Vox

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

A ‘Trump tornado’ is about to hit Europe

There is a wind of change blowing through the West. It emanates from Washington DC, where President Donald Trump continues to dash off executive orders; more than fifty by the end of last week, the highest number in a president’s first 100 days in four decades. The liberal mainstream media is rattled. The New York Times magazine ran a piece at the weekend in which it described Trump as "the leading light of a spate of illiberal leaders and parties flourishing in democracies around the world." The paper namechecked some of them: Poland, Holland, India, France, Germany, Italy, Brazil, Hungary and Russia. What unites and motivates these "illiberal" parties is their opposition to what the NYT called "liberal creep," which they regard as a civilizational threat.

Trump

Saturday

Juan P. Villasmil

Inside a very international CPAC

“I’m running to be the senator to the Romanian diaspora,” I overheard a man tell the leader of Spain’s right-wing Vox Party, Santiago Abascal. “I’m running for congress in the Dominican Republic,” Fernando Abreu told me. Argentinians, Salvadoreans, Venezuelans, Brits, Hungarians — all of them were at CPAC 2024. At times it seemed that half of attendees weren’t American. The most interesting foreigners, though, were not just there for the speeches. On the sidelines, they dined, laughed and planned. In a VIP Latin America Luncheon thrown by the Center for a Secure Free Society, a small group of leaders, Heritage Foundation fellows and experienced policymakers met to talk about what’s next for the region.

cpac international

Wednesday

Cockburn

ProPublica to return SBF cash — will other outlets follow suit?

Sam Bankman-Fried may have been arrested, but he's not the only one with questions to answer following the FTX implosion. ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative news outlet, has finally claimed in an internal email that it will return the $1.6 million it received from Bankman-Fried's family foundation, according to Axios. In a memo, ProPublica president and co-CEO Robin Sparkman and editor-in-chief and co-CEO Stephen Engelberg said the company will be returning the money from Bankman-Fried’s family foundation, called Building a Stronger Future, because "it does not seem appropriate to keep these funds." Go figure.

sam bankman-fried propublica

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Sam Bankman-Fried’s media outlets must come clean

Bankrupted crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried is the talk of the town thanks to the implosion of his heavily celebrity- and lawmaker-endorsed digital currency platform, FTX. SBF cleverly disguised his shaky financial schemes behind an awkward personality and philosophy labeled as “Effective Altruism,” meaning giving away massive amounts of wealth in the name of simply doing good. It’s a popular philosophical fad that has caught on among progressive global elites in the philanthropy arena and seems to be quite popular among media elites as well. Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced a plan to donate most of his wealth, on the same day that 10,000 jobs were to be eliminated at Amazon.

sam bankman-fried

Monday

Stephen L. Miller

The American media: the CCP’s useful idiots

There was a shooting spree at several massage parlors outside of Atlanta last week. The killer confessed in custody that his motivation was a combination of religious guilt and sex addiction. But the American media used the occasion to push a race-based explanation for the killings — an explanation that no investigators, including the FBI, have been able to prove thus far. By any and all factual indications, this was not a crime based on the victims’ race, but their occupation. American reporters ignore all that. Instead they sensationalize for a social-media audience of woke identitarians — and now the Chinese Communist party is getting in on the act. The CCP is employing the same talking points via their state media outlets as we see in our ‘free’ ones.

ccp

Wednesday

Cockburn

Harper’s vs Vox — and the bonfire of the liberal values

Cockburn is long enough in the tooth to recall when it was uncontroversial to defend the 'free exchange of information and ideas.’ Not so many moons ago, it seemed obvious to the point of boring to say that 'the way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.’ Not anymore. In 2020, that is edgy stuff, as the group of 150 writers who just wrote a joint letter to Harper’s have proved. Their letter, a defense of free expression, makes the perfectly clear and fair point that ‘as writers, we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.

vox

Saturday

Stephen L. Miller

Why was early coronavirus coverage so lazy? The media’s insatiable thirst for political correctness

When the media views its entire mission through a lens of meting out social justice while presenting itself as the opposition to the current administration, it completely misses the forest for the trees. Usually this just leads to harmless sparring between ideological opponents on the pages of the New York Times opinion section, but its lazy coverage of the early spread of coronavirus had national and international consequences.President Trump’s order to halt all travel from China on January 31, for example, was met with hollers of xenophobia from the loudest corners of mainstream media. Those cries have since been memory-holed — quite literally, in some cases (Vox) — but it’s worth revisiting the where the worst actors in media stood when this pandemic started.

media coronavirus coverage

Friday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Ben Shapiro on YouTube: ‘if you approach an unspecified line, you’ll be downgraded or banned’

This week was a disastrous one for those of us who care about free speech, viewpoint diversity, and fighting censorship. To find out why, tune in to the latest episode of Censored in the City, in which Ben Shapiro and I dig into the nefarious ongoings at YouTube. ‘They’ve created this incredibly vague standard, if you approach an unspecified line, then, presumably, you will be downgraded or banned,’ Ben tells me. ‘And not only that, in their new standards they say they are going to upgrade what they call “authoritative sources”. Well who the hell are “authoritative sources”?

ben shapiro youtube

Thursday

Michael Tracey

Steven Crowder and the folly of the internet playground

Steven Crowder is a buffoon with a YouTube channel who churns out simplistic, reactionary political takes every day. This might be passably acceptable if he were funny – but he is not. He’s just annoying and obnoxious. Still, annoying and obnoxious people have populated the internet since it first became available to the masses: bitter insults were hurled at the dawn of the online bulletin board.

steven crowder carlos maza

Sunday

Will Lloyd

Bonfire of the ‘journalists’: social justice clickbait faces its Waterloo

At the end of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Clover and her friends gaze through the farmhouse window at a terrible scene. Their leader Napoleon is hosting a delegation of humans from the neighboring farm. A strange thing is happening to the faces of the men and the pigs sat around the table: ‘Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.’ There was a time when I ‘liked’ the Facebook pages of Vox, VICE, the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Mic, Upworthy, Mashable, Refinery29, Slate, Salon, NowThis, Thrillist, Gawker.

digital media ideology social justice