The "withhold judgment" edition

Four stories that require some introspection and waiting. Sorry.

The nature of media, both social and mainstream, is that fast and new is best. The first few people with a hot take get most of the air in the room, and by the time corrections come around, people have moved on and aren’t paying attention.

It’s boring advice (and boring TV) to tell people to withhold judgment until more facts come out, but as we saw with the Paul Pelosi story, it’s the wisest practice.

There have been four stories bubbling up lately that all require a little more thinking and waiting, and a little less reacting.

1.) James O’Keefe on paid leave from Project Veritas

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any length of time, you know I’m a huge PV fan. It’s an important organization that has exposed corruption at Facebook, Twitter, Pfizer, and many more companies.

This week, O’Keefe was put on paid leave by his board of directors. It didn’t take long for many to start speculating that Pfizer managed to get its long tentacles into PV and pressure them into getting rid of James. It’s an easy thing to think about a company that was recently exposed by Project Veritas, after they taped an employee talking about mutating the virus and about how much the company was making from vaccines.

But it’s hard to believe this $20 million non-profit could be easily cowed by anyone, especially a company it just exposed. There are also reports that O’Keefe made many former employees unhappy, and one anonymous employee called him a “power drunk tyrant.”

(I personally met O’Keefe once, at a social event, where he was quick to insult me just after we met. I’m not sure he realized it was an insult, and it was an odd interaction. He’s done a great job at PV, but I’m not sure what kind of a boss he is to the group’s 65 employees.)

2.) Award-winning journo says Biden bombed Russian pipelines. But.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh wrote a long piece this week, claiming that Biden ordered U.S. Navy divers to plant explosives that destroyed three Russian gas pipelines.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical here. Hersh’s report relied on just one source, for starters. In a vast operation involving hundreds of people, he could find only one to confirm everything?

And we’re to believe that the guy who wanted to wait on killing bin Laden, the guy so eager to get out of Afghanistan he made a bungle of the entire thing, is the same guy blowing up pipelines? In a move that could lead to WWIII?

The jury’s still out.

3.) The unfortunate ABC producer

Two days before Christmas, ABC producer Dax Tejera died suddenly. The president of ABC News said at the time that he’d suffered a heart attack, and anti-vaxxers pounced:

I’ve applauded Alex Berenson in the past for not being afraid to ask hard questions, but in this case, he jumped the gun.

The NY Post reported this week that Tejera actually choked to death while drunk, after an evening out with his wife.

I definitely think there are lots of questions that need to be answered about vaccines, but a lot of people rushed to judgment here.

4.) Finally, Chinese spy balloons

Although the general public seems to have moved on from spy balloons, there’s so much to this story, and some of it we’ll likely never know.

There have been reports of balloon-like objects in various parts since at least 2020. At the time, it was fun to speculate about aliens and Godzilla (because they were over Japan, see?), but the actual source seems to be much more sinister. During balloon briefings this week, Air Force brigadier general Pat Ryder, confirmed that the Pentagon is aware of four previous balloons that have gone over U.S. territory. Years later, it was determined that those balloons were part of China’s spying efforts. In fact, the reason Trump didn’t shoot down balloons while he was in office is that the military wasn’t aware of them until the Biden administration.

The National Review points out that although we want to blame either Trump or Biden for the spying going on under our noses, the real problem is less sexy and more serious. “It’s not clear that our current NORAD systems are sufficiently effective at detecting these balloons.”

It’s fun to jump on the latest story that confirms our biases or suspicions. And it’s a lot harder to reserve judgment and continue to read up on stories after they’ve left the mainstream consciousness. But it’s vital that we do.

— Ken

Finally …