Why I still don't give money to Counterpunch

Yes, but, Jeff St. Clair, on your reposting two months ago of a 2019 piece explaining the rigors of your annual major fundraising drive. 

One-quarter of what Counterpunch runs is dreck, like the guy who was (is?) your poet laureate. I've sent stuff that you haven't run, both poetry and prose.

I posted the above as part of a Texas Progressives roundup in early November.

And, then, that same day, St. Clair posts a dreck piece by wingnut James Bovard about Waco and the Branch Davidian standoff. Bovard is flat wrong that ATF outgunned the Davidians. (The FBI is a different story.) From all evidence we have, he is wrong that the National Guard helicopters during the ATF initial raid fired shots at the compound.

Bovard is a wingnut otherwise. Retweeting folks like the Brownstone Institute shows he's a COVID wingnut; the fact that he's an official fellow shows that in spades. His own website shows that 95 percent of what he writes is for the NY Post.

On Waco, I suspect he's trying to grift on the recent release of the Stephan Talty book, which followed the spring Jeff Guinn book. Both links are to my Goodreads reviews, which is part of how I know that, as far as forces on the ground, Davidians outgunned ATF agents.

Otherwise, his piece, and his Twitter replies to me, are filled with a mix of "maybes" and "possiblies," and quotes of people like wingnut former Congresscritter Steve Schiff, a UFO conspiracy theorist, plus strawmanning. On the media, the reality is that the Clinton Administration faced a fair amount of fairly early pushback.

The idea that the FBI "targeted childen" is itself laughable. Anybody who knows the reality knows that Koresh had any and every opportunity to let remaining children go. As for the final FBI assault, since it had nobody inside, and the bugs it had sent in on food were audio-only, it couldn't have known where children were to be targeted. It's also "interesting," in regard to this, where Bovard ends direct quotes in the middle of a sentence. It's another version of quoting someone out of context.

Finally, per both books and repeated investigation? Koresh started the fire. 

And, speaking of books? Per one of his, co-authored with fellow nutters from the Libertarian Institute, he claims that gun-ownership is a "God-given right." Since there is no god, no such rights exist, and certainly not to guns.

So, St. Clair, even if he's not behind the paywall, if you're running this, once again, you don't need my money.

Or, if you're running the dreck of Michael Hudson, totally uninformed about biblical criticism, and close to being a duck-quacking water carrier for Zionism, whether behind a paywall or not? You don't need my money.

Or, other nuttery behind the paywall? This interview of Mitch Horowitz, a hater of modern skepticism because he's a paranormal true believer? Again, Jeff, you want to run him, and behind the paywall? You don't need my money.

Otherwise, the St. Clair-Cockburn slugline of "we welcome all political faiths" may be marginally more true than the Libertarian Party's "neither left nor right," but that's a low bar to clear indeed. To take it it an extreme, you could publish both Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and Stalin's personally edited version of the 1936 show trials and be wrong twice. (I don't know what the Stalinist equivalent of Godwin's Law is, but I just went there with pleasure.)