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I had never heard of Noam Dworman before today. Apparently he is the owner of a comedy venue in New York and he does podcasts. I had vaguely heard of the Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, and I had certainly heard of the Washington Post. Woodward. Bernstein. Watergate. Like thousands of others, after seeing ‘All the President’s Men’, I dreamed of being an investigative reporter.
The WaPo is not what it was, judging from Bump’s performance on this edition of Dworman’s podcast. When Dworman called it “Live From The Table: Philip Bump Battles Hard on Hunter Biden” he was too charitable. The main thing Bump battles to do is not acknowledge the steaming great news story in front of his nose and to extricate himself before someone asks a reporter at the Washington Post to investigate the President.
I often think it is a valuable exercise to type out extracts from videos so that what is in them has a better chance to reach the quite large number of people who don’t watch videos. So I tried to transcribe what was said in the last few minutes of this podcast, starting at 1:10:25. There were several places where Bump and Dworman talked over each other, so forgive me if I didn’t get every word. All the bold type was added by me.
NOAM DWORMAN: What do you take from the text message to his adult daughter where Hunter says, “I have to give 50% of my income to Pop”?
PHILIP BUMP: I have no idea what that means. I don’t. I have no idea what that means.
I would have thought it was clear enough.
NOAM DWORMAN: Well, it’s, it’s –
PHILIP BUMP: I know it’s circumstantial evidence and you’d prefer that…
NOAM DWORMAN: What – what could it be?
PHILIP BUMP: I have no idea.
NOAM DWORMAN: Well does it – ?
PHILIP BUMP: I appreciate your asking-
I could not hear whether Bump then says that he appreciates Dworman asking the question or that he appreciates Dworman asking him to be on his podcast, but judging from his repetition of the line later, it was probably him trying to end the session.
NOAM DWORMAN: Has anybody asked her?
PHILIP BUMP: I don’t know. I don’t know.
NOAM DWORMAN: Don’t you think that somebody should ask her?
PHILIP BUMP: “OK, like I’m – I just said I don’t know what to make of it, so I have nothing to say. What do you want me to say?
NOAM DWORMAN: Yeah, but you say, ‘There’s no evidence, no evidence’ but then there’s a text message where he says, ‘I give Pop 50% of my money. That’s – that’s evidence.
PHILIP BUMP: Okay, well, what, fine, fine. It’s evidence.
For a very brief moment I thought that Mr Bump was about to say that the Washington Post would fearlessly grab the story and not let go.
NOAM DWORMAN: So…
PHILIP BUMP:. I appreciate you having me on.
NOAM DWORMAN: It doesn’t…? That something like that…?
PHILIP BUMP: I feel you want me to leave, like just walk out in the middle of this so you can…
NOAM DWORMAN: You can go, but is this the standard, really, is this the way, that the Washington Post handles people who disagree with them?
PHILIP BUMP: When I agreed to be on for 45 minutes and then I get on for an hour and fifteen, then, yeah, after a while I go. Thanks for having me on. [He leaves.]
When Mr Bump was a little boy, did he watch All The President’s Men like I did? Did he dream that one day he would be a journalist at the very same newspaper as Woodward and Bernstein, and that he too would have evidence of Presidential malfeasance put before him, and that he would see it for what it was, and that he would…
…complain that he’d been sitting in the same seat for half an hour more than he was booked for and say, “Yeah, after a while I go.”
Here are three articles I saw over the last couple of days, one about Canada, one about the UK, and one about Ireland.
Jordan Peterson writing in the Telegraph:
As a professional, practicing clinical psychologist, I never thought I would fall foul of Canada’s increasingly censorial state. Yet, like so many others – including teachers, nurses, and other professionals – that is precisely what has happened. In my case, a court has upheld an order from the College of Psychologists of Ontario that I undergo social media training or lose my licence to practice a profession I have served for most of my adult life.
Their reason? Because of a handful of tweets on my social media, apparently. Yes: I am at risk of losing my licence to practice as a mental health professional because of the complaints of a tiny number of people about the utterly unproven “harm” done by my political opinions.
Bill Goodwin writing in Computer Weekly:
Plans by the government in the Online Safety Bill to require tech companies to scan encrypted messages will damage the UK’s reputation for data security, the UK’s professional body for IT has warned.
BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, which has 70,000 members, said that government proposals in the new laws to compromise end-to-end encryption are not possible without creating systemic security risks and in effect bugging millions of phone users.
John McGuirk writing in Gript.ie:
Yesterday morning my colleague Ben Scallan attended the Electoral Commission’s announcement of the new constituency boundaries for the next Irish general election. While most of the focus of the event was on who would be voting where, Ben asked a question of more general relevance to the commission: It has been granted significant powers to regulate so-called “misinformation” in Irish election campaigns. If this was a power it needs, we reasoned, then surely it would have examples of the kind of misinformation that it intended to regulate in future elections. Ben asked for such an example, and here is what happened:
The Irish government's new anti-misinformation force, the Electoral Commission, says it has "very extensive powers" to "require the correction or removal of information we believe to be incorrect" – all in an effort to "enhance democracy." Question by @Ben_Scallan#griptpic.twitter.com/nMlixyGM2q
That the commission does not have examples of the kind of misinformation it intends to correct is hardly shocking if, like me, you are a cynic. It’s quite hard to genuinely shock us cynics.
And yet Mrs. Justice Marie Baker, the Chairperson of the Commission, did indeed manage to shock me at 3.15 in the clip above when she said “we’re also going to have to learn how to deal with the balance between the right to freedom of expression on the one hand, and on the other hand, the right of persons not to be misinformed”.
This is shocking firstly because Mrs. Justice Baker is a judge of the Supreme Court, and should know that while the right to freedom of expression is in the Irish constitution, the right not to be misinformed appears nowhere. Even granting some allowances for the fact that she was speaking off the cuff, it’s objectively remarkable to see a Supreme Court Judge essentially making up a law, and a right, that nobody has ever voted on – and more than that, assuming for herself the right to enforce on everyone else a right or a law that she’s just invented herself.
To do that is one thing – to do it while speaking of “defending democracy”, when democracy is about having the people choose their own laws, is quite another.
“The right of persons not to be misinformed” is a truly Orwellian inversion of the meaning of “right”. It describes the withdrawal of a right as the granting of one.
I would like to think that the absence of any news stories about threats to freedom in Australia, New Zealand or the United States in today’s little collection was because there were none to report. I would also like the figure and eyesight of a twenty year-old and a billion pounds.
How will these people react when they hear detailed evidence that Donald Trump knew there was no evidence of electoral fraud? That he was told again and again, by his trusted inner circle, that he had lost the election?
Can their faith withstand the weight of the evidence the prosecution will bring to court?
I don’t know. But Ms Smith seems to be forgetting that in a trial it is not only the prosecution who bring evidence to court. Trump, too, will have the right to call witnesses and demand hidden things be brought forth. Faith can be tested in more than one direction.
After the 2020 election, the US establishment and media made Herculean efforts to silence anyone arguing that election fraud had occurred. They may not have succeeded with the deplorables, but they succeeded with the respectables. There is scarcely a member of the American upper middle class without the protection of a private income or tenure who would dare to talk about the events in Maricopa Countyeven to say that they were satisfied that no irregularity occurred. Doing that would imply that they had given Trump’s views on the 2020 election enough consideration to reject them. The censors got Trump himself and many of his most prominent supporters thrown off Twitter. They had Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members deleted. They deleted his videos from Facebook. Facebook also demoted posts from private individuals that contained “election misinformation”. The social media companies instituted regular meetings where government officials told them who to censor and shadowban next – and the companies asked what more they could do.
And now, after doing all that, they have decided to demand that Trump explains in detail why he believes the 2020 election was stolen. They are going to demand he does it in the one place where even they dare not keep the public from hearing him speak. “In all criminal prosecutions,” says the Sixth Amendment,“the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”
Is there some factor obvious to Americans but missed by my British eyes that explains why this reversal of policy is not as rash as it seems? True, it might work out well for the Democrats. Trump is irritating. He has an irritating voice. His speech from the dock will not echo those of Robert Emmet or Nelson Mandela in anyone’s ears but his. All the same, I would bet on him rather than them coming out ahead. He does not have to prove the election was stolen from him. He does not even have to prove that he believes the election was stolen from him. (Which of course he does believe. He’s Trump, for goodness sake. One doesn’t have to take a view on whether or not he truly has been wronged to see that Donald Trump is the last man on Earth to ponder whether the bad guy might be him.)
It is for the prosecution to prove that Trump does not believe the election was stolen.
Unless I am misunderstanding something, that seems a formidable task.
A new film is out, called The Sound of Freedom, and it is about the horrible topic of child sex trafficking, and based on the experiences of people, such as former US government agent, Tim Ballard, who tried to shut this trade down. The film has become a hit already in the US, overtaking the new and lame Indiana Jones film (starring an aging Harrison Ford).
I want to focus on a different angle here, because I can imagine some of the “whataboutery” sort of responses from those who, for example, dislike the emphatic Christian convictions of the actor who plays Tim Ballard – Jim Caviezel. The film has already provoked sniffy responses from certain quarters.
There is, as readers know, a gap between rhetoric and performance when it comes to Christian churches and other faiths’ groups in terms of the treatment of children in some cases, while Christians and those of no faith are also to be found in seeking to protect children, too. I hope and generally imagine that the benign consequences of religion, when it comes to care for children, outweigh the negatives (full disclosure: I am a lapsed Anglican). I recall reading, with horror, about the child abuse allegations that were sweeping through the Catholic church a few years ago in cities such as Boston. I recall there was a film about this, such as about the situation in Boston, a few years ago. On the flip side, consider the work of evangelical Christians, Quakers and others on issues such as building a moral storm against the slave trade, or the encouragement of prison reform, and so on. It is hard to contemplate the US civil rights movement and not see the importance of Christianity in the US. (For a fascinating account of how different Christian denominations have shaped American culture to this day, read Albion’s Seed, by David Hackett Fischer.)
So why the hostility to this film now? This seems driven more by political partisanship and point scoring between the Left and Right than an ability to view stories on the facts.
Even the most secular person can and should be appalled, and want to tackle the matter of sex trafficking and coercion of minors. This is why issues such as money laundering, for example, are such a big deal for banks (and why it is all the more important to get that sort of issue right.)
It is true that these issues can get out of hand when it comes to fear and panic about what is going on. In the UK and other places about 40 years ago there was a “satantic abuse” problem, in parts of the north of the UK, I think, and there were miscarriages of justice, and a serious concern about the errors and oversight of various government agencies.
Even so, on the face of it, there is a problem. Slavery today is, in numerical terms, a major issue. The United Nations said, in a report last year, that there are millions of people in a condition of slavery, and a number of them will be children. (The usual health warnings apply to official figures, but even with that, these are non-trivial numbers.)
I can understand the reason for some people, maybe from good intentions, to either play down the issue or hope it goes away because they don’t want specific groups to be portrayed in a negative light, or fear this will cause specific groups to be persecuted. Centuries ago, Jews were attacked for wanting to kill Christian babies, and other such nonsense. But the problem is that our politeness, even our desire not to “rock the boat”, creates a breeding ground for trouble.
Unfortunately, in today’s always-offended culture, and its myriad hypocrisies, blind spots and desire to wish things were different than they are, the chances that there will be a rational, realistic discussion on how to prevent abuses, deal with criminals, and so on are not great. But we have to try.
One naturally wants to believe that an issue one is involved in is of world-historical importance. But as the judge himself wrote in the decision, “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” That, my friends, is a strong claim, but as I have previously argued, an entirely accurate one.
Dear benighted parents, you must understand that we operate under a “higher obligation”.
There is a magnificently orotund opinion article by one Professor Sarah J. Reynolds in the Indystar* (the newspaper formerly known as the Indianapolis Star):
“Parents’ rights” have been widely discussed in local, state and national debates around education in recent years. Here in Indiana, Attorney General Todd Rokita’s office has released a “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which specifies that parents “have a constitutional right to direct the upbringing and education of [their] child in the manner [they] see fit.” Many of these bills and discussions, however, crucially forget that the higher obligation in education is not to the parent, but to the child themselves.
We have a collective community responsibility to ensure that children’s education is not determined by or dependent on the whims of a few, but instead is truly preparing children for a future as independent, free-thinking citizens in a world beyond their parents’ control and vision. In our communities, we need to work together to collectively ensure that children’s rights to education are what is privileged in our schools and laws.
[…]
Certainly, the parental impulse to protect and guide and nurture is an important one, and one that strongly benefits children and their education. However, we must remember that impulses can lead even the well-intentioned astray. Protection can be stifling, guidance can seep into control, and forms of nurturing that were once age-appropriate must transform and transition into different varieties of love and respect as children mature. Furthermore, we are sorrowfully aware that not every parent has their children’s best interest at heart.
In the comments to the Indystar’s tweet, a lady called Orietta Rose shares her own sorrowful awareness that “less than 40% of 4th graders [in Indiana] were testing proficient or above in reading & math in 2022. Can’t read, but they’re learning to be freethinkers, right?”
When I asked my five-year-old grandson what he knew about George Washington, all he could say was, “He owned slaves.” That’s how Washington is remembered today: slaves, bad teeth, and a face on the dollar bill. But he won the Revolutionary War by sheer force of character; the precedents he set as our first chief executive embodied the ideology of freedom and remain in effect today. Other great men of similar talents behaved quite differently. Napoleon began as first consul, then promoted himself to emperor. Simón Bolívar went from liberator to dictator. By contrast, Washington voluntarily and with much relief relinquished power and ended his days as a farmer at Mount Vernon. That was unusual, unlikely—and exceptional.
This bill, if passed, would fundamentally redefine family life in California. It would devastate parents’ rights. Your rights over your children – to love them, to look after them, to socialise them as you see fit – would be utterly contingent on your acceptance of the new state religion of transgenderism. AB957 is best seen as an act of forced religious conversion. It sends a stern message to parents across California that if they do not sign up to the cult of gendered souls, to the cranky belief that even young children sometimes feel a mismatch between their ‘real’ gender and their cursed biological casing, then they’ll be treated as the morally lesser party in custody hearings. Your worth as a parent will be determined by how willing you are to take the knee to the gender beliefs of your superiors.
Tara Reade, the woman who accused Joe Biden of having sexually assaulted her when she worked for him as a Congressional aide, has “defected” to Russia.
I first noticed her direction of travel when I saw a tweet by her in praise of Vladlen Tatarsky. Plenty of people had concerns about his killing without gushing over him in the way she did. I cannot find that tweet now. It was there. Perhaps she deleted it when she read the replies. At any rate, she has now gone fully Putinite.
And her accusation against Joe Biden should still be taken seriously by the authorities. Note that “taken seriously” does not mean “automatically believed”. #BelieveWomen is a literally prejudiced sentiment on a moral par with #BelieveWhitePeople. Nor does it mean “automatically disbelieved”. As a woman and a Putinite, Tara Reade’s report of a crime being committed against her should be taken seriously, because as an anything whatsoever anyone whatsoever should have their report of a crime taken seriously.
The gross disproportion between the way the media lined up not merely to cover but to profess their unquestioning belief in Christine Blasey Ford’s unevidenced accusation of sexual assault against Justice Brett Kavanaugh yet refused to even look at Reade’s considerably more detailed accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden will never be anything other than a disgrace.
So far I’ve only really discussed the procedural happenings—however what limited expedited discovery in this case has exposed (separate and apart from the Twitter files) is both unprecedented and abhorrent. The most widespread and troubling discovery? CISA has designated YOUR THOUGHTS part of the governments infrastructure. They call it “cognitive infrastructure”.
They argue they can regulate what you think as they consider it under their purview. In this article I describe “The 6 Most Shocking Recent Revelations of Government Censorship,” if you want the details. One character of particular importance was White House director of digital communications and strategy Rob Flaherty. Flaherty was ABUSIVE to social media companies—like they were his battered wife. Many of them resisted the calls for censorship until threats forced them into action. I was actually stunned to see how averse they were to censoring—until forced to by the government.
– Tracy Beanz. Read the whole thing, it is astonishing.
It was about a minute later that I encountered Feinstein coming off an elevator, sitting in a wheelchair and flanked by staff. It’s been hard to find the senator since her return; she’s kept her movements mostly to the least-populated passageways and skipped luncheons and non-urgent committee hearings.
I asked her how she was feeling.
“Oh, I’m feeling fine. I have a problem with the leg.” A fellow reporter staking out the elevator asked what was wrong with the leg.
“Well, nothing that’s anyone concern but mine,” she said.
When the fellow reporter asked her what the response from her colleagues had been like since her return, though, the conversation took an odd turn.
“No, I haven’t been gone,” she said.
OK.
“You should follow the—I haven’t been gone. I’ve been working.”
When asked whether she meant that she’d been working from home, she turned feisty.
“No, I’ve been here. I’ve been voting,” she said. “Please. You either know or don’t know.”
After deflecting one final question about those, like Rep. Ro Khanna, who’ve called on her to resign, she was wheeled away.
Senator Feinstein, who is 89, appears to have forgotten that she was in hospital with shingles for two and a half months.
If you’re a Democratic senator and you’re not at least privately urging Feinstein to resign, and urging Schumer and Durbin to take action, you have failed the people who sent you to Congress. You’re lying to yourselves that this 👇🏽 is *okay*
He is right, but Feinstein’s is not the only photograph that could be placed below that downward-pointing finger.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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