The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Streisand Effect and the Results of Everybody Blog About Rebekah Jones Day

Posted on | May 16, 2021 | Comments Off on The Streisand Effect and the Results of Everybody Blog About Rebekah Jones Day

Three months ago, almost everyone had forgotten about Rebekah Jones, and so most people didn’t pay too much attention when Christian Pushaw published a 2,000-word exposé in Human Events:

THE “FLORIDA COVID-19
WHISTLEBLOWER”
SAGA IS A BIG LIE

Pushaw’s article was published less than a month after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, when the Biden presidency was just getting underway and few Americans were looking ahead to the political future. Yet to anyone with eyes focused as far forward as 2024, it was becoming apparent that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was well-positioned to contend for the next GOP presidential nomination. His handling of the state’s COVID-19 pandemic had been vindicated. Not only had DeSantis’s policies successfully protected Florida’s large population of retirees from the deadly virus, but his emphasis on rapidly reopening businesses had spared the state the economic damage experienced in states where draconian lockdown policies were imposed.

If Democrats wanted to sabotage DeSantis as a future rival, obviously the “whistleblower” claims of Rebekah Jones were potent ammunition, and thus Christina Pushaw’s article was important as a preemptive defense of DeSantis against attacks based on Jones’s claims. Jones then made the mistake of trying to silence Pushaw, seeking a peace order from a Maryland court “to suppress Ms. Pushaw’s First Amendment free speech and free press rights,” to quote my podcast partner John Hoge.

In response to that threat, we organized “Everybody Blog About Rebekah Jones Day.” For a while, it seemed that our efforts to publicize this situation had little impact, but Hoge kept pounding away at the story, and earlier this month, a Maryland judge dismissed the Jones v. Pushaw case.

Then last week, Charles C.W. Cooke did a National Review article about Jones that got widespread attention, including from The Daily Caller (“The Media Elevated A COVID-19 Conspiracy Theorist To Hurt Ron DeSantis”). So now everybody knows the story — demonstrating again how “The Streisand Effect” operates. The truth is great and will prevail.




 

Category: Florida, Media Bias

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