Oct 31: Elon Has Broken the 2020 Censorship Machine

Trump tells Bibi to win; A ceasefire proposal in Lebanon; Another polling miss?

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The Big Story

In yesterday’s Big Story, we gave you our view that Trump is on track to do much better this year than he did in 2020 (if we’re wrong, we’ll know by this time next week). Today, we want to highlight another major difference between this presidential cycle and the last one: the media environment.

Earlier this week, former CBS reporter Catherine Herridge published a video report on X (watch it here) that demonstrated, in a nutshell, how much the information space has changed since 2020. Herridge interviewed the two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, who last year exposed the extensive efforts by political appointees in the IRS, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Justice to derail the joint IRS/FBI investigation into Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling and tax crimes and protect President Joe Biden from being connected to the scandal (which we’ve covered here and here). In the interview with Herridge, Shapley and Ziegler said that investigators at all three agencies had “corroborated” that the laptop was real as far back as 2019 yet slow-walked the investigation and remained silent as 51 former intelligence officials released a letter publicly denouncing the laptop as Russian disinformation. Their letter, we now know, was organized by current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, then a Biden campaign adviser. 

We doubt, at this point, that any information about the Bidens will move the needle in the election—the point is that the video was published on X at all. Four years ago, X (then Twitter) suspended the account of the New York Post for publishing a story citing the laptop and blocked users from retweeting the story or even sharing it privately in direct messages; Facebook did not entirely block the story but “demoted” it while waiting for a “fact-check.” These decisions were the direct result of interference from security state officials hoping to swing the 2020 election to Biden, according to internal communications published in a Wednesday report from the House Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. On more than 30 occasions in 2020, FBI officials met with Big Tech executives to warn them that “the Russians” were planning a “hack-and-leak” operation to reveal evidence about links between the Biden family and Ukraine. According to testimony from FBI agents included in the report, the officials meeting with the tech companies were the same officials in possession of the Biden laptop. The report (read it here) also includes internal communications from Facebook employees, in which they joked that they didn’t need to fear blowback from the press for censoring the story because (a) they had cover from the intelligence community (IC), and (b) “the Press is only as good to you as you are bad to Trump.” 

Elon Musk, whatever his faults, has broken the Democratic Party-media-IC stranglehold on X, which remains the most influential platform among American political elites. For instance, earlier this week, The Federalist reported on the Harris campaign’s (largely successful) attempts to manipulate political discussions on Reddit by using an army of volunteers coordinating with campaign operatives via a Discord server. In a subsequent report published Wednesday, The Federalist exposed a similar form of attempted astroturfing on X, where the Harris campaign is directing volunteers to manipulate the platform’s Community Notes feature—essentially a crowd-sourced fact-check—to help Harris and hurt Trump. For instance, X users flagged as “misleading” a post from Kamala HQ saying that Trump had called “Americans who don’t support him dangerous people.” In reality, as the Community Note pointed out, Trump had used the “dangerous people” line to describe the U.S. government officials who leaked Israeli war plans to Iran. A Harris campaign employee, however, directed volunteers on the Discord to mass report the accurate Community Note as “not helpful,” in an attempt to get it taken down.  

The scheme, however, does not appear to be working. One user in the Discord expressed his frustration that the Community Notes feature is not as easily manipulated as Reddit:

CN’s [Community Notes] only get approved on tweets that are obviously incorrect and not controversial for anyone. … It’s because the CN system is looking for notes that get people who normally disagree with each other to agree the note is worthwhile. So a CN needs people who normally believe misinformation to cross over and agree that, in fact, this case is misinformation.

Or consider how tech platforms are treating claims of election irregularities. In 2020, Twitter and other platforms aggressively censored reports of fraud. This cycle, Musk has created a feature, the Election Integrity Community, allowing users to crowd-source reports of irregularities, such as malfunctioning ballot machines or suspicious registration dumps. While many of these reports will prove to be bogus (some already have), some—for instance, the early closures of early voting locations in deep-red parts of Pennsylvania, or reports of hundreds of potentially fraudulent voter registrations in the state’s Lancaster County—have been shown to be real. Publicizing them allows the Trump campaign to file timely legal challenges and also pressures local officials and the press to seriously investigate them. Compare that to last time around, when, as Lee Fang reported in February, Twitter, under pressure from the Department of Homeland Security, censored (among other things) an accurate report from a New York Times reporter that a vote-counting machine in Green Bay, Wisconsin, had run out of ink. 

And while much of the mainstream media is acting as a de facto Harris campaign comms shop, there is at least some evidence that other platforms feel less pressured to respond to them. Today, The New York Times—last seen “corroborating” Harris’ McDonald’s story with unverified double hearsay from a campaign surrogate—published an “investigation” in collaboration with Media Matters for America, a “press watchdog” that functions as an attack dog for Democratic campaigns. The “report” was, in effect, a demonetization effort targeting high-profile conservative YouTubers such as Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, and Benny Johnson. These influencers, the report alleged, had been promoting “disinformation” and “false narratives” related to the 2020 election—such as claiming that it was “rigged”—ever since 2023, when YouTube announced that it would stop policing election claims. The point of the Times report was to pressure YouTube to stop selling ads for these channels; the company, according to the Times, was making money from “conspiracy theories, half-truths, and lies.” The most important part of the story, however, was the comment from YouTube when the platform was presented with evidence of this alleged disinformation:

A YouTube spokeswoman said none of the 286 videos violated its community guidelines.

“The ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial, is an important value—especially in the midst of election season,” she said in a statement.

That’s a polite way of telling the Times to go jump in a lake. Say what you will about YouTube, but we find it hard to argue with that.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Steven McGuire and Michael B. Poliakoff on the literary world’s latest failed Jew ban

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The Rest

→Donald Trump has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he wants Israel to “wrap up” the war in Gaza by January if he wins the upcoming election, according to U.S. and Israeli sources quoted in The Times of Israel. Trump has been open about wanting to give Israel a freer hand to fight Hamas and other Iranian proxies—he recently slammed President Joe Biden for pressuring Israel not to target Iran’s nuclear infrastructure—but has also said on several occasions that he thinks Israel needs to get the war over with, believing it to be bad for the country’s “PR.” According to the report, “Trump wasn’t specific in his appeal to Netanyahu and could well back ‘residual’ IDF activity in Gaza, so long as Jerusalem has officially ended the war”; Israeli sources, however, indicated that the conflict is not yet at the “wrap-up” stage and that Netanyahu faces internal constraints on his ability to conclude an official peace. We’ve seen some panic at Trump’s comments in sections of pro-Israel social media, but our read is that he’s saying, Do what you need to do to win quickly. That might not be perfect (or possible), but it’s certainly an improvement on the Biden-Harris position of Don’t win no matter what. 

→Speaking of not winning, a draft proposal of the U.S.-backed cease-fire in Lebanon leaked on social media yesterday. The proposal calls for:

• A complete cessation of hostilities;

• Hezbollah to withdraw from southern Lebanon below the Litani River, which will be occupied by the Lebanese Armed Forces and the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon;

• Lebanon (where Hezbollah is part of the government) to assume responsibility for disarming Hezbollah;

• The creation of a U.S.-led “independent monitoring mechanism” to address “alleged violations” of the agreement;

• Israel to retain a right to recon overflights in Lebanon, but not to kinetic action (i.e. airstrikes), which will be subject to U.S. approval

Our verdict? It’s a bullshit deal that embodies all the worst elements of Obama-Biden policy in Lebanon. It strips the Israelis of any strategic autonomy to go after Hezbollah, places “security” in the hands of Hezbollah auxiliaries (the LAF and UNIFIL), and makes self-defense contingent on approval from Washington. As Tablet’s Tony Badran put it on X, summarizing the U.S. position: “If you have a complaint about Hezbollah, you can file it with us and we’ll look into it.”

Netanyahu met today with U.S. officials Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk. According to The Times of Israel, the prime minister stressed that the most important element of the agreement was “Israel’s determination and ability to enforce the agreement and to foil any threat to its security from Lebanon.”

→In the past few days, there’s been a flood of public polls showing what we regard as implausible Harris leads in several key swing states, pushing her to a narrow lead in most polling averages, even as the early vote numbers continue to look good for the former president. Our instinct is not to pay too much attention, especially this late. As the British political strategist and all-around eccentric Dominic Cummings notes in a Thursday Substack post, public polling dramatically understated Trump support in 2016 and 2020. There’s no reason to believe it’s gotten more accurate since, and some reason to believe it’s gotten worse. A few points, cribbed from Cummings:

1. While there are dozens of polls with different company or university branding, most of them conduct their polls through a much smaller number of online panel companies (such as YouGov), which tend to recycle panelists among polls. This means the actual diversity of pollsters is far less than the apparent diversity.

2. Quote: “The quality of the panel data has worsened since 2020, according to specialists who deal with them constantly. The panel business got commoditised, and competition has focused on price not quality/accuracy.”

3. Polls have routinely underestimated Trump support by under-sampling his support among noncollege whites and other difficult-to-poll demographics (such as seniors over the age of 75). Some pollsters have attempted to address this through weighting, but they have not solved the underlying data collection problems.

We would also note that the private polling conducted by campaigns is generally thought to be more accurate than public polls because it is better-funded and more incentivized to produce the right answer. And from what we have heard—both from speaking directly to those who have seen the campaigns’ internal polls and from reading what has been publicly reported through leaks and well-informed reporters such as Mark Halperin—the consensus is that the private polls for both campaigns are more favorable to Trump than the public ones. 

→Quote of the Day: 

[Normalization] is off the table until we have a resolution to Palestinian statehood.

That’s Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud speaking on Thursday at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh. (He also said that the relationship with Washington was “among the best we’ve ever had.”) Faisal’s comment follows a report from last week that the Saudis had conducted their first-ever joint naval exercise with Iran in the Gulf of Oman—a move that analysts told Fox News spoke to the Saudis’ desire to “not be seen as taking Israel’s side” and their concerns “about whether or not the U.S. would be robust in its defense of the kingdom in the event that the Iranians … [target] them.” Both the comment and the joint exercises, of course, are big middle fingers to Israel.

We’ll attempt to translate that for The Scroll audience, based on what we’ve heard from Saudi analysts. The Saudis accurately understand that the Democratic Party is pro-Iran and anti-Israel. They believe (probably accurately) that the Democrats is unlikely to protect them from Iran. And they believe that the Democrats are the ruling faction in the United States and therefore the people they need to make a deal with if they want the deal to stick. The Democrats also managed to give the Saudis a major scare with the joint Democratic-Qatari messaging operation over Jamal Khashoggi, which was, among other things, a warning to Riyadh not to get too cozy with Trump.

If Trump wins, he’d be smart to work with Bibi to put the Saudis in the doghouse for a while, just to show he means business. They could start by making a lot of noise about the 21,000 Indian, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese workers who have died in Saudi Arabia since 2017 while working on Saudi Vision 2030 projects, according to the new documentary Kingdom Uncovered. According to some estimates, that’s more civilian deaths than in Gaza since last October. 

→Clip of the Day: 

That was Donald Trump in Green Bay, Wisconsin, last night, riffing on Biden’s “garbage” remark from Tuesday night. Trump wore the reflective garbageman’s vest onstage for the subsequent rally because, telling his audience that it was because his aides had told him, “It makes you look thinner.”

→The Scroll’s Park MacDougald will be joining Tablet’s Liel Leibovitz, Tony Badran, and Lee Smith tomorrow morning at 9:00 am Eastern Time for a Zoom discussion reviewing the news of the week and previewing the election. The Zoom is only available to Tablet members, but if you’d like to sign up, you can do so here:

https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/membership-sign-up

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Bubble-Wrapping Coates, by Tevi Troy

Feuding, not coddling, is the true American intellectual tradition

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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BHL Boycott Backfires

The American literary world and booksellers normalize Jew-banning. But Jews still sell books.

by Steven McGuire and Michael B. Poliakoff

Censorship is ugly behavior, whether it comes from the right or the left. Fortunately, it is most often self-defeating, but it is a warning sign of deeper pathology. So we see in the matter of philosopher, filmmaker, and humanitarian Bernard-Henri Lévy’s new book, Israel Alone.

The attempt within the book trade to limit mention of Israel Alone is an act of breathtaking moral cowardice, and it bodes ill for the core values of this nation. The book trade by rights should be the most vigorous defender of intellectual pluralism. But a robust free press, robust freedom of expression, and maybe even freedom of religion do not seem to matter in the world of cancel culture. Earlier this month, Shelf Awareness, a major trade publication with a reach of 600,000 readers, including booksellers and librarians, canceled a previously accepted advertisement for Mr. Lévy’s book. The well-understood intention of such cancellation, of course, given the nature of the industry, is to keep the volume on the margins, to consign it to obscurity.

Was the title that includes Israel just so toxic that this account of Mr. Lévy’s months in Israel in the immediate aftermath of the massacre inflicted by Hamas would be bad for business? That seems to be what Shelf Awareness’ publisher Matt Baldacci thought. Noting that both employees and customers would be unhappy even to see an ad for the book, he said, “We can debate about the rightness or the wrongness of those customers complaining, but the fact is that they will, and our partners trust us to protect them from those kinds of situations. So, we had to make the difficult decision not to accept the ad.”

The ethical bankruptcy of his position becomes yet clearer in light of Shelf Awareness’ enthusiastic profile of The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates, as “one of 13 upcoming books we know you’ll love.” Notably, that book recently earned the scorching critique of journalist and author Coleman Hughes as “a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion”—chief among those warped arguments is its virulent hostility to Israel.

This episode is the latest in a series of events illustrating how the literary world has turned so decisively against Zionism as to become broadly antisemitic. Referencing a spreadsheet titled “Is Your Fav Author a Zionist?” that was published on social media early this year, James Kirchick reported in May that “a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel.” Blacklists like this one, as well as cancellations and denunciations, await those who refuse to comply.

PEN America was compelled to cancel its annual awards ceremony after numerous nominees withdrew and the organization faced mounting criticism for not siding more strongly with Palestinians against Israel.

More recently, a panel was canceled at a literary festival because two of the panelists refused to share the stage with the moderator who is a “Zionist.” And a book event in New York was canceled because the author’s scheduled interlocutor was a rabbi.

Fortunately, in the case of Mr. Lévy’s Israel Alone, this cynical pandering to antisemites, ideologues, and to those who worship at the altar of the bottom line backfired. Education may enlighten the prejudiced, which is why Mr. Lévy’s book is so urgently needed, but there are few antidotes for stupidity, except the free market, which is working brilliantly in this instance. Interest in the book is quite robust and will undoubtedly have a positive effect on sales. So, we owe thanks to Shelf Awareness for the unintended consequences of its malfeasance.

We are pleased to add that our organization, in partnership with B’nai B’rith International, has raised funds from generous private donors to purchase and distribute for free thousands of copies of the book to college students around the country. Mr. Lévy will also be speaking in November at select American and Canadian universities. As he explained, “curbing this hate begins by going to the source.” It is abundantly clear that far too many universities and far too many journalists have failed to provide what Americans need to understand about Israel and the Middle East.

Censors can cause a lot of short-term damage, but history tells us that they ultimately lose and their disgrace follows. This comes from the first-century Roman author Tacitus: “When what has been created is persecuted, its authority grows. Neither foreign despots nor others who employ such savagery beget anything except infamy for themselves and glory for those they persecute.”

The ironic good news is that despite the efforts of Shelf Awareness, many more people are now aware of Israel Alone. They can make up their own minds about its message.