Journalists Have Been This Way For Decades
Submitted via Portfolio Armor:
Journalists Have Been This Way For A Long Time
After Elon Musk exposed his BBC interviewer James Clayton's use of "hate speech" claims to advance the establishment's interest in political censorship, one of the interesting reactions was from Paul Graham, the influential founder of Silicon Valley's most successful accelerator, Y-Combinator:
People who've grown up in this new world may think "Weren't things always this way?" No they were not. A generation ago, even the most powerful people used to try to stay on the right side of journalists. Very few dared to be openly contemptuous of them.
— Paul Graham (@paulg) April 13, 2023
So far, so good. Then Graham invidiously compared today's journalists to Watergate's Woodward and Bernstein. That's when I pointed out that Woodward and Bernstein were more similar to today's journalists than he realizes. They were also tools of the establishment.
Woodward and Bernstein were a lot more similar to today's journalists than you might think.
— David Pinsen (@dpinsen) April 13, 2023
Like today's journalists, they allied with unelected government officials in the national security state to take down a populist president. https://t.co/Da9ChJbYQj
I linked to Geoff Shullenberger's excellent thread about Watergate there, which I have shared in full below. After that, I'll close with another brief trade update.
At this point there is a vast trove of research showing "Nixon was removed from office not because he endangered the constitutional order, but because his bureaucratic and political enemies plotted successfully against him," as Nathan Pinkoski puts it./2
— Geoff Shullenberger (@g_shullenberger) April 6, 2023
As Pinkoski puts it, "Hoover, the Joint Chiefs, Helms, and Felt"—the parties responsible for Nixon's downfall—"weren’t defending the Constitution or fighting to limit 'the imperial presidency.' They were guarding their institutional autonomy," which Nixon threatened./4
— Geoff Shullenberger (@g_shullenberger) April 6, 2023
"Mindful of Nixon’s fate," Pinkoski notes, "most presidents—but not all—prefer to avoid defying that consensus." It's important to correct the record because the dynamics in play are just as true today as they were in the 1970s, if not more so./6 https://t.co/HwxfYq91xL
— Geoff Shullenberger (@g_shullenberger) April 6, 2023
Today's Trades
We've got limit orders in for three earnings trades now:
- A bearish bet on a regional bank at risk of default.
- A bearish bet on a bank vendor with weak fundamentals.
- A bullish bet on a homebuilder with great fundamentals and a strong chart.
If you want a heads up when these get filled, feel free to subscribe to the trading Substack/occasional mailing list below.
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