You're Not Supposed to Understand the Rumors About Biden
On Tuesday, Fox News Laura Ingraham broke some news: An investigative journalist named Matthew Tyrmand had uncovered a cache of 26,000 emails belonging to Hunter Bidens disgraced business partner Bevan Cooney, who is now in jail. Tyrmand claimed that he had gotten hold of the emails via a person in the same facility as Cooney (a federal work camp for white-collar infractions, is how Tyrmand put it). Tyrmand explained that Cooney felt stiffed by Biden, the son of the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, and implied that Cooney had handed over his own Gmail password in an act of revenge.
Perhaps thats what happened. Or perhaps not: I have good reason to doubt the reliability of the source. The last time I saw Tyrmand was in October 2017. I was speaking at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and he was in the audience. Security guards were keeping an eye on him after I warned them that he might show up: Hed come to another public lecture of mine the previous day in New York City, then had turned up in Boston and announced on Twitter that he was following me to Cambridge. His goal, I think, was to shout at me and draw attention to himself while waving a cellphone camera in the air, which is what hed done in the past. But the lecture went off smoothly; afterward, a very gentle and very tall Harvard professor stood firmly between us, engaging Tyrmand in vigorous conversation so that I could slip away unharassed. I didnt hear directly from Tyrmand after thatI block the social-media accounts of tiresome trolls. But I gather that, year in and year out, he continues to post obsessively about me and my husband, a Polish politician, including photographs taken surreptitiously in public places. I have no idea why.
A clue might come from a 2016 New Yorker story in which Tyrmand (who is described as an investor, not a journalist) plays a minor role in a ludicrously clumsy attempt to run a sting operation on the Open Society Foundations, which are funded by the prodemocracy philanthropist George Soros. The deception failed, according to The New Yorkers Jane Mayer, because James OKeefe, the notoriously unprincipled leader of a group called Project Veritas, forgot to hang up the phone after calling the Open Society office. In a long voicemail, he inadvertently recorded himself plotting to embarrass Soros. These are people who think that smear campaigns are politics, harassment is journalism, and online stalking is something you do for fun.
For those trying to follow along at home, the emails produced by Tyrmand are not the same emails that originally appeared on a laptop that Hunter Biden supposedly left at a Delaware computer-repair shop, the laptop that then became a story in the New York Post (and whose contents, according to a report in Time, were circulating previously in Ukraine). This is a different cache, one that is even more tangential to the U.S. presidential campaign and even harder to understand. In order to even make sense of the messages content, the reader must learn the backstories of a whole new cast of characters, not just Cooney but two other convicted fraudsters named Devon Archer and Jason Galanis; the wife of the former mayor of Moscow, Yelena Baturina; and Chris Heinz, John Kerrys stepson, who broke away from the group; as well as their relationships, their jokes (they refer to Baturina as the USSR womans shot put champion), and the rules of the ugly world they inhabit. In order to link them to Joe Biden, you have to turn somersaults, do triple flips, and squint very hard.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/smears-against-biden-dont-need-make-any-sense/616824/
Sedona
(3,769 posts)KnR too.
Aussie105
(5,444 posts)You just need to retain something like 'Biden mumble mumble emails mumble bad mumble mumble can't vote for him!'
Remember . . . Hillary . . . but her emails . . . can't vote for her!
Sad that someone bothers to set that up. Even sadder some people believe it.
With Trump though, you don't need to make anything up. All the BAD is out in the open.
Jim__
(14,089 posts)chia
(2,244 posts)underpants
(182,950 posts)Last edited Sat Oct 24, 2020, 12:46 PM - Edit history (1)
Ive asked friends to listen to the first 10 minutes of his radio show. Its on tape delay in our market. Write down references and inside jokes that dont register with them. I ask that they tell me the number from the first night. They also spend an hour or so googling. A few have taken me up on it and the number is usually at least 5 sometimes 15 - in 10 minutes.
They have almost their only language. You have to immerse yourself in it a bit to understand it. For instance, the Moscow Mayors wife and $3.5 M - I understood that a firm Hunter was a founder of did take that money not directly to him but they firm. Now I read that he wasnt a founder and may have had nothing to do with that organization. See how it works.
Arkansas Granny
(31,535 posts)they won't believe those who do. They are displaying willful ignorance at its finest.
Jim__
(14,089 posts)FWIW from phys.org
Everyone is speaking English, they said, yet the computer analysis of social media discussions shows viewers of different news channels are, in a sense, speaking different languages.
Based on millions of user comments on the YouTube channels for four leading cable news outlets, it seems that viewers of right-wing outlets think of "Burisma," in the same way that their left-wing counterparts think of "Kushner." A "protest" to one set of viewers is a "riot" to another. For one, it's a "mask," to another, a "muzzle."
"Black Lives Matter" (BLM) in CNN English is equivalent to "All Lives Matter" in Fox News English. Even more extreme, some right-wing news viewers use "BLM" in the same context as left-wing news viewers use "KKK" (Ku Klux Klan).
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