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Sep 7, 2023 11 tweets 5 min read Read on X
The Washington Post’s latest “disinformation study” – sponsored by the EU with an Omidyar-funded group that accuses Twitter of failing to censor "Russian propaganda" – is another in a long line of fraudulent attempts to justify censorship with pro-censorship demands.

Looking at the underlying study makes the fraud here manifest: the same type of fraud on which the newly emerged "disinformation industry" depends.
The EU-led study insisted that Elon Musk’s new Twitter policies, and those of other Big Tech platforms, help spread Russian propaganda –– by which they mean that Musk's reduction of political censorship on the site, and the "failure" of Big Tech generally to censor upon command, is "dangerous."
.@ggreenwald “I know we're all trying to think of the EU as these nice, soft Democrats with a small D, but in the name of prosecuting this war, in the name of their powers on COVID and just in general, they are really aggressively seeking to prevent dissent on the internet in exactly the kind of authoritarian and totalitarian way we are always trained to believe is done by our enemies.”
.@ggreenwald “These people constantly march under the banner of “saving democracy” and “pro-democracy” and “saving the West from authoritarianism” when in reality their central project is to eliminate free speech in the digital age, because of fears of what free speech will enable the populations to do –– meaning people will think freely outside of their control, and might therefore vote in ways different than they want them to.”

By the definition of the Washington Post’s article, “propaganda” boils down to “anything that speaks out against the neoliberal regime,” a narrative intensifying now that more and more people are growing tired of the Ukraine-Russia war.
@ggreenwald .@ggreenwald “Propaganda, that word, is like terrorism. It means whatever the wielders of the term wanted to mean, same with hate speech, same with disinformation.”
@ggreenwald Thanks to the lax definition of “propaganda,” anyone can be in league with the Kremlin. All you’d have to do is openly express doubts about the Ukraine war, which, by the EU’s standards, makes you a Russian propagandist.
.@ggreenwald “Simply by opposing the U.S. war in Ukraine, or questioning the false claims of the United States and its media about the war, you will be counted as a pro-Russian propagandist who should be censored from the Internet under EU law because you have quote, ‘ideological alignment with the Russian state.’”
@ggreenwald These liberal U.S.-centered agencies are currently outsourcing their censorial dirty work to ones in the EU, because while U.S.-based censorship is heavily restricted thanks to the First Amendment, the EU has no such protections.
@ggreenwald Censorship attempts — like the current EU study — are our most dangerous threat. If we aren’t free to express anything that deviates from the policies dictated by Western governments and billionaires, then we might as well forfeit all other political rights.
.@ggreenwald “Hearing Germans and German politicians talk about the need for unity, and achieving that through suppression of dissent, because of the need to win glorious war over Russia by attacking it through Ukraine, has such obvious historical relationships to these kind of very traumatic themes that I'm amazed that more people don't see those and react that way.”
@ggreenwald Full episode: rumble.com/v3ffei8-system…

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More from @SystemUpdate_

Mar 20
🚨 SCOTUS RULES—FOR NOW—ON SIDE OF TEXAS IN BIDEN-BORDER DISPUTE.

Though they conspicuously sidestepped the core constitutional question, Texas remains empowered enforce their laws at the border—and the Federal government is barred from interfering.
@GGreenwald: "It's really an extraordinary state of affairs when you have states empowered to arrest people who have illegally entered the country and building their own fences because the federal government simply refuses to do so."
Full breakdown on last night's show: rumble.com/v4k90ju-system…
Read 4 tweets
Mar 18
🚨 Happening NOW: Murthy v. Missouri—SCOTUS hears arguments on US govt collusion with social media platforms to censor online speech.

A US judge has called this case "the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history."

Alito: "When I see the White House and Federal officials repeatedly saying that Facebook and the Federal government should be partners... regular meetings, constant pestering... Wow, I cannot imagine Federal officials taking that approach to print media."
Kentaji Brown Jackson grills LA solicitor general, says that because the govt can occasionally censor, they can also occasionally coerce:

KBJ: “Whether or not the government can do this… depends on the application of our First Amendment jurisprudence.

There may be circumstances in which the government could prohibit certain speech on the internet or otherwise.”
KBJ doubles down: “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways.”

That is, quite literally, the entire point of the First Amendment—of the entire Bill of Rights.
Read 4 tweets
Dec 12, 2023
‼️ URGENT & ALARMING: The House Intel committee's proposed surveillance bill is nothing but a trojan horse for online privacy/section 702 reform.

As @SenMikeLee explained last night, it would:

1) Extend the FISA 702 reauthorization period by an unprecedented 9 years

2) Fix none of the unconstitutional warrantless searches found in the current system

3) And worst of all: Vastly expand the scope of 702's warrantless, domestic surveillance capability—creating a massive new category of businesses/entities who can be compelled to hand over private user data

This bill *cannot* be allowed to pass.
CRITICAL CONTEXT: This program was a *scandal* when it was first exposed in 2005 that the Bush administration had been covertly spying on American citizens without warrants.

Then Congress gave it their stamp of approval, retroactively legalizing these abuses—And it was renewed under both Obama and Trump 👇
@SenMikeLee And we know they've abused these powers.

We *know* that they've conducted illegal backdoor searches on a sitting US Senator, a Representative, and hundreds of thousands of Americans.

And it could be/get much, much worse.
Read 5 tweets
Sep 16, 2023
President Biden just appointed the multi-billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker – Obama's chief mega-donor – to oversee the profiteering plans in Ukraine of BlackRock, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs: to "rebuild" the country with US funds once Raytheon and Boeing are done profiteering from its destruction.
As the Ukraine war rages on and thousands of Ukranians’ lives are ruined and displaced, while Americans and Europeans endure economic harm, a select group of Americans continues profiting off the continued conflict: Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and the rest of the military industrial complex.

@GGreenwald “I would submit you have to either be very naive or someone drowning in either hearing propaganda or disseminating it to believe that it's a gigantic coincidence that the companies who wield the most power in Washington happen to be greatly profiting from the number one policy priority of the US security state, which is the war in Ukraine.”
It must be a simple coincidence that Biden’s Secretary of Defense and steadfast supporter of the Ukraine war, Lloyd Austin, was once on Raytheon’s Board of Directors.
Read 8 tweets
Sep 15, 2023
As US public support for the war erodes, Zelensky and his spokespeople are now overtly threatening both the West and war critics. Zelensky has moved to full-on extortion, making threats about what might just happen if aid to Ukraine were cut off.

.@GGreenwald “He's essentially saying: “I have terror cells embedded in your country. And if you give into your population's growing hesitance to keep sending all of this money to our war and keep enduring higher energy prices in the risk of escalation, nuclear war, if you stop that, I'm not saying I would tell them to do it, but no telling what they might start to do to you, these millions of Ukrainian refugees that you now have embedded in your country.’”
Besides Zelenky’s outright shakedown on the West, Ukraine ramped up its threats through propagandist outlets with a new and obviously unwell official American spokesperson for their Territorial Defense Forces who promises that all “Kremlin agents” will “pay for their crimes.”

.@GGreenwald “They're threatening specifically a Russian propagandist, what they're calling a Russian propagandist, which as we know from that quote I just referenced from President Zelensky and the Economist, means anybody who questions the war, anybody who questions the accuracy of the claims of the Ukrainian government or who questions the war effort itself.”
These threats coincide with the ongoing imprisonment of Gonzalo Lira, an American blogger arrested for expressing anti-war sentiments — which as the Ukrainian government has made abundantly clear, is tantamount to working for the Kremlin
Read 4 tweets
Sep 15, 2023
Polls show that Americans’ confidence in the Biden administration is steadily declining — in part due to concerns over Biden's age but especially due to anger and fear over the economy — which wealthy Democratic pundits chide and lecture them for, saying they need to realize how good they have it.
Instead of empathizing with most Americans about their warranted economic anxieties, Democrats instead patronize their constituents by insisting that their economic perceptions are just misinformed. On top of this, they’ve chosen multimillionaires as their economic spokespeople, as an act of further condescension.

.@GGreenwald “Their strategy is basically to attack the validity of their perceptions, to tell them that they might wake up and think the economy is doing poorly for them in their own lives, but they don't understand their own lives. They're misguided about their own views of their experiences every day.”
.@GGreenwald “Instead of trying to understand what those problems are and how to address them, they're basically sitting here saying: ‘I'm looking at the data and these people are mystifying to me. What do they want, these people? We're getting them an economy where they get to take their kids out to dinner once in a while. They want more than that?’”
Read 4 tweets

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