was delisted for a time this week.

The Drudge Report has gone through a sharp change in recent years leading to speculation about whether reclusive owner-editor Matt Drudge secretly sold the site and relinquished control. Regardless, the site is not what it used to be and has lost substantial traffic.

Last month the Press Gazette reported the Drudge Report lost over forty percent of its traffic year-on-year from February 2020 to February 2021, “Influential conservative news aggregation site the Drudge Report saw its year-on-year visits fall by 41{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} from 71.4 million to 42.4 million.”

This is why the entrepreneur’s dream of being acquired or going public is so ultimately futile. Because unless you’re creating something purely for the love of filthy lucre, selling out is going to destroy what you created. The more effective and beautiful your creation, the more demand there will be to subvert it, if not entirely invert it.

Joseph Farah of WND saw it coming.

In the early days, WND had the distinguished honor of having more links back on Drudge than any other website. Joseph Farah was the second one. How did I achieve it way back in the ’90s? I simply asked for it. Yes, Drudge and I had a real relationship. That’s how I knew in recent years that it wasn’t Drudge in charge. He sold it – or sold out. 

Fortunately, there is still Infogalactic News for all your daily aggregated news links. 

Not bad, considering that unlike its traffic peers, this is just a blog that doesn’t even purport to be any sort of magazine or corporate endeavor. I’m a little surprised there are more visits here than to The Unz Review, given the higher pageviews there, but Ron features deeper and more varied content, so I suppose that makes sense. Anyhow, Ron is right to observe that while the converged social media companies can take a bite out of our traffic, they can’t stop the greater part of the signal.