12:18:22
Matt Taibbi on the FBI Files
“This is a chance for ordinary Americans to see, from the inside, how their tax dollars have been spent building an elaborate, systematized method of censorship and opinion control, with agencies like the DHS and the DOJ/FBI at the helm. These ‘enforcement’ agencies are not fighting or investigating crime (or even, say, terror plots), they’re just collecting domestic intelligence on a grand scale, and seeking to distort the public’s perception of reality through mass moderation, via programs we’ve been told little to nothing about.
Hasan believes that just as we’re getting this state-sponsored mass-censorship program in our sights, I should stop, beat my breast on Twitter about an unrelated topic every other corporate journalist in the world is already wailing about, and make the story about me at exactly the moment we’ve found good reason for people to focus their attention on agencies like the FBI and the DHS.
People who deliver information to the press do so for all sorts of reasons, and as journalists we of course consider them. Again, however, they’re not our main responsibility. We only have two questions in situations like this: is the material real, and is it of public interest? If the answers are yes, then we’re in, at which point the public absolutely should judge us. However, they should do it on the basis of the material, not other considerations, like whether or not we’ve called out the right fifty people before hitting send.
If we had a real press corps, its minions certainly wouldn’t be calling me about him or Bari Weiss at this moment. They would be calling about the FBI, DHS, ODNI and other such over-empowered entities, whose secrets are only just starting to bleed out. They’re the story, everything else is a head fake, and people like Mehdi know it.”
—Matt Taibbi
Article here.
And here is Taibbi’s entire FBI Files thread
Coffee and Covid, December 17, 2022
“As Taibbi said, instead of chasing criminals on Twitter, or anywhere else, a vast army of law-enforcement agents at the FBI were spending their time monitoring American’s political speech and telling Twitter who to censor.
I’m sure that lefty defenders will point out the majority of communications from FBI agents to Twitter were framed as ‘helpful’ suggestions that a particular tweet ‘violated Twitter’s terms of service.’ They’ll argue that FBI agents weren’t censoring people, they were just filing reports about potential TOS violations, and Twitter — a private company — took appropriate action. So it’s all okay.
False. The civil rights violation occurred the instant the FBI pressed send on any email reporting a Twitter user for violating Twitter’s TOS. Government officials have no business reporting Americans to anyone for speech-related violations. Unlike FBI agents, ordinary Americans had no access to Twitter employees to report violations of terms of service.
And that’s even before we get to the question of whether the ‘reports’ were merely a pretext, and were not actually suggestions at all, but were actually explicit directions from the FBI to censor Americans, directions dolled up in drag to look like ‘reports,’ reports that Twitter surely understood and cooperated with.
The FBI’s organized, abundantly-staffed covid censorship was bad enough, given that the government was the sole buyer of covid shots and was under intense political pressure to make its misbegotten vaccination scheme look like a success. But the political censorship was even worse.
Some examples of FBI-targeted tweets cited by Taibbi included jokes about the elections or about the former vice president. Someday I hope the FBI will have to explain how a joke about Biden’s hair sniffing could possibly be ‘dangerous misinformation.’
A couple dots to connect: First, this is the just tip of the titanic censorship iceberg. We’re only glimpsing a tiny part of what was happening inside Twitter. We can’t see all the phone calls, personal text messages, Signal chats, direct messages outside Twitter, and the myriad other ways FBI agents were surely communicating with Twitter’s employees.
And, how about Facebook, Instagram, and the others? How many more agents were assigned to those social media platforms?
Now connect Biden’s law-enforcement army with the Administration’s trillion-dollar media bribery scheme, where HHS paid corporate media, celebrities, and social media influencers to push its poisonous medicines. Now we can begin to see the outlines of a vast pincer movement, with historical bribes on one side and unparalleled threats on the other.
It’s been carrots and sticks all the way down. Every bit of it was illegal as Hades. You want to talk about domestic terrorism? I’ll see your bet, and raise you ‘GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED domestic terrorism.”
