Look carefully at what Twitter is saying to justify censoring the Biden story. If applied consistently, it’d mean that some of history’s most consequential journalism — the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks’ war logs, Snowden docs, Panama Papers, our Brazil Archive — would be banned.
So much of the important journalism you read is based on a source providing to journalists “content obtained without authorization.”
Beyond the above examples, why doesn’t Twitter ban links to the NYT’s stories based on Trump’s tax returns, “obtained without authorization?”
Please don’t be deceived. The authoritarian mindset expressed below — celebrating mass censorship of journalism they dislike — is absolutely a significant strain in current US liberalism, which is why so many of them cheered the stunning censorship yesterday:
There is literally zero daylight between many, arguably most, national journalists reporting on the election and the Biden campaign. Does this sound like a journalist or a DNC operative? And, of course, they’re going to the RUSSIA playbook again based on anonymous CIA claims.
For liberals arguing that tech giants are just private corporations who can do as they please — a free-market absolutism not even radical libertarians espouse — read @matthewstoller in the NYT today on their monopolistic hold over the flow of information:
I find it so interesting when long-obvious truths suddenly are acknowledged in mainstream circles.
Here, in the WPost, even @TaylorLorenz (!!) admits that the hordes of #Resistance freaks and anti-Trump obsessives are as conspiratorial and deranged as what they claim QAnon is:
Here's @SohrabAhmari in the @NewStatesman on how many prominent liberals -- not anonymous Twitter trolls but major DNC donors and academics -- are deranged and drowning in moronic conspiracy theories.
@SohrabAhmari @NewStatesman Just by the way: a non-trivial sector of the Brazilian left still believes the 2018 stabbing attack on Jair Bolsonaro was fake -- despite doctor testimony, his multiple surgeries, etc. -- and now believes the same about the attack on Trump.🇧🇷
Also: US corporate media always tries to deny "journalist" status to anyone who actually does real adversarial reporting against the US Govt, rather than just doing a Natasha Bertrand of writing down what CIA orders.
Assange won multiple journalism awards around the world:👇
I urge everyone to watch the repulsive exchange between Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani at the 2008 GOP debate Dave mentioned.
It shows how blind and repressive the Bush-Cheney-era GOP - and US - were, and still are, to core truths about our foreign policy:
That military aggression by the US and allies (Israel) will produce "blowback" -- meaning the people we bomb will hate us and want to kill us in return -- was created by the CIA!
Yet it's so taboo that TikTok was forced to censor the bin Laden letter because it discuss this.
To prosecute Hunter Biden, FBI has to say -- and has testified -- that his laptop and every document on it is authentic and unaltered.
Not one media outlet who spread the CIA's bullshit "Russian disinformation" lie has retracted it or apologized:
One more time: the people who most loudly and continuously claim that they are combatting "disinformation" are the exact people who spread it most aggressively and easily. Just look:
For weeks before the 2020 election, corporate media and CIA united to fabricate this complete lie to shield Joe Biden from incriminating reporting about his family's business activities in China and Ukraine.
This exchange alone proves what a pathological liar Fauci is.
One week after receiving emails from top epidemiologists arguing the virus was likely a lab leak, Fauci caused a virtual ban on questioning COVID's origin.
But he's a liberal folk hero so only GOP can raise this:
Before anything was known about COVID's origins, Fauci engineered a fake consensus that it was naturally occurring: in part because he had connections to the Wuhan lab.
People were banned online from questioning or debating it, until even Biden Admin admitted they don't know:👇
And just to show how cynically liberals weaponize racism:
It was decreed that "lab leak theory" was racist even though the more racist theory was theirs: that the Chinese are so unsanitary that filthy wet markets caused it.
The only thing that should have mattered was truth.