This Week in Tikvah Tablet Goes Full Devin Nunes Sedition! (12/12)

Another federal judge has sided with Attorney General Alan Wilson Tuesday and blocked a mandate from the Biden administration that would require employees of federal contractors to be vaccinated against COVID-19. This is now the third time that the courts have backed Wilson’s original lawsuit challenging the mandate as a violation of the Tenth Amendment and upheld an injunction blocking enforcement. The case was originally brought by officials from seven states: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Idaho, Kansas, Utah, and West Virginia.

But the key was the final story:

There’s a temptation to downplay the announcement Tuesday that Sen. Devin Nunes is leaving Congress to become the CEO of a new media company headed by ex-president Donald Trump. There have been numerous right-wing media and social media companies launched in the past year that were obvious cash grabs or publicity spectacles, and there are plenty of people who see the new Trump venture, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG)—which includes a social media platform called “TRUTH”—in that vein, but my sense is that it’s something different and worth taking seriously.

For one thing, the venture announced a distribution partnership with the new media company Rumble, which hasn’t been on the scene long but has already made an impact. Rumble is a YouTube-like streaming video service, but unlike the Google-owned YouTube, it has positioned itself as a free-speech haven, inviting in iconoclastic journalists such as Glenn Greenwald. The reward has been rapid growth over the past year. That gives the Trump company both a built-in infrastructure and potentially some crossover audience that could move it out of the ideological ghetto.

Then there is the historic weakness and vulnerability of the establishment media, which has primed the market for outside challengers. The outrage and hysteria generated by new independent publishing platforms such as Substack is a direct reflection of the weakness of the traditional media, which tends to respond to new challengers by denouncing them as fascists, appealing to the government to regulate them out of existence, or both.

But media profits have tanked over the past year as ratings and readerships have collapsed without the 24/7 drama of the Trump presidency. Now you have Trump himself, the guy who was driving those ratings, returning to the field. Complications will abound, especially if he chooses to run for president again in 2024, but it’s hard to see how the Trump name alone doesn’t at least provide an initial user base that could threaten more established media players.

Of course, it’s possible this really is just a money play. The TMTG special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC—which Trump established in October for the purpose of launching his new media company to “stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech”—announced over the weekend that it had raised $1 billion in capital from an unnamed “diverse group of institutional investors.” Then, on Monday, the company disclosed that it’s being looked into by the Securities and Exchange Commission. But it seems unlikely that money would be the motivation for Nunes, who certainly has easier ways to cash in as an ex-senator, such as by going into the lobbying world. Nunes was instrumental in revealing the Russiagate hoax, so maybe it’s only fitting that the same person who helped destroy the media’s credibility by exposing its complicity is now coming to try and take its place.

Yes, you read it correctly: The Whore of Trump is all in with Trumpscum criminal Devin Nunes:

https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/rpDlGlad0WQ/m/_8a1d4s_AQAJ

It is all too much to take.

Nunes should be in jail, in a cell next to the Zombie Orange Pig and the rest of his corrupt family. But the Whore of Trump is applauding this new form of Trumpgrift, and along the way refers to the Russiagate Hoax in true Matt Taibbi Trumpscum fashion.

That is the true face of The Tikvah Fund!

Doubling-Down on Defending Putin and the Trump Alt-Right!

As if that was not enough, we got a second helping of RUSSHER COLLOOSION support the very next day:

https://mailchi.mp/40f48a239fb7/what-happened-today-june-16-810141?e=4b6f9b46a8

It is now completely axiomatic among the Trumpist lackeys that the proven RUSSHER COLLOOSION is a hoax.

Enjoy!

Devin Nunes is assuredly not a senator as I incorrectly described him yesterday in an unfortunate, unforced error. Rep. Nunes, as numerous Scroll readers pointed out, is a Republican congressman from California. I especially regret the error because I have followed Nunes more closely than I do most members of Congress owing to his 2018 memo outlining “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation” and his larger role on the House Intelligence Committee debunking the dramatic claims alleging collusion between President Donald Trump and the Russian government.

This brings me to the follow-up. I understand from reader emails that some people are disturbed to hear me refer to Russiagate as a hoax, but those are the facts. We now know as a matter of public record that the Steele dossier was a political product paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign; that multiple people working for the Clinton campaign lied about their relationship to it in the course of passing information damaging to the Trump campaign to the FBI; that multiple FBI officials lied or doctored evidence in the course of manufacturing the spurious evidence for the collusion narrative. And, among many, many other disturbing details that I’m leaving out here, we know that the main source for the Steele dossier was not some Russian FSB officer whom Christopher Steele had encountered in his espionage work, but a mid-level Brookings think tank functionary in Washington, D.C., whose claims about Trump were recycled second- and third-hand anecdotes.

It has become impossible to defend the Steele dossier without losing credibility, so the effort now is to suggest that the dossier was never that important to the larger case against Trump. Who actually believes this? We were all here for the past four years, weren’t we, watching as Steele was lionized and the dossier’s claims were aggressively amplified by the press and members of Congress, such as Adam Schiff. Not to mention, the dossier was a key piece of evidence submitted to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court court to secure the warrant that authorized spying on the Trump campaign. What about Trump campaign officials’ “repeated contacts with Russians?” They never happened. It was just a claim repeated so often it started to feel true. Even former FBI agent Peter Strzok, who led the Trump-Russia probe, acknowledged, in documents that were only declassified in 2020, “We are unaware of any Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.”

It’s understandable given the low-level civil war environment in the United States right now that some people interpret criticisms of these claims as a matter of right-wing partisanship and endorsement of Donald Trump, but it’s neither. I don’t vote in American presidential elections, if that makes it any better.

In fact, accepting that the U.S. intelligence community and the press—two communities I’m personally connected to—had perpetrated a massive fraud on the public was something I came to terms with only gradually. My inclination in 2016 and 2017 was that while there was some clear exaggeration about Trump’s Kremlin ties, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. I realized that I was wrong about this only because the evidence became overwhelming. My team, insofar as I had one, was the intelligence community. Accepting that the case against Trump was cooked meant the bad guys were on my side. I didn’t find the experience pleasant.

Finally, on to this new Trump-Nunes media venture. Several people wrote in to say that I’m a rube for thinking that it could actually pan out. Their view is that this is just a money, publicity, and messaging machine with no intention of serving an audience. They may be right. On the other hand, poll after poll shows that trust in the media is at record lows. And Trump remains the single most popular Republican figure in the country. Why not try to leverage that into a media business?

Would it be good for the United States to have a media magnate running for the presidency? I didn’t particularly think so in the case of Michael Bloomberg, and I don’t think so about Trump either, who has more than a few similarities to former Italian prime minister and media empire owner Silvio Berlusconi. But that’s a different question.

And try not to choke on it!

Foucault the Neo-Con: And There is Always COVID Denialism!

This one is very good:

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/conservatives-new-queers

I am not exactly sure if The Tikvah Fund is a hotbed of Queer Activism, but this article by up-and-comer hot Straussian Blake Smith is quite a bit of Pinkwashing.

It is not the Pinkwashing that we are used to see from the Neo-Con Trumpscum Jews, as we can see from the following New York Times Op-Ed by Sarah Schulman:

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/opinion/pinkwashing-and-israels-use-of-gays-as-a-messaging-tool.html

No, Blake Smith, who is apparently Gay himself, wants to turn Neo-Cons into persecuted Gay people:

Out of straight people’s earshot, my conversations with other gay men about COVID often alight on comparisons with HIV. We note the profiles on dating and sex apps by which men declare themselves vaccinated—often with the date and brand of the doses—and enthusiasm for bareback (condomless) intercourse. And we joke—although I, at least, mean it—about our relief to find ourselves in a public health crisis for which we cannot be held specifically responsible.

Of course, such talk is horribly tasteless. But there are strange parallels and stranger contrasts between the discourses by which Americans have tried to understand the two epidemics of COVID and HIV. Coming of age just as the latter began to fade from a terrifying crisis and shadow over gay sex into, for many gay men, a matter of relative unconcern that can be prevented with daily medication, it has been dizzyingly disorienting to see the type of medical fear and moral judgment that once attended HIV reactivated and reorganized around a new disease associated with very different victim-cum-villains.

Those unvaccinated for COVID, who include some of my friends and family members, figure, in everyday conversations and debates among self-consciously responsible observers from the left and center as targets of disgust and opprobrium, a disturbed subculture whose decimation by illness is both horrifying and deserved. On the right, meanwhile, resistance to COVID-era public health mandates at times takes on the lurid, perverse enjoyment of self-conscious transgression, the sort of dark pleasure in rule-breaking that seems incongruous among stolid advocates of family values and traditional morality. As gay men become less identified in the public mind with medical danger and moral decay, queerness, the status of belonging to a marginal and threatening periphery of the social order, ironically is becoming linked with the right.

It has an echo of Rapist Kavanaugh’s disgusting argument against Abortion, which looks to turn Evangelical Christians into persecuted African-Americans, while promoting “States’ Rights”:

https://www.mississippifreepress.org/18565/justices-kavanaugh-alito-compare-abortion-to-segregation-raise-states-rights/

Smith’s dizzying PILPUL marshals Susan Sontag and Michel Foucault to ultimately argue that today’s Conservatives are not the heirs of Buckley – but of Foucault!

It is all too much to take, but feel free to read it if you have got the stomach.

And There is Always “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardischkeit!

Where would we be without the Whore of Trump deep concern for Sephardic culture?

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/holding-on-to-fathers-hummus

Jamie Betesh Carter adds her Self-Hatred to that of Esther Levy Chehebar, as she sees Syrian Jewish identity out of HUMMUS!

Betesh Carter has written four articles for Tikvah Tablet, three of them are on her father’s death and how she is dealing with it:

https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/jamie-betesh-carter

The deeply-felt articles betray a complete ignorance of the Sephardic heritage, and once again mark Tikvah Tablet as the new home for Orientalist Sephardi ephemera, as it helps in the erasure of our intellectual-literary culture.

Well done, Whore of Trump!

David Shasha

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