The Streisand Effect At Work
From the DOJ to Bari Weiss, attempts to bury or obscure are having the exact opposite intended effect.
Today’s piece is abbreviated, partly because my baby is sick (and demonstrated her projectile regurgitative skills this morning) and partly because I’m caravanning with extended family up to Kingston and am way behind in my packing!
Screenshot courtesy of The Global App, Canada
As I perused the headlines earlier this morning, it struck me that the Streisand Effect is in full swing and exacting punishment upon all who disobey the Barbra rules.
As a refresher, the Streisand Effect is so named because Babs’s lawyer once tried to hide the fact that his client had purchased a large seaside home, but his attempts at covering up its existence paradoxically led to greater public awareness of her home.
Generally put, the Streisand Effect holds that attempts to hide a fact will lead to more people knowing about it, because a cover-up is irresistible to the public.
Here are two examples of how that played out today.
“Bury” Weiss earns her moniker
You’ve likely heard by now that Bari Weiss, the new hand-picked president of CBS and enforcer of pro-Trump messaging, spiked a story that 60 Minutes was set to run on Sunday. It was to feature first-hand accounts of how brutally immigrants sent by the regime to CECOT were tortured in that hellish prison.
Because we not only live in an era of creeping fascism but also of high and often hilarious incompetence, the segment was inadvertently forwarded to a distributor of 60 Minutes in Canada, which proceeded to air the segment.
It was then shared widely on YouTube and Twitter, garnering millions of views before the initial videos were taken down. That didn’t stop others (including me, whoops) from posting new links to the segment, creating such a torrent of availability that the censors pretty much gave up. (This is a rare instance where I believe unauthorized links are entirely appropriate to share; the segment’s creators no doubt were almost certainly delighted by the mishap.)
I can’t guarantee this will still be up by the time of this publication, but you can (and should) view the spiked segment here:
As political commentator and thorn in the regime’s side George Conway remarked,
This could wind up being the most-watched newsmagazine segment in television history!!
Congratulations to the Ellisons and Bari Weiss!!!
For those who don’t catch the unauthorized version before it comes down again, Weiss has promised to air it at a later date after giving the administration an opportunity to respond. This is disingenuous, however, because the White House was given a chance to comment and chose not to. Spiking the piece because the regime declined to comment is, as the segment’s producer noted, giving the White House an effective veto through a “no comment” response.
If and when the segment does air, millions more will want to watch it, now that Weiss and her corporate bosses tried to delay it and water it down. We’ll also be able to compare the aired version to the one that they accidentally let get out.
I suppose that’s one way to lift ratings! It sure worked for Jimmy Kimmel. Welcome to the Streisand Effect, Bari Weiss!
Redaction action, gets more traction
In my piece yesterday, I discussed the DOJ’s extensive efforts to redact names and information about parties whose identities are supposed to be revealed through the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Among these of course is Donald Trump himself, and the government’s clumsy attempts to redact him from documents has failed. This is in part because other non-redacted versions of the same documents already exist. A simple side-by-side comparison demonstrates that the target of the redactions was Trump, to absolutely no one’s surprise and in direct contravention of the law.
Few expected, however, that the regime’s incompetence—or perhaps even winking sabotage from within, who can say these days—would provide even greater insight into who is deliberately being shielded. As many internet sleuths discovered, the “redactions” were poorly done in many cases. Copy-and-paste alone into a new document was enough to expose what lay beneath.
Ed Krassenstein explained how this worked in this video:
Much of the FBI’s cover-up is now exposed. And rather than make investigators’ jobs more difficult because key names are blacked out, the redactions ironically provide a road map for getting more quickly at what the government was trying to keep from the public.
Welcome to the Streisand Effect, FBI!
Items of interest
As a side note, the following email was produced in the latest Epstein files dump last night, and it is garnering attention. It’s document EFTA00028716, sent from an unidentified Assistant U.S. Attorney, dated nearly five years ago and circulated to a number of others. It states that flight records showed Trump flew on Epstein’s jet many more times than had been reported, including eight flights between 1993 and 1996. On two other flights, there were two women passengers “who would be possible witnesses in a Maxwell case.”
There is also this wild handwritten note, EFTA00036085,1 from Jeffrey Epstein in his jail cell to a sex offender named Larry Nassar around the time of Epstein’s death. It appears to suggest that Epstein did plan to take his own life, but he also implicates Trump in sexual assault of girls. (Warning: reader discretion advised.)
Dear L. N.
As you know by now, I have taken the “short route” home. Good luck! We shared one thing . . . our love & caring for young ladies at the hope they’d reach their full potential.
Our president shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to “grab snatch,” whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system.
Life is unfair.
Yours
J. Epstein
I suspect that we have only begun to see the extent of what the Epstein files contain—and why Trump has been so eager to keep them out of the public eye. I also suspect that the evidence against Trump, specifically what non-MAGA cult members have long understood about his involvement with Epstein, will become insurmountable.
Whether the GOP will ever do anything in response to all the damning evidence remains doubtful. But if ever the time comes to throw Trump under his own MAGA bus, there will be plenty of grounds to do so.
I remember Larry Nassar's name. He was a disgusting long-time pedophile, an M.D. who took advantage of that position to sexually assaulted hundreds of female gymnasts, and at least for some of them, he told them what he was doing had medical benefits. Makes me want to throw up all over again. He may have been the official doctor for the Olympic aspirants and teams. Not sure about the details of that, but I know that it took several well-known gymnasts coming forward to get him prosecuted. Don't even want to imagine what he would have done in Epstein's orbit.
I don't watch 60 minutes and haven't for years. I did watch the CECOT segment.