The latest effort of the academic-media complex to steer citizens in the direction that the powers-that-be prefer comes in the shape of “The Disinformation Age,” edited by Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston, Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Despite the prestigious publisher, a cursory glance is enough to tell me that this is the usual reverse-engineered history, by which I mean that the authors already know what their conclusions are going to be and are determined to rewrite history to fit them.
Just one small example. The book dwells on the influence of the Koch brothers on the establishment libertarian think-tanks like the Mercator Center and the Cato Institute, NEVER mentioning that that “beltway libertarianism” is only one form of right libertarianism, and not the most radical or convincing by any means. That brand of libertarianism is in fact constantly criticized by anarchist libertarians as well as by minarchists.
What’s more, the Cambridge book has the nerve to source the term “Kochtopus,” coined by the libertarians at Mises.org/Lew Rockwell, to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, whose use of it came several years later and whose knowledge of the whole history of the Kochtopus is at second-hand, filtered through liberal-left tropes, and filled with suspicious gaps and elisions.
LRC: 2008 March 25 How Libertarian Is the Kochtopus
MindBodyPolitic.com: 2009, April 3, The Libertarian Kochtopus
New Yorker: 2010: The Koch Brothers’ Covert Ops
Mayer, a documentedly uninformed and lazy investigator got the whole Kochtopus network notion from bloggers who picked it up from the Ron Paul libertarians, which included me at the time, whom Matt Taibbi, a fellow left-lib journalist, was following, plagiarizing, and misrepresenting.
According to this Cambridge disinfo guide, “Kochtopus” is the term Jane Mayer “likes to call the network”…. no mention of the piddling fact that dozens if not hundreds of people had analyzed the network and called it that long before she did, all of them with a world-view diametrically opposite hers.
The charge of plagiarism surfaced fairly soon, but the New Yorker did its own misleading pseudo- investigation and came to the unsurprising conclusion that there was no there there.
Not surprising, since Mayer is a prime product of the nepotistic and incestuous media culture.
InfluenceWatch tells us the following:
Mayer’s maternal grandfather was Allan Nevins, founder of American Heritage magazine and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. Mayer’s great-great-grandfather was Emanuel Lehman, who founded the investment bank Lehman Brothers. [15]
That’s who decides what’s disinformation and what isn’t. Plagiarists and propagandists live in a bubble all their lives, sheltered from any necessity to defend their ideas honestly, and the result is false, empty history.
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More on ”reporter” Jo Becker and her direct ties to HILARY ROSEN AND KEN MEHLMAN, whose interests evidently guide her reporting.
Becker’s Pulitzer Prize was not given because her gay marriage book was great: it’s been trashed even by the Guardian, from the left, as a kind of rewrite of the history of marriage equality to give credit only to “rich, white” guys….
What the Guardian should have said is that CREDIT WAS ONLY GIVEN TO DEMOCRAT ACTIVISTS.
In other words, those kinds of prizes go to those who promote the CABAL NARRATIVE.
Becker’s book promoted Chad Griffen, who ended up heading HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN, a very important part of the Democrat power base.
Becker’s promotion of Griffen and Human Rights Campaign ties directly to HRC’s HILARY ROSEN, one of the most powerful women in politics, Democrat political strategist, lobbyist, CNN analyst, Trump hater, and handler of Hillary, Feinstein, and other swamp critters on the left.
ON HILARY ROSEN’S TDS
https://dldnews.com/two-elephants-in-the-room/
“Hilary Rosen thinks that media will bitterly regret the day they have started treating Trump as a “normal politician.”
ON BECKER’S BOOK
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/chrisgeidner/the-new-book-about-the-marriage-equality-movement
“But Becker’s reliance on the AFER (and, later, HRC) team — primarily lawyers Olson and Boies, staffers Griffin and Adam Umhoefer, and consultants [HILARY] ROSEN and KEN MEHLMAN]— is ultimately the book’s downfall. Almost any contextualizing of the case is done by people with a vested and open interest in advancing the narrative that Griffin, with Olson’s help, rescued a cause that Becker claims “had largely languished in obscurity.”
Correction:
Correction:
I lumped Ken Mehlman in with Rosen as a DEM operative, but in fact he is a gay Republican…one time chair of the RNC, whose position at HRC misled me. A RINO most likely, as he seems to be very active in Green investments. He is chief of Environmental Social governance at KKR, one of the largest private equity firms in the world. We know that private equity is heavily invested in Dominion Voting systems…and I would guess Mehlman has a hand in investments at KKR…and they are likely invested in Dominion as well. Must find a concrete link for that.