Will the MSM ever retract their old Russiagate stories, in light of the Durham revelations?
The answer to that question asked here is: “no.” I suppose it’s within the realm of possibility that one or two might, although I doubt, it, but there’s virtually no chance of any substantial number of news outlets ever doing such a thing.
Long ago I assumed that sort of meaningful retraction would of course happen when media outlets had been wrong – but, I’m talking long long ago. It was also long ago that I reluctantly realized this wouldn’t be the case, and furthermore that most of the original reporting errors weren’t errors at all, but were actually part of a campaign by “journalists” to further a certain “narrative” that hurt the right and helped the left, offered with either regardless disregard for the issue of truth or actual knowledge of their falsehood (in other words, by fools or knaves).
For me the biggest turning point was Rathergate and the doubling down in the media and among Democrats after the hoax was revealed. The egregious nature of the error/falsehood involved in the entire story was easily proven, and yet they couldn’t or wouldn’t back off. Instead they doubled down and even made a mendacious movie about it in which they were the heroes.
That’s when I knew that this was more than an ordinary error by biased people. This was either an error by people so biased that they could not admit the truth if it hit them in the face, or a purposeful lie for propaganda purposes. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference, and in practical terms it hardly mattered although it did in moral terms.
Over time I have come to think that the latter group – the conscious liars – is bigger than the former group, the mistaken partisans. There are a lot of ways they justify themselves, but justify themselves they do.
So, to get back to the Durham investigation, here’s an article whose author Charles Lipson writes this:
Last week, John Durham’s grand jury issued its third criminal indictment in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. The person who was arrested may be obscure; the news may have been buried after Virginia’s bombshell election results; but Durham’s move is a big deal. It shows that the special counsel’s probe is methodically unraveling a huge conspiracy, seemingly engineered by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and implicating James Comey’s FBI, either as a willing participant or as utterly incompetent boobs.
Note the ubiquity of the “knave or fool” question.
The latest indictment also damages the mainstream media, which is why so many news outlets have ignored or underplayed it. After all, they broadcast a false story for years and are none too eager to revisit it. Other losers are the prosecutors assembled by Robert Mueller, most of them Democrats, who had reams of this damaging information and ignored it.
What Durham and a few intrepid reporters are uncovering may well be the most ambitious dirty trick pulled in an American election and its aftermath. The question now is whether Durham can expose the full extent of this malfeasance and charge those who planned and executed it.
Yes, they indeed are burying it because if they didn’t it would indeed damage them. But I don’t think that’s the main reason they are burying it. The main reason is the furtherance of the ideology they embrace and their mission as they see it, which is to advance that ideology. The issue of truth does not concern them, in their post-modernist thinking.
[HOTE: The Lipson article is worth reading. It even may be worth sending to people you know who are unaware of the facts in it. Will it change any minds? Almost certainly not, especially in isolation. However, it depends where on the spectrum the reader might fall. Not everyone who votes Democratic is a true believer or a leftist. Some are merely misinformed and retain an open mind. The trick is figuring out who those people are, but you can usually tell from the way your previous conversations with them have gone.]
[NOTE II: If you want to see a good example of the continuing Rathergate spin, take a look at this Salon piece from 2015 entitled, “Rathergate and the dark magic of 2004: When the GOP learned how to subvert truth and alter political reality” and subtitled, “Long before Benghazi and Planned Parenthood, Karl Rove toppled Dan Rather, gutted CBS and proclaimed lies as truth.”]
You are correct. They (the MSM) will kill it with silence. The Japanese in World War II responded to Allied demands (before the A-bombs) in 1945 for surrender with “Mokusatsu” which is a Japanese word meaning “ignore”, “take no notice of” or “treat with silent contempt”. That will be what the media does just like they did with the Hunter Biden laptop story last Autumn.
This is yet another reason to be entirely mistrustful of the FBI, now obsessed with Project Veritas and the so-called “stolen diary” of Ashley Biden. We live in a country in which the FBI and the CIA are hardly any better than the East German Stasi and the Soviet KGB. The only solution to the problem of these completely politicized agencies (the FBI under the odious Wray, with the complicity of the ghastly Garland at DOJ, being nothing more than the secret police of the current illegitimate administration) would be that of the ancient Romans against their Carthaginian foes.
The media know that either their lies will take root until they become conventional wisdom, (something I’ve seen happen many times over my lifetime as a “kook”), which will be impossible to question without being labeled a nutcase. Or, if they don’t take root then drop them, as per BrooklynBoy above, and move on to some new lie.
What they don’t see is for every turn of this wheel more people notice the lying and at the same time they, the media, have to invest more effort in making the sale. This is a curve that is going hyperbolic and will be jumped off of at some point. Whether that is into actual truth or the lies being reinforced at gunpoint is an unknown right now.
I’m curious to see what will come of this. My best guess continues to be that Durham will be unable to get anyone higher up the food chain due to attorney client privilege or some other plausible deniability. But I’d love to be proven wrong.
But even if somehow Hillary and other various higher ups at the FBI and the DNC get fully exposed and even prosecuted, what would it mean for the greater public? Would Democrat voters merely be embarrassed or would they actually be angry about it? Or would they care at all? Do these people truly believe that Trump is so utterly evil that anything is justified? And if so… why?
Will people who currently generally trust the media continue to believe them implicitly? Or would there be a reckoning, mass firings and CNN, MSNBC, and the Networks and NYT and WaPo ect. I’m not sure about anyone else, but that seems pretty unlikely from here.
Like you said the leftist media will ignore this story or couch it in ambiguous terms. And because most leftists/liberals listen to or read only their preferred news sources most of them will never actually link the Durham investigation with the Russia gate hoax.
Nothing to see here, move along.
The story NEEDS to be true. Therefore, it is.
Objections based on facts can be dismissed with an insult and the true believers remain undisturbed.
I’m seventy-six which seems old but not old enough to say “I’ve seen it all before…” or some such. And I recall hitting maybe eighteen and thinking something I just found out must be new. New to me didn’t mean new, I shortly found.
That said, has this level of willing disbelief in the face of reality ever been seen before?
Back in the days before air conditioning and when respectable people wore three layers of clothes from throat to wrist to ankle, some towns on Michigan’s western shore became summer resorts. I was mentioning this to a relation about how Petoskey was an upscale resort in the late nineteenth century because it was cooler in the summer than Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago. I was told this was because of global warming.
A level of obduracy so obdurate must be…rare? In history, possibly. Now? Half the population?
Not. Getting. It.
Nonapod (3:53 pm) asks (I’m sure, rhetorically),
“Would Democrat voters merely be embarrassed or would they actually be angry . . .?”
They wouldn’t even be embarrassed. As Rush Limbaugh was fond of pointing out, they “are different from you and me: they have no shame gland.”
“Or would they care at all?”
The question answers itself.
“Do these people truly believe that Trump is so utterly evil that anything is justified?”
In a word, yes. In four words, why yes, of course. Try talking to one of ’em.
“Will people who currently generally trust the media continue to believe them implicitly?”
With precious little input from any other source with a differing perspective, definitely.
“Or would there be a reckoning, [etc.]?”
Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha . . . [inhales] . . . ha ha ha ha ha . . .
Here’s one being pitched, via Insty, and it has a small truth in it but doesn’t get the reasoning right. People have been buying stuff in quantities they didn’t 2 years ago but it’s because of the supply chain uncertainty which started back in early 2020. If you never know when something will be out-of-stock then you’ll stock up when it is there. Businesses and people alike.
https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2021/11/09/way-to-go-stupid-americans-time-takes-a-page-from-jen-psakis-playbook-and-explains-how-all-you-greedy-people-screwed-up-the-supply-chain/
Jonathan Turley has some interesting reporting today. https://jonathanturley.org/2021/11/09/durham-exposes-new-links-to-clinton-campaign-in-creation-of-russian-collusion-scandal/
Regarding the moral depravity (or plain incompetence) of so-called “journalists”, WAPO’s Suzy Buzzbee is STILL LYING about Sergei Millian (either that, or she’s playing dumb…or she may actually be the genuine article):
From Hans Mancke:
https://twitter.com/HansMahncke/status/1457846226137780230
Buzbee writes—
“The [recent Danchenko] indictment raises new questions about whether Sergei Millian was a source for the Steele dossier, as The Post reported in 2017.” –Washington Post executive editor
@SallyBuzbee
Mahncke responds—
‘Hello? Sally? The indictment does not “raise new questions”. It says it never happened.’
Richard Aubrey:
Please see this, which is somewhat relevant.
The newly-revealed name in the Russian collusion plot is Jake Sullivan, currently the White House national security adviser. He shouldn’t be anywhere near our national security.
Sullivan (together with the central role he played in Russiagate) was outed when Michael Sussman was indicted—almost two months ago.
No doubt the media tried to sit on that; but now that Danchenko has also been arrested, perhaps they feel they can no longer do so.
Actually, a reporter(!) just recently asked the Deputy Press Secretary (filling in for Psaki) a pertinent question about Sullivan…
https://twitter.com/HansMahncke/status/1458183036852477953
To which Hans Mancke comments:
“Imagine if Trump’s National Security Advisor, say Michael Flynn, had been named in the indictment of Trump’s campaign lawyer.
“Pretty sure it wouldn’t have taken the media eight weeks to ask about it.”
neo. Thanks. To riff on the example, what happens if, by chance, our Frenchman finds out about the crimes on his street that day?
Meets a victim?
In my experience, the people I’m talking about do not meet a victim nor see the chalk outlines on the sidewalk. Whatever happens happens far away and to other people who–to justify it, are retroactively bad people–who thus deserve it.
were actually part of a campaign by “journalists” to further a certain “narrative” that hurt the right and helped the left,
From long ago, 60s-70s, it’s easy for us geezers to remember ‘the revolution’ and all those bright young college kids studying law, and journalism, so they could ‘make a difference’. That was back in the day when racial integration was still a hopeful principle, well stated by MLK as ‘content of character, not color of skin’. Also back in the day when the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act, were passed by white Congressional majorities, clearly sharing those hopeful principles of integration and fair treatment.
But coming forward, other Acts began building up a wave of hard-nosed burdens placed on businesses and public utilities, wherein hires who once had to prove competence for their jobs were more and more displaced by replacing the tests with ‘other’ reasoning, based on racial bean-counting which was elevated over any sort of mere competence at trade or profession.
And our difference-making ‘news’ media never gave up those revolutionary narratives, rather they’ve enhanced and improved and weaponized them to the point we now see their Revolution nearly complete in its triumph. They’ve Long Marched their way into primacy in education, in University administration, in pop culture, in the moulding of public opinion, in the HR departments of the biggest corporations, and even in international governance. And through their ‘woke’ brigades, they’re well on their way to the next Long March: getting even.
The Future looks a bit grim.
The handmade tale is the very model of social leverage, which in principle and practice is only aborted in darkness, when it is deemed safe and politically congruent (“=”). A special and peculiar religious rite, indeed. In the meantime, take a knee, beg, and off with his head.
Insufficiently….heh. Grim future? So it seems to me. And these are people I will not stay civil with as citizens.
Barry — thanks for sharing the Sullivan quip vid a vis Trump.
Death to fascists, I say.
An absolutely MUST READ on the current, and evolving, predicament—make that “attack from within”—facing the country:
“Yuri Bezmenov’s Marxist Crisis Is Near
And it’s just the beginning of the Left’s plan to destroy America as we know it.”
https://spectator.org/yuri-bezmenov-crisis-america/
H/T Instapundit
Key grafs (read the whole thing):
“…In that interview, Bezmenov outlined the Soviet plan, hinted at so many years before by Premier Nikita Khrushchev, to implode American society from within. It had four stages.
“Demoralization. Destabilization. Crisis. Normalization.
“Bezmenov’s formulation was eminently believable, even if things didn’t turn out the way he envisioned. It informed virtually every single Marxist takeover of the 20th century, from Latvia to Venezuela. But it never quite permeated our understanding of the Marxist project, because less than a half-decade after Bezmenov’s interview with Griffin the Soviet Union had fallen apart and our attention to communism as a threat to our freedom diverted elsewhere.
“You’re probably a lot more familiar with the Cloward–Piven strategy than Bezmenov’s four stages, and that’s not surprising.
“But right now, if you want to understand the insane times in which we’re living and make some sense of why things are happening as they are, perhaps the best way to do so is to focus on the first two stages Bezmenov outlined.
“Demoralization and destabilization are where we are.
“Things aren’t falling apart by accident, and they aren’t falling apart because Joe Biden is incompetent. As my column last year noted, Joe Biden wasn’t selected by the Democrat Party’s top leadership because he was a strong leader — exactly the opposite is true. In Biden they have a figurehead they can control completely…”
“…It isn’t incompetence. It’s the plan. It’s Cloward–Piven. It’s destabilization. They’re even gaslighting you, trying to make you believe it’s a good thing….”
Etc…
– – – – – – – –
Re: media retraction…
Forget about it.
E.g., here’s how the media reported the prosecution’s immolation in the Rittenhouse trial:
“If you want to understand why no one trust the press, today’s headlines about the trial are a perfect example. This witness got caught in multiple lies and his testimony ended up making a clear case for self-defense. This is how the major outlets reported on it”….”
https://twitter.com/AGHamilton29/status/1457822321465495556
Watershed moment for America….
Gonna have to pull together.
It’s existential.
Re Jake Sullivan…
He figures, along with many others, in this masterful (if not all that easy to follow) compendium (from Sept. 20) on the morass that was the extraordinarily convoluted and complex plot to take down Trump.
The article’s author tries to cover the evolution of the defenestration but it’s incredibly complicated. (A timeline would be useful here. I wonder if anyone has put one together…)
https://www.theepochtimes.com/details-in-michael-sussmanns-indictment-reveal-conspiracy-against-trump_4006442.html
+ Bonus…of sorts (that is, if you can stomach it):
Adam Schiff (yes, I know) being interviewed. The interviewer actually asks some serious questions, and Shiff is his usual dishonest, evasive, creepy and repulsive self—did I mention “contemptible”?—(poor guy can’t seem to help it…).
Well, you’ve been warned…
https://twitter.com/LiveOnTheChat/status/1458113615739998217
H/T Lee Smith twitter feed.
Keep in mind that John Ratcliffe in a previous interview claimed that Schiff, as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was informed that the Steele Dossier was bogus, i.e., he was TOTALLY IN THE LOOP regarding its total unreliability. IOW, Schiff KNEW.
Still, that is some hope out there…based on the possibility that Youngkin’s victory in Virginia will be adopted as a strategic model for future elections:
https://www.city-journal.org/glenn-youngkin-coalition-of-the-sane
H/T Powerline blog.
Key grafs:
“…[Younkin’s] victory offers three key lessons for Republicans. First, Youngkin relentlessly opposed the cultural agenda of the newly ascendant illiberal Left…
“Second, Youngkin avoided conspiracy theories and extremism and deftly triangulated where necessary…
“Third, Democrats may not be able to pull themselves out of this mess….”
More hope?
The Danchenko indictment may cause a cascade as the net widens:
“New Twists in Durham Probe: FBI Danchenko Recordings and Suspicions Fiona Hill Lied”—
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/11/09/new_twists_in_durham_probe_fbi_danchenko_recordings_and_suspicions_fiona_hill_lied_802878.html
H/T Powerline blog.
Key grafs:
‘Asked whether she was “aware of any interaction between Mr. Steele and Ukrainians,” Hill did not say “to the best of my recollection” or “I don’t remember specifically,” or even a simple “no.” Instead she expanded her answer to deny not only any knowledge of Steele and Ukrainians, but to deny any knowledge of anything Steele-related: “I have no knowledge whatsoever of how he developed that dossier. None. I just want to state that.”
‘Lawmakers are particularly interested in that statement. The Danchenko indictment states that Hill introduced Danchenko both to Steele and to an unnamed public relations executive, since identified as Charles Dolan Jr., a Hillary Clinton ally. Republican members of the House Permanent Select Committee are questioning whether Hill could have had “no knowledge whatsoever” of how the dossier was developed when she had a central role in connecting those key players….’
– – – – – – –
NOnetheless, there are still plenty of reasons for grave dismay and foreboding…in the wake of the imminent passage of the so-called “Infrastructure Bill”—
“Pete Buttigieg’s Slush Fund”:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/11/pete-buttigiegs-slush-fund.php
Nope.
And don’t you bring up even the name of principal players in social media, specifically FaceBook, Wikipedia, or Reddit.
Although not in the Russia B.S., in the collateral smear, saying the name Eric Ciaramella will get you banned off those platforms.
Voldemort!
“Keep in mind that John Ratcliffe in a previous interview claimed that Schiff, as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was informed that the Steele Dossier was bogus, i.e., he was TOTALLY IN THE LOOP regarding its total unreliability. IOW, Schiff KNEW.”
As did all members of the “Gang of Eight.” The House Speaker and minority leader. The Senate majority and minority leaders. The House and Senate chairs and ranking members of the Intel committees.
Yes, that’s right. Thanks
Here’s Glenn Greenwald’s take on the Schiff show:
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1458128033907359744
(Tlak about “take no prisoners”…)
+ Greenwald himself interviewed on the topic..
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1458128033907359744
In that interview, Greenwald says (or implies) that Durham’s investigation, ultimately, must be approved (or accepted?) by Garland.
I guess that’s the huge catch.
That is, if I’ve understood Greenwald (in the interview) correctly, Durham can work his backside off for years and produce all the evidence he wants, thousands and thousands of pages—all of it ironclad and irrefutable—and successfullyindict everyone and his brother; but at the end of the day Garland can say, “Great job, John!!…You really hit it out of the park! But, um…uh, uh. Nope. Sorry. No dice. Stiil, helluva job. Really. No one coulda done it better….”
Someone, kindly tell me I’m wrong about this….
Barry. Love to see convictions by the boatload.
But as a lesson against “they’d never do that” comments by those only moderately mush headed, the records can still be useful.