Our Worst Fears About Twitter Were True

The whole thing seems absolutely incredible.

Not that we didn’t suspect it. But it’s even worse than we could’ve imagined. The FBI/CIA/DHS and other existing and former agents at Twitter had their own messaging channel at the company. They were continually leaning on management to throttle and block accounts. They weren’t shy about it.

They even gave Twitter management top-level government security clearances. Then, the FBI paid $3.5 million for staff time at Twitter. This means that the national security bureaucracy—the spies who hate us—had a hand-in-glove relationship with Twitter and, very likely, all social media.

This really happened in the United States. It’s still happening.

Reading through all the evidence released since Elon Musk’s takeover of the company is an eye-popping experience. It’s not just what was going on. It’s how they didn’t bother hiding it within the company. More than that, the management actually seemed to relish the status they enjoyed by being in constant touch with government about what speech to allow and what to forbid.

Did it ever occur to anyone involved in all this that this collusion might run afoul of the First Amendment? The short answer is no. It wasn’t even a thing. It’s as if everyone involved just thought it was completely normal. The Constitution just didn’t matter.

How did we arrive at this place in American history in which the Constitution no longer has any real standing in elite circles? Isn’t this the law of the land? It’s supposed to be. But in practice, how much does it really matter? Not that much.

All of this is being tested in court right now, and the courts will likely rule against the government. How could they not at this point? Still, that’s very little solace for what we’ve been through for at least three years and probably longer.

The platforms we believed were set up by the private sector for us to have more contact with each other and give new life to the idea of free speech have been effectively nationalized.

Even if the courts say this is illegal, precisely what is to prevent it from happening again? More lawsuits? Where’s the enforcement arm to stop this and forbid it in the future? Who or what is going to pay the price for what already happened?

Here we really get to the problem of government itself. No one has ever really come up with an infallible way to stop it from doing egregious things to the population. The idea of monarchy was to institutionalize tradition and extend the period of responsibility over generations so that a family would feel a sense of pride and refrain from pillaging. That worked until it didn’t. Democracy seemed like a good plan: Put the people in charge. But then the politicians approved permanent bureaucracies that live outside the democratic process. The Constitution is a beautiful piece of parchment but what happens when the administrative state ignores it?

Then you have the check of the courts. But there’s a problem there too. They’re slow. They’re expensive. And judges don’t control the military. It’s not clear what they control in society except perhaps its weakest elements. If you’re rich and powerful enough, you can control the courts too.

This is why so many people throughout history have been drawn to the idea of anarchism. Just get rid of government entirely. Maybe that sounds like a decent idea but how to get from here to there? Revolution is too costly and mostly ends terribly with very few exceptions.

In the end, the only real restraint on government comes down to public opinion. But for the public to value freedom requires education and some degree of sobriety and health. When a population becomes corrupt, tyranny becomes much easier to enact and almost impossible to stop.

Is that where we are today? Sometimes, it seems that way, but I actually doubt it. There’s enough intelligence and fortitude remaining in the population to resist and cause the tyrants among us to back off. It won’t be easy but the critical job here is having access to the right information. An informed public is far less easy to control.

And herein is why government places such a high priority on censorship. I admit that I didn’t know that censorship was such a danger in the United States. I was raised in a different time. The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) controlled television and radio but generally endorsed the First Amendment. It has thus far had no control over online content.

“The limitations on the FCC’s power to restrict or ban speech begin with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which decrees that the federal government ‘shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.’ Accordingly, Congress through Section 326 of the Communications Act, 47 U.S.C. § 326, explicitly declared that nothing in the statute ‘shall be understood or construed to give the Commission the power of censorship over the [broadcast] communications or signals transmitted by any [broadcast] station, and no regulation or condition shall be promulgated or fixed by the Commission which shall interfere with the right of free speech by means of [over-the-air] broadcast communication.’”

That kind of restriction was the old days. These are the new days. Something about the Trump administration kicked up a wild frenzy on the part of the national security apparatus that led it to believe that there should be no limits. The virus hysteria made it worse: The rumor was that it was a bioweapon and therefore all limits on government had to be repealed as the whole country went on a wartime footing. Ever since then, our rights have been severely limited and still are to this day.

It’s going to require massive work to claw back our rights and freedoms. If you’re unaware that an emergency exists right now, you haven’t been reading the right stuff. The truth is that we’re veering closer and closer to a Chinese-style social credit system. The pushback has barely begun. They already wrecked the internet. The next thing is to wreck the banking and money system. The process is underway.

The release of the Twitter Files—hardly covered at all by the mainstream press—should sound the alarm. Anyone who thinks this is normal isn’t paying attention. Even now, I’m grateful that I can write these words for this great news source (The Epoch Times). We’re going to have to fight for the right to read such words in the future.