A Few New Year’s Resolutions for the FBI
Will Republican congressional leaders hold the leadership of the DOJ and FBI accountable?
Last year was a complete disaster for the men and women of the FBI. They’ve been betrayed by apparatchiks at DOJ, led by the mole-like Attorney General Merrick Garland who has behaved like the Grand Inquisitor to Joe Biden’s very real persecution of everything constitutional. Aside from Jim Crow — another Democrat party initiative —our civil rights have never been more threatened, abused, or abrogated.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has presided over some of the most pernicious abuses of power in the history of the FBI. The Watergate scandal, an egregious invasion of executive privilege for which no one has been held accountable, and resulted in the impeachment of President Nixon, pales in comparison to the 2022 list of malfeasance.
The invasion of Mar-a-Lago by a gestapo-like phalanx of FBI agents, directed by DOJ and FBI HQ politicians was breathtaking in its unabashed hubris. And, the deeply collusive behavior of former and current FBI agents at Twitter is profoundly disturbing. It must be noted, however, that though conspiracy theories are tempting to entertain, because they’re simplistic, it is far more likely that these bad actors aren’t conspirators so much as they share a common liberal world view.
Furthermore, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have former FBI agents working at a social media company. In fact, the FBI does some very necessary work by liaising with big tech to share threat information and collaborate on solutions.
As the new Congress is sworn in, there may be some cause for a cautious optimism. The new Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Republican James Comer of Kentucky, who leads Oversight and Reform have both promised hearings. Well, we’ve heard that before. The Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strasser reports that Republicans are considering the creation of a new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Again, we’ve heard that before.
At this point, it’s a lot of talk. Some real action would be a welcome change from the mostly inert Republican Party.
Comer is stumping for dismantling the FBI, and Andrew McCarthy has dredged up the old post 9/11 slogan: let’s split the FBI into separate criminal and intelligence components. Both assertions are simplistic slogans and don’t bode well for the implementation of any real solutions for the abuses of DOJ and the FBI. Furthermore, this myopic obsession with “doing something” with the FBI ignores the head of the serpent — DOJ.
Twitter, Truth Social, and podcast personalities can blow the “defund the FBI” dogwhistle until their capillaries burst, but no amount of whistleblowing into that trope will result in real-world results. Lawmakers need real solutions to action, and fan dancing clowns attempting to compensate for their own professional inadequacies only obfuscates the way forward.
A recent Wall Street Journal Op Ed piece reported the problem accurately, “In November, Judiciary Republicans defined the problem this way: ‘The problem lies with the FBI structure that centralizes high-profile cases in D.C., in the hands of politicized actors with politicized incentives. Quite simply, the problem — the rot within the FBI — festers in and proceeds from Washington.”
You can now tune out all the other noise about how rank and file FBI agents are somehow culpable for not “falling on their swords” and supporting a pair of disgruntled former employees. If we want real change we’re going to have to support the efforts of Congress to create leadership change at DOJ and the FBI.
The solutions aren’t too complicated and they aren’t sensational. A few simple New Year’s Resolutions will do the trick.
First, the Attorney General must be replaced by an individual who respects our civil rights and the Constitution, which limits federal government authority. That’s easy, but it will require a dramatic change in power in the White House. Instead of a senile mannequin controlled by radical leftists, we’ll need a real president who possesses Trump-like qualities, who will attack and dismantle the bureaucratic state.
The second resolution has precedent at the FBI. Two former Directors — Clarence Kelly and Louis Freeh — were actually agents before being chosen to lead the FBI. Makes a lot of intuitive sense right? So, instead of the Chief Executive selecting from a list of empty suits, wouldn’t it dramatically increase the likelihood of creating the right leadership environment to appoint an FBI Director who actually worked cases and deeply reveres and understands the role of law enforcement in preserving our civil liberties?
Third, any coalescence of power tends to breed corruption. So, ensuring that FBI cases are handled at the Field Office level, not at HQ, would keep investigations within the span of control of those good men and women of the FBI who are career law enforcement professionals — not careerists.
We have nearly two more years of Joe Biden’s weak, befuddled presidency. Two more years of left-wing tyranny from the Democrat party. Let’s pray that our Republican congressional leaders can get something right and hold the leadership of the DOJ and the FBI accountable.
I’d be inclined to disagree with Don except for one thing: Biden has proven to be a very adept criminal mastermind. For decades, he has funneled millions of dollars to his children and siblings and, especially, to his debauched, deviant son, Hunter.
ANDREA WIDBURG
Joe Biden has made it abundantly clear that he is unprincipled, untrustworthy, and unscrupulous. His faux presidency will be remembered as one of the darkest periods of American history. We can only hope that the damage he leaves behind him will not be completely irreversible. ROBERT SPENCER
YOU MEAN BIDEN'S SEC. OF OPEN BORDERS GAMER LAWYER MAYORAKS IS A LIAR???
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security habitually lies about America's borders being "secure," even though illegal immigration has never been worse, and so long as corporate media parrot government lies, reality is ridiculously distorted. JB SHURK
Joe Biden and his staff have claimed at least seven times that the president has not been involved in the family business, yet more than 17 pieces of evidence suggest Joe Biden has played an influential role in his son Hunter and brother James’s activities.
Fifty-eight percent of voters believe that Joe Biden has played a role in his family’s business dealings. Sixty percent say Hunter Biden has sold “influence and access” to the president.
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
I can’t tell you how many times I have been assured by people on my
conservative side of the political spectrum that “all politicians are
liars.” It’s a common riposte when I encourage people to get
involved in the political process and vote or when I flag the flagrant
untruths uttered by the Democrat pantheon of political liars (the
Clintons - GAMER LYING LAWYERS -, Gore, Kerry,
Kamala, GAMER LYING LAWYER ALONG WITH
HER GAMER LAWYER HUSBAND the
Bidens GAMER LYING LAWYER ALONG WITH
GAMER LAWYER HUNTER BIDEN AND JAMES
BIDEN, Schiff GAMER LYING LAWYER, Pelosi,
Schumer GAMER LYING LAWYER,
the MSM, etc., etc.) to my friends on the Left. For many, it seems, it
is an excuse to accept the status quo and embrace inaction.
Are All Politicians Liars?
WELL CERTAINLY ALL LAWYERS ARE AND ARE THEREFORE A SERIOUS DANGER TO OUR COUNTRY!
By Danny Lemieux
I can’t tell you how many times I have been assured by people on my conservative side of the political spectrum that “all politicians are liars.” It’s a common riposte when I encourage people to get involved in the political process and vote or when I flag the flagrant untruths uttered by the Democrat pantheon of political liars (the Clintons, Gore, Kerry, Kamala, the Bidens, Schiff, Pelosi, Schumer, the MSM, etc., etc.) to my friends on the Left. For many, it seems, it is an excuse to accept the status quo and embrace inaction.
Well, in fairness, we Republicans have hardly been without sin, especially now that we must deal with an obscure, newly elected-fabulist congressman from Long Island, George Santos. Because Santos is a Republican, his lies aren’t as acceptable to the Left as those of a Democrat would be for Democrats and their media flacks. But should they be acceptable to us on the Right? I admit to a certain degree of schadenfreude seeing a Republican capture high office using the same tactics used by our Democrat opponents; as Saul Alinsky noted in rule #4 for radicals, “make the enemy live up to their own rules.”
Here is the problem, though: once we accept the premise that “all politicians lie”, we lower the bar for all politicians; we establish lying as an acceptable criterion for politicians. I don’t accept that premise: I know plenty of politicians that are stand-up individuals and not liars.
Now, by a “lie,” I don’t mean the Democrat definition thereof as it applies to their opponents, which is basically anything they don’t agree with, along with exaggerations, and honest mistakes uttered in order to gain ground against one’s opponents. Come to think of it, the Democrat justifications for lying track closely with the Islamic concept of “Taqiyya,” where dissimulation is deemed perfectly okay as long as it advances the faith.
Image: A liar (cropped) by borjandreu.
No, by “lie,” I mean a material lie uttered deliberately to hide malfeasance or advance one’s agenda. We should never accept this.
The late psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, author of People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, devoted his career to understanding the roots of evil. He concluded that, starting with the Biblical story of Genesis, at the core of all human evil rests a lie. Peck described a dynamic whereby people begin as small children telling small lies that, if not called out, metastasize into bigger and bigger lies.
Liars, like all criminals, eventually justify their vice by claiming that “everyone does it,” so why shouldn’t they lie? And, because “all” people lie, no one can trust what other people say.
At some point on this trajectory, liars begin to lie to themselves, and that is where their worldviews depart from reality. There are all kinds of lies…lies of commission; lies of omission; lies of deflection, gaslighting….
Look around our country today and note the scale of damage that a culture of lies has done to our once-healthy Western society. Look at our social, news, and entertainment media and note how lies are celebrated for their brazenness.
Consider how much humor is wrapped into celebrating the brazenness of lies. Just look at our youth entertainment, even in such iconic youth movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (to cite just one example).
What on earth have we been teaching our kids? In much of our society today, lies are celebrated…as long as you get away with it. Really good liars become cultural and political icons.
Only 75 years ago, the United States, like most of northern Europe, was viewed as a “high-trust” society, where a high level of social trust allowed for healthy transactions between individuals to occur, buttressed by robust legal, political, and informational systems. This was a big factor that helped fuel our economy.
While some countries (e.g., the Nordic countries, Switzerland) still qualify as high-trust societies today, the past decades in the U.S. and many European countries have witnessed a breathtaking collapse of trust in our most important public and private institutions. I live in an area of our country where many transactions are still done with a handshake. Sadly, my county and others like it are the exception in America, not the rule.
Our moral and ethical collapse will continue as long as we accept that it is okay for others, especially politicians and institutions, to lie. The consequences are serious: low-trust countries and economies usually qualify as global laggards plagued by poor economies, social and political oppression, and internal conflicts.
Want an example? Look at Russia and the disastrous decisions it made vis à vis Ukraine, decisions that were founded on the web of lies interwoven throughout its security establishment. Russia faces disaster because it lied to itself and created an alternate reality built on falsehoods. We cannot hope to maintain our global leadership as a country if we devolve into a society of liars that lie with impunity.
The right response to our continued decline is for Republicans and conservatives once again to stand athwart our road to perdition, as conservative icon William F. Buckley once did, and yell, “Stop!” We should never allow ourselves to accept that lying is OK. If we do, then we become complicit in a long and painful decline to third-world status.
It is not for Democrats to pass judgment on Rep. George Santos; they have no standing to do so. Neither is it the purview of Congressional Republicans to remove Santos, as he was duly elected by his constituents. But he can be sanctioned in other ways: shunned, humiliated, and otherwise disgraced. The sanctioning of Santos should be done very publicly, in-house, by Republicans and other conservatives, as an example for all the world to see because there is so much at stake.
Danny Lemieux, a pseudonym, is a retired industry executive living the good life in rural Virginia.
of course the republicans will never pursue impeachment as ultimately they have the same agenda as closet republican 'credit card' joe biden!
GOP House Opens Probe into Biden Family for Potential Tax Evasion, Money Laundering, Human Trafficking Violations
Members of the newly controlled Republican House on Thursday announced an investigation into the Biden family business and whether President Joe Biden is compromised by the family’s business schemes.
Rep. James Comer (R-TN), the top Republican on the Oversight Committee, announced during a press conference that the Biden family will be investigated for the following violations:
1. Conspiracy or defrauding the United States
2. Wire fraud
3. Conspiracy to commit wire fraud
4. Violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act
5.
Violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
6.
7. Violations of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000
8. Tax evasion
9. Money laundering
10. Conspiracy to commit money laundering
“I want to be clear, this is an investigation of Joe Biden,” Comer stated. “The Biden family’s business dealings implicate a wide range of criminality from human trafficking to potential violations of the constitution.”
“In the 218th Congress, this committee will evaluate the status of Joe Biden’s relationship with his families foreign partners and whether he is a president who is compromised or swayed by foreign dollars or influence,” he said.
“We are also sending letters to the Biden administration and Biden family associates renewing our request for voluntary production of documents relevant to this investigation,” Comer continued before stating Joe Biden lied about having knowledge about his family’s business dealings.
“This is an investigation of Joe Biden, the president of the United States, and why he lied to the American people about his knowledge and participation in his family’s international business dealing schemes,” Comer said. “National security interests require to conduct an investigation and we will pursue all avenues – avenues that have long been ignored.”
Comer then listed a number of crimes that members of the Biden family may have committed, according to uncovered evidence by House Republicans.
“These include conspiracy or defrauding the United States, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, violations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, tax evasion, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit money laundering,” Comer said.
Comer added that additional evidence suggests the Biden family tried to aid the Chinese’s purchase of American assets.
“We find evidence that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden were involved in a scheme to try to get China to buy liquified natural gas,” Comer said. “People are in outrage over China buying farmland in the Dakotas. What about China starting to buy into our American energy industry?”
Joe Biden and his staff have claimed at least seven times that the president has not been involved in the family business, yet more than 17 pieces of evidence suggest Joe Biden has played an influential role in his son Hunter and brother James’s activities.
Fifty-eight percent of voters believe that Joe Biden has played a role in his family’s business dealings. Sixty percent say Hunter Biden has sold “influence and access” to the president.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
Government by Gimmick Won't Last
The system's too powerful! You can't beat a "big brother" police State! The globalists control all the money and have all the leverage! I've heard every reason under the sun why individual liberty will continue to lose out to the rapidly advancing technocratic surveillance structure extinguishing Western freedoms today. I say, "So what?" The bigger they come, the harder they fall.
Our whole human story is a repeating pattern in which power accumulates, empires emerge, power corrupts, divisions grow, and empires come crashing down. Anyone who thinks an international oligarchy of corporate behemoths, central banks, and Intelligence Community spy chiefs will succeed where the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Carolingian, Byzantine, Ottoman, Yuan, Ming, and British empires all failed makes the mistake of giving today's power brokers more credit than they deserve. International oligarchies commanding unbeatable militaries and hoarding unparalleled wealth are nothing new. The "unbeatable" are always beaten.
When we are overwhelmed by those who choose to torment us, we tend to unfairly reward them with even more semantic power by referring to them as an ever-shifting, all-knowing, globular "they" that cannot be tamed, let alone specifically named. Individual politicians, companies, institutions, and agencies end up looking so invincible that they are treated as omniscient gods. Well, they are not divine; they are just ordinary men and women who have acquired tremendous wealth and power over others; and they exist at the top of society's artificially constructed hierarchical pyramid only so long as society chooses. Their authority is neither fixed nor eternal; it disappears the moment enough ordinary people recognize the illusion of power as mere delusion.
They control the news, social media, the banks, the food supply, the flow of gasoline, and they're set to use the excuse of tracking our "carbon footprint" as a means to monitor and control us throughout our lives. Well, that sounds scary, but those aren't exactly new powers being wielded for the first time in history. Aztec priests engaged in human sacrifice to appease their gods during pandemics and droughts; "climate change" priests seeking to control population growth by stifling food and energy production are not at all different. Just because population control has been freshly weaponized behind digital computer systems, facial recognition technology, and artificial intelligence platforms does not alter the age-old power structure of a group of "rulers" claiming the "divine" prerogative to tell a group of "subjects" what they can and cannot own, say, or do. Whether some high priestess from the Stone Age, a First Dynasty pharaoh, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, King Louis XIV, Napoleon, Stalin, or Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum, those who presume to have the power to command others what to believe and how to behave do not last.
What is more powerful than the people who appear so powerful? Ideas. Give my enemies more weapons, money, and soldiers to wreak havoc and conquer what is not theirs. I'll take the power of an idea over a blade in any conflict at any time. Force is effective only in achieving momentary compliance; ideas upend whole systems like trickling water seeping through tiny cracks never before seen. You plant the seeds of a new idea, give that idea room to spread, and let it grow right through the floorboards of a system of power unable to fend off attack — that's how real revolutions unfold.
The Marxists have been playing this game for over a century, except the seeds they have planted throughout the West are nothing but poisonous weeds. They slowly took over the arts, institutions, schools, churches, and corporations until, unbeknownst to most Westerners, Marxist socialism had become their lands' dominant species. Because so few defenders of freedom cut back against Marxism's invasive growth, its weeds spread over everything, and the only way now to remedy the immense damage is to sow such powerful ideas that vibrant, healthy growth overtakes the twisted, parasitic rot.
The good news: man's yearning for liberty is as fierce as any inherent need, and when conditions are right, nothing can stop its vigorous bloom. You open a population's eyes to its own enslavement, reawaken its forgotten thirst for freedom, provide it with the seeds for rejuvenation, and the lifeblood of liberty beats harder and flows stronger the longer it has been denied. How do you eradicate the thorny weeds of Marxist globalism destroying the West with pernicious strains of totalitarianism in the twenty-first century? You plant the seeds of liberty and let them grow into such tall trees that Marxism can find no sunlight, water, or soil beneath freedom's canopy. How do you bring down an unhealthy system that nonetheless presumes to be all-powerful? You let those trees of liberty flourish into wild orchards that overgrow all else.
We are right now in an interim period that might best be called a kind of government by gimmick. Nothing our "leaders" say is bound by much truth. Three years of pandemic lockdowns, forced experimental injections, government-sanctioned censorship, and other unconstitutional COVID-1984 measures were moronically justified as necessary because government health bureaucrats and politicians were acting at the "speed of science." What kind of nonsense is that? When has real science ever been anything but methodical and slow? Yet that authoritarian policy directive has justified three years of reckless tyranny across the West, and too many minds squeezed by Marxism's weeds simply complied.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security habitually lies about America's borders being "secure," even though illegal immigration has never been worse, and so long as corporate media parrot government lies, reality is ridiculously distorted. Climate change, which is an immutable planetary phenomenon, has been transformed into irrefutable proof that centralized government authority must intervene in all economic activity — the exact policy objective, coincidentally enough, that forms the foundations of Marxist power. When Elon Musk's recent "Twitter Files" release confirmed that the FBI has been actively directing policies of censorship and speech punishment against the American people, the lawless law enforcement agency accused anybody with eyes and brain sufficient to comprehend the Bureau's constitutional betrayals of being "conspiracy theorists" pushing "misinformation." Why should federal police confess to crimes when only they, not the people, have the power to make arrests?
Not only have Western governments partitioned free speech into new categories of "mis-," "mal-," and "dis-information" that have miraculously lost any legal protections, but they have also decided to ban all "hate" speech outright — which again, completely coincidentally, includes any anti-government language governments would naturally hate. So the same Western governments that pretend to be bastions for freedom and democratic principles inexplicably insist that they can both declare what kinds of things the people may freely say and whether what the people ultimately say will be tolerated. In the not so distant past, such government actions were understood as prima facie examples of tyranny, but in this era of government by gimmick, Western governments have simply redefined their tyranny as "protecting democracy."
By distorting the meaning of words, Western governments have destroyed their legitimacy. For this reason, Westerners who wish to fight back can start by doing three things: (1) reject appeals to authority; (2) embrace the role of "conspiracy theorist" or any other derogatory label governments use when they seek to manipulate the public; and (3) consciously choose to elevate virtue, morality, and the pursuit of excellence in life.
Appealing to authority, instead of truth, has always been a false path. Today, however, when our "leaders" embrace obvious lies and the redefinition of words, positions of authority should hold no special value. When those who commit crimes call the innocent criminals, no Westerner should be cowed by government name-calling. And the fastest, most direct road back to a prosperous civilization grounded in personal freedom rejects Marxist relativism and embraces steadfast virtue.
Image: Pashi via Pixabay, Pixabay License.
‘Significant Public Interest’: Legal Bid to Get DOJ to Release Hunter Biden Material Inches Ahead
(CNSNews.com) – A Colorado law firm’s two-year attempt to have the Justice Department provide documents relating to Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China, Russia, and Ukraine comes before a judge again next week, after the plaintiff argued that there was “significant public interest” in the records being released.
Attorney Kevin Evans and Evans Law PLLC sued the DOJ last March, 16 months after first filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents dealing with the business activities of both President Biden’s son, Hunter, and the president’s brother, James Biden.
Evans wrote in documents before the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado that he initiated the action after 15 separate communications with the DOJ over more than a year provided “no real assurance from DOJ as to when it would provide a substantive response.”
In the FOIA request, served on November 19, 2020, Evans asked for material relating to Hunter and James Biden “pertaining to any relationship, communication, gift(s), and/or remuneration in any form with, to or from any individual or entity (government agency or otherwise) from the countries of China, Russia, and/or Ukraine.”
What he received from the DOJ, the following March, were copies of letters between lawmakers (including Republican Sens. Rand Paul, Chuck Grassley, and Ron Johnson) and the Attorney General relating to Hunter Biden’s business deals.
Apart from that correspondence, Evans said the DOJ also provided a copy of a report by the majority staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Finance Committees (the Johnson-Grassley report, released in Sept. 2020) on Hunter Biden’s business dealings, including his role on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings. (Despite having no prior experience in the gas industry or in Ukraine, Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board in 2014. According to the Senate GOP staff report he was paid $50,000 a month.)
For months Evans sought more information in line with his FOIA request. He advised DOJ in a letter that he would sue, “[a]bsent a prompt, significant, and substantive response (as opposed to what I have received to date).”
Evans then filed suit last March, seeking a court order for the DOJ to “promptly comply with the request and produce all requested documents.”
During a March 2022 status conference in the case, counsel for the DOJ said it had found 400 pages of documents “potentially responsive” to the FOIA request, that were undergoing review.
But four months after acknowledging the existence of the 400 pages, the DOJ in a letter to the plaintiffs said it “refuse[s] to confirm or deny the existence of such records,” according to court documents.
In defending its “neither confirm nor deny” stance, the DOJ in documents before the court cited two exemptions in the FOIA, both relating to “an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
The next hearing in the case – another status conference in the courthouse in Denver, Colo. – has been set down for next Monday.
Evans lodged the original FOIA request after the New York Post published revelations about Hunter Biden’s business dealings, based on emails and messages found on a laptop which he had left at a computer repair shop in Delaware in 2019.
The Post reporting drew attention to alleged attempts by Hunter Biden to benefit in his business interests in Ukraine and China from the position of his father, the then-vice president.
In documents before the court in Colorado, Evans laid out why he believed release of the DOJ documents was indeed a matter of “significant public interest.”
“Any suggestion that Plaintiffs have failed to identify a significant public interest is, with all due respect, an imperious position,” Evans said in a status report last September.
“To the extent there was any confusion here by DOJ, how about public interest in national security concerns and influence peddling? How about concerns as to whether such favors and gifts were provided in exchange for an illicit quid pro quo?”
“How about whether specified individuals are receiving favorable treatment vis-Ã -vis others in a similar position?” Evans continued. “It can hardly be suggested that these are not matters of ‘significant public interest.’”
Victor Davis Hanson: Biden is the most dangerously radical President in US history
The question is who should get to decide? On the heels of the Warren exchange, Senator Josh Hawley released damning evidence demonstrating that Biden’s “Disinformation Governance Board” had been interfacing with leftist eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s network.
Warren objects to one billionaire member of the PayPal mafia, but not another making those decisions because they share a common set of political views that include censorship. While Musk put billions on the line to buy Twitter to protect free speech, Omidyar committed $100 million to fight “disinformation”, “fake news” and “hate speech”. That includes funding for leftist “fact checkers” who have been used by Big Tech monopolies to censor opposing views.
Twittergate and the Plot Against Free Speech
What happens when Twitter stops suppressing speech for the government.
“Don’t you think that users have a right to freedom of speech even if what they’re saying is wrong or offensive?” Fox Business correspondent Hillary Vaughn asked.
“I think that one human being should not be able to go into a dark room by himself and decide ‘Oh, that person gets heard from, that person doesn’t.’ That’s not how it should work,” Senator Elizabeth Warren retorted, referring to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
The question is who should get to decide? On the heels of the Warren exchange, Senator Josh Hawley released damning evidence demonstrating that Biden’s “Disinformation Governance Board” had been interfacing with leftist eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s network.
Warren objects to one billionaire member of the PayPal mafia, but not another making those decisions because they share a common set of political views that include censorship. While Musk put billions on the line to buy Twitter to protect free speech, Omidyar committed $100 million to fight “disinformation”, “fake news” and “hate speech”. That includes funding for leftist “fact checkers” who have been used by Big Tech monopolies to censor opposing views.
Warren, despite her rhetoric, is quite happy to have one human being go into a dark room and decide who gets heard from and who doesn’t, as long as he’s running the censorship machine to suit her. The leftist politician and her political allies in the Senate and House repeatedly pressured tech companies, especially Facebook, to censor their political opponents.
And she’s not alone.
The release of the Twittergate files at Elon Musk’s behest revealed the process by which the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story was censored.
The general counsel for Netchoice, a Big Tech coalition that
included Facebook, Google, Amazon, PayPal and Communist
China’s TikTok and Alibaba, claimed to have polled
congressional staffers about how tech companies were handling
the Hunter Biden story.
“The Democrats were in agreement: social media needs to moderate more because they’re corrupting democracy.” And when “asked how the government might insist on that, consistent with the First Amendment, they demurred: “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.”
The First Amendment is constitutionally absolute. But the Democrats are moving to undo the Constitution and its protections of freedom of expression to protect “democracy.” Twittergate had revealed the long game behind Russiagate which was about manufacturing a crisis, in this case Trump, as a pretext for treating free speech as a national disinformation crisis requiring the suspension of civil rights and liberties in order to save democracy. That’s still the plan.
It’s why Warren wouldn’t answer the simple question, once considered the cornerstone of our freedoms, whether those she disagrees with still have the right to freedom of speech. She’s not complaining that Musk is deciding who can’t be heard from, but who can be heard from. Her issue, to paraphrase the old glib libertarian line, is that he took over and is leaving people alone.
Big Tech’s complicity made the culture of censorship revealed by Twittergate possible.
Unable to immediately impose direct government censorship, the Biden administration and figures loyal to the Obama and Clinton administrations in the Justice Department, worked with Big Tech, the media and fact checking nonprofits fighting “disinformation” to create a speech cartel to maintain a leftist monopoly on speech. The existence of the cartel depended on political cohesion and covert censorship among the corporate leadership in the tech industry.
That’s what Musk’s stewardship of Twitter and the release of the Twittergate files has exposed.
In the Obama era, the formerly libertarian tech industry morphed from renegade hackers into pathologically woke campuses. Renegade college kids turned billionaires followed the Bill Gates ethos of finding a life outside work through social justice. BLM logos, pride flags and assorted causes joined the litter of nerdy paraphernalia of Warhammer figurines and Star Wars X-wings along with inspirational “Move Fast and Break Things” mottos in Big Tech workspaces.
It would have been impossible to imagine Big Tech bosses holding workplace meetings and crying when Kerry lost to Bush, but by the time Hillary lost to Trump, that was the new normal. Google had fought Obama’s censorship push over ‘The Innocence of Muslims’ in court before becoming one of the most strident tech monopolies suppressing a wide variety of views.
The compliance of the tech industry made a speech cartel possible. Until Musk broke it.
The government side of the speech monopoly needed Big Tech to do its dirty work for it by coordinating with leftist nonprofits, like Facebook’s fact checkers, to do the censoring.
But what’s the government to do when a tech company stops suppressing dissent on its behalf?
Warren’s plaint is revealing. How dare one man take on the function that had been allotted to the government. Someone, she insists, has to decide what speech to suppress. It never occurs to her that maybe people should be deciding what they read, watch and think for themselves.
But socialists just don’t think that way.
The exposure of the Disinformation Governance Board documents shows that the government side of the arrangement was more developed and further along than the Biden administration had been willing to admit when it tried to dismiss its existence as a random stray thought.
“Sec Mayorkas told me under oath that the Disinfo Board hadn’t met yet back in May. But DHS emails reveal their Disinfo ‘Steering Group’ held weekly meetings starting as early as February. The Board was up and running,” Hawley tweeted.
Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas had claimed that the board would focus on foreign propaganda and would not monitor Americans. That also proved to be untrue.
Say what you will about Elon Musk, but his decision making remains quite transparent.
Asked about restoring the Twitter account of Alex Jones, Musk tweeted, “My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.” Compare that clear and concise response to secret meetings by a government board, private decisions by fact checkers who are funded by dark money machines tied to billionaires who issue press releases, but don’t discuss individual decisions.
Given a choice between Musk’s transparent plutocracy and a complex oligarchy, one man in a room whose preferences are clear, or a secretive network of political and economic interests invisibly manipulating online narratives to maintain a monopoly on speech, the choice is simple.
The underlying challenges of the internet have not gone away with Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Even assuming he hangs on to it and maintains liberal policies, that’s not any kind of solution. Musk created an alternative to a speech cartel, but the cartel is far more powerful than any one man, one company or one platform. And as the internet has come to be concentrated in fewer hands, a bottleneck dominated by one search engine, one social media giant, one retail channel, and two mobile operating systems, a monopoly on speech is inevitable.
The old decentralized internet was inherently free, web 2.0 is inherently unfree. The fact that it took $44 billion just to create a temporary space of free speech shows the scale of the problem. With someone in a room somewhere always deciding who should be heard, the marketplace of ideas ls constantly in someone’s hands. And that’s the opposite of the promise of the internet.
Change in the form of web 3.0 might be coming. Some believe that the tech monopolies are the final stage of an ossifying dead internet whose giant companies will collapse to make way for new things. But for now there’s little sign of this optimistic ‘internet spring’ in the real world where companies that spent endless billions to fund data centers, hardware and free services, and the investment giants behind them, still control our internet as thoroughly as China’s Xi.
When the Constitution first protected freedom of speech, the nation’s cities were filled with printers, most of them crude amateurs by European standards, who published a welter of contradictory leaflets, pamphlets and papers. A century later, newspapers were becoming concentrated in a small number of chains, and with the addition of radio and television, later created the media that conservatives spent generations fighting until the internet liberated them.
Once the greatest blow to speech monopolies, the internet has become a stifling speech monopoly operated with greater control and precision than CBS or Hearst could have imagined. The complexity and centralization of the internet has made it possible to disguise how it is censored to a previously inconceivable degree. But Musk’s breach in the speech monopoly has also revealed how comprehensive the censorship was the breath of its sudden omission.
“That’s not how it should work,” Senator Elizabeth Warren insists. But information, as hackers used to say, wants to be free. It takes a lot of work and a lot of money to keep it penned up.
Warren and her leftist allies are worried about free speech. They should be.
Booker: Worried GOP Focus Will Be ‘Crazy Hearings’ Attacking Biden, His Son
Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) said Tuesday on CNN’s “The Situation Room” that he is worried the Republican controlled House will hold “crazy hearings” attacking President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Anchor Wolf Blitzer said, “You said in the past, senator, you would support a 2024 run for President Biden. Given where things stand now, do you still feel that way?”
Booker said, “Oh, very strongly if the president makes the decision to run. I don’t think we can point to any president, maybe going back to LBJ that a president has had as much of a successful two years. Even today you look at the jobs report we had another quarter million jobs in the United States, the unemployment rate down another 3.7%.”
Blitzer said, “So what are your biggest concerns right now for Democrats looking forward, senator?”
Booker said, “Well, you know, I think my biggest concern is we’ve had a constructive bipartisan Congress. A lot of the things wave gotten done, we’ve gotten done together. So I’m really worried about the House of Representatives and listening closely to what they say, what they’re talking about is not their idea to deal with inflation or help working families. I’m worried their focus is much more attacking President Biden, going after his son, and doing crazy hearings that are not going to be productive and constructive to what Americans really need right now.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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