☕️ BLINDSIDED ☙ Wednesday, January 8, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Shocking Zuckerberg confessional triggers libs; fighter joins Meta board; LA county fires burning out of control but FEMA already on the job; President Trump wide-ranging second press conf.; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! I awoke this morning to a world on fire (literally), with multiple breaking news stories that weren’t on my planned list. So several stories, including Florida’s vaccine grand jury report, got pushed. Never fear, we’ll cover them this week. But today’s roundup includes: Zuckerberg makes full censorship confession and explodes progressive minds with free speech commitment; guess who joined Meta’s board and why; LA county fires rage out of control but people are already asking hard questions; comparisons to the W.N.C. response; and President Trump’s second major press conference in Mar-a-Lago triggers progressives.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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They’re fired. Yesterday, Wired ran a surprising free-speech story headlined, “Meta’s Fact-Checking Partners Say They Were ‘Blindsided’ by Decision to Axe Them.” In other words, Facebook fired the fact-checkers, effective immediately, without notice, no severance. They’re done. The sub-headline explained, “Fact-checkers claim they had no idea the company was going to end their partnerships and are scrambling to figure out the financial implications of the move.”

CLIP: Zuck throws fact-checkers and the USG under the bus for pandemic censorship (5:17).

The financial implications? How about the much more significant implication that elections have consequences? A flurry of front-page news landed in corporate media yesterday after Meta (Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an astonishing mea culpa, a hostage-style video with an enthusiastic promise to make free expression the firm’s first priority.

“It’s time to get back to our roots…the importance of protecting free expression,” Mr. Zuckerberg began, as the space-time continuum rocked on its fourth dimensional foundations. The Facebook chief continued, “We built a lot of complex moderation systems that make mistakes. (But) the recent election feels like a cultural tipping point. So we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, like X.”

Buh bye, hated fact checkers! Check your financial implications, you buzzards.

Try imagining the horror progressives must have felt, watching their carefully collated worlds collapse. In 2020 Zuckerberg sent $400 million to county election supervisors and gamed Facebook’s algorithms to help elect Joe Biden. But yesterday he signaled surrender. He does not want to fight. He wants to survive.

In other words, it looks like the left just lost another influential billionaire.

The CEO pretty much admitted that Facebook censorship was wrong: “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”

Facebook has long outsourced “fact-checking” to progressive non-profits and politically connected companies, so that Facebook could innocently claim to be hands-off and unbiased. But now, suddenly, Facebook is replacing its expensive fact-checking contractors with free, user-driven self-policing. For good measure, insulting them on the way out the door, Zuckerberg threw the fact-checkers under the bus, saying “The fact-checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, so we’re going to phase in a community notes system.”

He vowed to lift the heavy hand of censorship off hot political topics and in doing so, admitted that conservative takes on illegal alien rapists and transsexual deviants are the mainstream, not just the far-right. “We’re going to simplify our content policies,” he explained, “and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch of mainstream discourse.”

The pendulum has swung, and the balance has tipped toward freedom of expression. “We’re going to catch less bad stuff,” he admitted, “but it will reduce the number of innocent people’s posts we take down.”

Mr. Zuckerberg’s next promise was perhaps most surprising. Hearing it, one imagines a conversation between Zuckerberg and a certain President-Elect, since this sounds exactly like one of his ideas. Get this: “We’re going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US-based content review will be based in Texas, where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams.”

It’s more capital flight from California. Silicon Valley’s digital footprint is shrinking.

As he wrapped up what most resembled a coerced confession, Mr. Zuckerberg pinned the blame directly on the Biden Administration, not just for making Facebook censor Americans, but even for worldwide censorship. He said, “Over the past four years, the US government has pushed for censorship,” which “has emboldened other governments to go even farther. But now,” the CEO continued, “we have the opportunity to restore free expression.”

He meant we have an opportunity to restore free expression everywhere.

The social media billionaire ended by giving the credit where it was due, and teasing a rescue effort aimed at our British cousins: “We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more in Europe.”

“In Europe” sounds a lot like in Great Britain, where sneering élites in London are busily jailing citizens for exposing or even talking about the élites covering for pedophile rape gangs.

Help is coming soon.

British compatriots: If you can’t complain about the rape gangs without risking jail, don’t risk jail. Move one step lower down the tree to start cutting. Complain instead about the rule that prevents you from complaining about the you-know-what, and never stop complaining about the rule until they go mental. In other words, first kill the censorship rule.

🔥 Corporate media was shocked and appalled at Mr. Zuckerberg’s sudden and unexpected epiphany over the evils of fact-checkers. For example, behold this self-owning, Babylon Bee-style headline from the New York Times:

Haha, but if a fact-checker falls in the forest, and there’s no social media enforcers listening, do they make a sound?

MSNBC’s extra-diverse anchorlady Joy Reid’s reaction to the news was just as entertaining; for the life of her, Joy couldn’t understand how it’s even possible for a fact-checker to be biased. After all, they’re only checking facts.

Progressives were beyond triggered. Without bullies like the big social media platforms to do the canceling for them, liberals can only scream in impotent rage.

Liberals have lost X, TikTok, and now Facebook. Disquieting rumors circulated yesterday that YouTube might also ditch “moderation” for a community notes system. Their world keeps getting smaller.

🔥 However Trump ‘convinced’ Mr. Zuckerberg to purge Facebook of parasitic censorship infrastructure, apparently there was even more to it. Yesterday, CNBC ran a curious story headlined, “Meta employees criticize Zuckerberg decisions to end fact-checking, add Dana White to board.”

Dana White is the President of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), a global mixed martial arts (MMA) organization and entertainment empire. He is also a long-time Trump friend and trusted insider.

Dana’s surprising addition to Meta’s board cannot possibly be coincidental. He’s there to make sure Zuckerberg follows through, or else the social media billionaire is getting kicked in the face.

It’s not like Dana is a board kind of guy. “I’ve never been interested in joining a board of directors until I got the offer to join Meta’s board,” White told reporters. I believe him. He’s there to hold Zuckerberg to a deal.

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Early yesterday, hours before things began heating up, local KTLA ran a prophetic story headlined, “100-mph wind, fire danger, rain and snow in ‘bizarre’ Southern California forecast.” It was literally a perfect storm of rain, snow, high winds, and dry air all creating a mega-fire hazard. The combination also made it crazy difficult for emergency responders, such as firefighters trying to traverse icy roadways. The worst-case scenario appears to have come true. Los Angeles is burning.

This morning, the New York Times ran a live update thread on the fires headlined, “Southern California Wildfires Live Updates: Officials Warn the Worst Is Still to Come.” Mandatory evacuations are in place and are still evolving as the fire moves quickly over thousands of acres. More than 30,000 people have fled, often abandoning cars right on California highways and running for it on foot. Many structures have already been destroyed as increasingly dense urban areas are consumed. The Times reported, “an unknown number of homes have been destroyed along the Pacific Coast.”

The scenes posted to social media are nothing short of apocalyptic.

We pray for the people of Los Angeles.

The hot takes are well underway. Be cautious, read critically, keep skeptical, and don’t leap to any conclusions. But we do know that, despite the perilous weather conditions, LA’s Mayor Karen Bass was away on vacation in Ghana, which I was not aware had a holiday venue. There are credible rumors that due to Mayor Bass’s budget cuts, the county’s fire reservoirs were not refilled and so hydrants were dry (but still, rumors).

Luckily, LA’s fire chief Kristin Crowley has been lauded as both the first woman and the first lesbian fire chief in LA’s history. And she is on video saying her top priority for the fire department was even more diversity. Many people are looking closely for signs of DEI incompetence.

Contrary to the federal government’s response to the hurricane disaster in Western North Carolina, in LA County, even while the disaster rages, FEMA has already responded. Governor Newsom says that he’s already received two federal relief packages and has spoken several times with President Biden.

We’ll all be paying very close attention to the similarities and contrasts with the federal government’s response to the disaster in North Carolina.

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Yesterday, President-Elect Trump held a wild second press conference at Mar-a-Lago. You should watch the whole thing. The New York Times’s sour headline this morning read, “Greenland, Panama and Faucets: Trump Conference Shows Hints of Chaos to Come.” It’s chaos! To the Times, anyway. It sounded pretty good to the rest of us.

VIDEO: President Trump’s “chaotic” January 7th press conference (1:12:00).

It was a wide-ranging, unscripted discussion soaring between topics from dysfunctional dishwashers and rusted windmills to the Hamas hostages to changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. In one of the first questions, a reporter asked Trump, “Regarding the Panama Canal and Greenland, can you rule out the use of force or economic coercion?”

“No,” Trump pointedly and immediately answered.

Besides the long list of stuff the New York Times disagreed with, and its frustration at not receiving an agenda, it also harped that “something else was back: the chaotic stream-of-consciousness presidency.” Apparently, the Times prefers Biden’s mumbling, stammering, telepromptered, no-questions-answered press conference style.

We are not going to let corporate media get away with criticizing Trump’s press conferences this time, because they were completely AWOL during the Biden you-know-what-show. New York Times, we’re ignoring you. Get bent.

Apart from the article’s relentless criticism, and its inability to finding a single scrap of policy to like in the entire hour, and its cowardly refusal to allow comments, the Times story was otherwise informationally useless. Don’t bother. But perhaps tellingly, the useless story was penned by the Times’s deep-state-affiliated “national security” reporter David Sanger.

In other words, here we go again. But this time we’ll be calling them out.

Firebrand Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) quickly announced she was so fired up that she’s already directed her staff to work up a bill to officially change the name of the Gulf of Mexico (0:49). “It’s absolutely the right thing to do,” MTG said enthusiastically.

Trump repeated his recent promise that, after the Inauguration, America will enter a “new golden age” (1:38). A Golden Age is a pretty high bar. Many of us are nervous as scalded cats, and fear getting our hopes up too high. Ending Bidenomics would be a great start. But how can we avoid the irrepressible sense of shared optimistic expectation?

We’ll take it. Onward.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Get back here tomorrow for all the other terrific news and commentary we couldn’t get to today.

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