Who are you going to believe? The FBI or your own lyin’ eyes?
That was the question posed to all Americans by the G-Men on Wednesday after the federal agency finally addressed “The Twitter Files” — leaked emails showing rampant collusion between the social media platform and law enforcement to censor and limit certain kinds of speech (chiefly any press damaging to the Democratic agenda).
“The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public,” an FBI statement given to The New York Post said. “It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
All those “conspiracy theorists” are doing is publishing emails — albeit with a little commentary thrown in the mix — that show that federal law enforcement policed content on the platform and asked executives to remove certain posts.
More than that, the FBI even paid Twitter more than $3.4 million for their “legal process response” after successfully censoring The New York Post’s infamous Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election. That was an apparent reference to the time Twitter executives spent coordinating with the agency.
Taken all together, it isn’t a stretch to say that the FBI and Twitter were in bed together. There were more than 100 emails and numerous meetings between the social media company and the FBI in recent years.
If you ask the actors involved in this scheme, everything was copacetic and par for the course.
“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the FBI also told The Post.
The FBI would likely prefer that independent journalists simply repeat expert-approved talking points showing everything is on the up-and-up in government and anything suggesting the contrary is “a threat to democracy.”
Regarding the matter at hand, the FBI claims that it had no enforcement mechanism, so thus it wasn’t engaging in censorship, the argument goes.
Yet as pointed out by reporter Michael Shellenberger, who released one batch of “The Twitter Files,” the data indicate that Twitter was highly motivated to work with the feds, chiefly because of the reimbursements they began receiving in 2019.
“What was interesting about that is that they had decided they had not been taking that money before 2019,” Shellenberger said on the Wednesday edition of “The Ben Shapiro Show.” “They then decided to take it after 2019. So this is one sign among many that Twitter was basically finally succumbing to the pressure from the intelligence agencies.”
As Shellenberger explained, offering money to do your bidding could be very appealing for a company struggling to turn a profit.
“Of course, it creates an incentive, particularly when you get to a business like Twitter that was losing money at the time … having the federal government give them millions of dollars while also asking for the censorship of accurate information,” the best-selling author added. “It’s really dangerous incentive.”
Again, The FBI sees no danger here — only upsides. They are from the government and they’re here to help.
“As evidenced in the correspondence. the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers,” the FBI said.
In reality, FBI officials pressured Twitter management to censor accurate information which could have swung the 2020 election to President Donald J. Trump.
Aided by 51 intelligence officers who also signed a letter saying that the laptop was disinformation, social media companies blocked the story from being spread.
Shellenberger described the entire gambit as “an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community” aimed at “senior executives at news and social media companies” to discredit “leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published.”
And that’s just scratching the surface.
On the inside of Twitter, dozens of former agents worked for the tech business. Eighty FBI agents were tasked with monitoring Twitter around the clock. Twitter’s ex-chief legal counsel James Baker was a former FBI official, for Pete’s Sake. That same guy was involved in Russiagate and worked as a CNN analyst in between stints.
In other words, it’s all a Swamp and all the creatures just swash back and forth in the muck.
It's all a Swamp and all the creatures just swash back and forth in the muck. https://t.co/0rWfIcNdnk
— Tim Meads (@TimMeadsUSA) December 8, 2022
But wait there’s more!
As flagged by The Federalist, what these leaked emails also show is another way to view the so-called “Deep State.”
“What most people think of as the ‘deep state’ is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs.” Matt Taibbi, one of The Twitter Files journalists said. “The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.”
It should be noted that the FBI never denied specific allegations from The Twitter files. They defended their actions as noble and necessary while maligning anybody who thinks otherwise.
If you’re wondering why liberals aren’t outraged by the agency’s attack on the free press with that statement, or with Twitter’s actions as a whole, it’s because the Left thinks that shadowbanning and censorship are moral necessities. The left thinks it is a good thing that stuff happens.
More than that, it seems all the folks exposed in “The Twitter Files” think it was all worth it because President Donald J. Trump lost the presidency. Legacy media must think that too — which explains the utter lack of attention to the story from the usual suspects. Sadly, as evidenced by the FBI’s statement, our own government approves of such attacks on free speech as well.
The ends justify the means for these totalitarian freaks.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.