Who is the Authoritarian?

because I follow these trends closely, but . . . For the past month Matt Taibbi has been reporting in detail that the FBI, DHS, DOD, CIA and other agencies have built a system for mass delivery of censorship requests to firms like Twitter and Facebook. MSNBC has now accused Taibbi of fueling authoritarianism with his reporting. Taibbi responded by listing some of the many pro-censorship advocates currently lurking around at MSNBC, people who call themselves journalists:

John Brennan, former Director of the CIA, now senior intelligence analyst at MSNBC

Frank Figliuzzi, formeer Assistant Director of Counterintelligence at the FBI

Asha Rangappa, former Special Agent for the FBI, specializing in counterintelligence

Nicolle Wallace, former Communications Director for George W. Bush

Jeremy Bash, former Chief of Staff of the CIA

Clint Watts, former FBI counterintelligence agent and MSNBC national security analyst

Chuck Rosenberg, former Acting DEA administrator and senior FBI official

Nayyera Haq, former Senior Director of the White House

Richard Painter, former Chief Ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House

Neal Kaytal, former Acting Solicitor General of the United States

Ben Rhodes, former National Security Advisor to Barack Obama

Barry McCaffrey, former U.S. Army General and Drug Czar, security analyst for NBC and MSNBC

Stephen Twitty, former Lieutenant General of the U.S. Army

Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney

Barbara McQuade, former U.S. Attorney

Glenn Kirschner, former Assistant U.S. Attorney

For more on the abject silence of the left-leaning legacy media, its refusal to acknowledge the obviously disturbing importance of Taibbi's recent reporting on the Twitter Files, consider this episode of Glenn Greenwald's System Update on Rumble. The title: "Media Silent as Twitter Files Expose Flagrant Misconduct in Govt. & Journalism."

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The Twitter File Disclosures, So Far . . .

Matt Taibbi recently published a summary of the Twitter File disclosures so far.

One of the big take-aways with the Twitter Files so far: There has been substantial ongoing Deep State (FBI, CIA, DHS, CENTCOM) interference with how citizen attempts to discuss important important issues on Twitter. Our own government encouraged the shadow-banning and cancellation of thousands the authors of true or controversial postings. The net result was to secretly muzzle many people (including highly-credentialed medical doctors and researchers on COVID issues) in order to make it look like there was a false consensus on many highly disputed issues. The independent journalists further uncovered evidence that the FBI was paying Twitter multi-millions of $ so that Twitter would do the FBI's dirty-work for it. In sum, we appear to have actionable cases of a private third-party acting under color of state law (Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan (1963)).

This is chilling stuff right out of Orwell's 1984. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution suggesting that this government censorship is authorized and, in fact, this government action appears to clash head-on with the First Amendment. According to Matt Taibbi, there are a lot more disclosures yet to come.

The official reaction of the legacy media so far (NYT, MSNBC, NPR, WaPo and MSNBC: almost total silence. No better evidence that they think of their readers as infantile.

I have been following the Twitter Files closely. To express my outrage about what has been going on I redesigned the FBI Official Seal, which I hereby offer to the FBI free of charge.

Continue ReadingThe Twitter File Disclosures, So Far . . .

Twitter Files Result in Conspiracy of Silence by Legacy Media Outlets

I just finished reading "The Most Terrifying Conclusion From the Twitter Files That Everyone's Ignoring," by J.D. Rucker.  He makes these observations, with which I agree.

Government and their proxies have been censoring American citizens by ordering Big Tech companies to do it for them. This is a clear betrayal of the spirit of the 1st Amendment at the very least and is likely worthy of legal action. . . .

But while conservative media is busy discussing the ramifications of censorship and the near certainty that both the last two elections as well as the Covid "vaccine" rollout were dramatically impacted by illegal actions taken by members of our government, there's actually a far more troubling takeaway from all of this. For the various misinformation operations to have gone unreported by anyone in or out of government and media, that means an unfathomable number of people have been aware at the least. Many have been directly involved and we're just getting confirmation of it now.

Halfway through Rucker's article I did a search for the word "Twitter" at the websites of the NYT, Washington Post, MSNBC and NPR.  There is almost zero coverage of the Twitter Files at any of these outlets, with the exception of one article by the NYT. It's as if the Twitter Files were never released. This non-coverage is predictable based on the "news" covered by these outlets over the past several years, during which they have been selectively embellishing and stuffing stories mostly in unison, to push their Woke agenda and to elect democrats. These outlets want to claim that nothing interesting is going on because the Twitter Files revelations reflect so poorly on the "journalism" being produced by these media corporations. They want to act as though nothing is happening, but Rucker's article accurately describes that these things have been going on--there is enough here to convince any legitimate journalist with even low-level curiosity to write hundreds of articles:

  1. The FBI set up a command center in San Francisco in fall 2020 that forwarded censorship requests from bureau headquarters to social media platforms.

  2. The FBI succeeded frequently with social media firms when it forwarded censorship requests, including content posted by Americans.

  3. Federal agencies also partnered with contractors to ensure certain content was policed and censorship, creating a degree of separation.

  4. Homeland Security officials took part in weekly meetings with Twitter executives as the 2020 election approached.

  5. Homeland Security knew Twitter had second thoughts about censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.

    6. [More . . . ]

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Read more about the article Wilfred Reilly is Keeping Score on those Twitter “Conspiracy Theories”
Wilfred Reilly: Twitter's Shadow-Banning Exposed

Wilfred Reilly is Keeping Score on those Twitter “Conspiracy Theories”

Wilfred Reilly is a fact-driven political scientist. And I'm referring to old-fashioned kinds of facts. I have followed him for several years and I enjoy his comments and candor. At The National Review, Reilly recently commented on the supposed conspiracy theories involving Twitter, which repeatedly denied that it was shadow-banning users:

What is newsworthy, however, was that the Big Lie of information neutrality was just that: a lie. Probably for decades now, conservative and heterodox thinkers have been called weird paranoids for doubting “the science ™,” “the experts,” “the trends,” “the (new) dictionary definitions,” “what the search results obviously show,” and so forth. We now know that those lonely cynics were largely correct: the Great Barrington Declaration and the Hunter Biden laptop, among many other things, never “trended” because they were not allowed to. More broadly, almost all of the information we see on a daily basis is greatly shaped by the people who allow access to it. This is not a “conspiracy theory” — it is a fact.

Definitely don’t stop tweeting and searching and reading the morning paper with your eggs — but also never forget that fact, consider the DuckDuckGo option that actually shows you all of the results, and remember also that libraries still exist. And, if I can give one last piece of takeaway advice in this first column: Buy a hard-copy dictionary and encyclopedia from before about 2012, and never let those bad boys go.

Continue ReadingWilfred Reilly is Keeping Score on those Twitter “Conspiracy Theories”