Who Killed Michael Hastings? -- New York Magazine. At the end of his life, Michael Hastings, like many of the progressive journalists he counted among his friends, felt besieged by an overreaching government. Hastings was living in Los Angeles, and at a Beverly Hills theater in April, he took part in a panel discussion about the documentary War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State. Interviewed in May on The Young Turks, a talk show on Current TV, Hastings railed against the Obama administration, which “has clearly declared war on the press”; the only recourse, he said, was for the press to respond: “We declare war on you.”
On May 31, he dashed off an urgent tweet: “first they came for manning. Then Assange. Then fox. Then the ap.drake and the other whistle-blowers. Any nyt reporters too.” By the middle of June, though, Hastings, then 33, had become openly afraid. “He was deeply agitated,” says The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur. The lunch never happened. Hastings lived as he died. Who Killed Michael Hastings? How Did Michael Hastings Really Die? UPDATE 8/21/2013 @ 7:22 pm: The Young Turks report that Hastings had taken an attention deficit disorder medication Adderall on occasion, a pharmaceutical drug that would show up in a test as the ‘trace amounts’ of amphetamine found in Hastings’ system. Again, all the media reports admit these ‘trace amounts’ had nothing to do with Hastings’ crash and that Hastings was not intoxicated at the time of the crash, but the headlines continue to portray him as a meth and pot junkie that got messed up and simply drove his car into a tree, diverting attention away from the completely suspicious circumstances surrounding his death.
This is a smear campaign, character assassination and nothing more. Hastings deserves a real investigation! Dancing in step to the establishment tune on cue, the mainstream media has jumped all over another excuse to titillate its audience with the second act of the spectacle we are currently witnessing. noun \ˈspek-ti-kəl also -ˌti-kəl\ What an amazing coincidence!