This is a teachable moment, as Barack Obama once condescendingly put it.
I spent last weekend considering how the progressive/liberal media would try to counter the Twitter Files story. The Files detail the extent to which the Biden administration/Deep State colluded with Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story in the final days of the 2020 election — on behalf of their masters in the corporate state.
18. Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022
Related: THE TWITTER FILES: Elon Musk Exposes Twitter’s Suppression of Hunter Biden Laptop, Other Content
They had all weekend to devise their counternarrative, since the leaks were oddly released on a Friday night. The Young Turks, the MSNBC of the internet, delivered the goods.
Here’s Ana Kasparian — the shameless Armenian who works for a media organization named in honor of the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide — reading and commenting on a Mediaite report:
“Outlets chose not to aggregate the Post report and followed warnings from former US intelligence officials — former U.S. intelligence officials,” that’s a key word here — “who signed a letter saying the Hunter data had all the markings of a Russian disinformation campaign.…”
It’s the government, specifically, censoring your speech — [that is] considered a violation of the First Amendment. That’s not what happened here.
She giddily clings to and highlights the “former” part of “former intelligence official” as well as the fact that it was the Biden campaign, not the administration, ostensibly prodding Twitter to censor on its behalf. As Kasparian explains, she believes this allows the U.S. government to legalistically squirm out of culpability for censoring the laptop story.
In 2020, Twitter hired former FBI lawyer Jim Baker — the same one seen in the Twitter files directing censorship of the Laptop From Hell story — to be its own general counsel.
That would be the same Jim Baker who, while at the FBI, architected the Russiagate hoax, helped secure the FISA warrant against General Michael Flynn, and later contributed to CNN.
THREAD: Meet @thejimbaker, the former top FBI lawyer turned Brookings Institute fellow turned CNN contributor turned Twitter deputy counsel at Twitter.
He is the Forrest Gump of the swamp. pic.twitter.com/4Dlz2gBBck
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 6, 2022
Are the common threads apparent?
“Plausible deniability” is the name of the game here.
No reasonable person really believes that a former FBI official inserted into Twitter management magically severs all of his ties to his former agency. Nor that he wouldn’t act as a conduit between Twitter and the state. No reasonable person thinks Twitter, which very much wishes for favorable regulation, would not be swayed by pressure from the permanent bureaucracy to acquiesce to its requests. Nor that it’s impossible that promises were made or, alternately, threats issued to induce Twitter to comply vis-à-vis censorship of materials unfavorable to corporate state interests.
But there remains, barring further revelations, plausible deniability. Functionally, there is no line between the state and private industry in this context and many others, but technically there is.
Although it’s violated in spirit, there may be no prosecutable violation of the letter of the First Amendment when Twitter uses a former FBI official as its in-house Deep State Whisperer to channel the censorious desires of the permanent bureaucracy and tip the scales in favor of its chosen candidate.
Chalk this legal jiujitsu up to one of the “seven ways from Sunday [the intelligence community has] to get back at [Trump],” as Chuck Schumer declared to Rachel Maddow on de-facto state media MSNBC (which itself employs a whole roster of “retired” CIA spooks and generals to disseminate state propaganda).
Time magazine, early last year, came right out and revealed in great detail the corporate state’s efforts to rig the 2020 election for Biden, Inc. The operation featured a cabal of corporate interests and Deep State political actors united to thwart the democratic process:
For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President… Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding… This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election… a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. [emphasis added]
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