1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

> Has American Democracy Been A Hallucination For Nearly 60 Years?

https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/notes-on-a-friday-night

Notes on a Friday Night

A few delirious reflections at a crazy month's end

Sitting in a hotel bar in San Francisco, going through what’s become a
nightly “remembering to eat” ritual. As readers here know, this has
been a crazy month, during which time I lost track of a lot of things.
I’ve been an absentee father during the holidays, which is contemptible,
and also remiss when it comes to responsibilities to subscribers to this
site, omitting to even take time to explain basic things, which I’ll try
to do now.

Once again today we did not publish the written America This Week, which
frankly will have to stay on hold for at least a little while longer. Also
once again, I’ve abused the patience of podcast partner Walter Kirn,
who’s been a great friend during this time and deserves better. We will
do another makeup episode early next week, and I’ll announce the details
as soon as I can.

The reason for all this of course is the Twitter Files story. This last
week saw the FBI describe Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger and me as
“conspiracy theorists” whose “sole aim” is to discredit the
agency. That statement will look ironic soon, as we spent much of this
week learning about other agencies and organizations that can now also be
discredited thanks to these files. Selfishly I may release some of that
information in the morning, to be done with it so I can be fully-present
Dad on the actual holiday.

A group of us spent the last weeks reading thousands of documents. For me
a lot of that time was spent learning how Twitter functioned, specifically
its relationships with government. How weird is modern-day America? Not
long ago, CIA veterans tell me, the information above the “tearline”
of a U.S. government intelligence cable would include the station of
origin and any other CIA offices copied on the report.

I spent much of today looking at exactly similar documents, seemingly
written by the same people, except the “offices” copied at the top of
their reports weren’t other agency stations, but Twitter’s Silicon
Valley colleagues: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, even Wikipedia.
It turns out these are the new principal intelligence outposts of the
American empire. A subplot is these companies seem not to have had much
choice in being made key parts of a global surveillance and information
control apparatus, although evidence suggests their Quislingian executives
were mostly all thrilled to be absorbed. Details on those “Other
Government Agencies” soon, probably tomorrow.

One happy-ish thought at month’s end:

Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel
robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define.
Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world
that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s
reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too
intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that
seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was
true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward
place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the
crazy one?

I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically
during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm.
This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and
dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll
take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve
been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used
as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until
this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight
years.

Something tells me the coming year is going to be a better one. Happy
Holidays, everyone. Enjoy your loved ones, ignore the rest, and see you
all again soon.


IansQuest
Mr. Taibbi,
I am both relieved and horrified at the documents you, The Free
Press team, and Lee Fang have revealed. This late night note
captures explicitly how I feel. I feel both vindicated and
terrified that the suppositions I had watching social and legacy
media seemingly manhandle reality, distorting it to fit into
their corporate/state-sponsor approved boxes, are being revealed
as reality. "The reality they stole from us" and that you and
your colleagues are wrenching back, inch by inch.
Thank you for your work.

Isabel
Thank you for just letting us know the truth!! Please continue
the reveal!