Kmele Foster
speaker
485 appearances
8 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 28 Apr
Kmele Foster’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I hope I absolutely hope so. And I would commend people briefly to go and read Matt Taibbi on this, who's been obviously one of the best chroniclers of the way that governments, especially in the Biden era, has put unholy amounts of pressure on social media companies to ban things. I mean, Rand Paul couldn't go on YouTube to say that, hey, you know, masking studies are not really all that.
They would ban it for six months after that is crazy. What take play? We're still like unraveling that. But what Taibbi argues is that perhaps Zuckerberg, in the way that he's talking about this, wants to partner with Donald Trump in a way that is actually good and not bad. And that is there's a lot of Western European and other country advocates.
efforts to make a sort of transnational anti-speech or sort of anti-misinformation regime. And so if Zuckerberg is leading or being part of the solution to fight against that and to encourage Trump, because now Trump has a lot of Silicon Valley people have his ear in ways that they didn't five years ago at all. If they can encourage him to
to resist any american cooperation and in fact uh active american resistance to any attempts to be as horribly anti-free speech as the uk has become then that can be a really good thing i think which which zuckerberg actually mentions too yes so let me play a little bit of the zuckerberg um mea culpa admission announcement of the end of his censorship regime
Ruled. That's the great answer. I wrote, I think, my first... Long piece about how the fact checking industry, which deserves scare quotes, was not all that. It was more than a dozen years ago or a dozen years ago or so for reason because of the way that it was being applied so in lopsidedly in the Obama era. Right. You had PolitiFact giving lie of the year about Obamacare. OK, that makes sense.
Except it was about Sarah Palin making a Facebook post about death panels. It wasn't about whether you could keep your doctor. It wasn't about whether, you know, you've taken on the drug lobby and finally won or many of the other things that wasn't about.
Yeah.
I mean, that's like even take out the politics of this, even take out the it's obvious that you're more upset about Republican and MAGA Republican in particular rhetoric than you are about Democratic. Take that out. Actually look at the difference between and this was true 12 years ago is true today that They want to fact check political rhetoric.
They don't want to fact check the lies that government are telling you in the name of making bad policy. How many? I mean, this goes hand in hand. We've had this crackdown on quote unquote misinformation hand in hand with the government serially lying to us about policies relating especially to COVID. And Michael's right to point to that. Huh. That's an interesting thing.
Why are we like actually using government pressure? I would say in violation of the First Amendment, it's being sort of adjudicated as we speak. But government pressure about this at the same time that the government is doing is making brand new kind of bold stakes of its own misinformation. I would say that those two things go hand in hand.
And journalism made a really bad departure 10 years ago or so where it decided to be the referee of rhetoric as opposed to covering policy. Policy matters much, much more. And Democratic policy in Democratic places has produced really bad results. Republican policy sometimes does as well. But you should actually follow the way that that works. And they don't.
They are more naturally inclined to be upset with Sarah Palin's rhetoric than what would actually Barack Obama did when passing and implementing Obamacare. And this goes on and on and on. The biggest lie of a really long time was Biden's age. That that is not lie of the year. is fundamentally enraging to at least half of the country.
Well, I worry, I think we are winning in the culture and you're right to point that out. But we are not going to, it's, we're not going to find a lot of winning within the kind of legacy cultural institutions. Even yesterday, you know, I was just doing a last quick little Google news search before I hit publish on a piece about Charlie Hebdo. And here's the Columbia Journalism Review, right?
Institutional kind of organ of the media industry talking to itself, you know, talking about the mixed legacy and the, And the free speech is more complicated and nuanced than all of that. And like we're talking about the murder of 12 people, beloved cartoonists, cartoonists who mocked first and mostly actually the pope and every single French leader.
I mean, they're an anti-clerical satirical weekly. Stretching way back, very anti-authoritarian. The mixed record here is only the performance of the media, which made Charlie Hebdo lonely, and it shouldn't have been.
And this is something that Michael and I in particular have talked about and written about many times, not just over the last 10 years, but over the last 35 since the fatwa was placed on Salman Rushdie for Satanic Verses. There was a moment there. Where there was a time for choosing among Western intellectuals, and they chose badly. They chose intersectionally.
They said, well, Rushdie and Jimmy Carter's words in an op-ed that he wrote for The New York Times just – Three weeks after the fatwa, you know, Russia is guilty of insulting Islam, you know, because people from Muslim countries are more oppressed than Catholics or than people from a majority opinion.
This was like a new introduction of cowardice on the part of the West kind of judging it in this way. And when the Danish cartoon crisis happened in 2006, which Danish newspapers published cartoons of Muhammad, no one cared. And then a bunch of imams in the Middle East started publicizing them months later. And then it led to a bunch of riots. That was the moment when the West...
writ large, should have reprinted those cartoons. I advocated for such when I worked for the LA Times very strenuously, and I lost very narrowly in the opinion section, and I feel ashamed to this day that I didn't win that argument because Charlie Hebdo was one of the only places that did that. And once you become an outlier, then you become a target.
And they became an outlier because of the cowardice of the West, and not just about reprinting cartoons. In the case of the New York Times, at one point, writing a file story about a statue of Muhammad that appeared on top of a New York courthouse for a half a century that no one cared about.
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