Hard Times Make New Heroes
RFK Finds His Voice :: FBI Fesses Up :: Student Reporters Topple A President :: Rep. Luna vs. The General
Special “Abuse Of Power” Edition
Over the last several weeks, it’s become increasingly clear that we are living through some of the worst abuses of power by our government in history.
And now, it seems like every abuse of power scandal is exploding simultaneously.
Look at the pattern: in every major societal institution, from the news media and the universities to the FBI and DoD, powerful individuals are committing crimes, covering them up, and spreading disinformation.
As soon as whistleblowers, journalists, or anyone else blows the whistle, the people in power cry “Conspiracy theory!” and demand their opponents be censored.
Which scandal are we referring to? Practically all of them.
Let’s dig in.
FBI Admits It Knew Hunter’s Laptop Was Real
In 2020, the FBI repeatedly warned Twitter & Facebook of a forthcoming Russian disinformation operation about Hunter Biden. When The New York Post published emails from his laptop in mid-October of that year, Twitter and Facebook censored the content.
Now, an FBI official admits the FBI knew the laptop was real. This is massive news.
We already knew the FBI took possession of Hunter's laptop in December 2019. We didn’t know whether or not the FBI agents warning of Russian disinformation related to Hunter Biden also knew that the FBI had his laptop.
Now we know they did.
Just four days ago, Laura Dehmlow, the chief of the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, told Congressional investigators, "Somebody from Twitter essentially asked whether the laptop was real. And one of the FBI folks... did confirm that 'yes, it was,’ before another participant jumped in and said, ‘no further comment.’”
The people who dismissed the Twitter Files as a "conspiracy theory" said compartmentalization would have prevented the FBI agents who warned of a coming Russian disinfo campaign from knowing that other FBI agents had the Hunter Biden laptop.
We now know they weren't just "theories." There really was a conspiracy by the FBI to "pre-bunk" the Hunter laptop story before the media got it. The "pre-bunking" was disinformation. And the censorship that the FBI demanded and got from Twitter and Facebook was part of the FBI’s disinformation campaign.
Lovers of irony note: the true role of the FBI's "Foreign Influence Task Force" was to influence US elections. By constantly accusing others of disinformation, the FBI waged a war of distraction. The FBI warned of Russia’s foreign influence as it exercised illegal domestic influence.
It's important to be clear about all of this. What has just been revealed is evidence of a criminal conspiracy by high-ranking FBI officials to influence the 2020 election. And the people involved must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
— MS
Wait, It Gets Worse
Yeonmi Park is the world’s most famous defector from North Korea.
Of late, she has been warning people in the West of our incipient totalitarianism, such as cancel culture and censorship, which she says remind her of North Korea.
But Park’s message of racial equality was apparently unwelcome at the FBI.
In a new podcast interview with friend of Public, Winston Marshall of the Spectator, Park says the FBI’s “diversity officer” canceled her previously scheduled invitation to speak at the agency because she disagreed with Park’s opposition to racial quotas. “They said, ‘Your political opinions do not align with our values,’” recounted Park.
Park says that when she took the test to become an American citizen, the US government officer in charge asked her to affirm her commitment to free speech.
“You know what’s funny about it?” Park told Marshall. “On my citizenship test, the lady asked me, ‘Have you ever persecuted anybody for their political opinion?’ If I had said ‘Yes,’ I could not have become an American. So they [the FBI’s diversity staff] don’t even know what it means to be American.”
It’s a lesson that a North Korean defector is acutely well-positioned to teach.
— MS
The First Amendment in Peril
Pew has a poll out showing that Americans have become far less committed to free speech over the last five years. From 2018 to today, the percentage of Americans who favor tech companies and the US government “restricting false information online” has risen from 39% to 55%.
The 16-point increase is almost entirely attributable to Democrats: while Republicans’ support for online speech restrictions has barely budged, Democrats’ support has gone from 40% to 70% in the span of half a decade. That’s a thirty-point shift against the First Amendment.
Since 2016, Democrats have heard almost nothing from their pundits and party leaders but constant fear-mongering about the wicked souls of their fellow citizens and how the internet is a weapon to spread their evil beliefs like the zombie fungus in The Last Of Us. Through Russiagate, Covid, and the aftermath of the January 6 “insurrection,” they have been terrorized by dark warnings of rising fascism, and told again and again and again that mere exposure to bad ideas is enough for unsuspecting persons to be transformed overnight, into deranged extremists and white supremacists capable of political violence.
Concurrent with that barrage of paranoid propaganda, the party’s base has shifted radically away from working class voters and toward college-educated white liberals. As the party has become beholden to urban, credentialed professionals, it has come to adopt the prejudices of that class. When today’s diehard Democrats cast their gazes upon the vast majority of the country, two-thirds of which does not have a bachelor’s degree, they see a nation of parochial bigots, each of them one Facebook post away from being brainwashed by QAnon.
These party loyalists believe they’re resisting fascism, but they’re courting it. Every authoritarian movement has started by persuading one faction of the population that another faction, be it a minority or a majority, is a malignant threat within the body politic. In the name of neutralizing that threat, the authoritarian party demands the abridgment of rights and liberties, beginning with political pluralism. And that starts with policing the opposition’s speech.
The Democratic Party is in a dark place. Still suffering under the illusion that it’s the party of workers, it is unable to see that its leaders and activists are waging a class war from above. Every time a Democratic leader intones gravely about “fascism,” they’re expressing the anxiety of a cloistered elite terrified of the resentments of the unwashed masses. Every time they invoke a crisis of democracy, they’re borrowing from the playbook of dictators, who always contrive a national emergency to justify their power grabs.
From this reactionary paranoia springs the Democratic rank-and-file’s turn against free speech and its leadership’s constant calls for online censorship. Capitulating to them is the road to ruin.
—LW
Deep Fake Of The Week
RFK Finds His Voice
