OH-MY: Trump Unleashes Vile Threats in Tantrum Over Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ Farce (Part 6)

Posted by Mark NC on December 17, 2022 at 11:04 am. 10 Comments :

For the past couple of weeks Elon Musk has been hyping a series of pathetically shallow “Twitter Files” document dumps. He has characterized it as an “exposé” of Twitter’s prior management’s alleged cabal against aspiring tyrant and insurrection inciter, Donald Trump. Now episode 6 continues to expose only Musk’s own craven biases and dishonesty.

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Consistent with the previous episodes, the latest installment only manages to prove that prior content moderation decisions were actually responsible and that Twitter’s Trust and Safety team (who Musk recently fired) acted in good faith to protect their platform – and the nation – from the deliberate incitements to violence of Donald Trump and his “Big Lie” confederates.

Teasing the release of the sixth batch of what were private internal communications, Musk tweeted “And soon, ladies & gentlemen, the coup de grâce,” followed the single word “KABOOM,” which ironically is an accurate descriptor of his latest bomb. It is hardly the “coup de grâce” that he is bragging about.

In the 45 tweets of Episode 6 Musk’s “correspondent” (aka puppet), Matt Taibbi, began by making a couple of wholly unsupported conclusions that were supposedly based on the messages he posted. However, there was nothing in those messages that affirmed his predetermined conclusions. He began…

3. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.
4. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.
5. Some are mundane […]
6. But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation.

What Taibbi is portraying as “constant and pervasive” is 150 emails sent in a period of three years. And many of those were, by Taibbi’s own account, “mundane.” So, doing the math, there were likely only one or two a month that were relevant. That’s a rather tortured definition of “pervasive.” Particularly when considering the fact that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies were rightfully concerned about disinformation being spread by hostile foreign entities. Consequently, they stayed in touch with the social media platforms that those entities were exploiting to keep them apprised of the situation. That is, in fact, their job.

Taibbi later grossly misrepresented an email from the FBI to Twitter, saying…

[13] “HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which “FBI San Francisco is notifying you” it wants action on four accounts:

Taibbi’s characterization of the FBI being the “master” of the “canine” Twitter staff was invented by Taibbi and not reflected in any actual message. What’s worse is how Taibbi deceitfully edited the FBI’s email to imply that they were demanding “action.” The unedited email actually reads…

“FBI San Francisco is notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms and of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy.”

So the FBI explicitly stated that the accounts they referred to Twitter only “potentially” violated Twitter’s rules, and then merely asked Twitter to take appropriate action, or none at all, as per Twitter’s policy. How is that by any stretch of the imagination a demand or reflective of a “master-canine” relationship? That is only reflective of Taibbi’s intent to deceive.

Taibbi closed his tweet storm with a Trumpian reference to the “deep state” as a “tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors.” Which is just another biased conclusion that is unsupported by his own “evidence.”

For his part, Trump went bonkers over the latest episode of the “Twitter Files” nothingburger. He posted on his floundering Twitter ripoff, Truth Social, that…

“This (the FBI’s wild and crazy relationship with Twitter) is absolutely a coordinated effort to change Election Results! Rachel Campos-Duffy…and it worked, but they got caught. This is why people protested in Washington. Our 2020 Presidential Election was Crooked, Rigged, and Stolen, and yet the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks & Thugs didn’t spend any time investigating this outrage!”

And that…

“Our Country is SICK inside, very much like a person dying of Cancer. The Crooked FBI, the so-called Department of ‘Justice,’ and ‘Intelligence,’ all parts of the Democrat Party and System, is the Cancer. These Weaponized Thugs and Tyrants must be dealt with, or our once great and beautiful Country will die!!!”

Naturally, Trump is continuing to whine about having decisively lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. But in more than two years and 60 court cases he has failed to provide a shred of evidence that the election was “rigged” or “stolen” from him. He nevertheless maligns the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th insurrection in his typically infantile and patently dangerous manner.

More worrisome is what exactly Trump means by demanding that members of the justice and intelligence communities, as well as Democrats, “must be dealt with”? Especially when combined with the warning that if they are not “our once great and beautiful Country will die!!!” It comes off as an unambiguous threat and/or a command to his StormTrumpers to take action.

This is why Trump must be held accountable for his crimes as expeditiously as possible. He is still inciting violence and fomenting an insurrection against the United States, whose Constitution he recently said should be “terminated.” The longer that accountability is delayed, the greater the risk.

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly.

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Fox Nation vs. Reality:
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The Sham ‘Twitter Files’ Exposé Actually Proves that Trump’s Coup Plot was Appropriately Muted

Posted by Mark NC on December 10, 2022 at 12:24 pm. 22 Comments :

The new regime at Twitter has been engaging in what it calls an “exposé” of alleged censorship of conservatives in general – and Donald Trump in particular – on the part of Twitter’s prior management team. However, their efforts thus far have been pitifully underwhelming and have failed to prove any of their outrageous and unfounded allegations.

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When Elon Musk took control over Twitter he portrayed himself as a “free speech absolutist” who aspired to bring a dialogue to the service that was unfettered by bias and censorship. In reality, Musk just inserted his own personal biases and revealed that he has no grasp of what free speech really means. He also demonstrated that his absolutist approach only permits unfettered hate speech. Consequently, despite his instance that Twitter would not become a “free-for-all hellscape,” that’s precisely what it became shortly after he took the reins.

Last week Musk put out the first of what he promised would be a series of revelations exposing the bias of Twitter. That first release was pathetically devoid of any of the bombshells they teased. Although it succeeded in doxing private citizens and putting them at risk for harm.

Now the latest release of Musk’s multipart melodrama was posted Friday night. It consisted of 67 tweets by his protégé/puppet, Matt Taibbi, that ostensibly unveiled a vast conspiracy against conservative tweeters. Suffice to say that it was another nothingburger that failed utterly to prove its predetermined point.

To the contrary, Taibbi actually proved that the staff at Twitter acted responsibly to prevent Trump from inciting further violence during the January 6th insurrection in Washington, D.C. For example, the seventh tweet explicitly laid out how carefully considered any decisions were to tag or suspend potentially violating tweets and users…

7. Twitter executives removed Trump in part over what one executive called the “context surrounding”: actions by Trump and supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.” In the end, they looked at a broad picture. But that approach can cut both ways.

This tweet included a screenshot of the remarks by Twitter moderation staff…

“[H]ere is our quick take: the decision on whether to pull that particular tweet or use that as the last straw for trump depends on many factors including: (1) The overall context and narrative in which that tweet lives – we currently analyze tweets and consider them on a tweet-by-tweet basis which does not appropriately take into account the surrounding context – you can use the telling fire into a crowded theater example – context matters and the narrative that trump and his friends have pursued over the course of this election and frankly the last 4+ years must be taken into account.”

How Taibbi can regard this as evidence of bias is puzzling. It shows a respect for analyzing tweets that takes into consideration the context and the tweeter’s prior comments in order to fully understand their intent. It’s exactly how content moderation should be done. But Taibbi exhibits his bias in the tweets that followed…

8. The bulk of the internal debate leading to Trump’s ban took place in those three January days [6-8]. However, the intellectual framework was laid in the months preceding the Capitol riots.

9. Before J6, Twitter was a unique mix of automated, rules-based enforcement, and more subjective moderation by senior executives. As @BariWeiss reported, the firm had a vast array of tools for manipulating visibility, most all of which were thrown at Trump (and others) pre-J6.

10. As the election approached, senior executives – perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed – increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of “vios” as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.

Taibbi is making a wholly manufactured assessment about what he calls the preceding “intellectual framework,” whatever that means. Then he complains that Twitter responsibly employed “rules-based enforcement,” that he baselessly calls subjective, and he whines that their moderation tools were “thrown at Trump.” Maybe that’s because Trump had violated Twitter’s rule innumerable times in the weeks and months that preceded January 6th.

However, the worst part of this screed was Taibbi’s claim that when senior executives “began to speak of ‘vios'” [violations] it was “perhaps under pressure from federal agencies.” Really? He could have just as credibly have said that it was “perhaps under pressure from Martians.” He provided zero evidence of anything resembling pressure by federal agencies or any other entity, terrestrial or otherwise.

That is representative how carelessly and dishonestly Taibbi put together this sham. His only purpose was to create a store of material that Republicans and Trump cultists could link to in order to advance their crackpot conspiracy theories and yammer about conservatives being victims of evil “Big Tech” liberals. The truth is that Twitter long ago admitted that their algorithms favored right-wingers. And near the end of the 67 tweet harangue was one that expressly outlined the situation with regard to Trump’s hostile incitements…

“An update on actions we’re taking as a result of what’s happening in DC today. We have removed (bounced) 3 tweets from @realDonaldTrump on 6 January 2020 [sic] for making unfounded claims of voter fraud and election theft, which must be viewed in the context of the violence in Washington DC today and reasonably can be expected to continue to incite and inspire violent acts around the country. We are requiring a 12-hour timeout following the removal of these tweets. We also have tweeted so there’s transparency in our actions and making it clear that future violations of the Twitter Rules will result in permanent suspension.”

That message completely negates virtually everything that Taibbi had falsely framed prior to it. But he still maintains that his work proves there was a bias at Twitter against Trump and other conservatives. If there was, it was a bias against allowing a treasonous, twice impeached, wannabe dictator from staging a violent coup. And Musk’s rush to reinstate Trump’s account further affirms that he couldn’t care less about the welfare of this nation or its people.

MORE ON “TWITTER FILES”:

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly.

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Fox Nation vs. Reality:
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Fox News ‘Psycho’ Analyst Comes To The Defense Of Deviant Scum Rupert Murdoch

Posted by Mark NC on October 17, 2015 at 4:43 pm. 8 Comments :

Earlier this week Rolling Stone published an article by Matt Taibbi that brilliantly chronicles the decline of Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch and how his empire is showing signs of crumbling due in part to the Frankenstein monster he created, Donald Trump. News Corpse reviewed the article here.

In response, Fox News dispatched their resident “psycho” analyst, Keith Ablow, to defend the deviant scum who runs Fox with an op-ed on the Fox News website. The headline of Ablow’s article asks “Does Matt Taibbi hate Rupert Murdoch or hate himself?” The article pretends to be concerned with Taibbi’s mental health while attempting to portray him as consumed by self-hatred.

Ablow starts off by digging up some historical and personal dirt on Taibbi that has nothing to do with his current writing career for which he has garnished widespread respect. And like any quack psychiatrist, Ablow used it against him. He then admits that he isn’t qualified to diagnose Taibbi, but damn if he doesn’t do it anyway before the paragraph is over:

“I have never evaluated Matt Taibbi and have never even met him. But it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to theorize why anyone would have such intense antipathy for men who believe deeply in individual autonomy and possibilities and would resort to grotesque jokes about them. […] He must be disconnected enough from his own real self.”

No it certainly doesn’t take a psychiatrist to do what Ablow does, which is to dispense vitriol disguised as medical advice. Ablow says that he would like to have coffee with Taibbi “not as a psychiatrist, but as a fellow man,” to help him find himself. And that magnanimous gesture is driven by his deeply held principles and his desire to save lost souls like Taibbi. Ablow writes that…

“I believe that even someone who hates greatly — starting, no doubt, with himself and then projecting that antipathy toward others — retains the possibility to heal and to realize his greatest possibilities.”

Well, that’s a relief. Because there isn’t anyone who hates greatly more than “doctor” Keith Ablow. His prior unofficial and unprofessional diagnoses have included openly hostile attacks, mostly on President Obama and other liberal or Democratic targets. For instance, he charged that President Obama was waging psychological warfare on the American people; he accused Obama of wanting Ebola to spread in America; he declared that it is “time to immunize our sons and daughters against the president’s psychologically toxic rhetoric,” and that Obama “long ago severed himself from all core emotions;” And my personal favorite, Ablow actually had praise for the Unabomber’s sociological philosophy.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

With all of that hatred, Ablow surely needs someone to provide the sort of care that he thinks Taibbi needs. It is a classic case of projection wherein Ablow sees in others the things he fears most within himself. His quackery is overflowing his distraught and inadequate brain. And it’s bad enough that he would compose a ludicrous pseudo-diagnosis like this, but it’s much worse that a so-called “news” enterprise would publish it.

Headline Of The Year: Rupert Murdoch Is Deviant Scum (Rolling Stone)

Posted by Mark NC on October 14, 2015 at 8:10 pm. 10 Comments :

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi has penned a thought provoking article that examines the fading glory of one of the world’s most prominent media barons, Rupert Murdoch. He begins above the fold with a no-holds-barred headline declaring that “Rupert Murdoch Is Deviant Scum.” And he has the reasoned analysis to back it up.

Taibbi carefully constructs a case for how Murdoch is losing either his empire or his mind, or both. At the outset is the observation that his crown jewel, Fox News, is at risk of being strangled by its own monstrous creation, Donald Trump. He notes that Murdoch “must be petrified at the prospect of losing his hard-won viewership at the end of his life.” The public feuding that has been ongoing between Fox and Trump threatens to sap the network of its previously loyal viewer base. Trump’s followers are incensed by what they feel is unfair treatment of their superhero and have pledged to boycott the network. Or as Taibbi deliciously puts it…

“Donald Trump is the fallen angel in the Fox story, a traitor who’s trying to tempt away Murdoch’s lovingly nurtured stable of idiot viewers by denouncing their favorite ‘news’ network as a false conservative God.”

Taibbi proposes that Murdoch’s fear of mogul emasculation is the impetus for his ludicrous tweet extolling Ben Carson, another former Fox News contributor, as potentially “a real black President who can properly address the racial divide?” And who could be a better gauge of real blackness that old Rupert? [For the record, along with Trump and Carson, the current GOP field of candidates includes three more ex-Fox employees, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and John Kasich.] But it’s Obama’s suspect blackness, in Murdoch’s view, that Taibbi focuses on. He notes that Fox’s standard profile of Obama is one of “a mongrel, a kind of Manchurian President, raised in madrassas and weaned on socialism, who hates white people and yearns to euthanize them.” Or when race was a part of the discussion, Obama was reduced to being a “secret street hood,” or a “skinny, ghetto crackhead.” Taibbi summarizes saying that…

“Rupert Murdoch has spent seven to eight years finding every conceivable way to say that Barack Obama isn’t one of us. The president is forever described as a kind of malevolent animal, unable to control his irrepressible urge to take and redistribute the white man’s property.”

The whole article is well worth the read. It contains rational insight, pertinent facts, and luminous prose. And I find it particularly relevant in light of an article I wrote three years ago positing that Murdoch was even then showing signs of losing it. On several pressing issues there were emerging stark difference between the powerful Murdoch of the past and the more impotent version of the present. On gun control, immigration, and climate change mitigation, all of which he viewed favorably, Murdoch’s views were contradicted by his Fox News subordinates. He was also being supplanted as the GOP kingmaker by his lieutenant Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News. As I wrote at the time…

Politicians around the world were once obliged to pay their respects to the “Dirty Digger” if they hoped to succeed electorally. […] However, in recent months the Murdochian monarchy seems to have been sapped of its power. There has been none of the reverential genuflecting to the man whose anointment was once compulsory. There has been scant evidence of his presence in the political backrooms where influence is administered.

The usurpation of the Fox News agenda is obvious and disturbing. Roger Ailes is installing himself at the top of the pile in opposition to his boss on some of the most important issues of the day. This can only lead to trouble. Visceral, personal, gut-wrenching, back-stabbing, explosive trouble. In other words: FUN!

Suffice to say that it hasn’t gotten better for Murdoch since then. And Taibbi’s profile illustrates just how much his situation has deteriorated. He notes that Murdoch “senses his beloved audience of idiots drifting away.” It becomes a question of whether Murdoch is willing to sink as low as Trump in order to get them back. It’s a tough call, but if anyone can descend to the most putrid levels of human indecency it’s Rupert Murdoch – the man whose British newspaper hacked the phone of a murdered schoolgirl. Let Trump top that.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Fox Nation’s Acrobatic Smear Fest: A Triple Putz

Posted by Mark NC on March 2, 2012 at 3:39 pm. 4 Comments :

Sometimes, in the right-wing noise machine, you really need to stretch to spread your smears across as many targets as possible. It calls for a strategy that aims to cast your juvenile insults so broadly that they ensnare any of your perceived enemies within a certain proximity. In a way, it’s a conservative approach that allows you to use less tar to tarnish more opponents in one wide swipe.

To that end, the Fox Nationalists went after Matt Taibbi of the Rolling Stone for his remembrances of Andrew Breitbart. Taibbi took a particularly Breitbartian tone in saying…

“So Andrew Breitbart is dead. Here’s what I have to say to that, and I’m sure Breitbart himself would have respected this reaction: Good! Fuck him. I couldn’t be happier that he’s dead.

I say this in the nicest possible way. I actually kind of liked Andrew Breitbart. Not in the sense that I would ever have wanted to hang out with him, or even be caught within a hundred yards of him without a Haz-Mat suit on, but I respected the shamelessness. Breitbart didn’t do anything by halves, and even his most ardent detractors had to admit that he had a highly developed, if not always funny, sense of humor.”

That’s the sort of hyperbolic, attention-seeking comment that epitomized Breitbart’s existence. And that is exactly the point that Taibbi was making. It was a fitting tribute, not just to the man, but to his inner being and what he stood for; what he was most proud of. Breitbart defiantly rejected calls for civility, and when he was challenged to apologize for outrageous statements, he famously responded by barking back, “Apologize for what!” So how did Fox Nation report this news?

Presumably the Fox Nationalists don’t think that Matt Taibbi is well enough known to carry a hit piece on his own. So they dressed it up with one of their favorite, and most childish insults – to refer to comedian Bill Maher as “Pig” Maher. But some pimply-faced editor still didn’t think that was enough, so they added a reference to the evil home of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, NBC. Neither Maher nor NBC had anything to do with this story. Even the source article to which Fox Nation linked, from the uber-conservative NewsBusters, made no mention of these innocent bystanders. In fact the NewsBusters, while still incensed by Taibbi’s language, acknowledged a certain appropriateness. In their opening paragraph they say…

“I almost hate to draw attention to this incredibly sad example of the intolerant left over at Rolling Stone, but quite frankly, Andrew Breitbart probably would have eaten this up, and tweeted it back out.”

That’s absolutely true. Breitbart even tweeted back out a criticism of him that I sent just last week:

The photo of @AndrewBreitbart nobody wants to see: goo.gl/fb/49dy9 Why should I be the only one to suffer? #p2 twitter.com/NewsCorpse/sta…

— Mark @ News Corpse (@NewsCorpse) February 25, 2012

As I, and many others have noted, Breitbart would have been the first to proudly speak ill of the dead. On the day that Sen. Ted Kennedy died. Breitbart tweeted “Rest in Chappaquiddick.” He followed that up with several other disgraceful remarks that, unlike Taibbi, he could not frame as being tributes to the decedent.

Which brings us back to Fox Nation’s utterly unrelated assaults in their story’s headline. The inclusion of Maher and NBC was wholly the idea of Fox, and it really demonstrates how embarrassingly infantile the Fox Nationalists are. It’s bad enough that Fox is a netowrk that has no regard for the truth, but do they also have to embrace such brazenly immature rhetoric while they are lying?

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