The Twitter Files

There's Fascism in Your Social Media

Over the past few years, it’s been common to hear defenders of social media censorship retort to those who complain about, “Twitter is a private company, and they can ban whom they want.  If you don’t like it, go start your own Twitter!” 

One interesting aspect of this argument is that those who made it generally were individuals who were not known to respect laissez-faire capitalism or private property.  In fact, they tended to be socialists of one stripe or another. 

Those who complained about the censorship, generally those people who tended to favor political and economic liberty, then were wrongfooted.  Either they felt they had to call for government regulation of social media, which contradicted their free market principles or to make charges that the government was behind the censorship, at which point they’d be called “conspiracy theorists.”

“Conspiracy theorist” is one of those terms that seemingly everyone wants to avoid.  “I’m by no means a conspiracy theorist,” is a common turn of phrase people will use when they’re about to introduce an idea that sounds like a conspiracy theory.  It’s as if to believe in conspiracies is the very height of ignorance, and that one must deny conspiracies exist if he wants to remain a member of society in good standing. 

But conspiracies do exist and are even recognized in criminal law.  In many Western nations, one can be charged with conspiracy to commit murder.  In the Bible, we find many conspiracies. When Absalom sought to overthrow David, his plot was rightly described in the King James Bible as a conspiracy.  Twice, the Apostle Paul found himself the object of conspiracies to kill him.  The arrest and crucifixion of Christ was the culmination of a three-year-long conspiracy by the Jewish religious leaders to get rid of the man they perceived, rightly, as a threat to their power.  Doubtless, other examples of conspiracies can be found in the Bible, but these should be sufficient to make the point that conspiracies are not a figment of the imagination, but a documented historical reality. 

If he has done nothing else, Elon Musk has exposed for all the world to see that the “conspiracy theorists” were right.  As the Twitter Files have revealed, the government was deeply involved in the social media censorship business.  Not that there was any lack of evidence of this previously.  For example, the New York Post ran a headline on July 15, 2021, that read, “White House ‘flagging’ posts for Facebook to censor over COVID ‘misinformation.’” The Independent ran a piece on February 3, 2022, with the headline, “White House urges Spotify to take further action on Joe Rogan: “More can be done.’”  Why did the White House want Spotify to censor Joe Rogan?  It was due to the popular podcaster’s explosive interview with Dr. Robert Malone, who among other things, called the hysteria over Covid an example of “mass formation psychosis.” 

Going back further, in October 2016, less than a month before Donald Trump’s surprise victory in that year’s presidential election, Barak Obama gave a speech in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University.  During his talk, then-President Obama decried America’s “wild, wild west” media environment.  Said Obama, “There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don't have any basis in anything that's actually happening in the world."  Put differently, Obama was calling for a Ministry of Truth straight out of George Orwell.

And indeed, earlier this year the Biden Regime established its very own Ministry of Truth, calling their version the Disinformation Governance Board, and placing Nina Jankowicz at the head of it.  Jankowicz, who showed herself in her short tenure at the helm of this organization to be something of an odd combination of Mary Poppins and censorious Deep State operative, was ousted from her position and the Disinformation Governance Board was supposedly shut down.

I say, “supposedly shut down,” because years of observing tyrants in action have convinced me that they rarely, if ever, repent of their evil ways.  Sometimes circumstances require that they beat a tactical retreat, but they will almost always attempt to implement their evil plans in some other way when circumstances permit.     

But returning to Elon Musk and the Twitter Files, the famed engineer and entrepreneur has done a great service to this nation.  Through his release of the Twitter Files to reporters Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, Musk has made it clear just how much in bed Twitter was with the government when it came to shutting down the free speech rights of the American people.  In his Twitter thread from December 16, Taibbi called Twitter a subsidiary of the FBI and noted that “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.” 

In her reporting on the Twitter Files, Bari Weiss discovered that Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel James Baker had been involved in vetting the initial batch of Musk’s Twitter files release.  Baker, it turns out, was a former top FBI lawyer who was involved in investigating the bogus Trump Russian collusion hoax.  Among the items Baker was involved with at Twitter was the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, an egregious example of suppression of the truth that almost certainly helped put Biden in the White House.  So you had a former FBI lawyer involved in the anti-Trump Russian collusion hoax working for Twitter to suppress a story damaging to Biden and helpful to Trump.  Then, when Musk released the files, Baker had his hands all over them to suppress the truth once again from getting to the American people. 

There’s a word to describe this sort of “partnership” between government and private business.  It’s called fascism.  What was going on a Twitter, and certainly is still going on at Facebook and YouTube as well as on other big tech platforms, was the government telling these privately owned entities what to censor and what to promote.  Such “partnerships” fit the classic definition of fascism, the merger of state and corporate powers.  It also fits the description of fascism that John Robbins used in his book Ecclesiastical Megalomania.  Speaking of Pope Leo XIII, Robbins noted that the Pope drew a distinction between ownership and use (57).  In a communist system, the state owns the means of production.  For example, communism means that the state owns the social media networks.  There is no such thing as a privately owned Twitter or Facebook or YouTube.  But in a fascist system, ownership of the social media platforms remains in private hands while the government tells them what the censor and what to promote.   

Free speech and the politico/economic system that supports it, constitutional capitalism, are Christian ideas.  Living in America as I have all my life, I admit I have tended to take these things for granted.  Free speech is just how things are done around here.  Why, we’d never have a censorship regime in America as they did in the Soviet Union.  At least that’s what I thought growing up.  Now that I’m a bit wiser, I see how easily tyranny can come to a nation.  Yes, it can happen here.  In fact, it already has happened here. 

Perhaps the most galling aspect of the Twitter Files is that they serve as proof that the federal government violated, and is still violating, the First Amendment guarantee of free speech by outsourcing its tyranny to third parties.  The federal government cannot prevent people from speaking freely and pushing back on its pet narratives such as the safety and efficacy of the Covid jab or the righteousness of its involvement in Ukraine, so it attempted to do an end around by having Twitter, and Facebook, and YouTube do their dirty work for them.  But outsourcing its censorship to Twitter does not get the FBI off the hook.  Indeed, it is imperative that Congress hold them accountable for their clearly unconstitutional, out-of-control behavior.

Elon Musk is not, as far as I can tell, a Christian.  But he does seem to have a genuine respect for free speech and has done this nation a great service in bringing to light the dark secrets of censorship at Twitter.  This has rattled the Democrats who have been the biggest supports of censorship to the point that last week legal scholar Jonathan Turley wrote about Democratic members of Congress sending a threatening letter to Facebook telling them, in so many words, that they shouldn’t get any crazy ideas about relaxing their censorship efforts.  In “Censor ore Else: Democratic Members Warn Facebook Not to ‘Backslide” on Censorship,” Turley noted that the left is panicking about the potential for the collapse of what until now seemed like an impervious censorship regime at the big tech companies.  “Now,” wrote Turley, “some of the greatest advocates of censorship in Congress are specifically warning Facebook not to follow Twitter in restoring free speech to its platform.”  

Turley notes that attempts led by Hillary Clinton to starve Twitter of revenue by getting companies not to advertise on Twitter are not working out as planned as “citizens are flocking to Twitter and signing up in record numbers.”  

This is a healthy sign.  As Christians, we should rejoice in this news.  Perhaps the Lord will yet have mercy on the nations of the West.