As David Sachs asks, why was the FBI in the business of identifying social media posts to take down? Their job should be to investigate federal CRIMES. There were reportedly 80 FBI agents assigned to identify troublesome posts and they communicated with Twitter with messages that would disappear, not leaving a trace. Is this how a democracy works?
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."
The federal government is considering a ban on gas stoves.
Three points.
1. They will need to pry my gas stove from my cold dead hands.
2. Do you really want to shut down all the restaurants that use gas to cook, including my favorite little stir fry take-out place at the end of my block.
3. If you are REALLY worried about particulates, don't read Sam Harris' article about the dangers of fireplaces (link in the comments). Here's an excerpt:
It seems to me that many nonbelievers have forgotten—or never knew—what it is like to suffer an unhappy collision with scientific rationality. We are open to good evidence and sound argument as a matter of principle, and are generally willing to follow wherever they may lead. Certain of us have made careers out of bemoaning the failure of religious people to adopt this same attitude.
However, I recently stumbled upon an example of secular intransigence that may give readers a sense of how religious people feel when their beliefs are criticized. It’s not a perfect analogy, as you will see, but the rigorous research I’ve conducted at dinner parties suggests that it is worth thinking about. We can call the phenomenon “the fireplace delusion.” . . .
Here is what we know from a scientific point of view: There is no amount of wood smoke that is good to breathe. It is at least as bad for you as cigarette smoke, and probably much worse. (One study found it to be 30 times more potent a carcinogen.) The smoke from an ordinary wood fire contains hundreds of compounds known to be carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic, and irritating to the respiratory system. Most of the particles generated by burning wood are smaller than one micron—a size believed to be most damaging to our lungs. In fact, these particles are so fine that they can evade our mucociliary defenses and travel directly into the bloodstream, posing a risk to the heart. Particles this size also resist gravitational settling, remaining airborne for weeks at a time.
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.
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:
[More . . . ]