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Anyone who follows me or listens to or watches my program knows I have regular guests whom I trust to be fair and accurate. The audience also knows the program promotes the podcasts I believe to be crucial to one of two things: serious content on which can be built “world views” on why “the West is best” backed up by facts and defensible opinions, and fun.
My “fun” — the Cleveland Browns, Cavaliers, Guardians and the Ohio State University Buckeyes — is not everyone’s idea of fun, but it’s the price of listening. For decades, the audience has put up with my idiosyncrasies concerning “fun” because they trust my screening on important points-of-view. They know and account for my biases.
One of the regular guests who has generated his own unique and very bright demand signal since the massacre of innocent Israelis and others on 10/7/23 is Haviv Rettig Gur.
Rettig Gur is an Israeli public intellectual who works across many platforms, including now The Free Press, the Times of Israel and his own podcast “Ask Haviv Anything.” Haviv’s Patreon community is also large and growing.
His popularity is (my opinion) because of his excellence as a teacher, period. Haviv is learned, articulate, funny and curious about the world, and he is eager to persuade about the facts of history and of Israel’s present crises. If he was a professor at Harvard, his basic course on world history would have to be limited because of student demand. He is among the finest teachers I have ever encountered, up there with Harvey Mansfield of Harvard, Larry Arnn of Hillsdale and the late Mary Kay Kane of Hastings Law School (whom I was lucky to draw for Civil Procedure — a difficult course for first year law students — decades ago when she was a visitor at University of Michigan Law School).
When Rettig Gur burst on to the worldwide scene after his introduction to Americans via Dan Senor’s influential “Call Me Back” podcast, the center-right Israeli point of view found a unique and powerful voice.
So I listen to every episode of “Ask Haviv Anything” and host him on my program on an approximately monthly basis. It is not surprising, then, that I promote various episodes of his podcast unrelated to my program. He is Israel’s version of the late Charles Krauthammer, and that’s as high a level of praise as I can deliver.
I have never said or written that a particular episode of any of my favorite podcasts is absolutely necessary for American state and federal legislators to hear.
Until today. They (and you) need to listen to a recent episode that focused on Wikipedia and Reddit — Episode 65, titled “The Unseen Editors Rigging The Information War with Ashley Rindsberg.”
This episode is so stunning, its revelations so striking and its implications so vast that I believe 99% of people curious about the world will inhale it. I hope it finds traction in the heads of everyone who understands how “world views” matter and how they are formed.
Haviv’s text summary of the episode puts it bluntly: The episode is a “deep dive into the surprisingly small number of editors who have managed to take control of Wikipedia’s articles related to Israel, Israeli history and Zionism, and to skew them into narrow ideological screeds that no Israelis or Jews would recognize as representing them or their story.” That is the crucial takeaway.
Even more alarming is not just Wikipedia’s fundamental bias against Jews and Israel, but the deep “GASP” bias of Wikipedia on many topics of great importance. (Other examples of the deep, enduring subject-matter bias of Wikipedia are its entries concerning the “Covid lab leak theory” and “Trump is an authoritarian” idiocy.
“GASP” is a Wikipedia founder’s acronym to simplify the sites’ biases: “Global, Academic, Secular, and Progressive.”
I had no idea. Most people, including me, think Wikipedia is “crowdsourced,” checked and rechecked for accuracy and balance by millions of volunteer editors. It isn’t always reliable, can’t be cited as a source, but is used by millions for quick checks on topics of interest. I considered it generally fair, but perhaps flawed in details here and there.
It’s not. Wikipedia is an “info-op” and it is poisoning not just search engines like Google, but AI models of all sorts. Ashley Rindsberg is an authority on this. He needs to be known and listened to as he explains what has happened to Wikipedia and Reddit in recent years.
Few people are naive about Wikipedia. Most know that long ago it distorted its entries about public figures and frequently includes errors or absurdities in their bios.
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But, I did not suspect at all that “big topic” entries were subject to intention manipulation on a scale so vast that to describe its biases as “systemic and enduring” is similar to saying that President Trump sometimes says surprising things.
The rise of AI depends on gathering and synthesizing what is available online everywhere, but especially on sites like Wikipedia and Reddit. The malign “editors” of Wikipedia know this too, and have purposefully and with fierce concentration and extended effort distorted those sites and particular entries with the consequent effect of distorting the world’s views on critical topics.
We now know, and Rettig Gur and Rindsberg explain, that AI is intentionally being polluted by extremists and fanatics, and that the engineers of the Large Language Models are either indifferent to these destructive mythologies being smuggled into their products or are ignorant to the fact that they have been played.
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The antisemitic crazies and fundamentalist jihadis know, and have turned, the big sites into weapons of the information war against Israel. The Chinese Communist Party knows, and it is scrubbing its image and has begun to turn its vast resources against the crowdsourced sites and the AI LLMs downstream of everything on the web.
Don’t believe me, but listen to Rettig Gur and Rindsberg. And commit yourself to questioning everything you read produced by people or machines that exists without reputational validity. And perhaps stop visiting Wikipedia and definitely stop contributing to it.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
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