Pizzagate XVI

BY Herschel Smith
7 years, 2 months ago

It’s difficult to be patient.  It’s hard to wait and let stories develop.  It’s hard work to investigate and vet sources.  But just occasionally it’s both gratifying and amusing to be a part of things like this, albeit small on my part.

Watching the developments over the last couple of days brought a smile to my face and made me glad to be alive and able to appreciate what I’ve seen.  The MSM has absolutely self destructed, little progressive heads have exploded all over the place, and it’s wonderful to sit back and observe the festivities over something so allegedly fake and fabricated as #Pizzagate.

But first things first.  This began months ago when a journalist named Ben Swann began studying #Pizzagate, I’m sure using the sources found by the citizen investigators.  He did a fairly short presentation for CBS46 in Atlanta on Pizzagate.  By my estimation it was fairly benign and moderate, but he was certainly honest and careful.  It was a good piece of investigative journalism making use of the discoveries by the citizen investigators.  Here it is.

Queue the fireworks and exploding progressive heads.  It was the first MSM piece that didn’t claim to “debunk” Pizzagate, but rather, gave it an honest hearing.  That cannot be allowed among the rank and file.  The attacks started and will continue for some time I’m sure.

First, YouTube began suppressing search results for Ben.  Within not too many hours of the presentation, too short a time to craft anything meaningful in reply, the attacks started.  Huffington Post, Media Matters, The Daily Beast, Gizmodo and The Washington Post all jumped on Ben Swann with hit pieces like he was ending journalism as they knew it.

Further, Ben Swann articles were scrubbed from reddit, and the most interesting thing of all is that we’ve learned that CBS46 took down their post of the video.  Here is a phone call where they admit it.

A “URL problem.”  This is priceless.  Above I said that the hit pieces were crafted like Ben Swann had ended journalism as they all know it.  Of course, that isn’t what happened.  That occurred long before now at the hands of the MSM.  No one cares about them anymore, so their own “get thee to thy fainting couch” reactions over their lost credibility are wasted effort.

But ironically, if it’s ever to be rebuilt, it will have to be with people like Ben Swann.  Let me interpret for you what’s happened.  There are those true believers in the “big state,” those “journalists” who believe that the government can do no wrong, who believe that the progressives have the correct vision for the world and that a monopoly of force should and must be used to enforce that vision.  They will never believe that anything nefarious could occur.  The state is righteous by definition.

This is a point of interest for my oldest son, Joshua, who quips from time to time about how the old conservatives and liberals have swapped places.  Not the neo-cons, many of whom are in bed with the progressives, but the conservatives like me – those who believe that government must have checks and balances and that the best government is the smallest and least intrusive government.

I’m not so sure that we’ve actually swapped places like he thinks, as the hippie movement always had statism at its core, it was just that they weren’t in power and others were.  Besides, neocons aren’t really conservatives anyway.  What we’re watching now is the logical consequence and necessary outcome of the Bohemian flower child generation.  These are the children of the hippies, both literally and ideologically.

But there is a second category of “journalists” who lament Ben Swann’s presentation, and they’re are the most interesting to me.  Years ago when my son Daniel was in the Marines and I was a military blogger, I wrote a story on their operations entirely from email communications with Lt. Col. William Mullen (now Brigadier General).  I couldn’t do it any other way.  I tried to go to Iraq and report on his battalion, but I started too late and the funds weren’t there.  I added some of what I knew without my conversations with Mullen, and it turned into a decent article.  Not great, perhaps not even really good, but decent.  Decent enough to publish, and that’s about it.

A friend named Bill Ardolino, who was a legitimate combat reporter, wrote me with both congratulations and lamentations.  He liked the piece and congratulated me for getting the story.  He lamented the fact that he considered it “his story” that I scooped.  Half jokingly, but still, I could tell that he had wanted to write what I had written.

Bill went on to write a much better report from Fallujah in 2007 than I did, so I didn’t really scoop him.  But here’s the thing.  Ben Swann really did scoop the rest of the MSM put together.  They are rattling their cages, chomping at the bits, barking at the walkers, or however you want to put it, waiting for the government – there’s that notion again of government omniscience – to tell them it’s okay to write about it because charges are coming down, or investigations are underway, or court dates have been set.

The editors are holding them back.  Investigative journalism is over in America.  All of the moral preening in the “journalism” community, all of the pining away for how things used to be, all of the time spent in journalism classrooms, is all just so much flotsam and jetsam.  It’s just all irrelevant, and no one outside of their little circle of self righteous watchers cares.  The watchers have turned into talking heads and pundits who interpret official talking points for the masses, nothing more.

Citizen investigators are beating everyone to the punch, and we finally see a courageous journalist who dares to go out and speak truth to power, and lo and behold, it’s not his detractors who did the piece.  Outrage!  Ben got their scoop, and they’re pissed about it.  He was first out of the gate, and so he must be censored, even by his own station.

The MSM sucks, and it doesn’t just suck, but it sucks really, really badly.  It’s worse than totally worthless.  It has a deleterious affect on the culture.  I work around many people every day, and I’m sure readers do as well, whose initial reaction to anything the MSM writes is either to ignore it or believe exactly the opposite simply because the MSM said it – not just conservatives, but everyone.  If fake news is a problem, it begins and ends with the MSM.  I’m not sure it’s possible for the collective community to recover, but if it stands any chance, doing what they did to Ben Swann is diametrically opposed to what they should be doing.  Their instincts are so bad I’m disinclined to believe that they can ever recover.

Prior:

Pizzagate XV

Planeload of FBI Agents Sent To Iceland To Frame Julian Assange

Pizzagate XIII: Who Really Leaked The DNC And Podesta EMails To Wikileaks?

Pizzagate XII

Pizzagate XI

Pizzagate X

Pizzagate IX

Pizzagate VIII

Pizzagate VII

Pizzagate VI

Pizzagate V: Pizzagate In Theological Perspective

Pizzagate IV

Pizzagate III

Pizzagate II

Pizzagate


Comments

  1. On January 20, 2017 at 6:42 am, Matthew W said:

    I don’t know if Pizzagate is real or not.
    But without investigating, how can the MSM claim that it is fake news if they don’t look !!!
    Also, PLEASE,PLEASE,PLEASE everyone !!
    Stopping adding “gate” to every scandal.

  2. On January 20, 2017 at 7:34 am, MattBracken said:

    The only honest reporting is now being done by the dissident right on new media. Thanks for pursuing this story and providing so many valuable links, because the MSM is doing all they can to bury or break them.

  3. On January 20, 2017 at 8:25 am, Frank Clarke said:

    I just went over to YouTube and searched for “Pizzagate”. The top result was

    CBS News Ben Swann does a “Reality Check” on Pizzagate
    David Dobbs
    2 days ago 206,624 views

    That doesn’t look like ‘suppression’ to me. What am I not seeing?

  4. On January 20, 2017 at 9:23 am, Herschel Smith said:

    If they’re no longer doing it, good.

  5. On January 20, 2017 at 12:20 pm, Archer said:

    The search algorithms are mostly automated. There’s a limit to how much YouTube admins can quietly “fiddle” with the search results before it becomes painfully obvious that they’re suppressing certain videos.

    If multiple users/accounts post up copies of the same video, eventually YouTube can’t keep it from appearing in searches without either removing all copies or banning all the users/accounts that post it, either of which results in two things:
    1. It harms YouTube’s position and brand; and
    2. It invokes the Streisand Effect as people start seeking out the videos to see for themselves what the big deal is, and for cases like Ben Swann’s pretty straight-up fact-based reporting, that just further harms YouTube.

    There’s very little that could make people more eager to see a video, than to say they can’t.

  6. On January 20, 2017 at 12:28 pm, Herschel Smith said:

    Yea. They’ve done a lot to suppress David Seaman’s work and it shows. It increases hate for Google rather than increasing good will.

  7. On January 20, 2017 at 9:36 am, Voiceofreason1 said:

    I Love Ben Swann ! God Bless the Man !

  8. On January 20, 2017 at 9:52 am, Ed Jewett said:

    There are some who think much of PizzaGate is a psy op run by pro-Obama forces (cognitive infiltration) inside intel offices. Wayne Madsen won’t touch or discuss the subject. There are people who have advanced the issue but who also push other strange stories. The FBI is … well, what are they doing? George Webb’s work brushes up against it. Is PG a diversion from the story Webb pursues? Or is this all a part of some larger agenda? Consider these two excerpts:

    “… The intentional disruption of social networks is now part of the political mainstream in the US (and increasingly the EU), and it took only one election cycle for the entirety of the political spectrum to adopt it. Now, salvos of intentional disruption are the most common form of political discourse in the increasingly fractured west. … Every participant in our political system is doing it….. Trump is the incredible Hulk of disruption. The more you throw at him, the stronger he gets. In contrast, the establishment derives its power through the smooth functioning of the system and strong connections.

    Anything that weakens, disrupts, negates, or damages the system makes it easier for Trump to operate and harder for the establishment to do the same.”

    http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2017/01/kompromat-and-the-disruption-of-the-west.html

    “… After observing the behavior of the corporate media, the outgoing administration, the defeated candidate, the Hollywood/entertainment industry, NGO network, and intelligence community, it is apparent that the ruling elite are now embarking upon a domestic strategy of tension. After years of constant propaganda and provocation by corporate media organizations and the NGO community, Americans are now more divided than ever in modern history, with race, religion, gender, and class divisions worse now than they were decades before. Many Americans – regardless of their preferred identification – have been radicalized by their media and entertainment industrial complex….”

    Trump Presidency, Transition of Power To Ignite Era Of Destabilization In The U.S.?

    Posted on January 18, 2017 by Brandon Turbeville

    http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2017/01/65035.html

  9. On January 20, 2017 at 11:24 am, Herschel Smith said:

    #Pizzagate and the George Webb investigations are all the same thing. The children are part of the “Brownstone Operations” and also part of the world view of those who are perpetrating the seven-country plan.

    It’s not either-or. It’s both-and.

  10. On January 20, 2017 at 1:37 pm, Ed Jewett said:

    I agree, However, many will not see that. They want to focus on the salaciousnesses on the surface, or they want to stick their head in the sane, saying that it’s preposterous to think that top officials and agencies of governments are deeply involved in sordid personal and ideological behavior.

  11. On January 20, 2017 at 5:13 pm, Billy Mullins said:

    Sticking your head in the sand only makes your ass the prime target.

  12. On January 20, 2017 at 12:52 pm, john jay said:

    you may rightfully regard “journalism/media” as the lap dog of the left, the propaganda arm of statism, if you will.

  13. On January 20, 2017 at 1:39 pm, Ed Jewett said:

    The whole left-right parading went out the door decades ago. I suggest getting a fine-tipped Scripto pen and a highlighter and buying a copt of Melanson’s book “Perfectibilists” and Milligan’s edited “Fleshing Out Skull and Bones”. Take an extra day in a quiet place to read the appendix with the curriculum vitae of the Bonesman over the last century.

  14. On January 20, 2017 at 4:47 pm, joefour said:

    “I work around many people every day, and I’m sure readers do as well, whose initial reaction to anything the MSM writes is either to ignore it or believe exactly the opposite simply because the MSM said it…”

    Pretty describes my reaction to all things MSM! :)

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You are currently reading "Pizzagate XVI", entry #16428 on The Captain's Journal.

This article is filed under the category(s) Media,Pizzagate and was published January 20th, 2017 by Herschel Smith.

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