It's good that you're honest about this. The difference between an honest reporter and a conspiracy theorists is that the conspiracy theorist never admits when they're wrong.
Let's now realize that "Trump is dead" fantasies are a distraction from the real work of dismantling MAGA.
Mike, I am dropping this comment on this piece because of its recency, which I hope provides a better chance for you to see it, but it’s about your previous piece on your mental health. Which was, I am sorry to say, a word salad of breathtaking dissembling, and, well, just plain horse manure. As a retired business and tech journalist, I have followed you since your seminal work after the election about how Trump and the tech elite formed one of the most dangerous mutual assistance pacts in modern history. Your Sovereign Individual piece was a tour de force of connecting the dots that no one else is doing to any meaningful degree. Especially In those cases, I know enough to know how right you’ve been, and you have the credibility to lay it all out because you’ve been there, and you undoubtedly talk to others who still are.
And then the Trump death notice, an area in which you have no credentials, and which would be the biggest story of the century. You spent much of your mental health piece trying to explain your process, and a bunch of other mumbo jumbo about the distinctions your readers need to understand. And then this:
“The disagreement between me and those readers is not a disagreement about my mental state. It is a disagreement about whether a writer is ever entitled to publish a claim whose foundation he cannot fully disclose, and how to weigh his certainty against the reader’s right to inspect the floor under it. That is a real disagreement and we will resolve it on Friday, or whenever the underlying question resolves, not by my reassuring you about my sleep schedule.”
No sir. This is a disagreement about whether a responsible writer drops a bomb like you did without spending a helluva lot of time checking to determine if it’s true. It’s a disagreement about whether a writer should ask himself whether such a massive conspiracy could possibly be maintained in today’s political and media environment. It’s not a disagreement about you revealing a source, but whether you must demonstrate that there is a preponderance of evidence to corroborate the story.
What your paragraph does is come perilously close to the “there-no-such-thing-as-truth” argument. And the result is that I now begin to question everything else that you write.
I sincerely hope, Mike, that you will do the right thing in your next piece. Eat your three full meals of crow, and get on with the business of educating us the way you have been. That’s what will make a difference, and what we so badly need.
Notably, he posted it right after posting a long essay about the difference between a "conspiracy" and a "conspiracy theory", and then fell right into a conspiracy theory. The structure was that an imagined coordination was asserted (covering up Trump's death), and the coordination was held to produce outcomes that no actual coordination of the kind described could plausibly produce. I could plausibly believe covering it up for a few hours, say from noon until the polls closed on Tuesday to prevent an impact on voting, but Mike claimed that Trump was found dead Monday morning. I don't know if the assertion was unsupported by the documentary record except through a chain of motivated misreadings and outright fabrications; only Mike can judge that, unless he presents the evidence which with he was presented.
Did you seriously believe what Mike said was true? I didn’t. It was a pleasant hypothesis that required confirmation. Perhaps you should reflect on your own practice of blindly believing unconfirmed statements.
@ArleneMach Thanks for responding to my comment. I’m puzzled by your interpretation, but I’m more curious about your phrase “pleasant hypothesis” (did you mean hypothetical?). Is that like when Trump talked about using bleach injections to cure Covid?
No, I didn’t believe Mike. And I’m pretty sure that Mike would not want to be characterized as a merchant of fantasy fiction. His piece went out of its way to assure us it was not idle musings. Like many, I first figured he was hacked, or had crossed the rubicon into conspiratorial madness, or worst, that it was clickbait, a modern-day Orson Wellsian War of the Worlds stunt to attract recognition and subscribers. What I fervently want to believe is that it was a singular case of gross irresponsibility that he begins to rectify by taking ownership (instead of blaming his source) learning from it and then getting back to the vital work of helping us understand the nature and breadth of the danger our democracy faces. Because one key engine of those dangers are wild, unsubstantiated claims about everything from science to government, and the widespread acceptance of them. We need antidotes, not more of the same.
Jesus, a MISTAKE was made and then corrected. This isn't the Fox News website purposely spreading misinformation, nor is it an online neighborhood for regularly scheduled QAnon meetings.
It wasn't a "mistake," it was journalistic malpractice: publishing as true something that you do not know to be true. (Mike is usually an essayist, but in this case he was definitely wearing a reporter hat.)
I don't think that I need to get a grip. And I don't know what makes it so different than Fox when unsubstantiated, huge claims are made? Because someone we like was the one who did it or has the right politics?
Either we believe in some sort of standard of verification before making massive claims, or not. That should apply to everyone.
It's not unforgivable in this case given that, from my observation, this isn't a common thing with Mike—so long as he reflects on why he jumped on this as easily and how he'd handle going forward. But I'm frankly really surprised at reactions such as this one.
Have you seen all these articles that pop up every once in a while about celebrities who had died? It usually originates in some small shady outlet and then makes its way out to bigger ones. And then relatives and friends freak out because they think it might be true. Except that person is alive? I don't want journalism to be practiced that way.
I agree that each of us needs to decide for herself/himself whether something feels true or not. In this case I didn’t, but had a wait and see response; I suspended judgment too, so did not jump on Mike afterwards, either externally or internally in myself, especially as he processed it responsibly and politely, and with the honesty I venture we all value him for.
This interesting thread has taken a turn that I think is an unfortunate distraction. As a lifelong journalist (retired), I think often about the meaning of that label in the age of social media, blogs, substack, citizen video, podcasts and on and on. For better and/or for worse, the term journalist has clearly lost some of its legacy exclusivity. In the context of Mike and his Trump announcement, the question some are grappling with is whether we should consider him a professional journalist, one who makes it a career and who possesses a level of training and expertise, and who abides by certain ethical codes of conduct. As such, Mike is not a professional journalist. But along with thousands of non-professionals these days, Mike often commits acts of journalism. And when he and others do, they should bear many of the same responsibilities of professionals: to not deceive or mislead, to not commit libel, to not cause gratuitous embarrassment or harm, to name just a few. Unfortunately, many don’t. Drunk on the power of large audiences, or the desire for them, they think they get a pass because ”freedom of speech!”
This is so critically important because disinformation and lies, deliberate or otherwise, are central to the dismantling of our democracy. It’s part of the MAGA playbook, as it has been for authoritarian regimes throughout history. The goal is to so effectively pollute the atmosphere with garbage that people stop believing in facts, in truth, and thus dictators can get away with pretty much anything. That’s where we are today.
I am infuriated about what Mike did because it contributes to the problem. Now, his work is easier to dismiss as just more crap. He has handed those he writes about a cannon with which to shred his credibility. And we badly need for his work, his acts of journalism, to be heard, understood and believed by a wider audience than those of us whose core beliefs match his.
Jamie and others can write in all caps as much as he wants about how Mike is not a journalist, that he just made an honest mistake, but that changes nothing. This was an avoidable error, if he had simply acted responsibly. I was amused by Jamie’s comparison to a guy who performs CPR and the injured party dies, but hey, his motives were pure, so it’s not malpractice. That guy would have been sued into a life of homelessness, because in the eyes of most juries, you don’t try something like that when you aren’t qualified. And if the guy was a doctor, it would worse.
But what has shaken my faith in Mike the most is how he has responded. First with his novella-length, self-indulgent attempt to be “transparent” about how hard he works, as if that all wasn’t an attempt to make excuses. And then his brief “ooops, Trump is alive, my source(s) misled me.”
Welcome to the field, Mike. Sources have agendas, and they will lie to push them. It’s your job to make sure you don’t get hoodwinked. Not on something that important.
I could not disagree with you more. I thought his piece was honest, informative, and succinct. He was addressing multiple, layered issues within that piece, but explained them thoroughly.
The other matter, "...whether such a massive conspiracy could possibly be maintained in today’s political and media environment" and the weight which Mike applied or didn't apply to it, is a totally different issue and one that I'm sure he will address in the near future.
This is an interesting issue. In general, I don’t think of Mike as a journalist, but the “Trump is dead” post was a rare example of Mike indulging in the practice of journalism. Sources mislead journalists all the time, and unfortunately, misled journalists do not often out their misleaders (though they should). In this case, I think it will be extremely dangerous to out the misleader(s). The proper course of action would have been to not publish what you did — nobody reads NFTC for news scoops — it’s just not NFTC’s role in the world.
No. This is definitely not the answer. All you can do is own the mistake, as he did. Sources mislead reporters all the time, not always intentionally. Outing them is a slippery slope that gets dangerous real quick. Soon, sources would dry up, and some sources could be at serious risk, legally and otherwise.
Yes, this did strike me as very unusual. But Mike not being a conventional journalist working under contract to a news org, I think it’s permissible for him to out his sources. They did a terrible disservice to him and to all of us.
It is unquestionably permissible. It's just a bad idea. Sources (and reporters) don't always get it right. You just have to decide if you trust the reporter and their sources. I believed this was true, given other things I've seen/read recently. It still might be. I still haven't seen a live confirmation of life. And if Mike is wrong? The world goes on. If anyone put all their stock in this and passed it on without attempting to corroborate it, they aren't skeptical enough to be a journalist. I passed it along, not as fact, but by saying "hey, this writer I trust said this. ..." I believe(d), but definitely not without hesitation.
Yes, but think about the nature of this particular ‘news.’ This is not just some palace intrigue or gossip. This is someone telling a professional writer — falsely— that the president is dead. That’s in a category all its own.
Don't forget, the person who told Mike maybe someone who was told this by someone they completely trust, who is told it by someone they completely trust. The chain can be a long series of links.
The more I think about it, the more likely it seems that this was deliberate disinformation. I don’t think Mike Brock would have posted this unless he got it from someone he regarded as a trustworthy primary source. And he specifically used the word “sources.” Plural.
His credibility and reputation are at stake? You've got to be kidding. Mike is not a reporter and, according to him, some folks misled him. I assume he does not have the professional toolbox or training needed to properly confirm or deny a story, as do reporters, so he's at quite a disadvantage when someone he trusts misleads him.
Now one can argue that if you don't have the proper toolbox then you shouldn't be in the game. Fair enough. But I hardly think, given the type of writing Mike does, that it puts him at any risk of losing his credibility or damaging his reputation.
I understand it's human nature for an individual to worry about the potential consequences of their actions, but what someone believes or fears might happen often just doesn't materialize. And I think this is one of those cases where an individual was misled, a mistake was made, the mistake has been partly addressed (with more coming it sounds like), and that will be the end of it.
Mike as an exceptional thinker, writer, and philosopher will carry on. And I don't think he will experience the kind of blowback that some people here, and perhaps even Mike himself, fear.
You might have been misled, but you also adopted someone else's professed certain knowledge as your own. You then reacted to good-faith, epistemically required doubt with apparent annoyance. This was irresponsible and disrespectful to your engaged readers, and it destroyed some of the hard-earned trust and credibility you have built with them. This was a disaster.
You *allowed* yourself to be misled. In the end, you made the choice to valorize an argument from authority rather than insist on an argument from evidence.
Evidence of a witness is evidence, especially when evidence of more than one witness. In a court of law, witnesses aren't dismissed as presenting arguments from authority. Of course, they may be liars.
Witnesses in a court are under penalty of law to tell the truth, so there is a bulwark, theoretically to pursue the truth. No such interference with a “source” hell bent on spreading lies.
Juries make the choice of whether to valorize witness testimony in court. In Mike's case, we didn't even get to see that testimony. We're asked to accept Mike's testimony about his source. How is that not "hearsay," which is inadmissible in court?
Why would someone(s) you would trust with your life deliberately mislead you? I’m not implying that you are not stating the truth, I am asking why that person(s) would do such a thing, in such a situation?
Trump is still mia for close to 8 days. That’s a fact that needs to be explained as well. The Friday night health checkup report near midnight just engendered further questions from medical doctors. That’s a fact too.
Something is rotten in Hamlet’s Denmark. As someone else said here, the pattern is off.
We need to see him in public, not a pre-recorded discussion, not social media posts, not recorded phone calls.
Trump routinely disappears for days around the beginning of every month, then reappears with IV bruising on the back of a hand. He’s almost certainly receiving Ig infusion therapy, perhaps for dementia or maybe even cancer.
20 years ago medical science couldn’t have kept him alive this long. As a society we have to devise a way to retire politicians once their brains degrade regardless of how healthy their bodies remain.
You did your best with it. And Trump is the walking dead anyway, feasting on human souls one after another. No information coming out of this administration can be trusted. Your sources might have been within the blast radius.
Frankly, I want to read whatever Mike Brock writes and thinks... with all due respoect, I'm not sure I want to be the one defining another writer's "role".
Agreed. Anyone who blindly believed Mike’s statement on the status of the fucking traitor should reexamine their logic skills. Mike said he was told, he did not say he KNEW and saw proof. That is plenty of reasonable to take a wait-and-see stance.
I disagree. I have faith in Mike too, but it's inescapable that "The President is Dead" is a statement of fact about his death, which should probably only be tried by those who have seen a body, while ""Unimpeachable sources tell me the President is dead" is a statement of an entirely different fact.
My point is, who of sound mind believed Mike’s pronouncement? I didn’t. Are you telling me ALL the very intelligent people who read Brock took his statement as gospel? I recall my initial response was, “So now we wait,” or similar.
Agreed. I didn't buy it for a second. There was no way in this day and age that there would not have been rumblings elsewhere had it been true. But I also understood that there were clearly people that Mike trusted that led him to conclude otherwise.
The fact that you pay is rather small potatoes compared to the question here. I picture you puffing out your chest and striding authoritatively about...
More important is the distinction between "The President is dead", which asks us all to accept the assertion, and "Sources I trust implicitly have told me the Preaident is dead.", which leaves us all to make up our own minds. Journalism is not always about flat statements of fact - sometimes it's about the nuances of uncertainty.
Banyan: I’m a professional writer and pay a handful of other professional writers on substack—Mr. Brock, Alaistir Crooke, Michael Sellers—to support their efforts. These writers are not just prolific, they are also accurate. I concur that journalism “is not always about flat statements of fact.” I’m not sure about your editors, but my editors at NY Newsday, IHT/NYT, NYRB and the other publications I’ve written for over the past 30 years would never have allowed me to publish an easily refuted rumor. Press pool reporters on May 30: “Motorcade is rolling as of 10:36 [a.m.]….As his vehicle turned out of the WH gate, POTUS [President of the United States] pointed toward the east side of the WH complex from his window, where significant construction is underway….The presidential motorcade pulled into Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, at 11:08 [a.m.].” May 31: “Motorcade is rolling at 9:47 am to an undisclosed location. POTUS was seen by poolers as he rode by us in back seat of his vehicle, before pool vans joined the motorcade. He is wearing a white cap, white shirt and red pullover. He was on the phone….Motorcade departed Trump National Golf Club in Sterling VA at 3:48 pm. Pool spotted POTUS in backseat of his SUV, still wearing red pullover….Motorcade arrived at White House north entrance at 4:21 pm after an uneventful ride. As POTUS was entering the North Portico, he stopped, turned, and waved to the pool.” I, with chest fully deflated, expect more from Mr. Brock. He writes powerfully about Big Tech and has taught me a great deal about it.
I think you were directionally right, just wrong on the magnitude. He’s not dead, but the WH is absolutely hiding something going on with his health.
He looks worse and worse - the swelling and bruising is everywhere and he can barely cover it up.
I’m wondering if he’s getting some treatment that knocks him out for days and he can only muster the energy needed to return to the public eye after significant rest.
The White House and the whole regime has been covering for his health for at least a year if not longer. And yet they scream constantly about how the Democrats were covering for Biden's health. Buncha hypocrites, all of them.
I mean, when you consider how many half-corpses are walking around in Congress, and the fact that this 'administration' gaslights constantly, it's not crazy to think he could have been dead and no one was admitting it. This timeline is just that bizarre.
Mike you have often written insightfully and even eloquently on complex topics from which many of us have learned. Such a miscue is understandable and very human. However, the rush (pun intended) to publicly proclaim what was not certain is I hope, something you’ll reflect upon.
I stand by my comment on the original post — what was the point of such a post, especially when unverified and stated in such unequivicable terms? To prove you had access to something news-breaking, and the chutzpah to share it ahead of mainstream or other independents journalists? Are other journalists and essayists who earn your/our respect over decades just happen to be lucky all the time? Or do they verify even more carefully? Was posting this a gamble by you to gain something? (I ask that not to provoke a defense, but for your own reflection).
If this had been accurate, would the hurry to present this info before official or independent sources confirmed it really jibe with the goal of this platform? If so, in my view as a subscriber, then maybe that could use some consideration or revising. My hope is we all gained something from this, something more than assigning blame and removing the sources who duped you from your trustworthy list.
I’ll hang in there with you for now, because you’ve shown discernment and patience in other essays — and in most of those it was evident the ripening was worth the wait. Cheers.
It would be interesting to find out WHY your sources misled you. What do those sources have to gain from such duplicity other than for you to avoid using them as sources in the future? Who wants us to think that Trump is dead? Why do they want us to think that Trump is dead?
It's good that you're honest about this. The difference between an honest reporter and a conspiracy theorists is that the conspiracy theorist never admits when they're wrong.
Let's now realize that "Trump is dead" fantasies are a distraction from the real work of dismantling MAGA.
Mike, I am dropping this comment on this piece because of its recency, which I hope provides a better chance for you to see it, but it’s about your previous piece on your mental health. Which was, I am sorry to say, a word salad of breathtaking dissembling, and, well, just plain horse manure. As a retired business and tech journalist, I have followed you since your seminal work after the election about how Trump and the tech elite formed one of the most dangerous mutual assistance pacts in modern history. Your Sovereign Individual piece was a tour de force of connecting the dots that no one else is doing to any meaningful degree. Especially In those cases, I know enough to know how right you’ve been, and you have the credibility to lay it all out because you’ve been there, and you undoubtedly talk to others who still are.
And then the Trump death notice, an area in which you have no credentials, and which would be the biggest story of the century. You spent much of your mental health piece trying to explain your process, and a bunch of other mumbo jumbo about the distinctions your readers need to understand. And then this:
“The disagreement between me and those readers is not a disagreement about my mental state. It is a disagreement about whether a writer is ever entitled to publish a claim whose foundation he cannot fully disclose, and how to weigh his certainty against the reader’s right to inspect the floor under it. That is a real disagreement and we will resolve it on Friday, or whenever the underlying question resolves, not by my reassuring you about my sleep schedule.”
No sir. This is a disagreement about whether a responsible writer drops a bomb like you did without spending a helluva lot of time checking to determine if it’s true. It’s a disagreement about whether a writer should ask himself whether such a massive conspiracy could possibly be maintained in today’s political and media environment. It’s not a disagreement about you revealing a source, but whether you must demonstrate that there is a preponderance of evidence to corroborate the story.
What your paragraph does is come perilously close to the “there-no-such-thing-as-truth” argument. And the result is that I now begin to question everything else that you write.
I sincerely hope, Mike, that you will do the right thing in your next piece. Eat your three full meals of crow, and get on with the business of educating us the way you have been. That’s what will make a difference, and what we so badly need.
The whole thing was so strange.
Notably, he posted it right after posting a long essay about the difference between a "conspiracy" and a "conspiracy theory", and then fell right into a conspiracy theory. The structure was that an imagined coordination was asserted (covering up Trump's death), and the coordination was held to produce outcomes that no actual coordination of the kind described could plausibly produce. I could plausibly believe covering it up for a few hours, say from noon until the polls closed on Tuesday to prevent an impact on voting, but Mike claimed that Trump was found dead Monday morning. I don't know if the assertion was unsupported by the documentary record except through a chain of motivated misreadings and outright fabrications; only Mike can judge that, unless he presents the evidence which with he was presented.
Did you seriously believe what Mike said was true? I didn’t. It was a pleasant hypothesis that required confirmation. Perhaps you should reflect on your own practice of blindly believing unconfirmed statements.
@ArleneMach Thanks for responding to my comment. I’m puzzled by your interpretation, but I’m more curious about your phrase “pleasant hypothesis” (did you mean hypothetical?). Is that like when Trump talked about using bleach injections to cure Covid?
No, I didn’t believe Mike. And I’m pretty sure that Mike would not want to be characterized as a merchant of fantasy fiction. His piece went out of its way to assure us it was not idle musings. Like many, I first figured he was hacked, or had crossed the rubicon into conspiratorial madness, or worst, that it was clickbait, a modern-day Orson Wellsian War of the Worlds stunt to attract recognition and subscribers. What I fervently want to believe is that it was a singular case of gross irresponsibility that he begins to rectify by taking ownership (instead of blaming his source) learning from it and then getting back to the vital work of helping us understand the nature and breadth of the danger our democracy faces. Because one key engine of those dangers are wild, unsubstantiated claims about everything from science to government, and the widespread acceptance of them. We need antidotes, not more of the same.
Whether he believed it or not is irrelevant. Mike claimed it to be true.
Who cares? Each of us has the free will to take his pronouncement at face value or to wait for proof.
Who cares if writers are irresponsible with their words? Who cares if people spread conspiracies and false claims?
Jesus, a MISTAKE was made and then corrected. This isn't the Fox News website purposely spreading misinformation, nor is it an online neighborhood for regularly scheduled QAnon meetings.
Get a bloody grip.
It wasn't a "mistake," it was journalistic malpractice: publishing as true something that you do not know to be true. (Mike is usually an essayist, but in this case he was definitely wearing a reporter hat.)
I don't think that I need to get a grip. And I don't know what makes it so different than Fox when unsubstantiated, huge claims are made? Because someone we like was the one who did it or has the right politics?
Either we believe in some sort of standard of verification before making massive claims, or not. That should apply to everyone.
It's not unforgivable in this case given that, from my observation, this isn't a common thing with Mike—so long as he reflects on why he jumped on this as easily and how he'd handle going forward. But I'm frankly really surprised at reactions such as this one.
Have you seen all these articles that pop up every once in a while about celebrities who had died? It usually originates in some small shady outlet and then makes its way out to bigger ones. And then relatives and friends freak out because they think it might be true. Except that person is alive? I don't want journalism to be practiced that way.
He did purposefully spread misinformation though, you just agree with his politics so you think it's an honest mistake
I agree that each of us needs to decide for herself/himself whether something feels true or not. In this case I didn’t, but had a wait and see response; I suspended judgment too, so did not jump on Mike afterwards, either externally or internally in myself, especially as he processed it responsibly and politely, and with the honesty I venture we all value him for.
Believe it without substantiation? Not at all. I was a little surprised he went there.
This interesting thread has taken a turn that I think is an unfortunate distraction. As a lifelong journalist (retired), I think often about the meaning of that label in the age of social media, blogs, substack, citizen video, podcasts and on and on. For better and/or for worse, the term journalist has clearly lost some of its legacy exclusivity. In the context of Mike and his Trump announcement, the question some are grappling with is whether we should consider him a professional journalist, one who makes it a career and who possesses a level of training and expertise, and who abides by certain ethical codes of conduct. As such, Mike is not a professional journalist. But along with thousands of non-professionals these days, Mike often commits acts of journalism. And when he and others do, they should bear many of the same responsibilities of professionals: to not deceive or mislead, to not commit libel, to not cause gratuitous embarrassment or harm, to name just a few. Unfortunately, many don’t. Drunk on the power of large audiences, or the desire for them, they think they get a pass because ”freedom of speech!”
This is so critically important because disinformation and lies, deliberate or otherwise, are central to the dismantling of our democracy. It’s part of the MAGA playbook, as it has been for authoritarian regimes throughout history. The goal is to so effectively pollute the atmosphere with garbage that people stop believing in facts, in truth, and thus dictators can get away with pretty much anything. That’s where we are today.
I am infuriated about what Mike did because it contributes to the problem. Now, his work is easier to dismiss as just more crap. He has handed those he writes about a cannon with which to shred his credibility. And we badly need for his work, his acts of journalism, to be heard, understood and believed by a wider audience than those of us whose core beliefs match his.
Jamie and others can write in all caps as much as he wants about how Mike is not a journalist, that he just made an honest mistake, but that changes nothing. This was an avoidable error, if he had simply acted responsibly. I was amused by Jamie’s comparison to a guy who performs CPR and the injured party dies, but hey, his motives were pure, so it’s not malpractice. That guy would have been sued into a life of homelessness, because in the eyes of most juries, you don’t try something like that when you aren’t qualified. And if the guy was a doctor, it would worse.
But what has shaken my faith in Mike the most is how he has responded. First with his novella-length, self-indulgent attempt to be “transparent” about how hard he works, as if that all wasn’t an attempt to make excuses. And then his brief “ooops, Trump is alive, my source(s) misled me.”
Welcome to the field, Mike. Sources have agendas, and they will lie to push them. It’s your job to make sure you don’t get hoodwinked. Not on something that important.
I could not disagree with you more. I thought his piece was honest, informative, and succinct. He was addressing multiple, layered issues within that piece, but explained them thoroughly.
The other matter, "...whether such a massive conspiracy could possibly be maintained in today’s political and media environment" and the weight which Mike applied or didn't apply to it, is a totally different issue and one that I'm sure he will address in the near future.
Mike is NOT a journalist.
I didn’t believe it. My comment was, “Now we wait,” or similar.
I was having a hard time finding the right words. I think you just found them all. Thank you.
I sure hope your sources will face consequences, such as being revealed.
This is an interesting issue. In general, I don’t think of Mike as a journalist, but the “Trump is dead” post was a rare example of Mike indulging in the practice of journalism. Sources mislead journalists all the time, and unfortunately, misled journalists do not often out their misleaders (though they should). In this case, I think it will be extremely dangerous to out the misleader(s). The proper course of action would have been to not publish what you did — nobody reads NFTC for news scoops — it’s just not NFTC’s role in the world.
No. This is definitely not the answer. All you can do is own the mistake, as he did. Sources mislead reporters all the time, not always intentionally. Outing them is a slippery slope that gets dangerous real quick. Soon, sources would dry up, and some sources could be at serious risk, legally and otherwise.
Yes, this did strike me as very unusual. But Mike not being a conventional journalist working under contract to a news org, I think it’s permissible for him to out his sources. They did a terrible disservice to him and to all of us.
It is unquestionably permissible. It's just a bad idea. Sources (and reporters) don't always get it right. You just have to decide if you trust the reporter and their sources. I believed this was true, given other things I've seen/read recently. It still might be. I still haven't seen a live confirmation of life. And if Mike is wrong? The world goes on. If anyone put all their stock in this and passed it on without attempting to corroborate it, they aren't skeptical enough to be a journalist. I passed it along, not as fact, but by saying "hey, this writer I trust said this. ..." I believe(d), but definitely not without hesitation.
Yes, but think about the nature of this particular ‘news.’ This is not just some palace intrigue or gossip. This is someone telling a professional writer — falsely— that the president is dead. That’s in a category all its own.
Don't forget, the person who told Mike maybe someone who was told this by someone they completely trust, who is told it by someone they completely trust. The chain can be a long series of links.
The more I think about it, the more likely it seems that this was deliberate disinformation. I don’t think Mike Brock would have posted this unless he got it from someone he regarded as a trustworthy primary source. And he specifically used the word “sources.” Plural.
It smells like sabotage to me.
More credible to report what people are telling you, rather than stating emphatically something as fact. Hopefully a useful lesson.
It will be interesting to see your explanation. Your credibility and reputation are at stake here.
His credibility and reputation are at stake? You've got to be kidding. Mike is not a reporter and, according to him, some folks misled him. I assume he does not have the professional toolbox or training needed to properly confirm or deny a story, as do reporters, so he's at quite a disadvantage when someone he trusts misleads him.
Now one can argue that if you don't have the proper toolbox then you shouldn't be in the game. Fair enough. But I hardly think, given the type of writing Mike does, that it puts him at any risk of losing his credibility or damaging his reputation.
But it kind of does. He owned that it might.
I understand it's human nature for an individual to worry about the potential consequences of their actions, but what someone believes or fears might happen often just doesn't materialize. And I think this is one of those cases where an individual was misled, a mistake was made, the mistake has been partly addressed (with more coming it sounds like), and that will be the end of it.
Mike as an exceptional thinker, writer, and philosopher will carry on. And I don't think he will experience the kind of blowback that some people here, and perhaps even Mike himself, fear.
That's just my take.
Sure sounds like you succumbed to motivated reasoning. There's a lesson here.
No. I was misled.
You might have been misled, but you also adopted someone else's professed certain knowledge as your own. You then reacted to good-faith, epistemically required doubt with apparent annoyance. This was irresponsible and disrespectful to your engaged readers, and it destroyed some of the hard-earned trust and credibility you have built with them. This was a disaster.
Appeal to motive and strawman.
You *allowed* yourself to be misled. In the end, you made the choice to valorize an argument from authority rather than insist on an argument from evidence.
Evidence of a witness is evidence, especially when evidence of more than one witness. In a court of law, witnesses aren't dismissed as presenting arguments from authority. Of course, they may be liars.
Witnesses in a court are under penalty of law to tell the truth, so there is a bulwark, theoretically to pursue the truth. No such interference with a “source” hell bent on spreading lies.
Juries make the choice of whether to valorize witness testimony in court. In Mike's case, we didn't even get to see that testimony. We're asked to accept Mike's testimony about his source. How is that not "hearsay," which is inadmissible in court?
He says, as he makes a strawman.
Why would someone(s) you would trust with your life deliberately mislead you? I’m not implying that you are not stating the truth, I am asking why that person(s) would do such a thing, in such a situation?
Trump is still mia for close to 8 days. That’s a fact that needs to be explained as well. The Friday night health checkup report near midnight just engendered further questions from medical doctors. That’s a fact too.
Something is rotten in Hamlet’s Denmark. As someone else said here, the pattern is off.
We need to see him in public, not a pre-recorded discussion, not social media posts, not recorded phone calls.
Trump routinely disappears for days around the beginning of every month, then reappears with IV bruising on the back of a hand. He’s almost certainly receiving Ig infusion therapy, perhaps for dementia or maybe even cancer.
20 years ago medical science couldn’t have kept him alive this long. As a society we have to devise a way to retire politicians once their brains degrade regardless of how healthy their bodies remain.
By someone you trusted with your life?
I certainly wanted you to be correct. Keep the champagne cold, he looks rather a zombie.
You did your best with it. And Trump is the walking dead anyway, feasting on human souls one after another. No information coming out of this administration can be trusted. Your sources might have been within the blast radius.
Frankly, I want to read whatever Mike Brock writes and thinks... with all due respoect, I'm not sure I want to be the one defining another writer's "role".
Agreed. Anyone who blindly believed Mike’s statement on the status of the fucking traitor should reexamine their logic skills. Mike said he was told, he did not say he KNEW and saw proof. That is plenty of reasonable to take a wait-and-see stance.
I disagree. I have faith in Mike too, but it's inescapable that "The President is Dead" is a statement of fact about his death, which should probably only be tried by those who have seen a body, while ""Unimpeachable sources tell me the President is dead" is a statement of an entirely different fact.
My point is, who of sound mind believed Mike’s pronouncement? I didn’t. Are you telling me ALL the very intelligent people who read Brock took his statement as gospel? I recall my initial response was, “So now we wait,” or similar.
The question isn't whether anyone believed it. The question is why did Mike post such an implausible and unsubstantiated assertion?
Agreed. I didn't buy it for a second. There was no way in this day and age that there would not have been rumblings elsewhere had it been true. But I also understood that there were clearly people that Mike trusted that led him to conclude otherwise.
Thanks for the update. The only thing I'm sure of is that a quite sophisticated attempt was made to discredit you. Look forward to the unpacking.
Your humint sucks. I followed up on this rumor. You wasted my time. I pay to read you and expect more rigor moving forward.
The fact that you pay is rather small potatoes compared to the question here. I picture you puffing out your chest and striding authoritatively about...
More important is the distinction between "The President is dead", which asks us all to accept the assertion, and "Sources I trust implicitly have told me the Preaident is dead.", which leaves us all to make up our own minds. Journalism is not always about flat statements of fact - sometimes it's about the nuances of uncertainty.
Banyan: I’m a professional writer and pay a handful of other professional writers on substack—Mr. Brock, Alaistir Crooke, Michael Sellers—to support their efforts. These writers are not just prolific, they are also accurate. I concur that journalism “is not always about flat statements of fact.” I’m not sure about your editors, but my editors at NY Newsday, IHT/NYT, NYRB and the other publications I’ve written for over the past 30 years would never have allowed me to publish an easily refuted rumor. Press pool reporters on May 30: “Motorcade is rolling as of 10:36 [a.m.]….As his vehicle turned out of the WH gate, POTUS [President of the United States] pointed toward the east side of the WH complex from his window, where significant construction is underway….The presidential motorcade pulled into Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, at 11:08 [a.m.].” May 31: “Motorcade is rolling at 9:47 am to an undisclosed location. POTUS was seen by poolers as he rode by us in back seat of his vehicle, before pool vans joined the motorcade. He is wearing a white cap, white shirt and red pullover. He was on the phone….Motorcade departed Trump National Golf Club in Sterling VA at 3:48 pm. Pool spotted POTUS in backseat of his SUV, still wearing red pullover….Motorcade arrived at White House north entrance at 4:21 pm after an uneventful ride. As POTUS was entering the North Portico, he stopped, turned, and waved to the pool.” I, with chest fully deflated, expect more from Mr. Brock. He writes powerfully about Big Tech and has taught me a great deal about it.
Agreed on all counts.
I think you were directionally right, just wrong on the magnitude. He’s not dead, but the WH is absolutely hiding something going on with his health.
He looks worse and worse - the swelling and bruising is everywhere and he can barely cover it up.
I’m wondering if he’s getting some treatment that knocks him out for days and he can only muster the energy needed to return to the public eye after significant rest.
The White House and the whole regime has been covering for his health for at least a year if not longer. And yet they scream constantly about how the Democrats were covering for Biden's health. Buncha hypocrites, all of them.
So - you ARE human!! No worries, Mike. Forgivable mistake.
I mean, when you consider how many half-corpses are walking around in Congress, and the fact that this 'administration' gaslights constantly, it's not crazy to think he could have been dead and no one was admitting it. This timeline is just that bizarre.
Mike you have often written insightfully and even eloquently on complex topics from which many of us have learned. Such a miscue is understandable and very human. However, the rush (pun intended) to publicly proclaim what was not certain is I hope, something you’ll reflect upon.
I stand by my comment on the original post — what was the point of such a post, especially when unverified and stated in such unequivicable terms? To prove you had access to something news-breaking, and the chutzpah to share it ahead of mainstream or other independents journalists? Are other journalists and essayists who earn your/our respect over decades just happen to be lucky all the time? Or do they verify even more carefully? Was posting this a gamble by you to gain something? (I ask that not to provoke a defense, but for your own reflection).
If this had been accurate, would the hurry to present this info before official or independent sources confirmed it really jibe with the goal of this platform? If so, in my view as a subscriber, then maybe that could use some consideration or revising. My hope is we all gained something from this, something more than assigning blame and removing the sources who duped you from your trustworthy list.
I’ll hang in there with you for now, because you’ve shown discernment and patience in other essays — and in most of those it was evident the ripening was worth the wait. Cheers.
These are thoughtful comments, John W.
The tell was that you were the only one saying it. If The Traitor had died then it would have leaked to more than a single source.
It would be interesting to find out WHY your sources misled you. What do those sources have to gain from such duplicity other than for you to avoid using them as sources in the future? Who wants us to think that Trump is dead? Why do they want us to think that Trump is dead?