RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19211/elon-musk-twitter-files

It was not “Russian disinformation.” Nor was it “unsafe.” The executives running Twitter in the 20 days before the 2020 presidential election clearly knew that, and tried to find other justifications for what amounted to raw censorship.

Twitter’s bias in censoring or banning conservative accounts for “hate speech” while happily servicing accounts for Iran’s “Supreme Leader” and the Taliban is a running joke. In a series of secretly recorded interviews with Twitter employees, Project Veritas had already confirmed that “shadow-banning,” manipulating the number of followers shown by certain accounts, and selectively “de-boosting” certain tweets in its algorithms was a well-established, standard manipulation of the platform’s stated purpose: “We serve the public conversation. That’s why it matters to us that people have a free and safe space to talk.”

Kudos to Khanna for his lonely but principled stand for free speech. Taibbi also noted in his thread that Khanna was the only Democratic official to do so.

China’s enticements to the Biden family are but one example of this campaign. We learned through this research how insidious and effective the Chinese government has been at co-opting not just the families of senior elected officials, but captains of industry, financial behemoths, and the wealthiest American philanthropists and educational institutions.

The Biden story also showed the ingenuity of corrupt politicians who essentially “outsource” their corruption to family members rather than risk a possible paper trail leading back to themselves. The Bidens, even more than Bill and Hillary Clinton before them, were a family influence business.

We have all learned about other stories of political interference and foot-dragging within the FBI. The public is right to wonder whether federal prosecutors are as serious about pursuing this case as Twitter’s Democratic partisans were in squelching it.

Further, President Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, continues to task the FBI with investigating the January 6, 2021 riots as a deep conspiracy, while simultaneously ignoring what certainly appear to have been well-organized efforts by Antifa to foment violence during the 2020 George Floyd riots, and violence done by pro-abortion organizations after someone on Twitter publicized the home addresses of Supreme Court justices.

For more than two critical weeks, under secret pressure from the Biden campaign and Democrats who were desperate to bury a devastating story that implicated their presidential candidate in his son’s corruption by Chinese intelligence-connected businessmen. The Post’s story was factually accurate, legitimately reported, and was (belatedly) authenticated by other news outlets. In short, there was no reason to do what Twitter, Roth, and Gadde did, other than pleasing a political party with whom they agreed.

Elon Musk’s release of internal Twitter correspondence around the censoring of the New York Post’s blockbuster “Hunter Biden laptop” story merely confirms what most knew already — that Twitter under Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal was staffed with Democratic Party partisans who censored information they thought would damage their cause.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/13/whos-more-un-american-oil-companies-or-joe-biden/

When Biden administration officials aren’t promising to put them out of business, they’re calling oil companies “un-American” for not drilling more. They should look in a mirror.

Amos Hochstein, Joe Biden’s “senior adviser for energy security” at the State Department, complained to the Financial Times last week that oil companies were using profits to buy back stock rather than invest in oil production.

“It is not only un-American, it is so unfair to the American public,” he said. “You want to pay dividends, pay dividends. You want to pay shareholders, pay shareholders. You want to get bonuses, do that, too. You could do all of that and still invest more. We are asking you to increase production and seize the moment.”

This is the same guy, by the way, who just a few months ago said that oil output must be limited in order to “make sure that we’re in a better footing to accelerate the transition” away from fossil fuels.  

In any event, by Hochstein’s standard, Biden is the most un-American president in history, because his policies are behind both the industry’s increased profit margins and its decision to spend that money on stock buybacks rather than increase production.

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.