Decay, AND MORE DECAY WITH DEM AMERICA’S POLITICAL ROT!

The Astounding Saga Of Hamilton 68 Illustrates Scope Of America’s Institutional Rot

BY: EMILY JASHINSKY at the Federalist:

JANUARY 31, 2023

Thanks to Matt Taibbi’s most recent contribution to ‘The Twitter Files,’ we know the full extent of institutional corruption in the mind-boggling case of Hamilton 68.

EMILY JASHINSKY

The media fell head over heels for a shoddy propaganda operation spearheaded by an ex-FBI agent. Twitter, internally, understood the operation to be partisan hackery but never spoke out. Organizations full of influential ex-government officials promoted the operation. And it’s only thanks to Matt Taibbi’s most recent contribution to “The Twitter Files” that we know the full extent of institutional corruption in the mind-boggling case of Hamilton 68.

American intelligence operatives have a history of using credulous reporters to spread disinformation for political purposes. (Remember when President Nixon’s team forged cables about John F. Kennedy and tried to get them in Life? Or the fate of Jean Seberg and her baby, thanks in part to COINTELPRO and the Los Angeles Times?) We’ve learned more and more about this in the years after the Cold War, yet elite media outlets eagerly swallow tactical disinformation when it confirms their priors.

The consequence? Self-appointed disinformation police in government and media shape American politics with actual disinformation, crafted specifically to quiet dissent.

New Information

Given access to Twitter’s internal records by new CEO Elon Musk, Taibbi pulled the company’s communications surrounding Hamilton 68 and reported his findings last Friday. The project styled itself as a “dashboard” that tracked Russian disinformation on Twitter.

As Taibbi wrote, “The secret ingredient in Hamilton 68’s analytic method was a list of 644 accounts supposedly linked ‘to Russian influence activities online.’ It was hidden from the public, but Twitter was in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s sample by analyzing its Application Program Interface (API) requests, which is how they first ‘reverse-engineered’ Hamilton’s list in late 2017.”

The files unearthed by Taibbi show Twitter’s internal audit of the Hamilton 68 list found it to be, in the words of former executive Yoel Roth, “bullish-t.”

“These accounts are neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots,” another employee said. What Hamilton 68 was passing off as foreign disinformation was largely legitimate speech from anti-establishment American tweeters. Here’s Roth again: “Virtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard] will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”

The “dashboard” confirmed elites’ bizarre anti-Trump Russia-collusion narrative by secretly classifying as Russian activity political speech from Americans with whom they disagreed.

Who ran Hamilton 68? Created by former FBI Special Agent Clint Watts, the project was supported by the Alliance for Securing Democracy and the German Marshall Fund. That means a host of powerful former government officials with long histories in and around intelligence agencies promoted the shoddy research for years or, at the very least, were complicit in Hamilton 68’s work by lending their support. Watts himself is an NBC News and MSNBC contributor. (Bill Kristol is a member of the Alliance’s advisory board.)

Institutional Corruption

It gets so much worse on three fronts: academia, Big Tech, and media.

First, Taibbi notes the suspicious research was promoted uncritically by elite American universities, including Harvard and Princeton. Second, the files show Twitter declined to call out Hamilton 68 publicly, opting to “play a longer game here,” in the words of one employee who now advises Pete Buttigieg at the Department of Transportation.

Third, and most importantly, Twitter’s efforts to privately nudge reporters away from the story failed miserably. Taibbi found, “[Emily] Horne wrote several times that she had no luck in steering journalists away from these hack headlines. ‘Reporters are chafing,’ she wrote, adding, ‘it’s like shouting into a void.’” Horne works for the Biden administration as well.

This is a damning illustration of the institutional corruption rotting American politics and culture. You may wonder how ex-spooks could create a secret list, hide their results, pass off the research as legitimate, convince just about every major media outlet to run with the findings, convince elite universities to run with them, and keep Twitter quiet in the process. The answer is that some institutional powerbrokers are corrupt, some are inexcusably incompetent, and others are a combination.

Media Enable It All

If the media, however, had a semblance of the competence and virtue journalists claim to have, there would be much more incentive for powerful people in other institutions to stop behaving badly.

Watts and Co. did not make an honest mistake. When leftists at Twitter saw the same information, they immediately and literally called BS — privately, at least. Even their warnings could not dissuade dozens of journalists and politicians from blasting Hamilton 68’s findings to millions of Americans for years. This was an attempt to create junk science, hide the results with a laughable excuse, and use it to bolster a false narrative that discredited a political opponent.

Journalists did their part and took the bait. Bear in mind that NBC News and MSNBC have used Watts himself as a national security contributor for years, ignoring plenty of evidence that he was a dishonest propagandist using their airwaves to advance the interests of intelligence agencies. They actually used their own “disinformation” reporters to spread more disinformation.

My colleague Mollie Hemingway called this out all the way back in 2018, when the likes of Adam Schiff, Dianne Feinstein, and an astounding array of media outlets were promoting Hamilton 68.

“Hamilton 68 won’t let anyone review their dashboard to determine in any way if they’re tracking actual Russian propaganda bots, or just conservative Americans who, for instance, care about FISA abuse,” Hemingway wrote. “Yet Hamilton 68’s claims are repeated uncritically by a media that asks no questions about the methodology.” (Twitter seemed to be misrepresenting its internal knowledge at the time, as well.)

Five years ago, making that point was met with attacks from anti-Trump activists who engaged in amateur intellectual gymnastics to classify every argument they disliked as Russian propaganda. The effect was to turn down the volume on people who were undercutting the campaign against Trump, empowering their own false narrative. Taibbi’s reporting vindicates the people who pushed back.

Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist and host of Federalist Radio Hour. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young America’s Foundation. She’s interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including “Fox News Sunday,” “Media Buzz,” and “The McLaughlin Group.” 

‘The Democrats’ plan is to attack any reasonable restriction on abortions as “extreme.” ‘

JANUARY 30, 2023 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

RIDING ABORTION TO VICTORY

The Dobbs decision upended last November’s election. Democrats successfully rallied their pro-abortion core and apparently convinced a lot of swing voters to turn out in favor of abortion. In Minnesota, where I live, abortion was the decisive issue that allowed the Democrats to sweep the Minnesota House, the Minnesota Senate (by a single vote) and the governorship.

Democrats apparently think there are more victories to be won by promoting unrestricted abortion. Breitbart reports:

A Democrat political committee centered on state legislatures is creating an affiliated non-profit which is set to launch a pro-abortion ad campaign in Virginia, “an early example of Democrats continuing to lean into the issue after a strong midterm performance,” Politico reported on Monday.

The Democrats’ plan is to attack any reasonable restriction on abortions as “extreme.”

“The new ad, which comes from the State Democracy Action Fund, raises the possibility of an abortion ban in the state, according to details shared first with POLITICO. ‘Will Virginia pass an extreme abortion ban?’ the ad’s narrator asks, before attacking GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin and ‘extremist lawmakers’ for wanting to ban abortion in the state after 15 weeks of pregnancy,” according to the report.

The 15-week proposal is what generally prevails in the more liberal European countries. There is nothing “extreme” about it.

The Democrats, on the other hand, want to go far beyond most voters’ views on the issue, if you believe the polls. Thus, for example, the Minnesota House and Senate have passed, on party line votes, the “PRO Act.” The PRO Act is short and simple: it provides an absolute right to abortion up to the moment of birth. I suppose we should be grateful it doesn’t permit fourth-trimester abortion.

But wait! There is a second bill working its way through Minnesota’s legislature that apparently would legalize killing babies that have been born alive. SF 70, among other provisions, repeals a long list of statutes, most of which relate in some way to abortion. Among the laws to be repealed is this one:

145.415 LIVE FETUS AFTER ABORTION, TREATMENT.

Subdivision 1. Recognition. A potentially viable fetus which is live born following an attempted abortion shall be fully recognized as a human person under the law.

Subd. 2. Medical care. If an abortion of a potentially viable fetus results in a live birth, the responsible medical personnel shall take all reasonable measures, in keeping with good medical practice, to preserve the life and health of the live born person.

I assume this bill will soon become law, too, as the Democrats are caught up in a wave of euphoria over abortion. Will they really be able to ride the issue to new and greater electoral victories? I don’t know. I am pretty sure most people disapprove of abortion up to the moment of birth, and a large majority certainly don’t favor infanticide. But, given the bizarre manner in which the press reports on matters relating to abortion, perhaps only the hard core Democrats who thirst for ever more abortions will understand how extreme these laws really are.

We Had To “Study” Edgar Allan Poe IN ENGLISH CLASS, 1950 when I was a sophomore in high school

JANUARY 31, 2023 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line:

MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE

I take it there is no news advancing the Biden classified documents matter today. Assuming our readers were intimately familiar with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, I may have mystified some by adapting the title of Edgar Allan Poe’s fantastic story “MS. Found In a Bottle” for several of my posts on the Biden matter. (“MS.” is an abbreviation of “manuscript.”) Published by Baltimore’s Saturday Visiter newspaper on October 19, 1833, “MS. Found In a Bottle” won the prize for best story submitted to the newspaper.

Poe had submitted a linked package of tales. The discerning judges found all the stories submitted by Poe worthy, but singled out “MS. Found In a Bottle” for the $50 award. According to the judges, Poe owed it to his own reputation and that of Baltimore to publish the entire volume.

Once upon a time, young readers enjoyed Poe’s stories. Poe’s “tales of terror” are both horrifying and unforgettable; they bear the stamp of deeply felt nightmares. Poe’s “tales of ratiocination” are fascinating as detective stories, and Poe was of course the inventor of the genre. Not even being required to read Poe in school could destroy the pleasure provided by his work. Does anyone now read Poe, either voluntarily or otherwise?

Well, maybe The Raven — not the poem, silly, the 2012 action movie starring John Cusack as Poe that was previewed by the Christian Science Monitor’s Molly Driscoll. I dreamed that it might do for Poe what Oprah’s book club did for John Steinbeck and a host of others worthies, near worthies, and contenders. I don’t think it worked out that way.

Thirty years ago Professor Kenneth Silverman published his compelling account of Poe’s life, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance. In Silverman’s telling, Poe’s life becomes the counterpart to Poe’s tales of terror. Poe lost both his mother and father by the age of three, was divided from his brother and sister to be raised by a family friend, and suffered the mortal illnesses and deaths of every other person he loved in the course of his life with the sole exception of his mother-in-law, to whom he was unfailingly loyal.

At the same time, Poe struggled manfully with alcohol and destitution. Nevertheless, by the time he died at the age of 40, he had created the impressive body of fiction, poetry and literary criticism that stands as his monument. With great artistry Silverman conveyed the headlong rush of his life by keeping the narrative going without division into chapters. Silverman’s reconstruction of Poe’s life is something of an inspiration. It turns out that Poe was a hero of a kind, just not the Hollywood action kind.

(Note: I never have been able to read books. My dyslexia was too overwhelming…but I wanted me to learn when I was in school. My teachers did too. I think it was in 1950 when the CLASSIC COMICS arrived in Minnesota’s Twin Cities…..AS I REMEMBER, I BOUGHT ABOUT THIRTY CLASSICS at ten cents a piece that year we had to read ENGLISH LITERATURE and I loved the stories so much even though life was tough.

We had to read Edgar Alan Poe during our American year.

(I delivered a paper route near where I lived with 70 receivers…… the St. Paul Pioneer Press in the morning, and the Dispatch after school. The Korean War had broken out! People went to Church or Synagogue then. I sang in our Lutheran choir.

Sunday’s were for |GOD and family then! ghr)

A Cold Spell From Leftist Minnesota!

Republicans have nicknamed the legislation the “blackout bill.”

Minnesota House passes 100% clean energy billalphanews.org

And this: https://www.mccl.org/post/senate-votes-for-abortion-up-to-birth-in-minnesota

“Minnesotans don’t support elective third-trimester abortion. They just don’t. But that’s what this extreme bill entrenches in our state law: the right to abort any baby for any reason at any time up to birth,” said MCCL Co-Executive Director Cathy Blaeser. “Under this bill, even babies who are old enough to live outside the womb and to feel excruciating pain have no protection from lethal violence. The extremism of H.F. 1 puts Minnesota in the same category as just a handful of countries around the world, including North Korea and China.”

And this, of course:

The above notes were sent by Mark Waldeland!