USA 2024 Elections Thread

[grarpamp]

Taibbi: The Democrats' Disastrous Miscalculation On Civil Liberties

Civil liberties have officially gone out of style, a phenomenon on
full display at the Weaponization of Government Hearing at which I
just testified.

https://www.racket.news/p/the-democrats-disastrous-miscalculation

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1610394197730725889
https://www.teslarati.com/twitter-files-fbi-belly-button/
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1604871630613753856
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603857534737072128
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/twitter-files-twitter-fbi-subsidiary
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/lev-parnas-sentenced-20-months-prison-campaign-finance-wire-fraud-and-false-statements
https://twitter.com/danielsgoldman/status/1634683968447471617
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1633830002742657027
https://www.ida.org/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html
https://www.racket.news/p/interview-with-martin-gurri-a-short

The circus-like scene featured a ranking member calling two
journalists a “direct threat,” a Stanford-educated former prosecutor
who confused accusation with proof, and a Texas congressman, Colin
Allred, who proudly held up the results of an adjudicated criminal
case to argue against due process in another arena. When I asked
Allred’s permission to point out that he’d just demonstrated that a
proper forum for dealing with campaign abuses already existed in the
court system, he basically told me to shut up.

“No,” he said, “you don’t get to ask questions here.”

I then had to keep my mouth shut as an elected official shifted to Dad
mode to admonish me to “take off the tinfoil hat,” because “there’s
not a “vast conspiracy,” by which he meant he apparently meant my last
three months of research.

Allred then went on MSNBC, where my former friend Chris Hayes with a
straight face suggested he didn’t see a “government angle” in either
the Twitter Files or our testimony — both of which were more or less
entirely about that issue — and Allred beamed in agreement, saying the
discovery of Truthout and Ultra Maga Dog Mom on federal blacklists was
just the FBI “pointing out that certain actions are probably Russian
disinformation ops.” He also offered the ironic criticism that some
people are “stuck in an information loop, in which you’re not allowing
outside information in”:

At the hearing, Pee-Wee’s words of the day were clearly cherry-picked,
money, and Elon Musk. Nearly every question asked of Michael
Shellenberger and me involved our associations or motives. Florida’s
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said “being a Republican witness certainly
casts a cloud over your objectivity” (only a Democratic witness can be
trusted), while Dan Goldman tweeted that only someone who signed his
version of a loyalty oath — a question about whether or not we
“agreed” with Robert Mueller’s two indictments of Russian defendants —
can “belong” in the public conversation:

    It is a complicated issue. But if you (and the GOP) won’t accept
that 1) Russia interfered in the 2016 election through social media
and 2) preventing that is a legitimate goal of the FBI, then you don’t
belong in the nuanced convo on the balance between NATSEC and lawful
speech. https://t.co/BfIZInqDgb
    — Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) March 11, 2023

These are behaviors we associated with Republicans in the War on
Terror years, when Democrats howled over accusations that John Kerry
“looks French.” That the roles have been reversed is old news, but the
big question remains: why did this happen?

In the coming days you’re going to see a new release of Twitter Files
material, about the creation of a multi-agency working group to
address what experts described as vaccine “disinformation and
misinformation.”

This cross-platform group looked for people who were just “asking
questions,” which they viewed as a rhetorical trick for introducing
misinformation. They took aim at people who “framed” ideas like
vaccine passports as compulsory or authoritarian, as opposed to
emphasizing their utility and necessity, which they interpreted to
mean a tendency to more generally negative opinions about vaccines.
Moreover, as disclosed last week, they saw a threat in people who
wrote about “true stories of vaccine side effects” or “true posts
which could fuel hesitancy.”

Most disturbing was a letter to a long list of academics, tech
executives, and communications specialists from a staffer for the
non-profit Institute for Defense Analysis. It referred to a new type
of online influencer, “some of whom enjoy reach commensurate with mass
media channels”:

    In an age of declining trust in media, government, and
institutions, influencers occupy a position of trust and enjoy a
perception of authenticity. In addition to the rise of influencers,
now-prevalent online crowds have been transformed into a significant
force in shaping narratives; they are persistent and can be leveraged
to achieve amplification of particular messages in the battle for
attention.

“Online crowds have been transformed into a significant force in
shaping narratives” is just another way of saying, “independent groups
now have politically effective ways to organize,” which the authors
clearly saw as a problem in itself.

The digital age has produced an almost involuntary general disrespect
for personal boundaries. Probably all of us are guilty of it on some
level. We peek, poke, and prod in ways that would have made us ashamed
in the pre-Internet years.

We see a more ominous form of it throughout the Twitter Files, where
content moderators are forever taking short cuts to judgment by
blithely entering the minds of users, to make snap calls about intent.
If people transmit true or possibly true stories that conflict with
approved narratives, from human rights abuses in the Donbass to
first-person accounts of “breakthrough” vaccine cases, these acts are
algorithmically detected as intended to deceive and thrown in
thoughtcrime baskets: undermining Ukraine, promoting hesitancy, etc.

The campaign against “disinformation” in this way has become the proxy
for a war against civil liberties that probably began in 2016, when
the reality of Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination first
began to spread through the intellectual class. There was a crucial
moment in May of that year, when Andrew Sullivan published
“Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic.”

This piece was a cri de coeur from the educated set. I read it on the
way to covering Trump’s clinching victory in the Indiana primary, and
though I totally disagreed with its premise, I recognized right away
that Andrew’s argument was brilliant and would have legs. Sullivan
described Plato’s paradoxical observation that “tyranny is probably
established out of no other regime than democracy,” explaining that as
freedoms spread and deference to authority withered, the state would
become ungovernable:

    Family hierarchies are inverted… Animals are regarded as equal to
humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to
blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen…

    And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato
argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.

It was already patently obvious to anyone covering politics in America
that respect for politicians and institutions was indeed vanishing at
warp speed. I thought it was a consequence of official lies like WMD,
failed policies like the Iraq War or the financial crisis response,
and the increasingly insufferable fakery of presidential politics.
People like author Martin Gurri pointed at a free Internet, which
allowed the public to see these warts in more hideous technicolor than
before.

Sullivan saw many of the same things, but his idea about a possible
solution was to rouse to action the country’s elites, who he said
“still matter” and “provide the critical ingredient to save democracy
from itself.” Look, Andrew’s English, a crime for which I think people
may in some cases be excused (even if I found myself reaching for
something sharp when he described Bernie Sanders as a “demagogue of
the left”). Also, his essay was subtle and had multiple layers, one of
which was an exhortation to those same elites to wake up and listen to
the anger in the population.

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