Livestream Tonight, 7:30 ET: Nevada Caucus Watch Party

Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi watch the results come in, with one host at the Las Vegas watch party of Donald Trump. Touching down in Las Vegas… Taking care of business first, Walter Kirn and I will be appearing on a livestream tonight at 7:30 ET. For Rumble: Click here For YouTube: Click here It wasn’t reported on Racket because your fearless author has been bogged down on a longer story, but this past Tuesday saw one of the most unusual occurrences you’ll see in presidential politics. I recall once witnessing a victory of “None of the above” in a Russian election — it might be a drug flashback, and being on a place it’s not easy to check — but I don’t remember anything like Nikki Haley losing 63-30 to “None of these candidates” in the non-binding, non-delegate-conferring primary Tuesday. I’d bet good money this will turn out to be at worst the 150th-most odd episode of the 2024 presidential season, but for right now, hoo boy. The caucus that counts is tonight and I’ll be at the Trump watch party, which I chose not for any particular reason, but because I’m pretty sure it’s the only electoral game in town tonight. America! Weirder every day… You’re on the free list for Racket News. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. © 2024 Matt Taibbi 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Trump's Ballot Access Case On Trial As the Supreme Court reviews Colorado's decision to remove Donald Trump from the ballot, press delusions multiply

Reading news on a flight to Las Vegas for tonight’s caucus… The CNN headline: “Supreme Court faces its greatest test yet from Trump.” Oral arguments are being heard in the high court today in Donald Trump’s ballot access case, about which CNN commentator Stephen Collinson seems to have no opinion, apart from being sure Trump’s response to its adjudication will be sociopathic and end human civilization as we know it:...

UK Files” Exclusive, Part 2: The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) Told the IRS It Was A Charity. Documen…

“UK Files” Exclusive, Part 2: The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) Told the IRS It Was A Charity. Documents Say Otherwise The influential UK-based “anti-disinformation” group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, told American tax authorities it was a registered charity. Were they telling the truth? PAUL HOLDEN Explosive documents from the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) show that one of the world’s most powerful “anti-disinformation” groups, the Center for Countering Digital Hate Inc. (“CCDH Inc.”), provided incorrect information to the IRS in its application to receive tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status. The status allows donors to CCDH to treat donations as a write-off and indicates that US authorities have determined the organization is involved in non-profit activities in the public interest. This has never been reported before, and the news should force CCDH to answer tough questions, especially since the group is in the business of accusing others of malfeasance. Now target of litigation filed by X that accuses it of publishing “bogus” research and scaring advertisers off of its platform due to a zeal for censoring political speech with which it disagrees, the CCDH has become one of the most feared operators in the media space, pressuring companies like Google to demonetize or remove sites like ZeroHedge and The Federalist. In Britain, the leading figures in the CCDH are perhaps best known for a relentless campaign to tie former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to accusations of antisemitism, while worldwide the group gained renown during the pandemic for efforts to remove the so-called “Disinformation Dozen” from Internet platforms, a group that included Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In reality, the CCDH was and is a pioneering effort in a new form of “non-governmental” pressure group that hides its ties to major-party politics as it pushes for the removal of “hate” speech, often the critics of mainstream politicians. CCDH Inc.’s IRS misstatements form part of a larger narrative of obscurantism and regulatory mix-ups on the part of a group whose origins are intertwined with Britain’s Labour Party...

Note to Readers: "The Fix is In" Underscoring a point made on last week's livestream.

Last week on this site, I published, “Is the Electoral Fix Already In?” and held a livestream on the subject that same night. I wanted to make sure I clarified something mentioned on the livestream. I asked former Department of Defense official and current Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks if she was involved with the “loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers” reported on by NBC News in its January 14th article, “Fears grow that Trump will use the military in ‘dictatorial ways’ if he returns to the White House.” Brooks was the co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project profiled in the article, a “loose” group that got a lot of press in the summer of 2020. One of the only people mentioned by name by NBC as a participant in the new group is Mary McCord, former acting head of the National Security Division at the Justice Department and also a Georgetown academic, serving as director of the Institution for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law. Brooks not only said she was not part of the group reported on by NBC (“Nope”), but added, “I am not sure there even is a ‘group,’ as such — just various people and organizations that occasionally coordinate or at least touch base, but often don’t do either.” Having mentioned it on the air, I thought I should put that answer in print. Thanks. Stay tuned for a story on different subject, momentarily. You’re on the free list for Racket News. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. Upgrade to paid Share SHARE LIKE COMMENT RESTACK © 2024 Matt Taibbi 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

The Anti-Democratic Movement Targeted Ralph Nader First.

We Should Have Paid More Attention The recent ballot access challenges, political investigations, and canceled primaries are just an extension of a phenomenon we should have seen coming twenty years ago In the summer of 2004 Theresa Amato, campaign manager of presidential candidate Ralph Nader, took out a notebook in preparation for an important phone conference. Her candidate, Nader, had already been subject to an extraordinary — and extraordinarily underreported — campaign of litigious harassment at the hands of the Democratic Party. John Kerry told Nader he had 2,000 lawyers at his disposal and would do “everything within the law” to win. In Arizona, Nader opponents filed a 650-page challenge to his attempt to get on the ballot, forgetting social justice concerns long enough to complain that one of Nader’s petition-circulators was a felon. They demanded ten samples of Nader’s own signature, hired a forensic examiner to call others into question, and challenged residents of a homeless shelter. The Democratic state chairman, Jim Pederson, said outright, “Our first objective is to keep [Nader] off the ballot,” because “we think it distorts the entire election.” Now, Amato’s candidate was set to talk with Democratic National Committee chairman (and future Virginia governor) Terry McAuliffe. A high-energy, Clintonesque schmoozer in public, McAuliffe in private was curt and to the point: he didn’t mind Nader running in noncompetitive places, but had an “issue” with 19 states where “a vote for you is a vote for [George] Bush.” He shifted with impressive nonchalance to offer a bribe. “If you stay out of my 19 states,” he said, “I will help with resources in 31 states.” McAuliffe then made a show of pretending to ask an assistant about other ballot challenges against Nader, saying he “supported them” but wasn’t funding them, a statement ultimately contradicted in court testimony by Maine’s State Democratic Party chair. This was just one of countless instances in which Democrats hurled billable hours at anyone deemed a “threat” to votes they considered theirs. In 2004, a third party needed to collect 634,727 valid signatures in about six and a half months to get on the ballot. If you’ve ever wondered why so few third-party candidates run, it’s because this is an extraordinarily difficult logistical task, and expensive, requiring services of companies that even then charged between $1.00 and $1.50 per signature. (Ross Perot reportedly spent $18 million to get on the ballot in 1992.) The process gets more cumbersome when you’re forced to account for “spoilage,” i.e. how many signatures you’ll lose in the face of challenges from a determined opponent, in Nader’s case from Democrats and affiliated groups. Nader lost signatures that were allegedly signed in the wrong county (an irony given recent events, as we’ll see), due to “unwritten rules” that a collector’s signature must be legible even if his or her name is printed underneath it, because signatories no longer lived at the addresses where they were registered, because signatures were printed instead of signed, because additional information like the date was included next to signatures, and so on, and so on, and so on. “We had more than two dozen lawsuits complaints filed against us in a massive effort to disenfranchise the people who wanted to see him on the ballot,” Amato says now. Amato later wrote a book, Grand Illusion, documenting the Democrats’ plan to keep Nader’s meager resources “tied up mentally, emotionally, and financially in courtroom after courtroom,” violating rules themselves while using the press to smear Nader as the cheat. “I wrote a whole book precisely because I didn’t want the history to be lost, of what the Nader campaigns went through,” she says now. A subtext of Grand Illusion is how Democrats showed great creativity when seeking ways to keep Nader off the ballot, but almost none when it came to examining possible reasons it might be underperforming. Kerry in 2004 was fatally flawed because he had no position on this central issue of the campaign, the Iraq war. He tried simultaneously to be against it (“Invading Iraq has created a crisis of historic proportions”) and for it (pledging to “hunt down and kill the terrorists”), while running all year from the fact that he voted for Bush’s war resolution. This complex non-position not only created a clear rationale for a third-party run in a year when support for the war dropped as low as 45%, it was a major factor in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 general election loss, when Donald Trump won 57% of military households vs Clinton’s 39%. Had the party shown a fraction of the backbone on the Iraq issue during the crucial October 2002 vote that it showed in bollocking Nader all through the 2004 cycle, it’s possible Trump never would have been president. Twenty years and multiple political upheavals later, the Democrats are taking the sabotage game it played in 2004 up a notch or ten. It’s taken the position that all of Joe Biden’s potential challengers within the party and without are, in effect, new Naders, whose presences are “distorting” the real election. The major difference between 2004 and now is that thanks to major changes in both the Democratic and Republican parties, current Democrats have the money and institutional capacity to attempt a legal campaign to “Naderize” even the likely GOP nominee, Trump, essentially seeking to ballot-block their way to victory. Democrats first disenfranchised internal party challengers like Marianne Williamson, Dean Phillips, and (initially) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. through tactics like declaring the New Hampshire primary “non-compliant” and “meaningless” and canceling the Florida primary. Then, when Dr. Cornel West, Kennedy, and a new party called “No Labels” decided to seek third-party ballot access, money from LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman, former “Right-wing hit man” turned Clintonian organizational assassin David Brock, and a group fronted by former presidential candidate Dick Gephardt was quickly deployed, leading to a meeting of Biden advocacy groups in which one of the participants warned potential third party entrants, “If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it… We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find.” Lieberman on January 16th sent a separate letter to his former Senate colleague Biden, saying, “I respectfully ask you to help put an end to this shameful attempt to silence voters and prevent choice and competition in the upcoming election.” Obviously, this fell on deaf ears. Two days later word came out that American Bridge hired former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias to help “thwart” third-party bids. In essence, Democrats first prevented politicians or interest groups from attempting to influence their platform by running in primaries, then used scorched-earth tactics to head off potential third-party runs, leaving only the Republicans an alternative —except of course they’re using Death Star tactics to try to disqualify that party’s candidate, too. Amato’s Grand Illusion described the evolving hypocrisy, cynicism, and ruthlessness of the Democratic Party a dozen years before Trump. It’s a story to which we should have paid more attention, because the Sun Tzu tactics unveiled against Ralph Nader are now clearly the strategic model for the whole party. Had the Republicans not suffered a major intramural collapse in 2016, Grand Illusion today might read like a cautionary tale about the anti-democratic tendencies baked into the two-party system. The Republicans, after all, have their own history of ballot-pruning tactics, for example working behind the scenes to suppress the candidacy of Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2012. But since Trump steamrolled the GOP clown car in 2016, establishment politics has increasingly consolidated under the umbrella of the one party that (just barely) succeeded in fighting off its populist challenger, the Democrats. The return to the Democratic tent of once-hated neocons like Bill Kristol (who was reportedly in attendance at the anti-No Labels meeting described by Semafor) has helped revamp the blue-party institutional space into something like a permanent Washington-against-the-world war council, fueled by an aristocratic contempt whose intensity is almost beyond comprehension. These people reordered the geography of the world, blithely moved whole manufacturing sectors from one continent to another, started moronic wars that pointlessly killed millions and created millions more refugees, bailed out corrupt banks while whole regions went into foreclosure, and failed to accomplish much but a growing sense of foreboding and decline despite decades of promises to the contrary. Still, they feel sincere rage at the idea that they should have to earn votes. The special anger Nader inspired came from his refusal to just “send a message,” saying things like “Isn’t that what candidates try to do to one another—take votes?” when Democrats suggested he stop “taking” votes from Al Gore or John Kerry, and run in “safe” states only. Again, never mind that they could have altered their own fortunes easily by prioritizing voters over donors just a little more. In their minds, this was not Nader’s call to make. In the minds of early 2000s Democrats, voters never elected Republicans. Ralph Nader did. Headlines like “Ralph Nader Was Indispensable To The Republican Party” (HuffingtonPost) and “Ralph Nader Still Refuses to Admit He Elected Bush” (the indispensable Jon Chait of New York, who recently insisted Joe Biden’s 2020 election inspired the “greatest outpouring of joy since V-J day”) still trickle out, as reminders that such grudges are never forgotten. The hyper-combative, winning-is-everything mindset of the new “lawfare” era was probably born in that 2000 loss, a “direct outcome of the 2000 Nader campaign,” as Amato puts it. This is true even though, as Amato notes, there were eight minor candidates on the 2000 Florida ballot, and all eight got more than the infamous “margin of difference” of 537 votes. In the age of Nader, the rage was directed at anyone who suggested the Democrats should have to face competition from more than one direction. The updated idea in the Trump era is that they should not have to face competition at all. Back in 2016, when I disliked Trump enough to write Insane Clown President, I was still naive enough to puzzled by the stream of headlines describing his win as a “failure of democracy.” It was anything but. The presidency had long been stage-managed to absurdity, with candidates needing the backing of one of the two parties, the press, and corporate donors to gain the White House. The whole idea of this oligarchical ADT system was to guarantee the president arrived in the Oval Office a political debtor, while keeping anyone with aspirations to independence out. This was the clear lesson of the Nader episode. Trump broke through all these barriers as an unapproved “fringe” candidate, making his win an extraordinary blow for democracy, or so I thought, even though I couldn’t stand him. If he could win, anyone could, and this was good news for those of us who thought the system’s corrupt features might never be fixed. Looking back, it’s clear Trump’s unsanctioned run and win were the violations of “norms” Washington insiders were most furious about. Now, when politicians talk about protecting “democracy,” what they really mean is restoring those old barriers of entry. The problem is, voters are wise to the game now, forcing insiders to resort to ever-cruder mechanisms of control, like the ten million criminal indictments and the recent ballot disqualification attempts. If those efforts fail, even more extreme action is surely coming, and “protecting democracy” is the pitch they’ll use to sell it. All of this is will be justifed based on the idea that the Trump threat is so grave that taking so much as one vote from Democrats is criminal irresponsibility, not really morally different from marching for Hitler. Everything is permitted in the fight against Hitler, which is why the aforementioned Hoffman is the quintessential modern Democratic backer: loaded, thin-skinned, and eager to color outside lines. Vox in 2020 profiled him: Myopically focused on collecting the 270 electoral votes needed to defeat Trump… to win those votes, critics feel, Hoffman is willing to play dirty. Hoffman’s defenders see this agitation as worth it — and if Democrats win, it could validate a more provocative form of political combat. Of course no one goes into politics to lose, but if you don’t believe in letting voters decide, and winning becomes about something other than making the best argument or boasting the best record, you got lost somewhere along the line. We cheat when we think we deserve to win, no matter what, and our leaders have spent decades now talking themselves into this frame of mind. The entitlement disease was there all along. We should have seen the chaos of this year coming. Racket News. © 2024 Matt Taibbi 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Is the Electoral Fix Already In?

The 2024 presidential race increasingly looks like it will be decided by lawyers, not voters, as Democrats unveil plans for America's first lawfare election The fix is in. To “protect democracy,” democracy is already being canceled. We just haven’t admitted the implications of this to ourselves yet. On Sunday, January 14th, NBC News ran an eye-catching story: “Fears grow that Trump will use the military in ‘dictatorial ways’ if he returns to the White House.” It described “a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers” that is “quietly” making plans to “foil any efforts to expand presidential power” on the part of Donald Trump. The piece quoted an array of former high-ranking officials, all insisting Trump will misuse the Department of Defense to execute civilian political aims. Since Joe Biden’s team “leaked” a strategy memo in late December listing “Trump is an existential threat to democracy” as Campaign 2024’s central talking point, surrogates have worked overtime to insert existential or democracy in quotes. This was no different: “We’re about 30 seconds away from the Armageddon clock when it comes to democracy,” said Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, adding that Trump is “a clear and present danger to our democracy.” Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, one of the advocacy groups organizing the “loose” coalition, said, “We believe this is an existential moment for American democracy.” Declared former CIA and defense chief Leon Panetta: “Like any good dictator, he’s going to try to use the military to basically perform his will.” Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice and current visiting Georgetown law professor Mary McCord was one of the few coalition participants quoted by name. She said: We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to. The group was formed by at least two organizations that have been hyperactive in filing lawsuits against Trump and Trump-related figures over the years: the aforementioned Democracy Forward, chaired by former Perkins Coie and Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias, and Protect Democracy, a ubiquitous non-profit run by a phalanx of former Obama administration lawyers like Ian Bassin, and funded at least in part by LinkedIn magnate Reid Hoffman. The article implied a future Trump presidency will necessitate new forms of external control over the military. It cited Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal’s bill to “clarify” the Insurrection Act, a 1792 law that empowers the president to deploy the military to quell domestic rebellion. Blumenthal’s act would add a requirement that Congress or courts ratify presidential decisions to deploy the military at home, seeking essentially to attach a congressional breathalyzer to the presidential steering wheel. NBC’s quotes from former high-ranking defense and intelligence officials about possible preemptive mutiny were interesting on their own. However, the really striking twist was that we’d read the story before. Summer, 2020. The TIP media blitz. For over a year, the Biden administration and its surrogates have dropped hint after hint that the plan for winning in 2024 — against Donald Trump or anyone else — might involve something other than voting. Lawsuits in multiple states have been filed to remove Trump from the ballot; primaries have been canceled or invalidated; an ominous Washington Post editorial by Robert Kagan, husband to senior State official Victoria Nuland, read like an APB to assassins to head off an “inevitable” Trump dictatorship; and on January 11th of this year, leaders of a third party group called “No Labels” sent an amazing letter to the Department of Justice, complaining of a “conspiracy” to stop alternative votes. Authored by former NAACP director Ben Chavis, former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, former North Carolina Governor Dennis Blair, and former Assistant U.S. Attorney and Iran-Contra Special Counsel Dan Webb, the No Labels letter described a meeting of multiple advocacy groups aligned with the Democratic party. In the 80-minute confab, audio of which was obtained by Semafor, a dire warning was issued to anyone considering a third-party run: Through every channel we have, to their donors, their friends, the press, everyone — everyone — should send the message: If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it… If you think you were vetted when you ran for governor, you’re insane. That was nothing. We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find. We did not do that with Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, we should have, and we will not make that mistake again. The Semafor piece offered a rare glimpse into the Zoom-politics culture that’s dominated Washington since the arrival of Covid-19. If this is how Beltway insiders talk about how to keep Joe Lieberman or Ben Chavis out of politics, imagine what they say about Trump? We don’t have to imagine. Three and a half years ago, in June and July of 2020, an almost exactly similar series of features to the recent NBC story began appearing in media, describing another “loose network” of “bipartisan officials,” also meeting “quietly” to war-game scenarios in case “Trump loses and insists he won,” as the Washington Post put it. That group, which called itself the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), involved roughly 100 former officials, think-tankers, and journalists who gathered to “wargame” contested election scenarios. The “loose” network included big names like former Michigan governor and current Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, and former Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, who in his current role as special advisor to President Joe Biden overseeing the handout of roughly $370 billion in “clean energy” investments is one of the most powerful people in Washington. The TIP was hyped like the rollout of a blockbuster horror flick: In a second Trump Term, No One Will Hear You Scream… Stories in NPR, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and over a dozen other major outlets outlined apocalyptic predictions about Trump’s unwillingness to leave office, and how this would likely result in mass unrest, even bloodshed. A typical quote was from TIP co-founder, Georgetown law professor, and former Pentagon official Rosa Brooks, who told the Boston Globe that every one of the group’s simulations ended in chaos and violence, because “the law is... almost helpless against a president who’s willing to ignore it.” Podesta played Joe Biden in one TIP simulation, and in one round refused to accede to a “clear Trump win,” threatening instead to seize a bloc of West Coast states including California (absurdly dubbed “Cascadia”) and secede. Podesta’s “frankly ridiculous move,” as one TIP participant described it, was so over the top that a player leaked it to media writer Ben Smith of the New York Times. The latter in Timesian fashion stuck the seeming front-page tale near the bottom of an otherwise breezy August 2nd story titled, called “How The Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong”: A group of former top government officials called the Transition Integrity Project actually gamed four possible scenarios, including one that doesn’t look that different from 2016: a big popular win for Mr. Biden, and a narrow electoral defeat… They cast John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in the role of Mr. Biden. They expected him, when the votes came in, to concede... But Mr. Podesta… shocked the organizers… he persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College. In that scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr. Trump took office… News that Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chief rejected a legal election result, even in a hypothetical simulation, was obvious catnip to conservative media, which took about ten minutes to repackage Smith’s story using the same alarmist headline format marking earlier TIP write-ups. Breitbart published “Democrats’ ‘War Game’ for Election Includes West Coast Secession, Possible Civil War,” and a cascade of further red-state freakouts seemed inevitable. “At that point,” says Nils Gilman, COO and EVP of Programs at the Berggruen Institute think tank, who served alongside Brooks as TIP’s other co-founder, “we decided we needed to be out about having run this exercise, to prevent the allegation that this was a ‘shadowy cabal’ — not that that narrative didn’t take hold anyways.” The final TIP report was released the next day, August 3rd, 2020. Titled “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,” the full text was, as any person attempting an objective read will grasp, sensational. The Podesta episode was worse than reported, with the secession proposal coming on “advice from President Obama,” used as leverage to a) secure statehood for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico b) divide California into five states to increase its Senate representation, and c) “eliminate the Electoral College,” among other things. TIP authors also warned Trump’s behavior could “push other actors, including, potentially, some in the Democratic Party, to similarly engage in practices that depart from traditional rule of law norms, out of perceived self-defense.” More tellingly, there were multiple passages on the subject of abiding by and/or trusting in the law, and how this can be a weakness. TIP authors concluded that “as an incumbent unbounded by norms, President Trump has a huge advantage” in the upcoming election, and chided participants that “planners need to take seriously the notion that this may well be a street fight, not a legal battle.” They added the key observation that “a reliance on elites observing norms are [sic] not the answer here.” Asked about that passage, Gilman replied that it was “the right question,” i.e. “Why can’t we just rely on elites to observe/enforce norms?” Noting that two-thirds of the GOP caucus voted not to certify the 2020 election, he went on: “If I had had total confidence in the solidity of the institutions, I wouldn’t have felt the need to run the exercises.” This answer makes some sense in the abstract, but ignores the years-long campaign of norm-breaking in the other direction leading up to the TIP simulation. In the eight-plus years since Donald Trump entered the national political scene, we’ve seen the same cast of characters appear and reappear in dirty tricks schemes, many of which began before he was even elected (more on that below). The last time we encountered this “loose-knit group” story, the usual suspects were all there, and the public by lucky accident of the Smith leak gained detailed access to Democratic Party thinking about how to steal an election — if necessary, of course, to “protect the democratic process.” That incident acquires new significance now in light not only of this NBC story, but also the dismal 2024 poll numbers for Biden, a host of unusually candid calls for preemptive action to prevent Trump from taking office, the bold efforts to remove Trump from the ballot in states like Colorado and Maine, and those lesser-publicized, but equally important campaign to keep third party challengers like No Labels or Robert F. Kennedy from gaining ballot access in key states. The grim reality of Campaign 2024 is that both sides appear convinced the other will violate “norms” first, with Democrats in particular seeming to believe extreme advance action is needed to head off a Trump dictatorship. Such elevated levels of paranoia virtually guarantee that someone is going to cheat before Election Day in November, at which point the court of public opinion will come into play. The key question will be, who abandoned democracy first? The TIP report provided an answer. It contained long lists of theoretical Trump abuses that sounded suspiciously more like the extralegal maneuvers already deployed against Trump dating back to mid-2016, particularly during the failed effort to prosecute him for collusion with Russia. Interpreted by some as a literal plan to overturn a legal Trump victory, its greater significance was as a historical document, since it read like a year-by-year synopsis of all the home team rule-breaking. In other words, the TIP read like a Team Clinton playbook, only with hero and villain reversed. Bearing in mind that many of the people involved were also Russiagate actors, here’s a abbreviated list of abuses the TIP authors supposedly feared Trump would commit: “The President’s ability… to launch investigations into opponents; and his ability to use Department of Justice and/or the intelligence agencies to cast doubt on election results or discredit his opponents.” It’s true a president so inclined can do these things, and possible a re-elected Trump might, but they were clearly done first to Trump in this case. The FBI’s road-to-nowhere Crossfire Hurricane probe of Russian collusion, which made use of illegally obtained FISA surveillance authority, began on July 31, 2016. Trump opponents have been “launching investigations” really without interruption ever since, with many (including especially the recent Frankensteinian hush-money prosecution) obviously politicized. Likewise, the office of the Director of National Intelligence published an Intelligence Community Assessment in early January 2017, again before Trump’s inauguration, that used information from the bogus Steele dossier to conclude that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.” If that isn’t using intelligence agencies to “cast doubt on election results,” what is? Worse, the trick would be repeated, over and over: “The President and key members of his administration can also reference classified documents without releasing them, manipulate classified information, or selectively release classified documents for political purposes, fueling manufactured rumors.” This phenomenon also began before Trump’s election, notably with the story leaked on January 10, 2017, about four “intel chiefs,” including FBI Director James Comey, who presented then-President-elect Trump with “claims of Russian efforts to compromise him,” including the infamous pee tape. “Selective” release of “classified documents” then continued through the Trump presidency. Other incidents involved the “repeated contacts with Russian intelligence” story (February 2017), a Washington Post story about Jeff Sessions speaking to the Russian ambassador (March 2017), the (incorrect) story about Trump lawyer Michael Cohen being in Prague (April 2018), the infamous “Russian bounty” story (June 2020), and many, many, others. Podesta himself participated in one of the first and most damaging “manufactured rumor” episodes, beginning in late 2016, involving the use of the Elias-commissioned Steele dossier to illegally obtain a FISA warrant on former Trump aide Carter Page. Podesta, who of course knew the real source of the story, reacted to it as if it was news generated by government investigators and publicly derided Page as a Russian cutout, before adding that the 2016 election “was distorted by the Russian intervention.” This was a textbook example of using “manufactured rumors” from intelligence agencies to “cast doubt” on election results as you’ll find. “Additional presidential powers subject to misuse include… his ability to restrict internet communications in the name of national security.” As for restricting internet communications “in the name of national security,” Racket pauses to laugh. The growth of state-aided censorship initiatives like the ones we studied all last year in the Twitter Files began well before Trump’s election, for instance with the creation in Barack Obama’s last year of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which later worked with Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership to focus heavily on posts deemed to be attempts at “delegitimization” in the 2020 election. Stanford’s group even flagged a story about the TIP in its final report as “conspiracy theory.” Not to say that these bureaucracies couldn’t be abused by a second Trump administration, but so far they’ve been a near-exclusive fixation of Democratic politicians and security officials. There’s a reason Joe Biden is the only candidate slated to enjoy a censorship-free campaign season, while Trump and third-party challenger Robert F. Kennedy have been repeatedly removed or de-amplified from various platforms. “There is considerable room to use foreign interference, real or invented, as a pretext to cast doubt on the election results or more generally to create uncertainty about the legitimacy of the election.” This may have been the most amazing line in the TIP report, given that the entire Trump presidency was marked by stories like “How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump” (New Yorker) “Did Russia Affect the 2016 Election? It’s Now Undeniable” (Wired), “Russia ‘turned’ election for Trump, Clapper believes” (PBS), “Yes, Russian Election Sabotage Helped Trump Win” (Bloomberg), and a personal favorite, “CIA Director Wrongly Says U.S. Found Russia Didn't Affect Election Result” (NBC). There was so much “Russia hacked the election” messaging between 2016 and 2020, in fact, that our Matt Orfalea made two movies about it. Here’s one: In the 2018 midterm elections, officials warned that Russia was going to “attack” the congressional vote. Stories like “U.S. 2018 elections ‘under attack’ by Russia” (Reuters) and “Justice Dept. Accuses Russians of Interfering in Midterm Elections” (New York Times) were constants, until the Democrats retook the House in a “blue wave,” at which point headlines began saying the opposite (“Russians Tried, but Were Unable to Compromise Midterm Elections, U.S. Says” from the Times was a typical take). The TIP was written during a repeat version, as stories like “Lawmakers are Warned that Russia is Meddling to Re-Elect Trump” (New York Times) were near-daily fixtures in 2020 pre-election coverage. After Biden won, headlines like “Putin Failed to Mount Major Election Interference Activities in 2020” again became fixtures in papers like the Washington Post. This brings us to the last and most controversial angle on the TIP report. When the original TIP text came out, Michael Brendan Daugherty in National Review wrote in an offhand tone that he got the feeling “some progressives are steeling themselves for a Color Revolution in the United States,” because winning a normal election “just isn’t cathartic enough.” To this day, the color revolution idea makes TIP organizers laugh. “The idea that some rando in Los Angeles,” Gilman says, referring to himself, “was secretly planning a color revolution (which he published a report about months in advance, which you gotta admit is a pretty weird move for a guy allegedly plotting a revolution) is a textbook example of Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style.” Brooks is also incredulous, saying the color revolution thesis is a “profound misunderstanding” of the TIP report. “They aren’t plans or predictions, they’re efforts to understand how things might play out,” she wrote, adding that the TIP participants were merely asking, “What could go wrong?” They may have asked that. Still, the group’s final report contained a string of references to “plans and predictions,” with entries like “Plan for a contested election,” “Plan for large-scale protests,” and “Make plans now for how to respond in the event of a crisis.” As for the “profound misunderstanding,” Brooks gave a friendly interview to a New York Times writer who was apparently laboring under the same “profound” delusion. Weeks after the National Review piece, Michelle Goldberg in the Times wrote of Daugherty: “He’s right, but not in the way he thinks.” She explained that Democrats don’t relish the thought of an uprising, but look upon it as something to be dreaded, that “must nonetheless be considered.” She then quoted Brooks. The Georgetown professor, who in her most recent book about life in the Defense Department described getting “a coveted intelligence community ‘blue badge’” to pass into “the sacred precincts of the CIA,” told Goldberg that in the event of a Trump power grab, “the only thing left is what pro-democracy movements and human rights movements around the world have always done, which is sustained, mass peaceful demonstrations.” That did sound like a description of the Eastern European color revolutions, which generally involved mass street actions, sustained negative press pressure, and calls by NGOs and outside countries for the disfavored leader to step down. A major reason the “color revolution” theme struck commentators in connection with TIP had to do with the presence in the TIP simulation of Barack Obama’s former chief ethics lawyer, Norm Eisen. Eisen wrote a manual called The Democracy Playbook for the Brookings Institution that is often referred to as the unofficial how-to guide for America-backed regime-change operations abroad. Anyone who’s been forced to read a lot of “democracy promotion” literature, as I had to in Russia, will recognize familiar themes in the TIP report. One of the controversial features of “color revolution” episodes is that the U.S. has at times supported ousters of perhaps unsavory, but legally elected, leaders. Was the TIP group contemplating the “sustained” protest scenario only in the event of Trump stealing an election, or if he merely won in an unpleasant way, i.e. via the Electoral College with a popular vote deficit? Brooks at first indicated she didn’t understand the reference. “I am not sure what the question is?” she wrote. “Peaceful protests, mass or otherwise, are constitutionally protected.” I referred back to the Times piece and the “movements around the world” quote, noting that while those outcomes might arguably have been desirable, it’d be hard to call them strictly democratic. “I am not an expert on the color revolutions,” she replied. “It is certainly true that on both left and right, in both the US and abroad, there are nearly always... I guess I’d say spoilers, or violence entrepreneurs — who try to hijack peaceful protest movements.” Lastly: one TIP simulation also predicted, with something like remarkable anti-clairvoyance, that Trump would contrive to label Biden supporters guilty of “insurrection” for protesting a “clear Trump win”: The Trump Campaign planted agent provocateurs into the protests throughout the country to ensure these protests turned violent and helped further the narrative of a violent insurrection against a lawfully elected president. That passage was published on August 3, 2020, long before most Americans knew or cared that the word “insurrection” had political significance. We’d be instructed in its use within hours of the riots, when Joe Biden said, “It’s not protest. It’s insurrection,” and everyone from Mitt Romney to Mitch McConnell to media talking heads to the authors of the articles of impeachment like Jamie Raskin fixated on the word. Still, not until December 2021 did a public figure explain how the 14th Amendment might be deployed strategically in the post-January 6th world. The insight came from Elias, who has since deleted the tweet: We’re of course now seeing that litigation, notably in the form of a Colorado Supreme Court decision to remove Trump from the ballot, which was handed down after complaints filed citing the 14th Amendment provision alluded to by Elias. All this is laid out as background for the coming nine months of campaign chaos, if we even end up having a traditional campaign season. Revolt of the Public author and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri summed up the situation in a piece for The Free Press titled “Trump. Again. The Question is Why?” The money quotes: The malady now exposed is this: the elites have lost faith in representative democracy. To smash the nightmare image of themselves that Trump evokes, they are willing to twist and force our system until it breaks… The implications are clear. Not only Trump, but the nearly 75 million Americans who voted for him, must be silenced and crushed. To save democracy, it must be modified by a possessive: “our democracy.” The Biden campaign, stuck in a seemingly irreversible poll freefall, has put all its rhetorical chips on the theme of “protecting democracy.” Biden mentions Trump’s “assault on democracy” at every opportunity, and even recently resorted to Apollo Creed-style imagery, campaigning at Valley Forge flanked by a dozen American flags and red, white, and blue lights. (Red-and-white striped trunks can’t be far off.) The DNC’s daily “talkers” memos for months have asked blue-party pols and friendly reporters to stress “the existential threat to freedom and democracy that Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans represent,” while pointing to stories like Vanity Fair’s, “There Is No ‘Both Sides’ to Donald Trump’s Threat to Democracy,” in its CONTENT TO AMPLIFY section. The DNC’s “talkers” mailers This messaging would likely have worked after January 6th, when Trump’s post-electoral conduct rankled voters, as evidenced by an exit approval rating of 34%. It can’t now, since the word “democracy” has been appropriated to refer exclusively to the party that declared its New Hampshire primary “non-binding” and “meaningless,” canceled its Florida primary, is preparing mass technical challenges against third-party challengers like No Labels or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (and has a rich history in that area; see accompanying Nader ... Isobel83 (40) < 10 mi.

Note to Readers: On the Border Protests I may want to travel to cover the "Take Our Border Back" convoy for Racket.

Readers may have noticed I’ve been a bit quiet lately, trying to finish today’s articles. With that done, I’m headed back out on the trail, with South Carolina planned next. However, the standoff in Texas is interesting, and the “Take Our Border Back” convoy protest sounds like something I may want to report on in person. If you know anyone who’s planning to go and doesn’t mind a having journalist tag along for a leg, please let me know. I want more watch-and-see in Racket this year, and though the campaign will provide plenty of that, there are other things happening. In either case, thanks for your time.

Livestream Tonight, 5:00 p.m. ET: "The Fix is In"

Going through some difficult material on the effort to fix next year's ballot, including some things I had to leave out of today's article “Orange.” On Racket today I published two articles: a long piece titled “Is the Electoral Fix Already In?” and a companion essay about the campaign to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot, titled, “The Anti-Democratic Movement Targeted Ralph Nader First. We Should Have Paid More Attention.” I had to leave a lot out of these articles, for space reasons, so I’m scheduling a livestream for 5:00 p.m. ET tonight to talk about some of the missing material, while also going over a couple of the key documents. Also, I’ll be on Newsmax tonight in the 7 ET hour to talk about the piece. Humorously, the impetus for these articles was a Russia flashback. When the topic of the Transition Integrity Project came up, I found an article from February 4, 2021 by Molly Ball at Time, titled, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Molly had written another feature in June of 2020 called, “Trench Lawfare: Inside the Battles to Save Democracy From the Trump Administration” that lovingly profiled Protect Democracy, one of the groups reported to have organized the TIP. It felt like the second article was crediting either TIP or some other “secret” group or groups for saving the Biden campaign. The “Secret History” article is a wild read. It described “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes,” an “extraordinary shadow effort” and yet another “loosely organized coalition of operatives” who got together to rescue democracy from the abyss: They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks… A powerful feeling of déjà vu came with this text. I realized I’d read this exact article as a 26-year-old, when I was living in Moscow and witnessed an all-time political comeback. Boris Yeltsin, who scored as low as 5% nationally in official polls in February of 1996, somehow surged from fifth place to victory in less than six months. It later turned out the United States was determined to prevent a Yeltsin loss to communist Gennady Zyuganov and flooded his campaign with cash and other forms of support through a variety of “democracy promotion” organizations. In truth Yeltsin had access to whole teams of American advisors, but a few in particular were so excited by Yeltsin’s win, they decided to blab to an American magazine, leading to one of the all-time covers: Borya holding an American flag, over the headline, “Yanks to the Rescue – the secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win.” The 1996 story and the 2021 Time stories were virtually identical: Moscow in the nineties was packed with party-hardy American consultants who threw so much money around that Scandanavian brothels and mob-owned strip joints tripped over themselves to pay obscene ads rates for my English-language club guide, the eXile. At first I dimly understood what they people did, but later came to understand that many of our “consultants” were in — to put it euphemistically — the election-influencing business. A fair portion were contractors either for USAID or the National Endowment of Democracy, about whom David Ignatius — yes, the same David Ignatius of the Washington Post who in 2017 published the game-changing pre-inauguration leak about Michael Flynn talking to a Russian ambassador — had written way back in 1991, “They have been doing in public what the CIA used to do in private.” Eventually, a lot would be written about the role of the NED and associated organizations like the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in assisting and funding so-called “color revolutions.” It’s fair to note that most of that literature has been written by scholars from unfriendly nations, particularly China, but when Vladimir Putin kicked USAID, the NDI, and the IRI out of Russia (this was often framed as us “pulling out”), nobody complained much. That the U.S. meddles in elections abroad is no longer particularly controversial, and those of us who’ve seen how these “democracy promotion” mechanisms work up close know that we’ve become expert at it, even attaching brand names to various regime-change efforts. My favorite was the failed “jeans revolution” in Belarus, the subject of more than a few jokes among Russian journalists, since “selling jeans” is a slang term in Russian media for writing political articles for money — selling out. In any case, though the TIP organizers scoff at the idea (and they may very well be doing so sincerely), the current propaganda about “saving democracy” in America sounds too exactly like the messaging around foreign regime change operations to be a coincidence. That this messaging also emanates in many cases from the same people who’ve repeatedly popped up in the middle of color revolutions abroad (Victoria Nuland, who was in Moscow at the same time as me, comes to mind) is also malodorous. It’s no longer possible to avoid the idea that America might be fixing its own elections. In any case, the articles published today attempt to use the “Transition Integrity Project” episode as a framework to show the gradual progression of different types of electioneering abuses, from before the 2016 election through the present. The TIP, as noted, unwittingly provided a road map of uniparty thinking about the toolkit of dirty tricks available to them, though the authors presented the material as a list of possible Trump abuses. Even just on this front, I was forced for space reasons to leave a lot of things out. So, in the livestream tonight, I’ll go through the report, as well as the shocking No Labels DOJ letter, and also answer any questions people might have (please list in the comments below, or during the stream). Thanks again, and see you all tonight. Racket News. © 2024 Matt Taibbi 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Transcript: America This Week, Episode 72, January 19, 2024 Walter and Matt discuss the sinister Westworld cyborgs of the World Economic Forum and their annual self-congratulation festival. Plus, "Microcosmic God" by Theodore Sturgeon MATT TAIBBI AND WALTER KIRN JAN 21

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi. Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn. Matt Taibbi: Walter, what’s going on? Walter Kirn: It’s been a long New Year, these three weeks since New Year here in Montana, it’s been 30 below zero consistently. It’s now warmed up a little. That’s not a physical feeling of cold, it’s an existential cold. Matt Taibbi: Is the word existential, have we used that word more in the last four years than the previous hundred? Walter Kirn: Well, when I went to college in the early eighties, existentialism was still a thing, you know, Camus art, et cetera, and it was a pretty heavy word to use, and it basically meant living on in the face of annihilation and death, but living in a world without God and only your own actions, which may be meaningless, but you must carry on nevertheless. Matt Taibbi: Right. Walter Kirn: And now it’s become just sort of an adjective for very, very much. Matt Taibbi: Right. Trump is a very threat to democracy. Walter Kirn: Yeah. Existential threats, existential challenges. Everything’s existential now. Beer probably is existential, existentially refreshing. Matt Taibbi: It’s existential cold that you’re living in. Walter Kirn: Yeah. So I’m going to just use the word the way it’s being used, but it was existential in the sense that it caused you to fear that you were a tiny organism, very vulnerable to the turns of the weather. And I grew up in a cold climate, but when I went outside and it was both windy and 30 below, I thought I could commit suicide this way. Matt Taibbi: Yeah, you just sort of lie down. Walter Kirn: Yeah. Just lie down and sort of meditate. And probably within five minutes my mind would be scrambled and I wouldn’t be able to feel anything, I’d start to numb up. So yeah, suicide by cold front, but I got through that. That was existential. See, suicide’s a big existential thing. And then I- Matt Taibbi: That’s actually a big part of learning how to drink in the former Soviet Union. Walter Kirn: What? Matt Taibbi: You have to be conscious of not passing out in certain places. Walter Kirn: How can you be conscious of not becoming unconscious? Matt Taibbi: I mean, people do. Every year there’s a raft of, I can’t believe I used that term, there’s a slew of stories about guys who go out ice fishing, get hammered, and then forget that they’re on an ice floe and then freeze to death. But there’s also always stories about men who curl up on benches on the way to the subway station, or they go out to the kiosk to get more vodka and they just never make it home. So it’s sort of like you’re training to be a grown man and the former Soviet Union, you have to learn. You have to know your measure, as Graham Greene would say, to be not so completely hammered that you forget to actually duck inside a doorway before you lie down. Although it doesn’t work in the summer, that’s for sure. It looks like Appomattox outside most beer bars. At least it did when I was there. Walter Kirn: Yeah. Well, that’s interesting. I haven’t had a drink since I was 30 years old. Had to stop. Matt Taibbi: Really? Walter Kirn: Yeah. But I always maintained that vigilance that you’re talking about. I practiced walking straight lines even when I was sober so that I could do it drunk. I had all kinds of boundaries then on my drinking that caused me never to get a DUI or get in a bad fight or anything. And I did think that was the height of responsibility to be able to be really, really drunk and yet still live and not be in jail. Matt Taibbi: Right, right. Yeah. And that’s a sure sign that probably you’re drinking too much, is when you’ve got- Walter Kirn: There were many sure signs. One was that I would go into bars where local bands were playing and promised that I could get them a record contract in LA. I was a expansive, grandiose drinker who believed- Matt Taibbi: Uh-oh. Walter Kirn: Yeah, I wasn’t mean. I was so nice. And then I’d come back to the same bar and the band would be playing the next night and they’d said, “Did you call the Eagles manager and get us that contract?” And I’d say, “What the hell are you talking about?” Matt Taibbi: That’s one of those things where you wake up in the morning and it’s like, who’s that director who makes Inception? Christopher Nolan? You get those extreme reverse zoom shots where suddenly everything flashes back to you about all the horrible stupid shit that you said the night before. Walter Kirn: But here was the thing, I didn’t threaten people, I over-promised. Matt Taibbi: Right. Walter Kirn: And actually people will get angrier at you for over-promising than calling them a name. So no drinking to get me through the existential cold. And then my back went out during our live stream on the Iowa caucuses. Matt Taibbi: Really? Walter Kirn: Right before. I was in severe back pain that whole time. Yeah. Matt Taibbi: So, mine too, but sorry, that’s really weird. Okay. Walter Kirn: Really? Matt Taibbi: Are you better now? Walter Kirn: Two-thirds, three-quarters. I’ve still got a sort of Frankenstein vibe when I walk, you know, keeping the back stiff. But the latest thinking on back pain and all the psychotherapeutic books about it say it’s psychological and that the way to get through throwing your back out is to pretend your back’s fine and just keep moving while you examine your emotional state to see if anything is deeply stressing you. And there’s a whole book on this, and I know a lot of people who go on TV all the time for whom back pain is a professional risk and affliction, and they swear by this method. So that’s what I’ve been using. Matt Taibbi: All right. I don’t know. I think if a doctor tried that on me, I might punch him actually. But I feel that way about a lot of things lately, so maybe that’s just not definitive. So, okay, we last spoke during the Iowa caucuses, which was pretty interesting I have to say. But this week is also marked by another, I would say far more sordid ritual in politics, which is the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. We’re going to get back to Iowa, but this has gradually become one of the most loathsome things that happens on schedule in the world, and it feels like it gets worse and worse every year. What did you notice so far from the headlines this week? Or do we need to explain to people what this is? Walter Kirn: The Davos World economic Forum is sort of like the Cannes Film Festival or- Matt Taibbi: For oligarchs. Walter Kirn: Yeah, for oligarchs, except they are the films. They give these frightening TED Talk kind of presentations to each other. They never show the audience so it’s unclear if all the CEOs and heads of state actually show up for the speeches or if they’re back in the ski lodge with their high-priced prostitutes. Matt Taibbi: I was going to say that a singular feature of Davos is that it takes place in this kind of extremely exclusive sort of ski and buggery resort for the filthy rich, not just, I got a million and a half dollars, you have to have 100 million dollars to be like somebody there... © 2024 Matt Taibbi 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Not a Nothingburger

 

Interview with "Stay Free" With Russell Brand: On the UK Files and CTI League

Thanks to Rusty Rockets for a great talk, published Friday. Excerpt, with links, here:

MATT TAIBBI DEC 2 I had the good fortune to talk with Russell Brand eariler this week. Russell is one of my favorite people, though I always exit our conversations wishing I could wear more interesting clothes (after exchanges with Douglas Murray, I just stand in front of a mirror and say “interlocutor” over and over again). This time around we got to talk about a variety of topics, including still-to-come UK Files reports, the #CTILeague, and the future of populist uprisings. For the full discussion on Rumble

Hey... I think we should take advantage of the different situations that life throws at us, alone and in company, although I am a young woman I have learned several things alone, I have been disappointed but I think that all this is part of growing up, living and move forward... now, I can say with certainty that I have a healthy heart and willing to give the best and also receive the best, I know what I deserve, I also know that it is not the time to make excuses, let's look for solutions and make it real... So tell me, do you feel ready for something different from now on? Jenn

Not a Nothingburger: My Statement to Congress on Censorship

The key question in censorship is always the same. Who's doing it?

MATT TAIBBI DEC 2 For time reasons, I had to cut my actual address a bit short Thursday. This statement, which began with a nod to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, is what was entered into the congressional record: November 30, 2023 Chairman Jordan, ranking member Plaskett, members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak. Exactly one year ago today I had my first look at the documents that came to be known as the Twitter Files. One of the first things Michael, Bari Weiss and I found was this image, showing that Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya had been placed on a “trends blacklist”:

This was not because he was suspected of terrorism or incitement or of being a Russian spy or a bad citizen in any way. Dr. Bhattacharya’s crime was doing a peer-reviewed study that became the 55^th-most read scientific paper of all time, which showed the WHO initially overstated Covid-19 infection fatality rates by a factor of 17. This was legitimate scientific opinion and should have been an important part of the public debate, but Bhattacharya and several of his colleagues instead became some of the most suppressed people in America in 2020 and 2021.

That’s because by then, even true speech that undermined confidence in government policies had begun to be considered a form of disinformation, precisely the situation the First Amendment was designed to avoid. 

When Michael and I testified before the good people of this Committee in March we mentioned this classically Orwellian concept of “malinformation” — material that is somehow both true and wrong — as one of many reasons everyone should be concerned about these digital censorship programs.

But there’s a more subtle reason people across the spectrum should care about this issue.

Former Executive Director of the ACLU Ira Glasser once explained to a group of students why he didn’t support hate speech codes on campuses. The problem, he said, was “who gets to decide what’s hateful… who gets to decide what to ban,” because “most of the time, it ain’t you.”

https://www.harryanddavid.com/h/promotions/flat-rate-shipping

https://coupon.lowcostlivin.com/sam-s-club/?utm_source=2023-12-0254747_10&utm_medium=daily

Wen Yan (Yilia) really wanna know you. So thrilling

 

Wen Yan (Yilia) really wanna know you. So thrilling 

Olena has fallen for you!

Relive your school days with a reprint of the 1981 Brebeuf Preparatory yearbook — available now.   Blinken in Tel Aviv Warns Israel on Long War: “I Don’t Think You Have the Credit for That” “Blinken and Biden Should be Ashamed” Senator Tom Cotton’s response to the latest effort of diplomacy from Biden and Blinken: The idea that after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Israel needs “credit” to defend itself is outrageous. Blinken and Biden should be ashamed (X). Ed Morrissey: Biden and Blinken seem perfectly ready to extend an unlimited amount of credit to Hamas these days, and this is a perfect example…. Blinken essentially blames Israel for all civilian deaths in Gaza rather than the terrorist quasi-government that is actually violating all of the norms of armed conflict and hiding behind those civilians (Hot Air). Moral Clarity From Marco Rubio: “Destroy Every Element Of Hamas” The comment came when the Florida Senator was approached by a Code Pink activist, asking if he’d call for a ceasefire:  “No, I will not,” Rubio replied. “Are you guys filming this? I want you guys to get this. I want Israel to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals who did horrifying crimes, and I hope you guys post that” (Daily Wire). Governors’ Debate: Newsom and DeSantis Square Off in Georgia With Covid-19 pandemic—and the two states polar opposite approach—on center stage. DeSantis: “Gavin Newsom did huge damage to people in California. He ruined livelihoods” (Fox News). City Journal: With the possible exception of the Great Depression, no domestic crisis of the past century and a half has been more catastrophic for the nation’s social fabric and economy than the Covid pandemic (City Journal). Governor Newsom claims California more free than Florida despite authoritarian lockdown measures instigated during the Pandemic. DeSantis will seek to use last night’s debate performance to bound into 2024, and rally primary voters to give him a second chance after dropping in the polls this year (National Review). Twitter Files Reveal More Than Censorship: "All of This Is Profoundly un-America” Argued Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi on Thursday at the hearing on Weaponization of the Federal Government: “Two days ago, my colleagues and I published the first batch of internal files from ‘The Cyber Threat Intelligence League,’ which show U.S. and U.K. military contractors working in 2019 and 2020 to both censor and turn sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics, developed abroad, against the American people…. All of this is profoundly un-America. One’s commitment to free speech means nothing if it does not extend to your political enemies.” (Washington Examiner). Leah Barkoukis: Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) called out a witness during Thursday’s Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing who accused the select subcommittee of spreading conspiracy theories about government censorship (Townhall). Massie: “I bring this up to show, number one, that your testimony is false. But Number two if they can do this to a member of Congress’ official account, they can do this to anybody” (X) Texas Suing Pfizer Over “False, Deceptive” Claims on Covid Vaccine Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton: The lawsuit notes: “How did Pfizer respond when it became apparent that its vaccine was failing and the viability of its cash cow was threatened? By intimidating those spreading the truth, and by conspiring to censor its critics. Pfizer labeled as ‘criminals’ those who spread facts about the vaccine. It accused them of spreading ‘misinformation.’ And it coerced social media platforms to silence prominent truth-tellers” (TexasAG). Federalist: Pfizer debuted the jab in late 2020 with the promise that it was 95 percent effective against Covid-19 infection. The company used this statistic, based on a final efficacy analysis, to bully Americans into getting the shots in the name of protecting their family and friends from the virus (Federalist). Key Question for Liberal American Jews and Israel: “Can the Leaders of Liberal American Judaism Say, Fundamentally, We Were Wrong!" Daniel Gordis on the future: “It’s going to depend on a very difficult question: can the leaders of liberal American Judaism say, fundamentally, we were wrong! … about Jews in America …  if we made Judaism about social action that wasn’t all that different from the Methodists or Presbyterians or the whoevers that, fundamentally, we’d be accepted… For a hundred years we built a community on a premise that was wrong (X). International Criminal Court Sends Prosecutor to Israel Jerusalem Post:  This is not just a diplomatic issue, as legally Jerusalem has said for years that it does recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction, such that even informal interactions are under a microscope in terms of their significance and meaning.… Should the ICC decide to prosecute and issue arrest warrants for Israelis, this could obligate around 125 countries, including essentially the entire EU, to arrest Israeli soldiers or officials, something which could alter the Jewish state’s global standing in a very negative way (JPost).      Gag Order Reinstated on Trump AP: A New York appeals court Thursday reinstated a gag order that barred Donald Trump from commenting about court personnel after the former president repeatedly disparaged a law clerk in his New York civil fraud trial. The one-sentence decision came two weeks after an individual appellate judge put the gag order on hold while the appeals process played out. Trial judge Arthur Engoron, who imposed the restriction, said he now planned to enforce it “rigorously and vigorously” (AP). This Weekend: Kirk Cameron Hosts Book Fair With Books That Really Are Safe for Kids Kirk Cameron: “We’ve decided to go after the head of the snake and find out who is filling libraries and schools with sexually explicit and gender-confusing material,” he said to WMAL on Wednesday. “The head of the snake, the dealer of all of this, is Scholastic Books, the largest producer of children’s books in America,” he continued (Washington Examiner). Kirk Cameron: Ever wondered how all the sexually explicit, morally disgusting, and dangerous books get into our children’s schools, classrooms, and libraries? @SkyTreeFairs  and I did a deep dive and discovered who the real wolf in Grandma’s clothing is. We see you @scholastic! (X). Copyright © 2023 DaybreakInsider.com