It became quite easy, after the so-called Twitter Files were dumped across the Internet, to dismiss entirely all of their revelations. For many progressives, the whole affair was a right-coded distraction, and therefore worth deriding or ignoring altogether.
Ross Barkin (in The Nation)
One month ago, Elon Musk asked the Twitterverse, “Why are so many in the media against free speech? This is messed up.” Still, America’s press yawned two weeks later at evidence proving the CIA, DHS, FBI, Biden campaign, and Trump White House prodded social media firms to censor speech. Now, the latest Twitter Files include a smoking gun email from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) asking Twitter to ban NY Post reporter Paul Sperry. Remind me again, who exactly is protecting our democracy?
Left or right, Musk’s your hero. He took the Democrat “existential crisis” seriously, invented the electric-car industry, and forced Detroit away from gas. He took the Republican “free speech crisis” seriously, opened up Twitter, freed real evidence of the Hunter Biden cover-up, and proved swamp monsters do exist. He might be the most consequential American of this millennium, and (if they care) he’s done our “free press” a solid.
In the 70s, adversarial reporters exposed the Pentagon Papers and Watergate to we the people. Now, media curiosity in what the US government might be doing has evaporated into total disinterest, making the press a de facto arm of the government. Musk is right to ask, “Why is corporate journalism rushing to defend the state instead of the people?” Because that’s real collusion.
Shame on the US press, whose raison d’être was clearly defined by Justice Black in the New York Times Co. v. United States: “The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.” The high court ruled for a “free press” so it could “censure the Government, bare the secrets of government, and inform the people, effectively expose deception in government, (and) prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people.” Sadly, Democrats have been deceiving the people since 2008.
That’s when the left’s pied piper, Barack Obama, bewitched the press and weaponized federal agencies; thereby creating the partisan co-conspirators now exposed by twelve Twitter Files tranches. Fox News excepted, news media have mostly ignored real evidence of federal agencies and Twitter cooperating to regulate speech, moving Based Politics’ Jack Hunter to conclude “the ‘liberal’ mission appears to be to nuke the Twitter Files and defame its reporters.”
Hunter’s view is shared by a few “liberal” reporters. The Nation’s Ross Barkin fears the worst: “There’s an absolute danger in allowing a select few human beings to arbitrarily decide what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ speech. Possibilities for abuse are endless. The Twitter Files should push us closer to reckoning with the gravity of these unsettling questions – at minimum” (revisit his quote up top).
The New Republic’s Leighton Woodhouse explains that there are now “good” and “bad” liberals. To wit, Twitter Files reporters Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi became “bad” liberals when they left the NY Times and Rolling Stone. The “good” liberals replacing them are “(mostly young) wokes” who’ve “abandoned adversarial journalism (and) taken on the role of defending the state against those who continue to practice it.”
Back to Hunter, who’s called out CNN for defending the state with stories that show “an implicit—and sometimes explicit—understanding that whatever the communications of the old Twitter regime supposedly show, the federal government was only doing its job and pre-Musk Twitter was being responsible in aiding this ‘content moderation.’ You would be hard pressed to find questions about the federal government possibly violating the 1st Amendment.”
Like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), whose office emailed Twitter demanding they suspend the account of New York Post reporter Paul Sperry, remove “any and all content” critical of Sean Misko, and regulate tweets about persons involved in the impeachment inquiry – right after Sperry put the “whistleblower” story in the middle of Schiff’s finest hour as House Manager for Trump’s impeachment.
The Schiff-Twitter email exchange has crystal clarity. Schiff staff: “Remove any and all content about Mr. Misko and other Committee staff from its service – to include quotes, retweets, and reactions to that content – and suspend the many accounts, including @GregRubini and @paulsperry.” Twitter staff: “No. this isn’t feasible. We don’t do that.”
Schiff’s demand is an abuse of power – because Perry’s reporting had linked Misko to a group inside the White House “trying to get rid” of Trump “just days after he was sworn in,” and Misko was now working for the House Intelligence Committee that Schiff chaired. What threatens democracy more; leaking a “liberal” whistleblower’s name – or censoring a “conservative” reporter? Even the left-leaning, young censors at Twitter knew Schiff was the greater evil.
Take the FBI, whose fingerprints are all over the censorship weapon. The Twitter Files journos took screenshots of FBI emails – and still the Bureau lied: “It is unfortunate conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency” (emphasis mine). Anyone can now read the emails proving the FBI is the party feeding “misinformation” to the American public; thus, there are “unsettling questions” before the GOP-controlled House.
Start with the state of America’s press. Their lack of outrage after the FBI’s attack on adversarial reporters shows our “free press” is OK with its government “deceiving the people” as long as “good” liberals control the deception. If the press is not part of the free speech solution, isn’t it then part of the censorship problem?
Then there’s the state of mind of Mr. Trump and the January 6 rioters. Maybe they knew what the rest of us did not, because the Twitter Files did make me mad as hell, which is (by the way) why the angry mob decided we’re not going to take it! When Adam Schiff and Donald Trump both say they are defending democracy, whom should we the people trust?
Hard to say for sure – both are despicable – but one thing is 100% certain: voters need the unvarnished truth to choose who governs these “united” states before the USA devolves into a new revolution. This is what Elon Musk has figured out: defend the 1st amendment or lose the union.