🚨 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.”

‼️ 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 👇

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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 “They are attempting to seize the power to dictate what you can and cannot say, which political opinions you may and may not express, over virtually every consequential online platform, with very severe real-world consequences if you violate their decrees.”

The ADL has fully and openly abandoned its original aim of defending free speech and fighting bigotry, and now instead uses its decades of goodwill to assist the Democratic party in its censoring any perceived opposition.
.@ggreenwald “Exploitation of anti-Semitism has weakened the term because people realize it no longer means what it originally was supposed to mean, which was harboring animus for Jewish people based on simply who they are. But instead, it's a club, a tool, a weapon, to attack people who don't agree with you on a particular issue. And the more those terms are weaponized that way, transparently, the more of the sting they lose, the more trivialized they become.”

CORPORATE MEDIA EXISTS TO SPREAD ESTABLISHMENT LIES

A Dan Goldman Case Study

@DanielSGoldman—billionaire-heir & rising Dem starlet—told @JakeTapper that Joe Biden's successful campaign to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor hurt Burisma—and therefore was not evidence of corruption. He cited Devon Archer's testimony as proof of this claim, going so far as to say Archer himself stated Burisma had Shokin "under control."

The problem is that we have the transcript of this testimony—and Goldman is a complete and utter scumbag liar👇

STUNNING: "Congresswoman" @StaceyPlaskett has lied to the public about her deep ties w/ Jeffrey Epstein:

She received his support from the start of her political career, solicited further donations in-person, & spent years working for his personal lobbyist.

@LHFang reports👇 This is the same woman who berated @MTaibbi
and @ShellenbergerMD for their #TwitterFiles reporting.

If nothing else, Plaskett is an admirably consistent & ruthless defender of US power centers.

https://twitter.com/SystemUpdate_/status/1634253362936905729?s=20

"Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD" of MSNBC/TMZ fame would like for you to know that he's far too credentialed and elevated to bother debating RFK Jr.

OR

He's terrified that his atrocious, politically-motivated COVID record would be exposed.

A brief thread on his worst transgressions🧵 1) In September of 2020, he was a leading voice AGAINST Trump's Emergency Use Authorization to fast-track vaccine production—citing the dangers of an expedited approach.

By 2021, with Biden in office, he deemed them safe enough to call for vaccinating CHILDREN.

Doomed endless war history repeats in Ukraine as the exact same depraved neocons—David Petraeus, Max Boot, Bill Kristol—who pushed the failed "surge" in Iraq reuse the exact same tactics to sell Ukraine's "spring offensive."

Victory is *always* just around the corner. Regardless of how often they are proven to be liars—when the promised victory fails to emerge after years of drained time, money, & human lives—they always maintain their destructive prominence in establishment circles.

And Ukraine is their latest project.

Fox is on a war path against Tucker Carlson, now demanding he end his new show on Twitter.

They don't just want to keep him away from their competitors—They want him and his anti-establishment views silenced altogether.

Notably, until the 2024 election is over. Since Tucker was fired, Fox's ratings have been in catastrophic free fall—with 1/3 of their prime-time audience abandoning them.

The idea that this decision was motivated by profit-driven business interests runs directly against this predictable outcome.

STUNNING DECLASSIFIED REPORT EXPOSES NEW MASS SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM:

The government is using your taxpayer dollars to buy troves of your digital data—content so "sensitive & intimate" that even they admit they could never collect it themselves without a search warrant 🧵 We read through key parts of the report last night, reviewing the govt's own chilling assessment of this Commercially Available Information (CAI).

On dubious legal grounds, they're collecting your highly sensitive information—from geolocation-tracking to online advertising data.

"Regardless of past cases, if Trump broke the law, shouldn’t he face consequences?"

Actually no.

The law only has legitimacy if applied consistently—otherwise it becomes nothing more than a political weapon.

This is an obvious & obscene break with precedent 🧵 #1 David Petraeus: Obama's CIA Director leaked highly classified documents to his mistress. Then lied about it to the FBI.

Consequence: One misdemeanor count, a $40,000 fine, and probation time rather than prison.

WATCH: Media berates Belarusian tennis player @SabalenkaA—demanding she denounce the war in Ukraine.

Can you imagine an American or British athlete being asked to account for their government's actions in this way? Earlier this year, similar demands were made of @vika7.

Implying that these athletes—civilians—are somehow responsible for the actions of their governments is a dangerous precedent for Western media to set.

And especially perplexing given Russia's authoritarian system.

US Media the last 6+ years: "Trump is LITERALLY Hitler."

US Media Today: "Trump is MORE RADICAL than ever before. And DeSantis is even WORSE than him!!!"

This Hitler Redemption Arc—the logical conclusion of these claims—would be hilarious if it weren't so pernicious 👇 Ron DeSantis is unambiguously a polarizing figure.

But the extreme rhetoric around his candidacy—and its implications—go far beyond reality.

WATCH: The Democrats' newest social media superstar—Manhattan billionaire heir @danielsgoldman—bends over backwards to shield the FBI from criticism.

Of course today's Dems ❤️ him.

This snotty, entitled, establishment mouthpiece embodies everything they've become. Goldman, a freshman member of Congress, is now one of its wealthiest members, with stocks and holdings in everything from oil and gas to big pharma to big tech to military contractors.

He spent 3x his primary opponent to secure his seat in the House.

DEEP DIVE: The Largely-Forgotten—And Enormously Consequential—Mystery of the Anthrax Attacks That Enabled the Iraq War

In 2001, just seven days after 9/11, media outlets began reporting that a highly weaponized form of Anthrax was being mailed to news outlets & US politicians 🧵 Over the next several weeks, the media pushed this story as more and more letters appeared, killing several.

Put yourself in the mindset of the already-shaken American public—you can imagine how quickly fear turned into outright terror.

DEEP DIVE: Who funds Bellingcat—the shady "journalistic" outlet now beloved by Corporate Media and the CIA?

When Elon Musk referred to @bellingcat as a PsyOp org, he was met with outrage by leading media figures, from @jaketapper to @chrislhayes, who rushed to their defense 🧵 twitter.com/i/web/status/1… You can see Chris Hayes' segment "refuting" Musk's claims here.

Notice that neither he nor his doppelganger guest/Bellingcat employee engage the substance of their critics:

Namely, that their funding is largely derived from the govts & intelligence communities they cover.