Commentary
‘Hey, hey, get your program here …you can’t tell the players without a program … hey, hey …’That used to be a familiar shout out one would hear from someone holding a stack of programs as you entered a stadium for a sporting event.
For those of you just coming in from the dark to learn that our politicized FBI was complicit in censoring information about Hunter Biden and the corruption of the Biden family, this should be of interest.
On October 20, 2020, fifty former intelligence officers colluded to sign a letter professing that the Russians were behind a misinformation campaign using the Hunter Biden laptop story.
When the FBI followed by falsely cautioning social media sources like Twitter and Facebook of pending Russian disinformation just prior to the 2020 presidential election, they complied by censoring it. Thus, millions of Americans voted for Joe Biden, unaware of the news.
With Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, and his pledge to restore freedom of speech, it occurred to me that a number of names have surfaced that may not be familiar to you. But it’s important that you know a bit about them as the Twitter story continues to unfold.
Elon Musk – You should know who he is by now. He invested $44 billion to take on Twitter, but you probably know that he is the founder of Tesla, arguably the premier electric car manufacturer, and SpaceX, his rocket company that has significantly reduced the cost of launching satellites and soon humans into space.
He commissioned journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss to review thousands of Twitter’s internal documents prior to his takeover in an effort to review past management decisions that benefitted Democrats and to restore trust in the Twitter platform.
Matt Taibbi – Although I have quoted him a number of times in past postings, his isn’t exactly a household name. Since he departed from the left-leaning Rolling Stone, I have enjoyed reading his perspective on people and events in the news as a subscriber to his Substack column, TK News with Matt Taibbi
It was Taibbi, who Musk agreed to release Part One of the evidence found in censorship at Twitter. Taibbi began to weave the thread of information he gleaned from his initial look and made the news among conservative news sources.
“Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the New York Post’s expose on Hunter Biden’s laptops, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe,’” Taibbi wrote.
Bari Weiss – I thought Musk’s choice of adding Weiss to further investigate censorship at Twitter was unusual in that she was an opinion writer and editor at the left-leaning New York Times for four years prior to her resignation there in 2020.
Giving her unprecedented access to Twitter files stirred journalism critics, who were undoubtedly supportive of Twitter censoring conservative views.
In her lengthy resignation letter, she wrote, “The truth is that intellectual curiosity – let alone risk-taking – is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security by publishing our 4,000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so, self-censorship has become the norm.”
While in the process of producing the “Twitter Files” for public consumption, things got complicated when a lawyer “close to management” was becoming an obstacle. When they discovered that “lawyer” was Jim Baker, formerly general counsel for the FBI, Weiss said, “My jaw hit the floor.”
When Musk learned that Baker was vetting the files, he was immediately terminated.
Jim Baker – Although he’s no longer in the picture, it’s important that you know that’s the same Baker who was “up to here” in the cover-up of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to stop Trump using the Steele Dossier. Between his work in the FBI and Twitter, he was a visiting fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institute and was a legal analyst for CNN.
Jack Dorsey – Dorsey was the former CEO of Twitter who claimed to have no knowledge of the decision to block the New York Post’s original story on Hunter Biden, even though Taibbi said the decision was “made at the highest level of the company.”
In Part Two of the “Twitter Files” Weiss revealed that Fox News host Dan Bongino and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk were targeted for censorship at Twitter, along with Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an opponent of COVID “groupthink” during the pandemic, who opposed lockdowns.
Finally … ponder this: How can employees of ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times and Washington Post consider themselves journalists when they have yet to cover the story of the Twitter findings by Taibbi and Weiss?
I hope you found that background enlightening. Stay tuned.
May God continue to bless the United States of America.
