What Happened Today: December 5, 2022
Taibbi tells tales from Twitter; Drag show power outage; Israeli fighter tells Kanye 'come see me bro'
The Big Story
On Friday night, independent journalist Matt Taibbi published a trove of internal Twitter documents that revealed more of the backstory behind the platform’s decision in October 2020, three weeks before the U.S. presidential election, to block the distribution of a New York Post article about then-candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter. According to Taibbi, Twitter’s decision to treat the reporting on Hunter Biden—obtained from a laptop he had left at a computer repair store—as if it were hacked material and potential misinformation was made without any evidence to back up that claim. Even Twitter officials were skeptical that the company’s rules about hacked material justified what appeared to be overt interference in distributing politically explosive news that was unflattering to the Biden campaign. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” Brandon Borrman, the head of Twitter communications, wrote in an email to colleagues.
The narrative that the New York Post article on Hunter Biden was dangerous misinformation came from former top intelligence officials with close ties to the Democratic Party—like James Clapper and James Brennan, who signed an Oct. 19 letter claiming that the laptop at the center of the story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russia information operation.” However, the Russian misinformation narrative appeared thin then and fell to pieces after the election, as outlets including CBS News, The New York Times, and The Washington Post verified that the emails recovered from the Hunter Biden laptop were authentic.
Over the course of some 40 Twitter posts, Taibbi cited the internal emails and communications—provided to him under unspecified “certain conditions,” presumably by new Twitter owner Elon Musk—noting that company officials were receiving and honoring requests from the campaigns of both presidential candidates to remove material in the lead-up to the election. Though Twitter had previously denied any responsibility for confirming the veracity of news distributed on the platform, company representatives in 2020 claimed that the Hunter Biden story was “unsafe” and possibly obtained in an illegal hack. This became the justification to suspend the Twitter accounts of the Post—one of the oldest newspapers in the United States—and several high-profile users who shared the story, including White House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany.
Speaking on Saturday about why Twitter provided the internal materials to Taibbi, Musk noted, “The idea here is to come clean on everything that has happened in the past in order to build public trust for the future.” Yet dozens of prominent journalists who had once jointly echoed the Russian hacking claim about the laptop in October 2020 were quick to cast doubt on the new reports about Twitter’s political interference. “Imagine throwing it all away to do PR work for the richest person in the world,” tweeted NBC’s “disinformation” reporter Ben Collins, using a phrase that was repeated verbatim by multiple other journalists engaged in widespread personal attacks against Taibbi over the weekend.
In the Back Pages: Jewish Life is Cheap
The Rest
→ Some 33,000 North Carolina residents were still waiting for their electricity to be turned back on after what appears to have been a deliberate attack on Saturday night on two electrical substations in Moore County. The power facilities were damaged by gunfire in what FBI investigators say is an act of “willful damage,” and although no official motive has been substantiated, law enforcement are exploring the possible connection to a local drag show that event organizers say had been the target of violent threats from protestors trying to prevent the show from happening. The power outage did cut the lights on the venue for the show, which continued nonetheless, with flashlights. Locals are being told power might not be restored until Thursday.
→ New polling by the United Kingdom’s The Times shows Donald Trump losing altitude for his new bid for the White House as he trails Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by a full 20 points. Though DeSantis has yet to announce his candidacy, the fundraising efforts for his 2022 gubernatorial election netted him a $60 million surplus that will go a long way should he decide to get into the 2024 presidential race, a decision he’s expected to announce sometime in January. Over the weekend, Trump continued to strain relationships with establishment GOP figures when he took to his media platform Truth Social to call for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” citing the recent publication of Twitter internal materials by journalist Matt Taibbi as evidence of election interference by Democratic officials.
→ Video of the Day:
Following his dominant victory over opponent Genaro Valdéz at the MMA UFC fight in Orlando on Saturday night, Israeli fighter Natan Levy let Kanye West, America’s most prominent bigot of the moment, know he was ready to shoot the fair one. “Kanye West, if you’ve got a problem with me or my people, come see me, bro,” Levy said at the post-fight press conference. “I am Jewish, it’s what I am, it’s [the way] I was born. I’m very proud of it and I will fight for it. I will fight for my people in the octagon, or wherever need be.”
→ Despite some recent easing of China’s zero-Covid restrictions, lingering complications caused by the police state policies has seen demand for goods manufactured in China drop a whopping 40%, according to a new CNBC analysis, and now Chinese factories are planning to close down operations two weeks ahead of their usual break for the nation’s Lunar New Year celebration. That’s a rapid downturn in volume compared to peak trade demand during the pandemic lockdowns, and the radical swing could lead to some new supply chain disruptions as U.S. importers look to Europe to fill the gap. In 2022, the United States imported more goods in total from Europe than China for the first time in more than a decade.
→ The ongoing gang warfare embroiling parts of Mexico escalated further over the weekend when gang members shot Roberto Elias, a judge in Zacatecas, in his car. The gang slaying of a sitting judge comes after the head of Mexico’s National Guard in the state of Zacatecas was killed in October during a raid on a gang operation. Zacatecas has spiraled into a state of existential chaos over drug trafficking turf wars, with some 1,050 drug-related murders recorded there in 2021.
→ Number of the Day: 136 million
That’s how many dollars the Canadian Medical Association Journal said on Monday the nation’s healthcare system would save every year thanks to Canada’s dystopian euthanization program, which legalizes medically assisted death for a growing number of ailments beyond terminal illness. “The take-away point is that there may be some upfront costs associated with offering medical assisted dying to Canadians,” said Aaron Trachtenberg, a University of Calgary medical professor who helped crunch the numbers. All told, the savings of no longer providing medical care to those killed by the state far surpass the euthanization program that’s expected to cost no more than $14 million next year. “It’s just the reality of working in a system of finite resources,” Trachtenberg noted.
→ Coach to some of the greatest tennis players in the modern era, Nick Bollettieri died on Monday at the age of 91. Swing doctor to Andre Agassi, the Williams sisters, Jim Courier, Maria Sharapova, and a long list of other major champions, Bollettieri picked up tennis coaching as a side hustle while getting his law degree at the University of Miami. That gig soon became the famed Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, the Florida compound that quickly developed a reputation for intensely reshaping players from the ground up with a training regiment that could sometimes break a young player’s spirit. “It’s about hitting hundreds of tennis balls for four or five hours daily, of squeezing schoolwork between training sessions, of spending three or four weekends each month at tournaments,” Bollettieri said in 2021. “Nothing is going to come by accident. If it does, it’s a one-time victory. Success is about blood, sweat, tears, frustration, and the determination to achieve it.”
→ Jonathan, the giant tortoise on Saint Helena, a British overseas territory off the western coast of Africa, celebrated his 190th birthday over the weekend—just one more milestone in the life of the oldest known living land animal. A chelonian, Jonathan has seen tourists come and go to get a look at so much wisdom under one shell, although since he’s recently lost his vision due to cataracts, he might not recognize his well-wishers. Over the centuries, Jonathan’s caretakers have tried to help him deal with bouts of what appeared to be deep melancholy, even presenting him with a new romantic partner in 1991 in the hopes that he might father a new generation of offspring. After roughly 25 years, it became clear why Jonathan and his partner, Frederica, had failed to conceive: After a closer look, his handlers realized Frederica was a male.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Only (Illiberal) Democracy in the Middle East by Yoav Fromer
The rise of the Religious Zionism party is bringing a different, and extreme, form of Judaism to Israel
Blessing Afrifah by Hillel Kuttler
Israel’s Usain Bolt takes aim at the 2024 Olympics in Paris
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.
Jewish Life is Cheap
Just look at how it’s treated in the media
Ever since Ye declared he’d be going “death con 3 on Jewish people,” the media and advocacy groups like the Anti Defamation League have sought to portray the issue as a battle between free speech and censorship. When Ye fawned over Hitler alongside an open Holocaust denier on a talk show hosted by a man successfully sued for calling a school massacre a hoax, it seemed to prove the larger point: unregulated internet forums (like the ones where Alex Jones made his name) are dangerous, and the best safeguard against antisemitism lies in actively policing them.
Free speech of the kind being advocated by people like Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk, the argument goes on, is a direct threat to Jews. Following Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform, The New York Times wrote breathlessly that “Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find.” Only two groups are named as sources for the research, one is the ADL and the other is British-based, dark money funded Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), perhaps best known for providing the White House with data that was then used to pressure Facebook to remove content deemed objectionable. The ADL, meanwhile, has increasingly defined its mission to defend the Jewish people as being synonymous with the Democratic party’s efforts to eliminate “hate” from the internet, while turning a blind eye to it elsewhere. The head of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, has repeatedly framed the fight against antisemitism in recent weeks as hinging on the actions of Elon Musk.
But this tells only half the story. After all, Ye’s narrative of sinister Jewish control did not emerge fully formed from his personal study of historical and theological matters. Rather it’s been building for decades in the same media ecosystem that now proclaims itself guardian against all things racist and the protector of the Jews.
For the past five years, the dominant media narrative about race—perhaps the dominant media narrative, period—has built up a hierarchy of racial justice. At the top are the perennially marginalized “BIPOCS,” victim to the lash of the ever-present colonial whip. At the bottom lurks the “white male,” inherently and ineluctably racist, even when (or perhaps especially when) they’re trying hard not to be.
In a manner true to our history, Jews have been sucked into this Manichean whirlpool, cast by radical academics and their media acolytes as an essential, almost distilled element of the global system of racial oppression. We are not just white; we are the plotters and financiers of the entire sysyetm of white supremacy.
Worse still, if Jews are white then they are not, well, Jews. The largely successful effort to assign Jews to the white race means Jews do not have the moral privilege of determining our own identity. The perverse result of dispossessing Jews of their own history is that it grants the mantle of Jewishness to our enemies. Thus Ye, in the same Twitter thread where he threatened to go “death con 3” on Jews, also claimed: “I actually can’t be antisemitic because Black people are actually Jew also.”
When Whoopi Goldberg asserted on The View that the “Holocaust was not about race,” she was advancing a version of the same arguments made by virulent Black Hebrew Israelite hate preachers, professors who insist on the indelible whiteness of Jews, and anti-Zionists who deny the legitimacy of Jewish historical identity. It’s true that only the last two groups tend to have their ideas promoted by the media, but all three share the idea that “Jew” is not a meaningful or legitimate category. Palestinians can be Jews—thus the Democratic political activist and Louis Farrakhan fan Linda Sarsour is invited to participate as an expert in a prominent panel on antisemitism. And by the same logic, Black Hebrews can be Jews. Ye can be a Jew. Only Jews are not allowed to be Jews.
Over and over, Jews have watched this trend play out, and largely we’ve been silent.
In a key scene in the 2014 Oscar-nominated Selma, Dr. Martin Luter King leads a group of activists and protestors across a bridge alongside Black civil rights leaders. Not pictured in the scene was a man who walked in that front line of protestors, fighting for civil rights: the great American Jewish rabbi and leader Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Why would Ava Duvernay, the film's director, compromise the film’s historical integrity to whitewash one of America’s most prominent Jewish spiritual figures out of the image? The answer is that over the past decade, the anti-racist movement that has been the media’s single most championed social cause has turned a syllogism into a truism: whites are by definition white supremacists; Jews are the whitest of whites because they falsely hide behind their fake ethnicity; Jews, therefore, are at the top of the white supremacy totem.
The media has actively spread these ideas by turning woke racialism into the defining moral cause of our time, while at the same time ignoring the consequences of this campaign. While Ye was “canceled” for making open threats and affirming his love for Hitler, little more than a week earlier hundreds of Black Hebrew Israelites marched through central Brooklyn, uniformed and in formation, chanting “we are the real Jews.” Save for some coverage in The New York Post and in Tablet’s daily newsletter The Scroll, the rest of the media was virtually silent. The media is still talking about the alt-right’s 2017 hate march in Charlottesville, treating it as one of the defining events of the modern era, but when hundreds of virulent antisemites march in Brooklyn—the mecca of America’s media establishment—it was crickets. The silence was appalling but also unsurprising given that the same media has largely ignored the routine violent attacks against religious Jews in New York.
When Ilhan Omar tweeted in 2019 that Jewish money swayed congress to support Israeli policies—only weeks before claiming American Jews harbor dual allegiance—the media response was hedged. Ilhan Omar “was widely accused of antisemitism,” NPR wrote, working hard not to claim Omar’s comments were in fact antisemitic. CBS News noted that it was not the first time Omar “has been attacked,” positioning Omar, incredibly, as victim rather than aggressor.
The New York Times worked this idea of dual Jewish allegiance into a 2021 news article by Catie Edmonson that claimed—without any source to substantiate it—that unnamed “rabbis” had influenced Congress’ decision to fund Iron Dome, a missile-defense system that has saved countless lives in Israel. The media appeared to further boost the narrative that the Iron Dome is a tool of Israeli injustice when it ran dozens of headlines about AOC openly weeping after the vote.
In a profile of Alice Walker last spring, The Times offered sympathetic treatment to The Color of Purple author despite that fact that she has spread vile antisemitic tropes, including writing a poem that asks “Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only/That, but to enjoy it?” The Times, which previously ran a conversation between Walker and Cheryl Strayed that made no mention of Walker’s Jew hatred, characterized this noted antisemite as “complex.”
By far, the most effective tool in the demonization of Jews has been the use of Israel and Zionism as a means to hide what would otherwise be recognized as pure ethnic bigotry under the cloak of social justice. Casting Israel as the world’s last settler colonial state allows antisemites to call Jews colonialists. And casting Jews as colonialists has allowed them to call Israel a colonial movement. It has also underlined the idea that Jews are the most villainous sect on the hierarchy of white supremacy.
But by this tail-swallowing logic, the mere existence of Israel constitutes a crime. If Jews are not a real category with a legitimate identity, then why would they ever have a state, given that other people are there, too? And if the state is mired in the original sin of apartheid, how can any Jews support it without upholding white supremacy?
As a PLO political cartoon so neatly illustrates, the Palestinian national movement has not been slow to capitalize on the opportunity to conflate Jews with whites and Palestinians with American Blacks: an American police officer kneeling on the neck of an African American man is joined by an Israeli soldier kneeling on the neck of a Palestinian.
This paradox is resolved by a narrative of control. “Three hundred Zionists” (by Ye’s reckoning) run Hollywood, media and finance to keep the gentiles in thrall. And through its silence, its endless attacks on Israel, its complicity in demonizing Israel and treating the word “Zionism” as an epithet, the media not only accepts but advances this heinous narrative.
Blaming the normalization of antisemitism on Elon Musk or on the internet’s “dangerous” tolerance of unregulated speech shifts attention from the way many Jews are regularly treated by the media, their neighbors, their college classmates, and law enforcement. As calls now come from the ADL and establishment figures that Jews should trust them to censor the problem away—that our very lives depend on it!—Jews understand that the real problem has been censored all along.
Rindserg whose book on the NYT is indispensable for understanding his the NYT creates its narratives at the expense of the facts on the ground is completely in the mark in his assessment of the ADL and the growth of woke based anti Semitism