RED-PILLED: Facebook’s Fact-Checkers Changed the Way I See Tech—and Speech—Forever.

Back in February 2020, when I was the Sunday editor of the New York Post, China expert Steven Mosher pitched me a theory about how the coronavirus started. Back then, it was believed it came from a wet market in Wuhan, but Steven was unconvinced. He said it was much more likely it had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had been doing experiments with the coronavirus for years.

This was before the lockdowns, and before Covid had spread across America and killed millions worldwide. Some experts had just started talking about the possibility of a global pandemic.

I was happy to publish Steven’s piece, because I figured the world would want to hear an alternative idea at an important moment from a social scientist who had lived in China and written books about the country.

I was right about the story. (In fact, the lab leak theory is now seen as the most likely explanation for Covid’s origins.) But I was wrong—and naive—to think anyone in power would want to hear it.

We published the piece on February 22, under the headline “Don’t Buy China’s Story: The Coronavirus May Have Leaked from a Lab.” It immediately went viral, its audience swelling for a few hours as readers liked and shared it over and over again.

I had a data tracker on my screen that showed our web traffic, and I could see the green line for my story surging up and up. Then suddenly, for no reason, the green line dropped like a stone. No one was reading or sharing the piece. It was as though it had never existed at all.

Seeing the story’s traffic plunge, I was stunned. I thought, How does that even happen? How does a story that thousands of people are reading and sharing suddenly just disappear?

Read the whole thing.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Mark Zuckerberg Has a Bad Case of Musk Envy. “I think that Zuckerberg’s pilgrimage up Mt. MAGA is motivated in no small part by being envious about the dizzying political heights that his fellow tech billionaire Elon Musk has risen to since he went all-in for President-elect Donald Trump last summer. It’s the kind of power that Zuckerberg probably thought he was buying from the Biden administration in 2021 by doing its bidding. The Biden people merely wanted him to be an obedient lapdog, however.”

UH-HUH: Hamas stands by demand for end to Gaza war under hostage deal, as Trump deadline nears.

Hamas stood by its demand on Tuesday that Israel fully end its assault on Gaza under any deal to release hostages, and said U.S. President-elect Donald Trump was rash to say there would be “hell to pay” unless they go free by his Jan. 20 inauguration.

Officials from the Islamist group and Israel have been holding talks with Qatari and Egyptian mediators in the most intensive effort for months to reach a ceasefire in Gaza.

The outgoing U.S. administration has called for a final push for a deal before Joe Biden leaves office, and many in the region now view Trump’s inauguration as an unofficial deadline.

But with the clock ticking, both sides accuse the other of blocking a deal by adhering to conditions that torpedoed all previous peace efforts for more than a year.

Hamas says it will free its remaining hostages only if Israel agrees to end the war and withdraw all its troops from Gaza. Israel says it will not end the war until Hamas is dismantled and all hostages are free.

Losers don’t get to make demands.

This guy, on the other hand, is winning: Trump warns ‘all hell will break out’ if Gaza hostages not released by his inauguration.

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB, PART DEUX:

As Fox News notes, “Internet roasts NYT headline about fact-checkers ruling Meta criticism of fact checks ‘false:’ ‘Beyond parody:’”

“This actually does an effective job revealing the problem with the fact-checking industry (perhaps by accident),” Reason senior editor Robby Soave observed.

“Fact-checkers fact-check claim that fact-checkers are the problem. Real headline from the NY Times,” civil liberties attorney Laura Powell noted. “How can anyone produce satire when the legacy media has become so ridiculous?”

“This is amazing. Meta says fact-checkers were the problem Fact-checkers rule that false,” Analytics Miami founder Ana Bozovic said in a post. “Rounding off the absurdity: this is the NYT reporting.”

“They really wrote this and then published it,” senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Chris Rufo marveled.

The Federalist editor-in-chief Mollie Z. Hemingway wrote, “A beyond parody headline from propaganda outlet New York Times.”

“I had to look it up myself because I could not believe it wasn’t parody,” political columnist Moshe Hill wrote in surprise, “It’s real.”

Meteorologist and data scientist John Basham joked that the headline “could have easily been” from political satire website, The Babylon Bee, adding, “Life Has Become Parody On The Left.”

The editor of America’s Newspaper of Record says that there’s a bright future for the headline writer if he wants to take a significant step up from what Iowahawk once dubbed a “scrappy local paper:”

HMM: Egypt Prepares for Military Confrontation with Israel.

Despite facing substantial economic hardships, Egypt is in the midst of significant military spending. The Israeli defense establishment identifies military activity in central Sinai, including logistical preparations and the construction of cement obstacles aimed at blocking Israeli armored vehicles.

Political officials in Jerusalem have voiced concern over Egypt’s unprecedented military buildup, including the construction of tunnels and bridges over the Suez Canal. These developments, they warn, could facilitate the rapid deployment of Egyptian forces into the Sinai Peninsula and potentially across the border with Israel.

Also, despite IDF reports to the contrary, Egypt maintains more than a dozen deep tunnels connecting Rafah in the Gaza Strip and points deep in the Sinai Peninsula – which have not been demolished yet. The above, and many other military boosts are in clear violation of the restrictions outlined in the Camp David Accords and the subject of heated debates between Israeli and Egyptian security officials.

Hopefully, whatever is going on is being overhyped… but I wouldn’t count on it.

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB:

Perhaps the AP is taking their lead from the New York Times, which began 2024 by covering all the bases:

ELON MUSK AND EVEN DONALD TRUMP ARE MORE POPULAR IN THE UK THAN ANY POLITICIAN OTHER THAN FARAGE:  New polling from Freshwater Strategy, which interviewed 1,207 UK voters between 4-6 of this month, shows that the world’s richest man is more popular among Brits than their own Prime Minister. 

America is, as usual, in the vanguard, but guys, our revolt is not just ours, it’s world wide. World wide, the Death of the Blue is consigning the leftist model to the scrap heap of history. Where it always belonged.