This week marks 12 months since Josephine Cashman supplied Andrew Bolt with a letter falsely attributed to a Yolngu lawman that Bolt published via NewsCorp on Jan 26 as parcel of his persecution of Bruce Pascoe. Cashman & Bolt still haven’t provided a satisfactory explanation

Terry Yumbulul didn’t write the letter and didn’t agree with its content. He said so himself in a video published the next day https://t.co/IJ6ricZeRi and in a written statement published later the same day
The weird thing was, it soon emerged that large sections of the letter had been cribbed from other sources. Weird because as a Yolngu lawman, Terry didn’t need to borrow his knowledge from unrelated, alternate sources ... pretty much verbatim https://t.co/mICkFNiJQN
The fallout was swift. Bolt was compelled to do a correction on his column and Cashman was just as swiftly dumped from her position of the Morrison government’s Senior Advisory Group for an Indigenous Voice to Government
There was no apology from either of them or from NewsCorp tho, and with the assistance of Sky News After Dark they desperately attempted to obfuscate the reality that everybody involved had been caught out and left red faced
In the last 12 months I’ve asked Bolt several times to explain what he knew about the letter at the time, what he had been told about it etc etc. Bolt never responds
I’ve also asked Cashman, as have other journalists. Cashman can’t get her story straight. I’ve also spoken with one other person v. close to Cashman who told me that herself and other people were involved in drafting the latter falsely attributed to Terry Yumbulul.
I have contemporaneous notes of that conversation taken while on the phone, and I again asked Bolt via email if he was aware of this when he published the letter in Terry Yumbulul’s name. Bolt never responded.
Anyway, it’s weird what comes up around January 26

More from News

SkyNews reporting "a major leak containing a register w/the personal identifying details of 1.95 mil Communist Party members [in #China], mostly from Shanghai, there are also the details of 79,000 Communist Party branches, many of them inside companies”.

What appears to be so newsworthy about this particular leaked list is the presence of CCP branches in not only foreign-invested firms in #China, but also in firms entirely located overseas.

This is by no means new-- I wrote several years ago about #China's massive Party-building drive to construct new CCP branches in Shanghai's NGOs in @chinaquarterly (The Advance of the Party: Transformation or Takeover of Urban Grassroots Society?*
https://t.co/I1XKmkPKty )...

As well as the CCP's attempts to "comprehensively cover" 全覆盖 Shanghai's private sector in "The New Life of the Party: Party-Building & Social Engineering in Greater Shanghai" in the #China Journal, but what's apparently of concern in the leaked list..

...is the number of new Communist Party branches & committees now in Chinese-invested companies abroad. This is unsurprisingly going on on a massive scale in countries housing #China's Belt and Road projects as part of the CCP's "going out" 走出去efforts...#OBOR #BRI #一带一路
.@louiscasiano from @FoxNews reached out to ask if we are actually planning on contaminating the hotel rooms of Proud Boys with bedbugs. The short answer is no, we don't even know if that's possible. But here's our full response.


That post was clearly satire. We have no idea how one would actually go about the activity that was suggested.

What is not satire are the numerous death threats that were sent to us by Trump supporters in the lead up to the November election.

Here are a few tweets depicting detailed and credible death threats that you didn’t ask for comment on:
https://t.co/UiI12M0Aey.
https://t.co/PPe75XWImX
https://t.co/4Ia8659wK8
https://t.co/n5ov6R8Gyh


Each of those tweets includes the email address of the sender. We wish you luck in reaching out to them for comment.

Further, the hate crimes committed by the Proud Boys during their last visit to DC were not satire. A marauding band of drunk white nationalists stormed through our city, tearing down and burning religious symbols declaring respect for Black lives.

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