Start Dot Connecting With These Busters Right'Chere!!! (The Character Of The Country Was On The Ballot)

nypost |  Exactly two years ago, on October 19, 2020, one of the dirtiest tricks in electoral history was played on the American people by 51 former intelligence officials, who used the false alarm of “Russian interference” to stop Donald Trump winning a second term as president.

Using the institutional weight of their former esteemed roles, they signed a dishonest letter to mislead voters 15 days before the election, claiming that material from Hunter Biden’s laptop published by the New York Post “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

In their expert opinion, “the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue.”

Russia was “trying to influence how Americans vote in this election … Moscow [will] pull out the stops to do anything possible to help Trump win and/or to weaken Biden should he win.

“A ‘laptop op’ fits the bill, as the publication of the emails are [sic] clearly designed to discredit Biden … It is high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.”

It was all a lie. Their letter was the culprit “interfering with democracy” in broad daylight.

Not one of the 51 had seen any material from the laptop or bothered asking for it, but their letter, instigated by, signed and delivered to Politico by Democratic operative and former John Brennan aide Nick Shapiro, killed the story stone dead. It got candidate Joe Biden off the hook for the corrupt influence-peddling scheme his family had been running through the eight years of his vice presidency.

The shameful letter was used by Joe Biden three days later, on October 22, to deflect Trump’s attack in their last debate.

“There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan … Four, five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage … You know his character. You know my character. You know my reputation is for honor and telling the truth … The character of the country is on the ballot.”

Biden dismissed as a Kremlin smear all the evidence that was on his son’s laptop of dirty money from China and Russia, of all his meetings with Hunter’s overseas business partners, and all the lies he had told about his involvement in Hunter’s business deals.
The letter, like the Steele dossier and Russia collusion hoax peddled by many of the signatories, has helped fuel a moral panic about Russia in recent years that now has heightened the risk of nuclear war.

As well as sharing their Trump derangement, the Dirty 51 sit on the same boards and think tanks, speak at the same events or liberal TV shows, write for the same publications, pal around with the same journalists, retweet each other’s “Slava Ukraini” or Mar-a-Lago memes, share hawkish views about regime change in Russia and are remarkably sanguine about the prospect of nuclear war.

You would think since so many have been outed for their involvement in the (non-existent) weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence disaster that justified the Iraq war, not to mention secret prisons, torture, warrantless eavesdropping and the bulk collection of Americans’ data, they might have learned some humility.

 

What EXACTLY Were The FBI And Twitter Talking About At Their Weekly Meetings?

jonathanturley |  The internal company documents released by Musk reinforce what we have seen previously in other instances of Twitter censorship. A recent federal filing revealed a 2021 email between Twitter executives and Carol Crawford, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s digital media chief. Crawford’s back-channel communication sought to censor other “unapproved opinions” on social media; Twitter replied that “with our CEO testifying before Congress this week [it] is tricky.”

At the time, Twitter’s Dorsey and other tech CEOs were about to appear at a House hearing to discuss “misinformation” on social media and their “content modification” policies. I had just testified on private censorship in circumventing the First Amendment as a type of censorship by surrogate. Dorsey and the other CEOs were asked about my warning of a “‘little brother’ problem, a problem which private entities do for the government that which it cannot legally do for itself.” In response, Dorsey insisted that “we don’t have a censoring department.”

The implications of these documents becomes more serious once the Biden campaign became the Biden administration. These documents show a back channel existed with President Biden’s campaign officials, but those same back channels appear to have continued to be used by Biden administration officials. If so, that would be when Twitter may have gone from a campaign ally to a surrogate for state censorship. As I have previously written, the administration cannot censor critics and cannot use agents for that purpose under the First Amendment.

That is precisely what Musk is now alleging. As the documents were being released, he tweeted, “Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is.”

The incoming Republican House majority has pledged to investigate — and Musk has made that process far easier by making good on his pledge of full transparency.

Washington has fully mobilized in its all-out war against Musk. Yet, with a record number of users signing up with Twitter, it seems clear the public is not buying censorship. They want more, not less, free speech.

That may be why political figures such as Hillary Clinton have enlisted foreign governments to compel the censoring of fellow citizens: If Twitter can’t be counted on to censor, perhaps the European Union will be the ideal surrogate to rid social media of these meddlesome posters.

The release of these documents has produced a level of exposure rarely seen in Washington, where such matters usually are simply “handled.” The political and media establishments generally are unstoppable forces — but they may have met their first immovable object in Musk.

 

Why Do The Twitter Files Matter?

gizmodo  |  There is genuine news value to a story along the lines of “These Are the Emails That Led to Twitter Suppressing the Hunter Biden Laptop Story.” It is rare for a company as large and valuable as Twitter to account so thoroughly for wrongdoing, perceived or actual. The emails resemble the documents received in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. They detail internal drama at a company whose power is on the order of a government agency, maybe greater. BuzzFeed’s Katie Notopoulos tweeted, “Any news outlet would’ve loved to have this scoop! It’s just not a ‘scandal’ as teased.”

Twitter’s new owner considers it “the de facto public town square,” suggesting he believes in a level of public accountability. Again, not unlike a government agency. Though it is thrilling to receive once-hidden documents in response to a FOIA, it is also possible that those documents are boring, that they tell you what you already know. Such is the case with the Twitter files. We learned how Twitter came to its decision to block the Post’s story, but we did not learn a shocking new reason why. We knew Twitter suppressed the story before the release of these documents, and, for the most part, we knew who was involved.

Those people have since suffered professional punishment and left Twitter. Vijaya Gadde, the former chief legal officer who played a “key role” in the decision, according to Taibbi, was fired by Musk. Roth quit over Musk’s “dictatorial edict.” Borrman left before Musk arrived. Jack Dorsey, CEO at the time, is gone. When deciding to digitally quarantine the Post’s story, did those people act out of fealty to Joe Biden and the Democratic Party? Out of opposition to the Republican Party and hatred for Donald Trump? Out of distaste for the New York Post? Judging by the documents we have, we can’t say they did. Was it drastic interference in the political process and the press? It was. We already knew that.

Taibbi interviewed several anonymous ex-Twitter employees on the decision, all of whom expressed shock and outrage at the company’s actions: “Everyone knew this was f–ked,” he quotes one source. But since Taibbi doesn’t quote that expletive from the leaked emails, we can reason they included few or no quotes as sensational for his purpose. Ergo, we can deduce that those executives said little to support claims of nefarious purposes.

Outlets far more vested in the Hunter Biden story than Gizmodo also seem vexed by the release, and delivered the news below muted headlines. If the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop belongs to any one outlet, it belongs to the New York Post, which has never shied away from a blaring headline in its 221-year life. Yet the Post’s two Friday-night notifications about Musk’s actions were restrained. The first was a simple curtain-raiser about Musk’s promise: “Elon Musk to drop Twitter files on NY Post-Hunter Biden laptop censorship today.” The other was a “Read these documents”-style headline: “Hunter Biden laptop bombshell: Elon Musk’s Twitter drops Post censorship details.” Fox News’ push alert, delivered via Apple News, read “Elon Musk drops bombshell docs on Twitter censorship.”

Bombshell, bombshell, bombshell… what, exactly, is the bombshell? We’ve yet to hear it explode. Maybe we’ve heard too much about this story, and we’re missing the forest for the trees. Or maybe these documents detail a decision where the outcome was already well-documented.

On its website, the Post argues why you should care. Twitter is censoring things willy-nilly and concocting reasons to do as it goes along, its headline implies: “Hunter Biden laptop bombshell: Twitter invented reason to censor Post’s reporting.”

And yet, it is not shocking that Twitter used an ad hoc decision to moderate a piece of content from one of America’s most infamous tabloids. The social network had done that exact thing for years as it struggled with toxic users—violent white nationalists, virulent transphobes, harassers and bullies of all political stripes, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum et ad nauseam. The company never had a handle on content moderation, and it certainly doesn’t now, no matter how much Musk crows. Back in 2016, a lengthy investigative story published by Buzzfeed showed how Twitter had been struggling with abusive posters since its 2006 founding. Jack Dorsey and all his executives made things up as they went along, just like Musk.

Lastly, did the United States government run interference on a social media company for the former vice president? That would be shocking indeed, a bonafide bombshell. Musk himself said as much Friday: “Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is.” That is true! And Taibbi once believed that is what happened. In August 2022, he tweeted: “The laptop is by the far the secondary issue. The real problem is the FBI stepping in to cut distribution of true story [sic],” as pointed out by Columbia professor and New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufecki. But on Friday night, Taibbi rescinded the assertion: “There’s no evidence—that I’ve seen—of any government involvement in the laptop story.”

The Trumpification Of Elon Musk

realclearpolitics  |  The relentless attacks on Elon Musk since he purchased Twitter should be familiar to most Americans. It’s exactly what Democrats and their media and corporate allies did to demonize Donald Trump.

The McCarthyite formula is simple: Claim you are defending high-minded principles (Democracy! The rule of law! Civil discourse!) to justify efforts to delegitimize someone you’ve identified as a political opponent.

Democrats denied Trump’s presidency from day one; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden themselves declared for years that he had stolen the 2016 election. In the name of election integrity, Democrats turned a bogus conspiracy theory cooked up by Clinton’s campaign about Russian collusion into years of official investigations that undermined and tainted Trump. When Special Counsel Robert Mueller proved that a lie, Democrats immediately seized on a few innocuous sentences in a Trump phone call with a foreign leader to launch just the third presidential impeachment in U.S. history.

Those events are well-known, but ponder them for a moment. This was a soft coup, a nonviolent version of Jan. 6 that was far more dangerous than the Capitol riot. The effort to remove a lawfully elected president was planned and orchestrated by officials at the highest level of government and the media. While Jan. 6 was a one-off eruption of crazed anger, the false attacks on Trump edged our political discourse toward Orwellian Newspeak by presenting lies and smears as ringing defenses of sacred constitutional values.

The ongoing attacks against Musk are following the same playbook. The man once hailed by liberals as a genius for developing electric vehicles is now Public Enemy No. 1 because he says Twitter should allow more free speech. Ponder that as well: Musk’s enemies are casting him as a threat to the country because of his commitment to one of America’s most cherished freedoms.

FBI Gave Social Media Censorship And Content Targeting Instructions

foxnews  |  An FBI agent testified to Republican attorneys general this week that the FBI held weekly meetings with Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley ahead of the 2020 presidential election to discuss "disinformation" on social media and ask about efforts to censor that information.

On Tuesday, lawyers from the offices of Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana deposed FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan as part of their lawsuit against the Biden administration. That suit accuses high-ranking government officials of working with giant social media companies "under the guise of combating misinformation" to achieve greater censorship.

Chan, who serves in the FBI’s San Francisco bureau, was questioned under oath by court order about his alleged "critical role" in "coordinating with social-media platforms relating to censorship and suppression of speech on their platforms."

During the deposition, Chan said that he, along with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and senior Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency officials, had weekly meetings with major social media companies to warn against Russian disinformation attempts ahead of the 2020 election, according to a source in the Missouri attorney general's office.

Those meetings were initially quarterly, then monthly, then weekly heading into the presidential election between former President Donald Trump and now President Biden. According to a source, Chan testified that in those multiple, separate meetings, the FBI warned the social media companies that there could be potentially Russian "hack and dump" or "hack and leak" operations.

In their complaint, the GOP AGs noted an Aug. 26 podcast episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience," in which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that "the FBI basically came to us" and told Facebook to be "on high alert" relating to "a lot of Russian propaganda." Zuckerberg added that the FBI said "there’s about to be some kind of dump… that’s similar to that, so just be vigilant."

As noted in the complaint, Zuckerberg stated, "If the FBI… if they come to us and tell us we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously." Zuckerberg said he could not recall if the FBI specifically flagged the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation, but said that the story "basically fit the pattern" that the FBI had identified.

"On information and belief, the FBI’s reference to a 'dump' of information was a specific reference to the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, which was already in the FBI's possession," the complaint said.

 

Did The Kardashians Do To Poor Kanye What They Did To Bruce Jenner?

 

theatlantic  |  If you’re looking for a way to understand the right wing’s internet-poisoned, extremist trajectory, one great document is an infamous October 6 tweet from the House Judiciary GOP that read, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” This tweet was likely intended to own the libs by adding Kanye to an informal, Avengers-style list of supposed free-speech warriors and truth tellers—a variation, perhaps, on the sort of viral meme that the Trump camp deployed during the 2016 election. (Remember the “Deplorables”?) It was written in support of the rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, shortly after he wore a white lives matter shirt during one of his fashion shows.

This was just the beginning of a shocking two-month spiral of anti-Semitic rhetoric that has led to the undoing of Ye’s business empire and his full transformation into arguably the most openly bigoted famous person in American life. Throughout this grim unraveling—which has as its backdrop Ye’s ongoing mental-health issues—he has been thoroughly embraced by right-wing media as well as prominent white nationalists. He has also been active on the Republican political scene, most recently dining with former President Donald Trump and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.

All throughout, the @JudiciaryGOP tweet stayed up. Over the past eight weeks, people have used it as a barometer for what kind of awful behavior the GOP will accept. And so it is notable that, yesterday afternoon, it was finally deleted after Ye’s calamitous appearance on Alex Jones’s Infowars broadcast. Wearing a black face mask, Ye drank Yoo-hoo, read from the Bible, and repeatedly and enthusiastically offered his praise for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis (“They did good things, too”) while spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric alongside Fuentes.

Say What You Will About Kanye - Ain't Nobody Ever Called Him A Liar

LATimes  |  While West initially struggled to be taken seriously as a rapper, his solo breakthrough came after a brutal car wreck that required his jaw to be wired shut. The impervious confidence of his song “Through the Wire” and his debut, “The College Dropout,” propelled him to 10 Grammy nominations in 2005.

When he castigated President George W. Bush’s failed response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on live TV — “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” — many Americans saw a brave rapper taking on the government and standing up for the Black community.

“In that moment after Katrina, his lack of social graces made him an important figure speaking truth to power,” Wasow said.

West recorded a bestselling, orchestra-driven album, “Late Registration,” with indie producer Jon Brion. West’s next LP, “Graduation,” won a 2007 sales war with 50 Cent, seen as a victory for ambitious, heartfelt hip-hop.

Yet the sudden, tragic death of his mother in 2007, after complications from cosmetic surgery, shattered his world. He seemed to blame himself for it — “When I moved to L.A., she moved to L.A. And she wound up in a place that would eat her alive,” he wrote in XXL after her death. “If I had lived in New York, she’d still be here.”

He rapped about his feelings on 2008’s “Pinocchio Story,” from the bleak and groundbreaking LP “808s & Heartbreak”: “The only one was behind me / I can’t find her no more, I can’t call her no more … The day I moved to L.A., maybe that was all my fault.”

“A single mom with a single child, they had each other’s backs no matter what,” Baker said. “That’s a little bit of where that fierce protectiveness comes from. When I found out that Donda died, my first reaction was, will he be OK?”

His boastfulness and hair-trigger temper enlivened awards shows and earned a “South Park” parody. In 2009, he rushed the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards to vent frustration over Taylor Swift beating Beyoncé for best female video. It blew up a planned tour with Lady Gaga and led Obama to insult him on that hot-mic recording. From a fellow Chicago legend, it hurt. “You know I’m your favorite,” West said afterward. “Just tell me you love me. And tell the world you love me. Don’t tell the world I’m a jackass, I’m fighting hard enough.”

West made some of his finest music in the next years, including 2010’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” and 2013’s “Yeezus,” and in 2014 married Kardashian in a fame-merging event for the ages. Yet signs of creeping antisemitism began to emerge. West said in a 2013 radio interview that “Black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people. … We ain’t Jewish. We don’t get family that got money like that.” He responded to criticism by saying, “I thought I was giving a compliment. … I don’t know how being told you have money is an insult.”

Fans began to question his beliefs, and even his stability, in 2016. He wrote on Twitter that “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!” and depicted him and Trump nude in bed in the video for “Famous.” He declared onstage at a California concert that, while he didn’t vote, he “would have voted for Trump.” He underlined the point by meeting with Trump in New York, claiming, “I feel it is important to have a direct line of communication with our future President if we truly want change.”

That November, after Kardashian was bound and robbed in a Paris hotel room, West’s paranoia spun out further. Onstage at a concert, he said, “Jay-Z, call me, bruh. You still ain’t called me. ... Jay-Z, I know you got killers. Please don’t send them at my head. Just call me. Talk to me like a man.” He ended the show early and canceled his remaining tour. Just hours later, after police responded to a welfare check call at his trainer’s home, West entered treatment at UCLA Medical Center for a “psychiatric emergency,” according to the Los Angeles Fire Department dispatch call.

Slate Let Some Soyboys Run Their Mouths Reckless Before The Friday File Drop...,

Slate |   Musk’s rightward drift is one of the most scrutinized storylines in the tech sector. After fashioning himself as an ecological visionary dedicated to saving human civilization from disaster through clean energy, space colonization, and a thick portfolio filled with generous government contracts, Musk has recently solidified himself as a fringe, sideshow mouthpiece for the Lauren Boebert wing of the GOP. (He still claims to be a centrist, in the same way that commentator Tim Pool claims to be a disaffected liberal.) All of the man’s established precepts have been swapped out with issues that reek of a distinctly paleoconservative tang. For instance: He now believes that swooning birth rates are a bigger threat to the human race than climate change is. Musk has carried that philosophy into his management approach, and has operated his newly purchased social network with the cloying, unserious cruelty of so many unaccountable titans of capital before him: mass layoffs, hollowing austerity measures, and yes, a willingness to frequently rub elbows with guys like Ian Miles Cheong. It is as if his sole desire is to be hated by liberals, which appears to be the only animating praxis of the entire Republican Party.

I’m not here to home in on the particulars of Musk’s politics. (I already did that, a month ago.) In fact, I’d argue that his recent redpilling is barely relevant to why his stewardship of Twitter has been so uniquely agitating. Sure, it isn’t ideal that Musk has restored the accounts of guys like Jordan Peterson, but I am not of the opinion that social media has much effect on corporeal reality. (May I reiterate one more time: the midterms!) Instead, the worst part about Musk’s Twitter tenure is that he is simply bad at posting. He was consistently one of the most oppressive presences on social media in the mid-2010s, back when he was promising to dig a tunnel from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and he’s only grown more obnoxious as he attempts to fabricate a strained MAGA pivot while he slowly loses all of his famous friends. We have handed over the Crucible of Posting to someone who has a remedial understanding of the art; honestly, that might be the impetus for his radicalization.

There’s already a lot of literature that’s been published on Musk’s shortcomings as a poster. In 2021 the New York Times went long on the frequency at which Elon pilfers memes he finds on Reddit without proper accreditation (a big no-no—just ask @FuckJerry). The underlying thesis here is that he was never able to engineer the creativity, humor, or cultural fluency necessary to become an elite tweeter, so, like innumerable struggling YouTubers and canceled podcast hosts before him, Musk has started playing to the cheap seats by taking on the woke mob in the name of free speech, which has, frankly, become the hackiest and most overplayed hand on social media.

Slate |  You are Elon Musk. You possess the not-wholly-unjustified sense that you can beat anyone in business combat. Being the richest guy in the world confers a certain steamrolling feeling that is hard to shake. Some of that vibe is even grounded in reality. For example, you can more or less use securities law as toilet paper while building up shares in Twitter and not lose a wink of sleep over it. You can hire excellent lawyers and deploy them for limitless hours against your critics and enemies. The worst day of your life is still a day in which you have more wealth than anybody else.

Some of this strength is only in your head, though. Being you has privileges and curses, and one of each is that you’re surrounded in large part by sycophants. Some of them have fancy jobs and want to do business with you. Most of them, numbering somewhere in the millions, will never meet you but will cheer you on all the while, believing there is genius in everything you do. They will believe you can browbeat an extremely well-lawyered public company into getting out of a deal that has no apparent legal out. (To be fair, Wall Street may also believe that.) When you get stuck buying that company, and things immediately get rough, you might pick a fight with the most valuable company in the history of the world. What looks like desperation to most people will look like a stroke of nine-dimensional chess to your fanbase. You could accidentally shoot yourself in the testicles with a rifle, and your most devout followers would spot a long game to start a prosthetic genital company at a $2 trillion valuation.

NYTimes, WaPo, LATimes, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe Acted Like The Twitter Drop Didn't Happen

https://nypost.com/2022/12/02/elon-musk-releases-twitters-files-on-censorship-of-post/

 

I'm Not Leaving Twitter

WaPo  |  If there’s a group that should be fleeing Twitter, one would think it would be Black women. An analysis by Amnesty International and Element AI found that Black women were 84 percent more likely than White women to receive abusive and hateful tweets. At this point in my career, I’ve been threatened with rape and called the n-word more times than I can count. I’ve had authoritarian and supposedly liberal governments attack me online. And that doesn’t include the tweets from professional, blue-check-marked figures who have condescended to me and belittled my work or expertise.

Twitter has always been a snake pit catering to the worst of human impulses. It rewards the most extreme viewpoints. And it has reinforced our society’s race and gender caste divides, making the space safest for White people at the top (especially men) and more brutal for Black, Brown and LGBTQ people at the bottom.

Yet lately, it is mostly White Twitter migrants who have flocked to places such as Mastodon to escape Musk.

Here’s the thing: In real life, Black women have not had the privilege of retreating every time things get tough or our spaces get taken over by rich, obnoxious White men. For years, via Twitter, Black women have been sounding the alarm about having targets on our backs. We’ve protested, we’ve resisted. Yet it took Musk, the rise of blatant antisemitism and elite men feeling uncomfortable to finally prompt more widespread protests and, now, an exodus.

I agree that staying on Twitter to engage in battles with trolls isn’t “resistance.” But building community and mobilizing resources are.

Twitter is probably the only global digital platform where elite institutions and powerful individuals share space with marginalized people, including the working and lower classes. It has the power to quickly focus enormous amounts of attention on crucial issues.

I’ve seen people use Twitter to raise funds for mutual aid groups and disaster recovery. Disabled people have called Twitter a lifeline of networking and support. And just recently, the case of Shanquella Robinson, who was killed in Mexico while on a trip with friends, would not have gotten mainstream attention if it weren’t for Black Twitter.

Twitter hashtags have been used to help organize, mobilize and amplify the biggest peaceful resistance movements on the planet — movements that, by the numbers, have dwarfed white supremacist rallies and the raging crowd at the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Twitter has also been a powerful tool for accountability, especially for Black voices challenging harmful narratives out of major media institutions. And on a small, personal scale, it can be revolutionary, allowing individuals to form life-giving relationships with people they otherwise never would have met.

I know Twitter is no substitute for on-the-ground activism and deep engagement with weighty problems. And it’s always risky to become dependent on a platform one doesn’t own. But as the times ahead get more challenging, the last thing liberals should do is abandon the potent tools at their disposal — even if those tools aren’t perfect.

People on the right know well how to exploit every instrument of social and cultural power. Sadly, the left seems not to have figured this out. Liberal inaction and retreat do not bode well for anti-racist allyship or “resistance.”

So yes, I will go down with the Twitter ship. I’m not interested in hyperfocusing on the antics of one rich man. Instead, I’ll train my attention on the energy, creativity and beauty of the communities that have made Twitter my digital home for the past decade. The racists, fascists and trolls haven’t stopped me before. We shouldn’t let them stop us now.

The 4th Reich Has An AWFUL Lot Of Skeletons In Its Closet

kunstler  |  Barreling down to Christmas and the bitter butt end of a bad year, a primal fear of the deepening darkness makes people desperate — another reminder that human nature has not changed so much in ten thousand years, despite the discoveries of Prozac and plant-based meat. Yet Freud was right: death has its attractions for tormented minds. Thus, our nation appears to hasten to its own funeral.

       Can anyone actually grok how “progressive” thinking works these days? This faction now in charge of so many things has decided in the starkest terms that freedom of speech has got to go. For some years, the Party of Chaos had achieved such exquisite control of all national debate by seizing the dials and toggles of social media that they made reality itself their hostage.  The truth was only what they said it was, and anyone who said otherwise got banished, cancelled, and even destroyed.

     There seemed to be no way to overcome this death grip on the process of consensus, the formation of a coherent collective idea about what is going on in the world. And so, any number of scams could be run on the people of this land. They could rig elections in plain sight. They could surreptitiously suspend due process of law when it suited them. They could send national police thugs to your door at five-o’clock in the morning with riot guns, body armor, flash bangs, and bogus warrants. They could take your livelihoods, your freedom to move about, your childrens’ minds and bodies, and your dignity. Finally, they could take your life with false vaccines — and, unlike the Nazis in 1944, get the private sector to dispose of the corpses.

     And now a struggle ensues over the relationship between the truth and the making of a consensus. Elon Musk bought Twitter — the horror! — and methodically set about to liberate this new digital “public square” from insidious and nefarious manipulation. It’s not a trifling matter, of course, but it’s amusing to watch Elon play with our nation’s overlords; and even more entertaining to see these tyrants strain and bluster to justify their war against free speech. How did the cognitive elite, America’s thinking class, the law professors, the editors and pundits, the public intellectuals, the managers of most everything, ever find themselves so self-owned in idiocy?

     I wish I’d been a fly-on-the-wall in that meeting mid-week between Elon Musk and Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple — the very same week that Apple disabled the Air-drop function on iPhones in China (slyly, by means of a new OS update), making it more difficult for street protesters to coordinate their movements against CCP lockdowns. Rumors were flying days before that the Lords of Tech would pull on Twitter the same kind of treatment they dealt to Parler two years ago, a then-rising rival app for Internet chatter that threatened to open up free debate. Apple and Google took Parler out behind the woodshed and shot it in the head — and nobody could do a damn thing about it. I have a hunch that Elon explained a few things to Tim Cook that made him think twice about another move like that.

Twitter is different than the upstart Parler was. Twitter was already established as the authorities’ official arbiter of approved thought in America. Under the old boss, Jack Dorsey, Twitter accomplished its thought management ends with a staff of thousands of mini-Stalins rooting out anything that smelled like opposition to the official narratives. (Elon fired the whole lot of them in short order.) It has been revealed since then that Twitter carried out censorship at the aggressive prompting of US deep state officialdom, the nagging, twanging, and strong-arming by bureaucrats from many federal agencies. Who knows (not yet, anyway) how many Twitter censors were actually put in-place by the government?

       So now, one big truth has come nakedly out in the open: the Left is against the First Amendment to the Constitution. Free speech, they say repeatedly now, makes our democracy unsafe. It can’t be allowed. They say that because they don’t have a better argument. The safety talking-point is a shopworn cliché from their grab-bag of Woke shibboleths that the public is sick of hearing. Anyone with half a brain can see how transparently dishonest and stupid it is. It’s not going over well, even among a people so sorely gaslighted as the USA in late 2022.

       Speaking of what is safe and what is not safe, one of the main deceptions the past three years has been the suppression of information about the Covid-19 vaccines that were foisted on the population — for many, made a requirement to earn a living. The old Twitter worked strenuously to bury any data and all news that suggested the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines were disabling and killing people. It has now reached a critical point, with so many suspicious “all-causes” deaths coming to the public’s attention. This is what the authorities are really afraid of: that the people will learn their government has carried out — by epic incompetence or true malice — something the looks like an attempted genocide.

 

Hollywood For Ugly People Continues Its War On Free Speech

jonathanturley |  The real question is why the political, business, and media establishment is ramping up this campaign. The answer is power. With President Biden and Democratic senators supporting investigations, the message could not be clearer: proceed at your own peril. That message was brought home by Politico’s Sam Stein when he warned Musk that it is “[a]lways risky to attack members of congress. Especially risky with Dems assured of Senate power.”

For years, Democratic politicians and their allies have exercised an enormous degree of control over political discourse through allies in the media and social media.

The problem is that censorship only works if it is complete. If there are alternative sources for information, free speech is like water . . . it finds a way out. That is why Democratic members pressured cable carriers to drop Fox News, the most popular cable news network on television. (For the record, I appear as a Fox News legal analyst). Having an echo chamber on every other news channel means little if alternative views or stories are just a click away.

The same is true for print media. With the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and a few other newspapers, the effort to kill stories like the Hunter Biden laptop could not be completely successful. The truth found a way out and now the same outlets that peddled the false “Russian disinformation” claim are admitting that the laptop is authentic.

The threat is an even greater on social media, the area of greatest success for those seeking to control political discourse. If Musk carries through on his pledge, the public will have a free speech alternative and they are already speaking loudly by signing up with the company in record numbers. Despite a creepy Facebook advertising campaign to convince the public to embrace censorship, it has not worked.

The public is not buying. They are buying Free Twitter.

So, the only way to regain control is to prevent people from getting the app or threaten to force Twitter into insolvency. The problem is Musk, an eccentric billionaire who is not easy to intimidate.

Musk now stands against a massive alliance of governments, corporations, celebrities, and politicians. He has only the public and free speech on his side.

He needs to use both.

Musk cannot remain on defense and just take political and economic hits. The campaign is growing because the risk is growing for these various interests.

The way to end this is simple: release everything related to the company’s massive censorship operation. This is an effort to force Musk not only to resume censorship but to protect the censors. So, open the files. Allow the public to see not just communications on censorship (including subjects beyond Hunter Biden) but how Twitter may have used verification, throttling, algorithms, or other methods to control speech. The company does not have to release codes or potentially damaging information to reveal the back channel communications, deliberations, and targeting choices.

By embracing total transparency, Musk can force Apple and other companies to face the ugly realities of censorship. The anti-free speech alliance has declared total war on Twitter. It is time for Twitter to get into this fight and realize that free speech is not just its guiding principle but its greatest weapon.

When Musk threatened to restore free speech protections, Hillary Clinton and others went public to “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”

So be it.

The Musk purchase has forced people to pick sides in this fight for free speech. However, Musk can leave the dogs at home and just unleash the truth.

Huntergate: The Twitter Files

1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES

2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.

3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.

4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.

5. In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”

6. As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.

7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.

8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”

9. Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party:

10.Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However:

11. This system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right. opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/s…

Ancient Anatolia: Meetings With The Ancient Teachers Of Mankind

arkeonews  |  “Our findings change the perception, still seen in schoolbooks across the world, that settled life resulted from farming and animal husbandry,” he said at a September presentation of the site. “This shows that it begins when humans were still hunter-gatherers and that agriculture is not a cause, but the effect, of settled life.”

The region of these settlements is named “Taş Tepeler,” literally meaning Stone Hills. Covering an area of 200 kilometers from one end to the other, Taş Tepeler is an Anatolian and Upper Mesopotamian territory that hosted the earliest settled communities.

As far as we know, Taş Tepeler is the first example of sedentism and social union on earth. Sacred and secular spaces were built simultaneously at Karahantepe, where humans dwelled year-round for about 1,500 years, and no remnants of farmed vegetation have been found.

Göbekli Tepe, which was previously thought to be the only place where nomadic people came to worship, is now considered a part of simultaneous settlements. Recent work has also revealed domestic structures at Göbekli Tepe. “In this region, we encounter monumental structures for the first time in the oldest villages of the world,” Karul says.

Scientists have long assumed that the domestication of plants and animals approximately 10,000 years ago pushed people to adopt a sedentary lifestyle and that the increase in food production enabled them to establish complex communities and build the groundwork for civilization. However, emerging evidence that Stone Age people erected permanent buildings for spiritual, rather than technically necessary, activities are challenging the conventional wisdom that they lacked a large-scale civilization with the division of labor and common ceremonial themes.

The Neolithic era, which coincided with the end of the Ice Age, symbolizes humanity’s tremendous transition from foraging to farming.

“It will take time for the scientific community to digest and accept this game-changing research,” says Mehmet Özdoğan, the professor emeritus of archaeology at Istanbul University.

“We must now rethink what we knew—that civilization emerged from a horizontal society that began raising wheat because people were hungry—and assess this period with its multi-faceted society. The foundations for today’s civilization, from family law to inheritance to the state and bureaucracy, were all struck in the Neolithic period,” Özdoğan says.

In Taş Tepeler, which is thought to be the beginning of the process where the shelter turned into a dwelling and real villages emerged 12 thousand years ago, there are finds on humanity’s first use of pottery and the ability to carry out basic trade initiatives. The monumental structures in the region are believed to be communal spaces where people come together.

Karahantepe rises within Şanlıurfa’s interesting limestone authentic land structure. These limestone rocks are the main material of the finds.

 

Premature Rejection Of The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis - Sound Familiar?

sagepub | Scientists have initially rejected many theories that later achieved widespread consensus. In some instances, the rejection lasted for half a century or more, until enough new evidence arrived to convert all but the most obstinate opponents, who often carried their opposition to the grave.¹ The canonical example in the earth sciences is continental drift. First proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912, continental drift did not achieve consensus until the mid-1960s.² The theory of meteorite impact cratering on the Moon and the Earth provides another example. We can date its origin to a classic 1893 paper by the great American geologist G. K. Gilbert³ and the beginning of its broad acceptance to 1964 and the first returned photographs of lunar craters from the Ranger missions to the Moon. Both rejections stemmed mainly from the allegiance of geologists to the principle of uniformitarianism, which eschewed catastrophic events such as moving continents and colliding meteorites. Anthropogenic global warming offers a third example. First proposed by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, within a few years it had become almost universally rejected, based on a single, misinterpreted experiment.⁴ Its acceptance began with the first results of computerized climate modeling in the mid-1960s. The pioneer of climate modeling, Syukuro Manabe, won the 2021 Nobel prize in physics for his early work. Today we can only wonder what the effect would have been had scientists in the first half of the twentieth century retained AGW as a working hypothesis.

One would hope and expect that in the internet age, with its online journals, instant communication, and vastly improved scientific methods and instrumentation, premature rejection would be a thing of the past. The reaction to the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH), introduced in 2007, shows that this assumption is incorrect.⁵ Within months of its appearance, two authors⁶ called the hypothesis a “Frankenstein Monster” and in 2011, the same two plus others⁷ compared it to UFOs and other examples of “pathological science” and wrote its “requiem.” Yet after a comprehensive review of the literature in 2021, Sweatman⁸ concluded: “Probably, with the YD impact event essentially confirmed, the YD impact hypothesis should now be called a ‘theory’.” The question this article seeks to answer is how scientists can so thoroughly reject a hypothesis, even write its requiem, only to have it emerge in little more than a decade strengthened and deserving of possible promotion to the status of theory.

 

It should have been clear to readers, including peer reviewers, that Pinter and Ishman had offered hyperbolic language but no actual evidence against the YDIH; that Surovell et al.³⁷ had failed to sample the YDB and/or made fatal errors in procedure; and that the samples reported by Scott et al.⁴⁰ and used by Pinter et al.⁷ and Daulton et al.⁴⁹ had not come from the YDB and therefore did not bear directly on the impact hypothesis. Instead of critically examining and rejecting these false claims, many geologists and impact specialists embraced them, thereby allowing an alleged absence of evidence to trump abundant, peer-reviewed evidence, even photographic evidence. Then a kind of “groupthink” seems to have set in, rendering the YDIH beneath further consideration.

 

The broader lesson from impact cratering, continental drift, anthropogenic global warming, and now the YDIH is that it is better to encourage further research than to prematurely condemn a novel, data-based hypothesis to the dust bin of science. Unfortunately, once a hypothesis has been prematurely rejected, even truly “extraordinary evidence” may not be enough to restore it to scientific respectability.

 

Compliant Meat-Robots Don't Get To Question The Status Quo

realitysandwich  |  DMT (N, N-dimethyltryptamine) is an incredibly powerful, short-lasting tryptamine psychedelic found naturally in animals, fungi, and a wide variety of plants. DMT experiences are characterized by fantastic visions and breakthrough events, including most interestingly, contact with a range of entities. Among these DMT entities, “machine elves”, or “clockwork elves”, are some of the most well-recognized in the DMT realm, even cross-culturally. In this article, we will take a deep dive into machine elves, and also explore some of the other DMT entities that are commonly reported in DMT trips.

Overview of DMT Entities

Contact with entities is reported in the majority of DMT trip reports in the West, but also in a multitude of non-Western cultures. This ranges from the ancient shamanic traditions of Native Americans to indigenous Australian and African tribes.

In the West, the psychiatrist Rick Strassman was the first to conduct human research with DMT at the University of New Mexico throughout the early 1990s. In the five year study, nearly 400 doses of DMT were given to 60 volunteers. In his book DMT The Spirit Molecule, where he documents these experiences, Strassman writes, 

“I was neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared for the frequency with which contact with beings occurred in our studies, nor the often utterly bizarre nature of these experiences.”  

Indeed, of the thousand pages of notes taken throughout the course of Strassman’s research, 50% of them involve interactions with DMT entities. Similarly, Philip Mayer collected and analyzed 340 DMT trip reports in 2005. Mayer found that 66% of them (226) referenced independently-existing entities that interact in an intelligent and intentional manner.

According to Strassman, the research subjects described contact with “entities”, “beings”, “aliens”, “guides”, and “helpers”. Contact with “life-forms” such as clowns, reptiles, mantises, bees, spiders, cacti, and stick figures was commonplace among the volunteers as well. Interestingly, the DMT entities appear sentient and autonomous in their behavior, as if denizens of a free-standing, independent reality.

What are Machine Elves and Clockwork Elves?

Machine elves is a term coined by the ethnobotanist, philosopher, and writer Terence Mckenna to describe some of the entities that are encountered in a DMT trip. They’ve come to be known by many names, including “clockwork elves”, “DMT elves”, “fractal elves”, and “tykes” (a word for small child). 

In his book Archaic Revival, Mckenna refers to them as “self-transforming machine elves.” In any case, they are inhabitants of the DMT dimension that often try to teach something to whoever is visiting. McKenna frequently resorts to a series of metaphors to describe his experiences with machine elves (and the DMT experience in general), underscoring the difficulty of reducing such ineffable experiences to the lower dimensionality of language. 

As detailed in his book True Hallucinations, Mckenna traveled with his brother and some friends to La Chorrera in the Columbian Amazon in search of Oo-koo-he, a DMT-containing plant preparation used by the indigenous people to access the spirit realms. Mckenna found their descriptions of entity contact resembled his own experiences with the machine elves,

“What was eye-catching about the description of this visionary plant preparation was that the Witoto tribe of the Upper Amazon, who alone knew the secret of making it, used it to talk to “little men” and to gain knowledge from them.“

Machine elves are frequently portrayed in trip reports as benevolent, playful, prankish, and sometimes ornery. Generally, they’re reported to greet the visitors with a child-like curiosity and innocence, often continuously changing form and singing immensely complicated objects into existence. They commonly urge the DMT realm visitors to try to focus on what they are showing them, or even want the subject to imitate what they are doing.

What Are Machine Elves? (Dudes Who Have And Have Not Ingested DMT Speculate)

trueself  |   One of the most common things that people see on DMT is what Terrence McKenna described as "machine elves." In the 1970s, McKenna and his brother traveled to the Amazon to try ayahuasca, and experimented with the drugs for a series of 11 days. They came away having seen " a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien," according to McKenna, who described these alien intelligences as "self-transforming machine elves."

According to McKenna, the elves are capable of "singing structures into existence. "What they're doing is making objects with their voices, singing structures into existence," he wrote. "They offer things to you, saying 'Look at this! Look at this!' and as your attention goes towards these objects you realize that what you're being shown is impossible. It's not simply intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture, it's impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be the Fabergé eggs, but these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a U.F.O., celestial toys, and the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive and can sing other objects into existence, so what's happening is this proliferation of elf gifts, which are moving around singing, and they are saying 'Do what we are doing' and they are very insistent, and they say 'Do it! Do it! Do it!' and you feel like a bubble inside your body beginning to move up toward your mouth, and when it comes out it isn't sound, it's vision. You discover that you can pump 'stuff' out of your mouth by singing, and they're urging you to do this."

There are many different theories as to what these "machine elves" might actually be. McKenna theorized that the elves were humans from the future, returning to give us some kind of wisdom or insight.

Other conspiracy theorists have gone down darker paths, with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones theorizing that the elves are aliens who have taken control of world leaders to do their malicious biddings. Jones believes the elves are the true source of the Illuminati, whispering their dark messages into the ears of world leaders.

Another theory says that machine elves are the same creatures that appear in folklore across the ages — elves, fairies, imps, and other magical creatures. Some Celtic people believed that these creatures were spirits of the dead, returned to communicate with the living. Anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz chronicled this folklore extensively, and in his 1911 book The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, he proposed that these creatures exist "as a supernormal state of consciousness into which men and women may enter temporarily in dreams, trances, or in various ecstatic conditions."

The "machine elves" also bear similarities to other supernatural creatures. The aforementioned Journal of Psychopharmacology study found that ""[DMT]-occasioned entity encounter experiences have many similarities to non-drug entity encounter experiences such as those described in religious, alien abduction, and near-death contexts."

Some people are far more skeptical, such as James Kent, who proposes that we see humanoid creatures in DMT visions because "we humans must have innate evolutionary wetware that forces our senses to latch onto any piece of anthropomorphic data that pops into otherwise randomly uniform data."

So what are the machine elves? Are they random hallucinations, malicious Illuminati members, or visitors from the past or future here to give us the solutions to all of our problems? It's up to you to decide.