In recent months, thanks to Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter Files (now “X”), the Facebook (now rebranded as “Meta”) documents obtained by the Judiciary Committee, and other discoveries, we now know that the White House (aka – The Democrat party) and an assortment of governmental agencies have persistently exerted heavy influence, including monetary payoffs, to control information on social media. Subpoenaed documents from other firms like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are supposed to be forthcoming and may reveal more.
We already know that many of the suspicions labeled for years as conspiracy theories, dealing with shadow banning, fake claims of Russian disinformation, de-platforming, censorship, account lock-outs, and more were true. Just how big of a deal is this
To answer that question, you first need to have a handle on the significance and influence of social media overall. Few Americans do. Over the centuries and decades, the balance of power has shifted amongst various media – in-person speeches, newspapers, books, theater, radio, magazines, billboards, television, movies, etc. While newspapers may have been the dominant medium in Jefferson’s day, they were not pervasive. A relatively small portion of the population had access to them, and word of mouth still represented a powerful competitor.
As this pervasiveness escalated, so did the emergence of alternative media – radio and then television – keeping that power balance somewhat in check. However, since the advent of the internet and particularly over the last decade, the significance of virtually all other media has been diminished dramatically by a new competitor – the digital leviathan.
Whether the digital format is audio, video, news websites, advertising, or social media, it is expanding as the old world media have been relegated to niche or dying, or both. Pew tells us that more than 8 in 10 U.S. adults now get their news digitally from their smartphone, computer, or tablet – far more than any other format.
Okay, but isn’t social media merely one of the many influential digital channels impacting information flow and opinion formation? Well, not quite. More accurately it is the 800 pound-gorilla in a rapidly shrinking cage. Since the advent of the smartphone, social media usage has absolutely exploded, with American usage rocketing from 5% in 2005 to over 70% today. Some estimates indicate that as much as 38% of all internet time today is devoted to social media.
Part of the reason for the meteoric rise is that access to the information is as simple as reaching in your pocket. It is estimated that Americans now spend about one third of their waking hours on their mobile phones – about 4.1 hours per day – with 7 of every 10 minutes spent on social media.
Facebook, which also owns two other surging, social media firms, Instagram and WhatsApp, remains the social media king, commanding 53% of all usage. The statistics regarding adoption rates, minutes of usage, and influence our mind numbing. In his book “The Four,” professor Scott, Galloway calls Facebook “the most successful thing in the history of humankind.” The vast majority of Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users (74%) visit the site daily, and more than half of them visit it several times per day.
While not matching Facebook in usership, Twitter is referenced by 70% of U.S. Journalists as the site they use most for their jobs. Along with its hashtag system, this gives Twitter a strong magnifying effect. One of the fastest rising stars in social media is TikTok, an app launched in 2016 and specializing in short videos. Their usership mushroomed to over one billion in just five years – a milestone that required double that time even for Facebook. But if you thought that TikTok was merely the place for dancing bikini-clad girls and guys performing unadvisable skateboard stunts, think again. A quarter of adults under the age of 30 now report getting their news from this source.
Importantly, brevity is the key to success with social media – headlines, bite-sized stories, and videos, things that can be consumed in 60 seconds or less. Thus, the in-depth content and analysis are not nearly as significant as simply whether the given piece appears or not, or what concluding headline is displayed. So, clearly, social media is the dominant and growing digital channel, and the 5” x 3” screen is now the dominant device for that channel. It is the central educational, social, and economic window in the lives of most Americans.
When you have the power to promote or disparage a given person, claim or story, or as importantly, prevent that claim or story from even appearing on that screen, preventing tens of millions, perhaps, even billions of eyes from even seeing it, you wield more power than Joseph Pulitzer or William Randolph Hearst could ever have dreamed of. Someone would go so far as to say such power could even influence national elections.
So how big of a deal is it that The White House, governmental agencies, and the most influential social media companies in the world all colluded to both push false narratives and censor true information from social media? Referring just to the Twitter Files revelation, author John Davidson has declared,
. . . it is one of the most important news stories or our time … [and]encompasses, and to a large extent connects, every major political scandal of the Trump-Biden era. Put simply, the Twitter Files reveal an unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to throttle free speech and maintain an official narrative through censorship and propaganda.”
Given Jefferson’s view on media and government, consider how horrified he would have been at another proposition – not only a government with newspapers (social media), but a government controlling the newspapers (social media). That is where we are today. And it is a very big deal indeed.
Portrait of Thomas Jeferson by Rembrandt Peale
Pollak: DOJ Never Prosecuted Hillary Clinton for ‘Conspiracy to Defraud U.S.’ with Russia Hoax KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images 4:51
Special Counsel Jack Smith charged former President Donald Trump on Tuesday with four counts relating to his challenges to the 2020 presidential election, including “conspiracy to defraud the United States.” The supposed act of “fraud” was that Trump said the election had been stolen, despite knowing, or at least being told, otherwise. But if pushing a false claim of stolen elections is a federal crime, then Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, the media, and the Department of Justice itself should be charged.
To recap: Hillary Clinton falsely claimed in 2016 that Russia was colluding with Trump. With help from election lawyer Marc Elias, Hillary’s campaign, and the Democratic National Committee, hired the Fusion GPS opposition research firm to create the phony “dossier” on Trump’s Russia ties. They shopped it, successfully, to the FBI, which began spying on a Trump campaign aide. Aides like Jake Sullivan (now the National Security Advisor) continued to spread the “Russia collusion” claim within the media.
After Trump won, the hoax took on new life. Despite conceding to Trump the morning after Election Day in 2016, Hillary kept claiming that the election had, in fact, been stolen. The Department of Justice renewed surveillance warrants even after it knew the “dossier” was false. Outgoing FBI director James Comey triggered the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate, though he had reason to know there was no evidence of “Russia collusion” — and, indeed, none was ever found.
The hoax undermined the legitimacy of the incoming Trump administration and interfered with its ability to conduct foreign policy. Even after Mueller came up empty, the hoax took on new life in the form of the 2019 impeachment investigation, which focused on Trump’s conversation with the Ukrainian president but implied that the president was secretly trying to help Russia. In the 2020 election, the perpetrators of the old hoax claimed, falsely, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.”
In short, there has never been a greater or more consequential hoax in modern American history than the “Russia collusion” hoax. And yet no one has ever been prosecuted for it — least of all Hillary Clinton, who was ultimately responsible for it. The Department of Justice, through Special Counsel John H. Durham, pursued a few low-level prosecutions, but no one was ever targeted for the overall “fraud” — even though the story of how the “Russia collusion” hoax was concocted eventually emerged.
Arguably, “fraud” is not an applicable charge. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court issued two decisions, Percoco v. United States and Ciminelli v. United States , that restrict the use of fraud statutes. As one summary put it : “For decades, the Court has grappled with federal fraud prosecutions creeping further and further from offenses grounded in traditional property interests … the Court sent a clear signal that the wire fraud statute has its limitations and that it is not a catchall for any and all deceptive conduct.”
But if “fraud” is to be used, the “Russia collusion” hoax certainly qualifies. And it is more obviously a fraud than Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 presidential election. While Jack Smith’s indictment claims that “These claims were false, and the Defendant knew they were false,” the indictment does not show direct evidence of Trump’s state of mind — only that he was told by aides that his allegations were untrue. There is overwhelming evidence in the public record to suggest Trump really believes that he won.
Regardless, the fact that the Department of Justice is willing to prosecute one side’s claim of a stolen election, and not the other, as a “fraud against the United States,” suggests a deep political bias in the agency, despite Attorney General Merrick Garland’s assurances. And it also points to the fact that senior officials at the Department of Justice, through their false warrant applications and leaks to the media, were co-cons pirators in perpetrating the fraud of “Russia collusion,” for years, on the American people.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election . His recent book, RED NOVEMBER , tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak .
On the other hand, Schweizer and Eggers note that Hillary Clinton actually violated federal election rules in 2016, in a case directly related to the work of G-A-I. Schweizer’s 2015 book, Clinton Cash , exposed Hillary Clinton’s involvement with the takeover of an American uranium mining company by Russia. That revelation so terrified Clinton’s presidential campaign they decided to pay for the infamous Steele Dossier, with its lurid, unsubstantiated claims that Donald Trump was a Russian stooge. Hillary’s campaign essentially accused the Trump campaign of doing what they were, in fact, guilty of themselves. Peter Schweizer
Everyone knows she stood by her man, blamed his women, and perhaps was a psychological co-rapist for the sake of her political ambitions. Before the next president is elected, Hillary will not only have an albatross around her neck, she will be covered with names like Wellstone, Broaddrick, Moffet, Ward Gracen, Brown, Dowdy, Jones, Ferguson, Zercher, Willey, and more. A majority of those one hundred people will remember the evil the Clintons did, and their legacy will be lost in the folds of tattered dresses and bleeding lips.
By Deborah C. Tyler
SAUDI DIRTY MONEY ENDS UP IN THE CLINTON FOUNDATION FAMILY SLUSH FUND
Jesse Watters: The Clintons' crooked connections https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnPSvkxKuLg
HOW MANY OF THESE PIGS ARE GAMER LAWYERS?
“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the Clinton (LAWYERS-2) Foundation and the (LAWYERS-2) Obama book and television deals. Then there is the Biden (LAWYERS-3) family corruption, followed closely behind by similar abuses of power and office by the (LAWYER) Warren and Sanders families, as Peter Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of government corruption (YOU CAN ADD LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS AND LAWYER CHUCK SCHUMER TO THE PATHEION OF DEMOCRAT BRIBES SUCKING CORRUPT LAWYER POLITICIANS!). BRIAN C JOONDEPH
One topic that Hillary is quick to criticize President Trump on is his relationship with Saudia Arabia. It’s ironic given the Clinton Foundation’s refusal to state that they will no longer accept financial donations from The Kingdom as others have.
But the Clinton Foundation, to which donations declined dramatically after Clinton’s 2016 defeat, has taken multi-million dollar contributions from Saudi Arabia in the past and isn’t ruling out continuing to accept them.
The Clinton Foundation accepted between $10 and $25 million from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with donations coming as late as 2014. A now-defunct group named “Friends of Saudi Arabia,” which was reportedly co-founded by a Saudi Prince and often worked as a PR front for the kingdom, also donated between $1 and $5 million.
Qatar's longstanding efforts to buy influence in the United States have, quite unsurprisingly, included substantial donations to the Clinton Foundation. In 2011, for example, the foundation accepted a $1 million gift from Qatar in honor of former president Bill Clinton's 65th birthday. Hillary was serving as secretary of state at the time, but failed to disclose the massive donation to the State Department despite her pledge to keep the agency apprised of the foundation's foreign donors.
Clinton pulled the 'dirtiest, dirtiest' tricks in American politics: Goodwin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MnyIh51EcY
All criminal roads lead back to Hillary Clinton: Former US attorney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rTyFs8gbpU
[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s masterpiece contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America. ]
How do you tell Hunter Biden’s lawyers apart from his prosecutors?
That was the confusing question that Judge Maryellen Noreika had to grapple with while unpacking a plea deal in which prosecutors buried an agreement that gave Hunter immunity from prosecution that had been written to avoid judicial scrutiny. Why would prosecutors write a plea deal for Hunter that one of them admitted to Judge Noreika had no precedent?
The rejected plea deal was unprecedented because prosecutors and defense attorneys were unprecedentedly working for the same team. But that’s what happens when the Justice Department pretends to be investigating the president’s son with his dad’s reelection on the line.
The Hunter Biden plea deal was part of a package in which the DOJ and the FBI stonewalled Congress and are trying to send Devon Archer, Hunter’s closest pal, to prison ahead of his congressional testimony in which he was scheduled to accuse Joe Biden of taking part in conversations with Hunter’s business partners while serving as vice president.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer called this “obstruction of justice” and denounced “the lengths to which the Biden legal team has gone to try to intimidate our witnesses, to coordinate with the DOJ and certainly to coordinate with the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee to encourage people not to cooperate with our investigation.”
United States v. Biden is a farce because they’re one and the same. The United States of America is currently run by Biden’s dad. The relationship isn’t antagonistic. Beyond ideological allegiances, a whole echelon of Justice Department personnel have bet their careers on the ascension of Democrat political candidates who then appoint transition team members whose pals are their former bosses. When a Hillary or a Joe Biden enters the White House, they all move up a few steps closer to a lucrative position they can use as a springboard to partner in a prestigious D.C. law firm, score a top security consulting position or run for public office.
If Biden loses in 2024, a bunch of DOJ people will have to hold off on that lake house, the extended trip to Europe and the move to a D.C. bedroom community. That’s why the Hunter Biden investigation was never anything more than performative. Everyone wanted to be seen going through the motion, but no one wanted to risk actually winning. Performative bureaucracy is a pantomime in which everyone appears to have done their job but nothing has gotten done. This routine infuriates ordinary citizens who watch it happen when they spend two years waiting for a construction permit, an appointment at the DMV or the outcome of a federal investigation.
The IRS whistleblowers were sidelined because they almost ruined the show by trying to do things even after they were told repeatedly that their job was to run out the clock. The FBI, which was moving full speed ahead in going after Trump or non-violent pro-life protesters, ran out the clock on the Hunter Biden investigation. Armed with evidence of a host of crimes that would have sent any ordinary person away long enough to become a grandfather, the combined defense team and prosecution teamed up to write up an extensive blank check for Hunter.
Judge Noreika’s objection, much like Durham’s, is procedural, but the problem isn’t just that the DOJ violated proper protocol in going after Trump or that it violated the correct procedures in cover up for Hunter Biden, it’s that the Department of Justice has become a political entity.
The procedural violations are symptoms of systemic political corruption.
Critics suspect that figures like Devon Archer or Gal Luft are targeted because they have damaging information about Hunter Biden. And Hunter Biden is protected because he’s the president’s son and anything he says has the potential to bring down his father and his party.
Hunter Biden has become too big to fall because his father, a formerly small-time hack, now carries a party and an ideology on his shaking shoulders. Anyone who threatens Hunter also threatens the ideological project of the leftists who placed their bets on Biden for a second term. And beyond them lies a vast career bureaucracy that also depends on Hunter staying free.
Parties and regimes often crack up over such petty corruption, but what’s cracking up here is the DOJ. The Justice Department has become a corrupt institution in which it alternately ignores and pursues charges of mishandling classified documents based on the party of the presidential candidate, in which it subjects everything from obstruction of justice and FARA violations to gun charges and prostitution to the same political test. While enemies of the party can be tried for anything, members of their party and their kin can commit any crime in the world and walk away.
Hunter Biden is personally insignificant, yet he has become a powerful symbol of a corrupt system. What began with the DOJ acting to protect Hillary Clinton and her aides has now escalated to covering for the entire Biden family. How far is that going to go? Is the DOJ going to become a family law firm for Joe Biden’s brother or for every Biden family member receiving money from the complex web of shell companies surrounding the family’s foreign enterprises?
How many bananas are there in the Biden banana republic? How many plantations? How many acres? If Hunter Biden had run over someone while going 170 mph through a residential neighborhood in Arlington, as he photographed himself doing, would the local cops have busted him or carefully bagged up his crack pipe for the FBI to take away as material evidence in some unrelated case that never sees the light of day? What if he had hit someone important?
Questions like these would have once seemed absurd but are now highly relevant. In a corrupt justice system all we can do is explore the limits of the corruption. How much Hunter could get away with is a stress test of how much corruption his father and the whole clan can do. The Lewinsky case was insignificant but it was a test of whether the rules applied. (They did not.) It’s hard to think of a case where the rules, large or small, have since applied to Clinton associates, accomplices, successors and members of his party.
What began as selective neglect has escalated into affirmative cover-ups. The son of a president doesn’t just expect to get a pass, but for prosecutors to come out and lie to a judge.
At the end of George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ describing the descent into Communism, “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” At Hunter Biden’s plea deal, the judge looked around but was unable to say which of the pigs covering for a presidential crackhead were his lawyers and which were the government prosecutors assigned to bring him to justice.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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