The Clouds Part and the Twitter Disclosures Stream In

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 . . .

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Jonathan Haidt Joins FAIR’s Board of Directors

Below is Jon’s statement on why he signed up to join FAIR’s Board of Advisors:

The first 50 years of my life, from 1963 to 2013, were the greatest period of social progress and the extension of rights and inclusion in human history. Progressives should have been celebrating success and vowing to continue on toward the fulfillment of Martin Luther King's dream. Instead, because of changes to social media platforms in the early 2010s, new, terrible, and illiberal ideas flooded into universities, and from there to the rest of our institutions. I co-founded Heterodox Academy to push back against illiberalism in universities. I joined FAIR's advisory board because FAIR is pushing back everywhere else.

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Conscious Strategies to Shut Down the Center-Left and Center Right

Jonathan Chait, writing at N.Y. Mag: "Helping Trans Kids Means Admitting What We Don’t Know

There is a familiar pattern here in the way left-wing activists shut down internal criticism by treating any criticism of their position as either identical to, or complicit with, the far right. Extremists on the right, of course, use the same method to shut down their critics on the center-right. To the radical, the easiest way to win a debate is to insist that the only choice is between opposing poles. If you oppose any element of their argument, you have endorsed the enemy. If the criticism is tempered and credible, this only makes them regard it as more dangerous.

But this absolutist mind-set has had an especially pernicious effect on the issue of youth gender medicine. This is because the science is genuinely murky and embryonic, making the struggle to identify a humane and effective solution both difficult and necessary. The left has thrown itself behind a crusade to define such a position out of existence....

Progressive activists have not just embraced the gender-affirming care model; they have begun treating any disagreement with it as hateful denial that trans people exist. Indeed, they have frequently denied that any debate exists within the medical community at all.

The purpose of their rhetorical strategy is to conflate advocates of more cautious treatment of trans children with conservatives who oppose any treatment for trans children. This campaign has met with a great deal of success. Much of the coverage in mainstream and liberal media has followed this template — ignoring or denying the existence of the medical debate, and presenting anti-trans Republican politicians as the only alternative to gender-affirming care. This has been the theme not only of progressive infotainment like Jon Stewart and John Oliver, but also mainstream organs like Politico and CNN, where coverage of the issue often treats progressive activists as unbiased authorities and dismisses all questions about youth gender treatment as hate-driven denial of the medical consensus.

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