Social Media: The FBI Subsidiary
After being outraged by the censorship and banning of accounts on Twitter, Elon Musk (along with other investors like Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz)16 bought the social media platform for $44 billion in October 2022. In his commitment to transparency, Musk selected six independent journalists to investigate internal files and documents, and report on what they found regarding censorship at the platform and any government involvement.
Now known as the “Twitter Files,” part of what was exposed included the “constant and pervasive” contact between Twitter employees and the FBI. Other reports addressed the suppression of evidence from the laptop computer belonging to President Biden’s son Hunter, blacklisting of conservatives, and the Twitter suspension of Trump’s account.
Former Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi, one of those tapped by Musk to review the Twitter Files, released his report titled “Twitter Files, Part Six: TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY.”
The Washington Examiner reported on Taibbi’s investigation:
The FBI was not the only one to flag content. The Department of Homeland Security and several state governments notified Twitter of content they thought was problematic. Some of this was done through the Partner Support Portal, an outlet constructed by the Center for Internet Security, a partner organization with the DHS. “What most people think of as the ‘deep state’ is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless,” Taibbi concluded.17
Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar and a professor at George Washington University School of Law, explains further: “The ‘Twitter files’ revealed an FBI operation to monitor and censor social media content—an effort so overwhelming and intrusive that Twitter staff at one point complained internally that ‘they are probing & pushing everywhere.’ The reports have indicated that dozens of FBI employees worked on the identification and removal of material on a wide range of subjects and that Twitter largely carried out their requests.”18
These reports just touch the surface of the main federal law enforcement agency using Twitter as a proxy to carry out an unconstitutional assault on everyone’s First Amendment right to free speech. While that is alarming enough, the pre-Musk Twitter regime’s cooperation with a government censorship operation without any significant legal resistance shows us the danger of the private sector’s willingness to collude with government if their political aims coincide. Finding this out years later, after the damage had been done, is not reassuring and does not solve the problem.
One of the major benefits for the FBI and progressives in general was the banning and suspension operation implemented by Twitter, apparently on behalf of or at the request of the FBI. This made the average person afraid of losing their Twitter or social media accounts. Today, social media acts as a significant communication tool for millions of Americans. People rant, organize, entertain, inform, and help others. The threat of banning or suspension, especially of someone like Donald Trump, sends a message to everyone else: if social media companies can do it to him, they can do it to you. Self-censorship becomes the solution out of fear, and can even cause some to doubt their own intentions and value.
For the left and progressives (a misnomer if there ever was one), that’s exactly the point and the goal.
As is often the case in history, the only reason this outrageous operation stopped and was exposed is because one man—Elon Musk—was as outraged as many of us were. As one of the richest people in the world, he was able to buy the platform. As more confirmation of the Biden administration’s willingness to run afoul of the Constitution in their effort to control and squash dissenting speech, a unanimous 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a federal district court judge’s finding that the Biden White House and the FBI unconstitutionally “coerced” or “encouraged” online censorship.19 The Biden administration appealed this decision to the United States Supreme Court, illustrating how desperate the establishment is to maintain control of what people learn about. It is also a threat to the status quo when the hoi polloi embrace and enjoy the ability to be heard on the issues of the day. Whatever the SCOTUS outcome on this issue, the progressive interest in censoring what the public can say and information they can see will remain and likely increase.
We got lucky this time, but we can’t rely on luck and the perfect storm of circumstances to survive the malign intentions of a government gone wild.
The Open Southern Border
The erasure of, and consequential chaos at, our southern border created by Biden administration policies speaks directly to the agenda of the corrupt bureaucratic state—creating and maintaining crisis and corresponding fear. When our own government is directing a type of orderly dismantling of the very existence of our southern border, that alone is fear-inducing for the citizens relying on the national, economic, and personal security of what is supposed to be a controlled point of entry. When this unlocked door is interpreted as an open invitation for unbridled entry, the inevitable and uncontrollable rush by millions of people to enter this country without the usual identity and background safeguards impacts everyone watching the human catastrophe unfold.
The building of the border wall was well underway by late in Trump’s term, and other border security efforts had been implemented, resulting in unheralded success at securing the southern border.20 Despite this success, or perhaps because of it, on the day he became president, Biden issued executive orders reversing Trump’s border policies.21 Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) noted: “Most of the problems we’re seeing at the border were created by Joe Biden himself, starting on his very first day in office as president when he sent a message throughout the world that America’s border is open by doing things like halting construction of the wall, reinstating catch and release, terminating the Remain in Mexico policy, the Northern Triangle agreements.”
The consequences? In February 2023, border patrol chiefs testified to the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability that the border crisis is “overwhelming.”22 But that wasn’t even the worst of it. Yet. On December 18, 2023, the United States hit a shocking milestone. “The besieged U.S. southern border saw a record number of migrant encounters in a single day on Monday, as thousands flooded into Eagle Pass, Texas, amid a broader surge in recent weeks that has left authorities overwhelmed. There were over 12,600 migrant encounters on Monday, Customs and Border Protection sources told Fox.”23
If that wasn’t alarming enough, at the end of October 2023, the Washington Examiner and Center Street reported,24 “More than 10 million people have been reported illegally entering the United States since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the greatest number in history and of any administration. They total more than the individual populations of 41 states.”
Moreover, in a Pew Research Center poll in February 2024 we learn,25 “The U.S. Border Patrol had nearly 250,000 encounters with migrants crossing into the United States from Mexico in December 2023, according to government statistics. That was the highest monthly total on record, easily eclipsing the previous peak of about 224,000 encounters in May 2022.” Other reports reveal concern about Chinese illegal immigration breaking records at the southern border.26 But it’s not just the southern border, as Hot Air reports, “Chief Patrol Agent Robert Garcia’s territory is the Swanton Sector. This includes portions of Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York. Garcia is based in Swanton, Vermont. He is sounding the alarm that illegal crossings are up. Since October 1, 2023, when FY 2024 began, Border Patrol agents have apprehended more than 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019 combined.”27
In the midst of this extraordinary situation, Center Street reports during the 2023 fiscal year, “CPB agents apprehended the greatest number of known or suspected terrorists (KSTs)—736—in a single year in US history.” How many terrorists did it take to implement the catastrophic September 11 attacks? Nineteen.
We all know what dangers lurk within the unprecedented number of unauthorized immigrants entering this country illegally.28 Sex trafficking and drug trafficking are making the cartels richer and more powerful than ever, while destroying American lives.29 In 2021, over 108,000 Americans died of a drug overdose. This is an “an all-time high and was the first time overdose deaths topped 100,000 in a calendar year.”30, 31
This isn’t happening because leprechauns got bored and waved a wand. It is the result of governmental policies that they do not change despite the obvious chaos and carnage. It is a situation that is overwhelming, distracting, and frightening. And that’s the point.
This is a perfect example of reminding ourselves of our earlier conversation, about the difference between allowing fear to push us into a paralyzed retreat, and using it as a signal to engage and work to overcome the problem. Like a bad health diagnosis—we must know so we can be proactive in confronting it. Remember, as Gavin de Becker tells us, fear is a gift, when managed consciously and with purpose.
Americans everywhere are impacted by this disaster, which contributes to most of our cultural and social ills—drug abuse, crime, homelessness, sex trafficking, human trafficking, economic uncertainty, and the specter of terrorism. An open, uncontrolled border makes a mockery of law and order and signals that the government is not in charge. If there ever was a problem that envelops all the issues that make people unsure and afraid, it’s this one.
COVID
All of the above is just the tip of the fear iceberg. Fearmongering takes many forms, and when you’re attempting to implement it against a free society like ours, the effort takes on a number of different layers. The manipulation of the American people during the COVID-19 crisis was normal for certain bureaucrats. Dr. Deborah Birx, who was part of the COVID Response Team in Trump’s White House and was the chief proponent of lockdowns, wrote Silent Invasion,32 a book in which she bragged about misleading then-President Trump and the country about the issue.33, 34
As reported by Libby Emmons at the Post Millennial,35 often Birx was deliberately deceitful about what she did. At one point in the book she admits to deliberate and active subversion of administration messaging:
After the heavily edited documents were returned to me [by the White House], I’d reinsert what they had objected to, but place it in those different locations. I’d also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the most salient—the points the administration objected to—no longer fell at the start of the bullet points. I shared these strategies with three members of the data team also writing these reports. Our Saturday and Sunday report-writing routine soon became: write, submit, revise, hide, resubmit. Fortunately, this strategic slight-of-hand worked. They never seemed to catch this subterfuge.36
Moreover, Birx wanted lockdowns, so she went about manipulating the president of the United States to achieve her goal. Last time I checked, misleading someone doesn’t count as “science.” Emmons reports, “Despite not having adequate data . . . [Birx] writes that in March 2020, she met with the President, and her plan was to obfuscate her intentions for economic shutdowns, knowing that Trump was wary of anything that would tank the economy he had worked so hard to build. ‘I couldn’t do anything that would reveal my true intention,’ she writes, ‘to use the travel ban as one brick in the construction of a larger wall of protective measures we needed to enact very soon.’”37 Birx, who had reportedly been lobbying then President-Elect Biden for a job in December 2020, suddenly announced her retirement instead. She cited the public criticism of her hosting a family gathering for Thanksgiving after warning Americans to restrict gatherings to “immediate households” during the holiday citing the dangers of COVID. But the rules perpetuating fear itself do not apply to those who manage the Fear Industrial Complex. The BBC reported, “It emerged on Sunday she had travelled from Washington to one of her other properties, on Fenwick Island in Delaware, where she was joined by three generations of her family from two households. While in Delaware, she did an interview with CBS in which she noted that some Americans had ‘made mistakes’ over Thanksgiving by travelling and they ‘should assume they were infected.”38
When caught flouting the rules she promoted for everyone else, she attempted to deflect, explaining she went to prepare the house for sale, and just happened to “have a meal” with family.39 Eventually, she admitted the distress of the lockdowns were taking a toll, telling Newsy and as reported by the New York Post: “Birx said she took her Thanksgiving jaunt to Delaware because her parents were so down in the dumps, they ‘stopped eating and drinking’—a justification ripped by people who said it was her coronavirus restrictions that prevented them from seeing their own dying loved ones. . . . ‘My daughter hasn’t left that house in 10 months, my parents have been isolated for 10 months. They’ve become deeply depressed,’”40 continued Birx. “My parents have not been able to see their surviving son for over a year. These are all very difficult things.”41 We know, Deborah. We know. What apparently wasn’t difficult was misleading the president, treating the American people like shmucks, and then ignoring your own regulations and rules that destroyed the lives and families of others. Thanks for the memories, Deb, and for illustrating the nature of the Fear Industrial Complex.
Meanwhile, her mentor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and leader of the national COVID response, remained head of the NIAID and also accepted Biden’s offer to become his chief medical adviser in January 2021, only to retire in December 2022. But with each passing day there are more startling revelations about what exactly happened with the federal response to COVID, and how the search for answers and the truth was often maligned as “conspiracy theories.” Those who presented alternative views were sometimes demonized, shut out of the conversations, and even canceled.
Even the New York Times couldn’t ignore the absurdity, publishing an excellent opinion piece looking at Fauci’s involvement in the war against the lab leak theory. How the media dutifully pushed the narrative was noted: “The MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace called it ‘one of Trumpworld’s most favorite conspiracy theories.’ Twitter added warning labels to posts that argued for lab leak; Facebook banned such posts altogether for several months in 2021 before reversing the decision. NPR called it a ‘baseless conspiracy theory’ in a tweet, and the foreign affairs expert Fareed Zakaria wrote (and repeated on CNN): ‘The far right has now found its own virus conspiracy theory.’”42
Looks like everyone got the memo.
And now? A February 2023 Wall Street Journal headline, “Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says.”43 Then on to a January 2024 Fox News report about comments from Dr. Francis Collins, the former head of the NIH: “Fauci’s ex-boss now says COVID-19 lab leak theory was credible, despite previous claims it was a distraction.”44
However, nothing tops Dr. Anthony “I-Am-the-Science” Fauci’s admission during a closed-door interview with the House Select Committee on Coronavirus Pandemic in January 2024. When asked about what was behind the idiotic six-feet social distancing rules forced on Americans, he told lawmakers they “sort of just appeared.”45, 46 While alarming, it’s not surprising. Many wondered how it was that a virus would be kept at bay as long as you stay in prearranged circles situated six feet apart at a park. With an answer like this from a man in his position, the urgent question becomes, what else “sort of just appeared” and then was presented as a legitimate, scientific action to combat a virus?
Well, how about mask wearing? In a New York Times Magazine story (I’m sure worthy of framing!) a few months after his retirement, Fauci was asked about the efficacy of masks and presented with data from Pakistan showing their marginal benefit. Dr. I-Am-the-Science then made an admission: “From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins—maybe 10 percent. But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work.”47 Oh, like a doctor? Such a slippery answer from the man who told us “cloth coverings worked as well as surgical masks.”48 While couched as an expert’s medical advice, with what we know now it’s more like an idea that sort of just appeared.
None of that stops COVID, but it sure creates fear, uncertainty, isolation, and mass anxiety.
Now we know the rules and regulations that destroyed people’s lives might as well have been delivered by a leprechaun and “just appeared.” But these mandates, pronouncements, and warnings sure facilitated fear itself. And we know when made afraid, we’ll be more inclined to do as we’re told. In 2021, Fauci was excited when recounting this expectation in an interview: “It’s been proven that when you make it difficult for people in their lives they lose their ideological bullshit, and they get vaccinated.”49
Fauci and his gang seemed quite informed about how to fearmonger and force people to do things. Last time I checked, that wasn’t “science,” it was bullying, gaslighting, and harassment. We are supposed to revere Fauci and trust him completely because of his almost forty years of work as a doctor and public health expert at the NIH. But if he was relying on the “Just Sort of Appeared” method, and the “Marginal at Best” theory, one could argue that he was indeed an expert—for the Fear Industrial Complex.
The New York Times Magazine story title was “Dr. Fauci Looks Back: Something Clearly Went Wrong.” It featured a picture of Fauci adjusting his tie, as though he’s looking in a mirror. If he keeps looking, it just may dawn on him who that “something” just might appear to be.
This is the attitude that controls the bureaucratic state. The bureaucrats eventually believe only they know best, and all the peons should be grateful that they’re in charge.
