The Robust Alliance

Amazing headline and story from NBC News:

How the GOP muzzled the quiet coalition that fought foreign propaganda 

Below are some excerpts with my annotations:

The lead paragraph:

A once-robust alliance of federal agencies, tech companies, election officials and researchers that worked together to thwart foreign propaganda and disinformation has fragmented after years of sustained Republican attacks.

My Comment:  The entire article is carefully written to give the impression that this is all about foreign propaganda.  It's not.  The revelations, from the Twitter files released by Elon Musk, testimony from Zuckerberg and others at Facebook, investigations by House and Senate committees, and information uncovered through the use of FOIA and litigation, is that what was going on was far beyond thwarting foreign misinformation.  It involved monitoring social media by American citizens and included attempts, many successful, by social media and tech companies to censor legal speech, including factually accurate information.  

The better title would be "How Concerned Americans Exposed The 'Quiet Coalition' Seeking To Suppress Speech".

That this article comes from another major media outlet is telling.  NBC and its media compatriots are all about censoring information from its fellow Americans that does not comport with the desired narrative.

One of the authors, Ken Dilanian, is known to have submitted articles in the past to the CIA for its approval prior to publication and he promoted every false story during the heyday of the Russia Collusion Hoax.  NBC is acting here simply as a pass through of the desired narrative promoted by the Intelligence Community (IC) and the federal bureaucracy.

“This is the worst possible outcome in terms of the injunction,” said one U.S. official familiar with the matter. “The symbiotic relationship between the government and the social media companies has definitely been fractured.”

My Comment: Good!  The reference to an injunction is explained below.  Suffice to say the injunction was prompted by a Federal Court finding that the administration was interfering with the free speech rights of American citizens!  It had nothing to do with foreign propaganda.

Beyond the FBI briefings, other coordination efforts have folded after facing pressure from conservatives. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which oversees federal election cybersecurity and has become a favorite target of Republicans, has halted its outreach to Silicon Valley, and the Department of Homeland Security has shuttered a board designed to coordinate its anti-disinformation programs. 

Some politicians are sounding the alarm. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said efforts to stop foreign manipulation of U.S. politics are well within the government’s remit. 

“I understand we don’t want to interdict constitutionally protected speech, but what is constitutionally protected speech?” he said. “Certainly foreign agents don’t have constitutionally protected speech because they’re not subject to our Constitution. I presume bots don’t have constitutionally protected speech. American citizens do.”

My Comment:  Once again, Romney allows himself to be used by his enemies.  The lawsuits and investigations have to do with American citizens, not foreign propaganda.  Let's take a look at how suppression of free speech actually worked.  The Alliance for Securing Democracy, a progressive foreign policy shop, started an initiative called Hamilton 68 after the election in 2016.  Under the direction of former IC personnel, and with the support of elements still within the IC. Hamilton 68 tried to persuade Twitter to censor what it characterized as Russian bot accounts.  With the release of the Twitter files, we now know that Twitter itself found that only 36 of 644 claimed bots were Russian, with most of the rest legitimate accounts by American citizens - and this at a time when Twitter was very active censoring non-Democrat accounts!  Nonetheless, Hamilton 68's "findings" garnered a lot of publicity from a media eager to support the Russia Collusion narrative (Rachel Maddow being one of the most frequent citers of Hamilton 68).

These partnerships between government, corporations and legal and academic researchers were praised after 2020 as a crucial part of ensuring a secure election. 

My Comment: Yes, by the very institutions determined to suppress any information unfavorable to Democrats and the federal bureaucracy.  It's a self-reinforcing circle designed to create and sustain narratives.

Many of them focused on Twitter and Facebook’s decision to temporarily limit the reach of a New York Post story about Biden’s son, Hunter. Published a few weeks before the election, to the tech platforms it had echoes of when Russia leaked Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016. While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg said FBI statements about certain threats fit the pattern of the Hunter Biden story, both later said the agency didn’t specifically say the Biden emails were a foreign intelligence campaign. Digital forensics experts have verified that at least some of those emails were authentic but much remains unknown about the origins of the files.

My Comment:  Talk about "ensuring a secure election"!  This paragraph is written in the most convoluted possible way to minimize what happened.  This is all about the IC gaming the system along with a press favorably disposed towards it.  Notice the "FBI statements about certain threats" phrase.  That's a reference to the fact the FBI knew the Hunter Biden story was about to break and sent an agent from its Silicon Valley office to meet with FB and other companies beforehand to give them enough hints to trigger the ban and make sure the story was suppressed once it became public.  As soon as the New York Post reported on the laptop, 51 former intelligence officials issued a statement saying the story had "all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation", a statement coordinated by Anthony Blinken on behalf of the Biden campaign. That was enough for most of the press to ignore the story and for many social media outlets to ban reference to it.  Only well after Biden had been elected did it become permissible to acknowledge the authenticity of the laptop and its contents, which raised questions not only about Hunter Biden, but what his father knew of, or possibly derived financial benefit from, his son's Russian, Ukrainian, and Chinese connections.  Once the authenticity of the laptop became evident, 50 of the 51 officials initially declined to comment.  The one who did respond told the press that their statement merely said the story had "hallmarks of Russian disinformation", not that the story actually was Russian disinformation, and it wasn't his fault if people can't read.  That's okay since it served its purpose, signaling to a press predisposed to favor Biden that it was okay to suppress the story. Since then, James Clapper, the former DNI who also signed the letter, stated that he objected to the way the press covered it.  But Clapper, at the time a CNN analyst, never said anything publicly at the time.  He's just messing with us.  They knew all along and yet were willing to do anything to kill the story.

Last year, the attorneys general offices of Missouri and Louisiana filed a joint lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging that federal government outreach to tech companies about content on their platform — including law enforcement tips about election integrity and Covid-19 — constituted intimidation and a violation of First Amendment protections to free speech.

My Comment: This is the lawsuit which prompted the injunction mentioned earlier.  Along with the two state plaintiffs, three healthcare professionals are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit.  The three are represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, an organization founded by Columbia Law Professor Philip Hamburger with the mission of taking on the unconstitutional administrative state which has become a 4th branch of the Federal government, an organization to which I am a donor.  Notice the NBC wording here. When they want to denigrate the basis of the lawsuit they use the word "outreach".  Sounds innocent, doesn't it?  But at the top of the article when they want to emphasize the importance of what the government is doing they refer to the "robust alliance" and "quiet coalition" working together "to thwart", and then later to the "symbiotic relationship between the government and social media".  In fact, the basis for the injunction was the Court finding that discovery had revealed there was a coordinated effort involving the government to suppress speech, including, by the way, factually accurate statements about Covid-19.  The case is all about domestic suppression of free speech, not foreign propaganda.

The NBC story is simply propaganda and misinformation designed to mislead the public and influence elections.  Perhaps we should complain to the Intelligence Community or Special Counsel Smith!

Two related points.

As more information has come out about the collaboration between the IC and social media, some supporters of that coordination have pointed out that it began in the Trump Administration.  Yes, it did which highlights one of the fundamental problems with the federal bureaucracy has it has grown over the decades.  An opposition party, and make no mistake, the bureaucracy sees the GOP as the opposition, will have great difficulty controlling the administrative state.  In other words, the people's elected representatives will be undermined by the bureaucracy if it does not approve of a proposed policy.  In the case of the Trump administration this problem was exacerbated by a Chief Executive ignorant of government operations and not interested in learning, compounded by his short attention span and being easily distractable, along with a overwhelming disinterest in details.  He also thought that tweeting about something was the same as doing something.  While Trump may be an extreme example, any future GOP president will face resistance.

The biggest issue is the lack of trust in institutions - both in government and throughout American society.  In their hysterical reaction to the election of Trump in 2016, institutions, in and out of government, have gone so far overboard as to completely wreck their credibility, finishing the job started in recent decades.(1)  Yes, Trump has no credibility, but who's left standing that does?  Do I think that the federal government could have a proper role in identifying and limiting the impact of foreign propaganda?  Yes, I do.  But why would I trust an Intelligence Community which helped create the Russia Collusion hoax to do so?  Why would I trust an Intelligence Community which acted to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story and speech by American citizens of which it disapproved.  Why would I trust a media to blow the whistle on any governmental overstepping of its proper bounds, when the media worked with the government to create the narratives I've just described?

Nor is this merely a partisan story.  If you examine the media, whether left or right (and all media now is left or right), who would you trust today?  I certainly trust very little at this point.  I don't watch any network or cable news of any political persuasion but for society to function there have to be some institutions we have confidence in.  I'm fortunate, being retired and having time to look at original documents and evaluate the credibility of sources, and I had a lot of experience in my career doing investigations.  By being willing to follow the evidence where it leads I've apparently ended up in a small group that knows both that Trump's "Stop The Steal" was lunacy, and the Russia Collusion story the biggest political scandal in our lifetimes.  But even I don't have the time to dive into everything.  What can people who have jobs and are raising families do?  I've also got time to evaluate people and new outlets on Twitter, Substack and elsewhere, seeking those in whom I might place some trust.  Most people don't have the time to do what I've been doing.  For most people, what is there on the right or left that can trusted to not just be generating narratives in support of their beliefs?  I don't know the answer and that is very troubling for our future.

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(1)  I observed in 2016 that Trump was Silvio Berlusconi, not Adolf Hitler.  I was right.  The Resistance went down a rabbit hole, while the real anti-democratic forces gathered on the left and seized control of the commanding heights.