Redacted - by Mr. Fish The journalist Matt Taibbi has been targeted by the Democratic Party for exposing extensive government blacklists used to censor left-wing and right-wing critics. Given access to the internal traffic of Twitter by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, he documented repeated cases where the FBI and other government agencies repeatedly suppressed news and commentary. The censored content was almost exclusively produced by those critical of the dominant narrative advanced by the Democratic Party and the old establishment wing of the Republican Party. Which has joined forces with the Democrats. Threads that were censored included those from the Yellow Vests movement, activists from the Occupy movement, Global Revolution Live, negative stories about Joe Biden, reports on the Ukrainian energy company Burisma that paid Hunter Biden about $1 million a year while his father was vice-president, positive stories about Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, reports about Ukrainian human rights abuses and details of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. These accounts that were flagged and usually disappeared. The so-called “moderation requests” were sent by an entity called the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF). The FITF is an FBI-led interagency task force that includes numerous government agencies, including Homeland Security, the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department. It flags what it considers objectionable content for about two dozen social media companies, including Twitter, Facebook, Google, Pinterest and Wikimedia. In March, Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were called to testify before the Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government. While Taibbi was testifying on March 9, an IRS agent visited his house in New Jersey. Taibbi discovered that the IRS opened a case against him on the day he published a Christmas Eve Twitter thread from a letter House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan sent to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel inquiring about Taibbi’s case. It was a Saturday. It was Christmas Eve. Taibbi did not owe taxes. The case was four years old. All this suggests that the IRS case was politically motivated and the FBI was monitoring Taibbi. Taibbi ran into a buzzsaw of orchestrated character assassination when he testified. The Democratic members of the committee rarely let Taibbi speak. They delivered vicious and insulting diatribes, which were then broadcast on outlets such as MSNBC and CNN, part of the effort to further discredit Taibbi. The ranking committee member, Stacey Plaskett, sent Taibbi a letter accusing him of lying to Congress and threatened Taibbi with a five-year prison sentence. Joining me to discuss this wholesale censorship, and the efforts by the ruling establishment, including the Democratic Party, to discredit him and his work is Matt Taibbi.
Chris, since FBI director James Comey decided to open up an investigation against Hillary Clinton that influence the election to get Trump elected more than Putin, and since attorney general Merrick Garland did not prosecute the ringleaders of the January 6th insurrection, it is pretty obvious, they're Almost all on the same team. I choose to support the socialist team because nobody can name one successful capitalist Nation with no socialism. They are all third world banana Republics. Russia and Saudi Arabia and China would be banana Republic if the first two did not have oil and China did not have our manufacturing base that Nixon and all the other traitorous presidents after him gave them. It remains to be seen whether the 1600 AM hate radio stations can cause a civil war. Hopefully the right wingers will not fall for a dictatorship. The intellectuals and the journalists will be the first ones targeted. None of the GOP and about 60% of the dems can't be trusted to do the right thing for "We the people". The progressive caucus of the Dems is all that is left of the old Democrat party. Most of the Democrat party are 1980s Republicans and now the Republicans are globalist capitalist fascists. That includes Trump.
Obviously we have red different history books. Russia and China are not banana republics today because of oil or some act of treason from Nixon. Russia is great because its people raised against the tyranny of the tzars and created a communist technological society that in many ways was more advanced than ours (remember its Sputnik vs our Flopsnik?). China was the most powerful nation in the past and its inventions like the compass and gun powder were basic for the western world's progress. It has a millennial tradition of culture and technology that was waiting to awake without the help of idiotic western leaders. Are we going to blame Nixon because its school kids perform better than ours in sciences and mathematics?
Without Rush's oil, couldn't would be just another dysfunctional third world dictator. And the Chinese are definitely more intelligent than the white man, but with thugs running the nation you can't advance. The Russian liberals and the Chinese liberals made their nation's great, well their leaders fleece them and are fleecing them. Same as in America now. China is no longer a communist Nation. Right-wing thugs are incapable of running a civilized Nation. All they can do is think about how much money and power they can loot.
Yes, "Right-wing thugs are incapable of running a civilized Nation" and I'm not shy to affirm that not the liberals, but the communists were the vehicle to make both Russia and China the great nations of today. Another thing that we perhaps disagree is that no particular race or ethnicity is more intelligent that the others. We all are cousins, descendants of the East Africa mitochondrial Eve, and the individual differences in intelligence among us is mainly due to the opportunities of having good education and health care when young.
Here is a short recipe for a civilized society. A maximum wage about 10 times the minimum wage, no indoctrination of children by anyone until age 27, that includes the military and the gays and the religions as well. Raise all of the babies from conception in a neutral commune, in order to end drug babies, all mental physical and sexual child abuse, anxiety,stress and drama. Provide all the children with plenty of toys, outdoor fields and indoor gymnasiums. Pair the adults up in groups of three in order to ensure there is no child abuse, and have hundreds of cameras and microphones at all times. This will end racism, crime, religious hatred, abandonment and neglect. Also there must be campaign finance reform, no donations more than $100 and no lobbyists, no bribing, guilty parties must be executed. The human race needs to work towards a Utopia, the right wingers oppose that and a maximum wage and no religious indoctrination of children and raising children in communes. The right wing are only good for leading humans to a hell on Earth.
I don't believe in communes that are guided by an inflexible set of regulations. My choice is a pure democratic society where the children are allowed to develop in the company of their loving parents and where all the members of the society have equal rights and opportunities and can participate in the decisions required for the society to progress. This is of course, our American experiment that until now have been only a dream waiting to be achieved. This is the only utopia I trust.
The family unit has worked so well hasn't it? Most of the people live in poverty and are mentally ill and violent. Lots of luck evolving with the virtuous raising the children. A couple virtuous adults could teach the children a lot and their parents as well. Nobody can teach what they do not know.
How many people are actually aware of this? I suspect a tiny tiny number of people. This insidious permeation of authoritarianism into our society will only be realized by society when it will be to late!
PLEASE forward this to EVERYONE you know🙏🙏🙏.
This is NOT “chicken little saying the sky is falling”
This is 1984 happening in the early 2020’s
People living in this world under a dictatorship live under this iron hand. Soon this will be happening in the USA as it’s empire and democracy begin to rapidly crumble. Will Canada be immune from this authoritarianism or is its progressing at a slower rate?
We MUST pass this information on to friends and colleagues Talk about it!
The ban on abortion is just another feature of authoritarian control. DeSantis says he did the right thing by barring abortions after 5-6 weeks while he speaks in front of a banner decreeing FREEDOM. This is an oxy moron. Where is the woman’s freedom? Their reproductive rights? Books are being banned in schools. There are attacks on the LGBTQ Community. The giant iron foot is going to slam down on America and I mean the giant iron shoe is corporate America which is in bed with the government. Trump and DeSantis are spearheading an authoritarian regime.
There have been numerous articles dictating control of the economy by corporate America. This is scary stuff that everyone needs to read and start talking because mainstream media is firmly attached to the government and are; THEREFORE, not reporting on these censored reporting apart from some description of conspiracy theories. And actually helping the government find whistleblowers. Journalism should equal the 1st amendment. But Trump got this snowball rolling that will obliterate freedom of speech claiming fake news while he was the biggest purveyor of false news
And who started this…… Trump! He had said 19,000 lies during his term and was never taken to task. During his CNN town hall he bullied the reporter and continued his false diatribes about the election. Trump wants to be the champion of an authoritarian government and therefore it will be easy to pardon his federal crimes. SOCIETY NEEDS TO WAKE UP AND UNDERSTAND THIS CREEPING OF TOTALITARIANISM INTO OUR SOCIETY
We need a charismatic, intellectual individual with credibility before he gets blacklisted and discredited. The billions of dark money pouring to politics to sway the outcome must closely monitored. DeSantis wants to abolish the public education system for private school. The result….. the poor remain uneducated and therefore they cannot mount a counter attack. Yet, the rich will be taught ideologies such that the paradigm of authoritarianism will be ingrained into their psyche/their belief system…….. and that is a very scary thing
The worship of money and all the things that money can buy may always lead in this direction.....power and privilege pretty quickly recognize that under their world view and capitalist system, not everyone can partake of either power or privilege. So inevitably, they must control the population, softly by feeding the people superficial ideologies of entitlement, and more directly by controlling what they read, learn in school, discuss in university, etc. etc.
And the real kicker is, that if you live in a capitalist society....that continues to believe its money buys you this freedom to consume, and opine.........its pretty hard to disagree, let alone threaten that hegemony.
When times are good.....there's a lot of 'freedom' to go around....andmost of us spend it on trivial pursuits, like bigger cars, longer vacate ons, and fancier stuff. But when times get hard, the black boots start to appear, because honestly........what does freedom of thought amount to in a capitalist society, if you can't afford that house, er,,,,appartment....shack in the boonies???
Times are hard now...and going to get harder. Wars abroad will only keep the people quiet for so long. Journalists like Taibbi threaten the delicate balance between compliance and truly informed rebellion.
We must hold the fort....as America makes her last ditch effort to defeat both Russia and China....in stupid wars of fear and jingoism, that don't need to happen. What the planet needs now is cooperation, collaboration, acceptance that there are many ways of running a society, some of which we haven't tried yet.
The climate emergency is what's coming for all of us.........while we fight our stupid wars, and censor the bright and courageous among us.
Yes....but there is still time for some of us to make other choices. One small example: We don't fly...we camp in a small tent in the back country. We're in our 70's...so go for short jaunts...
Our disposable income goes to educational funds, political action....and clean energy projects.
Censorship assumes that citizens ( the essence of democracy) are too dumb to sort out good information from bad information. Furthermore it assumes that there are other people, bureaucrats of some sort, who are able to do this in a reliable and unbiased, non politicized , uncorrupted way. Censorship shuts down debate - and that is the point. How does a democracy come to good choices without debate?
I recently heard RFK Jr talk about the role of the Pentagon and CIA in the covid response and it's chilling. The pentagon and CIA have been deeply involved in bioweapons research for half a century and more recently in "pandemic preparedness." They were up to their elbows in all the public health decisions during covid. Do we want this? Do we need this? And then they participate in censoring any debate about their activities! This is also happening around the war with Russia of course, its not just covid.
From my perspective, it is chilling to know that the CIA is conducting research in bioweapons because whatever we make now with the intent of hurting the enemy, eventually will come back to us too. But if they helped us with their expertise in pandemic preparedness when we needed most, is something to be appreciated.
And I agree with you that censorship is a right that the autocrats, who believe they are better than us, have always claimed. In the middle age it was the pope with the Index of forbidden books, and now, some of our states are doing the same prohibiting books which tell the true story of our race and class relations.
Completely agree on both points. And their bioweapons research probably did already come back to bite us. Even the FBI says covid appears to have been a lab leak. We know that there was US government funding going to the Wuhan lab.
When the deep state censors reporters and censors "the public" from information the deep state does not what "the public" to hear then our democracy is not.
Chris, since FBI director James Comey decided to open up an investigation against Hillary Clinton that influence the election to get Trump elected more than Putin, and since attorney general Merrick Garland did not prosecute the ringleaders of the January 6th insurrection, it is pretty obvious, they're Almost all on the same team. I choose to support the socialist team because nobody can name one successful capitalist Nation with no socialism. They are all third world banana Republics. Russia and Saudi Arabia and China would be banana Republic if the first two did not have oil and China did not have our manufacturing base that Nixon and all the other traitorous presidents after him gave them. It remains to be seen whether the 1600 AM hate radio stations can cause a civil war. Hopefully the right wingers will not fall for a dictatorship. The intellectuals and the journalists will be the first ones targeted. None of the GOP and about 60% of the dems can't be trusted to do the right thing for "We the people". The progressive caucus of the Dems is all that is left of the old Democrat party. Most of the Democrat party are 1980s Republicans and now the Republicans are globalist capitalist fascists. That includes Trump.
Obviously we have red different history books. Russia and China are not banana republics today because of oil or some act of treason from Nixon. Russia is great because its people raised against the tyranny of the tzars and created a communist technological society that in many ways was more advanced than ours (remember its Sputnik vs our Flopsnik?). China was the most powerful nation in the past and its inventions like the compass and gun powder were basic for the western world's progress. It has a millennial tradition of culture and technology that was waiting to awake without the help of idiotic western leaders. Are we going to blame Nixon because its school kids perform better than ours in sciences and mathematics?
Without Rush's oil, couldn't would be just another dysfunctional third world dictator. And the Chinese are definitely more intelligent than the white man, but with thugs running the nation you can't advance. The Russian liberals and the Chinese liberals made their nation's great, well their leaders fleece them and are fleecing them. Same as in America now. China is no longer a communist Nation. Right-wing thugs are incapable of running a civilized Nation. All they can do is think about how much money and power they can loot.
Yes, "Right-wing thugs are incapable of running a civilized Nation" and I'm not shy to affirm that not the liberals, but the communists were the vehicle to make both Russia and China the great nations of today. Another thing that we perhaps disagree is that no particular race or ethnicity is more intelligent that the others. We all are cousins, descendants of the East Africa mitochondrial Eve, and the individual differences in intelligence among us is mainly due to the opportunities of having good education and health care when young.
Here is a short recipe for a civilized society. A maximum wage about 10 times the minimum wage, no indoctrination of children by anyone until age 27, that includes the military and the gays and the religions as well. Raise all of the babies from conception in a neutral commune, in order to end drug babies, all mental physical and sexual child abuse, anxiety,stress and drama. Provide all the children with plenty of toys, outdoor fields and indoor gymnasiums. Pair the adults up in groups of three in order to ensure there is no child abuse, and have hundreds of cameras and microphones at all times. This will end racism, crime, religious hatred, abandonment and neglect. Also there must be campaign finance reform, no donations more than $100 and no lobbyists, no bribing, guilty parties must be executed. The human race needs to work towards a Utopia, the right wingers oppose that and a maximum wage and no religious indoctrination of children and raising children in communes. The right wing are only good for leading humans to a hell on Earth.
I don't believe in communes that are guided by an inflexible set of regulations. My choice is a pure democratic society where the children are allowed to develop in the company of their loving parents and where all the members of the society have equal rights and opportunities and can participate in the decisions required for the society to progress. This is of course, our American experiment that until now have been only a dream waiting to be achieved. This is the only utopia I trust.
The family unit has worked so well hasn't it? Most of the people live in poverty and are mentally ill and violent. Lots of luck evolving with the virtuous raising the children. A couple virtuous adults could teach the children a lot and their parents as well. Nobody can teach what they do not know.
How many people are actually aware of this? I suspect a tiny tiny number of people. This insidious permeation of authoritarianism into our society will only be realized by society when it will be to late!
PLEASE forward this to EVERYONE you know🙏🙏🙏.
This is NOT “chicken little saying the sky is falling”
This is 1984 happening in the early 2020’s
People living in this world under a dictatorship live under this iron hand. Soon this will be happening in the USA as it’s empire and democracy begin to rapidly crumble. Will Canada be immune from this authoritarianism or is its progressing at a slower rate?
We MUST pass this information on to friends and colleagues Talk about it!
The ban on abortion is just another feature of authoritarian control. DeSantis says he did the right thing by barring abortions after 5-6 weeks while he speaks in front of a banner decreeing FREEDOM. This is an oxy moron. Where is the woman’s freedom? Their reproductive rights? Books are being banned in schools. There are attacks on the LGBTQ Community. The giant iron foot is going to slam down on America and I mean the giant iron shoe is corporate America which is in bed with the government. Trump and DeSantis are spearheading an authoritarian regime.
There have been numerous articles dictating control of the economy by corporate America. This is scary stuff that everyone needs to read and start talking because mainstream media is firmly attached to the government and are; THEREFORE, not reporting on these censored reporting apart from some description of conspiracy theories. And actually helping the government find whistleblowers. Journalism should equal the 1st amendment. But Trump got this snowball rolling that will obliterate freedom of speech claiming fake news while he was the biggest purveyor of false news
And who started this…… Trump! He had said 19,000 lies during his term and was never taken to task. During his CNN town hall he bullied the reporter and continued his false diatribes about the election. Trump wants to be the champion of an authoritarian government and therefore it will be easy to pardon his federal crimes. SOCIETY NEEDS TO WAKE UP AND UNDERSTAND THIS CREEPING OF TOTALITARIANISM INTO OUR SOCIETY
We need a charismatic, intellectual individual with credibility before he gets blacklisted and discredited. The billions of dark money pouring to politics to sway the outcome must closely monitored. DeSantis wants to abolish the public education system for private school. The result….. the poor remain uneducated and therefore they cannot mount a counter attack. Yet, the rich will be taught ideologies such that the paradigm of authoritarianism will be ingrained into their psyche/their belief system…….. and that is a very scary thing
The worship of money and all the things that money can buy may always lead in this direction.....power and privilege pretty quickly recognize that under their world view and capitalist system, not everyone can partake of either power or privilege. So inevitably, they must control the population, softly by feeding the people superficial ideologies of entitlement, and more directly by controlling what they read, learn in school, discuss in university, etc. etc.
And the real kicker is, that if you live in a capitalist society....that continues to believe its money buys you this freedom to consume, and opine.........its pretty hard to disagree, let alone threaten that hegemony.
When times are good.....there's a lot of 'freedom' to go around....andmost of us spend it on trivial pursuits, like bigger cars, longer vacate ons, and fancier stuff. But when times get hard, the black boots start to appear, because honestly........what does freedom of thought amount to in a capitalist society, if you can't afford that house, er,,,,appartment....shack in the boonies???
Times are hard now...and going to get harder. Wars abroad will only keep the people quiet for so long. Journalists like Taibbi threaten the delicate balance between compliance and truly informed rebellion.
We must hold the fort....as America makes her last ditch effort to defeat both Russia and China....in stupid wars of fear and jingoism, that don't need to happen. What the planet needs now is cooperation, collaboration, acceptance that there are many ways of running a society, some of which we haven't tried yet.
The climate emergency is what's coming for all of us.........while we fight our stupid wars, and censor the bright and courageous among us.
Sucks to be Us.
Beautifully and fully outlined... and so sad 😞
Yes....but there is still time for some of us to make other choices. One small example: We don't fly...we camp in a small tent in the back country. We're in our 70's...so go for short jaunts...
Our disposable income goes to educational funds, political action....and clean energy projects.
We live for our grandchildren, and their friends.
Our Cree people are right: You can't eat money.
Censorship assumes that citizens ( the essence of democracy) are too dumb to sort out good information from bad information. Furthermore it assumes that there are other people, bureaucrats of some sort, who are able to do this in a reliable and unbiased, non politicized , uncorrupted way. Censorship shuts down debate - and that is the point. How does a democracy come to good choices without debate?
I recently heard RFK Jr talk about the role of the Pentagon and CIA in the covid response and it's chilling. The pentagon and CIA have been deeply involved in bioweapons research for half a century and more recently in "pandemic preparedness." They were up to their elbows in all the public health decisions during covid. Do we want this? Do we need this? And then they participate in censoring any debate about their activities! This is also happening around the war with Russia of course, its not just covid.
From my perspective, it is chilling to know that the CIA is conducting research in bioweapons because whatever we make now with the intent of hurting the enemy, eventually will come back to us too. But if they helped us with their expertise in pandemic preparedness when we needed most, is something to be appreciated.
And I agree with you that censorship is a right that the autocrats, who believe they are better than us, have always claimed. In the middle age it was the pope with the Index of forbidden books, and now, some of our states are doing the same prohibiting books which tell the true story of our race and class relations.
Completely agree on both points. And their bioweapons research probably did already come back to bite us. Even the FBI says covid appears to have been a lab leak. We know that there was US government funding going to the Wuhan lab.
Thank you Mr. Hedges.
When the deep state censors reporters and censors "the public" from information the deep state does not what "the public" to hear then our democracy is not.
Why is it common to call the current criminal monstrosity of US uniparty and recent Dem administrations -- “leftist” ??
I consider myself a leftist and what all of us jointly criticize has nothing “left” but a lot of fascist...
One of the likely reasons is that US conservatives have been brainwashed over decades that anything bad is / must be -- “evil and godless Communism.”
Hence a general blindness toward recognition that recent Dem administrations have been and are fully fascist.
The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.
Care to guess who said that?