When Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter became a firm prospect, the Biden administration threatened to step in and kill the deal. Why would they do that?
Because they are terrified of what Musk, lately a convert to the Republican party, might find and make public.
We know something of what they might find, thanks to a stunning investigation by the Intercept. This is no InfoWars, right-wing conspiracy-theory stuff, either: the Intercept is a strongly left-leaning media source, yet highly rated for accuracy by media websites. What they have exposed, independent journalist Tim Poole says, “may be the biggest story of our lives”.
It’s certainly the most shocking scandal of government spying and surveillance in a supposedly free country since COINTELPRO.
A report Monday from the left-wing Intercept revealed shocking details on how the FBI and Department of Homeland Security secretly affected the 2020 election and are rapidly expanding their suppression of dissent.
In the spring, DHS revealed that it had a Disinformation Governance Board, headed by a wacky zealot named Nina Jankowicz. The New York Post led the charge against that “Ministry of Truth,” and many people believed the peril ended when that board was dissolved. But far more insidious federal censorship efforts are proliferating.
The FBI, DHS, Secret Service and even Customs and Border Protection are elbowing social-media companies like Facebook and Twitter to engage in “censorship by surrogate,” as law professor Jonathan Turley observed.
Groucho Marx apocryphally said that “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
In this case, the “trouble” is so-called “misinformation” and the very wrong remedy is spying and censorship on a scale the Stasi or the KGB could have only dreamed of.
As the covert war against “misinformation” expands, the list of federally prohibited online thoughts is snowballing. DHS is targeting “inaccurate information on ‘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 same people dragging little old ladies with cancer through show trials for questioning a dodgy election are stopping at nothing to skew elections.
How many votes were swayed by federal censorship in 2020, and how many will be swayed in next week’s midterm election? The campaign by the feds and former CIA poohbahs to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story was only the tip of the iceberg in the presidential race.
“The FBI agent who primed social media platforms to take down the Hunter Biden laptop story continued to have a role in DHS policy discussions,” The Intercept noted.
As the Foundation for Freedom Online recently reported, federal contractors also alerted DHS (which then elbowed Big Tech) to suppress hundreds of posts by Americans that were “‘casting doubt on the integrity of the election outcome’ via criticism of things like the viability of drop boxes and mail-in ballots.”
But elections are small bananas in the Deep State’s grand scheme. After all, presidents come and go, but the faceless men and spooks remain secure in their little empires of spying and snitching.
The real goal of the Truth Cops is to control America’s minds. Jen Easterly, Biden’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency chief, declared that “the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation . . . is incredibly important.”
And the most important cognitive “fix” is to train Americans to never doubt Uncle Sam.
Remember when Hillary Clinton said that the central message of 1984 is “trust the government”? That’s what our real-life Ministry of Truth actually want.
Trust your sole sources of truth. Don’t ask questions, just obey.
Biden’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism explicitly proclaims a “broader priority” of “enhancing faith in government.”
In a March meeting with top Twitter executives, FBI official Laura Dehmlow “warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government.” The FBI has 80 agents on a task force to curb “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.” Mike Benz, a former top State Department official, warns that thanks to DHS string-pulling, “The U.S. government, in effect, censored the ability to ‘cast doubt’ on the U.S. government.”
New York Post
To do so, they have co-opted the legacy media and most especially Big Tech in a massive program of censorship and propaganda.
Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives. According to NBC News, the meetings were part of an initiative, still ongoing, between the private sector and government to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election […]
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.
The textbook example of how this system works in practice is the Hunter Biden laptop story.
In an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook had limited sharing of the New York Post’s reporting after a conversation with the FBI.
The Intercept
Polling after the election has shown that, had the media told the truth about the laptop from the start, enough voters would have changed their vote to flip the election entirely.
There’s no other way to put it: the Deep State, mainstream media and Big Tech colluded and lied to influence the 2020 election.
And they wonder why people were angry on January 6.
