RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/so_michelle_obama_was_behind_twitters_ban_of_trump_all_along.html

Michelle Obama, wife of President Obama, was one of the Democrat outsiders who pressed Twitter to make the unprecedented move to ban President Trump, then a sitting United States president, from that company’s platform.

That’s the latest revelation from the latest installment of the Twitter files, done by independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.

According to Fox News:

Former President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter the day after former first lady Michelle Obama and others demanded the company “permanently” remove him, according to the newest “Twitter Files” installment.

On Saturday, CEO Elon Musk and journalist Michael Shellenberger released the fourth batch of Twitter documents that show internal communications by the company’s executives between Jan. 6-8, 2021, including and shortly after the riot at the Capitol Building.

Among the files, Shellenberger reported “internal and external pressure,” including from the former first lady, fell onto the company calling for Trump to be banned from using Twitter.

“Now is the time for Silicon Valley companies to stop enabling this monstrous behavior—and go even further than they have already by permanently banning this man from their platforms and putting in place policies to prevent their technologies from being used by the nation’s leaders to fuel insurrection,” Obama wrote in a lengthy statement posted to Twitter on Jan. 7.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/11/our-parasitic-generation/

“Be assured young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
— Adam Smith

Are we sure that there is all that much ruin left in the United States?

We are $31 trillion in collective debt. The new normal is $1.5 trillion budget deficits. The military is politicized and short of recruits. We trade lethal terrorists for woke celebrity athletes as if to confirm our enemies’ cynical stereotypes. 

Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, collaborating with Silicon Valley contractors to suppress free speech and warp elections. We practice segregation and racial discrimination and claim we do not because the right and good people support it and, anyway, the victims deserve it. The country has seen defeat before but never abject, deliberate humiliation as in Kabul, when we fled and abandoned to the terrorist Taliban a $1 billion embassy, a huge, remodeled air base, thousands of friends, and tens of billions of dollars in military hardware—and hard-earned deterrence.

We are witnessing the breakdown of basic norms essential for civilized life, from affordable food and fuel to available key antibiotics and baby formula. Old Cairo seems safer than an after-hours subway ride or stroll at dusk in many major American cities. Medieval London’s roadways were likely cleaner than Market Street in San Francisco. Speech was freer in 1920s America than it is now.

The Breakdown of Basic Society

Our California always is a preamble to America’s future. Our present is likely your tomorrow. 

Each summer here we impotently expect forest conflagrations. Millions of acres of flames pour more millions of tons of smoke and carbon and soot in the skies. Tens of millions of hated combustion engines cannot begin to match the natural blankets of aerial dirt. 

The state seems to shrug it off, saying wildfires are both inevitable and natural. Old-fashioned forest management and fire-fighting strategies, honed over centuries, are deemed obsolete by our green experts. So, we let fiery nature take its better course. What is the implicit message to those in the way of fires that devour homes and trees? Nature’s way? Natural wood mulch? Or that such fools should not build their cabins or homes where they are not wanted?

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/10/wheres-the-outrage/

Bob Dole ran a pretty poor campaign against Bill Clinton in 1996. It was no surprise, then, that he lost. But let history acknowledge the former U.S. senator from Kansas asked the very best question in the entire election cycle. “Where’s the outrage?” he thundered at a GOP event at the end of October 1996. Back then, the chief issue was the Clinton Administration’s use and abuse of 900 FBI files on their political opponents. Imagine! An American president using the FBI as his secret police! Have you ever heard of anything so outrageous? In America, amidst Our Democracy™? 

Then as now, however, the answer to Dole’s question is simple: Nowhere. There was, there is, no outrage. Then, as now, there are little flutters of enthusiast unhappiness among the rest of the faithful who greet news of outrageous behavior with applause and expressions of solidarity. “You go, champ!” they seem to say, before relapsing into a blinking, weakly smiling repose. (This is the cue for people like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney to adjust their hairdos and stride boldly on stage.) 

But the media writ large? Then, as now, it’s crickets as far as the eye can see. 

The biggest story of the day revolves around Elon Musk’s decision to open the window and reveal Twitter’s active role in stage managing the 2020 election on behalf of Joe Biden and very much to the detriment of Donald Trump. Over the past week, extensive Twitter threads posted by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and others have revealed that the company was essentially part of a coordinated Democratic oppo-research and suppression operation and, moreover, one that was actively collaborating—or, to use the preferred term, “colluding”—with the FBI to destroy Donald Trump and assure Joe Biden’s election.

Obviously, this is front-page news in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major newspapers as well as top-of-the-hour reporting every night on the mirror-mirror-on-the-wall talk shows that many Americans turn to so they do not have to face reality. 

Just kidding—about the prominence of the story, I mean, not the habit of Americans turning to their digital fentanyl to avoid the truth. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/twitter-files-the-real-news-is-that-the-left-dems-media-do-not-care/

“And what a difference the laptop story suppression made. A survey by The Polling Company found that 17% of Biden voters in seven swing states would not have voted for President Joe Biden had they known about the story. This is nothing short of the biggest election interference in U.S. history.”

New Twitter owner Elon Musk gave reporter Matt Taibbi of Substack access to internal Twitter documents about the media platform’s decision to spike the Hunter Biden laptop story and about how “the Biden team” had a direct pipeline to Twitter executives.

Taibbi tweeted:

“By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.’ …

“Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party … Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However … this system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left than the right.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/maxine-waters-blew-sam-bankman-fried-a-kiss/

Sam Bankman-Fried, according to Victor Davis Hanson, “may have robbed perhaps a million investors, and along with them hundreds of large institutional investors.” He “protected from federal securities regulators, had drained off, lost, hidden, or spent billions of dollars of other people’s money.” Now his dear friend Maxine Waters (D-Incitement), who was caught on video blowing him a kiss in December 2021, will be leading an investigation into his sleazy FTX Ponzi scheme as Chair of the House Financial Services Committee. Waters initially stepped on a rake when she said that she wouldn’t be subpoenaing her pal Sam, but the winsome congresswoman backtracked after a firestorm and insisted that it was a “lie” that she didn’t plan to subpoena him. So will she actually do so? That remains unclear.

CNBC reported Wednesday that Waters “told the panel’s Democrats she doesn’t plan to subpoena former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to testify at a Dec. 13 hearing about the crypto exchange’s rapid demise, according to people with direct knowledge of the conversation.” She “informed committee members of her decision at a private meeting Tuesday with Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler on Capitol Hill, these people said, declining to be named in order to speak freely about the private discussion.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/musk_has_some_new_faucibased_pronouns_that_you_are_going_to_love.html

Elon Musk has dropped another major revelation, this time about Anthony Fauci, the shriveled, malevolent bureaucrat who is responsible for profoundly damaging the American economy, destroying Americans’ health, and putting Biden in the White House. However, if the response from the left to this latest news continues to be the same response with which it greeted earlier Twitter revelations, we may finally have the answer to that old philosophical question: If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound?

To date, the Twitter documents have revealed that Twitter was working arm-in-arm with the Biden campaign, the Democrat party, and federal law enforcement to silence conservatives, including the President of the United States, to amplify Democrats, and to stifle any factual reporting that would reflect badly on Biden. The government bureaucrats, by colluding with Twitter to silence political speech, were violating the First Amendment. Meanwhile, Twitter was committing a fraud on the public (and its advertisers) by using covert means and lies (including lies to Congress) to hide its conduct perverting free speech in America.

What’s become clear is that Musk, taking a page out of Andrew Breitbart’s and James O’Keefe’s book, is steadily escalating the nature of the revelations. This is a technique that sees a promised expose start out kind of boring so that leftists can say, “That’s not news,” or “You already knew that,” or “Who cares?” However, as the story ever so slowly gains traction, the conservative outlet begins to produce more serious material highlighting gross misconduct.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/elon-musk-is-right/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

His vision for Twitter largely reflects the proper instincts about free speech and transparency.

A more transparent Twitter will be a better Twitter.

Forget, for a moment, the arguments over the First Amendment and Section 230, and look at the matter from the perspective of the consumer. Twitter is a business, and I am a customer, and from the perspective of a customer, I naturally prefer clarity to murkiness. As a daily user of the product, I gain nothing from opacity, or from complexity, or from caprice, because they all make the service worse for me. If I follow someone, I want to see their tweets. If I search for someone, I want to find their account. If a given topic or person or claim is trending, I want to know about it without its being filtered through the personal predilections of other people. Because Twitter is a platform on which people write, I want the staff who work there to be instinctively supportive of free expression, skeptical of government pressure, and loathe to tip the scales in either direction. And if, for whatever reason, some superintendence of my conversations is deemed necessary, I want to know about it without euphemisms.

If my account has been suppressed wholesale, I want to be told that. If my tweet is too offensive to be shared widely, I want to be informed of it. If I am no longer permitted to use the platform — whether temporarily or permanently — I want to be apprised of which rules I have broken and why. I have no legal or constitutional right to any of these provisions, nor would I claim one. Twitter is a private company, and I would like to keep it that way. But to accept that I cannot recruit the state to my side is not to shed all my opinions, and, as a user, I have a whole bunch of opinions to share.