Our Coopted Fourth Estate

Mike Solana, writing at Pirate Wires, describes "The Fifth Estate":

Dangerous alliance. In 1787, Edmund Burke said there were “Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there [sits] a Fourth Estate more important than they all." The notion of some vital power beyond our government was imported to the New World, and today constitutes a core belief of the American liberal: there is no free people, we’re often told, without a free press independent of congress, the courts, and our president. But throughout the 20th Century thousands of media outlets gradually consolidated, and by the dawn of our internet era only a few giants remained. These giants largely shared a single perspective, and in rough agreement with the ruling class the Fourth Estate naturally came to serve, rather than critique, power. This relationship metastasized into something very close to authoritarianism during the Covid-19 pandemic, when a single state narrative was written by the press, and ruthlessly enforced by a fifth and final fount of power in the newly-dominant technology industry.

It was a dark alliance of estates, accurate descriptions of which were for years derided as delusional, paranoid, even dangerous. But today, on account of a single shitposting billionaire, the existence of the One Party’s decentralized censorship apparatus is now beyond doubt.

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The Case for Investigating Anthony Fauci

Elon's Musk has announced that his "pronouns" are "Prosecute/Fauci." This is over the top for me, yet Musk has the right to say this and I have the right to criticize Musk that it's over the top. That's how free speech works. We don't yet know enough to prosecute Fauci. Maybe we never will. Maybe Fauci is completely innocent of the things Musk wants to "prosecute."

I don't know all the facts about Fauci, but I know enough of them to be suspicious. There are a LOT of suspicious facts. I want very much to get to the bottom of this because COVID disrupted the lives of billions of people and hurt or killed millions of them. Since when do we ignore calamitous situations just because someone calls them a conspiracy theory, someone like David Frum (who doesn't understand the import of major media coordinating with the U.S. spy state to squelch the story of Hunter Biden's laptop)? Stevemur wrote an excellent response to Frum:

In invite you to walk through stevemur's thread, step by step, then ask yourself whether you too are suspicious.  Note stevemur's conclusions:

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If Shadow-Banning and Censoring Twitter Accounts were Not Interesting or Consequential, Why were Twitter and the U.S. Government Doing These Things??

Pundits and "Journalists" keep claiming that the Twitter revelations to date are boring and amount to nothing of consequence. OK, then consider Colin Wright's comment:

. . . and why were they hiding that they were doing these things?

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How the People Expressed Themselves on Twitter

Twitter presented itself as a place where the People speak freely, but Twitter was playing a nefarious instrument. By hitting certain keys, Twitter shut down certain opinions. By hitting others, it opened up the floodgates. This makes it look like the People are speaking, but Twitter tilting the tables to make it look like the losers in many debates were the losers.

And I see that Matt Taibbi recently explained the importance of last night's revelations. These are not "Nothing Burgers," as the media elite try their damndest to shout into cyber-space. These hucksters will do their best to avoid addressing Taibbi's indictment head-on, I guarantee you. Here is one of many from Taibbi's writings today:

ELECTION INTERFERENCE? When @BariWeiss proved once and for all that Twitter does indeed engage in shadow-banning, or what they call “visibility filtering,” it was a significant step forward in our understanding of how internet platforms affect our perception of reality. In this batch of Slacks it’s unmistakeable that Donald Trump — whatever you think of him — was being “visibility filtered” even before the election. One of the first things new Twitter chief Elon Musk brought up with me was the question of whether or not Twitter interfered with elections. “For instance, is this candidate actually more popular than another, or did Twitter put a thumb on the scale?” he asked. Even these first document reviews make it pretty clear Twitter the company did do this. Again, it is very hard to look at these internal discussions and not conclude that the firm interfered with elections.

Now, what we don’t have (yet?) is proof that federal law enforcement or intelligence was heavily involved with electoral questions. We’ve seen individual reports filed from the FBI about smaller political accounts, and we have a sizable pile by now of communications showing that executives like Roth were in regular contact with those agencies. But so far these are just outlines. Nonetheless, they’re significant.

We now have plenty of evidence that those running Twitter and their allies in the elite media saw their job censoring dissent and feeding red meat to their niche audiences, thereby poisoning our conversations, often making them impossible. And doing it for advertising $. I'm reevaluating who is more excellent at hurting Americans for money, Journalists or Big Pharma?

I encourage readers to go to Taibbi's website to read more, following the link to his source materials on his website but mostly on Twitter.

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