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I Want Names for Christmas
The “Twitter files” released by Elon Musk to Matt Taibbi are stunning. A task force of 80(!!) FBI agents/staff was involved with pressuring their (increasingly concerned and reluctant ) contacts at Twitter with cc’s to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, CIA, State (!!?). I hereby apologize to “conspiracy nuts” everywhere because this abuse was far more pervasive, coordinated, and larger in scope than even the average paranoid on the street probably assumed. I had mistakenly assumed that just a few woke recent college-deformed staffers at Twitter were carrying out a vague policy from a woke executive.
Many government people need to be fired and barred from public service if not prosecuted. It will not happen for at least two years because there is no integrity in the current administration. None. No one has resigned in protest or disgust. No senior whistleblowers. And little evidence of integrity among those who voted in this moral sewer. Is it ironic or just a sick joke that the people most offended by mean tweets are apparently indifferent to massive government abuse and manipulation of Twitter content?
The American people are entitled to all the names. I want a list. I want statements and questioning under oath. This is not undercover work where identities are secret. Police officers wear a name tag. Social workers do not have aliases. The conspirators are government employees. If the FBI is irresponsible enough to reassign any of these people to actual law enforcement, defense attorneys should be entitled to cross-examine such investigators to let jurors know about their willingness to lie, deceive and injure political enemies. Employers should have a right to know that these people are forever blacklisted by the bi-partisan core of the American people that still values the freedom of speech and limited, transparent government.
And let’s dispense with obvious lame defenses:
But these people protect social media from foreign enemies. Fine. If you participated in the lie about Russiagate or the Hunter Biden laptop, you can keep your job if you can prove an Al Qaeda link.
But some of these government employees were merely cc’d and not active conspirators. Too bad. People merely following some FBI plants into the Capitol and “parading” between the velvet ropes (after Capitol Police opened the door and let them in) were still prosecuted. This is the standard that applies in Biden’s America.
But Trump. The myth that Trump would initiate a fascist takeover was always stupid given the impossibility that the massively partisan federal behemoth would obey such a directive. Instead, there is an actual fascist blending of giant private tech corporations and unaccountable deep state agencies to impose and enforce a preferred political narrative contra Trump.
But January 6. It was a two- or three-hour fiasco by a few hundred unarmed demonstrators that was likely not even in the top 100 riots in the USA over the last four years in terms of injury and property damage. And there was never even the pretense of a coup, merely a mistimed petition that conspicuous irregularities be addressed so as to preserve the constitutional order, which demonstration got out of hand in large part because of the incompetence of those responsible for crowd control. Only a complete moron or a malignant partisan can argue that the blue clown in the buffalo hat was a greater threat to the Constitution than the FBI is now.
We have the names of every January 6 demonstrator (except the FBI guys, of course). It is only fair that we get the names of those involved in a more serious, more deliberate attack on the Constitution now that we have seen the Twitter files.
Published in General
But, but, but, they were just doing their jobs! Just following orders. . .
Well said. It’s even worse when you consider that the Trump fight is not about Trump. “Trump” used to be called the Tea Party, and will be called something else in the future.
Please keep OB’s two points above in mind anytime you hear the squishes and the cocktail types whinging about how bad the voters are for protesting against the Emmanuel Goldsteining of conservatism.
The Deep State engineered a coup. The (Republican!) House defected. The Executive branch mutinied. And yes, there’s a reason Obama set up shop in DC despite previous announcements that he would move to Hawaii. This March 2017 story from the Dilly Mill sums it up well, and looks like some of the best reporting of the last six years from our perspective now:
Well, I’ll just stop here.
And yet conspiracy theories are just whackdoodle mental meanderings of ignorant and superstitious people.
What happens when the truth is worse than the wildest conspiracy.
Added: What I don’t get is people who say over and over again that there are no conspiracies but merely the coincidental confluence of like-minded people acting entirely independently.
Toward the end of the Obama administration there was a new Democrat effort called embedding. The effort was the process of taking the Democrat political and activist class and embedded them into the various government bureaucracies to continue to effectuate party change. It seems obvious that the same has now happened to the corporations. So Democrat winning elections only matter in the pace of change of the Leftist trip to socialism. Thus all institutions are now answerable to the Democrats with the GOP being the boogie man whipping boy. It is funny, Democrat policies will destroy the country all the while the GOP will be blamed and eventually eliminated for it.
Great post. Expresses my frustrations well. :)
The Democrats and Never Trumpers inspired people on a holy crusade to rid the world of Donald Trump. When people are fired up like that, it doesn’t take a grand conspiracy to accomplish terrible evil in the name of [fill in the blank].
If the world were sane, people would have laughed uproariously at the election of a guy who had starred in his own reality television show, who had built golf resorts, and who had sponsored Miss Universe and mixed martial arts contests. The world would have said, “Well, this is interesting. I wonder why that happened! Ha ha. This is cool. I wonder what will happen next. He’s got some good ideas. Let’s hear him out.” And then, as America achieved prosperity and energy independence, Americans would have said, “Well, what do you know! He’s a pretty good president! I like this guy a lot! Who would have thought this person would make such a great president. The American people have done it again! They elected the least likely person as their new president, and, son of a gun, it worked out splendidly!”
Sort of like our version of The Dirty Dozen. :) Heroes and saints are the people we least expect to succeed! And that’s why we used to surpass the rest of the world in everything we did. Because we have always been open-minded, and we have always done the least likely thing. We have always liked the underdog. We have always liked the class cutup who was really a brilliant mind under a backward-facing ball cap. We have always been flexible. Not rigid in our thinking, the way Germany and Japan were before World War II. We’ve been different. We’ve been better because we liked and trusted each other. We had confidence in each other.
But we are not that way anymore. Instead, the election of Donald Trump unleashed a viscousness that I will never understand. The depth of this anti-Trump movement is symptomatic of how low trust has sunk our society. The lack of trust is the result of decades of our society telling ourselves we are racist and selfish. And we’ve lost the unique American spirit that kept us leading the world for seventy years. I fear we are now just like everyone else. If you’re not the right sort of person, you can’t succeed. No one will give you chance.
As for me, Trump has my support as long as he is on the ballot. I like the Trump American chapter. There were no political prisoners taken under his leadership. Life was good.
Not new, but absolutely weaponized by the Obama administration. These Marxists know how to do it. More from Kate Jones, whom I am quoting over on another thread:
Written less than a month after Trump took office, and days after Flynn’s ouster.
This was the sabotage of twitter, facebook, et al. There was no reason for it, other than that people, I think, were glad to have a punching bag.
If you cannot prove intention, then all must be accepted.
Looked it up, confirming my biases here (against interest, I might add), but I believe that the term malfeasance requires intent. If there’s no intent, it’s something other than malfeasance — where malfeasance is the charge, intent must be found to make the charge stick.
This is quite different from Comey’s imaginary standard for Clinton’s mishandling of classified material, which A) explicitly does not require intent, and B) still had obvious intent pouring over the top of the cup anyway.
I haven’t looked it up, but I have always suspected that Comey’s “no reasonable person would prosecute” or similar phrasing was 100% chosen to serve as his own defense against charges that would have to meet the “reasonable person” test somewhere down the line. There’s a reason these people aren’t in jail, and it is NOT the absence of crimes. It’s because they know how to game the law.
This is the scariest part of all. You can’t make this stuff up.
“Is there a conspiracy theory about twitter that didn’t turn out to be true? I think so far they’ve all turned out to be true, and if not more true than people thought.” — Elon Musk
Is it against Ricochet’s Terms and Conditions to sign up for multiple accounts so I can give this extra likes?
Names won’t matter. It didn’t matter for Lois Lerner, she came out fine for actively suppressing conservative 501(c)(3) applications. That’s election interference by sitting administration leadership.
I don’t watch the news, but I’m home for Christmas, and my Mom has NBC and CBS on, all day – they are reveling in the Jan 6 stuff, no mention at all about how no Republicans were on the committee, that no counter-evidence was allowed, the whole thing was a sham. It doesn’t matter, it’s the narrative now, and if you don’t like Trump or Republicans, you’re getting your perceptions cemented into place by media every time you consume a second of it.
You’d really have your work cut out to change minds on this, not just Jan 6, but the media narrative, period – its power and reach. See Covid. See how quickly and readily we tossed everything overboard in support of a narrative – our own rights, reason, and decision-making, discarded, casually, because of fear. Fear promulgated by politicians and media, obviously in collusion, with a political outcome as the goal.
It’s working. It’s already worked.
So why would they stop?
Nothing matters unless we make it matter.
Did it matter when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
I’ll have the names of the FBI agents as well. What they did was illegal and it’s time they suffered for it. I have no patience with infiltration that involves encouraging people to commit a crime. People who do that are criminals themselves.
Yeah, same with Lois Lerner and Stroczk, and Hillary Clinton, and…
I wish amend the post to include a demand for the author of that utterly contemptuous, arrogant false formal statement about FBI’s communications with Twitter. I also want the names of everybody who saw and approved it. (Also, Victor Davis Hanson nails it as usual. )
Political skullduggery and outright blackmail is a long tradition at the bureau. I have told this story before but one evening in the summer of 1968, my father put down his newspaper and said out of the blue “Gene McCarthy must be the cleanest politician in America.” This struck us as odd. Dad tended to be more centrist politically. He had been a DOJ attorney bringing civil rights cases in the Deep South and had Michael Barone-like detailed knowledge of politics.
I so bit. “Dad, how do you know?”
“Easy. McCarthy said that one of his first acts if elected was to demand the resignation of J. Edgar Hoover. It has been almost a month and absolutely no personal dirt on McCarthy has appeared in the papers.”
Too bad that he voted on the wrong side . . . that’s a great story.
Part of the process with government is that the bureaucracy has many protections that make them almost impossible to remove or even shift. I have ran across this many times at the local and state levels. I got into a dispute with the local county tax people on my property tax. They doubled my tax for no reason and against state law. I disputed and won in court only to be drug back in next year as they did it again. Went on for over 5 years. At one point I asked the county bureaucrat about why they kept doing it and the answer was basically because they could and that they would win in the end as the judge or whatever that was stopping it would go away eventually. That she was untouchable and knew it. I have ran across these little tyrants and thieves all my life at the local, county, state levels. It is why I hate government so much.
Back in the day, I was willing to tell Democrats that McCarthy was at least an honest Democrat who deserved respect.
I loved a line he delivered that the purpose of the President was “to free the energies of the people.”
McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey were part of the successful effort to keep the Minnesota Democratic Party (DFL) from becoming a virtual subsidiary of the American communist party. Being anti-Communist and expressly patriotic was actually normal for most Democrats back then.
How? Pounding our kitchen tables real hard?
Depends on your audience.
Excellent post.
In the UK, the PTB simply award those who participated in this murderous disaster bright and shiny new knighthoods.
Apparently an individual can not be prosecuted once they become a “Sir” or a “Dame.”
Excellent to hear that about Eugene McCarthy.
I think the story also points to how if Trump had engaged in underage sex romps on Epstein’s Island, we would have all known about it 3 years ago, or more. (Especially given that it is being suggested that Epstein had been a FBI informant for several decades.)
remember ABC killed stories on Epstein’s island – I wonder of George Stephanopoulos had a hand in this – given his old boss relationship with Epstein
@Jon, @bethanymandel, the federal collusion with Big Tech to suppress politically inconvenient speech is probably the most important current story being ignored by mainstream media. This post belongs on the Main Feed.
Wot? This is still not on the main feed?
I think we’ve heard that excuse in the past. It didn’t fly then, nor should it now, right?