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The left circles the wagons on the Twitter censorship story — 42 Comments

  1. I think the vicious nastiness of the responses from the Left are the most instructive part of the story.

  2. While releasing the information on he laptop might well have changed the decision of a number of voters—even a vast number of voters—I don’t believe the claim that THAT would have had a significant impact on the 2020 election.

    All the Democrats would have had to do was to create more fake ballots. Stop the counting a wee bit longer on Wednesday early morning.
    Definitely do-able.
    Same ready excuses available for public consumption.
    Same collusionists fully prepared to propagate THE LIE.

    Which means that the ONLY difference would have been that Joe Biden would have won the election with AN EVEN GREATER NUMBER OF VOTES than he did.
    IOW, he would been able to set an even HIGHER record of votes EVUH “received” by an American president….

    Tough luck, Joe…

  3. And then it’s old news. And one might contemplate saying something like, “You’ve been wrong about everything for twenty years. Does that give you some caution today?”
    Point being there was a list of “conspiracy theories” which all turned out to be true.
    Some people might acknowledge that but…it’s old news.
    I don’t think it’s only the media’s doing. Although my reading is sort of conservative, the actual facts do float around. It’s a matter of resisting them, not missing them, in many cases.
    And if shown to be wrong…shrug.

  4. Matt Taibbi, 12/2/22: “Mainstream Media Slain in Canada:
    In a wild and oddly nasty standoff, author Douglas Murray and I steamrolled Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg in the most decisive win in the history of Canada’s Munk debates.” https://mobile.twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598707504271204355?cxt=HHwWhoCxvaeA4K8sAAAA

    The video of the debate itself, from Murray, at Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/munkdebates/review/775853977/85003a644c

    The topic: “Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media.” Taibbi/Murray for, Gladwell/Goldberg against.

    It’s a rather dull debate to my way of thinking, though it does get a bit heated in the informal Q&A at the conclusion. The audience poll was telling.

  5. Leftists make judgments purely based upon who or which group is committing the wrong doing. If a leftist commits a wrong doing or a crime, well, that’s OK; let’s “move on.”
    The severity of the crime or malfeasance committed by a leftist, or the numbers of people who wind up dead as a result of leftist policies, is of no import to the leftist elites.

    A Castro takes a trip to Europe or the USA (the UN), and is treated like an icon of individual liberties and representative democracy – like a real hero – while a Pinochet is threatened with arrest if he steps foot in Europe.
    No on blinks an eye when someone wears a T-shirt with the murderer, Che Guevara depicted on it, or when somebody is waving about the “Little Red Book” of Mao (whose policies produced about 70 million dead people).

    The CPUSA has it’s national headquarters in Manhattan; no one blinks an eye despite that theology producing more dead bodies than any other politico-religious philosophy in world history.
    Imagine if the Nazi Party or KKK decided to open national headquarters in Manhattan. That effort would crash and burn in a pico-second.

    Leftists are truly evil, malevolent individuals because they WILL justify any and all deeds in pursuit of their vision. In this regard they are no different than Hitler’s Nazi’s ( National SOCIALISTS).

    By the way, there is no F’n way on earth that the Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, or
    facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg did not know and APPROVE of their suppression of any commentary that was inimical to the demokrat party agenda, despite their protestations to the contrary at SEVERAL congressional hearings.

    Why they were not charged with perjury is a mystery……….well, maybe not; that would have required that republicans get their thumbs out of their anal orifices, which dumpublicans are incapable of doing.

  6. Here’s a link on a twitter search for the terms “pr richest“, which I picked up from Mollie Hemingway who got it from Glenn Greenwald who got it from Alex Griswold: https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=pr%20richest&src=typed_query

    It results in a collection of lefty media flunkies imitating one another in the attack vector of the day against Taibbi and Musk.

    An exhibit of entertaining cattle behavior, in other words — either (or both?) amusing or appalling, I suppose, depending merely on one’s current state of digestion.

  7. It’s a tribal world, and nobody is more tribal than people who opine for a living. The idea of a disinterested, unbiased media belongs to the past, if it ever existed.

  8. No way Dorsey was completely unaware. It’s just a corp. version of DC’s “plausible deniability.” Probably he knew who was in control at the censoring group (necessary at some level btw) & gave them autonomy. And he knew where it would lead.

  9. At least for me it did not begin with the Swift Vets story in the leadup to the 2004 election. It started with liberal dismissal of Clinton’s BJ in the Oval Office. That dismissal of an appalling lack of respect by a sitting President was a clear indication that, in the aggregate democrat voters no longer held in high regard the principles upon which America was founded. Which at the least, made them disloyal Americans. And at worst, enemies of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”.

  10. As usual; the MSM will cover this scoop about Twitter’s free speech suppression – by first damning it as lies, all damned lies, and them ignoring it as far as possible. And it’ll probably work. There are too many LIVs and fellow travelers who will buy into the narrative.

    The FBI and DOJ? They KNOW NOTHING! (Sgt, Schultz.)

    Just like the revelations of the misdeeds around the Russia, Russie, Russia collusion scheme, hey will ignore it.

  11. I am Navy from a Navy family. I believed the Swiftboat Vets from the get go. Kerry put his Men in Harms Way for his glory. He should have been Courts Martialed.
    Yes Dorsey and Zuck knew full well what was going on. They are too controlling not too. (Full disclosure – my Middle Name is Dorsey, a Family name on my Dad’s side. May be derived from D’Arcy and a Knight in William the Bastards Army that conquered England)

  12. I agree that most Democrats will not consider any new evidence because they are resigned to voting against Republicans no matter what. But the elections today are won on the margins. They are close, so very close that I no longer have any fingernails. The expansion of non-woke sources of information may very well be the magic dust that convinces those few Democrats, and of course Independents, to realize the party that believes free speech to be a threat to our republic is not the one to support.

  13. SHIREHOME, it sounds like you might want to be on the lookout for descendants of the Angles and the Saxons seeking reparations from the descendants of the Normans.

    Of course, they in turn might want to watch out for any Britons coming at them. After all, the mortgage on Stonehenge has to be paid somehow. 🙂

  14. R2L, I have walked through the middle of Stonehenge. I don’t think I could get a construction loan to rebuild.

  15. And that is why Matt Taibbi is being so viciously attacked. As an aside, I have not figured out why Matt agreed to be the messenger. Thoughts?

  16. T-Rex:

    I think Taibbi likes to be controversial, and of course this also gets him attention. I think Musk may have chosen him because, like Musk, he’s not really on the right but he’s more interested in truth than the usual journalist.

  17. I think it’s fairly typical. The Progressive Left has become a vicious, empty shell without meaningful debate points, but still confident it can win. The recent Munk debate between Douglas Murphy and Matt Taibbi, versus Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg, on the subject of the trustworthiness of Mainstream Media, highlights this point. It was a disappointing debate, on content. Gladwell and Goldberg, both prominent journalists in the Progressive Legacy Mainstream Media, really struggled to make coherent arguments and instead relied on ad hominem attacks. Sound familiar? The brute strength of numbers, the Hive, has come to represent the forces of the Progressive Left. They are very good at keeping the worker bees aligned.

    Musk was on a group call today with Kim Dot Com to discuss the recent events and future ones too. You can move the slider, there is a label indicating when he joins the call.

    https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1599213381185318913

    I think Taibbi got the story because he’s an experienced journalist of the old school, and he has a track record of independence and some measure of integrity. I think Musk probably insisted that the expose be conducted live on Twitter, for the sake (and aggrandizement) of Twitter’s business model.

    On the Dot Com call, Musk reveals that he has given Bari Weiss full unfettered access to the ‘Twitter Files’ and is looking forward to what her team uncovers. Weiss, like Taibbi, is another member of the so-called intellectual Dark Web.

  18. I hadn’t thought I would listen to the full debate. It’s interesting that the debate took place as Taibbi was researching and preparing his Twitter revelation of Friday night. Taibbi mentioned during the week that he was travelling nonstop and things might be a bit chaotic.

    Michelle Goldberg’s response is typical: she points out some obscure detail of the Russia collusion hoax was factual, and dismisses the falsity of the mass with “We had to get the story out there.” Then, with the Twitter/NYT coverup of the Hunter Biden story, it’s “Oh, that old thing? So boring. So three years ago.”

    But in an echo of the debate a few years ago that featured Jordan Peterson (and Stephen Frye) debating Harvard affirmative action hire MIchael Eric Dyson and the ever-available Michelle Goldberg, author Malcom Gladwell stepped up to call the other side racists, over and over. Taibbi was attacked as dreaming of the 1950s when apparently white supremacists like Walter Cronkite ruled the earth.

    Dyson’s nasty insinuations about Peterson didn’t play well in the long-form debate, nor did Dyson’s grunts and hums while others spoke. Gladwell suggested that Cronkite et al never interviewed black people, women, gays or (insert identity group here). Funny, I was there, and I remember TV reporters interviewing all of these.

    And when Douglas Murray, who had written a book on the Northern Irish Troubles, called a chapter of a Gladwell book on the same subject “the most error-ridden thing I’ve ever read,” well, Gladwell had no response at all. It was nasty, and Gladwell had invited it.

    The point of Taibbi’s reporting on the internal Twitter censorship debates is that the Twitter people did what the government told them to do, willingly, and then scrambled to find excuses to justify their actions. He has the receipts. Dorsey comes off as a distant and uninvolved voice of sanity, unwilling to step up and demand answers from his staff.

  19. From a Leftist perspective, the system is corrupt so that Hunter and the savage violence in the ghetto are nothing special. Especially when they are getting their cut and they plan to do better after they are in control. They are working in filth and are not aware of anything else.

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  21. I keep thinking about something a wise executive said to me, many years ago:

    “When you are running a large organization, you aren’t seeing reality. It’s like your watching a movie where you get to see maybe one out of a thousand frames, and from that you have to figure out what is going on”

    True of large organizations…but even more true of the voter in a large & complex country. And those who decide what frame of the move are seen, and in what sequence, have enormous power.

    The form of totalitarianism that threatens us today resembles less ‘1984’ or ‘Brave New World’ than it does the rule of the influencers and communications-controllers projected in the 1954 pulp novel ‘Year of Consent”.

    https://ricochet.com/871838/book-review-year-of-consent-by-kendell-foster-crossen/

  22. The beginning? It began with the Gingrich and Limbaugh triumph of the 1994 midterms in taking the House. That was unthinkable. That was the wakeup call for the liberal media to become far more aggressive and partisan.

    I had a conversation with my Davidson friend, Tony Snow, in the summer of 1994. He said then that the Clintons were a laughingstock in DC. The scandals just kept piling up. No one respected them, D or R.

    Everything changed after the election. The loss of the House scared them. That was serious. From that point on, the tenor of all media stories about Clinton crimes was to cast them as pathetic GOP efforts to “get” the president simply because he was a Dem. No presidential scandal has any legs or results in any serious problems unless someone on the inside decides to talk. The loyal Clintonistas held the line (with the help of a massive force of private investigators/enforcers operating out of the WH basement). The news media crowed that the GOP kept failing to “get” him. Anything short of federal convictions showed that Bubba and Hillary were innocent, and the GOP vindictive meanies.

    Before 1994, liberal news media bias was mostly that — bias. With some exceptions (see Friendly and CBS’ brutal knifing of Goldwater), the bias didn’t produce deliberate, knowing propaganda. Andrew Ferguson actually wrote an article making this point which I know Tony Snow agreed with. Both had lots and lots of friends they had worked with in the news media who were liberal. Tony had been “pretty damn pink” (his words) in college at Davidson and had a bunch of his closest college friends who were active politically on the left. Their friends were biased, but they weren’t agents working to produce deliberate propaganda.

    After 1994, the news media actively colluded with Democrats. The fax from the DNC would present the talking point of the moment, the DC Democrat politicians would sing that talking point in unison from the hymnbook, and the news media would amplify and repeat. Journolist helped develop and spread the narrative.

    The shocking stories involved with the Vince Foster suicide, the shooting death of Ron Brown, the shooting down of the TWA airliner, the erasure of the Iraqi involvement in the Ok City bombing and blaming of conservatives, and the worst of the sordid coverup efforts involving Monica Lewinsky were all buried and whitewashed. [just to name some]

    2004 saw another dramatic descent down the steps to the media hell we now suffer through. The Swiftboat Vet silencing was shocking. The Rathergate faked scandal was disturbing. But it was the MSM reaction and resolve after the Eason Jordan scandal that cemented the news media into its role as active, dishonest propagandist for the Dems. Many journalists decided that they were simply not going to engage with conservative blogs when the bloggers exposed media wrongdoing. As one wrote, “why are we helping these guys get our friends fired?”

    Those who read Powerline and Instapundit back then may remember the feeling that perhaps honest commentators from the blogosphere would be a check and balance on media bias. And for a few months there seemed to be hope. After Jordan, it died. The MSM refused to play anymore. They simply took their ball and went home.

    This exposed the problem of the right wing blogs. They were all pundits commenting on news generated by others. What was needed, then and still today, was actual reporting. We have a story now and then from Project Veritas that produces actual journalism. We have the NY Post which sometimes provides a scoop. But the left still controls the news that we comment on.

    And the Dems now have their storm troopers in the FBI to muzzle and intimidate anyone attempting journalism that isn’t approved by Darth Vader and the DNC. They don’t have to rely on the Clintons’ army of private investigators and enforcers. They have the FBI, CIA, NSA and Dept of Justice to crush dissent along with their willing Big Tech lackeys.

  23. The shocking stories involved with the Vince Foster suicide, the shooting death of Ron Brown, the shooting down of the TWA airliner, the erasure of the Iraqi involvement in the Ok City bombing and blaming of conservatives, and the worst of the sordid coverup efforts involving Monica Lewinsky were all buried and whitewashed. [just to name some]

    Vincent Foster committed suicide, Ron Brown died in plane crash, the TWA airliner was not shot down, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were not working or Iraq.

  24. Art Deco,

    Silly rabbit. Bless your heart.

    Foster was found in a park covered in carpet fibers lying flat on the ground as if asleep. No dispute by anyone about this. Even if he killed himself, it could not have been there. How did he get there? That’s a story that the news media had no interest in reporting. You should check out the appendix that the federal court of appeals added to its opinion.

    Several military doctors who examined Brown testified that he had a bullet hole in the back of the head. Career suicide for them.

    TWA story has been covered by Jack Cashill. The story concocted by the CIA and forced on the FBI, which shockingly forced the NTSB off the investigation, was so ridiculous that no 747 pilot can be found to endorse it. Over 250 eyewitnesses reported seeing the rocket climb the sky and hit the airliner.

    Jayna Davis, a liberal local reporter in Ok City, has documented how the FBI put out an APB for an Iraqi agent seen with McVeigh the day before the bombing. Clinton shut down the search for the Iraqi and blamed Limbaugh. The APB was real. Its suppression alone is a story. Regardless of anything else. And you have absolutely no way to know whether there was any contact with Iraq. We know that Nichols spent time with Islamic terrorists in Mindanao. It’s not a stretch to think there was any influence from Iraq or Iran or al-qaeda. In any event, you can’t possibly support your claim.

  25. Right you know it took 20 years of edwin wilson*s to reveal he was not a rogue spy he did everything on orders

    *the inspiration for reddington

  26. Om,

    You might want to reserve your applause for stuff like facts and evidence. It would buttress your credibility. Assuming you care for your credibility. I apologize for assuming you do.

  27. JohnTyler posts with anger and (I’d guess) barely restrained outrage:
    “Leftists make judgments purely based upon who or which group is committing the wrong doing. If a leftist commits a wrong doing or a crime, well, that’s OK; let’s ‘move on.’
    “The severity of the crime or malfeasance committed by a leftist, or the numbers of people who wind up dead as a result of leftist policies, is of no import to the leftist elites.…
    “Leftists are truly evil, malevolent individuals because they WILL justify any and all deeds in pursuit of their vision. In this regard they are no different than Hitler’s Nazi’s ( National SOCIALISTS).”

    The Truth is only of value to the Left, today, in so far as it advances their agenda, build their power, secures them there for the future.

    THIS is why America is broken today. There is no shared value in finding the Truth, much less respect for the Truth-seeker.

    This makes them as dangerous in power as we can imagine Truth suppression to be.

    What is to be done? SCREAM. at the bastards. West message shirts insulting them as fascists — because they deserve to be shouted down as such.

    GET IN THEIR FACE, as if this were 1968 or 1970 again. SPEAK Truth to the s***heads in power.

    Let everyone be warned. The next rule of bullies is they will not like their rules, when we start to bully them into submission.

    THIS is the only way to build out to anything other than the violent, viscious Armageddon we’re fast approaching.

    Trump will be arrested and convicted. The Evil GOPe is going to sell him — and therefore us — out.

    That cake is baked. Worse, much worse, is coming.

  28. With so many other conspiracy theories proven to be true…

    I wonder on:

    – Seth Rich
    – UFO’s
    – Twa flight
    – Ftx funding – was it a billion?
    – Election Fraud in the US, including dominion software
    – Ukraine Narrative
    – Covid Vaccine Side Effects
    – WEF / Davos
    – Reach of Chinas influence
    – Who, What, Why, and How pushing Transgender Agenda

  29. Sdferr: many thanks for the Vimeo link to the debate in Toronto between Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray and Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg. I thought it was a good debate, actually.

    Gordon Scott: like you, I didn’t think I’d watch the whole thing, but I’m glad I did.

    Five takeaways:

    1. Don’t call Douglas Murray “Doug” to his face.

    2. Don’t be on the opposing side in a debate with Douglas Murray. You’ll lose.

    3. Malcolm Gladwell is a trendy poseur. I’ve read or listened to a couple of things by him–an old podcast on country music and a more recent slim book on the “Bomber Mafia” (a group of U.S. Army Air Corps theorists in the 1920s-1930s)–and thought they were pretty good. After his snarky, dishonest performance in this debate, I’m going to give him a pass.

    4. Michelle Goldberg is–to put it kindly–unimpressive. In Goldberg’s view, the world is divided between sane, educated people like her–people who read and believe the NYT and The New Yorker, people who listen to NPR–and “right-wingers”. She is a perfect self-parody of Upper West Side-bubble “thinking”.

    5. Gladwell and Goldberg aren’t good debaters and don’t fare well when they encounter intelligent and informed pushback from people like Taibbi and Murray. That’s why they seek to discredit or censor it out of the gate. Or play the racism card, as Gladwell repeatedly did. Or simply refuse to engage with it.

    Here’s the link again:

    https://vimeo.com/munkdebates/review/775853977/85003a644c

    Highly recommended if you have an hour to spare.

  30. Foster was found in a park covered in carpet fibers lying flat on the ground as if asleep. No dispute by anyone about this. Even if he killed himself, it could not have been there. How did he get there? That’s a story that the news media had no interest in reporting. You should check out the appendix that the federal court of appeals added to its opinion.

    You have carpet fibers on your clothing. And pet hair. And God knows what else. Foster was miserable and had been prescribed anti-depressants by his home town doctor. Four distinct investigations were undertaken of his death and they all came up with the same conclusions.

    Several military doctors who examined Brown testified that he had a bullet hole in the back of the head. Career suicide for them.

    Who are they?

    What’s your thesis here? That someone shot Ron Brown in flight? Or that thirty-odd businessmen got on an airplane to travel on an official trade mission and then Ron Brown’s dead body is loaded on the plane?

    TWA story has been covered by Jack Cashill.

    Jack Cashill is a consistent purveyor of the notion that he has the inside story that everyone else missed, caveat lector. Elaine Scarry was allowed by the editors of The New York Review of Books to crap up three separate issues with her nonsense thesis that the U.S. Navy caused the crash with errant radio propagation. There’s an engineering school near the New York Review‘s offices, about 23 minutes away if you take the PATH train. It never seems to have occurred to the editors to contact anyone there and ask them for a fee to review the literary scholar Elaine Scarry’s submission. Neither Cashill nor Scarry have any critical engagement with the technical issues at stake.

    Jayna Davis, a liberal local reporter in Ok City, has documented how the FBI put out an APB for an Iraqi agent seen with McVeigh the day before the bombing.

    And this is probative in your mind?

  31. It’s not just “the Left.” The usual gang of NeverTrumpers has joined in dismissing the Twitter Files. And what exactly has Mitch McConnell or Mitt Romney or Mike Pence or Lindsey Graham had to say, even with two full days now to craft a response?

    The Left isn’t the problem. The entire political establishment is the problem.

    And the thing about Vince Foster is that someone who was thisclose to the President and First Lady walked into a public park and blew his brains out…and the entire political and media establishment said “Nothing to see here. Move along.” If they didn’t want people to suspect something, they shouldn’t have acted like there was something to hide.

    Mike

  32. I haven’t ever gotten deep into the Vince Foster story but FWIW, I vividly remember – before he died – seeing a photo in one of the weekly mags. It was of the Clintons and Foster and at first glance I was struck by the body language and thought; Oh, they seem so close – they look like they really love each other. On closer examination, the man Hillary was leaning on was Foster!

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