Above, that’s Vijaya Gadde, who until she was fired by Elon Musk, was Twitter’s lead censor — and, as it turns out, a government suck-up. You have probably seen by now The Intercept’s jaw-dropping report about how the US Government has been collaborating with Big Tech to monitor and shape what Americans are allowed to talk about. I won’t quote the report at length here, but here’s the gist:

Note this part especially, from the report:

Got that? If you have a dissenting opinion on the lab-leak theory, on vaccines, on Critical Race Theory, on Afghanistan, or on Ukraine, then the Feds may be interested in you.

Check out this Twitter thread by Bill Roggio, editor of Long War Journal.

Same deal with Covid, and with racialist anti-Asian and anti-white policies implemented by elites, supposedly for our own good. What “inaccurate information” about “racial justice” does the US Government believes is a threat to the security of the homeland? Diversity is our strength, and if you doubt it, the Eye of Sauron notes your lack of faith and commitment to fighting racism. I’m reminded of this C.S. Lewis quote Paul Kingsnorth cites in his latest newsletter:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

You will notice if you read The Intercept’s report — and note well that The Intercept is a left-wing website — is how eager these tech companies were for the government to intrude:

Elon Musk fired Vijaya Gadde as one of his first acts after buying Twitter. Why do you think that these people were eager for the government to increase its monitoring of the media? Because they trust these state actors to enforce a progressive-friendly narrative. This is what it means when the Deep State has been captured by the Left.

I cannot say it often enough: this is what the people who came to America to escape Communism are warning us about in Live Not By Lies! Excerpt from the book:

What unnerves those who lived under Soviet communism is this similarity: Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups—ethnic, sexual, and otherwise—and to think of Good and Evil as a matter of power dynamics among the groups. A utopian vision drives these progressives, one that compels them to seek to rewrite history and reinvent language to reflect their ideals of social justice.

Further, these utopian progressives are constantly changing the standards of thought, speech, and behavior. You can never be sure when those in power will come after you as a villain for having said or done something that was perfectly fine the day before. And the consequences for violating the new taboos are extreme, including losing your livelihood and having your reputation ruined forever.

People are becoming instant pariahs for having expressed a politically incorrect opinion, or in some other way provoking a progressive mob, which amplifies its scapegoating through social and conventional media. Under the guise of “diversity,” “inclusivity,” “equity,” and other egalitarian jargon, the Left creates powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse and marginalizes dissenters as evil.

It is very hard for Americans who have never lived through this kind of ideological fog to recognize what is happening. To be sure, whatever this is, it is not a carbon copy of life in the Soviet Bloc nations, with their secret police, their gulags, their strict censorship, and their material deprivation. That is precisely the problem, these people warn. The fact that relative to Soviet Bloc conditions, life in the West remains so free and so prosperous is what blinds Americans to the mounting threat to our liberty. That, and the way those who take away freedom couch it in the language of liberating victims from oppression.

Or, protecting the homeland from badthinkers among its people. And for the record, I would find this every bit as repulsive and frightening if the Deep State were right-wing. Wouldn’t you?

The right-wing government of George W. Bush misled us all into the Iraq quagmire — and, as Bill Roggio says, lied to us to keep us in Afghanistan. The left-wing Obama government did the same thing about Afghanistan. Do you really trust Washington — left or right — to tell it straight to the American people about Ukraine? Whatever you think about US involvement in the Ukraine war, it ought to scare you that the US Government believes that it’s in the interest of “homeland security” to monitor and correct “disinformation” about US policy there.

Look, it’s very hard to know what’s true and what’s not anymore. Peter Savodnik had a good piece recently about how the mainstream media runs interference for John Fetterman, the disabled Democratic candidate for US Senate. Most of us are well aware how the mainstream media police the boundaries of discourse constantly to protect its sacred cows. Jonathan Chait, the liberal columnist for New York magazine, admitted in his latest piece that the Left hurts itself with this. Excerpt:

The motive for many progressives to follow these stifling conventions was sympathetic. If you believe systemic racism and inequality are the greatest crisis in America, which I do, and you also believe the racism of the Republican Party is far more dangerous than any excesses on the left, which I also do, then you might hesitate to admit to anything that might be used by Republicans to discredit the cause of racial justice. Yet that hesitation allows the most unreasonable people on the left to rope the whole progressive movement into indefensible and self-discrediting positions.

The George Floyd protests are hardly the only subject for which this dynamic has prevailed. Progressives decided that the hypothesis that COVID-19 may have originated in a laboratory rather than zoonotically was “racist” — even though this was a purely scientific question, the evidence was and is murky, and it was easier to imagine racist behavior resulting from a theory blaming COVID on Chinese cultural practices than a theory blaming China’s government. Journalists at mainstream organs followed this convention, essentially turning a scientific question into a political one. When institutions adopt illiberal norms of debate that make it impossible to challenge an accusation of racism or sexism, they open themselves inevitably to abuse.

I believe the cultural pressures that produced these errors are in remission. But they haven’t disappeared. As evidenced by the likes of Scocca and Katz, there remains a deep-seated impulse on the left to defend or deny illiberal norms. They insist the wave of hysterical accusations, overpolicing of language, and empowered outrage mobs were a figment of the critics’ imaginations, or that these things happened but were actually good, or perhaps, somehow, both. As people in these institutions begin to lose their fear of speaking truthfully, we need to honestly confront what happened.

It’s bad enough that progressive journalists do this. But to have those who control social media platforms engage in it, and to encourage involvement of the State in policing discourse? And to have a domestic security arm of the State spreading its bureaucracy into controlling the narrative behind the scenes?

Tyranny. That’s what this is: tyranny.

*****

This article was published by The American Conservative and is reproduced with permission.

The late, great Angelo Codevilla maintained that America’s response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed because it adopted a law enforcement approach to what is essentially a foreign policy problem. He argued that the law enforcement approach — the idea that we could detect and disrupt terrorist plots before they come to fruition, and arrest those responsible — required the construction of a vast state security and surveillance apparatus that would eventually, when the terrorist threat subsided, be turned on American citizens.

As in so much else, Codevilla was prophetic.

Earlier this week, a deeply reported piece by Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang of The Intercept revealed an “expansive effort” by the Department of Homeland Security to curb speech it considers dangerous by pressuring tech platforms to engage in online censorship. Although DHS’s widely ridiculed “Disinformation Governance Board” was scaled back and then shut down earlier this year amid well-deserved criticism, “other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.”

The security apparatus that was erected to keep us safe from al-Qaida, it seems, is looking for something else to do now, so it has decided to become the arbiter of what constitutes false and dangerous information, and therefore what political opinions Americans are allowed to express online.

Citing a trove of documents connected to an ongoing lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, Klippenstein and Fang reveal a quiet pressure campaign by DHS “to try and shape online discourse” that involves frequent meetings and coordination with top tech and finance executives, and even “a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use.” At the time of this writing, the portal is still live.

What might DHS consider “inaccurate information” worthy of suppression? A whole host of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

Because “disinformation” isn’t clearly defined, it can be whatever DHS and the federal agencies under its purview say it is. And wouldn’t you know it, disinformation turns out to be whatever ideas and opinions contradict the official narrative of the Biden administration and Democratic Party leadership on major political issues.

No surprise, then, that Big Tech appears to be OK with this. Klippenstein and Fang quote a February text from Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, a former DHS official, to a DHS director, saying: “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.”

But not, perhaps, as hesitant as Masterson thinks. Emails and documents connected to the Missouri lawsuit show a close collaboration between DHS and top executives of social media firms such as Twitter. In 2018, Congress passed and President Trump signed a bill creating an office inside DHS called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. It was a response to some high-profile hacking of U.S. firms such as SolarWinds and Equifax, and the idea was for CISA to protect critical national infrastructure.

But it didn’t take long for CISA to expand its definition of critical national infrastructure to include “misinformation and disinformation,” taking its cues from an advisory committee that includes Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s erstwhile head of legal affairs and policy, whom Elon Musk fired last week. Gadde was the co-author of a report in June urging CISA to take on an expansive role in policing online speech, calling on the agency to monitor “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online resources.”

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who has questioned the official government narrative on Twitter or Facebook over the last two years. Did you dare to speculate online that Covid might have come from a lab leak in China? If so, then as late as December of 2020 you were promoting what NPR (among many other outlets) called a “baseless conspiracy theory” for which there is “zero evidence.”

Problem is, things move fast in the world of real-time disinformation policing, and yesterday’s baseless conspiracy theory is today’s respectable viewpoint. A newly released Senate interim report reflects what most people’s common sense suggested to them a long time ago: that the pandemic was “more likely than not” the result of a “research-related incident.”

Same with the Hunter Biden laptop story that broke ahead of the 2020 election. The story was dismissed by dozens of former top intelligence officials who claimed it was “Russian disinformation,” but we now know what anyone who bothered to look into the story knew in October 2020 — that it was all true. The laptop was real.

We also know, by Mark Zuckerberg’s own admission to Joe Rogan in August, that the FBI reached out to Facebook ahead of the 2020 election to tell them to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation. And now we know a little bit more about the FBI’s involvement. According to Klippenstein and Fang, the FBI was involved in high-level communications that allegedly led to Facebook’s suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on the laptop.

It should all outrage Americans who think the First Amendment should actually mean something, that people should be banned from the public square for expressing opinions the ruling regime dislikes. Indeed it’s hard to think of anything more un-American, and it’s not too much to say that this censorship represents a real threat to the survival of the republic.

One need not even engage the facile libertarian line that Twitter and Facebook are private companies and can do whatever they want. It’s enough to see the many ways powerful government agencies are now working hand-in-hand with private Big Tech firms to suppress online speech and censor political ideas the regime deems to be a threat.

Codevilla was exactly right. A security and surveillance apparatus originally constructed to keep us safe from terrorists has been transformed into an instrument of domestic surveillance, and is now being used against us.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Libertarian candidate for the US Senate in Arizona has pulled out of the Arizona US Senate race, making it now a clear choice between Democrat incumbent Mark Kelly and Republican challenger Blake Masters.

The Prickly Pear has expressed concern that in such a tight race, votes for the libertarian candidate would be “wasted” and split the anti-socialist vote against Mark Kelly. Some have argued that Libertarians tend to pull more Democrats, but given their limited government orientation, there is little to no evidence of that view and many past examples of the contrary.

At any rate, we are pleased with the developments except that the libertarian’s withdrawal and the endorsement of Masters by Victor may have come a bit late. Many voters have already filled out their mail-in ballots and sent them in.

Those that did not follow our advice have truly wasted their vote, as their candidate is no longer in the race.

Still, at the margin, in a very close race, this is a positive development for the Master’s campaign.

The control of the US Senate hangs in the balance. Our particular concern falls into two channels.  One, we need to stop the radical Biden agenda in its tracks and stop the wild spending which has given legs to inflation. Secondly, we are very concerned about threats to end the filibuster and to pack the Supreme Court and destroy its important judicial function, which is equal to the other branches of government.

A video produced by Marc Victor is presented below:

We would like to congratulate Marc Victor for his decision and his statesmanship-like attitude. As you can see from the video, both share an interest in limited government, free markets, individual liberty, and peace.

We hope this decision has come in time to make a difference in a very close race. If you vote by mail, submit your ballot today or tomorrow. If you don’t, go to an early voting station or your polling station on election day, November 8th, and surrender your mail-in ballot to receive a new ballot and actually cast your vote in the booth to be tabulated and counted immediately for the results announced next Tuesday night.