The Twitter files and the smoking gun
I’m in complete agreement with this from the NY Post, by Andrew C. McCarthy:
Just don’t look for a smoking gun. We’re not going to see an FBI document that says, “Tell Twitter the Biden evidence is Russian disinformation.” When the new Chief Twit, Elon Musk, released the so-called Twitter Files over the weekend, Matt Taibbi’s consequent thread of reporting observed there’s no evidence of a specific warning to social-media platforms that the Biden information was sourced to Russia or hacked. As Devine countered, however, there is significant evidence of FBI collusion in the scheme.
I can explain the apparent disconnect. It is not necessary for FBI officials to issue specific warnings to convey the message that a story should be killed.
In these schemes, there are sophisticated actors in each camp, including former government officials in media and social media. When government officials do their nod-and-a-wink routine, these execs get the hint. The higher-ups at Twitter and Facebook knew the FBI wasn’t holding regular pre-election meetings with them idly. They would also have understood that when briefing private parties the FBI can’t accuse people of specific criminal misconduct — such as espionage and hacking. So it keeps things “general” (as Taibbi described the warnings). That, along with its perceived authority, allows it to get its accusatory message across but later deny it did so.
I have long thought the same. These people are not stupid, and they are used to playing this game and quite good at it. No one is going to leave “smoking gun” evidence, nor do they need to do so in order to get the message across and get the results they want.
McCarthy ends with this (and please read the whole thing):
That’s how this game is played. The players know exactly what they’re doing. They say enough to endorse the lie but leave themselves room to deny that they did so. They think we’re idiots.
The only part with which I don’t agree – at least not exactly – is that last sentence. I would modify it this way: they think that the MSM and the Democrats will rationalize, explain away, coverup, and otherwise manage to convince a lot of people that this was all quite innocent and in fact a big nothingburger tha can be safely ignored or waved away. And that, because a great many people – maybe even most, but at any rate enough – don’t really want to focus on all this complex and sordid stuff, sorting out the wheat from the chaff and trying to figure out the truth in a sea of lies, that the approach will work to shove it all under the rug still again.
Or, alternatively, they think that enough people will realize what actually happened and yet rationalize that the ends justify the means in the worthy cause of promoting Biden and defeating Trump.
Those screaming and screeching ad nauseam, hysterically and endlessly, about “threats to democracy” from the right are blind to the obvious truth that it is their party and their ideological side which represent the very essence of the grotesquely-overused term “fascism”, i.e. synergy between the state and private enterprises (Big Tech), fully aided and abetted by the compliant and biased media. That this will be rationalized by many as fully warranted in defeating Trump (and the right) simply illustrates the fact that the left is motivated now (and it has been since the French and the Bolshevik Revolutions) not by some ideal of uplifting the downtrodden, but rather by the desire to crush their enemies whilst attaining power and privilege for themselves.
And is this going to affect Andrew McCarthy’s view of the FBI? ‘Cause it sounds like he’s describing a process HE WAS ALREADY FAMILIAR WITH when he’s been jumping to defend the agency as absolutely above board and beyond suspicion. Or did he just realize the FBI did this kind of thing now?
Mike
People on the Right obviously care very much about all this.
The people on the Left are all OK with this. They generally believe that the ends justify the means because the people on the Right are all evil. And the great thing about categorizing a group of people as “evil” is that you can do whatever you want to them and feel justified. You can lie to them. You can cheat and steal from them. You can commit violence upon them. Heck, you could even round them up and put them into camps. After all, they’re evil aren’t they?
So the real battle is for the hearts and minds of the “normies”, the low information people. These are people who don’t really care about politics, or can’t be bothered to care that much about them anyway. But depsite their willful ignorance they’ll still vote, since that’s what responsible people are supposed to do (or so they’ve been told ceaselessly for their whole lives). Such people may be somewhat aware of the Hunter Biden laptop coverup story at best. But only dimly aware due largely to the mainstream media blackout. So it’s difficult to gage what they believe, if anything regarding the facts of the story. It’s even hard to say if they would even care.
Getting people to care about something like this in this day and age seems like an impossible task. And I think the powers that be know this.
MBunge:
McCarthy has been highly critical of the FBI for years. It happened to him – the turning – some time during Russiagate, but it was quite a while ago. I documented it in many posts following his columns. Don’t have time to find them now.
Yes. In criminal trials a strong circumstantial case is sufficient. But there, one has a captive audience. In politics, people change the channel or hit the off switch. Including figuratively.
It was in the “Cold Justice” TV series, formerly on Netflix but gone now, where Kelly Siegler explains the power of a good circumstantial case.
I have a couple of problems with McCarthy’s take. He writes that the scheme of Democrat/media collusion failed in 2016 but was successful in 2020. This isn’t quite accurate. If the same voting rules were in place in 2016 as 2020, with mass mail-in ballots and unsupervised drop boxes, Hillary Clinton would have “won” that election. The cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story made the election closer but even that was not enough to push old Joe over the line.
The other point is that the FBI and Justice department were ostensibly under Republican control when the FBI obtained Hunter’s laptop. A huge part of the blame for the cover-up of this story can be put on Chris Wray and Bill Barr who knew Biden was compromised and did nothing about it.
Yes, Ron Johnson and a handful of other Republicans have pursued this case but many mainstream Republicans were happy to see this story go away. Unfortunately, the loathsome David French and Bill Kristol represent a substantial part of the Republican establishment who will go to any lengths to defeat Trump, regardless of the damage it does to the county.
The FBI’s regular meetings with Twitter and Facebook execs to discuss “misinformation” are a sufficient reason to fire the agents involved and their management team and the FBI Director. Americans have free speech rights. Government interference in those is unacceptable.
Welcome to the party andrew have a beer
He takes an awfully long time to realize what is patently obvious to most
The tech companies and the media obey because they are all on the same side.
A huge part of the blame for the cover-up of this story can be put on Chris Wray and Bill Barr who knew Biden was compromised and did nothing about it.
I have a suspicion that Wray hardly knows what’s going on and defends his subordinates reflexively. As for Barr, he let it slide when Jeffrey Epstein ‘committed suicide’ in prison. He is not a man of character. He’s Sgt. Schultz. It’s a reasonable wager he knew one thing — that Robert Mueller was cognitively impaired. Their wives are personal friends. With scant doubt he auditioned for the post of Attorney-General to head off the appointment of someone who would really clean house. Again, Andrew Weissman’s crooked wrecking crew was recruited from among the Department’s senior appointees. What they were plotting – to indict Trump for obstructing their obstruction investigation – is a strong indication that the Department’s senior ranks are rancid.
Wray has been a mutineer along with comey and mueller going back to 2004
https://twitter.com/ShantMM/status/1599851457821708289?cxt=HHwWgsDUzZWb6LMsAAAA
The Post Millennial:
https://thepostmillennial.com/lead-fbi-agent-who-warned-twitter-about-russian-disinformation-dump-is-repeat-donor-to-democratic-party-report
And this person was chairman of the RNC?
Michael Steele explains how Elon Musk’s #TwitterFiles drop ‘undermines the central tenets of free speech’
https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2022/12/05/michael-steele-explains-how-elon-musks-twitterfiles-drop-undermines-the-central-tenets-of-free-speech/
Perhaps I have accidentally landed in an unrepresentative group of people in my circle of acquaintances.
But the dem/lib/prog and anti-Trump folks are…..strange.
If one mentions a fact inconvenient to their views, they’ll say, “Fox” or “Trump” with the self-satisfied air of intellectual triumph. Logic and facts are meaningless.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/does_granholm_hands_out_200_million_greenie_grant_to_lithium_battery_company__controlled_by_the_chinese.html
Shrug. “Faux news”.
There is no Bad Thing done to our country which is not denied or dismissed if it’s done by the dem/prog/lib…because it annoys conservatives (insert insulting nomenclature here).
I’m not talking about the Swamp, the fed bureaucrats, the MSM. I’m talking about ordinary people who, in other parts of their lives, seem to handle reality reasonably well.
Not getting it. But the left can’t succeed without a sufficient number of these folks. Where do they come from and why to they find such ideas so satisfactory?
Richard Aubrey:
I don’t think it’s a mystery. Sources they trust – friends, family, MSM, pundits – have told them those things are unreliable and mendacious (FOX) or both and downright evil (Trump). They haven’t the time or interest to listen for themselves; it seems a self-evident truth to them that all the smart and good people also believe. Plus, if and when they do listen to a little bit, it’s through the filter of their already-held conceptions. A mind is a difficult thing to change, and it’s satisfying to cling to a convenient excuse, and also it means you yourself are virtuous and good. There are so many benefits it’s easy to see them.
neo
Thanks for the input. Strikes me that, in earlier and harsher days, you needed to get it right, unsat as it may be. Now, as civilization files off the sharp edges to make things easier for the old, young, disabled, distracted, the penalty for getting something wrong is either nonexistent, far in the future, or not apparently connected to the self-indulgent decisions.
Chesterton’s note about The Fence is applicable. Somebody went to a lot of trouble, passed up other things which could have been done with the time and resources because this was the most important thing.
The liberal who kicks it over without a thought is gone before whatever it is that was fenced in or out appears to trouble the descendants of the fence builders. And because they complain, it means they are bad people whose complaints can be ignored and besides the deserve it.
And when the liberal is himself victimized, it’s somebody else’s fault.