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It’s important to get the facts about yourself on record, and to call out these abuses and “errors” when they occur... but: are you also thinking at all about broader strategic goals?
The “post-truth” model of discourse is dominant now, so it doesn’t really matter whether any of what GLAAD, the Daily Dot, or your blue-check Twitter haters…
It’s important to get the facts about yourself on record, and to call out these abuses and “errors” when they occur... but: are you also thinking at all about broader strategic goals?
The “post-truth” model of discourse is dominant now, so it doesn’t really matter whether any of what GLAAD, the Daily Dot, or your blue-check Twitter haters say about you is correct. GLAAD may modify a few phrases, but they won’t retract their claims in a way that restores your reputation. The conventional wisdom about you among respectable liberals will always be that you are a “transphobe,” a “stalker,” and a sleazy, lazy journalist. That impression cannot be fixed, ever. (Such is the power of slander and libel, especially when it’s directed against isolated figures who ask questions about official narratives.)
You can see for yourself that people are happy to continue libeling you long after you’ve shared incontrovertible proof of falsity and malice. Why is that? Because they know you won’t sue them, and that they stand a better chance of being socially and professionally rewarded for telling the lies than for telling the truth.
Brazenly lying on bigger and bigger platforms—the GLAAD list makes your status as a dangerous purveyor of hate almost official—is also a power play, and one that’s honestly pretty impressive. Nearly all of our political leaders and mass-media thought leaders have figured this out: shamelessly and stubbornly lying following repeated public corrections is an “alpha” move, and the impotent anger of the people who are libeled reduces their stature.
There are so many examples of this—many of which obviously involve Bush, Trump, and more recently Biden’s handlers in the Democratic party and in the media.
One example that comes to mind: when Joy Reid was revealed to have made, in the fairly recent past and as an adult, vile homophobic comments on her blog, she claimed that her various accounts had been hacked by people who had sensed that she would eventually be famous and wanted to bring her down by putting words into her mouth right in front of her, and that she had inexplicably left the hackers’ text on her blog for several years. If she had acknowledged that she’d made those comments and apologized, there’s a non-negligible chance that she would have lost her job (and in this case, she probably should have lost it—she said some awful things). But her willingness to tell a ludicrous lie, and then receive the protection of other media elites, ironically left her in better shape than she would have been in if she had never made the comments. We all see now that she is bulletproof, and that people who try to hold her to reasonable standards will be humiliated.
Another, more serious example is the successful years-long gaslighting of the Democratic electorate through the Russiagate scam. And of course, the entire Permawar was enabled by a concerted post-truth flex by Cheney, Rove, their Democratic cheerleaders, and a handful of well-placed reporters. Collectively, they unleashed hell on Earth—including the revival of torture—and they emerged from this wreckage strengthened rather than destroyed. One of the worst offenders is currently the US President.
GLAAD & Co. are playing a power game against you, and they’re winning. Nobody apart from Glenn Greenwald, a few other honorable holdovers from a previous era, and your readers and listeners (myself included), cares about “the record” or your attempts to set it straight.
It’s great (sincerely!) that you and Katie are earning a good living post-cancellation. But others in your situation are not nearly as intelligent, resourceful, and popular as you and Katie are. (Jack Smith IV, who comes to mind because I met him a few times, has been completely memory-holed, and has no professional future; his crime, if anyone remembers, is that he was allegedly a shouty boyfriend.) The people who are methodically destroying your reputation—the ADL, ACLU, and SPLC will presumably be the next groups to denounce you—are sharpening a tool that they will use to chill mildly dissenting speech and thought for decades to come.
The tl;dr version of my long, annoying comment is: do you have a plan B in mind? I don’t, and we need one.
Is “setting the record straight” working—for you, or indeed for any of us right now?
PS: As they say on social media (and—as they also say—“this, but ironically”): I’m sorry this is happening to you! You and Katie are both good reporters and seem like excellent human beings.
And among many of the things I despise about the Wokish is their redefining "amplify" to mean "link to unacceptable content in a manner that demands harsh punishment.
I sometimes feel lost, and I do mean figuratively *lost*, at the various progressive orgs I respected or even revered until fairly recently but whose flaming bodies would never urinate on today unless I'd drunk kerosene: The ACLU, Planned Parenthood, GLAAD, shit, probably every left-leaning socially oriented org with letters.