Posted on 12/20/2022 7:34:52 AM PST by RandFan
As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary.
The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US government officials for the “private” social media company to censor comments and ban commenters they did not like.
The Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a US government entity that included the FBI as well as other US intelligence agencies expressly forbidden from domestic activities, numbered 80 agents engaged regularly in telling Twitter which Tweets to censor and which accounts to ban. The Department of Homeland Security brought in outside government contractors and (government-funded) non-governmental organizations to separately pressure Twitter to suppress speech the US government did not like.
US Federal government agencies literally handed Twitter lists of Americans it wanted to see silenced, and Twitter complied. Let that sink in.
This should be a massive scandal and likely it would have been had it occurred under a Trump Administration. Indeed, Congress would be gearing up for Impeachment 3.0 if Trump-allied officials had engaged in such egregious behavior. But since these US government employees were by-and-large acting to suppress pro-Trump sentiment, all we hear are crickets.
What is interesting about these Twitter revelations is how obsessed the FBI and its government partners were with satire and humor. Even minor Twitter accounts with small numbers of followers were constantly flagged by the Feds for censorship and deletion. But knowledge of history helps us understand this obsession: in Soviet times the population was always engaged in joking about the ineptitude, corruption, and idiocy of the political class. Underground publications known as samizdat were rich with satire, humor, and ridicule.
Tyrants hate humor and cannot withstand satire. That is clearly why the FBI (and CIA) was determined to see a heavy hand raised against any American poking fun at the deep state.
There is good news in all of this, however. As Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley wrote over the weekend, a new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll found that even though the mainstream media has ignored the “Twitter files,” Americans have not. Nearly two-thirds of respondents believe that Twitter was involved in politically-motivated censorship in advance of the 2020 election. Some 70 percent of those polled believe Congress must take action against this corporate/state censorship.
As Professor Turley points out, although the First Amendment only applies to the US government, “it does apply to agents or surrogates of the government. Twitter now admits that such a relationship existed between its former officials and the government.”
So now we have proof that the FBI (along with US intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security) have been acting through “private” social media companies to manipulate what Americans are allowed to say when they communicate with each other.
Is there anything more un-American than that? Personally, I find it sickening.
We do not need the FBI and CIA and other federal agencies viewing us as the enemy and attacking our Constitution. End the Fed…and End the Federal Bureau of Investigation!
Salt the earth where it stood.
End Big Government, especially at the federal level.
He means Obama/Holder’s FBI
Good luck with that one.
Also the CIA and NSA.
By the time they get done salting that piece of land, it should be known as the J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Salt Pit!
It should have so much, we could start mining the property!!
Also the CIA and NSA.
Developed to protect from foreign threats, not to spy on intimidate domestic citizens and influence US Government
There’s a lot of chatter about the FBI “influencing” the 2016 and 2020 elections. But what strikes me is that so much of this reporting appears to make the election meddling seem like an isolated incident. We now know that virtually every department of the federal government, and especially the alphabet soup group, is collectively corrupt and has been for a very long time.
We all know the different events and scandals over the years that have taken place since, at the very least, the FDR days. Very long before, during and after the the DJT years, this stuff has been going on.
But here’s what appears to be missing from recent journalism and investigations:
Who or what is the “head of the snake?” Surely it can’t be somebody from the FDR days, most everybody from that period are long since dead and buried. So how can this “deep state” being continuing for eight decades?
For a very long time many of us “suspected” someone or something was controlling various administrations, becoming evident by the Obama administration and then overtly evident with the Biden administration. It is now out in the open and “in your face,” for anyone to see. The federal government and several state governments are not administered by elected officials.
And what or who controls these administrations is now also controlling a majority of “the free press.” The “protectors of our freedoms from tyranny.
Looks like a pretty successful trifecta . . .
The FIB, created by EO (1908, if I recollect).
All it would take is a new EO for extermination.
He is now on suicide watch.
Surprise Midnight raid with full news coverage on Ron Paul in 3...2...1...
Two different elections under two different directors. That's not the sign of isolated incidents, it's the sign of a systemic problem in an organization with a rotten core. They simply cannot be trusted or tolerated now that they've been exposed as picking our leaders for us.
THEY are the real insurrection.
I agree with him. There is no article in the Constitution anywhere that sanctions a national police force. Since the FBI is unconstitutional, it should not exist.
Everything the progressives have done, it must be undone. The FBI is a child of the Progressive Era.
Why would Democrats allow that? They own the FBI and McConnell.
Many of us owe Ron Paul an apology including me. He was right and I was wrong. I thought his predictions about the intel state and the inevitable abuses were wrong.
They were 100% correct. Ironically, part of my disdain for his predictions were that he was in agreement with many liberal journalists, pundits, and even the ACLU. Once those entities figured out that the intel state could further their agenda they did a 180.
Give Bernie Sanders his due too. I believe he has voted against the Patriot Act every single time.
The intel state we have built is gargantuan and as some predicted they are increasingly turning inward to look at our fellow citizens instead of “foreign threats”. The fact that they built the “Five Eyes” apparatus to do this “legally” should offend every citizen of the participating nations including us.
He’s absolutely right!
The argument that Twitter or any other social media are private enterprises, and thus can set their own policies, is a sham when you have politicized government bureaucracies pulling their strings.
Yep, keep their labs to assist in investigations but eliminated the agent force.
Are there still people from the Clinton Admin in the FBI or did Obama replace everyone?
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