Recent revelations from Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, show how Western populations are being manipulated by hidden state censorship of social media.
Just ahead of the globalist Covid pandemic in early 2020, which made fortunes for Bill Gates and his partners in the Swiss-based Gavi alliance, Moderna and Pfizer, a ‘high level pandemic exercise’ was held New York:
“The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York, NY.”
At Event 201, it was agreed that it would be necessary to prevent alternative views about the pandemic from being spread amongst the populace. Such misinformation might cause people to make their own estimate of the degree of danger. It might lead to questioning the efficacy and indeed sanity of states’ response to what was at worst a severe winter cold, if indeed it was not entirely bogus. It might even cast doubts about Big Pharma’s lucrative but untried RNA gene therapies (aka ‘vaccines’).
An American general said, apparently, that the internet should be shut down to ensure that only globalist WHO officials and their colleagues in national governments should be heard. (The WHO’s largest private sector donor being the Gates Foundation, of course.) The Social Media Tech companies - who were also present at this rather inclusive gathering - dissented. It would have done more economic harm than the lockdowns actually did. But they promised to monitor the internet to prevent alternative views from being aired.
As we know, all the bullying lockdowns, masks and tests were ineffective in dealing with the much-hyped virus. Countries and states which did not resort to coercive measures had the same or better health outcomes as those which did, but without the demoralizing and impoverishing side effects of such measures. The vaccines were indeed as useless and as harmful as so many independent voices warned all along.
Because of censorship in the West, political establishments were able to run amok without much popular pushback. The recently leaked WhatsApp messages from and to Matt Hancock, the UK head of the Covid ‘response’, show an unhealthy obsession with ‘scaring the pants off’ people, along with a complete lack of interest in their overall wellbeing.
We have had three years of dreadful policy mistakes, whether through incompetence, self-interest or malevolence it is hard to say. Why not all three? It has been the completest demonstration of the arrogant ignorance that the state engenders and promotes.
And yet many people still do not understand this. The ‘Covid’ narrative, and the equally flimsy ‘Climate’ narrative, would not have survived so long if enough people had had free access to correct information. Had there been open and honest reporting by the mainstream media, no intimidation and cancelling of doctors and other independent voices, and no woke censorship of social media - Twitter, Google and Facebook - many more people would have been ‘awakened’ much earlier to what is going on.
Now, however, in 2023, all around us the dams protecting the lies and half truths with which most of the population has been beguiled and terrorized are failing. Sy Hersh’s article revealed that the US planned the destruction of Germany’s Nordstream gas pipelines, even before the war in the Ukraine started. The Hancock WhatsApp messages, whether obtained honestly or not, have holed the credibility of the UK ‘Covid’ response below the waterline.
Tucker Carlson’s recent, resolute deployment, at Fox News, of videotapes of the events of 6th January, 2021 on the Capitol in Washington has shown that the political establishment is lying about these events, and has tried, and is trying, to suppress the tapes.
One of the first signs of the Dam of Lies weakening was Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. At Event 201 in 2019, social media firms had agreed to the internet, which was meant to be an open market place, including for ideas and information. This posed a problem for libertarians since we had to agree that private persons and their associations (in this case media companies) had the right to do what they liked with their businesses, including turn away business from content providers they didn’t agree with. On the other hand, since the Internet was built with taxpayer funds the argument was not clear cut.
But along came Musk and his backers. They paid over $40 billion for Twitter, which cannot be worth anything like that, in order, it seems, to break the globalist, technocratic censorship lock on free speech. Whilst the outcome is not yet what a convinced libertarian would hope for, the result has been a revival of ‘pro-liberty’, sovereigntist voices, which has expanded the supporter and financial base of independent commentary.
As Elon Musk said recently, was there ever a conspiracy theory about Twitter that didn’t turn out to be true? He invited two reputable, middle-of-the road if not ‘left wing’ journalists, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, to rummage through the mass of DMs (direct messages – I’m assuming this means emails and various text and messaging platforms).
They discovered that Twitter employees had received hundreds if not thousands of requests to cancel Twitter customers from the US government and its agencies, including public health agencies, the FBI and the CBI, and from US Senators and Congressmen, various often-taxpayer-funded ‘misinformation’ NGOs, and officials in foreign governments. Twitter had generally complied.
The US Government has been arm-twisting Twitter to censor free speech. It is not allowed to do so. It is a breach of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. All these US politicos and officials swore an oath to uphold it. Given the state’s accountable regulatory power, and the systemic failure of the rule in the West, Twitter felt unable to resist censorship demands.
On those occasions when Twitter tried to put up a fight against particularly unreasonable requests, journalists in the MSM propaganda press were mobilized to put the heat on Twitter to ensure compliance. Those people intentionally made public understanding and debate so difficult. Different groups, ‘woke’ or ‘awake’, are operating on the basis of different and irreconcilable knowledge bases, supporting or opposing state narratives. The result, intended or otherwise, is confusion and dissension. I would suggest that the side which has been hounded, cancelled and generally suppressed, is probably closer to the truth than self-interested establishment positions.
Elon Musk has stood up to the globalist establishment and its minions in the USA, for which we must be thankful. Twitter has become much more open. He and Matt Taibbi have thus blown the cover on yet another, and crucial, globalist misinformation operation.
It wasn’t just Twitter. It is clear that other social media firms, including Facebook and Google, and other Tech companies, are still conspiring with the state, in the US and elsewhere, to control what we are allowed to see and hear.
TOM WOODS ON MATT TAIBBI’S REMARKS TO THE HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE
The indefatigable libertarian historian, commentator and podcast host Tom Woods emailed his thoughts on Matt Taibbi’s opening remarks before the House (of Congress) Judiciary Committee. The actual remarks are also reproduced further down. Woods writes:
“In a House Judiciary Committee meeting today, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified about the kinds of issues they uncovered in the so-called Twitter Files, which revealed an outrageous collusion between government and Big Tech in the suppression of dissident voices.” “Matt Taibbi is firmly on the left, and Shellenberger voted for Biden. These are not partisans. But, of course, the general run of journalists has either stayed silent about the ridiculous attacks on them or actually joined in. Why, Taibbi and Shellenberger aren't working for the team!” “I thought you might enjoy reading Taibbi's opening statement:” Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Plaskett, Members of the Select Committee, thank you for having me today. My name is Matt Taibbi. I've been a reporter for 30 years and a staunch advocate of the First Amendment. Much of that time was spent at Rolling Stone magazine. Ranking Member Plaskett, I'm not a "so-called journalist." I've won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I've written ten books, including four New York Times bestsellers. I'm now the editor of the online magazine Racket on the independent platform Substack. I'm here today because of a series of events that began late last year when I received a note from a source online. It read: are you interested in doing a deep dive into what censorship and manipulation was going on at Twitter? A week later, the first of what became known as the Twitter Files reports came out. To say these attracted intense public interest would be an understatement. My computer looked like a Vegas slot machine as just the first tweet about the blockage of a Hunter Biden laptop story registered 143 million impressions and 30 million engagements. But it wasn't until a week after the first report, after Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss and other researchers joined the search of the files, that we started to grasp the significance of this story. The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free Internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow its very existence, a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere. What we found in the files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise and use machine learning and other tools to turn the Internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role. We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives before the 2020 election when we read things like "flagged by DHS" or "please see attached report from FBI for potential misinformation" -- this would be attached to an Excel spreadsheet with a long list of names whose accounts were often suspended shortly after. Again, Ranking Member Plaskett, I would note that the evidence of Twitter-government relationship includes lists of tens of thousands of names on both the left and right. The people affected include Trump supporters, but also left-leaning sites like Consortium and Truthout, the leftist South American channel Telesur, the Yellow Vest Movement. That, in fact, is a key point of the Twitter Files: that it's neither a left nor right issue Following the trail of communications between Twitter and the federal government across tens of thousands of emails led to a series of revelations. Mr. Chairman, we summarized and submitted them to the committee in the form of a new Twitter file, which was also released to the public this morning. We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests from every corner of government, from the FBI, the DHS, the HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same thing, including Stanford's Election Integrity Partnership, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index and many others -- many taxpayer funded. A focus of this fast growing network, as Mike noted, is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations or sympathies are deemed misinformation, disinformation or malinformation. That last term is just a euphemism for true but inconvenient. Undeniably, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism. Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for amplification or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Zander and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable algorithmic judge. As someone who grew up a traditional ACLU liberal, this mechanism for punishment and deprivation without due process is horrifying. Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people's last line of defense in such cases. But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post and other outlets who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not yet been taken. Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought policing system. I'm running out of time, so I'll just sum up and say: it's just not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is, however, becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we're looking at. This is a grave threat to people of all political persuasions. The First Amendment and an American population accustomed to the right to speak is the best defense left against the censorship industrial complex. If the latter can knock over our first and most important constitutional guarantee, these groups will have no serious opponent left anywhere. If there's anything the Twitter files show, it's that we're in danger of losing this most precious right, without which all democratic rights are impossible. Thank you for the opportunity to appear, and I'd be happy to answer any questions from the committee. Tom Woods continues:
“Not one word of that can be seriously contradicted. Meanwhile, House Democrats, who reside in an alternate universe, behaved as if the actual offenders in all this were the two journalists before them who were standing up against the entire U.S. regime. Taking the case was Rep. Stacey Plaskett, who said that Taibbi and Shellenberger "pose a direct threat to people who oppose them." “How deranged would you have to be to look at the balance of power here and say that it's Taibbi and Shellenberger, who are merely reporting on what has been happening, who represent the threat?” “Over the course of the proceedings the two journalists offered numerous specific examples of the phenomena they were describing, as they have been doing in their own writing over the course of the past several months.” “A particularly chilling one involves Stanford's Virality Project, which partners with a number of government agencies. It has urged the suppression of content it actually admits to be true. It refers to this kind of material as "true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy." So now it's not even so-called misinformation that they're looking to target. It's information that they admit is true.” “This includes "stories of true vaccine side effects" and "true posts which could fuel hesitancy, such as individual countries banning certain vaccines." “It's bad that Democrats are trying to pretend that all of this is normal and unobjectionable, but it's good that it's out in the open.” “If we have any honest historians out there, the story of the years you and I have just lived through will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.”