Jerm

@johnkonrad I remember when the MOH still meant something. Now it seems to be more of a political participation trophy

What a bizarre and outright misleading tale @_whitneywebb told here about my supposed refusal to debate her. That claim, by itself, is just false. (It's such a waste of time and energy to have explain all this, because it's ultimately trivial and the actual topic to be debated is of interest only to a tiny number of people), but since she's falsely pretending I refused to debate on her Epstein, I feel compelled to respond (ironically, it's Whitney who refuses to debate Micahel Tracey about Epstein; I'm not the one dodging debates). To be clear: I was the only one of the two of us who was willing -- indeed eager -- to quickly schedule a debate with Whitney about the critiques I expressed of several articles she wrote from 2013=15. This all happened back in August. And I remain 100% willing to debate Whitney about it. Whitney is the one who back in August was reluctant to accept my suggestion that we debate. Pressured to debate by her own audience, said finally relented and essentially said: yeah, fine: I'll debate him, but not until several months from now. The only reason any of this even came up at all is because, back in August of 2025, a viewer of mine asked during our live weekly Q-and-A show that we did at System Update: What do you think of Whitney Webb? In response, I said: she seems to do some good work, INCLUDING ON EPSTEIN, but my view of her is permanently contaminated by the fact that back in 2013-15, she wrote multiple articles about the founding of the Intercept and the Snowden files that contained wild conspiracy theories that I knew for certain are false (I knew for certain because most if not all centrally included factually false claims about me and my actions). Thus: despite her false assertions today and her weird, manipulative attempt to somehow include Michael Tracey in her tweet so as to imply that we're supposed to debate the Epstein files (something she dishonestly implied for obvious reasons), the differences that Whitney and I were supposed to debate DO NOT PERTAIN IN ANY WAY TO THE EPSTEIN FILES. I never once uttered a critique of Whitney's work on Epstein, so this debate would have nothing to do at all with Epstein. Instead, the sole, narrow topic we were supposed to debate is relatively trivial: namely, her articles from 11-13 years ago about the Intercept and Snowden. I doubt many people have a strong interest now in hearing us debate 13-year old articles in MintPress about the Intercept (especially a debate months after it first it was discussed). But the topic is not trivial to me, so I was and am happy to debate her on it (see the video clip below from that Q-and-A exchange where I was asked about Webb: I believe it's the first time in many, many years that I mentioned her, or the first time in many, many years where I expressed criticisms of her. For the sake of clarity: it is true that when Whitney was finally willing to schedule this debate -- in November -- our agreed-to moderator @briebriejoy messaged me to try to set up possible dates. But when Bri contacted me, I was very occupied going into the end of 2025 with various matters, and then again in January with our move to Substack. So I wasn't able to give it much attention. Had she just sent me a message asking if I'm still willing to debate, I would have said: of course. How about March. But she likes these sorts of attention-generation melodramatics where she's the center character being disappointed and mistreated by others. To be clear, what Whitney did in today' tweet -- cerating a totally false picture that I decided not to debate her, purposely misleading people into thinking this debate is about the Epstein Files and Michael Tracey, etc. -- is the kind of behavior that shaped those 2013-15 articles that I objected to because they were full of falsehoods. That said, I also continue to think she does quite good work on many topics, as I said when asked. Again, I don't think many people care about THIS debate, on THIS very narrow, parochial and old topic. But even if very few people care, I'm still willing to schedule a debate with Whitney for March. Let's schedule it.