“Punked” by the Deep State

Not long ago, a U.S. government intelligence cable would include the station of origin and CIA offices copied on the report. I spent much of today looking at [such] documents, except the “offices” copied weren’t other agency stations, but Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, even Wikipedia. It turns out these are the new principal intelligence outposts of the American empire. 

Matt Taibbi (Twitter expose)

Tired of getting “punked” by the deep state that liberals say does not exist? I am, because I lost thousands of Facebook and Twitter followers during the 2020 election run-up. Now, after Twitter’s spilled the beans, Republican leaders Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy have endorsed an investigation like the Church Committee, which exposed FBI and CIA abuses in the seventies.

McCarthy: “We’ve got to get to the very bottom, and I think you’re going to have to have a Church-style investigation to reform the FBI.” Jordan: “We are investigating politicization and abuses at the Bureau. New information shows the FBI has coordinated extensively with Twitter.” It’s about time, because this bureau and others are sworn to uphold the constitution – not serve and protect one party.

On Wednesday, two bits of (real) breaking news confirmed what leftist braggarts at Time Magazine first exposed in “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” back in February 2021: partisans inside America’s powerful institutions controlled what 2020 voters knew (and thought) about Joe Biden. That’s the REAL threat to our democracy, and Wednesday’s news proved America’s been getting punked ever since.

Biden is actually worse than both Obama and Trump said he’d be, but they feared bad decisions. Those can be reversed, but what of his culture of lies and coterie of hornswoggling bureaucrats? He won, and still they deceive an electorate to the point of cynicism. This just in.

The Twitter Files Exposed A Coordinated Deception

The latest “Twitter files” revelation, this time from former Democrat Michael Shellenberger, details how the “Hunter Biden Laptop” story, which broke in the New York Post, died in darkness on social media. A month before the 2020 election, folks from social media and news organizations participated in training exercises to prepare for breaking news about the Biden family by simulating a “hack and dump” leak to conservative media.

The meeting was organized by the left-leaning Aspen Institute, led by Twitter’s head of news Vivian Schiller (former CEO of NPR), and attended by national security reporters from The New York Times and Washington Post, the head of security policy at Facebook, and Twitter’s Global Head of Trust and Safety (the now infamous Yoel Roth). Shellenberger writes the “goal was to shape how the media covered and social media carried” what they knew was coming.

Ms. Schiller was forewarned. Not only did the FBI have Hunter Biden’s hard drive, it was in talks with Twitter before these “training exercises” began. And Ms. Schiller was not just a good guesser; the meeting was organized like war games with “hypotheticals” and “simulations” that had the tiniest details right about events to come, starting with “The Burisma Leak” being the name of the hypothetical breaking news.

One hypothetical news outlet was “Fox & Friends” and one simulation had “President Trump, at podium, pumps his fist as the crowd chants ‘Lock Him Up!'” Another was “Biden dismisses a story as ‘dirty tricks by Vladimir Putin.'” My favorite is “Two ‘former senior intelligence’ officials suggest a story is ‘Russian disinformation,'” because John Brennan and Leon Panetta did just that one month later. You want collusion? There it is.

Then, when the Post broke real news about Hunter Biden, each meeting attendee acted to sow disbelief in the electorate. A year later (with Trump gone), the attendees admitted one by one the Post story should NOT have been banned – because it was legitimate news. They all blamed a noble abundance of caution for the ban – but the “Twitter Files” prove a partisan abundance of coordination between Biden’s campaign, the FBI, and Big Media.

The Philadelphia Fed Proves Liars Figure

Last week, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve exposed an inexplicable overstatement of 2nd quarter jobs by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Q2 employment growth, according to the Fed, was “essentially flat” with only 10,500 new jobs – a far cry from the 1,047,000 new jobs reported by Biden’s BLS. A miss so big, the Philadelphia Fed focused much of its report on granular data. Methinks they smelled partisan BS. To wit…

The Fed’s metrics confirm the BLS significantly overstated employment numbers in 29 states and DC. Take Delaware; where the BLS reported a 4.5% jobs increase, but the Fed reported a 4.1% decrease. This has Republicans rightly accusing the government of manipulating data to aid a Democrat president. On Friday, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) tweeted, “Biden’s admin has been lying to the American people about our economy to prop up his failed agenda.”

How can Republicans trust DC bureaucrats after this, on top of the Census Bureau admitting its 2020 count understated populations in five red states and overstated in six blue states? Not Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX): “The numbers don’t lie. Texas was under-counted by 2%, which means we were cheated out of an additional seat in Congress.” Want a good conspiracy theory? We got a live one here!

One, all these agencies do is hire good counters and count all day, but they can’t count heads. Two, even my barber knew folks were leaving California and New York for Texas and Florida, but nobody at the USCB double-checked until after House seats and electoral votes were allotted. Three, Biden told voters he created the “most ever” employment, which wasn’t affected anywhere by steeply rising interest rates. The optics alone left the GOP no choice but to get both agencies under oath in the House next year.

It’s Some Kind of Treason

When bureaucrats don’t bend over backwards to get the numbers right, is our government for the people? No, it’s like China, where nobody trusts COVID numbers. Is America by the people when breaking news about a candidate isn’t seen before his election, or of the people when dissent is banned from the public square? No, we’ve become Russia, where Putin punks his own people daily – because he can!

Did Twitter need a “global head of trust” or Biden need a “minister of truth” to protect our democracy? No, because democracy is protected by free speech, even when the in-party says it’s not true. The framers of the constitution made a “first amendment” to avoid violent redress of grievances (like January 6). It was “first” for a reason, and Democrats used to love free speech – when it advanced their dreams.

Now, they love punking their own people – because they can!