Censorship: Twitter Takeover Totally Panics Political Regime of LeftLibDemSocMediaTechPol

[grarpamp]

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

1984 ... important topic in the past year, were the revelations from
the Twitter Files, exposed by the social medial company's new owner,
Elon Musk, who paid $44 billion so that the world can finally see
first hand just how little free speech there really is in the
so-called land of the free and the home of the First Amendment, and
how countless three-lettered, deep-state alphabet agencies - and the
military-industrial complex - will do anything and everything to
control both the official discourse and the unofficial narrative to
keep their preferred puppets in the White House, and keep those they
disapprove of - censored and/or locked up, both literally and
metaphorically... or simply designate them "conspiracy theorists."
None other than Matt Taibbi wrote the best summary of what the Twitter
Files revealed, namely America's stealthy conversion into a
crypto-fascist state where some unelected government bureaucrat tells
corporations what to do:

    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.

    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.