On top of all the other shit blowing into our faces we are dealing with finding out it's hit the Wikipedia fan too, By Hal M, Brown

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A report from the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, accuses Wikipedia of anti-Isreal and anti-Jewish bias. It is titled “Editing for Hate: How Anti-Israel and Anti-Jewish Bias Undermines Wikipedia’s Neutrality” You can read it here.

The image the ADL used for their report’s illustration, above, is an AI created version of the Wikipedia logo blowing apart. I added Wiki’s real logo on the lower left.

This was discussed on ‘Morning Joe’ today. They interviewed the president of the ADL, Joseph Greenblatt. This was the first I’d heard about it. 

This was covered in the media (see Google News search here) but as you can see it wasn’t getting major attention from very many American publications. I am pleased that “Morning Joe” covered it.

This is the Executive Sumarry from the report:

ADL has identified extensive issues with antisemitic and anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia in multiple languages. These issues include 1) a coordinated campaign to manipulate Wikipedia content related to Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and similar issues, in which a group of editors systematically evade Wikipedia’s rules to shift balanced narratives toward skewed ones, spotlighting criticism of Israel and downplaying Palestinian terrorist violence and antisemitism; and 2) pro-Hamas perspectives informing Arabic-language Wikipedia content on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

ADL has found clear evidence that a group of at least 30 editors circumvent Wikipedia’s policies in concert to introduce antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias, and misleading information.

These 30 editors were much more active than other comparable groups of editors, on average, by a factor of at least two, based on total edits made over the past 10 years.

• The 30 editors were much more likely than other editors to communicate with each other on Wikipedia: they were as much as 18x more active in group communications than comparable groups of editors.

• The editors appeared to coordinate to change pages related to Israel, Palestine¹, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, downplaying Palestinian antisemitism, violence, and calls to destroy Israel while foregrounding criticism of Israel.

• These edits have ramped up since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and include the systematic removal of citations to reputable sources and tandem voting to keep content critical of Israel but remove coverage of Palestinian violence and terrorism.

In addition to this multiyear campaign by bad-faith editors to revise Wikipedia’s content on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ADL found evidence of biased and extremist content in Arabic-language Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s rules are not applied consistently outside of some English-language pages, allowing biased pro-Hamas content in the Arabic-language edition.

Pages related to Hamas in Arabic glorify the Palestinian terrorist organization and perpetuate pro-Hamas propaganda, while failing to follow Wikipedia’s rules for neutrality.

This report makes clear that Wikipedia needs to do far more to address anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias and coordination. Until it has done that, those who rely on Wikipedia – from Google Search to large language models like ChatGPT – must deprioritize Wikipedia’s content on issues related to Jews, Israel and the Middle East conflict so that they do not perpetuate this bias.

It should be a no-brainer to say that some subjects require considerable diligence to write a totally obective article about in Wikipedia or any other publication trying to be an encyclopedia, especially one that reports on current events, often within a few hours after they occur the way Wikipedia does. 

When it comes to the Middle East conflict I agree with the ADL that Wikipedia must get its act together before anyone can use it as an unbiased source. 

Consider what would happen if Wiki’s exhaustive entry of the Russian invasion of Ukraine gave credence to Putin’s claim that that the Ukrainian government were neo-Nazis committing genocide against the Russian minority in the Donbas, and said that Russia's goal was to "demilitarise and denazify" Ukraine. What if they went further and said, like Trump has, that Ukraine started the war?

The matter of Wikipedia in this instance has nothing to do with Trump and his manic effort to control the press. I haven’t seen any reports of him jumping on it to discredit Wikipedia because it accurately describes what he does. I doubt he knows how many members of both the media and the public count on it for factual information. This may change. Consider that in doing reseacrh for my Substack today I found this from a Fox News article published on March 7th:

Wikipedia co-founder calls on Elon Musk to investigate government influence over online encyclopedia

Excerpt:

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is calling on Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to look into whether government actors have infiltrated the online encyclopedia that he helped start over two decades ago.

"Hi @ElonMusk. Wikipedia co-founder here. May I ask you to determine what branches of the U.S. government—if any!—have employees paid to edit, monitor, update, lobby, etc., WIkipedia? Such operations should be defunded, if any. If there are *none*, we’d like to know. Agree?" Sanger recently wrote on X.

Sanger, who left the organization in 2002, has been a heavy critic of Wikipedia since about 2005, when he says the website began to drift into left-wing bias.

If what Larry Sanger is true this tarnishes the reputation of all of Wikipedia. It is not up to the government to investigate it. Musk and DOGE should keep their dirty hands off it. However, Wikipedia has to clean house themselves.

I often either provide a simple link to Wikipedia so people can learn more about a person or a subject. For example, above with ADL president Joseph Greenblatt, for readers who want to learn more about him I provided a link. In yesterday’s Substack I used quotes from Wikipedia from their entries on police state and martial law.

I have found entries related to Donald Trump to be unbiased. This is the main entry in a series of articles about him.

Trump would no doubt want the following from that entry scrubbed along with it’s internal links to other Wiki articles:

Trump is the central figure of Trumpism. Many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racially charged, racist, or misogynistic. He has made false and misleading statements and promoted conspiracy theories to a degree unprecedented in American politics. After losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Trump attempted to overturn the outcome, culminating in the January 6 Capitol attackin 2021. In 2023, Trump was found liable in civil cases for sexual abuse and defamation and for business fraud, and in 2024, he was found guilty of falsifying business records, making him the first U.S. president convicted of a felony. After winning the 2024 presidential election against Kamala Harris, Trump was sentenced to a penalty-free discharge, and two other felony indictments against him were dismissed.

Trump began his second term by pardoning around 1,500 January 6 rioters, initiating mass layoffs of the federal workforce, and starting a trade war with Mexico and Canada. Trump's broad and extensive use of executive orders has drawn numerous lawsuits challenging their legality.

Trump has already been on a crusade to control the media. He has banned the Associated Press from press conferences using the excuse of their refusing to accept that the Gulf of Mexico has to be called the Gulf of America. Of course this is bullshit. The AP reporters are known for asking tough questions. (The AP style book which is used by many journalists has addressed the Gulf of Mexico vs. Gulf of America matter here.)

Wait for it, folks. How long before Musk sends his DOGE minions along with armed officers like he did at The United States Institute of Peace (read article) to break into Wiki’s San Francisco headquarters and kick out their staff and take over their computer servers? Of course, this could be problematic given this is San Francisco which is a sanctuary city, and Mayor Daniel Lurie might decide to order the SFPD to stop this.

For my recent Substacks about American politics click here.

For my readers as if we don’t have enough to worry about:

Keep New Bat Coronavirus On the Radar, Researchers Say

Trump and MAGA don’t want anyone to realize these are human beings:

Trump is engaged in two fights against democracy. Both involve agents armed with guns. Are we a nascent police state? By Hal M. Brown

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This is the main page of HUFFPOST this morning:

The news about Trump defying a federal judge’s order is all over the media. There are lotsa guns in that story. In this instance it is ICE agents. There’s another story with lotsa guns. Rachel Maddow reported on it last night. You can see the 10 minute segment in the RawStory article here.

This is from The New York Times (subscription):

Musk’s Team Evicts Officials at the U.S. Institute of Peace

A bubbling dispute broke into a dramatic standoff that ended with police involvement and the Department of Government Efficiency taking up residence at the independent agency.

Excerpt:

A simmering dispute between the Department of Government Efficiency and an independent agency dedicated to promoting peace broke into an open standoff involving the police on Monday, as Elon Musk’s government cutters marched into the agency’s headquarters and evicted its officials.

The dramatic scene played out in Washington on Monday afternoon as Mr. Musk’s team was rebuffed from the U.S. Institute of Peace, an agency that President Trump has ordered dismantled, then entered it with law enforcement officers. Agency officials say that because the institute is a congressionally chartered nonprofit that is not part of the executive branch, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk do not have the authority to gut its operations.

“DOGE just came into the building — they’re inside the building — they’re bringing the F.B.I. and brought a bunch of D.C. police,” Sophia Lin, a lawyer for the institute, said by telephone as she and other officials were being escorted out.

George Moose, who was fired as the institute’s acting president last week but is challenging his dismissal, accused Mr. Musk’s team of breaking in. “Our statute is very clear about the status of this building and this institute,” he told reporters. “So what has happened here today is an illegal takeover by elements of the executive branch of a private nonprofit corporation.”

If anyone still disputes the evidence that Trump is now a dictator who, when defied, is willing to use his own Gestapo and SS they have their head so deeply in the dirt that it may be poking into the Earth’s substrata. If they bury themselves too much deeper in denial it will get pretty damn hot for them.

How far will this go? There’s a name for the kind of country we could become. It is called a police state. At it’s extreme it looks like this.

This is the Wikipedia defintion:

A police state describes a state whose government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. There is typically little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive, and the deployment of internal security and police forces play a heightened role in governance. A police state is a characteristic of authoritarian, totalitarian or illiberal regimes (contrary to a liberal democratic regime). Such governments are typically one-party states and dominant-party states, but police-state-level control may emerge in multi-party systems as well.

Originally, a police state was a state regulated by a civil administration, but since the beginning of the 20th century it has "taken on an emotional and derogatory meaning" by describing an undesirable state of living characterized by the overbearing presence of civil authorities. The inhabitants of a police state may experience restrictions on their mobility, or on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force that operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state. Robert von Mohl, who first introduced the rule of law to German jurisprudence, contrasted the Rechtsstaat ("legal" or "constitutional" state) with the anti-aristocratic Polizeistaat ("police state").

Russia and other totalitarian countries have their own versions.

Some of my friends say “it can’t happen here.” Others say it can happen here. I am seeing indications it is already happening and what we have is a nascent police state. Trump is testing the limits. Trump and Musk and their lieutenants want to see how far they can go. They don’t know what will happen but I am certain they have considered the possibility that there will be massive protests. I am just as sure that they have a contingency plan for this. They will wait until there’s a protest that gives Trump an excuse to say it is a national emergency and declare martial law.

From Wikipedia:

Martial law is the replacement of civilian government by military rule and the suspension of civilian legal processes for military powers. Martial law can continue for a specified amount of time, or indefinitely, and standard civil liberties may be suspended for as long as martial law continues. Most often, martial law is declared in times of war or emergencies such as civil unrest and natural disasters. Alternatively, martial law may be declared in instances of military coups d'état.

This would put the onus for carrying out unconstitutional, illegal, and un-American presidentiall on true patriots in the military. Would they bend to Trump and Hegseth or could we actually have a military coup d'état?

Update:

This is in response to Trump. But Trump has the guns. Roberts doesn’t. He depends on the respect for the rule of law.

Read my related Substacks below.

Read all of my Substacks.

Think DOGE is bad, WOGE will be way worse, By Hal M. Brown - Trump is ready to launch his Weaponized Office of Government Extremism. Can he do this?

I think Trump has been testing what he can get away with as he orders his gun totting and missile firing troops to engage in more and more aggressive actions. The most recent two were having the Venezuelan gang members deported by invoking the Alien Enemies Act, the action blocked by a federal court, and ordering military strikes against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen.

On the latter, consider Trump’s words:

"Today, I have ordered the United States Military to launch decisive and powerful Military action against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen. They have waged an unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism against American, and other, ships, aircraft, and drones."

"It has been over a year since a U.S. flagged commercial ship safely sailed through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, or the Gulf of Aden. The last American Warship to go through the Red Sea, four months ago, was attacked by the Houthis over a dozen times. Funded by Iran, the Houthi thugs have fired missiles at U.S. aircraft, and targeted our Troops and Allies. These relentless assaults have cost the U.S. and World Economy many BILLIONS of Dollars while, at the same time, putting innocent lives at risk," he added. "The Houthi attack on American vessels will not be tolerated. We will use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective. The Houthis have choked off shipping in one of the most important Waterways of the World, grinding vast swaths of Global Commerce to a halt, and attacking the core principle of Freedom of Navigation upon which International Trade and Commerce depends."

Trump also said, "Our brave Warfighters are right now carrying out aerial attacks on the terrorists’ bases, leaders, and missile defenses to protect American shipping, air, and naval assets, and to restore Navigational Freedom. No terrorist force will stop American commercial and naval vessels from freely sailing the Waterways of the World."

He then continued, "To all Houthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE!"

In typical Trumpian all caps bellicose bluster he threatens hell raining down like nothing these terrorists have seen before.

“Why now?” one should ask. The Houthi terrorists have been doing this for a year. 

I think this is Trump making sure he can order the U.S. military to conduct an armed attack. This would appear to be a legal action, but aside from the visceral thrill he gets from being the Commander in Chief ordaining that bombs rain from the sky against his enemies, I believe he wants to make certain he can order the military to follow any other order no matter how far it pushes the bounds of legality. He’s already threatened military action against Greenland and has toyed with the idea of sending the military to go after drug gangs in Mexico. 

Incredible as it should not seem to be, considering this is Trump being Trump, he has ordered contingency plans should he decide to invade Panama.

President Donald Trump has directed the Pentagon to prepare plans for carrying out his threat to "take back" the Panama Canal, including by military force if needed, two U.S. officials familiar with the situation toldNBC News Thursday.

According to the outlet, the officials said that U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) is drawing up potential plans that run the gamut from working more closely with Panama's military to a less likely scenario in which U.S. troops invade the country and take the canal by force. They also said that SOUTHCOM commander Adm. Alvin Holsey has presented draft strategies to be reviewed by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is scheduled to visit Panama next month.

The officials explained that the likelihood of a U.S invasion depended on the level of cooperation shown by the Panamanian military.

Trump has repeatedly refused to rule out use of military force to seize control of the vital U.S.-built waterway, as well as Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.

The military may put together a plan, but the overriding question is whether or nor they would initiate it.

The megalomaniacal Trump is testing the waters to see how much he can get away with. I don’t think he particularly cares about the courts or public opinion. I do think he very much cares about the people with the actual guns and the people who fly the fighter jets and bombers. He’s already installed the leaders shown in my illustration, the blond devil in a dress Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Tom Homan to head up the departments with the actual weapons. What he does not know is whether enough of the people under them will follow unconstitutional, illegal, and just plain un-American orders.

Trump can fire fireable leaders of the departments and agencies who do not follow his orders, and he can order those down the chain of command fired or, in the military, court-martialed, if they disobey his orders. For any leader to have a viable armed force, whether civil like ICE or the FBI, or the military, they must have the majority obey all orders. 

What Trump can’t do is what Stalin did to soldiers who tried to retreat: 

On July 28, 1942, Joseph Stalin, premier and dictator of the Soviet Union, issues Order No. 227, what came to be known as the “Not one step backward” order, in light of German advances into Russian territory. The order declared, “Panic makers and cowards must be liquidated on the spot. Not one step backward without orders from higher headquarters! Commanders…who abandon a position without an order from higher headquarters are traitors to the Motherland.” (Read more here)

Our agents and soldiers who refuse illegal orders won’t be cowards. They will be patriots. I want to assume Trump can’t order them shot and have an order like this followed. At least I hope he can’t.

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