For the past couple weeks, I’ve been following the release of the Twitter files closely, reading them, piece-by-piece on Twitter (here is Part I of the nine parts so far released). I’m not reading the tamped-down, strategically-filtered and papered-over characterizations of the Twitter files published by self-interested legacy media.

Most people I know are refusing to read the actual Twitter files being dug out of the Twitter archives for us by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and her team, Michael Shellenberger and Lee Fang. They don’t understand or care to understand the difference between independent journalists and the big corporations that pretend to employ only serious journalists. Most people I know refuse to read the Twitter files with their own eyes, arguing that they are sure these disclosures are groundless/false/uninteresting/ even though they have not read them. I can understand their hesitancy, given the extent to which they have been misled and betrayed by the “news” outlets they have been trusting. Mark Twain once commented on this challenge: “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.”

Again, I have read the Twitter files. Every last one of them. Based on these detailed disheartening revelations that our own government has fully and secretly embraced the role of virulently pro-censorship nanny-state, my emotional reaction has been similar to way Matt Taibbi describes his own reaction:

Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one?

I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.

I’ll end with the purported mission statement of Twitter during this lengthy period of abject corruption, government malfeasance and censorship:

The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.

In how many ways did Twitter violate its own mission statement. Let us start counting the ways . . .