Remember how vindictive the political scenario after Joe Biden first took office? It wasn’t just the draconian prosecutions of Jan. 6 protestors, most of whom were non-violent and unarmed, many of them little old ladies. One guy got sent to jail who wasn’t even at the scene of the Capitol crowd control incident.
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There also were the blacklisters. They vowed to hunt down and punish one in one way or another any former official who spent time in the Trump administration, putting them on public lists to ensure that none would be able to find future employment. It was vicious stuff and there were former Trump small fry who were unable to get jobs after leaving the White House for no other reason but this..
The scandal-plagued Lincoln Project drew the most publicity for this blacklisting project, but there was also another skeevy group called the Transition Integrity Project, and together with the Lincoln Project Stasi-wannabes shared big-dollar donors. Both kicked off their blacklisting plans around the same time in the early part of 2021, seemingly coordinating their talking points. I wrote about that here.
There was a third advocate for blacklisting, too — this guy, Randall Lane, the chief content officer at Forbes magazine.
He wrote this:
Whoa. @Forbes chief content officer warns against hiring @kayleighmcenany or other prominent Trump flacks: “Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.” https://t.co/KeXF2gVXVV
— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) January 9, 2021
According to NPR:
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:Communications officials from the Trump administration might have a hard time finding work after January 20. That’s at least what the chief content officer of Forbes is hoping. Citing numerous lies by various press secretaries throughout the Trump administration, Randall Lane wrote a column, warning businesses this way – if you hire any of Trump’s communications officials, Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. To talk more about this is Randall Lane. He joins us now.Welcome to the program.RANDALL LANE: Thanks, Audie.CORNISH: So was this inspired by the violent sacking of the Capitol last week, or is this something you’ve been thinking about for a while?LANE: A little of both. First, to clarify, we were just talking about the four press secretaries, plus Kellyanne Conway – the people who are paid by the American people to talk to the American people, to inform the American people. And looking at Wednesday night, there was no way to look at that and not recognize that that entire day was built on a foundation of lies. The people who were in the Capitol believed what they’d been told about rigged election. And again, that was based on lies. There needs to be a reset, and we need to hold ourselves to an accountability standard where truth and facts matter because that’s the path forward for a healthy democracy.CORNISH: I’m going to reveal some bias here and ask – you know, part of the job of political communications, as I have experienced it, is to spin – that it’s rarely straight facts.LANE: Yes.CORNISH: What was different about this experience to you?LANE: Yes. The job of press secretaries sometimes is a lie of omission or it’s a spin. But never have we had, in modern history, an administration where up was down, right – you know, blue is yellow. Sean Spicer set the tone from Day 1 when he asked Americans to not believe their eyes when he’s saying, this was the largest inauguration in history. And again, that’s a trivial fact. But that’s also what made it so bad because it established from minute one that there was no standard for what the truth is. And that’s what’s different.
As a matter of fact, no, it’s not different. All you have do do is look at the statements of Jen Psaki or Joe Lockhart to recognize the real lies. Somehow, those press secretaries didn’t bother him.
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This was just naked Trump hate, or some kind of talking points obedience as it came at the same time as the other two organizations beating that drum. Very disgusting to see in an editor who clearly was consumed by his own political hatreds, which only made themselves known at that moment. Weird, really.
Turns out this guy was on the take, though, and got fired from his job because of it, failing to disclose a $6 million payment from R.J. Shook, a content partner, in a transation explicitly forbidden by Forbes rules and its handbook. He, uh, forgot.
Really?
It’s a rule everyone would have known about and would have been carefully enforced and I know this because I used to work there 20 years ago. I cannot imagine any of the great editors of Forbes I worked with — Bill Baldwin, Tim Ferguson, Laurie Minard, Nigel Holloway, or Luisa Kroll, to take a few examples, ever doing such a thing, it wouldn’t happen, they were always very careful to avoid any conflicts of interest or violations of the rules, and they always kept politics out of their writing. They were extremely conscientious editors. They had integrity.
He didn’t. So the question raised now is whether someone paid him off for that vindictive call for blacklists of former Trump officials. I have found no evidence it was R.J. Shook or Shook Research, they only revealed that Lane was buyable for the right price. The fact that Lane took big dollars, from Shook Research, which had an interest in rankings of money managers, probably indicated some kind of quid pro quo. So was there another payoff from somewhere else for the loud calls to blacklist? We know the donors were donating. That might be worth looking into given the egregious nature of what he did.
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