The Long Slow Demise of Twitter

Walter Kirn has personally and repeatedly seen the corruption of Twitter. An excerpt from his article at Common Sense:

My forebodings were confirmed with the launch of the “Russiagate” investigation. I doubted its premises highly from its inception, but when I voiced these doubts on Twitter curious things occurred. My tweets on the subject, my followers reported, often were invisible to them, and yet, to my eye, they drew engagement. Strange. The Twitter users who “liked” my tweets tended to have tiny followings, I found, and they didn’t follow me. Their profile photos were often stock images. I ran an experiment one night and sent out a tweet of a controversial nature which I expected would be suppressed or screwed with, and then, when it was, I used screenshots of the mischief to prove to my followers that Twitter was dishonest.

I looked crazy. Concerned DMs arrived. One accused me of grandiosity for thinking I mattered enough to provoke intervention from on high. Innocence about Twitter still prevailed then; its cheerful bluebird logo still charmed the public mind. We had yet to learn, as we finally did this week (in a manner which confirmed my worst suspicions) of the hidden but direct coordination between Twitter’s management and the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, to suppress and guide opinion on topics from war to public health. (“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is cognitive infrastructure,” one government official put it.)

Continue ReadingThe Long Slow Demise of Twitter

CDC Misconduct and Coverup

For two years I have been amazed at the news media's non-interest in the origin of the COVID virus, especially given my presumption that many news outlets serve as the lapdog for the U.S. government. Here is a summary of where we are, as well as an itemized list of significant events, including what appear to be cover-ups of the lab origin story. First, from Reason Magazine, Zach Weisssmueller and Regan Taylor have this to say (this is an excerpt) in their article, "The Lab Leak Deception: Public Officials concealed their conflicts of interest and role in funding research that may have caused the pandemic, says health reporter Emily Kopp":

Journalists and scientists routinely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a crackpot theory and even as "racist," up until the summer of 2021 when science journalist Nicholas Wade published an influential article, and a viral rant by Jon Stewart pushed it into the mainstream. Until that point, social media platforms had been removing or throttling posts that took it seriously. Anthony Fauci, who didn't respond to our interview request, said it wasn't worth even considering the possibility that COVID could have originated in a lab.

More recently, emails made public through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that Fauci, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, and other prominent public officials took the possibility of a lab origin far more seriously than they were letting on.

"Top virologists, sort of giants in this field, were looking at the genome and freaking out, basically," says health reporter Emily Kopp, who works at the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, an organization that has obtained thousands of pages of official documents and correspondence, some of which reveal an orchestrated effort by scientists to downplay the lab leak theory. It's also extensively analyzed emails obtained via a lawsuit by Buzzfeed's Jason Leopold that reveal the huge disconnect between what health officials were telling the public and what they were saying in private.

The above article refers us to this timeline compiled by Emily Kopp: "Timeline: The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2." Here are some excerpts:

In February 2020 — about a month before a pandemic had been declared — five top virologists huddled to examine aspects of a rapidly emerging coronavirus that seemed primed to infect human cells. (The furin cleavage site kept one virologist up all night.) A few days later, they concluded the virus had not been engineered. In March, their conclusions were published in Nature Medicine.

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingCDC Misconduct and Coverup

DHS’s Plans to Spread Propaganda via Social Media

Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang of the Intercept have just broken one of the most important news stories of the decade. Caveat: You can't read about it at the NYT, NPR, WaPo or NPR (I just checked) because it doesn't fit their narrative. The U.S. Federal Government has been putting enormous pressure upon social media outlets to censor certain stories and push others without factual justification. This brazen censorship being done by social media outlets (and spinelessly followed by corporate media) has long been obvious to all of us who are heterodox thinkers, but we didn't have access to the mechanism for this censorship and these lies . . . until now. Anyone who abhors tribal membership (I am one) constantly sees that social media and corporate media refuse to allow obvious questions and criticisms when publishing questionable claims (e.g., re COVID). What is the reason that so many of us are nodding in agreement at Noam Chomsky's recent comment: "“The United States has imposed constraints on freedom of access to information which are astonishing and, which in fact, go beyond what was the case in post-Stalin Soviet Russia.” If you find Chomsky's comment difficult to digest, read the article by Klippenstein and Fang. Here are a few excerpts from the much longer article, "TRUTH COPSLeaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation":

THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.

The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information. . . . .

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingDHS’s Plans to Spread Propaganda via Social Media

The “News” Media is the Dying Canary in the Coal Mine

I have lost respect for many institutions over the past few years. Not so much the members, but the leadership (which causes many member to fall silent). Exhibit A is our so-called "news" media. I have been collecting dozens and dozens of examples at my website, Dangerous Intersection.

It often boils down to these organizations failing to be curious about what is going on. Failing to question powerful people. Failing to vigorously cross-examine the leaders of the political parties they obediently serve. Journalists should be out there pissing off ALL of our leaders with probing questions, but they are too often serving as stenographers and megaphones for highly questionable positions. This great danger to our country is invisible as long as you cling to one side or the other (democrat serving or republican serving) "news" media.

I challenge anyone reading this to start reading "the other side" and, better yet, independent journalists, in order to get a much better view of what is going on. You'll find many of those independent journalists have left mainstream news to strike out on their own (e.g., on Substack), disgusted with what has happened to their employers.

Here's a recent example: Why were reporters failing to grill Pfizer executives and our political leaders on whether the vaccinations would stop transmission of COVID? How many dozens of bad policies resulted because our "news" reporters decided to parrot public officials rather than vigorously question them?

Continue ReadingThe “News” Media is the Dying Canary in the Coal Mine