Free Republic

Since the 2016 elections, politicians, journalists, and many others have raised the alarm about “foreign election influence” and “disinformation,” demanding greater “content moderation” by social media platforms. It is too easy, they argued, for foreign and malign actors to quickly “go viral” at low cost, leaving the good guys unable to correct bad information. We must become more “resilient” to disinformation. It’s now clear that all of that rhetoric was cover for a sweeping censorship effort by the federal government and government contractors. Since December, a small but growing group of journalists, analysts, and researchers have documented the rise of...

Major AI service providers continue to deploy content moderation algorithms designed to suppress and manipulate viewpoints, actively enforcing censorship under the guise of moderation. From Foreign PsyOps to Domestic Thought Control The censorship and content manipulation we see today did not emerge organically—it was the result of government-directed psychological operations (PsyOps) repurposed for domestic control. What was once used in foreign influence campaigns to destabilize adversarial regimes or control narratives abroad was turned inward—against the American people. The Twitter Files, exposed by investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, provided irrefutable evidence that U.S. government agencies used taxpayer dollars to...

Matt Taibbi gives his opening statement at today's House Judiciary Committee hearing on the "censorship-industrial complex." Transcript linked below video.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Two years ago, when Michael and I first testified before your Weaponization of Government Subcommittee, Democratic members called us “so-called journalists,” suggested we were bought-off “scribes,” and questioned our ethics and loyalties. When we tried to answer, we were told to shut up, take off our tinfoil hats, and remember two things: one, there is no digital censorship, two, if there is digital censorship, it’s for our own good. I was shocked. I thought the whole thing had to be a mistake. No way the party I gave votes to all my life was now pro-censorship....

Two years ago, Twitter emails offered voters a peek at state censorship. Now, they can be a road map for incoming investigators. Where they might search for wrongdoing In May, 2022, an agent from the FBI’s San Francisco office sent Twitter Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth a formal inviation to join an “exclusive group” for “an Executive-level roundtable” on June 8th of that year that would include the Assistant Director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, Bryan Vorndran. Roth was unavailable, so he passed the invite to other team members, who balked for a strange reason. “I’m guessing they’re probably...

00:00 Introduction 3:20 The Twitter files 7:35 Suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story 12:35 The anti-proliferation regime 16:26 Russiagate and the preemptive war against Trump 22:25 Conservatives and liberals flip stances on Russia 24:36 Leaving Rolling Stone for Substack 29:26 Matt’s Substack audience 30:40 Young liberals and progressives are turning against free speech 34:17 Breaking with identity politics 38:12 Support for prosecuting Julian Assange 41:52 The eternal villain 44:06 Similarities between RFK Jr. and Trump 46:50 Distrust in government due to COVID 51:11 Race relations and policing 54:14 Binary nature of media

When I heard Kash Patel had been tabbed by Donald Trump to run the FBI, I could already imagine the pushback and moved immediately to start the just-published article “The Bell Finally Tolls for the FBI” piece. The thought was that the role Patel played in preparing the “Nunes memo” was both the clearest example of media corruption from Trump’s first term and also the most easily demonstrated episode of FBI malfeasance. Since I had to spend an unnatural amount of time on the topic over the years (it even intersected with the Twitter Files and Hamilton 68) I quickly...

The reported nomination of Kash Patel means chickens are coming home to roost for the FBI, which needs to be destroyed as a political entity. From CNN’s “Trump announces he intends to replace current FBI director with loyalist Kash Patel”: Even among Trump loyalists, Patel is widely viewed as a controversial figure and relentless self-promoter whose value to the president-elect largely derives from a shared disdain for the so-called deep state… Patel rose to prominence within Trump’s orbit in 2018, when he served as an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee… Patel played...

From Matt Taibbi: So let me pause to say something about America’s current intellectual class from which the anti-disinformation complex works. By the way, there are no working class censors. The dirty secret of content moderation all over the world is that it’s a tiny sliver of educated rich correcting everybody else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it, basically. The problem is America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies who were marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the...

Evidence suggests our intelligence agencies launched the Russia-collusion hoax months before the Clinton campaign joined in full force.Tuesday’s explosive news — that long before the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, the U.S. intelligence community had asked foreign intel agencies to surveil 26 people connected to Donald Trump — raises the question of whether our intelligence community colluded with the Clinton campaign in these efforts. After all, it was then-Biden campaign adviser and now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken who “set in motion the events that led to” 51 former intel officials issuing the public statement that falsely framed...

Where’s the binder? That’s the burning question echoing through the swampy marshes of DC, and it’s been hanging in the air for some time. Rumor has it, this binder is packed with the real story behind the Russia Hoax—a narrative that deviates sharply from the widely reported “tip” originating from our Australian pals. Insiders suggest this saga didn’t kick off on some whim but was a coordinated effort by the CIA, Obama, and the FBI. CNN, of course, spins it as a dossier uncovering Russia’s plot to meddle in elections. Yet, the buzz among those in the know hints it’s...

When the Trump-Russia operation began unraveling, it was clear that there was an international cast of characters involved in the frame-up. The operation to get Trump — in time to torpedo his election in 2016 and then subvert his presidency — involved the Hillary Clinton campaign, the CIA's John Brennan, who informed President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden of the operation, the FBI, which appeared to cover it up, a reputed Russian spy working for a Democrat think tank, a mysterious Maltese professor, an international honeypot, an Australian diplomat, and a British spy. It was the earthly equivalent of...

Apologies for any inexact language, I’m dictating from the road back from Ithaca. This afternoon a story came out on Public that I co-wrote with Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag. Like our previous collaborations, this is a breaking news story, one that we worked on for many weeks. Without giving away the whole story, this first installment relies on a never-released classified report to describe a broad political espionage campaign that reportedly involved at least 26 Trump aides and associates. I strongly urge anyone interested in the topic to check out the article, titled “CIA Had Foreign Allies Spy On...

The keynote speaker of the World Economic Forum’s 2024 annual conference in Davos was Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President. She stated the top global risk for the EU is disinformation and misinformation, declaring disinformation destroys trust and limits the ability to “tackle the big global challenges.” In plain English, trust can only be restored by censoring inconvenient facts and evidence. Below is a short clip (1:39) highlighting her disinformation sermon. The top risk in the WEF’s 2024 Global Risk Report is disinformation. If not controlled, societies will be polarized, elections will be disrupted, and there will be mistrust...

A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance. They describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files....

It’s heartening to see so many faces here in London, to talk about the crisis of free speech around the globe, or to protest censorship, or whatever it is we’re doing exactly. Before we begin, I think it’s important to make a distinction. Unlike Russell and the rest of our hosts, Michael and I, and a few of us in the crowd, are Americans. For us, belief in unfettered free speech is a core part of our character. It’s a big reason that we Americans enjoy the wonderful reputation we do all around the world, especially here in Europe, where...

[FROM LARRY JOHNSON — I am posting this for a friend, David L. He prefers to keep his identity a secret. However, he has something important and useful to share about Matt Taibbi.]I first became acquainted with Matt Taibbi when he came to Moscow in the late 1990s and was co-editor of a newspaper called The eXile, along with another American, Mark Ames.The eXile’s motto was “We $#it on everybody equally.”Ames and Taibbi wrote all manner of expose articles on the corruption of the Boris Eltzin administration, the World Bank, the IMF, and USAID. One of their favorite targets was...

HOLY MOLY. James Baker was Twitter's legal counsel. He formerly worked for the FBI, and it is alleged that he removed references to the FBI's involvement in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story after the NY Post published it before the 2020 election. Remember, about 17% of voters said they would have switched their vote if they had heard about the laptop or other scandals around the Biden name. More from The Post Millennial: On Tuesday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced that attorney Jim Baker had been "exited" from the company following recent revelations that he may have played a...

Today you’ll find two new #TwitterFiles threads out, one by longtime Racket contributor Matt Orfalea, and another by Andrew Lowenthal, who worked for 18 years defending digital rights at EngageMedia and watched activists in his space slowly be absorbed by what we’re now calling “The Censorship-Industrial Complex.” The two new threads collectively show the wide political range of revelations in the #TwitterFiles material, which have been slandered — absurdly — as a partisan exercise. Lowenthal, who in his “Insider’s Guide to ‘Anti-Disinformation’” describes himself as a “progressive-minded Australian,” printed a series of exchanges between journalists who attended a summer “tabletop...

On March 9th Matt Taibbi testified before the House Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.At the same time, he was testifying before the committee the IRS paid a visit to his house–an almost unheard-of tactic used by the agency. Usually, they use the mail. The weaponization of Government? Not a thing, we are told. And if you disagree the IRS will remind you of that fact, forcefully and in person.John did a write-up yesterday that lays out the facts, although I admit to being more cynical than he. I need to get a few beers or bourbons in...