The Roundup: Week Ending December 10, 2022
The Roundup: Week Ending December 10, 2022
This week has been insane. Here we go:
#Twitterfiles. Some people call it #Twittergate. Elon Musk has cooperated with independent journalists and since last weekend, there have been four drops of information.
Twitter legal counsel (and former FBI - yes, you read that right) legal counsel James Baker was fired from Twitter after the first #Twitterfile drop.
Judge blocks Biden admin’s gender transition surgery mandate
The House passed the Respect for Marriage Act
#Twitterfiles/#Twittergate
I’ll let you read the threads below (and they are well worth reading). They expose Twitter leadership, the Biden campaign (and later administration) and some three-letter government agencies’ deep involvement in censoring/suppressing/influencing information toward one distinctly left, partisan viewpoint.
Here’s a great picture summarizing things so far:
FoxNews reported on the media’s stunning silence on the Twitterfiles.
"This is by far one of the most egregious examples of an industry doing something that was completely and totally wrong and unethical that we've ever seen," Concha said on "Fox & Friends First" Monday. Concha went on to highlight liberal media outlets’ double standard for viewing Twitter under its previous leadership as "an example of truth and a deterrent of misinformation" but now failing to cover the censorship that occurred.
There’s no way I can cover all the back and forth from this past week here. Here’s a brief summary:
Drop 1: Exposed Twitter’s intentional suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story that the New York Post exposed in October 2020 (just weeks before the election.) Twitter invented reasons to block the story and also to ban the New York Post’s Twitter account. We also learned the FBI was involved.
See also:
Hunter Biden laptop bombshell: Twitter invented reason to censor Post’s reporting, by Victor Nava, Kenneth Garger and Bruce Golding, New York Post, December 2, 2022
Drop 2: Exposed Twitter’s active suppression of conservative accounts and practice of “shadowbanning.” Twitter execs had argued before Congress in the past that there was no such thing.
“The journalist [Bari Weiss] revealed a cabal of executives, including Twitter founder and then CEO Jack Dorsey and FMR General Counsel Vijaya Gadde, placed accounts on the so-called trend blacklist. These executives previously stated no shadow-banning was taking place.”
Drop 3: Details the decisions and policy on-the-fly being made as Twitter execs lay the groundwork to banning the President of the United States from Twitter. They had already begun limiting his tweets’ influence and scope, even preventing users from retweeting them. Some users also found themselves banned for reposting Trump’s tweets.
"…while talk of banning Trump from Twitter took place from January 6 until January 8, the framework which led to his banning, was laid out months prior. Senior executives were using subjective moderation to choose what they believe did and didn’t violate the company’s policies.
A Slack channel from the company titled “us2020_xfn_enforcement” showed the evolving thinking of top officials in late 2020 until early 2021. Through this channel, employees would discuss election related removals, especially tweets from high profile accounts. During this time, executives were liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content.
Drop 4: In conjunction with internal teams and with input from Biden campaign leaders and the events of January 6, 2021, Twitter makes the decision to ban Trump from the platform.
All these revelations have led to quite the 🔥 on social media. Some speculate that this is indeed what Twitter needed to be relevant again. No one is shocked that liberals are silent or furiously venomous.
With the House now being under Republican control, the next few months should be interesting.
More revelations are coming
Musk has cryptically tweeted that Twitter’s suppression of information was not just U.S.-based. Brazilian leaders are looking into how Twitter may have sought to influence its recent presidential election.
Musk tweeted on Sunday, December 11, that there would be an upcoming drop about how social media companies (not just Twitter) and government agencies colluded to control and censor information about the pandemic.
Second judge blocks Biden’s gender surgery mandate
“The federal government has no business forcing doctors to violate their consciences or perform controversial procedures that could permanently harm their patients,” Becket vice president and senior counsel Luke Goodrich said in a press release. “This is a common-sense ruling that protects patients, aligns with best medical practice, and ensures doctors can follow their Hippocratic Oath to ‘do no harm.’”
Respect for Marriage Act
This piece of legislation requires the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages performed in states where they are legal. The bill won approval in a 258-169 vote, after the Senate passed it 61-36 last week. The legislation now heads to the White House for President Biden's signature into law.
“…the act creates a new private cause of action. Anytime the federal government empowers plaintiffs’ attorneys to sue more people, we should be wary… And creative trial lawyers are sure to advocate for its expansion… So, the act gives activists a ticket to federal court to engage in litigation aimed at pushing faith-based institutions out of the public square. The point of this sort of legal warfare (or “lawfare”) isn’t always to win, but to grind defendants down with relentless litigation. And that seems to be the case here; the Senate rejected amendments to the act that would have eliminated or cabined the private cause of action…”
“I think it comes from an honest hope to settle the same-sex marriage issue in a way that protects the conscience of all. If that’s the case, defenders of the act are straining toward a mirage, because its only practical effect is to issue legal hunting licenses to activists bent on silencing debate.”
Elon Musk fires Twitter lawyer James Baker over ‘suppression’ of documents on Hunter Biden story, by Victor Nava, New York Post, December 6, 2022
NBC, ABC, CBS called out for silence on Elon Musk's 'Twitter files' release: 'They're failing Americans,' by Amy Nelson, Fox News, December 5, 2022
Ibid.
It’s another story, but the lawsuit that the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana have levied against the government revealed that members of the DOJ, Biden administration and FBI met weekly with social media leaders to actively censor and prohibit information (which they labeled “misinformation” but now appears to be dissenting, evidence-based information from the governmental narrative about everything from riots to COVID to election fraud).
Trump Weighs In On Twitter Files Part 2, by One America News, December 9, 2022
Twitter Files Part 3: The Suppression Continues, by Sophia Flores, One America News, December 9, 2022
Federal Court Permanently Blocks Biden’s Gender Transition Mandate, by Breccan F. Thies, Breitbart News, December 10, 2022
Respect for Marriage Act passes the House, heads to Biden's desk, by Brianna Herlihy, Fox News, December 8, 2022
Which commentators are right about Senate’s passage of Respect for Marriage Act? by Ryan Bangert, The Hill, December 5, 2022