Bernie’s Weekly Q&A (12/15)

Hunter Biden, Alex Jones, Elon Musk, and more!

Welcome to this week’s Premium Q&A session for paying subscribers. I appreciate you all signing up and joining me.

Before we get started this week, I wanted to announce a special guest for next week’s No BS Zone: Bill O’Reilly!

Bill and I will be talking about the current state of the news-media. As always, the episode will be exclusive to BernardGoldberg.com paying subscribers. If you’re not one already, you can become one here.

Now, onto this week’s questions…

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Hi Bernie, Happy Hannukah and Holidays. Can you comment on the ethics of a journalist accompanying Hamas (or any terrorist and/or criminal organization) on a terrorist attack, such as October 7th? On its face it seems this is different from being embedded, say, with a platoon of soldiers from a conventional army; however, is there an ethical line a journalist crosses in these situations? It seems this would be wildly unethical, while covering a war with the military would not be. Thanks! —Peter S.

Good question, Peter. A journalist can’t simply say he was covering a story. If he knew what Hamas was going to do … and said nothing … and went along … that strikes me as just plain immoral. Would a journalist go along with a foreign power knowing that its commandos were going to slaughter American soldiers? That goes beyond merely covering the news. Journalists are also humans and humans should not sit by knowing people were going to be killed. One more example: What if the KKK invited a journalist along to a lynching … and the journalist knew what was going to happen … and said nothing. I could make a case that that would be a criminal offense. Enough said.

Bernie/John, With all the hyperventilating about Joey's kid Hunter, when is the pres just going to pardon him? —DT

From John: I can very much envision a presidential pardon for Hunter after election night of 2024, regardless of who wins.

From Bernie: What John said.

Not sure if you care at all about this topic, but Elon Musk’s “X” (formerly Twitter) has been losing advertisers and users left and right — not just because he’s been replacing popular features with terrible ones, and reinstating previously banned troll/spam accounts (which has greatly worsened the user experience), but also because he keeps spreading crazy conspiracy theories and lately antisemitic messaging on the platform. Now he’s reinstating Alex Jones (the guy who put the Sandy Hook parents through hell), I guess since Tucker Carlson likes Jones. How is it that one of the biggest tech-moguls in the world can be so bad a the social-media business? — Alex D.

Elon Musk is proof that brilliant people can be dopes.

Bernie and John, We’re all familiar with the left’s anti Israel views, and throwing around terms like “war crimes” and “war criminals”. But this is also getting pretty relevant on the conspiratorial right. I’ve seen many on the right I used to follow calling anyone who supports Israel’s war efforts as “neocons” and “war mongers”. I don’t remember this view being very prevalent on the right five or ten years ago. It’s apparent though that that wing is trying to pull trumps strings, even though he rightfully in my opinion was a strong ally of Israel and used aerial strikes to attack terrorists. I don’t believe in Bush era nation building, but I’m also not too fond of this new trad on the right. They cozy up to communists like Putin, but play moral equivalence with Israel and Hamas. Is this mindset growing on the right or is it just me? Although, I still think the true antisemitism is held by the left. — Ed G.