The MINUTE Netanyahu Opened His Mouth For SVB Bank, The Jig Was Up!!!

Counterpunch |  facilitating the purchase of critical infrastructure— and housing is critical infrastructure, by Wall Street is predatory, short-sighted, and systemically de-stabilizing. Permitting unlicensed hotels (AIRBNB), unlicensed taxis (Uber), and the systematic refusal to collect state and local taxes for online purchases (Amazon), reflects a contrived and wholly nonsensical ‘individualist’ ethos of capitalism where individuals born into the bailed-out class effectively govern the US. This is the political context in which Joe Biden bailed out corrupt and / or incompetent bank managers and corporate depositors at SVB.

Political architecture where a small group of politicians, oligarchs, and corporate executives erase the lines between corporate and state interests to use state resources for their own benefit while treating the populace as rubes and marks deserving of being preyed upon 1) reasonably well describes the US at present and 2) fits the definition of Italian fascism as state corporatism. Add in unhinged militarism motivated by imperialist objectives and ‘liberal democracy’ looks and feels like fascism to those on its receiving end.

It is clear that this view of the architecture isn’t widely shared, with most Americans relying on the imagined choice that voting for duopoly party candidates provides. Missing from that view is the proletarianization of the US that has taken place over the last five decades, with the exception being the PMC (Professional-Managerial Class), which manages state and corporate affairs for the rich. The genesis of the PMC in service to power has it parroting the logic of the rich in exchange for privileges that the remaining 85% of the population doesn’t receive.

SVB, like SBF (Sam Bankman Fried) of crypto infamy before it, is a weathervane helpful for reading the direction of the prevailing winds, but not a whole lot more. The system that produced it is coming unglued, with mass Covid deaths far out of proportion to the size of the population, failing healthcare and banking systems, a proxy war underway that risks nuclear annihilation, and a government that sees its role as working with corporations to loot the world. Underestimate the risk of truly horrific outcomes at your own peril.

Last, on a personal note, I, and most of the people I know, are so angry about this state of affairs that I don’t see how existing political unions hold. The people running the country never cared much about us, but unity in ‘nation’ led to a sense of shared interests that disappeared with the neoliberal turn. As I’ve written before, revolutionaries don’t make revolutions, existing power does. While I’m not holding my breath, if the current political leadership doesn’t lead to a revolution, revolution isn’t possible.

Journalists Lock Horns With State Sponsored Thought Police In Congress

zerohedge  |  As one might expect, the Judiciary hearing on the "weaponization" of federal agencies, featuring Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger as witnesses was full of fireworks, facts, and ad hominem friction.

Out of the gate, Ranking Member Democratic Del. Stacey E. Plaskett labeled the two "so-called journalists" as dangerous and a "threat" to former Twitter employees.

She claimed that Republicans brought "two of Elon Musk's ‘public scribes'" in "to release cherry-picked out-of-context emails and screenshots designed to promote his chosen narrative - Elon Musk’s chosen narrative - that is now being parroted by the Republicans" for political gain.

“I’m not exaggerating when I say you have called two witnesses who pose a direct threat to people who oppose them,” Plaskett said after the video.

Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, had a simple response to her accusations:

“It’s crazy what you were just saying.”

“You don’t want people to see what happened,” Jordan continued.

“The full video, transparency. You don’t want that, and you don’t want two journalists who have been named personally by the Biden administration, the FTC in a letter. They say they’re here to help and tell their story, and frankly, I think they’re brave individuals for being willing to come after being named in a letter from the Biden FTC.”

Taibbi snapped back...

As Glenn Greenwald chimed in from Twitter: "To Democrats, "journalist" means: one who mindlessly and loyally endorses DNC talking points. "

Unshaken, Matt Taibbi continued, when he was allowed to respond, laid out what he and Shellenberger had found in their research of The Twitter Files:

“The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere,” Taibbi said.

“What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”

Taibbi pointedly added that “effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system."

“It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.”

Democrats only response to Taibbi and Shellenberger's facts was to get personal...

The full hearing can be viewed below:

As we detailed earlier, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger are testifying before the House Judiciary Committee's Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government today. Both journalists were involved in the 'Twitter Files' disclosures, in which we learned that the government was directly involved in censoring disfavorable speech.

"Our findings are shocking," writes Shellenberger at his blog. "A highly-organized network of U.S. government agencies and government contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans, often without them knowing it."

Ahead of the appearance, Taibbi released his prepared remarks. He also dropped a new and related Twitter Files mega-thread on 'THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX' which will be submitted to the Congressional record which, according to Taibbi, 'contains some surprises.'

Cop City Protester Killing Reveals Treacherous Black Faces In High Places...,

BAR  |  What could possibly go wrong with a $90 million, 85-acre police training ground that the community doesn't want? Someone could be killed, and that happened before Atlanta's awful Cop City project has even been built.

The city of Atlanta, Georgia is often presented as a “Mecca” for Black people. Every mayor of that city who has held office since 1974 has been Black, and celebrities have made it their home. Major Historically Black Colleges and Universities are located there. Atlanta is thought of as a place where Black people thrive.

Except it is like every other major American city, where Black people are more likely to be low wage workers or among the unhoused. The Black people in leadership positions are allowed to occupy them precisely because they have taken a pledge not to upset the established political order.

These caveats must be kept in mind when discussing the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, known popularly as Cop City. The purported Black Mecca municipality is spending $30 million to construct an 85-acre militarized police training camp in the Weelaunee Forest. Cop City will feature a mock town with a gas station, bank, bar, nightclub, school, residential homes, apartments, park, and splash pad. There will also be a warehouse on site for training in “crowd control.”  A survey of area residents indicates that 98% of them are opposed to the facility which will be constructed by the Atlanta Police Foundation. The Foundation has pledged to raise an additional $60 million for the project from corporate donors.

The impetus for this theft of public land and training ground for brutality began in 2020. In that year millions of people across the country rose up in protest after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. But Atlanta then experienced its own rebellion when police there killed Rayshard Brooks. Brooks was killed by police after an altercation which began when he fell asleep in his car in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant. Such circumstances are common in police killings which usually happen during traffic stops, mental health crises, and even calls for help. Only one-third of police killings occur during the commission of violent crimes.

Brooks' death created another rebellion, this time in Atlanta itself, which years before was falsely dubbed, the “city too busy to hate.” The response was classic, as the city’s white fathers ordered their Black puppets to crack down and thus the idea for Cop City was born. Its funders are a who’s who of corporate giants including Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Chick-Fil-A, Home Depot, United Parcel Service, Delta airlines, Amazon and Waffle House. All of these entities claim to have some sort of racial equity program and pledge workplace diversity. Some of their CEOs made grand gestures like “taking a knee” in 2020, but when not creating feel good photo opportunities they use police foundations to help fund police departments across the country. These efforts are little more than slush funds which help police departments spend more money without any accountability to the public.

The protests against Cop City also attracted forest defenders , who camped out to save the old growth trees from destruction. But their peaceful protest of civil disobedience was met with brute force. Some of them have been arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism.” But the worst was yet to come. On January 18, 2023 a forest defender named Manuel Esteban Paez Terán was killed by the police.They claim that Paez Terán shot one of them first. But there has been no independent investigation and conveniently none of the police or members of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation who raided the protectors’ encampment were wearing body cameras. Cop City is killing people before it even exists.

Of course protests ensued after Paez Terán was killed and there were arrests. Mayor Andre Dickens channeled the segregationists of old when he said, "It should be noted that these individuals were not Atlanta or Georgia residents. Most of them traveled into our city to wreak havoc." The representatives of the Black Mecca have resurrected the old “outside agitator” trope.

Police surveillance in Georgia didn’t start with Cop City. In 2007 the plans for what is now Operation Shield were put in place. More than 10,000 video cameras and license plate readers make Atlanta the most surveilled city in the country and one of the most surveilled in the world. Corporate funders to the Atlanta Police Foundation paid for this hyper policing too.

Cop City shows the nexus between oligarchic control, the police state, and their errand girls and boys in the Black political class. The end result of their dirty dealing is the Cop City monstrosity. Police don’t need a training center. They are already trained. They know quite well that their job is to keep Black people under physical control and lock them up as often as possible. A mock town teaching riot control is the last thing Black people need. Haphazard brutality would be transformed into an efficient and well oiled machine.

Obviously Cop City should be opposed, but so should corporate control over our lives, and treacherous Black faces in high places. There will surely be more killings if Cop City becomes a reality.

Nice Peso You've Got There - Be A Shame If Something Happened To It....,

Reuters  |   Concerns about a U.S. recession and a trade spat Mexico is embroiled in with the United States and Canada over Lopez Obrador's energy policy, which critics call nationalist, muddy the outlook for the peso.

"The perception of risk could rise due to the consultations in the framework of the USMCA (trade deal), which could lead to the imposition of measures against Mexico," said Banco Base.

Traders at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, considered a bellwether of market sentiment, have started to bet the peso will begin depreciating.

Mexico's peso, which is ending 2022 with one of its strongest performances in a decade, could have its gains wiped out in 2023 after an expected end to the Bank of Mexico's rate hikes cycle and a possible recession in top trade partner the United States.

The peso last month clawed its way back to pre-pandemic levels and has appreciated over 5% versus the U.S. dollar in 2022, making it one of the best-performing global currencies alongside Brazil's real .

Houstonchronicle  |  Just weeks before President Joe Biden’s planned visit to Mexico, talks on the neighbors’ biggest trade dispute have stalled due to the departures of negotiators from the Latin American nation’s side and its reluctance to make concessions, according to people familiar with the matter.

The two sides have struggled to make headway on the energy-policy spat after Tatiana Clouthier, the economy minister at the start of the dispute in July, resigned in October, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. The dismissal of her trade deputy and more than a dozen senior staff also hindered progress, they said. 

Divisions have affected the Mexican team, with Energy Minister Rocio Nahle and Manuel Bartlett, the head of the electric utility, refusing for months to provide the nation’s trade negotiators with key information needed to address U.S. concerns, the people said. 

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador also has been unwilling to push for major changes in the nationalist energy policy at the heart of the U.S. complaint, the people said.  

A spokesperson for the Mexican economy ministry didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council acknowledged the request but didn’t immediately respond. The U.S. Trade Representative’s press office declined to immediately respond.

The two sides and Canada — which has some of the same concerns as the U.S. — are working to address the conflict before Biden visits Mexico next month, but American negotiators have little expectation for advances in that period, the people said.

Lopez Obrador’s policy privileges Mexican state-owned oil producer Petroleos Mexicanos and the electricity provider known as CFE. The U.S. says this violates the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade, which went into force in 2020 to replace the two-decade-old NAFTA pact. Canada filed a similar request for talks over Mexico’s electricity policy.

Lopez Obrador denies that his policies violate the pact, saying that the U.S. must respect Mexico’s sovereignty.

Great Reset, Or Else...,

pamho  |  The plan is to make Stockholder ideology, oops, sorry, *Stakeholder* ideology THE ideology of a new world system of governing. Leading non-governmental organizations — like The UN, The World Bank, The IMF, along with the biggest corporations and investment funds — and of course the governments of America, Europe, Asia and so on — they will kindly ask our new African friends to pretty please join our save-the-world party. The leaders of countries and businesses who don’t want to hop aboard the Stakeholder express, well, they don’t want to make all those groups and people have a sad at them do they? We are all in this together people.

Soon enough the African countries will “see the smart thing to do.” Capeesh? Like giving up on “advancing their economy” in favor of “saving the world” so Babs and Granpa Snooty feel like they are saving the world by telling them what they can and can’t do. And of course since batteries are such an important part of saving the world, “everyone” will have to pitch in and help the worldwide group effort. And wouldn’t you know it, it just so happens that the stuff that needs to be mined to make lots of powerful batteries are stuck, by gosh — under the ground in the underdeveloped world! Wow, what a coincidence!

So instead of their economy being based on uplifting their people out of their underdeveloped state, they can now focus on being good people! Good people who know their place in the worldwide effort to “save our planet!” Which means they must renounce the dirty fossil fuels they say will make them rich like America and Europe. I mean, fossil fuels are so damaging to our shared prosperity in our new Stakeholder world, right? People in Manhattan and London have just as much right as people in the Congo and Bolivia to say what the rules of industry are for the Congo and Bolivia because WE ARE THE STAKEHOLDER NOW!

Sure, some cynics might say that rich people from the developed world in reality just don’t want what they believe are “the limited stores of oil and gas left in the world,” to be “wasted” on building up Africa or other underdeveloped areas of the world.

But no no no, that cynicism is what Stakeholder Capitalism is supposed to put to rest. Don’t be cynical, because The Great Reset is all about equity, inclusion, AND anti-racism. Being good stewards of the environment, stopping climate change, and other words meant to make them look good is what it’s all about baby. It’s most definitely not about “creating a worldwide enforcement system funded by the richest and most powerful capitalists in the world to make themselves richer and more powerful.”

It’s also NOT about keeping undeveloped nations undeveloped so a cheap labor force can continue to be exploited in mines and factories. The new and purehearted “green economy” is about equity, clean air, buzzword, and another buzzword. So what if you can’t travel when and where and how you want? You will be safely made to take your medicine when you are told, and safely made to show your papers when you are told. No more scarey free speech and freedom to live as you choose! That’s old selfish extremist thinking. You must think the right safe thoughts. You must. No, really. YOU MUST.

The Great Reset also includes some newer ideas for newer “problems,” like a system to be set up for worldwide coordinated reaction to health-based “emergencies.” I mean, you can’t have the common non-rich people making the rich nervous by breathing near them can you? If it is flu season we don’t nay WE WILL NOT ALLOW Sally the waitress to be able to breath properly if the person she is serving has a trust fund. What to speak of flying on the same plane. I mean private jets don’t grow on trees people. It’s so much simpler to make sure Sally is kept from causing any potential harm she might bring to Justin and Jules on their bi-weekly getaway to the islands. So a no-fly list for Sally is best. She can visit her sick Dad next year when the flu isn’t so bad. PRIORITIES PEOPLE! The Great Reset knows best.

 

The FBI Responds To The Twitter Files

dailycaller |  The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a new statement Wednesday following the latest “Twitter Files” dump.

The FBI accused the “Twitter Files” release as an attempt “to discredit” the agency by disclosing information on the FBI’s correspondence with Twitter in October 2020. Journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that the agency warned the previous executives at Twitter of a “hack-and-leak” by “state actors” surrounding the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop to influence the 2020 presidential election.

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public,” the statement began.

“It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency,” the agency concluded.

The “Twitter Files” revealed that the FBI and Twitter worked closely in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. Internal documents published Monday found that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million between October 2019 and February 2021 for managing its financial burdens caused while complying with the agency’s requests. (RELATED: Twitter Gave ‘Special Protection’ To Pentagon Propaganda Accounts, Docs Show)

Taibbi reported he found no evidence that the FBI had involvement in Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post’s report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, though new reports released by author Michael Shellenberger indicated they may have, in fact, been involved.

Former FBI Deputy General Counsel James Baker argued Twitter’s then-head of trust and safety Yoel Roth’s claim that the Post’s report did not violate the social media site’s policies on October 14, according to Shellenberger. The agency had already been in possession of Biden’s laptop since December 2019, indicating that the agency knew the Post reported the story accurately.

Musk announced Dec. 6 that he fired Baker for allegedly withholding the release of documents related to the suppression of Biden’s laptop.

The agency also flagged certain tweets for Twitter to remove from the platform, the files found. Some agents were even employed at the social media company.

Republican Kentucky Rep. James Comer, the incoming House Oversight Chair, said Tuesday that Congress should block funding of the FBI until it disclosed the alleged involvement in Big Tech censorship.

“In the beginning, I thought that there were probably two or three rogue employees who were orchestrating this cover up of the Hunter Biden laptop story, but now we know the FBI had a division of at least 80 agents,” Comer said. “We also know that the FBI paid Twitter over $3 million for their time, all the time they took over the past couple of years in telling them who to suppress, who to ban. You know, it’s just things that the government has no role in.”

“The FBI was never granted the authority to create any type of disinformation task force that policed the social media sites. Now this we know with Twitter,” he continued. “We’ve heard similar stories from Zuckerberg. Who knows what went on at YouTube and Google. This is an agency that’s out of control.”

 

Musk Has Chosen To Make Common Cause With Idiot Trolls And Unapologetic Bigots

 

Slate  |  Musk is the richest man in the world and yet comports himself online like a pustulous incel on a Mountain Dew bender. Though Taibbi and Weiss were each once ensconced at the absolute top of the American mainstream media—Weiss at the opinion section of the New York Times, Taibbi as a star writer for Rolling Stone—both have since migrated to Substack, where they each run popular and lucrative newsletters that exist to bite the hands that once fed them

Their shared thesis, to oversimplify, is that the mainstream media, Big Tech, and other important cultural institutions now follow a shared set of ultra-liberal speech codes that have been imposed from within by woke young employees. Cowed by their strident staffers, executives at these institutions have allegedly abdicated their leadership responsibilities and have, so to speak, allowed the inmates to run the asylum. Dare to express opinions that transgress these implicit speech codes—dare to say anything that might offend even a single “social justice warrior” within these spheres—and you’ll quickly find yourself excommunicated. The broader implications of this alleged ideological uniformity, Taibbi and Weiss argue, are devastating for speech and democracy.

And actually, fair enough. There is ample historical precedent for leftist political movements using speech codes as tools to empower repressive regimes, just as there are countless moments in history when right-wing dipshits have stoked moral panics rooted in cultural revanchism and risible claims of conspiracy in order to consolidate power and influence for their own curdled ends. The challenge and obligation of citizenship in a democracy involves, in part, remaining alert to the various strains of demagoguery that are circulating at any given period of time, accurately assessing the relative threats that they pose to democratic principles, and taking notice when prominent voices seem intent on deflecting your attention from mountains while warning endlessly about molehills.

American democracy has indeed taken a bit of a beating over the past few years, but the most violent blows have been landed by the Trumpist right and its opportunistic enablers. While neither Taibbi nor Weiss is blind to the threats that Trumpism has posed to democracy, their recent output sure does make it seem as if the predominant crisis facing America today is one of creeping illiberalism and ideological uniformity in tech, media, and the Democratic Party. Though Taibbi and Weiss do not self-classify as conservatives, the drum that they’ve been banging for a few years now is functionally indistinguishable from the one that the American right wing has been banging for as long as I’ve been alive—a concordance that matters intensely when attempting to parse the import of the Twitter Files.

 

Stochastic Terrorism: The New Term Of Art For Thought Crime

theatlantic  |   If leaders have to answer for the violence they inspire, they will have a harder time gaining traction in the future. Since the beginning of the Trump era, far-right groups have recruited new members with fantasies of armed conflict; adherents are convinced that they can be on the winning side of history. Rhodes, a Yale Law School graduate, floundered for years until the Oath Keepers found kinship with the Trump movement and with Trump himself, who flirted with extremist groups before fully embracing them after his election loss. This week’s verdict further dispels the idea that the Oath Keepers are winners in any way. Every criminal conviction of figures implicated in the January 6 attack at any level—even on the misdemeanor charges facing some rank-and file rioters—helps discourage would-be recruits from seeing militia groups as a path to glory.

Although the jury likely did not debate the intricacies of how violence works, Rhodes’s conviction is a condemnation of stochastic terrorism—a technique the Oath Keepers share with the Islamic State. Leaders of such groups incite their followers in ways that make bloodshed all but inevitable, even if the specifics of how the violence will play out are unknowable beforehand.

From the November 2020 issue: A pro-Trump militant group has recruited thousands of police, soldiers, and veterans

In recent weeks, right-wing commentators have criticized the very notion of stochastic terrorism, treating it as just another broad accusation that Trump’s political opponents level against the former president and his supporters. Yet Rhodes’s trial points to a highly specific way in which some groups incite and normalize violence. They have used tools of intimidation, such as wearing military costumes and brandishing weapons, to achieve political goals—while also acting like what they’re doing is no big deal. Casual threats of civil war, when coupled with the means to wage it, are no longer casual. The standard for criminal conviction for promoting violence is justifiably high, but some leaders of some groups act egregiously enough to reach it.

Rhodes’s jury made a statement for the future. Although a single criminal case will not deter all hate and violence, a series of similar verdicts could significantly hamper violent groups’ ability to organize. Fomenting a bloody riot isn’t a game, and it isn’t mere protest. Criminal prosecution will find you.

 

Speech Is Not Violence, Statistical Abstraction Is Not Evidence, Association Is Not Guilt

city-journal  |  I browsed the news recently only to discover that, according to a popular science magazine, I was responsible for the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi, husband to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

In an opinion piece for Scientific American, writer Bryn Nelson insinuated that my factual reporting on Drag Queen Story Hour was an example of “stochastic terrorism,” which he defines as “ideologically driven hate speech” that increases the likelihood of unpredictable acts of violence. On the night of the attack, Nelson argued, I had appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss my reporting, and, hours later, the alleged attacker, David DePape, radicalized by “QAnon” conspiracy theories about “Democratic, Satan-worshipping pedophiles,” broke into the Pelosi residence and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

This is a bizarre claim that, for a magazine supposedly dedicated to “science,” hardly meets a scientific standard of cause and effect. There is no evidence that DePape watched or was motivated by Tucker Carlson’s program; moreover, nothing in my reporting on Drag Queen Story Hour encourages violence or mentions Nancy Pelosi, QAnon, or Satan-worshipping pedophiles. My appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight and DePape’s attack against Paul Pelosi are, in reality, two unrelated incidents in a large and complex universe. And Nelson, a microbiologist specializing in human excrement, is full of it.

But Nelson isn’t trying to prove anything in a scientific sense. Under the concept of “stochastic terrorism,” logic, evidence, and causality are irrelevant. Any incident of violence can be politicized and attributed to any ideological opponent, regardless of facts.

The scheme works like this: left-wing media, activists, and officials designate a subject of discourse, such as Drag Queen Story Hour, off-limits; they treat any reporting on that subject as an expression of “hate speech”; and finally, if an incident of violence emerges that is related, even tangentially, to that subject, they assign guilt to their political opponents and call for the suppression of speech. The statistical concept of “stochasticity,” which means “randomly determined,” functions as a catch-all: the activists don’t have to prove causality—they simply assert it with a sophisticated turn of phrase and a vague appeal to probability.

Though framed in scientific terms, this gambit is a crude political weapon. In practice, left-wing media, activists, and officials apply the “stochastic terrorism” designation only in one direction: rightward. They never attribute fire-bombings against pro-life pregnancy centers, arson attacks against Christian churches, or the attempted assassination of a Supreme Court justice to mere argumentation of left-wing activists, such as, say, opposition to the Court’s decision in Dobbs. In those cases, the Left correctly adopts the principle that it is incitement, rather than opinion, that constitutes a crime—but conveniently forgets that standard as soon as the debate shifts to the movement’s conservative opponents.

In recent years, the Left has not only monopolized the concept of “stochastic terrorism” but also built a growing apparatus for enforcing it. Last year, left-wing organizations and the Department of Justice collaborated on a campaign to suppress parents who oppose critical race theory, under the false claim that sometimes-heated school-board protests were incidents of “domestic terrorism.” Earlier this year, left-wing activists and medical associations called on social media companies and the Department of Justice to censor, investigate, and prosecute journalists who question the orthodoxy of radical gender theory. The obvious goal is to suppress speech and intimidate political opponents. “Stochastic terrorism” could serve as a magic term for summoning the power of the state.

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.

 

Your Betters Consider Your “Cognitive infrastructure” Part Of Their Remit

theintercept  | Under President Joe Biden, the shifting focus on disinformation has continued. In January 2021, CISA replaced the Countering Foreign Influence Task force with the “Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation” team, which was created “to promote more flexibility to focus on general MDM.” By now, the scope of the effort had expanded beyond disinformation produced by foreign governments to include domestic versions. The MDM team, according to one CISA official quoted in the IG report, “counters all types of disinformation, to be responsive to current events.”

Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media. “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” said Easterly, speaking at a conference in November 2021.

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.

“Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain,” Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, a former DHS official, texted Jen Easterly, a DHS director, in February.

In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government. Dehmlow, according to notes of the discussion attended by senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase, stressed that “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.”

“We do not coordinate with other entities when making content moderation decisions, and we independently evaluate content in line with the Twitter Rules,” a spokesperson for Twitter wrote in a statement to The Intercept.

There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the “content request system” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. DHS and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

DHS’s mission to fight disinformation, stemming from concerns around Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, began taking shape during the 2020 election and over efforts to shape discussions around vaccine policy during the coronavirus pandemic. Documents collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the evolution of more active measures by DHS.

According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

“The challenge is particularly acute in marginalized communities,” the report states, “which are often the targets of false or misleading information, such as false information on voting procedures targeting people of color.”

The inclusion of the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is particularly noteworthy, given that House Republicans, should they take the majority in the midterms, have vowed to investigate. “This makes Benghazi look like a much smaller issue,” said Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., a member of the Armed Services Committee, adding that finding answers “will be a top priority.”

How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly articulated, and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.

 

When Exposing A Crime Is Treated As Committing A Crime You Are Being Ruled By Criminals

greenwald  |  In May, the Department of Homeland Security's attempted appointment of a clearly deranged partisan fanatic, Nina Jankowicz, to effectively serve as “disinformation czar” sparked intense backlash. But liberal media corporations — always the first to jump to the defense of the U.S. Security State — in unison maligned the resulting anger over this audacious appointment as “itself disinformation,” without ever identifying anything false that was alleged about Jankowicz or the DHS program.

Though anger over this classically Orwellian program was obviously merited — it was, after all, an attempt to assign to the U.S. National Security State the power to issue official decrees about truth and falsity — that anger sometimes obscured the real purpose of the creation of this government program. This was not some aberrational attempt by the Biden administration to arrogate unto itself a wholly new and unprecedented power. It instead was just the latest puzzle piece in the multi-pronged scheme — created by a union of U.S. Security State agencies, Democratic Party politicians, liberal billionaires, and liberal media corporations — to construct and implement a permanent and enduring system to control the flow of information to Western populations. As importantly, these tools will empower them to forcibly silence and otherwise punish anyone who expresses dissent to their orthodoxies or meaningful opposition to their institutional interests.

That these state and corporate entities collaborate to control the internet is now so well-established that it barely requires proof. One of the first and most consequential revelations from the Snowden reporting was that the leading Big Tech companies — including Google, Apple and Facebook — were turning over massive amounts of data about their users to the National Security Agency (NSA) without so much as a warrant under the state/corporate program called PRISM. A newly obtained document by Revolver News’ Darren Beattie reveals that Jankowicz has worked since 2015 on programs to control “disinformation” on the internet in conjunction with a horde of national security state officials, billionaire-funded NGOs, and the nation's largest media corporations. Ample reporting, including here, has revealed that many of Big Tech's most controversial censorship policies were implemented at the behest of the U.S. Government and the Democratic-controlled Congress that openly threatens regulatory and legal reprisals for failure to comply. 

Every newly declared crisis — genuine or contrived — is immediately seized upon to justify all new levels and types of online censorship, and increasingly more and more offline punishment. One of the core precepts of the Russiagate hysteria was that Trump won with the help of Russia because there were insufficient controls in place over what kind of information could be heard by the public, leading to new groups devoted to "monitoring” what they deem disinformation and new policies from media outlets to censor reporting of the type that WikiLeaks provided about the DNC and Clinton campaign in 2016. This censorship frenzy culminated in the still-shocking decision by Twitter and Facebook to censor The New York Post's reporting on Joe Biden's activities in China and Ukraine based on documents from Hunter Biden's laptop that most media outlets now acknowledge were entirely authentic — all justified by a CIA lie, ratified by media outlets, that these documents were “Russian disinformation.”

The riot at the Capitol on January 6 was used in similar ways, though this time not merely to un-person dissidents from the internet but also to use Big Tech's monopoly power to destroy the then-most-popular app in the country (Parler) followed by the banning of the sitting elected President himself, an act so ominous that even governments hostile to Trump — in France, Germany, Mexico and beyond — warned of how threatening it was to democracy to allow private monopolies to ban even elected leaders from the internet. Liberal outlets such as The New Yorker began openly advocating for internet censorship under headlines such as “The National-Security Case for Fixing Social Media.”

The COVID pandemic ushered in still greater amounts of censorship. Anyone who urged people to use masks at the start of the pandemic was accused of spreading dangerous disinformation because Dr. Anthony Fauci and the WHO insisted at the time that masks were useless or worse. When Fauci and WHO decided masks were an imperative, anyone questioning that decree by insisting that cloth masks were ineffective — the exact view of Fauci and WHO just weeks earlier — was banned from Big Tech platforms for spreading disinformation; such bans by Google included sitting U.S. Senators who themselves are medical doctors. From the start of the pandemic, it was prohibited to question whether the COVID virus may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan — until the Biden administration itself asked that question and ordered an investigation to find out, at which point Facebook and other platforms reversed themselves and announced that it was now permissible to ask this question since the U.S. Government itself was doing so.

In sum, government agencies and Big Tech monopolies exploited the two-year COVID pandemic to train Western populations to accept as normal the rule that the only views permitted to be heard were those which fully aligned with the views expressed by institutions of state authority. Conversely, anyone dissenting from or even questioning such institutional decrees stood accused of spreading "disinformation” and was deemed unfit to be heard on the internet. As a result, blatant errors and clear lies stood unchallenged for months because people were conditioned that any challenging of official views would result in punishment.

We are now at the point where every crisis is seized upon to usher in all-new forms of censorship. The war in Ukraine has resulted in escalations of censorship tactics that would have been unimaginable even a year or two ago. The EU enacted legislation legally prohibiting any European company or individual from broadcasting Russian state-owned broadcasters (including RT and Sputnik). While such legal coercion would (for now) almost certainly be banned in the U.S. as a violation of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and free press rights, non-EU companies that decided in the name of open debate to allow RT to be heard — such as Rumble — have faced a torrent of threats, pressure campaigns, media attacks and various forms of retribution.

One of the easiest and surest ways to be banned these days from Big Tech platforms is to reject the core pieties of the CIA/NATO/EU view of the war in Ukraine, even if that dissent entails simply affirming the very views which Western media outlets spent a decade itself endorsing, until completely changing course at the start of the war — such as the fact that the Ukrainian military is dominated by neo-Nazi battalions such as Azov, especially in the Eastern part of the country. Regardless of one's views on the Biden administration's involvement in this war, surely it requires little effort to see how dangerous it is to try to impose a full-scale blackout on challenges to U.S. war policy, especially given the warning by Biden himself that this war has brought the world closer to nuclear armageddon than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

 

Who Owns The CDC?

amidwesterndoctor |  In democratic republics, it should not be possible for unelected groups to forcefully dictate the lives of citizens without those policies being legalized by the legislative process. Unfortunately, our bureaucracy has bypassed that process by allowing committees (whose members are appointed rather than being elected democratically) to craft “guidelines” (as this is the limit of their authority), and then have the rest of the government (and media) treat those guidelines as law. Unfortunately, the members of these committees tend to be individuals who have been bribed and inevitably arrive at conclusions that support their sponsors. 

Two excellent recent examples were the NIH panel (directly appointed by Fauci) recommending remdesivir while prohibiting ivermectin while having extensive financial ties to remdesivir’s manufacture, and that of the committee which made the highly questionable guideline for almost everyone to take statins having extensive financial ties to the statin manufacturers.

Although guidelines should only be treated as advice rather than law (this in fact was the decision of a federal judge), there has instead been a continual push to strengthen the guidelines and force ones that border upon absurdity onto the American people. In California for example, the state chosen to pioneer vaccine mandates for our nation, countless parents have been forced to flee the state so their children can remain in school, and parents who are not financially advantaged have been forced to make many very difficult decisions because of these mandates (many of these stories are quite tragic).

Recently this guideline-based governance ratcheted up another notch as California passed a law that stated anyone physician who provides advice to a patient that conflicts with a CDC guideline is guilty of professional misconduct. As you can imagine, this sets a variety of concerning precedents, such as how “advisement that does not carry the weight of law” can be allowed to supersede our sacred constitutional freedoms that have been enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and previously have been consistently upheld by our courts.

Throughout its history, the CDC and its advisory committee the ACIP, have consistently voted to approve each vaccine presented before them, regardless of the evidence against doing so (and as Steve Kirsch recently proved, its leadership has willfully disregarded that evidence). This raises an obvious question; why is it that the ACIP always acts in this way?

When examining complex questions, one helpful strategy, Occam’s Razor, is to first consider the simplest explanation and see if it fits relatively well to addressing the question at hand. In many areas of medicine (e.g. journal publications, research findings, and medical practices chosen by physicians or hospitals), there is a tendency to adhere to the financial interests of the involved parties. Not surprisingly, this is also the behavior guideline committees typically follow so the question naturally becomes: what are the financial conflicts of interest of the CDC?