Sympathy for Ray Epps

In “The new Kremlinology” Matt Taibbi gives a lesson in how to read the New York Times. The text of Taibbi’s column is available only in part to nonsubscribers, but it gives you the idea.

We’ve been reading the Times in the Kremlinological style for quite some time now. This week’s sympathetic Times profile of January 6 agitator Ray Epps by Alan Feuer presents a serious challenge to interpretation. The story ran under the headline “A Trump Backer’s Downfall as the Target of a Jan. 6 Conspiracy Theory.” Subhead: “Ray Epps became the unwitting face of an attempt by pro-Trump forces to promote the baseless idea that the F.B.I. was behind the attack on the Capitol.”

Tucker Carlson provided a Kremlinogical reading of the Times profile of Epps on Thursday evening. The video is below. RealClearPolitics has posted a partial and garbled text of his comments here. It should be noted that Tucker himself is named in Feuer’s story as one of those who has contributed to Epps’s ordeal.

This is the twenty-seventh paragraph of Feuer’s 39-paragraph story:

Mr. Epps also said he regretted sending a text to his nephew, well after the violence had erupted, in which he discussed how he helped to orchestrate the movements of people who were leaving Mr. Trump’s speech near the White House by pointing them in the direction of the Capitol.

We are curious about the time and the text of the message, but Feuer leaves it at that.

Tucker describes Feuer as “a reporter who has spent years shilling openly for the intelligence agency.” I am not familiar with his work and unsure that that is an accurate description. Feuer’s Times profile is here. It reads: “Alan Feuer covers courts and criminal justice for the Metro desk. He has written about mobsters, jails, police misconduct, wrongful convictions, government corruption and El Chapo, the jailed chief of the Sinaloa drug cartel. He joined the Times in 1999.”

However, Tucker’s apparent description of Feuer fits Times reporter Adam Goldman to a T. Goldman tweeted out Feuer’s story.

Feuer’s story can be read Kremlinogcially as a sort of mirror image of Goldman’s stories on the FBI’s investigation of James O’Keefe and Project Veritas. Goldman extends no sympathy to O’Keefe for the treatment O’Keefe has received at the hands of the FBI in the matter of Ashley Biden’s diary.

Indeed, as I read his stories, Goldman seems to take an almost pornographic pleasure in detailing O’Keefe’s treatment by the FBI. He has certainly exploited it. (All my many posts on “The O’Keefe Project” are compiled at the link.)

About Feuer and Epps I have no opinion, but about Goldman I stand by my judgment: he serves as the public relations arm of the national security establishment. Goldman’s tweet may itself take a Kremlinological reading.

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