What Happened Today: March 29, 2023

No Nashville manifesto; Burrito DNA; Italians don't want synthetic salami

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The Big Story

Representatives of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department told reporters on Tuesday that they would not immediately release the manifesto, detailed maps, and other writing left behind by the 28-year-old shooter who’d murdered three 9-year-old students and three staff members at a Christian grade school before being shot and killed by police on Monday. At a press conference, Police Chief John Drake said investigators were still determining the exact motive, adding that the assailant, who identified as transgender, potentially harbored “resentment for having to” attend the school when she was younger. 

Living at home with her parents in an affluent, leafy Nashville neighborhood, the shooter was under “a doctor’s care for an emotional disorder,” Drake said. “We strongly believe there were going to be some other targets, including family members, and one of the malls here in Nashville.” The police chief added that the shooter’s parents mistakenly believed their child had sold her only gun when in fact she had legally obtained and kept several in her bedroom, including the handgun and pair of assault rifles she used in the shooting.

In light of growing calls from lawmakers for the assailant’s manifesto to be made public, prominent LGBTQ activists have said releasing it could stoke resentment toward their broader community. “The focus should be on how this was able to happen in the first place. There should not be such easy access to deadly weaponry,” said Jordan Budd, executive director of Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere.

Read More: https://www.yahoo.com/news/police-nashville-shooter-under-doctors-201939719.html

In The Back Pages: Disinfo Dictionary

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The Rest

→ Two Iranian terrorist suspects are in custody, and a third has been charged by Greek authorities in absentia, for their role in planning to cause extensive loss of life in an attack on a Jewish restaurant in Athens. The terrorist plot was discovered by Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, according to a statement released by the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said the suspects were part of an “extensive Iranian network run from Iran and spanning many countries.” Greek officials told the Associated Press that the suspects had entered Greece from Turkey and had plans to attack several sites throughout Athens and southern Greece as part of their effort “to undermine the sense of security in the country.”

→ Developing countries with ties to the struggling infrastructure project Chinese Belt and Road Initiative have received $104 billion in emergency loans from China since 2019, according to a new study by the Harvard Kennedy School and Kiel Institute for the World Economy. The survey, which is the first to investigate Chinese efforts as a lender of last resort on a worldwide basis, reveals the impact of China’s banking institutions on a postwar global financial structure that had largely been anchored, and organized, by Western institutions. The rise of global interest rates has made it difficult for several nations to repay their debts, including Sri Lanka, which asked China last week to restructure its loan obligation after the International Monetary Fund approved a $3 billion rescue loan to stave off its collapse. Western leaders are watching China’s response to Sri Lanka’s plight carefully as it’s one of several distressed nations with both Chinese and Western banking debt that could become another geopolitical fault line between Beijing and Western counterparts.

All roads seemed to lead to stalemate and some kind of negotiated solution in the long run, regardless of how well the spring offensive goes this year.

That’s Puck reporter Julia Ioffe taking the pulse of a slew of unnamed foreign policy establishment sources who say the White House, despite public statements of indefinite support for Ukraine, actually hopes Ukrainian forces will recover enough territory in a spring counteroffensive against Russia to set the stage for a negotiated peace deal. Amid growing discontent on both sides of the aisle over the ballooning costs to keep cash and arms flowing to Ukraine, Ioffe suggests the administration’s resistance to define clear goals for a Ukrainian victory is part of a shadow strategy to pave the way for some form of treaty, ideally with ports vital to Ukraine’s economy and agricultural operations back in Ukrainian hands. 

→ Greenland is giving up the daylight savings game after turning its clocks forward this past weekend for the last time ever. The Inatsisartut, Greenland’s Parliament, endorsed the move to remain permanently in summer time, a vote premised on the idea that it will more closely align the Danish territory with business allies in Europe and North America. The policy change will tack on an extra hour of afternoon sunlight, with residents in Nuuk, the capital, getting days with as many as 20 hours of daylight.

→ Authorities wrapped up their investigation into a 2022 firebombing of an office of anti-abortion group Wisconsin Family Action in Madison after recovering the DNA from a partially eaten burrito that tied a suspect to a mason jar found at the crime scene. Shortly following reports of a leaked Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, the Madison office attack included spray-painted messages on the walls that had similar characteristics to graffiti left near a protest site months later. Authorities eventually homed in on a suspect, Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury, from that protest when they recovered a fast-food bag they saw him leave behind in the garbage. The DNA from the remnants of the burrito and “four unopened hot sauce packets” were enough for a forensics lab to match the DNA recovered from the initial crime scene.

→ Synthetic meats originating from a lab are one step closer to being banned in Italy, as lawmakers push a new bill they say will protect Italian food heritage. Praised by farmer lobbies and championed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry, the bill recommends fines up to 60,000 euros for violations of the ban. Coming on the heels of other government action against the use of flour made from crickets and other insects in pasta and pizza, some animal-welfare groups are crying foul over the latest salvo against lab-grown food, which they say is needed to reduce carbon emissions. But the agriculture and food minister, Francesco Lollobrigida, isn’t having it: “Laboratory products do not guarantee quality, well-being, and the protection of the Italian food and wine culture and tradition, to which part of our tradition is linked.”

1. Between 2003 and 2015, women between the ages of 15 and 44 filed 344% more prescriptions for Adderall.

2. Seattle has lost 2,300 downtown businesses since the beginning of 2020.

3. There are only eight public toilets for every 100,000 Americans, far less than Iceland’s 56 per 100,000.

4. The 2015 Toilet Revolution in China has included 68,000 new city public bathrooms and 10 million rural toilet upgrades.

5. The 7,761 undergraduate and 9,565 graduate students at Stanford University are overseen by more than 10,000 administrators.

6. Nearly 1 in every 20 Americans own one or more AR-15 assault rifles.

7. Twisting 1,000 Oreos, researchers found the filling would stick to one wafer around 80% of the time.

8. Profits for landlords in poor neighborhoods are double per apartment compared to in affluent neighborhoods.

9. Roughly 3.6 million Americans are evicted each year.

10. At least 2 million Americans lack access to running water.

11. Media land-sale prices in the digital metaverse are down 90% compared to last year.

12. From 2020 to 2022 the New York Times CEO received a 73% salary bump, to $7.6 million.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century by Jacob Siegel

Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation

The Russo-Ukrainian War Through a Historian’s Eyes by Yehuda Bauer

With a new Cold War emerging, can Israel continue to sit on the fence?

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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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Disinfo Dictionary

A helpful guide to America’s new ministry of truth

By The Editors

AMAZON: Tech company founded by Jeff Bezos as a bookstore, now enmeshed with the federal government via Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing service with two separate top secret data regions that is used by 7,500 government agencies—or, as their own website states, “the trusted cloud for government.” Bezos bought the The Washington Post in 2013, making him both the guardian of the government’s secrets and the owner of the house publication of the DC political class. The Washington Post would go on to become a leading purveyor of the Russiagate conspiracy.

BENZ, MIKE: Whistleblower. A former deputy assistant at the State Department who witnessed the creation of the state-run censorship machine under the auspices of “fighting disinformation.” Benz, who now runs a free speech watchdog focused on exposing threats to digital liberties, has chronicled how the government officials at State and in the Department of Homeland Security took a weapon built to fight foreign threats and used it against its own citizens. “DHS insiders’ collective justification, without uttering a peep about the switch’s revolutionary implications, was that ‘domestic disinformation’ was now a greater ‘cyber threat to elections’ than falsehoods flowing from foreign interference,” Benz has noted, revealing that, without any public announcements or black helicopters flying in formation to announce the news, America developed its own ministry of truth.

BERENSON, ALEX: Controversy-seeker who happened to be right about some important things and was punished as a result. Berenson was kicked off Twitter after writing on the site that mRNA vaccines don’t “stop infection. Or transmission.” As it turned out, that was a true statement (FDA adviser Dr. Patrick Moore in a meeting from December of 2020: “Pfizer has presented no evidence in its data today that the vaccine has any effect on virus carriage or shedding, which is the fundamental basis for herd immunity”), but saying so earned Berenson a spot on a list of people the White House sent to Twitter for banning.

BUSH, GEORGE W.: 43rd president, son of a former U.S. president and CIA chief. Bush Jr. pushed his father’s spook agenda beyond his wildest dreams by kicking off the War on Terror, which allowed for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act.

CHAN, ELVIS: The assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s cyber branch in San Francisco. Chan was one of the lead actors involved in putting the heavy on social media outlets like Twitter to make sure that posts and accounts that the FBI found objectionable were taken down—including requests that left Twitter’s Head of Safety Yoel Roth “frankly perplexed.”

COVID: Jet fuel dumped into the engine of the counter-disinformation machine that had been built on Russiagate: “Due to both the pandemic and the disinformation about the election, there are increasing numbers of what extremism experts call ‘vulnerable individuals’ who could be radicalized,” warned Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary of Homeland Security for counterterrorism and threat reduction. The Department of Homeland Security produced a video in 2021 encouraging “children to report their own family members to Facebook for ‘disinformation’ if they challenge US government narratives on Covid-19.” The pandemic is now seen as an opportunity to implement a “Great Reset,” that could advance the cause of planetary information control (see under: Schwab, Klaus).

COUNTER-ELITE: A group of private billionaires mostly concentrated in the tech sector whose figurehead is Elon Musk. They claim to view the state’s attempted capture of the shared communications and sense-making machinery as a social and cultural ill as well as a threat to their economic and political interests. On the other side of the skirmish line we have the forces of the bipartisan political establishment under the command of General Barack Obama. For more, read “Elon vs. Obama.”

“DISINFORMATION DOZEN”: Twelve social media accounts identified in 2021 by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as “anti-vaxxers who play leading roles in spreading digital misinformation about Covid vaccines” who were accused of being responsible for 65% of all the “anti-vaccine content” and, according to the organization, needed to be deplatformed.

DOMESTIC EXTREMISM: An ever-expanding label that now refers to everything from “hate speech” to Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass. Often involves incidents in which FBI plants encourage Americans in disaffected groups to say or do things so that they can then be portrayed as examples of dangerous domestic terror. One good example: the “kidnapping plot” against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, which turned out to be riddled with FBI insiders who egged on the drunk and high “terrorists.”

THE ELECTION INTEGRITY PROJECT (EIP): In the run-up to the 2020 election, according to reporting by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein for The Intercept, “tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives … to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.” The way they handled it was by operating an industrial-scale censorship machine in which the government and NGOs sent tickets to the tech companies flagging objectionable content that they wanted scrubbed, via a supposedly nonpartisan consortium called the Election Integrity Project—which, as EIP head Alex Stamos explained, was a workaround for the problem that the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations.” The collective comprises four groups: the Stanford Internet Observatory; the private anti-disinformation company Graphika (which had formerly been employed by the Defense Department against groups like ISIS in the war on terror), University of Washington’s (UW) Center for an Informed Public, and The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab.

FACEBOOK: Nerd dating platform that briefly took over the world. In the wake of 2020 election, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the charge that fake news posted on his platform had influenced the outcome as “pretty crazy.” But he was soon faced with a coordinated pressure campaign in which every sector of the American ruling class, including his own employees, blamed him for putting a Putin agent in the White House, effectively accusing him of high treason. The final straw came when Obama himself “publicly denounced the spread of fake news on Facebook.” Within two days, Zuckerberg folded: “Facebook announces new push against fake news after Obama comments.” As it turns out, the Russia smear was merely the pretext used by the intelligence agencies, working in concert with senior members of the Democratic Party, to seize control of the internet, which they viewed as the rightful property of a permanent ruling class with veto power over election results.

FOREIGN INFLUENCE TASK FORCE: FBI outfit created to monitor social media to flag accounts trying to spread disinformation, a category that expanded to encompass efforts to “discredit U.S. individuals and institutions”—in other words, any criticism of the government. The Department of Homeland Security took on a similar role.

GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT CENTER: Also known as the GEC; the lead government agency coordinating the war against disinformation. Originally created as a counterterrorism agency, the GEC was rechartered by President Obama as a vehicle for effecting the national mobilization, bringing together the public and private sectors, Silicon Valley, and nonprofit groups, to eradicate (i.e., censor) supposedly dangerous disinformation. Evolved, along with the rest of the counter-disinformation complex, from defending against foreign threats to adopting an official focus on domestic disinformation, which allowed it to serve as a tool of censorship and political repression.

GERTH, JEFF: Author of a very long CJR autopsy on the mainstream press’s fraudulent Russiagate coverage. Thorough and damming, but published too late for it to mean anything. (See also under: “Media.”)

GOOGLE: The savviest of the major tech companies, largely flying under the radar despite playing a lead role in the state censorship machine—allowing junior players like Facebook to take the anti-tech heat while maintaining much closer working relationships with the governments of both the U.S. and China. Google collects so much data on their users’ behaviors, it creates the illusion of knowing their thoughts and seems to possess the technological means to change people’s thinking without taking any action at all. The company began to function as a shadow branch of the U.S. government during the Obama presidency. From 2009-15, White House and Google employees were meeting, on average, more than once a week.

GREENWALD, GLENN: Left-wing journalist who risked life and citizenship to publish inside information on the NSA’s surveillance of U.S. citizens provided to him by former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor Edward Snowden. Greenwald has been one of the loudest voices against the mainstream media’s willingness to parrot White House and CIA talking points. For this, Greenwald is smeared as having turned into a dangerous attack dog of the right. His positions haven’t moved.

GRENIER, ROBERT: Former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Grenier wrote in The New York Times, a few weeks after Trump supporters rioted in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, that the U.S. should wage a “comprehensive counterinsurgency program” against its own citizens—not just violent extremists but any “native” who seemed vulnerable to supporting Trump.

HAMILTON 68: Hoax. An initiative spearheaded by a consortium of big names—including senior Democratic Party officials like Jake Sullivan and Michael McFaul, as well as neoconservative never-Trumpers like Bill Kristol—that claimed to have the names of hundreds of Russian affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter in order to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. None of it was true. After reviewing Hamilton 68’s secret list, Twitter’s safety officer privately admitted that his company was allowing “real people” to be “unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.”

HAYDEN, MICHAEL. Spook of spooks. Former Air Force general, CIA and NSA spy chief, Hayden ranks among the most senior intelligence officers the U.S. has ever produced, and was a principal architect of the post-9/11 surveillance system. Championed Clint Watts, the former FBI agent, who became a leading exponent of the idea that Russia had “hacked” the U.S. electoral system.

HYBRID WARFARE: An approach that combines military and nonmilitary means to confuse and weaken a target while avoiding direct, full-scale conventional war. A notoriously vague theory of warfare favored by professional defense “experts,” but not very useful for building strong armies that can win wars. Laid the foundation for the idea that millions of Americans expressing ideas about politics might unwittingly be aiding in Russia’s master war plans.

JANKOWICZ, NINA: Show tunes fan and short-lived head of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board.” The former adviser to Ukraine’s State Department-installed President Petro Poroshenko composed a ditty about disinfo, which she sang to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”: “Information laundering is really quite ferocious. It’s when a huckster takes some lies and makes them sound precocious, by saying them in Congress or in mainstream outlets so, disinformation’s origins are slightly less atrocious. It’s how you hide a little lie, little lie. It’s how you hide a little lie, little lie. It’s how you hide a little, hide a little lie. Rudy Giuliani shared bad intel from Ukraine. Or when TikTok influencers said COVID can’t cause pain. They’re laundering disinfo and we really should take note, and not support their lies with our wallet, voice or throat.” Now affiliated with a nonprofit called the Centre for Information Resilience.

JOHNSON, JEH. As Obama’s secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Johnson labored for months to put U.S. election systems under DHS control, but initially the reaction “ranged from neutral to negative” from local stakeholders who told him “that running elections in this country was the sovereign and exclusive responsibility of the states, and they did not want federal intrusion, a federal takeover, or federal regulation of that process.” In his final days in office, Johnson managed to override them, unilaterally rushing through the measure.

HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOPS: Real and authentic, as the FBI has known at least since 2019, when it first took possession of them, and even Biden’s lawyers have now publicly admitted. When the New York Post attempted to report on this, dozens of the most senior national security officials in the U.S. lied to the public—calling the laptops “disinformation”—a lie that was endorsed on multiple occasions by now-President Joe Biden. Twitter, Facebook, and Google, operating as fully integrated branches of the state security infrastructure, carried out the government’s censorship orders based on that lie. The press cheered on the censorship. The story of the laptops has been framed as many things, but the most fundamental truth about it is that it was the successful culmination of the yearslong effort to create a shadow regulatory bureaucracy built specifically to prevent a repeat of Trump’s 2016 victory.

HORNE, EMILY. Twitter executive who advised against calling out the Hamilton 68 scam. Horne previously worked at the State Department handling the “digital media and think tank outreach” portfolio. According to her LinkedIn, she “worked closely with foreign policy reporters covering ISIL [an abbreviation for the Islamic State - ed.] … and executed communications plans relating to Counter-ISIL Coalition activities.” From there she moved on to a role in the Obama National Security Council as the director for strategic communications, a job she left to join Twitter in June 2017. Conveniently, she moved to Twitter one month before the launch of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the powerful neoliberal think tank behind the Hamilton 68 initiative. Horne pushed the social media site not to make the revelations public. “We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” she wrote in February 2018.

KREMLIN: The Russian parliament. On these shores, serves as boogeyman for merged new team of neo-liberals and neo-cons, who assert that the Russians are plotting constant disinformation campaigns against the United States in order to undermine our democracy. Interestingly, the same charge is rarely leveled at the still extremely communist and eminently more powerful Chinese Communist Party, which is actually involved in making all of our communication devices.

KRISTOL, BILL: Right-wing royalty turned resistance darling, Kristol transferred his advocacy for a famously disastrous global war on terrorism into a domestic one. (Why let the Iraqis have all the fun?)

LAB LEAK THEORY: A once-unspeakable assertion that a coronavirus may have been manipulated in a laboratory to gain properties never before seen in nature that make it especially efficient at transmitting between humans. Google, Facebook, and Twitter all censored references to the lab leak on the grounds that it was misinformation, despite the fact that numerous esteemed scientists had declared in the early days of the pandemic that it might be man-made. Facts were treated as dangerous, racist conspiracy theories by U.S. government health authorities and their minions in the press for roughly two years before the party line abruptly changed and government agencies began to acknowledge the truth.

LUMPKIN, MICHAEL: A leading advocate for the position that laws protecting the privacy of American citizens jeopardize national security. Former Navy SEAL with a counterterrorism background, Lumpkin headed the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the agency Obama picked to run the new U.S. war against disinformation.

MCLUHAN, MARSHALL. Predicted everything in 1970 when he wrote: “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”

MEDIA: Convenient fall guy—by far the weakest player in the counter-disinformation complex. The American press, once the guardian of democracy, is a hollow and toothless shell that got worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.

MUSK, ELON: Genius inventor slash loopy transhumanist, whose wild man tactics are often mistaken for strategic master-planning. If he had not decided to purchase Twitter, crucial details in the history of American politics in the Trump era may have remained a mystery.

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION: Cooly named outfit that funds a dozen automated disinformation detection technologies explicitly designed to monitor constitutionally protected speech on issues like “vaccine hesitancy and electoral skepticism.”

OBAMA, BARACK: 44th president. Signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which launched an open-ended information war targeting Americans.

POPULISM: An inherently unstable but recurring kind of political movement that organizes broad popular dissatisfaction with elites and which, when it appeared in the U.S. and Europe starting in 2015, inspired a pathological freakout within the political establishment who treated it as the return of Nazism. Those movements relied on figureheads—Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the U.S.—because average voters, even when they were tens of thousands strong, were too cut off from the levers of power located inside institutional centers to pose any long-term challenge to the American ruling class.

PRINCE HARRY AND MEGHAN MARKLE: Failed podcast hosts who pivoted into a new career by joining the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Such initiatives flourished in the years after Trump and Brexit, like fantasy sports leagues for the idle rich to play at joining in the great cause of the deep state.

ROGAN, JOE: Former UFC commentator and comedian, and one of the biggest podcasters in the world. For his interrogation of experimental vaccines and potential alternative approaches to treatment, Rogan was denounced as “an enormous threat to public health” in a public letter that mainstream media outlets reported was written by “270 doctors,” but was actually a hodgepodge of some doctors as well as a majority of nonmedical professionals, including a group of... podcasters.

Read the rest of the guide, here.