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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
@oldbathos – thanks for the link to the VDH article in #18. It is a very good summary – as depressing as it is.
This is an area which needs federal legislation. As bad as it is, it’s unclear to me how it violates a law. I mean, give me the specific act, and then chapter and verse of a law which would allow the prosecutions you want to see. The First Amendment doesn’t count. I don’t think you can prosecute individuals under that. And frankly it doesn’t seem to apply here (at least under my strict constructionist interpretation of it).
You are a very funny person, Old Bathos. The word, FAIR, is not to be used in the context of the FBI, DOJ, or any of our alphabet government agencies. Therefore, I know you must be joking. Ha!Ha!
The names I want, but realize I’ll never get – are the names in Ms Maxwell’s black book…
Embrace the power of “and.”
“We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
I can take the black book over the Twitter names.
The Twitter names can be found through normal methods, Freedom of information, etc. Those names will eventually come out.
It may appear to be a prosecutorial stretch but a charge of conspiracy against rights seems warranted. See, eg, 18 USC 241.
Very interesting. This seems to make it possible to prosecute private citizens for actions which would be constitutional violations if done by the government.
There is clear precedent for civil actions against government when government enlists private agents to infringe first amendment rights. The enlisted agents are not usually the targeted defendants. If a Twitter employee intentionally restricts my first amendment rights would it matter if they conspired? Dunno. It does seem clear, however, that the federal agents are culpable.
There has long been an idea that female secretaries are not to be blamed for what their bosses are doing. This is connected to an assumption of power imbalance that is somehow perceived as greater than a soldier’s to his commanding officer and is certainly steeped in sexism that no longer applies.
Nevertheless, where it might have protected her in the past it has been eroded to the point that a non-combatant, non-military female desk clerk of the ’40s could hang by the neck in 2023.
I hope the people deciding this case do the right thing.
But I have no idea what the right thing would actually be.