Durham Report Findings Unsurprising to Those Who Have Had their Eyes Wide Open

The conclusions of the Durham report are not surprising to those of us who follow independent new media. For years, we've seen shoddy story after shoddy story revealing that the driving motivation of the two dominant flavors of corporate media is to serve as the PR Departments of the two dominant political parties. It has also long been clear (e.g., from the Twitter Files and the coverup regarding Hunter Biden's laptop) that the FBI & CIA are partisan organizations. Many people I know don't mind being played. They would rather think about short-term results than the long term damage that continues to be inflicted on American institutions. No matter who you prefer to be president, these revelations should be immensely disturbing.

From the National Review: "This was one of the dirtiest political tricks in American history. The damage it has done to American trust in the FBI and our intelligence agencies is incalculable."

Here is another straight-forward account from The National Review, a conservative leaning media outlet that vigorously opposed Donald Trump: "FBI Lacked ‘Any Actual Evidence of Collusion’ between Trump Campaign, Russia When Crossfire Hurricane Launched, Durham Finds":

The Department of Justice and the FBI did not have “any actual evidence of collusion” between Russian officials and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and began their Crossfire Hurricane probe of Trump’s campaign based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” according to a report released on Monday by special prosecutor John Durham.

Durham scolded federal law enforcement and counter-intelligence officials for failing to “uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law” as part of their investigation.

He wrote that at least one FBI agent criminally fabricated language in an email that was used to obtain a FISA surveillance order. And he accused FBI leaders of displaying a “serious lack of analytical rigor” and relying significantly on “investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents,” referring to staffers and allies of Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic presidential nominee, whose campaign funded the Steele dossier through its law firm Perkins Coie.

Continue ReadingDurham Report Findings Unsurprising to Those Who Have Had their Eyes Wide Open

Judiciary and Intelligence Committees: CIA and Biden’s own Campaign Interfered with 2020 Election

From the WSJ article, "Biden’s CIA Assist in the 2020 Presidential Election: The agency, not only retirees, turns out to have worked on the Hunter excuse letter."

Even new habits are hard to break, and that’s the case with a federal intelligence apparatus that can’t keep its fingers out of elections. It seems President-elect Biden on Nov. 4, 2020, owed thanks not only to a cabal of former intelligence officials, but to the Central Intelligence Agency.

That’s the big takeaway of this week’s interim report from House committees detailing the origins of the October 2020 disinformation letter about Hunter Biden’s laptop. An earlier release revealed that Joe Biden’s campaign helped engineer a statement from 51 former U.S. spies that claimed the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” That letter provided Democrats, journalists and social-media companies the excuse to dismiss and censor evidence of Hunter’s influence peddling, removing an obstacle from his father’s path to victory.

Now we find out that, according to a written statement supplied to the committee, an active CIA official joined the effort to solicit more signers to the letter. The campaign to elect Joe Biden extended into Langley.

The report (issued jointly by the Judiciary and Intelligence committees and the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government) tells the sordid story of the letter, beginning with a call from Biden campaign official Antony Blinken to former Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell three days after the New York Post published its laptop scoop. Mr. Morell told the committees that Mr. Blinken wanted his “reaction” to the laptop news, but another signer said Mr. Morell put it to him bluntly: the Biden campaign “asked” for the letter.

Continue ReadingJudiciary and Intelligence Committees: CIA and Biden’s own Campaign Interfered with 2020 Election

FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff Discusses the Importance of Free Speech

Greg Lukianoff, CEO of FIRE, addressing the audience at FIRE's recent gala expanding its free speech mission beyond schools and colleges. I created the following transcript based on this video:

Athens. 375 BCE. The agora. A man goes before the agora, and he talks about a better world in which the smartest of us would would lead us the people who can understand the real and permanent truth that exists beyond our common understanding. It would be a new and better world led by the Guardian class. And a man stands up and says, "Plato, this sounds awful. Like really awful. "By philosopher kings, you mean like you right? And you really think us dummies sit and watched shadows all day?"

Fast forward ahead to the French Revolution. Robespierre is defending the terror by citing the general will. This same figure pops up again, and says, by "general will," you mean like yours, right?

Fast forward again, to default to the Bolshevik revolution. People say to Lenin, "You know, I don't know if you're seeing this. But your system makes good people into suckers and sociopaths and gives them superpowers, right?"

And then fast forward again to the Nazis. And someone stands up and says, "So you guys think you're really into evolution, and you don't understand biodiversity?"

And sometimes these people managed to survive because instead of saying any of this stuff, they stand up and instead say, "I don't want to get guillotine. Anybody else want to move to the United States?"

And a lot of us are descended from these very types of people. I am for one. And why do I bring this weirdo up? Because he is us. He is people like the people in this room. People who do not like the arrogance of power. People who do not like the idea that someone who thinks they're smarter than us is going to tell us what to say or what to think. It's the personality that brings us all together.

So one thing that all the weirdos that I work out at FIRE have in common is we hate bullies. What is our job? Our job is to fight the Guardians, now and forever. And the problem is, of course, that a lot of times, this is a population that self-elects in every generation, the ones who are going to save us from ourselves. Weirdly enough, they oftentimes claim to speak for the people, which doesn't really work. The funny thing is they usually talk about, "Oh, I speak to the people. I mean, maybe there's people over there. They're the real people. You might have false consciousness or something.

And whenever you hear this, and it's very important to say today, when someone says that they claim to speak for the people, you should say to them, "Why don't you let the people speak for themselves?" That is the wisdom of the First Amendment. So what do we get as we celebrate free speech, as we celebrate the First Amendment? We should remember what we fight for, because the fight is getting harder. But we need to remember why we fight for it. So what does free speech give us? Free speech does not give us certainty. And that's a good thing. Certainty is a dangerous illusion. But it does give us richness. It does give us complexity. It does give us nuance. It does give us awe if we're lucky. And it gives us the only chance we'll ever have to know the world as it really is. And what does free speech give us that's better than civility? Candor, and authenticity. Authenticity. You cannot be yourself if you're not allowed to speak. Censorship is a tactic used over and over again that societies use to lie to themselves that they're just fine. And that's why I've joked for years that censorship is like taking Xanax for syphilis. It makes you feel a little better about your horrible disease. But your horrible disease keeps getting worse.

What else can free speech give you that the Guardians can't? Individuality? You can't have individuality without freedom of speech. There's a cynicism that often goes with this. Just remember that when people talk about being unique individuals--and we have all of this kind of putting people in the groups--remember, your individual uniqueness is a scientific and mathematical fact. Not some goofy poetic vision. It's literally true and never let someone take that away from you.

On the Other Side, none of us are all that smart individually, except for maybe Steve Pinker, who's here tonight. But if we stay curious, intellectually humble and keep talking to each other, we can know a billion billion times more than any lone human being. It'll be messy. It'll be strange. It'll sometimes be troubling. But I'd rather live in the real world with the unruly and ever-evolving lot of you than to live in the dreary conformity of any utopia. I want nothing to do with utopia. It's a place where humans can't go and stay fully human. The chaotic paradise, the loud, creative cacophony of a free people, is where I want to be.

Continue ReadingFIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff Discusses the Importance of Free Speech

Taxonomy of the Censorship Industrial Complex

Matt Taibbi's most recent report fleshing out the taxonomies of the "Censorship Industrial Complex." This is what we know so far about the 50 groups (Funded by well-monied foundations, many of them with government support) dedicated to protecting you from your own thoughts. They see us as infantile and naive, defenseless and incapable of sorting through conflicting information. The existence of these sorts of organizations indicate some combination of grifting/rent-seeking or a substantial abandonment of the American Project, IMO.

Taibbi comments:

The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.

Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.” It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.

They suggest we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like “toxicity monitoring,” replace the musty old free press with editors claiming a “nose for news” with an updated model that uses automated assignment tools like “newsworthy claim extraction,” and submit to frank thought-policing mechanisms like the “redirect method,” which sends ads at online browsers of dangerous content, pushing them toward “constructive alternative messages.”

Binding all this is a commitment to a new homogeneous politics, which the complex of public and private agencies listed below seeks to capture in something like a Unified Field Theory of neoliberal narrative, which can be perpetually tweaked and amplified online via algorithm and machine learning. This is what some of the organizations on this list mean when they talk about coming up with a “shared vocabulary” of information disorder, or “credibility,” or “media literacy.”

Anti-disinformation groups talk endlessly about building “resilience” to disinformation (which in practice means making sure the public hears approved narratives so often that anything else seems frightening or repellent), and audiences are trained to question not only the need for checks and balances, but competition. Competition is increasingly frowned upon not just in the “marketplace of ideas” (an idea itself more and more often described as outdated), but in the traditional capitalist sense.

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And then almost predictably, we now know that Facebook it protecting us from Matt Taibbi's analysis. of the Censorship Industrial Complex:

As one of our contributors points out, Meta is indeed very big on irony. It seems the social media giant has deemed an announcement about the Racket report on censorhip to be “hate speech.”

I try to keep perspective about incidents like this, given that smaller independent outlets deal with much more serious threats to their livelihood when they have content blocked or receive strikes on sites like YouTube. But in this case, a lot of people apart from myself have put in a lot of work on a report that wasn’t intended to be sensationalistic or needlessly provocative. It’s a scrupulously researched project that is intended to provide other journalists and researchers a starting point for investigations into this space.

I’ve put in a query to Facebook, but if this is how the algorithm responds to this kind of content, it says a lot about their algorithm.

Continue ReadingTaxonomy of the Censorship Industrial Complex

Three Cheers for the Pessimist’s Archive!

If you want to feel a bit happier about all of the sad things out there, check out the "Pessimists Archive." Things have always been shitty.

For example, you will learn that people were panicked about the fact that the development of new machines would cause mass unemployment. This was back in the 1920's, when those new machines included the horseless carriage.

And I learned how typewriters were once seen as a big sexual turn-off:

A love letter written with a typewriter today would be considered a romantic gesture, however in 1906 they were called the most “cold-blooded, mechanical, unromantic production imaginable" by one writer.

Continue ReadingThree Cheers for the Pessimist’s Archive!