Hysterical reporters at Mother Jones stalk Blake Masters' campaign donors' chat.
Hysterical reporters at Mother Jones stalk Blake Masters' campaign donors' chat.
Lol. lmao
Mother Jones reporter Noah Lanard wants to embarrass Senate candidate Blake Masters, and is thus half-heartedly menacing your favorite niche micro e-celeb.
Some donors to Blake Masters’ Senate campaign were invited into a Discord group chat. Noah Lanard is going around DMing them about it and their views. “Did you write this? This is you, yeah? You said this didn’t you. Huh? Huh?”
The implication in a forthcoming hitpiece is that these are bad hombres and thus, so is Blake Masters. And if that’s true, man, oh man, he can’t win the race!
This is funny, as Mother Jones itself agrees with all about which they shout "J'Accuse...!" , they’re just angry other people don’t agree any further.
More on that later.
But why do they bother?
If you’re a cool cat who’s hep to the jive, the next two ‘grafs are nothing new:
Journalism functions as a way for political regimes to produce compliance in the politically active (unreliable) part of the population and to police dissenters. This is not always true. In regimes where the fig leaf of exercising power over others, i.e., governing, isn’t legitimated by ‘consent of the governed’, journalism doesn’t function this way.
Americans today don’t have much familiarity with those (they’re not democracies) but they used to know what the real purpose of a club’s newsletter or a company’s quarterly reports was; keeping people informed about events. Being informed is different from producing compliance when one isn’t ruled with the excuse that those who rule are legitimate because people who know them also agree with them, and agree they should be in charge.
A favorite tool of compliance by journalism in American democracy is to make white people who want to be socially respected, good citizens, feel embarrassed. Embarrassment is not exactly fear. Fear is more when you get a call from your Dad that your Mom was just in surgery (!) and that everything will be okay(!?).
Embarrassment is more like slipping and falling on an icy street, or not knowing when to use the smaller fork at a dinner, or a credit card being declined. Socially, we humans are still very much troupes of primates, hooting and hollering at each other in the trees, sizing each other up for combat (instead of biting toes and gouging eyeballs, we mostly use guns, or more often, harsh words) so as to acquire More Status—‘looking bad’ in front of the group is thus probably evolutionarily related to fear of the group, but yet in the fat, happy West, these are still not exactly the same thing. It’s not even clear we have real single group.
Preface finished, what transgression against good taste, what deficiency of gentility, what incompatibility with the political formula of rule has Noah Lanard—faithful, capable regime servant as he is—uncovered in Blake Masters? Nothing.
Nothing that hasn’t been published over and over again elsewhere, anyway, which is a sorry thing. In the long run, idempotency is the same as impotency. But there’s a new twist, there’s a new development. Someone in a Discord chat who supported Blake Masters's campaign…continued to approve of Blake Masters!
Folks—this is some serious stuff. Earth-shattering revelations which should convince the voters of Arizona that the only way to be a good person is to do as they’re told by the “Smart, Fearless” journalists at Mother Jones. (nota bene: This is a bit like “Red, Delicious” apples, or the “Democratic, Republic” of North Korea).
Here’s a Daily Beast article from back in June which attacks Blake Masters:
Blake Masters Blames Gun Violence on ‘Black People, Frankly’
Tech investor and Arizona Republican Senate hopeful Blake Masters acknowledges that the United States has a gun violence problem.Masters boiled the issue down in an April 11 interview on the Jeff Oravits Show podcast, telling the host that “we do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence.”
“It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly,” Masters clarified.
Those are the FBI’s annually published statistics on crime and race in America.
Here is the US Census on how many White and Black (Hispanic, or not) people there are in the United States. Obviously, these figures are all approximate, obviously, they have things moving the trends up and down in certain years. But the numbers are the numbers. If you do the sums and figures—without additional considerations about gang affiliation, or being located in Chicago or St. Louis, or the use of a firearm, by the way—you can see reality for yourself.
Are you a small, fragile, incapable child?
If the answer is “Yes”, our political process, where the franchise has only ever expanded, even in 2022 says that you cannot register to vote because you haven’t obtained the age of majority and presumably, some level of maturity which would mean your approval of who governs can be taken just as seriously as anyone else’s in our great American experiment.
But if the answer is “No”, I have to ask - why would you take what Noah writes seriously?
His position is that this hive of villainy, this Discord chat, is full of people who are imperiling the American Res Publica with their WRONG AND BAD AND SCAAAAARY ideas. Ideas, which, by the way, Mother Jones (very dishonestly) totally acknowledges as fact when they choose to massage the data themselves:
Consider this piece by Mother Jones: US Mass Shootings, 1982–2022. They claim there have been…128 mass shootings since 1982, with 1,036 deaths, or something like 0.2% of all homicide deaths in the United States over the past forty years.
But that’s quite strange, because EveryTown says that “there have been 277 mass shootings in the United States, …1565 people shot and killed.” since 2009.
As is pointed out in that piece, Mother Jones knows what’s happening with gun violence in America, and chose to conceal facts about it even if it meant their tracking of mass shootings paints a much, much, much less bloody picture than the one EveryTown wants to show the public. This is par for the course.
Journalism isn’t about keeping people informed, or seeking the truth. No.
It’s about making people with something to lose fear they’re next if they don’t think, act, and behave exactly as the favored political and media incumbents of the US elite classes want them to behave, or at least fear the social embarrassment that will oh-so-certainly be caused to befall them when it’s revealed they believe in gauche things like arithmetic or not lying about crime.
I’m not totally sure what motivates one like Noah Lanard to feel so compelled to serve this kind of agenda. I’ve worked with, invested alongside, been friends with, still am friends with, etc. lots of people in his audience—kindhearted White Liberal Americans who often vote for Democrats, give to charitable causes, and generally go along to get along with what they perceive to be socially safe, and then of course, morally sound causes and political positions. I know why they behave the way they do—while they are smart, they’re usually not fearless.
So a formerly productive tactic of journalists who want to get compliance and stop things like donating to political campaigns, or even running such campaigns, which threaten the incumbency they enjoy, is harassing and intimidating people who donate to them, gussied up as speaking truth to power.
Journalists, though, who put them in charge? What drives them? They want to police the bounds of our democracy, but did we ever elect them? Why are their opinions more important than anyone else’s? Why are their deep intonations of dark and terrible bêtes noires prowling in Discord chats more important to think about than fact? If I had to guess, it’s that their journalism in a period of regnant Liberalism inspires feelings of immense self-loathing and motivation to destroy.
Everything in which they, like all us social animals do, invested their social cache is at this moment beginning to crumble. Another less than honest Noah, Noah Smith, writes as such:
It really pains me to have to write this post.
I had high hopes for Bidenomics. The combination of the Covid emergency, Chinese competition, and general American anger at long years of stagnation and inequality felt like they might motivate this country to get up off its butt and do something to improve the situation. And it felt like Biden’s people had a good, cohesive program for improving the situation, which I thought would be fairly effective….15 months later, it’s looking like my optimism was unwarranted…That doesn’t mean Biden’s presidency will be a failure — there’s still the Ukraine war,
Emphasis added.
If your job is being a Regime mouthpiece, and the Regime is having a really bad go of things, to see people like Blake Masters—capable, sophisticated, people who clearly aren’t rubes—so fundamentally disagree with the Regime and pursue displacing it…well…that doesn’t just cause embarrassment in someone like Noah:
They’re deeply afraid. Like those in the panicky JournoList group eventual Vox founder and abandoner Ezra Klein set up for coordinating election narratives, they have no idea how to maintain their rule—or rather, the rule of the class which pays them. That’s why they are running stories about stories about stories about Bad Thoughts. That’s why their go-to is to say, “Hey, well, this guy is Bad News, okay? you don’t wanna be associated with that guy. Please don’t associate with that guy! I mean how could you? He’s so Bad!”
There’s no second level, there’s no actual principle, just them hysterically watching power slip through their fingers like sand. It almost inspires pity.