patrick.net

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/business/mark-zuckerberg-meta-fact-check.html



OMGLOLWTF

Does the NY Times have any idea how much they sound like The Babylon Bee now?

Although it was completely predictable, the New York Times still ran perhaps its stupidest article in a long series of cognitively compromised columns, this one capped with the stunningly imbecilic headline, “As a Felon, Trump Upends How Americans View the Presidency.” A far more honest headline would have been, “Trump’s Sentencing Proves Liberal Lawfare Complete Waste of Time.” ...

After everything, after spending $80-million-plus (?) and who knows how much political capital to obtain the first criminal conviction of a U.S. president, Judge Merchan bravely sentenced Trump to nothing. No jail, no fine, no probation, not even community service.

Merchan’s unprecedented non-sentence left the Times with very little ammunition to work with, but it did it’s lying best. In the Times’ view, Trump has been punished: politically.

“TrUmP is tHe fIrSt FeLoN pReSiDeNt!!”

“While Mr. Trump was spared jail time or financial penalties,” the Times’s glum reporter noted with the slightest hint of finding a bright side, “he effectively had the word ‘felon’ tattooed on his record for all time unless a higher court overturns the conviction.”

Hahaha! Stop it! It’s too much! The best slam the Times could come up with was this is going on his permanent record. That is, effectively permanent. But not actually permanent! Because Trump’s appeal is still pending, and it’s pending under a whole new regime. So. ...

The reporter scared up an appropriate, if false, quotation from Barack Obama’s former lawyer who sadly said “You have somebody who is an adjudicated felon 34 times over, but you also have a nation that is either so numb or so in shock that it does not know how to react.”

Please. That is a progressive fantasy. Not only do we know exactly how to react, we did react. We re-elected the felon. Nor are we numb or in shock; we are furious. And we’re not going to let sold-out corporate media get away with it this time.

On Thursday, Fortune published one of the most remarkable articles I can recall, which also remarkably replaced an overheated article published earlier in the day. The replacement article ran under a one-word, all-caps headline: “CORRECTION.” Here is the entire new article:

CORRECTION: On January 9, Fortune published an article titled "Elon Musk is pushing to
remove dates from X posts and planning new $8 sign up fee." After publication, Fortune
learned that a source that was central to this story had intentionally misled our reporter over
a series of exchanges. The sourcing and story do not meet our editorial standards, and the story
has been deleted. We apologize to readers and to Mr. Musk and employees of X.

It sounds hilarious and it was. Fortune figured out that a single X user named “SpaceSudoer” had catfished the corporate media outlet into running a 100% fake story intended to mock Elon Musk. Yesterday, a new ‘Fortune Exposed’ account took credit (it seems SpaceSudoer created the Fortune Exposed account for this purpose):



In a series of posts, SpaceSudoer described how he’d answered a prompt seeking X whistleblowers at the bottom of one of reporter Kali Hays’ articles. So he pretended to be a disgruntled X employee and made up a story about being relocated. When Kali bit, he offered an outrageous tale of getting fired by Elon personally, after he pushed back on Elon’s dumb idea to “remove dates from X posts” and cancel the free account option.

Reporter Hays asked him for some supporting evidence, like an email or screenshot, which SpaceSudoer did not provide, ghosting her. He said he was then “surprised” to see Fortune run with the story, multiplying his fake, anonymous “whistleblowing” report into two anonymous sources:

Musk has floated the idea of nixing date and
time stamps from the timeline to X to
employees in recent weeks, a person familiar
with internal conversations told Fortune. The
suggestion, which has raised worries among
some staffers for its potential to exacerbate
misinformation, comes as X is moving ahead
with a separate plan to begin charging new
users an $8 fee to sign up and begin posting on
the platform, two sources told Fortune.

Ruh roh. Not only did Fortune fall for being journalistically catfished —without evidence— but it also lied about its sourcing.

Lying corporate media is on life support. I keep telling you these articles quoting only anonymous sources are pure propaganda. If it fits the narrative, any bad actor can supply willing corporate media reporters who will neither try to confirm or deny the story, but will merely run with it so long as its politically helpful.

Kali could have emailed X and asked for a comment. I know it’s a lot of work, but still. I’m just saying. She didn’t check because she didn’t want to know.

If we had a functioning corporate media instead of a sold-out, deep-state propaganda operation, Fortune would not have deleted its article in panic. Instead, it would have published a much more introspective follow-up story explaining what went wrong, how it violated its own journalistic standards, and how it plans to fix it to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Instead, all we got was a “CORRECTION” that blamed everything on the spoofer. As though Fortune has some right to expect anonymous tipsters to be scrupulous with the truth, so that it need not do any journalism work itself.

Remember — we were this close being forced to accept that the only credible sources of information were Fortune and the rest of corporate media.

Is it spreading misinformation when Fortune does it?

Well, it’s his own fault. Elon neglected to submit his speech six weeks in advance for prior review by the Global Gesture Compliance Committee of the World Economic Forum in Brussels. Had he done so, the GGCC would have indicated that his proposed arm motion fell under the chapter ‘Faux Paus’ in the Committee’s Manual on Acceptable Waving (see page 1116).

The sad part is it could have been so easily avoided, had he just flashed the standard GGCC-approved princess wave, or even just flicked his wrist in a feminine downwards thrust at the finish. But with one careless arm-flail, Elon’s semaphore signal accidentally unlocked the Fourth Reich, a deplorable DLC module whose armies are assembling even now, and which, as you read this, are Goose Stepping their way through a fantastic zone of feverish progressive imagination.

Seriously though, the corporate media is so easy to troll. I’d bet decent money Elon created this controversy on purpose, taking a page from Trump’s own media-trollbook. Since progressives are so desperate for something to cling to, to reassure themselves as virtuous despite Trump’s landslide, they’ll even latch on to something as dumb as this.

This fracas over Elon’s wave is the adult equivalent of a child on a long car ride complaining that the other child keeps staring at them. He’s still looking at me!

Whaddabout Superman - ain't he a NAZI as well, with the hand in the air when he flies. I guess now it's OK since woke DC made him a homo.

Instead of addressing RFK, Jr.’s concerns about data transparency and safety when it comes to injecting children with products for which manufacturers bear no liability, the WSJ Editorial Board dismissed them out of hand. Of the Opinion’s many inanities, the most notable is the following:

"He says he merely wants to ensure that vaccines are safe and thoroughly studied—who doesn’t?—and that Americans have access to more information. In Mr. Kennedy’s case, this means opening the industry to lawsuits by the trial bar."

Can the editors name a single other industry in the United States that is shielded from lawsuits in the event that its service or product results in injury or death? Would aircraft and car manufacturers maintain stringent quality control standards if they never had to worry about a lawsuit in the event of a crash?

Corporate media spent its Friday joyously doxxing more DOGE members, trying its best to cancel them before they can uncover more government misconduct. Early yesterday, Wired broke the biggest story, hysterically headlined “DOGE Teen Owns ‘Tesla.Sexy LLC’ and Worked at Startup That Has Hired Convicted Hackers.”

The horror.

Unironically, Wired accused Edward Coristine, 19, of creating his LLC, Tesla.Sexy, three years ago, when he was sixteen. I’ll say it again — Edward created his own successful tech LLC when he was sixteen years old. In its bloodthirsty excitement to cancel a top DOGE team member, Wired completely missed the gist.

For example, Wired’s article also smeared Edward with a prior job he’d held at IT security firm Path Networks, “known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers.”

In other words, Wired accidentally explained Edward is a real-life computer genius. But wait, there’s more. Edward’s next job was working for Elon Musk at the Neuralink company. And now Edward works in a top agency of the federal government.

All by the time he was 19 years old.

Michael Dell, you may have heard of him, also started a tech company when he was 19. So we’re talking about a potential Michael Dell-level of talent.

Wired, fueled no doubt by Deep State dirty tricks, did everything it could think of to smear young Edward, using the poor kid’s own resume. For example, he briefly owned a website selling an AI tool for a gaming website (Discord) — with Russian and Chinese versions. It proves he must be a Russian-triple-agent-Chinese spy!!!! Just like Trump!!!!

It was a Wired self-own. Or at minimum, the Wired article is a Rorschach test. If you are a woke lunatic, and you squint at the blobby dots hard enough, you see a comic-book supervillain. Sort of.

But everybody else sees a clear picture of DOGE hiring our country’s best and brightest.

Edward is the élite’s worst nightmare. His highest educational attainment was high school. No Ivy League. Not even college. But, enjoy this, an indignant Wired resentfully reported Edwards title at DOGE is simply, “Expert.”

That’s it, that’s his whole title: “Expert.”

Hahahaha! Edward’s title is an inside joke, an obvious mockery of progressives’ most treasured possession: expert status. DOGE is killing the wokescolds with humor. Everyone gets it now: progressive expertise is the cheapest kind of expertise, a knock-off, a Canal Street counterfeit; it’s expertise the easy way, not requiring actually accomplishing anything except being good at butt kissing.

Hence, for five years, they rubbed our faces in bulbous buffoons like Peter Hotez and dimlights like Leana Wen. The truth is, not everybody who graduated medical school in Haiti and is willing to lie on TV is an expert. Almost none of them are, actually. But I digress.

But the worst, most disqualifying misstep Wired discovered was that Edward once used a particularly colorful online gamer nickname. By this time, most everyone reading this has probably already heard it.

Edward might have big … basketballs, but his nickname was big news, especially among a certain far-left media category, represented best by a bevy of breathless, pearl-clutching, post-menopause-aged anchorwomen on CNN who were absolutely furious. “We looked into his background,” Karen scolded —by ‘looked into’ meaning she skimmed the same widely-circulating Wired story everybody else did— and, get this, she discovered “he has used the unfortunate nickname Big Ballz online.”

Hilariously, DOGE made them say it. Over and over and over.

Edward’s braggadocious gaming handle was, indeed unfortunate. But maybe not for the reason CNN thought. Among most young people, the “unfortunate” moniker is no slur, it is an unhumble brag. The left completely missed the target by repeating the rough compliment a thousand times, elevating Edward into the colored inserts in America’s testosterone-fueled history books of masculine achievement.

The Atlantic’s piece desperately clung to its rapidly shrinking purpose as the elite gatekeeper. “Kennedy holds broadly appealing views on combatting corruption and helping Americans overcome chronic disease,” the Atlantic allowed, admitting Kennedy’s undeniable grassroots support. “But,” they sneeringly continued, “he is also, to an almost cartoonish degree, not impeccably credentialed.”

Haha! Good one! Not impeccably credentialed! To a cartoonish degree! I wonder how long the tortured writers struggled to find the best words to describe their seething hostility without completely lampooning themselves as reeking caricatures of overfed academia. Only four years ago, corporate media clapped like trained seals about the confirmation of another lawyer —a lawyer with no public health background— named Xavier Becerra.