18: Slipping the DISC: State of The Portal and Chapter 2020: Difference between revisions

===Two current examples of the DISC in action===

Let's talk about some aspects of idea suppression. The two stories that I'm following most closely—and we can date this particular episode by talking about current events, I think that's fine—the two stories I'm following most closely with interest from the perspective of understanding the DISC are the story of Andrew Yang and the media and the story of Jeffrey Epstein and his recent demise.

Now, in neither of these cases is my principal interest the ostensible subject matter. In the case of Andrew Yang, Andrew is going through a weird ritual that I've noted repeatedly election cycle after election cycle. Perhaps the three most recent versions of the situation have been with Ron Paul and his run for president, with Bernie Sanders and his run for the presidency, and now with Andrew Yang.

In all of these cases, we see a very bizarre behavior inside of the news media. That is that when the candidate starts to gain traction with the public, they become left off of lists. They become misreported—very often a reporter will stand in front of the graphic that has that particular candidate alongside others, and we don't really know why this is occurring. We don't know how these instructions are going out. But in the case of Andrew Yang because this is taking place in a highly connected internet era, we have people chronicling all of the myriad ways in which Andrew Yang's candidacy is distorted. In particular, there appears to be a different level of distortion taking place at one particular news media outlet.

We need to better understand exactly what is the political economy of the news.  

Now in the case of Andrew Yang, the key question would be, "why aren't the regular news media, and the competing news media, reporting on the outsized effort being made to make sure that Andrew does not appear normally with other candidates in this Democratic primary?"

It doesn't make logical sense, if you believe that the principal reason for reporting on the election is to make sure that the voters have an early opportunity to hear all voices and begin to make their decisions, rather than immediately trying to pick a narrative about frontrunners, who are always taken to be inevitable. That's a conserved feature of this bizarre election coverage, cycle after cycle. So the first thing I want to do is recommend that you Google "MSNBC" and "Andrew Yang" and "Yang Media Blackout", and look at the impressive data set that has been collected, which shows a singular focus that can be inferred from the data on Andrew Yang. Now, to an extent, this has also happened with Tulsi Gabbard. To an extent there's been some carryover from Bernie Sanders, but Bernie Sanders' showing in 2016 was so strong, the same games that were applied to Sanders then cannot easily be applied now.

But the key question we have is, "Why is the news media spending so much on one candidate who doesn't appear to be that large, to keep that candidate from growing? I think this is an interesting topic, and what it has to do with is making Maps of Silence. Now through the efforts of Dana Boyd and the Data and Society group. We learned about a doctrine called Strategic Silence, and that is that there are certain things that the media may not want to happen and therefore, rather than simply reporting the facts of the matter, they make editorial decisions so as not to give fodder or fuel for some undesirable outcome. Now, we can partially understand that in the case of copycat killings, after, let's say, gun massacres, but it's much harder to understand why somebody coming from outside of the political system would be treated to something like Strategic Silence or Strategic Distortion.

What we need to do is to have a better understanding of the Maps of Silence and Maps of Distortion that take place in our press. And what Andrew has done that is special and unique is that he's given us a very large N for our dataset. We now have enough, and different, incidents of this that we can begin to piece together what might be inferred from this very bizarre behavior.

An example of this that I find fascinating is the death of Jeffrey Epstein. Now, you'll hear a lot of other people say, "Well Epstein didn't kill himself" or "It's obviously this or it's obviously that". I have a decidedly smaller interest in those questions. Questions that fascinate me have to do not with Epstein, not with who might have killed him, whether he died by his own hand, but they have to deal with the sense-making apparatus—that is, the news media around this untimely exit from our world. Now, Jeffrey Epstein was accused of trafficking and had a very bizarre life that is difficult for many of us understand where you got a slap on the wrist in Florida and appeared to operate with impunity even after his conviction in Florida as a sex offender.

What's fascinating is that if anyone remembers the Watergate era, the news media used to go to federal agencies and ask whether or not something was true or false, and this gave us the phrase "A Non-Denial Denial".

When is the question arises, let's say, in this case, "does Jeffrey Epstein have any ties to any known intelligence community?", that question can be asked, let's say, to the CIA, to the State Department, to the NSA, and you might expect that you get an answer, "Absolutely this person had no ties", because the idea of the intelligence agencies being connected to a known sex trafficker seems preposterous at one level, but you can also imagine that they'd get "No comment".  

Now, we don't even have that in this situation. You can go—I think I did this fairly recently with the New York Times—and try to simply use their own search engine. "Have you asked the question whether Jeffrey Epstein had ties to the intelligence agencies?" The other questions that arise in this case are, "Where is the last known recording of Ghislaine Maxwell's passport crossing a border?" This is a simple factual question. A reporter would be dispatched, they would call up somebody like Interpol. They would try to find out whether people would speak about it or not speak about it. Under any circumstances, they would be able to print an interesting story. For example, "Interpol has no comment" or "Interpol says that the last recorded border where Ghislaine Maxwell's passport showed up was, you know, a border crossing in New York City".

Under any circumstances, it is very bizarre to see the Map of Silence around these questions.  

Another such question is: if Jeffrey Epstein's fortune came from currency trading, where are the records from his office in Villard House in Manhattan? He had a very large office in a trophy property on the island of Manhattan, and to the best of my knowledge, I have seen no printed discussion of where the supposed trading records of this person, who seemed to amass a fortune. Another weird thing about this fortune is this that he seemed to live life as a high 11-figure individual, owning islands and incredible properties, and multiple jets, and yet all of the assets I've seen accounted for puts him instead in nine-figure territory. Now that's two orders of magnitude different, and I don't think that there are many nine-figure rich who would live anything like Jeffrey Epstein's lifestyle. It appears that most of the assets were put towards a kind of "front", if you will.

So we don't have any idea about where the records are of his trading. We don't have any idea where the passport of his partner was seen last, and we also have no confirmation that any of our major government agencies have denied that Jeffrey Epstein, the accused sex trafficker, was tied to any intelligence community. In all of those situations, what you can map with honesty, and without having to go anywhere near tinfoil-hat territory, is that there's something broken with our sense making apparatus, because of the Watergate era you could have assigned this to a cub reporter and they would have known exactly what to do. Where are no comments on the record? No one knows.

All right, in those two circumstances, that gives you an idea about how the DISC, the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex works inside of journalism. There is some sort of editorial function that is keeping us from learning certain things, because certain stories do not run.

With a little bit of poetic liberty, this seems to be what Paul Simon was talking about in Sounds of Silence. What we're listening for now are the silences. Where else are we confronted with silence? What are the other things we would expect, where we don't hear particular ideas?  

Now, obviously you have a situation where I've been talking for quite some time about the idea that there are many reasons that one might ask to restrict immigration. The Sierra Club used to support a restriction of immigration. Farm Workers unions used to support restrictions on immigration. But sometime in the fairly recent past it became an idée fixe of the elite, that the only reason for supporting a restriction in immigration, the only ''possible'' reason could be that you were xenophobic, and probably racist.

Now, I don't exactly know where these ideas came from. But I know that these ideas are prima facie preposterous. They make no sense. And so I've been talking for some time about, where are the media willing to discuss all of the reasons that one might want to restrict immigration having nothing to do with xenophobia? The so-called "xenophilic restrictionist" perspective. This is another place where there is no public discussion. We have no idea why. So once you begin to look for these silences—these gaps—you start to become rather terrified that somehow the world is not behaving properly, and that's one of the reasons that people are flocking to this podcast.