Elon Musk is under fire, again, this time from neocons and corporate journalists insisting that his refusal to turn on Starlink satellites to enable an escalation of Ukraine's military actions amounts to a form of treason.
From where does this obligation come? Do we care that this attack may have caused a major escalation of this war?
It’s never been easier to be a “Russian propagandist” or “Kremlin agent” now (just don’t expect a paycheck) — all it takes is voicing any view oppositional to the prevailing media view on our involvement in Ukraine.
.@GGreenwald “The reason why Elon Musk is being targeted by the ADL as an anti-Semite and now being depicted as a traitor to his country, the United States… is not because necessarily they're angry about what he did in Ukraine, although they are, but more so because it's punishment for his refusal to censor on demand.”
The media continues its relentless attacks on Elon Musk because he poses an existential threat to what they hold most dear –– their ability to silence any opposition.
Musk’s only “crime” was not following Ukraine’s orders –– a country he doesn’t even count among his three citizenships.
.@GGreenwald “The pretense here is that you have no right to resist the Ukrainian military’s demands. If you’re a citizen of the West you are duty-bound to give them everything they demand, and if you don’t, that’s considered sabotage."
Using the reasoning applied to Elon Musk, the vast majority of Americans are also “traitors,” since most people didn’t take President Zelensky’s invitation to go to Ukraine and join the fight against Russia.
.@GGreenwald “What is actually going on here is an attempt to legally ban any dissent, take away Elon Musk's right to be a military contractor, haul him before a congressional committee, require Twitter to ban what they're calling pro-Russia propaganda, which is really nothing other than people questioning or opposing their war policy of their government –– which is absolutely the right of every American citizen or the citizen of any country to do.”
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🚨 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."
🚨 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.
‼️ 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.
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.
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
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?’”