I know this couldn’t have actually happened, and was just an extended hallucination (probably the result of the copious amount of drugs I consumed in my misspent youth, or the effects of a Commie bio-weapon with a fatality rate of less than one percent, because I’ve been writing about The War on Dissent (2018), and The Criminalization of Dissent (2021), and the global Corporate COINTELPRO op (2017), and The War on Reality (2021), and The Manufacturing of Reality (2021), and Manufacturing Truth (2018), and Manufacturing Normality (2016), and The Road to Totalitarianism (2022), and The Gaslighting of the Masses (2022) … well, for quite some time. So, I’m sure it was just an hallucination, because there’s no way Matt and Shellenberger were actually sitting there talking about how …

“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.” (Matt Taibbi’s Statement to Congress)

… and documenting the coordinated censorship of sources that interfered with certain official narratives, like “Russiagate” and “The Apocalpytic Virus” …

32. In one remarkable email, the Virality Project recommends that multiple platforms take action even against “stories of true vaccine side effects” and “true posts which could fuel hesitancy.”

None of the leaders of this effort to police Covid speech had health expertise. pic.twitter.com/UUd50ZaghG

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023

… because that’s just a crazy “conspiracy theory.”

I am also sure I was hallucinating yesterday, because, right in the middle of my hallucination, right around the time that Stacey Plaskett started squawking like a demon pterodactyl, I had another hallucination, like my hallucinating self was hallucinating, which was like being in a Christopher Nolan film. In this one, Matt asked me to talk about how I was being censored by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al., and their governmental and NGO partners in 2021, and I started babbling all this “conspiracy theory” stuff about the very “Censorship-Industrial-Complex” that Matt and Shellenberger were testifying about in the hallucination I appeared to be hallucinating the other hallucination in.

And then my hallucination got weird.

Now, it’s been quite a while since I’ve indulged in any seriously mind-bending drugs, but this reminded me of a bad LSD trip, like when Satan starts talking to you through the TV. There I was, happily hallucinating these two distinguished independent journalists who had done all this historic reporting on a story of extreme importance and had been invited to Congress to talk about it, and, suddenly, it all went dark and twisted.

Stacey Plaskett, the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary subcommittee started badgering, insulting, smearing, and baiting Matt and Shellenberger like Joe McCarthy in drag. Trembling with hatred, she accused them of being members of some sort of Substack-based death squad that “poses a direct threat to people who oppose them,” and of stochastically terrorizing Yoel Roth, the former Twitter Censorship Czar, and of unleashing “homophobia and anti-Semitism” on him. Then she launched into a spittle-flecked rant about “January 6” and “threatening our democracy,” until she was restrained by James Jordan, the Subcommittee Chairman. And this was just during her opening remarks.

The other Democrats soon joined in the bullying, and lying, and smearing, and sneering, and generally acting like prosecutors at some hate-drunk witch trial. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who, for whatever reasons, is still allowed to serve in Congress after being forced to resign as the DNC Chair for rigging the 2016 election, staged a whole dog-and-pony show with blow-up photos of Joe Rogan and so on. Sylvia Garcia, who appeared to be drunk, demanded that Matt reveal his source, and then, when he refused, repeatedly tried to weasel it out of him with all the deftness of a one-legged idiot in an ass-kicking contest. Colin Allred put on a PowerPoint show involving Kanye West’s anti-Semitic tweets, random bigots on Twitter, and the Russian agents who conspired against him (i.e., Allred) personally, and then lectured Matt about the “threats to our democracy” and called him a “conspiracy theorist.” Stephen Lynch went full-McCarthy, demanding that the witnesses affirm they “believe that Russians interfered in the 2016 election.”

And so on. I told you things got twisted. Thank God it was just an hallucination and not a live, televised demonstration of precisely what I have been trying to describe the emergence of for the last six years, which is a new totalitarian form of global capitalism that no longer needs to maintain the pretense of upholding (or respecting) our “democratic rights,” because it has no external adversaries, and thus is free to morph into a quasi-Orwellian dystopia where any and all forms of dissent from official ideology can (and must) be delegitimized as “disinformation,” “misinformation, and even “malinformation,” and corporate-owned political puppets feel no compunction whatsoever about behaving like vicious little fascists on television because they know they have the fearsome power of the global-capitalist machine behind them, no matter how openly (and badly) they lie, and that their fanatical followers will parrot any propaganda they are given to parrot, no matter how patently false or absurd, and will spew their mindless hatred at whomever they are ordered to spew it at, and otherwise act like a bunch of fascists.

Anyway, thank God that was just a bad flashback, or a minor cerebral infarction, or whatever, because, if it wasn’t … what a total bummer!

OK, seriously now, I assume that some of my regular readers might be confused by this essay. After all, I have been rather critical of Elon Musk and his handling of the “Twitter Files.” And now, here I am, celebrating Matt and Shellenberger’s testimony yesterday. Did I not call the Twitter Files a limited hangout? Yes, I did. And I will do it again. But not today. Today I will celebrate. I will raise a glass to Matt and Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and the other Twitter Files journalists. I will even raise a glass to Elon Musk (who continues to maliciously defame and censor me and others like me with fake “content warnings” and other such slimy censorship tactics) for making the Twitter Files available to them.

If that baffles you … well, let me tell you a secret.

The way this little ecosystem works is, writers like me don’t get to testify on television before subcommittees. Actual journalists get to do that. Actual journalists who are “normal” enough. Actual journalists like Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, et al. You know who I’m talking about. Actual journalists who know where the lines are, who aren’t going to start babbling about “Pathologized Totalitarianism” and “The New Normal Reich” on national television. What writers like me do get to do (and what it is our job to do) is subtly influence, gently pressure, and pester the living hell out of actual journalists who still have a shred of integrity left by saying the things they cannot say, or saying them in a way that they cannot say them, until the time comes when they can almost say them, because we have said them over and over again, and more or less everyone can see them, so it is finally safe to say them, almost.

OK, sure, it doesn’t pay all that much, but it’s fun, and I tend to sleep fairly well.

So, don’t worry, I’ll get back to doing that shortly. The “Censorship-Industrial-Complex” is a much bigger story than just the US division. I’ll be prodding Matt and the other Twitter Files journalists to prod Elon Musk to bring in international journalists to cover the same story in countries like Germany, the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, The Netherlands, and so on. Feel free to join in the fun. Who knows? In another four or five years, we might even find out how this photo simultaneously appeared in every paper of record on the planet in January of 2020 … that is, if we’re not all locked away in “conspiracy theorist” camps by then.

In the meantime, kudos to the Twitter Files Team!

Article cross-posted from CJ’s blog.

Among the various censorship requests they made were some that called on deletion of Tweets that accurately claimed the so-called “vaccines” did not offer protection against contracting Covid-19 and did not prevent infected people from spreading the disease. Those realities were already acknowledged by the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, as well as the Big Pharma companies themselves. For them to go after those facts so fervently tells us beyond a shadow of a doubt that Big Pharma relies on an ignorant populace. They cared only about shifting the narrative to back their lies. Moreover, they preyed on uninformed people to keep their agenda moving forward which is why suppressing facts was necessary.

On one of today’s News Clips for The JD Rucker Show, I broke down the hideous implications of this type of censorship. It’s bad enough that they were going after critics and those who were spreading debatable information, but for them to demand suppression of verified and widely accepted facts tells us they knew their narrative was false. Here’s an article by Tom Parker over at Reclaim The Net that breaks down the details of today’s drop…

Campaign Funded by Pfizer and Moderna Lobbyists Sent Twitter Weekly Lists of Tweets to Censor

Some of the content targeted by the campaign included articles that were “using the news to further prove the CDC is untrustworthy.”

The Public Good Projects (PGP), a nonprofit that has developed several projects to fight so-called Covid “misinformation,” received $1,275,000 from the Pfizer and Moderna lobbying group, Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), to create a content moderation campaign that influenced Twitter’s Covid misinformation rules. As part of this campaign, PGP sent Twitter lobbyists and content moderators weekly emails containing lists of tweets to censor.

Journalist Lee Fang published one of the weekly emails that Twitter received from PGP as part of the latest release of the Twitter Files — collections of internal Twitter communications that have exposed the censorship relationships Twitter had with government agencies and other powerful groups before Elon Musk took over.

The email shows Todd O’Boyle, a senior manager on Twitter’s Public Policy team, sharing “this week’s misinfo report” from PGP. The February 24, 2022 email included a list of top trends the PGP had seen during the week and two attached lists. According to Fang, one of the lists contained tweets the PGP wanted Twitter to take down and the other list contained tweets that it wanted Twitter to verify.

Despite flagging two trends in this weekly misinfo report, the PGP admitted that articles related to the first trend “do not contain misinformation themselves but are using the news to further prove the CDC is untrustworthy.”

The PGP also acknowledged that the second trending article it flagged, which described a German health insurance company official suggesting that reports of healthcare visits for vaccine side effects may be severely undercounted, “is difficult to fact check because it does note that this data includes any side effect, not just serious side effects.”

Fang said many of the PGP’s emails to Twitter focused on independent news outlet ZeroHedge which was banned from Twitter in January 2020 and reinstated in June 2020.

Fang also noted that this campaign flagged a tweet from senior Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientist Stephanie Seneff that questioned vaccine passports on the basis that vaccinated and unvaccinated people have “roughly the same capacity to carry, shed and transmit the virus.”

Additionally, Fang shared a screenshot of a BIO tax form that revealed part of the funding ($883,000) it provided to PGP for this campaign.

The PGP campaign is called “Stronger” and, according to Fang, it worked with Twitter to craft the platform’s content moderation rules around Covid misinformation, helped Twitter create content moderation bots, and helped Twitter select which public health accounts got verification.

Stronger says its goal is to “stop the spread of misinformation” and its website contains a page that encourages people to flag misinformation to Twitter and other platforms.

This page also contains a form for users to submit alleged misinformation to Stronger.

“Paste the link to a post, account, or website below, and the Stronger team will report it to the appropriate platform,” the form states.

Previous campaigns from the Public Good Project have involved recruiting pro-vaccine keyboard warriors to mass report anti-vaccine social media posts.

Fang’s revelations are the latest of several examples of those affiliated with Pfizer pushing for the censorship of content that questions or criticizes Covid vaccines.

Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb complained to Twitter in August 2021 that it was promoting an article from journalist Alex Berenson. A few days after this complaint, Berenson was banned from Twitter. Twitter also censored another tweet after it was flagged by Gottlieb in August 2021.

Meanwhile, Pfizer’s CEO has branded those who share what he deems to be misinformation about vaccines as “criminals.”

Alternative Video Sources:

All the stories I will talk about on today’s radio version of The JD Rucker Show are focused on this premise. We are witnessing the Deep State do things in recent months that go against their past norms. They’ve always operated in the shadows with zero transparency to the public and limited transparency to the government officials, most of whom they control anyway. Lately, they’ve been far more bold with their public posture.

It’s no coincidence that the Twitter Files are exposing them. I believe this is intentional. That’s not to say Elon Musk or the journalists he tasked with revealing the Twitter Files are complicit in the Deep State’s agenda. On the contrary, I think they are doing a fine job and have the right intentions, but let’s face it. If the Deep State didn’t want the information to come out, it never would have.

The same can be said about recent “whistleblowers” painting the CIA as directly involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr. Again, I do not believe the information would have been leaked out conveniently at about the same time unless the Deep State allowed it. They WANT us to be concerned about them, including “normies” who may have never even heard of the Deep State or assumed it was conspiracy theory fodder. For those who think that’s silly because it implicates them, I ask this: Does it really? Are you hearing about people getting fired or arrests being made at the CIA? Are they losing budget over this? Is anyone really pressing them? Or is it all fodder to make us think the truth is coming out when in reality they’re facing zero consequences as a result?

Now, we’re seeing the rising police state policies being used by the Deep State to promote the tyranny of the nanny state. It’s confusing, but hear me out. Police state policies include the use of technologies to keep track of us at all times. They position these things as a positive.

For example, the capture of alleged Idaho murderer Bryan Kohberger and much of the evidence that will be used to convict him were procured by the police state through “advanced” methods. We will all cheer if he is convicted and ignore the fact that the FBI used DNA they acquired from a family history service like Ancestry.com or 23 and Me. Has your DNA been given to a company that will tell you your great, great grandmother was Irish? If so, the Deep State has your DNA.

The use of cell phone pings was instrumental in locating Kohberger. But the same people who were able to pinpoint his location this way claim identical technology used in 2000 Mules is inaccurate. They’ll also ask us to ignore the fact that they had isolated cell location data on the January 6 pipe bomber. We’ve even seen security footage showing the bomber using his phone on his way to drop off the bombs. The FBI increased the reward to $500,000 for information about a man they almost certainly already know. It’s all Kabuki Theater.

Now, take it all a step further with the nanny state driving the narrative that we need government to control our lives. Will the Deep State use the police state to go after people who are insufficiently limiting their carbon emissions or eating too much meat? Will they track people who don’t want to participate in the Digital Dollar as their only means of commerce? Will they put people like you and me on a list of potential domestic terrorists because we aren’t getting jabbed?

An article by John and Nisha Whitehead breaks down what they believe to be 19 of the steps that our government will take this year to bring us closer to total tyranny. I will cover this in today’s episode and expand on some of the pieces, which are listed below. I don’t agree with all of them but I am preserving their writing because we don’t always have to agree on everything. They’re close enough, so it’s a worthwhile post.

Let me know what you think about their list in the comments.

What to Expect from the Government in 2023? More of the Same

“There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.”—Montesquieu, Enlightenment philosopher

For those wondering what to expect from the government in 2023, it looks like we’re going to be in for more of the same in terms of the government’s brand of madness, mayhem, corruption and brutality.

Digital prisons. Unceasingly, the government and its corporate partners are pushing for a national digital ID system. Local police agencies have already been given access to facial recognition software and databases containing 20 billion images, the precursor to a digital ID. Eventually, a digital ID will be required to gain access to all aspects of life: government, work, travel, healthcare, financial services, shopping, etc. Before long, biometrics (iris scans, face print, voice, DNA, etc.), will become the de facto digital ID.

Precrime. Under the pretext of helping overwhelmed government agencies work more efficiently, AI predictive and surveillance technologies are being used to classify, segregate and flag the populace with little concern for privacy rights or due process. All of this sorting, sifting and calculating is being done swiftly, secretly and incessantly with the help of AI technology and a surveillance state that monitors your every move. AI predictive tools are being deployed in almost every area of life.

Mandatory quarantines. Building on precedents established during the COVID-19 pandemic, government agents may be empowered to indefinitely detain anyone they suspect of posing a medical risk to others without providing an explanation, subject them to medical tests without their consent, and carry out such detentions and quarantines without any kind of due process or judicial review.

Mental health assessments by non-medical personnel. As a result of a nationwide push to train a broad spectrum of so-called gatekeepers in mental health first-aid training, more Americans are going to run the risk of being reported by non-medical personnel and detained for having mental health issues.

Tracking chips for citizens. Momentum is building for corporations and the government alike to be able to track the populace, whether through the use of RFID chips embedded in a national ID card, microscopic chips embedded in one’s skin, or tags in retail products.

Military involvement domestically. The future, according to a Pentagon training video, will be militaristic, dystopian and far from friendly to freedom. Indeed, all signs point to the battlefield of the future being the American home front. Anticipating this, the government plans to have the military work in conjunction with local police to quell civil unrest domestically.

Government censorship of anything it classifies as disinformation. In the government’s ongoing assault on those who criticize the government—whether that criticism manifests itself in word, deed or thought—government and corporate censors claiming to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns are, in fact, laying the groundwork now to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Threat assessments. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score. It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

War on cash. The government and its corporate partners are engaged in a concerted campaign to shift consumers towards a digital mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal.

Expansive surveillance. AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude. Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer. With every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

Militarized police. Having transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are moving into the next phase of the transformation, turning the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone extraction software, Stingray devices and so much more.

Police shootings of unarmed citizens. Owing in large part to the militarization of local law enforcement agencies, not a week goes by without more reports of hair-raising incidents by police imbued with a take-no-prisoners attitude and a battlefield approach to the communities in which they serve. Police brutality and the use of excessive force continues unabated.

False flags and terrorist attacks. Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government. This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party is in power: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.

Endless wars to keep America’s military’s empire employed. The military and security industrial complexes that have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that will continue to profit the most from America’s expanding military empire abroad and here at home.

Erosions of private property. Private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

Overcriminalization. The government has increasingly adopted the authoritarian notion that it knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives. Overregulation and overcriminalization have been pushed to such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair.

Strip searches and the denigration of bodily integrity. Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, forcibly take our DNA, strip search us, and probe us intimately. Individuals—men and women alike—continue to be subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops.

Censorship. First Amendment activities are being pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. Free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors have conspired to corrode our core freedoms. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

Taxation Without Any Real Representation. As a Princeton University survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. We are no longer a representative republic. With Big Business and Big Government having fused into a corporate state, the president and his state counterparts—the governors—have become little more than CEOs of the Corporate State, which day by day is assuming more government control over our lives. Never before have average Americans had so little say in the workings of their government and even less access to their so-called representatives.

Year after year, the government remains the greatest threat to our freedoms, and yet year after year, “we the people” allow ourselves to be suckered into believing that politics will fix what’s wrong with the country.

Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the very definition of insanity.

About the Author

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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.

To put it into perspective, many lambasted Hollywood for keeping the open secret for decades that Harvey Weinstein was a rapist. For him to continue to do what he did meant hundreds if not thousands of people were aware and did nothing about it. That was shocking and many of us attributed it to the demonic nature of Hollywood itself. Now take that level of coverup and magnify it exponentially. That’s the implication of the Twitter Files. The coverup is so huge that I’m convinced the reason so many in conservative and alternative media are ignoring it because the scale is too massive for them to comprehend.

It took someone who could spare tens of billions of dollars to reveal that there are at least hundreds of thousands of Americans who were aware before the Twitter Files were released that our 1st Amendment rights are being subverted. Employees at Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and likely dozens of other Big Tech companies were aware. Apparently tens of thousands of employees at government agencies were actively involved in this censorship in some form or fashion. Thousands if not tens of thousands of people associated with NGOs were aware.

Once you add in friends and relatives of these people we can say with a certainty that hundreds of thousands of Americans knew. It may actually be over a million.

A direct attack against the United States Constitution is being waged by our own government and nobody with a voice was willing to obey their oath as American citizens until Elon Musk came along. Nobody. Sure, there may have been whistleblowers and conscientious objectors along the way, but none of them were able to break through to the masses. This isn’t an indictment of government’s influence. It’s an indictment of the powers of the Deep State. The federal government is incapable of coordinating anything for longer than 10 minutes before cracks start showing up. The Deep State can coordinate massive campaigns for decades and if it weren’t for Elon Musk, this campaign may have continued indefinitely.

But here’s the thing. Even Elon Musk has not been able to break through to the masses. The corporate media silence on the biggest story of the year tells us it’s far, far worse than just an attack on our rights by hundreds of thousands of American citizens. Every institution of truth has been subverted from the media to academia to the Department of Justice and all of the supporting industries. It is impossible for this to have happened… and yet it did.

That tells us we’re in huge trouble and only God could possibly turn this around if He wills it. Nobody wants to hear this, but the truth is we are incapable of defeating this enemy. Why? Because this isn’t just government. It isn’t just the Deep State. I believe that for this size of an operation to have remained hidden for so long would require demonic Powers and Principalities. If that’s true, and I’m nearly certain it is, then the forces of Satan are controlling things in Washington DC and have been since before Joe Biden was in office. Maybe they’ve been controlling it since before Trump was in office. Maybe, just maybe, they’ve been controlling things the whole time. That’s what I’ll be discussing on today’s episode of The JD Rucker Show at 7:00 am Pacific..

Show Notes

Ten Major Revelations Exposing Extent of Government Pressure on Big Tech to Censor Americans

Article by Nick Givas from Just The News.

1. The FBI set up a command center in San Francisco in fall 2020 that forwarded censorship requests from bureau headquarters to social media platforms.
2. The FBI succeeded frequently with social media firms when it forwarded censorship requests, including content posted by Americans.
3. Federal agencies also partnered with contractors to ensure certain content was policed and censorship, creating a degree of separation.
4. Homeland Security officials took part in weekly meetings with Twitter executives as the 2020 election approached.
5. Homeland Security knew Twitter had second thoughts about censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.
6. Whistleblower memos show DHS downplayed plans for a “Governance Board” to fight “misinformation.”
7. FBI paid Twitter $3.4 million as part of its disinformation monitoring
8. Federal agencies launched a coordinated campaign to discredit stories about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.
9. Federal agencies also impacted Americans’ debate over the COVID-19 pandemic, at times censoring factually accurate posts at odds with the government’s preferred narrative.
10. What’s next? Congress is investigating how far reaching federally sanctioned censorship has become, including at platforms beyond Twitter.

The FBI Won’t Name Other Social Media Companies It Pays

Article by Cindy Harper from Reclaim The Net.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has refused to indicate the exact social networks it has paid. This follows recent revelations verifying that the bureau paid Twitter at least $3.5 million.

Representatives for the FBI already spoke to Fox News and said that the substantial Twitter payment was a “reimbursement” for expenses and costs of its requests. The representatives indicated that the payment was to compensate the social media platform for acting in accordance with legal “requests.”

The FBI stated that the group had compensated social media platforms beyond Twitter as well. The news network requested the names of other companies that the FBI had paid for these purposes. The federal agency, however, was not willing to provide further information regarding the matter. The representatives did say, though, that the FBI has to offer reimbursement for any and all reasonable expenses that tie in with the acquisition of information that is essential for legal processes.

“While we are not able to speak to specific payments, the government is required to provide reimbursement for reasonable expenses directly related to searching for, assembling, reproducing, or otherwise providing the information responsive to the legal process. This requirement is set by federal law and the courts are the final arbiters of what is reasonable compensation,” the FBI officials said.

Of Course Every Big Tech Company Is Controlled by the Deep State and It’s Worse Than Elon Musk Admits

One of the bad parts about being in the world of “conspiracy theories” for the last couple of years is that I often think something is common knowledge when in reality it’s a bombshell to most people when they hear it. Such is the case of Elon Musk declaring that all social media companies are controlled to some degree by the U.S. government for the sake of censorship.

Most people don’t appreciate the significance of the point Matt was making: *Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government. Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.

Most people don’t appreciate the significance of the point Matt was making:

*Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government.

Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 27, 2022

Musk’s assessment, while being a shock to many, is actually quite mild compared to reality. His emphasis on “every” is a given. He said the censorship is heavy, but it goes beyond censorship. The algorithms Big Tech companies use can amplify or suppress content and users with the push of a button, meaning government-approved narratives are amplified while counter-narratives are suppressed.

Musk also claims it’s being done at the “explicit direct of the government.” This is also just part of the picture. The Deep State is both in and out of government and their reach is both explicit with influence over Big Tech employees as well as secretive in their direct control. The Twitter Files give us a glimpse of communications coming from official government agencies and their affiliates, but it doesn’t show us how the Deep State has direct backdoor control over much of what we see. Perhaps Musk doesn’t even know this is going on. We would hope that if he did, he would reveal it soon. Of course, doing so would put him at great risk.

This is more than just pushing the government’s universal vaccination agenda. It’s more than just stealing elections. It’s more than just pushing climate change hysteria. The real damage done by the Deep State’s control over Big Tech is in herding the people toward a state of compliance through manufactured outrage. They keep the tribes separated in their echo chambers so both sides on any particular debate feel they are winning. This helps them to keep the compliant, which mostly encompasses the political and cultural left, all aligned while separating out the non-compliant on the ideological right. This will make them easier targets when a future stage of their plans is set in motion.

Kim Dotcom had a similar but more precise take on the situation.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have betrayed you. To protect their monopolies they sold you out to the deep state. Their products and services are used to spy on you and to manipulate you. Big Tech are co-conspirators in some of the biggest crimes against humanity.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have betrayed you. To protect their monopolies they sold you out to the deep state. Their products and services are used to spy on you and to manipulate you. Big Tech are co-conspirators in some of the biggest crimes against humanity.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) December 27, 2022

Without a corrupted media and big tech the evildoers can’t deceive or manipulate you. Their non-stop lies and censorship have been exposed. The deep state attacked and censored the truth. Their ability to do this in the future must be destroyed. We must end the deep state.

Without a corrupted media and big tech the evildoers can’t deceive or manipulate you. Their non-stop lies and censorship have been exposed. The deep state attacked and censored the truth. Their ability to do this in the future must be destroyed. We must end the deep state.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) December 27, 2022

While the people are busy fighting each other, we’re not paying any attention to what the Deep State and their globalist cronies are doing to us all.

Worse Than Censorship: Four Realities of the Twitter Files World

1. Censorship is just a small piece of the puzzle. The real damage is done through the narrative-control psyop that bends the will of the masses. While most believe they are immune to such manipulation, literally everyone who participates in the digital information world is being indoctrinated. Most are being pushed into the groupthink, which is why we have tens of millions of Americans who were shocked by the results of the midterm elections but only a tiny percentage even entertaining the possibility that the elections were stolen. Those who are aren’t accepting groupthink are being herded into a separate category of dissent. These people will be monitored now and vilified in the future to be purged from society one way or another.
2. Elected officials don’t have much of an impact on the activities of the Deep State. We know this because the Deep State was operating unimpeded through both Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s watch. In fact, the foundation for the modern iteration of Operation Mockingbird was laid when Republicans were in control of the House, Senate, and White House between 2017-2019. In other words, we can’t vote our way out of this informational tyranny.
3. If at least hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans were aware of the attacks against our freedoms and did nothing, what does that say about our ability to fight back? If not for Elon Musk these bombshells would have remained as speculation. Now that we know for sure that this is widespread and somehow being kept completely in the dark, we must take this as our “John Doe has the upper hand” moment.
4. God’s plan is perfect. We do not know how things will go as we are rushed to the end, but we do know the ending of the story itself. With every victory such as the release of the Twitter Files, we’re dealt a sobering defeat in the realization that the conspiracy is bigger than most imagined. But we must not fret. We must not curl up into the fetal position and accept that we cannot win. We go forward knowing that God’s plan truly is perfect and therefore the role we are allowed to play in its fulfillment is a blessing no matter how bad things seem along the way. We fight the good fight and spread the truth. Everything else is what happens between here and Heaven.

Internal emails published by journalist David Zweig show that there were “countless instances” of Twitter posts being taken down or labeled as “misleading” because they differed from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines or “establishment views” around COVID-19 or vaccines.

In one instance, according to internal emails, a Twitter moderator flagged a post from former Harvard School of Medicine professor Martin Kulldorff because it violated the the social media firm’s COVID-19 misinformation policy and asserted that he was posting “false information.” When the firm took action against his post, it was labeled as “misleading” and all likes and replies were turned off, which prevented the post from being shared more widely.

Rhode Island-based physician Andrew Bostom was also targeted by Twitter for permanent suspension after receiving several strikes for violating the social media firm’s terms and service around COVID-19. A screenshot of the company’s internal log files showed that only one out of five violations were valid, and that came only after Bostom’s attorney contacted Twitter.

“One Bostom tweet found to still be in violation cited data that was legitimate but inconvenient to the public health establishment’s narrative about the risks of flu versus Covid in children,” Zweig wrote. “That this tweet was not only flagged by a bot, but its violation manually affirmed by a staff member is telling of both the algorithmic and human bias at play. Bostom’s account was suspended for months and was finally restored on Christmas Day.”

“The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about COVID-19,” Zweig also wrote, adding that when the current administration took over last year, “one of their first meeting requests with Twitter executives was on COVID.” The focus, namely, was regarding “anti-vaxxer accounts,” internal emails show.

But Twitter, according to the latest tranche of files, did not fully cooperate with the Biden administration’s demands.

“An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed employees often debating moderation cases in great detail, and with more care than was shown by the government toward free speech,” Zweig wrote.

A summary of meetings that was provided by Twitter’s head of public policy, Lauren Culbertson, showed that some White House officials were “very angry” that Twitter did not deplatform enough accounts and warned the firm to do more.

“But Twitter did suppress views—many from doctors and scientific experts—that conflicted with the official positions of the White House,” the journalist wrote, although he did not provide any evidence. “As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.”

Trump Posts

Many of President Donald Trump’s pandemic-era Twitter posts, meanwhile, were subject to a number of internal debates and squabbles, according to Zweig’s reporting.

In one email, then-Twitter General Counsel James Baker—who previously was involved in the infamous Crossfire Hurricane investigation when he worked for the FBI—asked former Twitter head of security and safety, Yoel Roth, why Trump’s post saying “don’t be afraid of COVID” in October 2020 wasn’t flagged or taken down. Roth replied by saying that issuing an “optimistic statement” about the virus was not misinformation.

“In short,” Roth replied, “this tweet is a broad optimistic statement” that doesn’t “incite people to do something harmful, nor does it recommend against taking precautions or following mask directives (or other guidelines),” according to the newly published email. Baker was “exited” from Twitter by Musk earlier this month after it was revealed that he was secretly vetting Twitter’s internal files before they were sent by Musk to Zweig and other journalists for publication.

Previous Revelations

Since the start of December, several other independent journalists were provided internal communications under Twitter’s previous management by Musk, who acquired the firm for $44 billion in October. They showed how the company placed certain individuals on secret blacklists, internal debates over how to deal with Trump’s account before it was suspended in January 2021, and how some FBI officials had flagged certain accounts to Twitter staffers via backchannels.

At one point, in October 2020, the FBI and other intelligence agencies carried out an “organized effort” targeting senior Twitter executives to discredit information sourced from Hunter Biden’s laptop before and after it was published.

In response, the FBI told Fox News that the latest reports show that there was no malfeasances on behalf of bureau officials. And, it said, “the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.”

“The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public,” the statement continued. “It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US government officials for the “private” social media company to censor comments and ban commenters they did not like.

The Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a US government entity that included the FBI as well as other US intelligence agencies expressly forbidden from domestic activities, numbered 80 agents engaged regularly in telling Twitter which Tweets to censor and which accounts to ban. The Department of Homeland Security brought in outside government contractors and (government-funded) non-governmental organizations to separately pressure Twitter to suppress speech the US government did not like.

US Federal government agencies literally handed Twitter lists of Americans it wanted to see silenced, and Twitter complied. Let that sink in.

This should be a massive scandal and likely it would have been had it occurred under a Trump Administration. Indeed, Congress would be gearing up for Impeachment 3.0 if Trump-allied officials had engaged in such egregious behavior. But since these US government employees were by-and-large acting to suppress pro-Trump sentiment, all we hear are crickets.

What is interesting about these Twitter revelations is how obsessed the FBI and its government partners were with satire and humor. Even minor Twitter accounts with small numbers of followers were constantly flagged by the Feds for censorship and deletion. But knowledge of history helps us understand this obsession: in Soviet times the population was always engaged in joking about the ineptitude, corruption, and idiocy of the political class. Underground publications known as samizdat were rich with satire, humor, and ridicule.

Tyrants hate humor and cannot withstand satire. That is clearly why the FBI (and CIA) was determined to see a heavy hand raised against any American poking fun at the deep state.

There is good news in all of this, however. As Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley wrote over the weekend, a new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll found that even though the mainstream media has ignored the “Twitter files,” Americans have not. Nearly two-thirds of respondents believe that Twitter was involved in politically-motivated censorship in advance of the 2020 election. Some 70 percent of those polled believe Congress must take action against this corporate/state censorship.

As Professor Turley points out, although the First Amendment only applies to the US government, “it does apply to agents or surrogates of the government. Twitter now admits that such a relationship existed between its former officials and the government.”

So now we have proof that the FBI (along with US intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security) have been acting through “private” social media companies to manipulate what Americans are allowed to say when they communicate with each other.

Is there anything more un-American than that? Personally, I find it sickening.

We do not need the FBI and CIA and other federal agencies viewing us as the enemy and attacking our Constitution. End the Fed…and End the Federal Bureau of Investigation!

Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.

The big news today was that the FBI censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, not just with Twitter but other media companies. This isn’t news to our readers as we’ve known about it since October, 2020, but the vast majority of Americans had no idea then and likely still have no idea today. But buried in thread item #46 was arguably the most damning piece of evidence to date. They didn’t just ask Twitter for help with suppressing the story less than a month before the election. The FBI PAID Twitter for doing it, a move that unambiguously helped Democrats steal the White House.

According to Michael Shellenberger:

The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time. “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” reports an associate of Jim Baker in early 2021.

46. The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time.

“I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” reports an associate of Jim Baker in early 2021. pic.twitter.com/SmNse97QxK

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) December 19, 2022

This is among the biggest of MANY pieces of evidence proving the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a political organization that occasional works on law enforcement as a side gig. They are the Deep State’s tip of the spear for their domestic manipulation campaigns. They spent decades and countless taxpayer dollars engaging in political meddling, which should come as no surprise since they’ve been doing so since J. Edgar Hoover was in charge.

$3,415,323 may seem like a drop in the bucket for a government that operates in terms of billions or trillions, but it can go a long way to get members of media and Big Tech to do the bidding of the Deep State. They didn’t want Donald Trump to win so the FBI engaged in one of the ugliest forms of government corruption possible: collusion through bribery.

This is a game-changing Twitter Files drop… at least it could be if it’s given any attention at all by the people. Unfortunately, it likely won’t be if we rely on corporate media to report on it. This is why it’s incumbent on patriots to do a better job of informing our “normie” brethren than we did at informing them about the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020.

Leave a comment about this story on my Substack.

How closely aligned were Twitter and the FBI? They were practically family, as Matt Taibbi’s latest drop reveals.

I will post the text from each of his Tweets here, edited only for formatting. The actual Tweets are below, including referenced images, followed by my commentary.

THREAD: The Twitter Files, Part Six TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY

The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.

Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth. Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chan wishing Roth a Happy New Year along with a reminder to attend “our quarterly call next week.” Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations. But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.

The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds. Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.

It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts. The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.

What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government. Some are aggregated from public hotlines. 

An unanswered question: do agencies like FBI and DHS do in-house flagging work themselves, or farm it out? “You have to prove to me that inside the fucking government you can do any kind of massive data or AI search,” says one former intelligence officer.

“HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which “FBI San Francisco is notifying you” it wants action on four accounts.

Twitter personnel in that case went on to look for reasons to suspend all four accounts, including @fromma , whose tweets are almost all jokes (see sample below), including his “civic misinformation” of Nov. 8.

Just to show the FBI can be hyper-intrusive in both directions, they also asked Twitter to review a blue-leaning account for a different joke, except here it was even more obvious that @clairefosterPHD, who kids a lot, was kidding.

“Anyone who cannot discern obvious satire from reality has no place making decisions for others or working for the feds,” said @ClaireFosterPHD, when told about the flagging. Of the six accounts mentioned in the previous two emails, all but two – @ClaireFosterPHD and @FromMa – were suspended.

In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command Post, which compiles and sends on complaints, sent the SF field office a long list of accounts that “may warrant additional action”. Agent Chan passed the list on to his “Twitter folks”. Twitter then replied with its list of actions taken. Note mercy shown to actor Billy Baldwin. Many of the above accounts were satirical in nature, nearly all (with the exceptions of Baldwin and @RSBNetwork) were relatively low engagement, and some were suspended, most with a generic, “Thanks, Twitter” letter.

When told of the FBI flagging, @Lexitollah replied: “My thoughts initially include 1. Seems like prima facie 1A violation 2. Holy cow, me, an account with the reach of an amoeba 3. What else are they looking at?”

“I can’t believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter. That’s crazy,” said @Tiberius444.

In a letter to former Deputy General Counsel (and former top FBI lawyer) Jim Baker on Sep. 16, 2022, legal exec Stacia Cardille outlines results from her “soon to be weekly” meeting with DHS, DOJ, FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Twitter exec writes she explicitly asked if there were “impediments” to the sharing of classified information “with industry.” The answer? “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.”

This passage underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI. With what other firm would the FBI blithely agree to “no impediments” to classified information? At the bottom of that letter, she lists a series of “escalations” apparently raised at the meeting, which were already “handled.”

About one, she writes: “Flagged a specific Tweet on Illinois use of modems to transmit election results in possible violation of the civic integrity policy (except they do use that tech in limited circumstances).”

Another internal letter from January, 2021 shows Twitter execs processing an FBI list of “possible violative content” tweets. Here, too, most tweets contained the same, “Get out there and vote Wednesday!” trope and had low engagement. This is what the FBI spends its time on.

In this March, 2021 email, an FBI liaison thanks a senior Twitter exec for the chance to speak to “you and the team,” then delivers a packet of “products”.

The executive circulates the “products,” which are really DHS bulletins stressing the need for greater collaboration between law enforcement and “private sector partners.”

The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state.

While the DHS in its “products” pans “permissive” social media for offering “operational advantages” to Russians, it also explains that the “Domestic Violent Extremist Threat” requires addressing “information gaps”.

FBI in one case sent over so many “possible violative content” reports, Twitter personnel congratulated each other in Slack for the “monumental undertaking” of reviewing them.

There were multiple points of entry into Twitter for government-flagged reports. This letter from Agent Chan to Roth references Teleporter, a platform through which Twitter could receive reports from the FBI.

Reports also came from different agencies. Here, an employee recommends “bouncing” content based on evidence from “DHS etc”. State governments also flagged content. 

“WHY WAS NO ACTION TAKEN?” Below, Twitter execs – receiving an alert from California officials, by way of “our partner support portal” – debate whether to act on a Trump tweet.

Here, a video was reported by the Election Integrity Project (EIP) at Stanford, apparently on the strength of information from the Center for Internet Security (CIS).

If that’s confusing, it’s because the CIS is a DHS contractor, describes itself as “partners” with the Cyber and Internet Security Agency (CISA) at the DHS.

The EIP is one of a series of government-affiliated think tanks that mass-review content, a list that also includes the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory, and the University of Washington’s Center for Informed Policy.

The takeaway: what most people think of as the “deep state” is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.

Twitter Files researchers are moving into a variety of new areas now. Watch @BariWeiss, @ShellenbergerMD, and this space for more, soon.

Here are the actual Tweets:

1. THREAD: The Twitter Files, Part Six
TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

3. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

5. Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chan wishing Roth a Happy New Year along with a reminder to attend “our quarterly call next week.” Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

7. The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

9. It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

11. What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government. Some are aggregated from public hotlines: pic.twitter.com/cm9JjEXUSm

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

“HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which “FBI San Francisco is notifying you” it wants action on four accounts: pic.twitter.com/LjgB6fxENo

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

15. Just to show the FBI can be hyper-intrusive in both directions, they also asked Twitter to review a blue-leaning account for a different joke, except here it was even more obvious that @clairefosterPHD, who kids a lot, was kidding: pic.twitter.com/uLxHayY11C

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

17.Of the six accounts mentioned in the previous two emails, all but two – @ClaireFosterPHD and @FromMa – were suspended.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

19.Agent Chan passed the list on to his "Twitter folks": pic.twitter.com/eXaZnC3I7y

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

21.Many of the above accounts were satirical in nature, nearly all (with the exceptions of Baldwin and @RSBNetwork) were relatively low engagement, and some were suspended, most with a generic, “Thanks, Twitter” letter: pic.twitter.com/0S0XoqhwYD

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

23.“I can't believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter. That's crazy,” said @Tiberius444.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

25.The Twitter exec writes she explicitly asked if there were “impediments” to the sharing of classified information “with industry.” The answer? “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.”

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

https://t.co/dtvy82pfce the bottom of that letter, she lists a series of “escalations” apparently raised at the meeting, which were already “handled.”

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

29.Another internal letter from January, 2021 shows Twitter execs processing an FBI list of “possible violative content” tweets: pic.twitter.com/Dwad3lGM4j

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

31. In this March, 2021 email, an FBI liaison thanks a senior Twitter exec for the chance to speak to “you and the team,” then delivers a packet of “products”: pic.twitter.com/POOpYrd9q8

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

33.The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state. pic.twitter.com/GSaEzM0aYo

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

35.FBI in one case sent over so many “possible violative content” reports, Twitter personnel congratulated each other in Slack for the “monumental undertaking” of reviewing them: pic.twitter.com/rt5WzhfCga

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

37.Reports also came from different agencies. Here, an employee recommends “bouncing” content based on evidence from “DHS etc”: pic.twitter.com/5DP8DEFZiO

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

39.Twitter for instance received reports via the Partner Support Portal, an outlet created by the Center for Internet Security, a partner organization to the DHS.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

https://t.co/4zD4nEkDdW, a video was reported by the Election Integrity Project (EIP) at Stanford, apparently on the strength of information from the Center for Internet Security (CIS): pic.twitter.com/kJfJ6gDrb1

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

43.The EIP is one of a series of government-affiliated think tanks that mass-review content, a list that also includes the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory, and the University of Washington’s Center for Informed Policy.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

45. Twitter Files researchers are moving into a variety of new areas now. Watch @BariWeiss, @ShellenbergerMD, and this space for more, soon.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

What does all this mean? While many if not most of us were aware that direct government influence, including from the Deep State, has huge impacts on our freedoms on social media platforms, it would seem the conspiracy theorists who claimed the Deep State essentially had carte blanche were correct. Twitter employees were giddy to be doing the bidding of government to stifle American citizens.

As a non-government entity, Twitter has always enjoyed a certain level of control over what they allow on their platform. Many of us have argued that their Section 230 protections mean they cannot suppress legal speech, but thus far that avenue of attack against censorship has yielded limited fruit.

These Twitter Files may be a gamechanger in the fight. Government may not participate in quashing free speech and the revelations here demonstrate they are breeching our constitutional rights. But it’s actually worse than that, if one can imagine. They have used their control over Big Tech companies to influence the results of elections and to steer sentiment to the left in many regards. Taibbi attempts to highlight that attacks by the Deep State against free speech included attacks on leftists, but it’s crystal clear the lion’s share of censorship was distributed against conservatives.

Corporate media won’t cover this. Democrats will ignore it. Unfortunately, most Republican lawmakers won’t lift a finger either. Hopefully, someone in government with courage and a conscience will start holding the corrupt FBI accountable.

With that said, I want to point out the other side of the coin. As big as this story is, it’s actually a distraction. Before the Twitter Files, we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Big Tech has been working against us. Now that the Twitter Files are being released, we have confirmation. We’re learning a bit about how it all works and that can definitely help us prevent other current and future narrative control operations in and out of Twitter. But I am a bit concerned that the story is getting too much attention from the right even as it’s getting zero attention from the left.

Some would argue that we need to balance the left’s silence by broadcasting the truth more loudly. I generally agree, but there’s a risk that the story will linger, expand, and continue to overshadow the direct threats we face. While we talk about Michelle Obama prompting Twitter to ban Donald Trump, we’re NOT talking about the coming food shortages. While we’re exposing Yoel Roth as both a creep and a totalitarian censor, we’re NOT exposing the massive, widespread voter fraud that affected dozens of elections just last month. And while we’re keeping our eyes on Elon Musk, we’re not keeping our eyes on Joe Biden, Klaus Schwab, or any of the globalist elites who are feverishly working on their depopulation and control agenda.

Watching Elon Musk tear down Twitter while simultaneously building it up is fascinating. It’s like watching P.T. Barnum at the circus — when someone knows instinctively how to please the crowd and hold their attention, it’s nearly impossible to look away. But let’s not be so enamored with the show that we ignore the real-world troubles that continue to brew. The greatest digital showman is revealing the truth but he’s also taking our attention away from the storms outside. Here’s the article by Tyler Durden that explains why the story is so important. Just be sure to read it knowing that something can be a huge story and still be a massive distraction…

The biggest story of the past decade is not the covid pandemic, the January 6th protests, the war in Ukraine, the BLM riots, or even the stagflationary crisis in the US.  Behind these major events is another story, one that connects them all together in a disturbing way.  Even more important than the effects of geopolitical and economic chaos is the effect of mass censorship; without the free exchange of information and debate the public remains ignorant.  And if the public remains ignorant, crisis events have an increasing potential to explode.

Public perception of national and international affairs is a key determinant of the outcome of disasters and conflicts.  This is why governments and elitists from around the world often seek to manipulate the ways in which people digest information.  The idea is rather simple – They believe that ‘we the people’ cannot be allowed to come to our own conclusions.  They think we cannot be trusted to develop the “proper” viewpoints and we are not smart enough to understand the implications of governmental decisions.

In other words, they believe the exact opposite of what is outlined in the US Constitution.  The establishment will give numerous reasons why they need to censor, suppress, spin and misrepresent the facts of any given situation, but in the end the real rationale is that they have a vision for society that is contrary to our foundations.  They have appointed themselves the arbiters of reality to see that vision done.  As Edward Bernays, the “father of pubic relations” once stated in his book ‘Propaganda’:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

This is pure authoritarianism.  It’s the stuff of nightmares and revolutions.  But for many years now a large subsection of the world has denied such a dynamic exists.  It’s “conspiracy theory” and “tinfoil hattery” to claim that a small number of elites work together in secret to control public perception and govern our society from the shadows.  After all, where is the proof?

Of course, this kind of argument is a coping mechanism for the mentally deficient.  Proof of such secretive governance and control is everywhere these days, but some people prefer willful denial.  Take for example the ongoing data drops for what is now being called “The Twitter Files.”

The mainstream media is barely responding to the information dump initiated by Elon Musk.  They seem to be far more interested in Donald Trump’s tax records.  When they are forced to acknowledge the story, they are hostile, calling the information “boring” or unimpressive.  It’s a classic psychological  tactic of typical narcissists and criminals – When they get caught, they act indifferent, as if neither the evidence nor their crimes really matter.  If getting caught doesn’t matter to them, then their crimes must not be all that bad, right?

The content of these files is astonishing, but at the same time it is true that the conclusions are not surprising.

The files simply confirm almost everything conservative and libertarian commentators have been saying for years; all those “conspiracy theories” about Big Tech censorship of conservatives turned out to be true.  Not only that, but the theory that government agencies and officials from the DNC worked with Big Tech to silence and undermine their political opponents was also true.

Twitter has long denied that they “shadow ban” users, but this was a lie.  The data shows that small groups within Twitter called “strategic response teams” suppressed up to 200 accounts per day.  Usually these were accounts of larger and more influential conservative politicians and celebrities.  And, these teams operated in coordination with Democrat officials and agencies like the FBI.  In some cases the goal was to mute a particular individual. In other cases the goal was to steer national elections.

Internal Twitter communications show that SRT groups spent most of their time fabricating reasons why certain information was subject to TOS.  In other words, if Twitter’s rules were not being violated, they made up new rules.

The exposure of Twitter is the biggest story of the decade because it provides proof of a hidden cabal.  It shows the ugly mechanics behind the scenes and exposes a network of elites and their errand boys who were involved in direct operations to destroy the 1st Amendment for the sake of ideological supremacy.

It’s the classic definition of fascism, a definition that Benito Mussolini reiterated when he argued:  “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

And, if this brand of Fascism was happening within the halls of Twitter, then there is little doubt it is also happening at companies like Google/YouTube, Apple, Facebook, etc.  Before we had evidence, now we have confirmation.

The corporate media argues over relevance instead of morality because they benefited from the censorship.  It’s important to remember that one of the first measures Big Tech companies applied after suppressing the alternative media during the pandemic was to then amplify the corporate media.  These companies are floundering with dismal audience numbers and dwindling profits.  No one listens to them anymore.  Yet, as long as they promote the establishment narrative their opinions and disinformation are given priority on nearly every search engine and social media platform.

Of course they aren’t interested in the Twitter Files, liars are often “bored” by honest commentary and factual information.  Also, their continued existence relies on the censorship of their competition in the alternative media.

The bottom line is this:  According to the Bill of Rights, it is illegal for agents of the US government to obstruct the free speech of law abiding American citizens.  It does not matter if the action is done by using “private businesses” as a middlemen.  And, if a private business is colluding with government to implement political policy then it is no longer a private business.  Twitter was participating in a form of treason, along with the agencies that they cooperated with.  It’s a huge story, and one that should lead to punishment for those involved.

This is an unambiguous breech of our 1st Amendment rights. Government officials may not call on private companies to censor legal speech, but that’s exactly what Democrats and RINOs across the country have been doing for years. Now, it’s being exposed that the Hobbs Secretary of State staff — and likely her gubernatorial campaign staff — committed egregious acts of censorship against American citizens in their quest to steal the election from Republican Kari Lake.

Watch:

.@TuckerCarlson: "Staffers for the Secretary of State of Arizona, ordered by gubernatorial candidate and then-Secretary of State @KatieHobbs directed censorship through CISA…this is illegal. This is a crime. A crime against our Democracy." pic.twitter.com/XsCtFqypCp

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) December 6, 2022

While it’s noteworthy that the request which has been made public happened early in 2021, it demonstrates a willingness to suppress speech from within the halls of Arizona’s government. If they were doing so long before the primaries, we can safely assume that this practice was amplified in the heat of the general election in 2022.

As Carlson noted, Arizona is the last state in the nation to complain about its people not having faith in the election institution. The corruption that favors Democrats and RINOs in the state is arguably thicker than in any state. They have laws against ballot harvesting, but those laws are never enforced even in light of video evidence demonstrating massive, widespread voter fraud.

They don’t care. Their only concern is committing illegal acts and covering them up in order to take the purple state and make it as deep blue as possible. They want to be California and if the theft of the various elections in the state this year are not investigated and reversed, the state will be lost for the foreseeable future.

The will of the people has been subverted by power-hungry and unscrupulous Democrats and their RINO cronies who desperately want to keep America First patriots out of office. They’re willing to do anything because they feel they will not get caught. They might be right. Let’s pray that justice prevails and the confidence of the people is restored.