How Could We Be So Blind, Part 1
A Summary of Twitter Files Parts 1 – 15
Hardly anyone, including most of the corporate media, is talking about the Twitter files released by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig, and Alex Berenson at the direction of the new CEO Elon Musk. Yet, there are very valuable accounts about how the federal government censored information through social media companies. It is difficult to know if Musk has ulterior motives for allowing this, or if the items released can be verified conclusively and are showing the complete picture of everything that transpired, but either way, we can be sure that government officials have no respect for the free flow of information. The Twitter files do provide more evidence of government-corporate collusion and general censorship, and for that, we should be grateful. Below is a summary of everything that the authors of these texts have provided to us, thus far.
Twitter Files Part 1
Matt Taibbi started out complaining about how it was Democrats that disproportionately abused the tools at their disposal, but in reality, there is a bigger picture here. President Donald Trump also utilized the ability to censor tweets. Regardless of political party, the federal government does not have the authority to violate the First Amendment or create a narrative that regulates unfavorable speech.
Even though the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had an active investigation on Hunter Biden’s potential foul play, Twitter wanted to eliminate any mention of corruption ahead of the 2020 election, as to not allow for the soft coup against President Trump to fail. We know from testimony by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook that the FBI warned social media companies that Russian disinformation and hacked material were coming down the pipeline, and it was hinted at that any posts related to the Hunter Biden laptop story should be taken down.
Think about what this means. The FBI tried to persuade the public that the story was Russian disinformation, even though it was investigating Hunter Biden for corruption with that very same laptop as part of the inquiry. There was no evidence of Russia having been involved, and this was a blatant lie on the part of the FBI.
Internal Twitter communication reveals that some employees were concerned that there was no justification for censoring the story based on the hacking policy, and they were worried that congressmen were searching for violations of the First Amendment, but that did not stop the company (and Head of Legal Policy and Trust Vijaya Gadde and Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker) from going through with it. Labels were put up on stories related to the laptop, and although initially there may have only been generalized warnings by the FBI about hacked information, some of the employees may have been afraid of the liability of having related posts on their platform in case of legal action taken by the federal government. Either way, the government created an environment of fear and wanted the information suppressed.
Twitter Files Part 2
In the next installment, Bari Weiss explained how Twitter engaged in “visibility filtering” to keep certain individuals and accounts from being viewed by the public. This included: hindering the ability of certain posts from reaching the “trending” page or being discovered through hashtags, shadow banning or reducing visibility of conservative or nonconventional writers (such as Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk), and blacklisting people from search results. Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, for example, had his tweets unable to be trended because he spoke out against lockdowns and the harm that they would have on children (claims that were actually true). Chaya Raichik’s @libsoftiktok was also blacklisted and suspended multiple times for “hateful conduct,” but the Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support (SIP-PES), which consisted of CEO Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde, acknowledged that the account was not actually hateful. Twitter just did not like the content (Raichik’s personal address was even displayed in the comments, and Twitter did not consider the potential harassment as a violation of its terms, but unflattering clips of liberals was a breach). Of course, Twitter argued that it was not intentionally targeting conservatives and those questioning the narrative, but the lie has now been uncovered.
Twitter Files Part 3
Matt Taibbi then moved into the unprecedented process of removing a sitting president from a social media platform and attempting to take away his voice. Although President Trump constantly ran his mouth and caused controversy with the content of his tweets, the hype surrounding January 6th and the “insurrection” pressured Twitter to remove his account. Government agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), met (monthly and weekly) with Twitter and other social media companies to discuss misinformation and how to deal with it, so these companies were already being conditioned to take on information enforcement roles with the federal government. Twitter Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth even had meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and he reported to the FBI and DHS that his company had censored the Hunter Biden laptop story from the New York Post. The FBI was flagging certain posts, such as those of Councilor John Basham (of Tippecanoe County, Indiana), so there can be no mistake that a public-private partnership evolved between the federal government and Twitter (and, of course, other social and news media companies).
Twitter Files Part 4
As Michael Shellenberger pointed out, Twitter finally caved on its longstanding refusal to ban political leaders from its platform, and the staff (especially Roth and Gadde), which was overwhelmingly anti-Trump, had been trying to make the case that those supporting the former president were fascists and needed to be prohibited from expressing their views (this is ironic, being that limiting speech is a fascist ideal). In order to justify eliminating President Trump’s account, the executives made a platform-wide policy that would permanently suspend users after five “strikes.” Yes, it appears that Twitter created arbitrary policies to silence Trump. The former president got his permanent suspension on January 8th, after Roth pushed to have Twitter’s “public-interest exception” reversed in order to be able to easily remove the president’s account. The company determined that his tweets were perceived as a call to violence (this was, of course, not an objective decision).
What was Trump’s dangerous tweet? He said, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!” Yes, telling people to be peaceful and go home was an inspiration for violence. Liberal logic is truly pathetic. Twitter even attempted to ban code words, such as “kraken” (used by QAnon), and suspend Matt Gaetz’s account.
Twitter Files Part 5
The decision to ban President Trump was controversial, being that many executives and staff could not find justification for doing so and raised concerns (including the internal safety team); but because he said, “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!,” it was considered many times worse than Iranian Ayatollah Khamenei’s tweet, “Our stance against Israel is the same stance we have always taken. #Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen. 7/31/91 #GreatReturnMarch.” Yes, Trump was banned for his tweet, but the Iranian supreme leader was overlooked and allowed to continue on the platform. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad tweeted, “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past,” but this was met with silence by Twitter executives. However, Trump says something that has to be stretched to condone violence, and goodbye!
Bari Weiss informed us that Twitter had to code Trump’s tweet as an “incitement to further violence” to get rid of him, since it was clearly not an actual call to violence (Vijaya Gadde was the mastermind behind this concept). Twitter’s “scaled enforcement team” interpreted the phrase “American Patriots” to mean “rioters,” and with a little manipulating, they stretched Trump’s tweet as an incitement. The team went further by connecting all of his prior tweets as comparable to Adolph Hitler and the Christchurch shooter. Again, liberal logic is delusional and laughable. Anti-Trumpers are authoritarian and love censorship, and they hate free speech.
Twitter Files Part 6
Taibbi moved away from Trump to explain the more concerning parts of the 150 emails between Roth and the FBI. As I have discussed numerous times, social media companies have become nothing less than agencies of the federal government, and the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) expanded after the 2016 election and pressured Twitter to address foreign influence and election interference.
We are now aware that the FBI and DHS specifically sent Twitter pre-flagged (and ready to be moderated) items by utilizing think tanks, security contractors, and public hotlines (why not allow the snitching public to do some of the dirty work?) to warn the company of “violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service.” This was really a polite way of telling the company that it needed to remove those troubled posts or accounts.
An example of election interference that the FBI flagged was a tweet that read, “So, Cuomo wants to imprison suspected Covid carriers, force Vaccinations without due process? Things Power hungry madmen would do!” (of course, New York did introduce bill A416, which could potentially do just that, but the FBI did not want that to be part of the election discussion). Twitter was also told to lower engagement on the tweet, “This is our future guys if the dems get full control. If you are in Georgia you better vote Wednesday.” Is the FBI showing its partisan side? Even several satire accounts were suspended. The agency was creating an environment where it would control what and who Twitter could allow on its platform, as well as use the data for its own monitoring and law enforcement purposes. The FBI is pathetic, and it does not have the right to determine what is acceptable speech, but yet, most people simply do not care.
Twitter Files Part 7
As discussed, the FBI issued a subpoena for Hunter Biden’s laptop (left at a computer shop owned by John Paul Mac Isaac) and initiated an official investigation, but on the other hand, it censored the story revealed by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the New York Post (ahead of Joe Biden’s election in 2020). Michael Shellenberger wrote about how the shady business dealings between the Biden father and son pair were not factually incorrect (these included deals with the Chinese and other foreign governments to the tune of tens of billions of dollars), but the FBI just did not want their apparent chosen candidate to lose. Many people trust Twitter, so when it censored the information, the public was convinced that the story was false. However, in reality, it was true. This was clear meddling in the 2020 election, so Republicans are rightfully angry that the election was rigged against Trump (if it was rigged in this one area, where else was it rigged?).
The Biden laptop story was classified as Russian hacked misinformation, but it was not just simply the push by the FBI that made this disturbing. No, it appears that the FBI’s weekly meetings and regular correspondence with Roth conditioned the company to act on the agency’s behalf (the Russian hacking group APT28 was named). At first, Twitter could not find any significant campaigns of Russian meddling in 2020, even after several urges to investigate for it and follow The Washington Post’s and NBC’s accounts of widespread disinformation. Despite the continued requests by the FBI to have Twitter find what it was looking for, the company was unable to locate anything of concern. Roth and other executives were then given temporary top secret security clearances to be able to see intelligence on Russian hacking and what was on the horizon with election threats. San Francisco-based FBI agent Elvis Chan then inquired about sharing top secret information with Twitter’s then Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker, who had previously been a high-profile lawyer and general counsel at the FBI (as well as having worked for CNN and the Department of Justice) and was involved in the investigation against Trump (he was clearly biased against Trump and his supporters).
This part is important because there is what should be a well-known concept of a revolving door between the defense, intelligence, and pharmaceutical industries. In fact, Project Veritas’ leak of a Pfizer marketing director is a good recent example, but also, former Pfizer board of directors member Scott Gottlieb was the former commission of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Current Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was on the board of directors at Raytheon, and now, he is sending money to that company with his Ukraine policies like he is Dick Cheney to Halliburton. In addition, Dawn Burton, who served as deputy chief of staff under FBI Director James Comey and was involved in Trump’s investigation, became the director of strategy at Twitter. Twitter even had its own onboarding private channel to welcome recruits from the FBI, being that there were so many employees that went to work there. Yet, despite all of this, most Americans still believe that we have a free market and that the people are free from government corruption and tyranny.
By September 2020, Roth became an attendee of a “hack-and-dump” tabletop exercise at the Aspen Institute that was aimed at suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story (The New York Times and NBC also sent representatives, which shows the collusion between government and the corporate media), and at that point, he was willing to set up a network to increase communication between Twitter employees and agents of the FBI. He was still a little reluctant of censoring the laptop story because there was not any clear violation of the company’s hacking policies, but this would change. Furthermore, the FBI allegedly paid almost $3.5 million to Twitter to abide by its information requests and eliminate unfavorable posts, meaning that Twitter became a paid agency of the federal government (this delegitimizes the liberal argument that Twitter is a private company and can censor what it wants).
Twitter Files Part 8
As I mentioned above in regards to the revolving door and the military-industrial complex, Lee Fang’s portion of the Twitter Files focused on psychological operations (psyops) run by the Pentagon. Despite Twitter having denied the allowance of government agents to influence users through propaganda, it was permitting the military to set up fake accounts, amplify accounts and messages that it wanted to be made a priority, and gain exceptions to its bot and spam policies. US Central Command (CENTCOM) utilized this ability to spread anti-Iranian messages throughout the world (including making false claims that Iran was threatening Iraq’s water supply and smuggling methamphetamine and Afghan organs across the border), promote Saudi Arabia’s brutal war against Yemen, and convince the public that its drones were not killing civilians. Twitter became a propaganda center for American government disinformation campaigns, which also spread false narratives about Russia and China; and even state actors in Thailand, Russia, and Venezuela were taken down. When it comes to Washington, let the empire capture the minds of the docile and naïve public.
Twitter would suspend Trump and those challenging the official narrative, but it would look the other way for fake government accounts and allow them to operate however they saw fit (the Defense Department, or DoD, even tried to cover this up and shift the accounts away from the government to avoid detection). Facebook, Telegram, and others were also involved in such covert operations, so the government’s propaganda was able to spread far and wide. If this disinformation was being distributed by the government, why should we believe any claim that its agencies make, from foreign policy to Covid-19 to election integrity?
When Twitter got caught assisting the military in its covert propaganda operations, the corporate media took the heat away from the company and allowed the government to take the hit. Of course, we all forget about government offenses in a matter of weeks (who still thinks about Edward Snowden’s revelations?), and Twitter was spared the publicity blunder, but some of us will not let this idea die.
Twitter Files Part 9
As Matt Taibbi pointed out, the FBI has not denied that it was monitoring and censoring information through Twitter, but rather, it just dismissed all of this as routine operations. It released a statement suggesting that conspiracy theorists are trying to undermine the agency and its work, and instead of trying to regain the public trust, it would prefer to label others as spreaders of misinformation, while it propagates false narratives itself.
It turns out that Twitter did not stop at facilitating the FBI or DoD, and even the Central Intelligence Agency (commonly referred to as “Other Government Agency” or the CIA) jumped in on the fun. Regular forums between FITF, CIA, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, and Pinterest were utilized for communication and requests for censorship (often through Teleporter, which was a timed platform); and even state and local governments joined in on the content moderation. However, the FBI spearheaded the operation to act on the hundreds of accounts that it did not want to be freely circulating with counterinformation (it manipulated requests to seem like they violated Twitter’s policies, and the agency even assigned employees to scour for breaches).
The CIA has a foreign jurisdiction, and the FBI’s FITF was supposed to be searching for external threats, but in reality, both were looking for backdoors to monitor citizens and censor information. All of these agencies found secret ways to bypass the Constitution, particularly the First and Fourth Amendments, and we have gotten to a point where government agencies can get away with anything that they desire without accountability. Our founding fathers are rolling over in their graves.
Twitter Files Part 10
As I have written on extensively, the narrative around Covid-19 was rigged in favor of a single authoritarian viewpoint. Anything that went against it was censored, ridiculed, and blamed for all of the problems in the world. People were prevented from going to church or freely exchanging goods and services in establishments of their choosing (while government-connected corporations made profits from lockdown policies), and the unvaccinated were scapegoated and fired from their jobs for not adhering to government mandates. The anti-Trump fascists, who claimed to be pro-choice, were attempting to enforce their standards on everyone else and eliminate bodily autonomy (including with masks and vaccines). Social media companies were on the front lines of this grand social experiment that erupted into a virtual war, and they were willing partners with the government in suppressing free speech.
Both the Trump and Biden administrations were guilty of trying to shape the Covid-19 narrative to their favor, and they both coerced Twitter into compliance. David Zweig started off his segment of the Twitter Files with President Trump’s attempt to cover up panic buying, particularly that of toilet paper (I specifically remember going to the grocery store one day just so I could witness it for myself), and 5G cell tower conspiracy theories (Trump also engaged in censorship with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others). For those who think that Trump is a constitutionalist and transparent servant of the people, think again.
The Biden administration took the censorship even further and requested that Twitter take down posts from “anti-vaxxers” (like Alex Berenson, who sued to get his account back and expose internal communications between the administration and the company). It is difficult to believe, for most Americans, that the White House would be engaged in direct violations of the First Amendment, but meetings between Twitter’s Head of US Public Policy Lauren Culbertson and the administration revealed that the company was harshly pressured to do more to influence the Covid-19 narrative (Biden himself was allegedly “very angry” that more accounts were not suspended). How we have come to accept that the government can create the narrative and suppress physicians and scientists who had a difference of opinion is beyond comprehension in a free society, but that is exactly what occurred.
The government utilized bots, foreign contractors, and biased Twitter employees to suppress information and suspend the accounts of dissident voices, such as Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff; and the war against misinformation, which many non-establishment types have become accustomed to, began. Many of those expressing alternative viewpoints were factually and ethically correct, but they were treated like second-class citizens and enemies of the state. You were not publicly permitted to criticize the profitable vaccines or speak out against lockdown policies, both of which were unsuccessful for their originally-stated purposes. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was allowed to falsely preach that the vaccines blocked transmission, and she was never met with “misleading” or “false” reporting, but those of us saying that they did not block transmission from the beginning were misinformation spreaders. Our accounts were suspended or blacklisted, but government officials could shout out whatever false information that they wanted without consequences.
The account @KelleyKga posted “misleading” information when she posted data directly from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s own website (the CDC was allowed to cherry pick data to prove its point, but when you reveal inconvenient facts, adios); but the ironic part is that the tweet that she replied to, which suggested that Covid-19 was a leading cause of death in children, was blatantly false. That post remained on the platform without any warnings. A physician (with account name @_euzebiusz_) was classified as spreading misinformation, despite the post pointing to a published scientific study; and Dr. Andrew Bostom had his account permanently suspended for citing a peer-reviewed study about the effects of mRNA vaccinations. Bostom’s strikes were considered invalid upon Twitter conducting an internal audit, but this just goes to show that only the approved studies of the religious order were permitted.
Twitter Files Part 11
We all know that Russian agents started lurking around every street corner around 2017, at least that is what liberals and progressives in the United States claimed (according to phony investigations, even Trump was in collusion with the Kremlin). However, initially when Facebook was on a crusade to free our elections from Russian meddling, Twitter was convinced that its platform was largely unaffected by Putin’s campaign. According to Matt Taibbi, only about 0.8% of accounts selected by the Senate for review came back as possible Russian accounts (with another 6.6% of the accounts potentially linked to those accounts). It was an extremely small number, and given that the 2,700 accounts selected were likely chosen for suspicion of foreign links, the overall number among the general populace was likely far less. Congress, and particularly Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, was unsatisfied with Twitter’s assessment and requested that Twitter set up the “Russia Task Force.” Of course, this would benefit Warner’s Intelligence Committee by justifying its existence and doing its job for it, as Twitter’s Vice President of Public Policy Colin Crowell suggested.
The task force was unsuccessful at locating coordinated Russian agents on the platform (there were just a few lone-wolf accounts), even after receiving data and account information from Facebook. Of the three accounts linked to Russia that the investigation turned up, two of them were Russia Today (RT), which is Russian-funded but has elements of independence (American independent comedian Lee Camp was once employed there). Trying a more advanced model of investigation, Twitter was still not able to find more than twenty Russian-linked accounts, and this was after a couple thousand reviews. The Russian threat that Democrats wanted Twitter to find just simply did not exist, but this did not stop the corporate media from pushing headlines like, “Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone.” Yet, progressives and liberals are supposed to be the data- and fact-driven morally superior ones, but here is another example of them pushing fear-based propaganda and misinformation.
The lack of cooperation from Twitter sparked government partners in the corporate media to smear the company and suggest that it was dumping data showing the Russian threat. After Twitter was threatened by Congress with financial penalties for noncompliance (under the guise of Federal Election Commission regulation changes), and it kept receiving negative publicity, the company finally caved. Yes, the thugs in Washington really stooped to that level and was able to reign in Twitter’s last efforts at independence. Even though there was no evidence that the original 2,700 accounts selected by Congress were linked to Russia, the Intelligence Committee leaked all of them and attempted to convince the public that they were threats. Thus began the 2017 and onward partnership between Twitter and the federal government.
Twitter Files Part 12
Matt Taibbi then went into how the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) warned against Twitter accounts that it argued were pushing Russian propaganda (the GEC was claiming that the lab leak theory and the idea of Covid-19 having been a bioweapon were misinformation, even though information refuting the government’s claims have since been revealed), and this was done without Twitter’s knowledge or approval (other organizations and outlets were also going above Twitter to contribute towards the fearmongering headlines of Russian interference). The government was in full force attempting to cause Russian and Covid-19 hysteria by manipulating the narrative and advancing false or unproven claims of Russian connections. Interestingly, the Biden administration was not the only one trying to convince the public of foreign agent boogeymen. In fact, the Trump administration attempted to censor and emphasize posts by Chinese agents and the propaganda that they spread in regards to national threats and the Covid-19 narrative (same concept with different foreign actors).
After the GEC agreed to alert Twitter of its covert operations to combat Russian disinformation (why is the State Department getting involved in domestic censorship?), Roth was still hesitant to allow the State Department to be involved in the regular meetings between the DHS, FBI, and social media companies for fear that it may sway the 2020 election in favor of Trump (he would do the Democratic Party’s bidding, but he did not want to cooperate when the Trump administration was in power). A compromise was made, and the GEC was allowed to participate but in a minor role under the leadership of the FBI and DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Even the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) were allowed to participate (in a “listening” role). It was a real “Party in the CIA” and a conglomeration of the best and brightest agents of tyranny (“gotta catch ‘em all!”). Twitter became a real wing of the federal government, as it was doing the bidding of almost every section of it (including the Senate Intel Committee, the Treasury Department, and the Department of Health and Human Services). Even the leader of the House Intel Committee, Adam Schiff, jumped in on the fun and requested that Twitter ban a journalist that he did not like for partisan and conspiracy theory reasons; and other officials, who have obvious biases in favor of their employer, got to sanction whatever accounts they deemed as hazardous. Not only were challenges to the Covid-19 narrative eliminated from public debate, but engaging in conversations about President Biden’s corruption in Ukraine and against American intervention in that country was forbidden. You would be an agent of Putin himself if you disagreed with official government positions.
The federal government went overboard with banning accounts and posts that went against the narrative, and this was extremely dangerous to our rights. Why have we the people not required an investigation into governmental abuse of power and violations of the First Amendment (the corporate media is silent on the Twitter files and the Facebook lawsuit, so we have no help there)? In the United States, we have the illusion of free speech, but in reality, our minds are manipulated into accepting the dogmatic views of government officials.
Twitter Files Part 13
Well, as I have stressed on multiple occasions, the former FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, is now on the board of directors at Pfizer, which profited off of the Covid-19 narrative and vaccine mandates. Worried that information about the superiority of natural immunity and the fact that those with prior infection do not need the vaccine (as was reflected in actual policies in many countries in Europe but not in the United States) would be revealed, Gottlieb pressed Twitter to label posts making such claims as “misleading,” which prevented them from being shared. The Pfizer board member then attempted to eliminate posts pertaining to the low risk of the virus to children (this was, of course, a fact, but if allowed to circulate, it would cut down on parental fear, and thus, profits). Yes, as we already knew, Covid-19 mandates were as much about financial interests as they were about social experimentation into totalitarianism. Alex Berenson’s portion of the Twitter Files was nothing new, but it did provide more evidence of corruption.
Twitter Files Part 14
Matt Taibbi then went on to explain the RussiaGate scandal, and you should recall from one of the previous installments that there was no evidence that Russian-linked accounts posed serious problems. Democrats pushed the false narrative of Russian bots acting to undermine the Trump-Russia collusion examination (most of the so-called bots were not even Russian), and to fight back, Representative Devin Nunes established a memo in the House Intel Committee, which outlined how the FBI’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) investigation of Trump’s campaign team was unwarranted (think of the “Steele Dossier”). The memo was dismissed in lockstep by the corporate media, after it got its marching orders (Representative Adam Schiff, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Senator Richard Blumenthal assisted in casting doubt on the report). What evidence did all of these individuals and organizations have of Russian bots undermining the investigation and helping to spread Nunes’ memo? Hamilton 68 dashboard provided the evidence, you say?
It turns out that Hamilton 68, which could not provide proper indication of Russian bots while selling the story anyway, was created by the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) with the help of former FBI counterintelligence agent Clint Watts (current contributor to MSNBC); and Twitter did internal investigations and could not find evidence of Russian activity in regards to Nunes’ memo. Blumenthal and other congressmen flooded Twitter with requests, but still, the evidence would not surface. AP, Politico, NBC, Business Insider, Snopes, Rolling Stone, and others continued to spread the disinformation about Russian bots, without evidence, and the networks even blamed Russia for several domestic events within the United States, such as the Parkland shooter incident. Again, liberals and progressive, hell-bent on sinking Trump and having their hatred of the president on full display, would stoop to any level to rid the country of their political enemy (including the collusion investigation, two impeachments, and a classified documents breach; and the crazy part is that Biden engaged in quid pro quo in Ukraine as vice president and had classified documents himself). They would even spread misinformation that went along with their agenda (like Russian bots influencing the gun control debate or the suppression of the black vote), and then, they would turn around and cry that disinformation campaigns were a huge threat to our democracy.
It turns out that RussiaGate was a huge nothingburger, but for years, liberals and progressives pushed this false narrative about the illegitimacy of Trump’s presidency, despite them criticizing and investigating Republicans who denied the results of the 2020 election. You cannot say that the election denial by your rival party is a threat to democracy while also denying the legitimacy of the elections when it is convenient for your party. This is not only hypocritical and partisan, but it is also pathetic.
Twitter Files Part 15
As mentioned above, the Hamilton 68 dashboard to detect Russian bots was not evidence-based intelligence, nor were the targets Russian or even bots, and it turns out that it was more of an effort to eliminate posts and information from conservative or counternarrative circles than it was about protecting Americans from foreign influence. Interestingly, Bill Kristol, Michael McFaul (former Russian ambassador), John Podesta (head of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, a current senior advisor for President Biden, and holder of other high-level positions within the government), and heads and deputy heads of the CIA, NSA, and DHS were all members of the ASD’s advisory council. Hamilton 68, in addition to claiming that Russian bots were infiltrating Trump’s run for the presidency, even targeted Bernie Sander’s and Tulsi Gabbard’s campaigns (it was pro-Hillary Clinton), and all of these attacks against political dissidents were based off of a list produced by ASD.
The corporate media, which ran with the false stories of Russian bots, could not cite anything that Hamilton 68 created, and instead, they were basing their narratives on faith that the federal government was telling them the truth (which it was not). Guess what? All of those liberals, progressives, and Democrats who called their political enemies Russian agents and Putin apologists were completely mistaken and ignorant. The so-called Russian bots were actually legitimate non-Russian accounts by people who simply did not bow to the narrative being pushed, and the federal government used Hamilton 68 as a surveillance and censorship tool, the First and Fourth Amendments be damned. Several critics, including the writer of this portion, Matt Taibbi, took the opportunity to point out that what the federal government is doing (yes, present tense), equates to McCarthyism in our time.
Even though Twitter was concerned with the falsehoods spread by Hamilton 68, it did very little to challenge the claims or present the information to the public. In addition to the corporate media, so-called fact-checkers, anti-Trump alternative media, and government officials relying on ASD’s program; even Harvard, Princeton, Temple, New York University, and other academic institutions fell for the trap and pushed disinformation as truth.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, the majority of Americans now believe (or seemingly believe) that right-wing, libertarian, pro-Trump, and nonconformist individuals are promoting disinformation and relying on fake news to frighten the public (on top of them also being painted as domestic terrorists by the Biden administration). Yet, should dissident voices in the United States not be enraged and seeking alternative news sources? President Trump had the election stolen from him or rigged against him, even if this was done by censorship and narrative manipulation instead of through the electoral process.
We are in dangerous new totalitarian territory, and most Americans are in the dark on what is actually taking place (or they do not care). Freedom is now an illusion in the United States, and the First and Fourth Amendments exist only on paper. The revolving door of government agents and defense and media industries makes it near impossible to understand the full truth on anything. In fact, we may find out that the information provided in the Twitter Files is exaggerated or fabricated in some way, though based on research that I have done on many other topics, it seems unlikely that the information presented is false or misleading (though it does appear biased towards Republicans and conservatives, when this should be a unifying message to convince Democrats and liberals that censorship and government manipulation and corruption are bad). Can enough Americans stand up to tyranny and wake up from their propaganda slumber? The future is up to us. Will we continue down the current road to disaster, or will we fight for our freedom?
Thank you for reading, and please check out my book, The Global Bully, and website.