21 Dec The Twitter Files
We have yet to comment on the “Twitter Files” for reasons that will be clear in a moment. Despite our silence, the information contained within the various document dumps is more than a little concerning and well worth your time. If you have any concerns about the reach of the American federal government and the willingness of social media executives to enable that government, then you’ll want to read the files – although you’ll probably want to read them sitting down. This bit from yesterday – Part 8 – will give you just a taste of the collusion between the Deep State and Big Tech:
Despite promises to shut down covert state-run propaganda networks, Twitter docs show that the social media giant directly assisted the U.S. military’s influence operations….
behind the scenes, Twitter gave approval & special protection to the U.S. military’s online psychological influence ops. Despite knowledge that Pentagon propaganda accounts used covert identities, Twitter did not suspend many for around 2 years or more. Some remain active….
In 2017, a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) official sent Twitter a list of 52 Arab language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.” The official asked for priority service for six accounts, verification for one & “whitelist” abilities for the others.
The same day CENTCOM sent the list, Twitter officials used a tool to grant a special “whitelist” tag that essentially provides verification status to the accounts w/o the blue check, meaning they are exempt from spam/abuse flags, more visible/likely to trend on hashtags.
As they say, you should read the whole thing – or at least a summary of the various “bombshells.”
If you do, however, be prepared for one thing: “bombshells” may be a bit of a misnomer. We hate to sound like the mainstream media folks, who have actively and consciously ignored the Twitter Files news, but these aren’t exactly the bombshells that we were promised. Indeed, the most surprising thing about the Twitter Files is how UNsurprising they are.
Now, to be clear, we’re not saying that they are unimportant or a waste of time. (in fact, we just said the opposite above.) We do NOT support the mainstream media view that there is nothing interesting or damning contained in the files. Quite the opposite. We think the files are extremely damning – not to mention extremely important and extremely interesting. It’s just that we’re not surprised by them. We knew it all along, or at least we sensed it all along. And that’s not because we’re especially insightful or discerning.
The biases at the various Danton-ian or Robespierre-ian “Trust and Safety Committees” in social media have been obvious for years, and, frankly, one had to be in on it or willingly blind not to see them. Likewise, the hatred of the national security apparatus – the FBI, CIA, DHS, etc. – for Donald Trump and others outside of the political mainstream has also been obvious for years. The details contained in the Twitter Files may not have been entirely expected, but no one serious can even pretend for a second to be shocked to learn that Twitter and the feds were in bed together, de-platforming, de-monetizing, and de-emphasizing the speech of those mostly on the political Right.
As we have noted before in these pages (and as others far smarter have noted elsewhere), over the course of the last fifty years and especially over the course of the last decade, the political parties in this country have changed places on the question of their faith in and respect for the national security agencies. In the 1960s, while J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI were trying to convince Martin Luther King to kill himself, Democrats were growing increasingly skeptical of “the man,” while Republicans assumed that getting crosswise of the FBI meant that you were doing something wrong. Today, Republicans are suspicious of the feds, while Democrats are “the man” incarnate.
The chart below, which comes from an October 5, 2022 Gallup report, shows the shift clearly and dramatically. As Gallup notes:
All 11 agencies in this year’s survey get majority positive evaluations from Democrats, while only NASA and the Postal Service — both at 51% — are viewed positively by a majority of Republicans.
Partisan groups diverge most in their assessments of the FBI, which 79% of Democrats and 29% of Republicans say is doing a good job.
We suspect that there are several reasons why this is the case. For our money, though, the most germane in this case and the most disturbing as well is the advance of the Total State. As society becomes more and more politicized and more and more bifurcated into friend and enemy groups, the professional Left, Big Tech, and the national security apparatus have concluded that they are all friends and that Trumpers, conservatives, and others with “problematic” views are enemies.
That’s a problem…a HUGE problem. It has already had consequences. We don’t know that the FBI’s intentional and illegitimate suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story altered the results of the 2020 election. But we don’t know that it DIDN’T either. Not only does this type of behavior undermine trust in the institutions of the federal government, it also undermines the actual legitimacy of those institutions. There are literally tens of millions of Americans who will never trust the results of an election again, and this is not the fault of Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani alone. As the Twitter Files confirm, the “state” played a significant role in that as well.
As we’ve always said, the Total State is a terrible fate for what Lincoln called “the last, best hope of earth.” It is not, however, the ultimate terrible fate. That comes later, when the chaos of the Total State breeds contempt, hatred, and a longing for order.
The Twitter Files show that neither Big Tech nor Big Government has learned anything from history.
