A couple of weeks ago Rurik, one of our most frequent longtime commenters, suggested that we add a “Breaking News” section, providing newslinks to external articles along the general lines of the influential Drudge Report:

I’d like to take this opportunity to make a suggestion.

I used to visit Drudge from time to time, just to get the latest news. If there was a plane crash or coup somewhere in the world, Drudge would usually be one of the first, if not first to have a link, if not a headline.

But Drudge has become ‘woke’ of late, and so he’s as useless as the MSM.

Which leaves a dearth of news sites linking to news stories. Especially with an objective interest in what is news per se, rather than their eternally agenda-driven slant, as you well know.

So the suggestion I have, is for The Unz Review to start a ‘Breaking News’ section.

If Russia shoots down a Turkish jet, instead of going to CNN or the NYT to read how ‘Russia’s provocations against NATO and International Law have become untenable and a dangerous threat to world peace and stability’.

We can get a more measured and nuanced look at breaking news, with links to the stories from a vast and wide-array of international news organizations.

From there perhaps your website could allow for commenting on the breaking news, or not.

But since there is such a dearth of objective news sites, or those linking to them, I just wonder if such an addition to the (amazing and inimitable) Unz Review wouldn’t be resoundingly popular. Perhaps even one day competing with and eventually replacing Drudge as the go-to site for breaking news on the Internet.

Thank you for your consideration,

the humble commenter ~ Rurik

He soon added that our own commenters would be ideally suited to providing such a crowdsourced presentation of important stories ignored by the MSM:

contemplating this, I wondered- ok, that would require someone to peruse the international and domestic news for interesting and consequential ‘breaking news’.

And who better to do that, than the notoriously news-savvy Unz Review commenter-commentariat?

Such a space would certainly need to be moderated for chaff, (considering the trolls that inhabit your site), and commenting would slow it down, but perhaps at the start, give it a boost.

Already your willing staff participate ‘gratis’, posting breaking news on existing threads, occasionally admitting it to be off topic, but on a “Breaking News’ addition to your site, it would be appropriate for all topics to be covered, so long as they were of interest.

I even wonder if a kind of Drudge-style format wouldn’t work well. With several news stories displayed on the page, with the most recent or most news-worthy at the top.

Just ‘thinking out loud here…’

I’m sure you’re familiar with WRH.

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/

And that site is enormously popular simply by posting breaking news, with some slight commentary from the site owner.

But that site is bogged down with enough ads to alienate many people, so there again, another opportunity to fill a vacuum.

It amazes me that there is such a dearth of objective news sites on the Internet. Especially as Drudge was so popular, (and lucrative and influential). But now he’s become woke, and it seems like there’s simply hardly anywhere to go for interesting and consequential news that isn’t part of the American Pravda cabal.

This seemed like a very good idea to consider, especially since I’d recently noticed the rise of other newslink-aggregation websites. Therefore, I have now gone ahead and built it, generally following the simple design of the Revolver website.

• Newslink Aggregation Section

Since this is an alternative media website, with a very energetic and ideologically-diverse commentariat of thousands of regular readers, I’d hope that they would soon become source of the overwhelming majority of our newslinks. All frequent commenters—those currently provided access to the Opinion Response buttons—are now also allowed to suggest possible Newslinks, though I’m currently applying a restriction of 3 per 24 hours. To suggest a possible Newslink just click the Suggestion box at the top of the Newslink page and add it in the following very simple format:

• (Required) URL of Newslink on First Line
• (Required) Suggested Newslink Heading on Second Line
• (Optional) Description of Newslink on Later Lines

If your Newslink is approved, it will be added to the top of the page. Depending upon how things go, I may need to adjust some of there parameters over time.

Given the increasingly harsh Social Media crackdown on the distribution of unorthodox opinions, I think these sorts of aggregation pages may become more important in the future.

The Newslink section is now displayed in the top menu and also the Sidebar. I’d look forward to hearing your perspectives and suggestions.

Several years ago during the height of the Edward Snowden/NSA spying scandal, Glenn Greenwald was sometimes described as the world’s most famous journalist. I think that characterization was probably correct, at least if we exclude Julian Assange from consideration.

The American government has emphatically denied that Assange was ever a journalist, now working to prosecute him for espionage and sentence him to life in a maximum security prison. Meanwhile, it did grudgingly concede that protective status to Greenwald. So the fates of the two most famous figures who revealed American crimes to the world sharply diverged, and the year after Assange was forced to desperately seek asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and begin his long period of miserable confinement to a single room, Greenwald made worldwide headlines as founding editor of a lavishly-funded new journalistic enterprise that captured the imagination of the world.

That venture was First Look Media, established by Tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who pledged $250 million in financial support. Its first and only visible project has been The Intercept, an outlet intended to provide a home for fearless investigative journalism, free from the pressures and dishonest compromises so often found in traditional media outlets. Greenwald’s two fellow founding editors were Laura Poitras, an award-winning documentarian who had collaborated on the Snowden project, and Jeremy Scahill, whose best-selling books had lacerated the American crimes committed during our disastrous Iraq War, focusing especially upon the huge growth of international mercenary outfits, now euphemistically styled as “military contractors.”

Numerous other veteran journalists also soon eagerly came on board at a time when so many of American’s traditional media outlets were losing their advertising revenue to the Internet, resulting in crippling waves of layoffs and cut-backs. Backed by such enormous and apparently disinterested financial support, The Intercept seemed poised for an extremely bright future.

Unfortunately, the reality has been quite different. Creating a successful media outlet is a far more difficult and complex undertaking than merely hiring experienced journalists and providing them with heavy funding. Late last week Greenwald announced his resignation from The Intercept, explaining that the top editorial staff had repeatedly blocked him from publishing his lengthy article analyzing the huge corruption-scandal now swirling around Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Greenwald was thus forced to abandon the high-profile publication that he himself had co-founded in order to regain his journalistic freedom, and that irony was hardly lost upon many other independent Internet voices, including his former colleague Matt Taibbi, Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism blog, and the Moon of Alabama blogger.

Greenwald himself explained the situation in his scathing letter of resignation. According to him, in recent years The Intercept had increasingly abandoned its original stated mission and instead become more and more indistinguishable from all the other left-leaning publications on the Internet, adopting a fiercely partisan party-line and demonstrating Procrustean tendencies to shape its journalistic output in support of its ideological goals and favored candidates. The large crew of New York editors eventually brought on board tended to measure their success by the accolades they attracted from mainstream outlets while they lived in fear of Twitter denunciations. As a result, they soon came to closely resemble the establishmentarian media that their publication had originally been created to challenge. They and most of their mainstream media peers regarded the defeat of Donald Trump as an overriding goal and therefore seem to have somehow persuaded themselves that any temporary sacrifice of honest journalistic standards was a price well worth paying.

Julian Assange may soon be spending the rest of his life in a small prison cell, and compared to that outcome Greenwald’s humiliating treatment is a mere bagatelle, but both figures fell from ideological grace for similar reasons. As an anti-secrecy campaigner, Assange had become the toast of our liberal elite by exposing the crimes of the Bush era American military, but when he evenhandedly released DNC emails deeply embarrassing to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, he was reviled as a traitor and a Russian stooge. Although Greenwald remains left-liberal in his personal views, his staunch refusal to avert his eyes from the flagrant political and media corruption on his side of the aisle has provoked deep resentments among his one-time ideological admirers.

Many details of Greenwald’s resignation can be found in the following articles, and he also explained the circumstances in an interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight:

• My Resignation From The Intercept
• Emails With Intercept Editors Showing Censorship of My Joe Biden Article
• Article on Joe and Hunter Biden Censored By The Intercept
• Matt Taibbi: Glenn Greenwald On His Resignation From The Intercept

Although I’d mostly lost track of both Greenwald and The Intercept over the last few years, the story of his sudden resignation didn’t particularly surprise me.

Donald Trump had always struck me as an ignorant buffoon and most of his proposed policies were ridiculous, but I felt that his establishmentarian political critics had almost been driven insane by their loathing for him. Since I regarded both Trump and Biden as such exceptionally awful candidates, I’d paid relatively little attention to the many months of heated presidential campaigning. However, the recent charges of massive financial corruption against the Biden family seemed pretty credible to me, and the unified media efforts to drag the Democratic ticket across the finish line by hiding the scandal from the American voters was utterly outrageous.

The New York Post is America’s oldest newspaper and after it broke the Biden corruption story a couple of weeks ago, both Facebook and Twitter took the unprecedented step of banning all links to the published account of that potentially massive political scandal. Compared to such absurd censorship, the unwillingness of The Intercept‘s Trump-hating editors to publish Greenwald’s article was shameful but hardly surprising. However once I looked into the background, other surprises did appear.

Audio Segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

One morning a couple of years ago I received an urgent email from a moderately prominent libertarian figure strongly focused on antiwar issues. He warned me that our publication had been branded a “White Supremacist website” by the Washington Post, and urged me to immediately respond, perhaps by demanding a formal retraction or even taking legal action lest we be destroyed by that totally unfair accusation.

When I looked into the matter, my own perspective was rather different. Apparently Max Boot, one of the more agitated Jewish Neocons, had written a column fiercely denouncing some recent criticism of pro-Israel policies that Philip Giraldi had published in our webzine, and the “White Supremacist” slur was merely his crude means of demonizing the author’s views for those of his readers who might be less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic about Benjamin Netanyahu and his policies.

After pointing this out to my correspondent, I also noted that a good 10% or more of our writers were probably “White Nationalists,” and perhaps a few of them might even arguably be labeled “White Supremacists.” So although Boot’s description of our website was certainly wrong, it was probably less wrong than the vast majority of his other writing, which was typically focused on American military policy and the Middle East.

Our webzine is quite unusual in its willingness to feature a smattering of writers who provide a White Nationalist perspective. Such individuals are almost totally excluded from other online publications, except for those marginalized websites devoted to their ideas, which often tend to focus on such topics and related issues to the near exclusion of anything else. However, I believe that maintaining this sort of ideological quarantine or “ghettoization” greatly diminishes the ability to understand many important aspects of our world.

Substituting ideological slurs and demonization for rational evaluation and rebuttal has long become a commonplace in heated American policy debates, recently growing more severe in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the associated “cancel-culture” driven by inflamed social media. Locating a couple of controversial sentences and then using these to dismiss an enormous body of detailed analysis may sometimes serve as an effective debating technique among timorous journalists, but its intellectual legitimacy seems rather doubtful. And this is especially true with regard to the charged subject of white racialism, which seems to provoke a near-religious antipathy among so many of the politically correct elites of our society, despite their avowedly secular protestations.

Even the choice of preferred accusatory phrases suggests a certain amount of bad faith. My impression is that a couple of years ago members of the pro-white ideological camp were usually denounced as “White Nationalists” but more recently that term has been superseded by “White Supremacists.” I suspect that part of the reason for this verbal shift was the obvious hypocrisy of their disparate treatment. As I noted a few years ago:

A strident Black Nationalist such as Malcolm X was widely condemned during his own lifetime as an extremist advocate of violence, yet he has now been honored with a U.S. postage stamp, while today a lifelong racial activist such as Al Sharpton has his own MSNBC cable television show and received 80-odd invitations to the White House over the last few years. Such treatment seems very different from what their white-activist counterparts, either past or present, might expect to receive.

Following the unexpected victory of Donald Trump and the resulting sudden media prominence of the racialist Alt-Right, a national journalist who had become a leading chronicler of that movement visited me for lunch in Palo Alto, and we spent a couple of hours discussing what I considered some of the tremendous ironies of America’s existing ideological landscape. Among other things, I pointed out that the overwhelming majority of the world’s leading academics and intellectuals from one hundred years ago—whether left, right, or center—held many views that would surely have gotten them branded as “White Nationalists” in today’s severely constricted ideological climate.

But whereas today’s WNs are an extremely vilified and marginalized group, with their ranks therefore necessarily skewed towards eccentrics and misfits, the situation was entirely different back then. Their counterparts of the past included many of the foremost academic scholars and public intellectuals of that era, who openly discussed their views in leading opinion journals rather than by pseudonymous postings in dark corners of the Internet. Partly for this reason, such individuals tended to approach the same issues with far greater sophistication.

Until the early 2000s, nearly all these names would have been almost unknown to me, either rating a sentence or two in my introductory history textbooks, or else being entirely omitted. But I spent most of that decade building a content-archiving system that provided convenient access to over a million articles from more than 200 of our leading periodicals since the mid-nineteenth century, and was stunned by the severe distortions and enormous lacunae in my knowledge which this revealed. As I wrote a couple of years ago on related matters:

I sometimes imagined myself a little like an earnest young Soviet researcher of the 1970s who began digging into the musty files of long-forgotten Kremlin archives and made some stunning discoveries. Trotsky was apparently not the notorious Nazi spy and traitor portrayed in all the textbooks, but instead had been the right-hand man of the sainted Lenin himself during the glorious days of the great Bolshevik Revolution, and for some years afterward had remained in the topmost ranks of the Party elite. And who were these other figures—Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov—who also spent those early years at the very top of the Communist hierarchy? In history courses, they had barely rated a few mentions, as minor Capitalist agents who were quickly unmasked and paid for their treachery with their lives. How could the great Lenin, father of the Revolution, have been such an idiot to have surrounded himself almost exclusively with traitors and spies?

As I gradually discovered, large portions of America’s entire intellectual past had been hidden or altered beyond recognition, and racial beliefs constituted a major portion of this transformation.

As everyone knows, over the last couple of decades California has become a one-party Democratic state. Democrats hold a better than three-fourths hyper-majority in the State Assembly and their control is nearly as overwhelming in the State Senate. California has our nation’s largest Congressional delegation, but of its 53 members only seven are Republican.

Not only is every statewide officeholder a Democrat, but no Republican has won such a race in almost 15 years, with many of the recent contests not even featuring a Republican on the November ballot. The once-proud Republican Party of Reagan and Nixon has been reduced to almost total irrelevance.

This same pattern has held in national elections, with Donald Trump losing the 2016 California vote by a remarkable 30 points and the most recent polling data suggesting a similar outcome this November.

Except for tiny Hawaii, California is now America’s most heavily non-white state, with our white European population reduced to little more than 30% of the total. But such demographic factors explain only part of those lop-sided 2016 election results since white Californians supported Trump at a rate 20-25 points lower than whites in the rest of the country. If America’s entire white national electorate had voted like its Golden State counterpart, Trump would have lost all fifty states, mostly by huge landslides, and suffered by far the greatest electoral disaster in American history. All the Trump-hating pundits would have spent Election Night laughing and saying “I told you so!”

Although liberal domination of California state politics is not quite as absolute as Democratic control, the state is certainly very liberal, with our elected officials supporting all sorts of causes and policies that would be anathema in much of the rest of the country.

Given these political realities and expecting a heavy November turnout, state Democratic leaders believed they had the perfect opportunity this year to undo one of the last hated legacies of Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, the Prop. 209 ban on governmental Affirmative Action, passed into law by a relatively narrow 55% to 45% margin in 1996. Democrats felt quite confident that a full generation of demographic and ideological shifts had totally transformed the electorate, allowing them to win a resounding victory for “racial diversity” at the ballot box.

The plan to restore Affirmative Action became an unstoppable political juggernaut, with the Assembly voting 60-14 and the Senate 30-10 to place Prop. 16 on the November ballot, repealing Prop. 209. The project enjoyed the strong support of popular Gov. Gavin Newsom and nearly all other prominent political leaders, as well as the unanimous backing of the UC Board of Regents and the heads of all three public higher education systems. Leading sports teams such as the San Francisco Giants and the Golden State Warriors added their endorsements.

California’s Attorney-General is a liberal Democrat, and his office provided what seemed like a slam-dunk official title description for the ballot measure: “Allows Diversity as a Factor in Public Employment, Education, and Contracting Decisions.” In this day and age, what California voter could possibly oppose “Diversity”?

So much for theory. PPIC, California’s leading public policy thinktank, just released the first major poll on the November vote, and our morning newspapers revealed that the attempt to restore Affirmative Action will probably lose, perhaps even by a huge landslide.

The traditional rule in California politics is that support for a ballot measure steadily declines as Election Day approaches, with undecideds overwhelmingly breaking No. Therefore, at this stage a successful measure should probably have a lead of at least 10 points. For example, experts believe that Prop. 15—a split-roll tax initiative—appears to be in trouble given its weak 51% support.

Meanwhile, only 31% of voters are currently backing Prop. 16, aimed at restoring Affirmative Action. Anything might still happen, but those are dismal numbers just a couple of weeks before ballots are mailed out.

The demographic distribution of support also tells an interesting story. Whites are probably one-third or less of California residents, but for reasons of age and naturalization, they still constitute a slight majority of likely voters, and only 26% of whites support Prop. 16. It appears that most white California Democrats refuse to support Affirmative Action.

Latinos are California’s largest group, currently representing 40% of the total population and perhaps eventually rising to an outright majority according to some projections. Only 41% of Latinos seem to support Affirmative Action.

Asians have been the group most strongly opposed to the restoration of Affirmative Action, fearing that racial discrimination would exclude their children from Berkeley, UCLA, and other top UC campuses, and a few years ago their vocal opposition had blocked a previous attempt to repeal Prop. 209. PPIC polls normally break out their Asian numbers, but in this instance Asians and blacks were lumped together, registering a combined 40% support for Prop. 16. Perhaps PPIC feared that revealing Asians (and blacks) as extreme outliers on this divisive issue would produce bitter feelings. Since Asian respondents outnumbered blacks by more than 2-to-1 and probably showed very little support for Prop. 16, it seems likely that black support for Affirmative Action was overwhelming, probably in the 60-70% range.

The low level of Hispanic support for Affirmative Action may surprise many rightwingers, but it makes perfect sense. The overwhelming majority of Hispanics work in the private sector, often in small businesses where most or all of the other employees are also Hispanic. If you and most of your coworkers are Hispanic, Affirmative Action is simply meaningless.

Prop. 209 had required color-blind university admissions since 1996, but Hispanic students have nonetheless still done rather well over the last couple of decades, actually overtaking whites in University of California admissions a few years ago, though still heavily outnumbered by Asians at Berkeley and UCLA. Hispanic families seem quite satisfied with this situation, and have provided no grassroots support for restoring Affirmative Action in university admissions.

With the exception of a tiny sliver of “professional Hispanics” who have made an entire career out of their ethnicity, Affirmative Action has never historically been much of a Hispanic issue. Indeed, I once noted the strong support Pete Wilson had received in his first 1990 campaign for governor.

For many years I had predicted to my friends that the increasingly bizarre and incompetent behavior of America’s ruling elites might soon result in a major “negative discontinuity” for our unfortunate country, the sort of massive event that future authors would use to divide one section of a thick history textbook from the next.

I couldn’t quite say what form that “discontinuity” might take, but I suggested possibilities along the lines of another Great Depression or some huge social upheaval or perhaps even a world war. The notion of an uncontrolled disease epidemic never crossed my mind, but our Covid-19 outbreak—together with the totally incompetent governmental response and the resulting social and economic disaster—seems to fit the bill quite nicely, even producing a triple-header of national calamities.

Or perhaps a quadruple-header. Although a world war still seems distant, the recent demonization of China, a bipartisan project of Democrats and Republicans alike, has already been labeled a new Cold War by leading journalistic observers, and cold wars can easily turn hot. Just a couple of weeks ago, American provocations in the vicinity of Chinese military exercises led the Chinese to respond by test-firing several of their vaunted “carrier-killer” missiles, weapons widely believed capable of immediately sending any of our primary power-projection platforms to the bottom of the ocean.

For three generations, the US has carefully avoided any military conflict with a near-peer, but that traditional forbearance may now have been replaced by extreme recklessness. Many of our cities have been set aflame in urban rioting, we have seen a huge spike in violent crime, and massive unemployment continues. So if the incumbent’s poll numbers look bleak as Election Day nears, a political October Surprise of major sabre-rattling and brinksmanship seems quite possible, and a sudden misstep might then put us at war in the South China Sea.

Chinese anti-carrier ballistic missiles have been developed to prevent an American blockade of their vital offshore waters, and many analysts doubt we have any effective defense. The loss of a carrier would mean thousands of American deaths and the possible collapse of our perceived control of the world’s sea lanes, perhaps ending the dollar’s long reign as the world’s reserve currency and thereby massively impoverishing our citizenry. A frantic American government might react by escalating to nuclear weapons, with horrific and unforeseeable consequences.

Greatly increasing this risk of war has been the very dangerous public game played for months by the Trump Administration and its political allies. The response of America’s national government to the Covid-19 outbreak was among the worst and most incompetent in the world, with only India and Brazil challenging our place at the bottom of the charts, and it is difficult to imagine a worse political nightmare for an incumbent during a presidential election year. The widespread national lockdowns produced an unprecedented spike in business failures and unemployment, which have only temporarily been mitigated by raising our national debt to levels last seen at the close of the Second World War.

Under such difficult circumstances, even the most sober and cautious of political leaders would naturally seek some desperate means of diverting blame elsewhere, and no one has ever accused our current president of such sobriety. So it was hardly surprising that for weeks during the peak of the New York outbreak and the early national lockdowns, Trump and his top officials explicitly suggested that the deadly virus had come from a Wuhan lab, thus accusing the Chinese government of being responsible for our deaths and economic disaster, with such charges being widely echoed in the media.

Although that public war of words has now subsided, the impact still remains. According to a poll taken at the end of April, a remarkable 45% of Americans believed that the deadly virus had “probably” or “definitely” originated in such a laboratory, with 74% of Republicans having that belief. Consider that nearly 200,000 Americans have already died and our business economy has suffered trillions of dollars in losses. Most great wars have been launched on merely a sliver of such justification.

This is an exceptionally dangerous situation, and we would naturally expect that our leading national publications would devote enormous resources to carefully investigating such dramatic charges and perhaps refuting them, especially given that their editorial staffs so greatly loathe the current occupant of the White House.

It sometimes seems like every edition of my morning New York Times includes one or more headlines screaming the phrase “Trump lied”, generally with reference to some casually insulting Tweet about a leading Democrat. But the Great Satan’s public accusation that the Chinese government has been directly responsible for the deaths of nearly 200,000 Americans seems to have received far less scrutiny. Both the Wall Street Journal and the Times have published investigative reports on some of these issues, but these have been extremely deferential in their coverage, and anyway lacked the depth and detail that is so clearly warranted.

A natural venue for serious investigative journalism would be the prestigious national magazines that have traditionally provided long-form reporting, with The Atlantic and The New York Times Sunday Magazine being the most obvious possibilities. But these publications have increasingly shifted their focus to “wokeness” and seem to believe that the investigative research necessary to help deflect a world war with China has far less importance than a soulful piece on the emotional plight of transgendered black rappers.

Fortunately, the ease of Internet publishing has allowed the creation of a multitude of new webzine outlets, able to fill the gaps created by the increased frivolity and irrelevance of their established predecessors. The emerging landscape of alternative media is a broad one, with individual publications possessing different strengths and weaknesses. For example, our own webzine has very high traffic but is among the most controversial and therefore one of the least likely to be mentioned in mainstream outlets.

Situated at the opposite end of this spectrum is Quillette. Launched in 2015 by former mainstream journalist Claire Lehmann, this webzine is sufficiently respectable that few journalists or academics would fear any association. Establishing such respectability is merely a means toward an end, and Quillette has now justified that effort many times over by publishing a remarkable four-part series analyzing the wider Covid-19 accusations against China. The author, Philippe Lemoine is a Cornell graduate student originally from France and his exhaustive 31,000 word opus might once have appeared as the cover-story of one of our leading national publications prior to their lapse into decadence. I have seen nothing else so comprehensive on that subject, and I would strongly recommend that the articles be read by everyone interested in this important topic.

• The China Syndrome Part I: Outbreak
READ MORE