REMINDER: HOLLYWOOD IS RUN BY GARBAGE PEOPLE. Dave Chappelle gets show pulled because Viacom wasn’t paying him. “They stole that from me. They just took it. And I’m not here trying to tell you guys that I believe Comedy Central gave me a raw deal just because I’m black. I believe they gave me a raw deal because this fucking industry is a monster.”

Plus: ‘Star Wars’ author says Disney is stiffing him on royalties. “Foster added that Disney has ignored his agents’ and legal reps’ efforts to collect the cash and pressed him to sign a nondisclosure agreement before even starting negotiations — something no one else has ever asked him to do.”

#JOURNALISM:

Think of the press as garbage people who lie for the Democrats and you won’t go far wrong.

UPDATE: Like I said:

AMERICA’S “INTELLECTUAL ELITE” IS COMING OUT AS GARBAGE PEOPLE: Paul Krugman, professors seek top economist’s removal from influential job for criticizing Black Lives Matter. “University of Michigan professor Justin Wolfers and dozens of other academics are leading a massive effort to have a senior faculty member at the University of Chicago removed from his position at the world’s preeminent economics journal — all because he criticized Black Lives Matter’s push to defund police departments. The attack on a leading academic at the University of Chicago, traditionally a bastion of free speech and no-nonsense conservative economic theory, comes as swarms of left-wing activists have successfully secured numerous firings across the country for viewpoints they deem politically unacceptable.”

People need to start suing over these campaigns, which are basically conspiracies to deprive people of their civil rights. I think there’s money to be made.

IT’S REAL, AND IT’S THE OPPOSITE OF SPECTACULAR:

Garbage people in our national news media, as Glenn likes to remind you.

GARBAGE PEOPLE: Ayatollah’s American Allies Seize on Pandemic in Fresh Push for Sanctions Relief. “In echo of regime propaganda, critics falsely claim U.S. sanctions target food and medicine.”

GARBAGE PEOPLE, GARBAGE MAP: SPLC Releases Fear-Mongering ‘Hate Map’ Amid Coronavirus Outbreak.

HYPOTHESIS: “JOURNALISTIC” OUTLETS ARE RUN BY GARBAGE PEOPLE.

SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS ARE GARBAGE PEOPLE: Karol Markowicz: The Times’ obscene attacks on the Apollo program. “‘Cosmonaut diversity was key for the Soviet message to the rest of the globe,’ the writer, Sophie Pinkham, wrote. Her piece reads like something from an old issue of the Soviet newspaper Pravda boasting of the achievements of the Soviet space program.”

Or maybe she’s a closet alt-right operative, comparing the failed-but-diverse Soviet program with the white-male-dominated American program that actually landed men (!) on the Moon. Best to un-person her just in case.

Related:

WELL, IT’S OBVIOUS TO MOST THAT THE PEOPLE RUNNING OUR INSTITUTIONS ARE GARBAGE. THAT MAKES THE PEOPLE THEY CLEARLY HATE MORE ADMIRABLE.

It’s an interesting finding — suggests that the Borg overreached in its response to Trump and lost its ability to define consensus reality in ways that will soon be manifest at the ballot box https://t.co/lRe6bVnBMT

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) May 22, 2023

NEWS YOU CAN USE? How To Talk Like An EU Baizuocrat:

The pod people who come up with this garbage must be repudiated at every opportunity. They are trying to change the meaning of … well, of reality, by the use of language. The thing is, they really can do a hell of a lot of damage by requiring people to do this, and making mastering the jargon the sine qua non of working for the EU bureaucracy (and eventually for woke capitalist entities). If I were European, I would vote populist, simply to vote for common sense and basic reality. If I had to work for the EC, I would have to keep my code-switching skills up so that I didn’t lose touch with humanity.

* * * * * * * *

Soon enough, there won’t be any Europeans left who remember the old way of speaking and writing, only the falsified one that destroys the concepts of family, church, and nation.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

FIRST RULE OF JOURNALISM: IF YOU WON’T WANT PEOPLE TO THINK OF YOU AS GARBAGE, DON’T BE GARBAGE. Ron DeSantis and ‘Resistance Journalism:’ Florida’s governor and the new rules of media sourcing.

It’s hard to find silver linings in this era of expanding government authority and contracting individual opportunity for free expression. But at least the media establishment can no longer pretend that its abandonment of journalistic standards was necessitated by the unique character of Donald Trump. “Resistance journalism” is now industry standard, judging by a story on Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis by the formerly prestigious television newsmagazine “60 Minutes.”

Resistance journalism is the term coined by media maven Ben Smith, who was also one of the genre’s most successful practitioners. The idea was to create compelling anti-Trump narratives unbound by the traditional obligations of fact-checking.

The Trump administration began with news organizations flogging false collusion claims from anonymous sources. It ended recently with news organizations flogging a false story from a single anonymous source who did not even witness the relevant event—and was then protected until she granted her permission to acknowledge she was the source of the bogus report.

Now we have a traditional pillar of U.S. broadcast journalism applying the model to the next Republican in line for national attention. But “60 Minutes” seems to have taken the spirit of resistance journalism one step beyond simply advancing the hidden agendas of people unwilling to go on the record. Sunday night’s attack on Gov. DeSantis didn’t even include key facts presented by witnesses who have been speaking on the record. . . .

The term resistance journalism is starting to seem a little dated. Perhaps it’s better to just call it propaganda.

Or garbage, whatever.

AS A GENERAL RULE, PEOPLE WHO MAKE STRONG CLAIMS OF MORAL SUPERIORITY ARE GARBAGE: Inside the Lincoln Project’s ‘toxic’ workplace.

DEAR JOURNALISTS: IF YOU WANT PEOPLE TO STOP THINKING OF YOU AS GARBAGE, STOP BEING GARBAGE:

How it must hurt to have to admit: Jerry Falwell Jr. was right.

No doubt this explains why we’re not reading stories about how the president of Liberty University kept his Lynchburg, Va., campus open while keeping his community safe from Covid-19. The doomsday predicted when Mr. Falwell announced Liberty students would return after spring break never came to pass.

On March 16, three days after that announcement, Mr. Falwell had to abandon his plans for in-person classes when Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam banned gatherings of more than 100 people. So Liberty moved its classes online. Thanks to long experience with such instruction—Liberty already had 100,000 online students—the move wasn’t as wrenching as it was for others. Meanwhile, students could still come back to campus if they chose, and about 1,200 of them did.

From the reaction, you would have thought returning to Liberty was a death sentence. An emergency-room physician told the Daily Beast, “If Liberty University reopens, people will die.”

On March 29, the New York Times ran a news story whose original headline read, “Liberty University Brings Back Its Students, and Coronavirus, Too.”

As the Times reported, nearly a dozen Liberty students had come down “with symptoms that suggested Covid-19,” a fact endlessly re-repeated in other news outlets. A snarky Financial Times op-ed citing “Falwell’s hubris” dropped the qualifiers and asserted “twelve students promptly came down with coronavirus,” which was corrected about a week later.

Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote that Mr. Falwell “seems to have created his own personal viral hot spot.” In one of several critical pieces, the Washington Post headlined a story “An authoritarian power structure brought coronavirus to Liberty University.”

Now the university has finished the school year and the students have gone home. So what actually happened?

To start with, only one student tested positive for coronavirus. Liberty says this was a graduate taking an online course who hadn’t been on campus before or after spring break. Four employees either working remotely or from offices off-campus also tested positive. But Mr. Falwell says no infections were traced back to campus. No Liberty student living on campus tested positive, and no staffer stationed on campus tested positive. But press accounts left a different impression.

So far there have been no mea culpas. In fact, now that the story’s had a happy ending, there’s barely been any follow-up at all. Mr. Falwell has company here. Like Mr. Falwell, Gov. Ron DeSantis was pilloried for trying to reopen Florida. Today Politico admits that “DeSantis looks more right than those who criticized the Sunshine State’s coronavirus response” and that the predicted “post-apocalyptic hellscape of coronavirus infection and cadavers stacked like cordwood” hasn’t materialized.

As is true of too much of American life these days, many of the responses are rooted in feelings about Donald Trump.

Trump derangement is real, it’s toxic, and it’s infected nearly all the news media, turning them into terrible people doing a terrible job.

HEY, JOURNALISTS: IF YOU DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO THINK OF YOU AS GARBAGE, TRY NOT BEING GARBAGE. Surprise: The Mask-Shamers in White House Press Corps Turn Out to Be Hypocrites. Plus, a Karen named Kaitlan.

HEY JOURNALISTS: WANT PEOPLE TO STOP THINKING OF YOU AS GARBAGE? STOP BEING GARBAGE.

#JOURNALISM:

Related:

Don’t want people to think of you as garbage? Try not being garbage.

WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE THINK THE PRESS IS GARBAGE? IT’S A REAL POSER.

UPDATE: Seen on Facebook:

DEAR JOURNALISTS: IF YOU DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO THINK OF YOU AS GARBAGE, STOP BEING GARBAGE. THANKS, BYE. WaPo’s Glenn Kessler Caught in Embarrassing Self-Own After RTing Dr. Critical of Trump’s Wuhan Virus Response. “As I’ve said before, when it comes to the so-called ‘fact checkers’ in the media, I find the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler hit or miss – but mostly miss. Over the last few weeks as the Trump administration has ramped up its efforts to combat the Wuhan coronavirus, Kessler has engaged in a series of missteps (to put it charitably) when it comes to analyzing their efforts. . . . It would be nice going forward if Kessler would actually dissect claims before sharing them with his followers, which is what an actual fact-checker would do.”

The origins of “fact check” journalism explain why it doesn’t actually check facts. When the GOP discovered that negative ads were a way to end-run the Democrat-favoring media, the media responded with “fact checks” intended to neutralize those ads. It’s always been a partisan messaging gig, not about finding the truth in which, as Kessler keeps demonstrating, they’re not especially interested.

THE DELTA-V IS MUCH MORE THAN MOST PEOPLE THINK: We Can’t Just Throw Our Garbage Into The Sun.

OUR GARBAGE CENSORS: Images that Bing Image Creator won’t create: And what that means for for AI trust and safety in practice. “This is almost certainly the future of AI trust and safety limits. It will start with overbroad rules written to satisfy left-leaning critics of Silicon Valley. Then those overbroad rules will be further broadened by hidden code written to block many perfectly compliant prompts just to ensure that it blocks a handful of noncompliant prompts.”

You can’t have trust in people who treat censorship as “safety.”

THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE PRESIDENT, OUR INSTITUTIONS WOULD BE TAKEN OVER BY PEOPLE PEDDLING RACIST GARBAGE. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Supreme Court Justice Jackson’s second error reveals another industry gone woke. “The AAMC brief refers to four studies in support of this claim. Yet none of them examine whether Black doctors are better at treating the pain of Black patients. All four document Black patients’ problems with pain management, but crucially, not one examines the efficacy of doctors of different races. The AAMC either failed to read the research or deliberately created this claim out of whole cloth.”

SO MANY OF THEM ARE BASICALLY GARBAGE: Matt Taibbi: The Most Embarrassing “Facebook Files” Revelation? The Press, Exposed as Censors: The “Facebook Files” show the press is part of the censorship establishment, but that’s not the worst part.

In the summer of 2021, the White House and Joe Biden were in the middle of a major factual faceplant. They were not only telling people the Covid-19 vaccine was a sure bet — “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations” is how Biden put it — but that those who questioned its efficacy were “killing people.” But the shot didn’t work as advertised. It didn’t prevent contraction or transmission, something Biden himself continued to be wrong about as late as December of that year.

If you go back and give a careful read to corporate media content from that time describing the administration’s war against “disinformation,” you’ll see outlets were themselves not confident the vaccine worked. Take the New York Times effort from July 16th, 2021, “They’re Killing People: Biden Denounces Social Media for Virus Disinformation.” You can see the Times tiptoeing around what they meant, when they used the word “disinformation.” In this and other pieces they used phrases like, “the spread of anti-vaccine misinformation,” “how to track misinformation,” “the prevalence of misinformation,” even “Biden’s forceful statement capped weeks of anger in the White House over the dissemination of vaccine disinformation,” but they repeatedly hesitated to say what the misinformation was.

Any editor will tell you this language is a giveaway. Journalists wrote expansively about “disinformation,” but rarely got into specifics. They knew that they couldn’t state with certainty that the vaccine worked, that there weren’t side effects, etc., yet still denounced people who asked those questions. This is because they agreed with the concept of “malinformation,” i.e. there are things that may be true factually, but which may produce political results considered adverse. “Hestiancy” was one such bugbear. Note the language from the unnamed Facebook executive above, which describes the press lashing out “Covid-19 vaccine discouraging content,” not “disinformation.”

This is total corruption of the news. We’re supposed to be in the business of questioning officials, even if the questions are unpopular. That’s our entire role! If we don’t do that, we serve no purpose, maybe even a negative purpose.

Maybe even.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “Colorado’s top public university says that people should address new acquaintances as transgender until otherwise instructed and that ignoring someone’s pronouns is ‘an act of violence.'”

No it isn’t, and saying otherwise doesn’t change anything.

Also, University DEI administrators are mostly garbage. That you can assume up front.

GARBAGE PERSON, GARBAGE TAKE: Cori Bush says black House Speaker nominee Byron Donalds is a ‘prop’ ‘upholding and perpetuating white supremacy.’ “The comments from Bush come as, for the first time, 2 black people were nominated for Speaker of the House, with House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries being the other. Republicans who oppose nominee Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) nominated Donalds (R-Fla) as their candidate.”

ROGER SIMON: To Change the Left, Be Their Psychiatrist.

If you think of these people as victims of that mass formation psychosis, you will realize they aren’t in their right minds. The word psychosis is there for a reason.

I hate to say this, because, as noted above, family and friends are often involved, but think of these people, bluntly, as mental patients.

If you wish to have any success at all in changing them, treat them that way. I know it sounds mean, but there really is no other way.

That means no arguments. Instead, ask them questions kindly about their views. Let them explain them as long as they wish. Don’t interrupt. Let them finish and then ask another question—gently. Don’t go too far. You are the psychoanalyst, ironically, in an era when the field of psychiatry has been almost entirely taken over by the left.

Nevertheless, you can do it. You don’t need a credential. As with many things, that’s meaningless. Be patient. Keep asking those questions. Never argue, just ask. (Do this subtly, of course, so you won’t seem condescending. And resist the temptation—it will be there for sure—to prove you are right.) Let them lead themselves to whatever conclusions they make.

Ultimately, those conclusions may surprise you. After all, the reality of life is largely conservative. It’s mostly common sense. Beneath their years of indoctrination, these are still human beings, dealing with the same daily issues we all do. They have to take out the garbage and drive their kids to school. When they are more comfortable with you, change will … very slowly … begin. Don’t rush!

In some cases, they may even be grateful to you because most liberals and progressives, in my estimation, are depressed. They will welcome the opportunity to talk without judgment.

And remember, people change without us anyway. Joe Biden came into office one of the most popular of all presidents and is already, in about a year and a half, close to the least popular of all time and headed downwards. Few of us—not even pundits (ahem!)—had anything to do with that.

He did it all by himself because, whatever his mental level, he has no common sense.

So gently and kindly ask those questions. It will seem slow but things will move faster because of them. Do it.

As has been said, “You can’t get there by trying, but you won’t get there if you don’t try.”

(No, don’t ask me to explain that. It’s a Zen koan!)

Related: My Biden-Voting Friend Had ‘No Idea’ Things Could Get This Bad. Buckle Up, Buddy, We’re Just Getting Started. “‘How can the most experienced politician in Washington f*** up this badly?’ he asked. That’s when I guffawed. ‘This isn’t a mistake,’ I told him. ‘This is intentional.’”