Loading ...THANK GOODNESS FOR THE FBI
Jeff Childers at his FINEST
Imagine a plucky young cadet who finally landed that plum job at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They hit the big time, proudly texting their parents and friends about their accomplishment. They’re excited, raring to go, ready to bring down the next Al Capone. Imagine how they must have felt after getting their first assignment: “you’re reading twitter all day to find misinformation about vaccines and the election.”
In my mind’s eye, the naive young FBI agent eagerly asks, “what crimes are we looking for?” Her supervisor answers brusquely, “shut up and surf the internet. Your quota is 300 tweets a day.”
As it turned out, and as our plucky young cadet learned the hard way, it wasn’t Al Qaeda they were after. It wasn’t Al Capone. It wasn’t even Al Gore. It was Al Smith of Two Eggs, Florida, with 32 Twitter followers, mostly close relations, who’d tweeted that he would bet a 12-pack of Natural Light the election was stolen, and he wouldn’t jab his neighbor’s pig, either.
Thank goodness for the FBI.
Read his whole Take of Twitter Files Part 6 …from his Legal Eagle Eye…FBI et al are Legally Culpable to the Maximum .
Matt Taibbi released the next segment of the Twitter Files yesterday, which I’ll call The FBI Files. They show an extended and extensive pattern of regular and routine communication between Twitter employees and as many as 80 FBI agents, concerning tweets that were almost all either political or covid-related speech.
Before I start beating up the FBI again, for the record, I’ll allow that there are plenty of ‘good,’ law-abiding FBI agents who are suffering from the black eye earned by a lot of other lawless, politically-motivated activists in the disgraced law-enforcement agency. The problem is, there are a LOT of agents in that second group. Too many.
Taibbi neatly summarized the problem in this tweet:
Twitter avatar for @mtaibbi
Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
Instead of chasing child sex predators or terrorists, the FBI has agents — lots of them — analyzing and mass-flagging social media posts. Not as part of any criminal investigation, but as a permanent, end-in-itself surveillance operation. People should not be okay with this.
10:22 PM ? Dec 16, 2022
128,605Likes37,613Retweets
As Taibbi said, instead of chasing criminals on Twitter, or anywhere else, a vast army of law-enforcement agents at the FBI were spending their time monitoring American’s political speech and telling Twitter who to censor.
I’m sure that lefty defenders will point out the majority of communications from FBI agents to Twitter were framed as “helpful” suggestions that a particular tweet “violated Twitter’s terms of service.” They’ll argue that FBI agents weren’t censoring people, they were just filing reports about potential TOS violations, and Twitter — a private company — took appropriate action. So it’s all okay.
False. The civil rights violation occurred the instant the FBI pressed send on any email reporting a Twitter user for violating Twitter’s TOS. Government officials have no business reporting Americans to anyone for speech-related violations. Unlike FBI agents, ordinary Americans had no access to Twitter employees to report violations of terms of service.
And that’s even before we get to the question of whether the ‘reports’ were merely a pretext, and were not actually suggestions at all, but were actually explicit directions from the FBI to censor Americans, directions dolled up in drag to look like ‘reports,’ reports that Twitter surely understood and cooperated with.
The FBI’s organized, abundantly-staffed covid censorship was bad enough, given that the government was the sole buyer of covid shots and was under intense political pressure to make its misbegotten vaccination scheme look like a success. But the political censorship was even worse.
Some examples of FBI-targeted tweets cited by Taibbi included jokes about the elections or about the former vice president. Someday I hope the FBI will have to explain how a joke about Biden’s hair sniffing could possibly be ‘dangerous misinformation.’
A couple dots to connect: First, this is the just tip of the titanic censorship iceberg. We’re only glimpsing a tiny part of what was happening inside Twitter. We can’t see all the phone calls, personal text messages, Signal chats, direct messages outside Twitter, and the myriad other ways FBI agents were surely communicating with Twitter’s employees.
And, how about Facebook, Instagram, and the others? How many more agents were assigned to those social media platforms?
Now connect Biden’s law-enforcement army with the Administration’s trillion-dollar media bribery scheme, where HHS paid corporate media, celebrities, and social media influencers to push its poisonous medicines. Now we can begin to see the outlines of a vast pincer movement, with historical bribes on one side and unparalleled threats on the other.
It’s been carrots and sticks all the way down. Every bit of it was illegal as Hades. You want to talk about domestic terrorism? I’ll see your bet, and raise you “GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED domestic terrorism.”