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Communist Defectors Warn About Four Stages of Subversion — And America Is on the Last One


BY: SCOTT S. POWELL | APRIL 29, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/29/communist-defectors-warn-about-four-stages-of-subversion-and-america-is-on-the-last-one/

Hammer and Sickle from Museum of Communism in Prague.

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Forty years ago, a KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov, revealed the systematic plan Soviet communists used to take down countries and establish a communist-type society and regime. More recently, a Chinese defector immigrant, Xi Van Fleet, has been on a crusade to warn Americans about the parallels between what is happening in America today and what Mao did in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The systematic plan Bezmenov revealed involves four fluid stages of communist subversion: 1) demoralization, 2) disorientation, 3) crisis, and 4) normalization. In Mao’s America, Xi Van Fleet explains how Mao’s destruction of the “Four Olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits) is being replicated by today’s leftist cancel culture, which will end what is left of freedom in America if not stopped.

Demoralization

The first stage in the Bezmenov analysis, demoralization, lasts a generation or more. One of its main thrusts is to undermine the Judeo-Christian beliefs, customs, habits, and traditions that have been foundational to America — these parallel the Four Olds that Mao destroyed in China.

Another target for demoralization is the family, which communists want to replace with the state. Xi Van Fleet points out that just as the Chinese Cultural Revolution turned children against their parents, American families are under increasing attack. Government schools, the medical establishment, and popular culture — which now support the transgender movement — are increasingly turning children against their parents.

A third demoralization strategy is breaking the people’s loyalty and love for their country by rewriting history, denigrating the founders and national heroes, and destroying historic monuments — again, the Four Olds. In summary, the goal of demoralization is to disconnect people from the virtue of the past and render them unable to assess what is true.

Disorientation

The second stage of the communist strategy, according to Bezmenov, builds on demoralization to advance society’s disorientation, a condition wherein the masses feel bewildered and helpless. While it’s impossible to prove intentionality at this time, the China-originated Covid-19 pandemic caused massive disorientation in the U.S. when the government mandated masks, social distancing, quarantines, lockdowns, and the abandonment of tried-and-true medical practices of preventive and therapeutic treatments.

Another important part of disorientation happened early in the Covid crisis after the death of George Floyd. Assertions of systemic racism in law enforcement triggered rioting, looting, and the destruction of several billion dollars’ worth of property, along with the tearing down of historic statues and memorials in many cities across the United States.

Americans became further disoriented when they realized government authorities were unable or unwilling to do anything about the destruction in big cities across America. There were few arrests while more than 2,000 police officers were injured. Disorientation may have reached its peak when cities with the most lawlessness, such as Minneapolis, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, initiated efforts to defund local law enforcement.

Crisis

Following disorientation is the crisis stage. An unprecedented crisis stage for America came in November 2020 with election rigging. Democrat operatives exploited the fear factor of Covid-19 in the summer months of 2020. They visited almost every swing state to change voting rules to accommodate expanded mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and extended vote-tally deadlines — all of which facilitate vote fraud.

The crisis that ensued from election irregularity was deepened by the massive media and social media censorship and cancellation campaigns that began well before the Nov. 3, 2020, election. The Department of Homeland Security division called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, better known as CISA, collaborated with the Stanford University-based NGO Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to suppress information that would help Trump.

EIP launched a campaign to prevent the public from challenging the anticipated voting irregularities by getting agreements from all the social media companies — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and Pinterest — to modify their customer terms-of-service policies to incorporate language about “delegitimization.” Once that was accomplished, according to Mike Benz, a former U.S. State Department communications policymaker and an expert on propaganda, the door was opened to algorithmic mass censorship and cancellation.

EIP exerted pressure on all the social media companies to adhere to their customer service policies and censor, cancel, or deplatform any content that contained “delegitimized” narratives about new election protocols and “processes,” election “issues and outcomes,” “mail-in ballots,” “early voting,” “drop boxes,” “Dominion Voting Systems,” and “Antifa.”

The media treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop story that broke in mid-October 2020 in the New York Post illustrates just how quickly the channels of propaganda and media manipulation fall into place. The laptop story (which contained massive incriminating evidence revealing a compromised Joe Biden family), was immediately delegitimized and taken down from every social media site. At the same time, 51 former top intelligence officials signed a letter, published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, stating that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

After the 2020 election, social media effectively thwarted discussion about election fraud. Again EIP insisted that social media companies uphold the terms-of-service contracts that required censoring social media content containing newly delegitimized terms, such as “Stop the Steal,” “dead voter rolls,” “Sharpiegate,” “stolen election,” “ballot harvesting,” and “Postal Service,” to name a few. Additionally, people questioning the integrity of the 2020 election were marginalized by the media and discredited as “election deniers.”

Bemenov’s four stages are fluid, so demoralization and disorientation continue in the crisis stage. We see this with lawfare against Donald Trump, his aides, and some 1,200 Jan. 6 participants arrested by the FBI.

The target is not just Trump and his supporters, but the American people, who are now seeing that large parts of the justice system in America resemble that of a banana republic. With equal justice under the law and respect for the Constitution being mocked, the subliminal message is, “This is not the America you know; it’s a new world that you have entered, so get used to it.”

Normalization

While America is still in the crisis stage, some subversion experts argue that the lawfare, censorship, and cancellation regimes that now exist are really part of the last stage of communist takeover known as normalization — Bezmenov’s fourth and final stage. If America’s borders remain open and the American people are denied access to information, become accustomed to rigged elections, accept limitations on free speech, and acquiesce to the rewriting of history, the constitutional republic that was the United States will be gone, and the new world of communist global elite control will be normalized.

John Adams, the second president, unequivocally warned, “Liberty once lost is lost forever.” It is no longer enough just to man the ramparts. It’s time for the people to turn the tables on the elite destroyers of our constitutional republic.

Scott Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. His recent book, “Rediscovering America,” was the No. 1 Amazon New Release in the history genre for eight weeks. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org.

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Exclusive: Jordan Tells CISA To Fork Over Docs About Its Collusion with Pennsylvania to Target Election Speech


BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | MARCH 20, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/20/exclusive-jordan-tells-cisa-to-fork-over-docs-about-collusion-with-pennsylvania-to-target-election-speech/

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter Wednesday to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA) — which has been called the “nerve center” of government censorship — notifying the agency that documents related to CISA’s partnership with Pennsylvania to target so-called “misinformation” are included in the Judiciary Committee’s ongoing subpoena, according to a copy of the letter obtained exclusively by The Federalist.

Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro recently announced the state’s Election Task Force would partner with CISA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to “mitigate threats to the election process, protect voters from intimidation, and provide voters with accurate, trusted election information.”

The Pennsylvania State Department revealed to The Federalist that the state would also be partnering with CISA to “open lines of communication and share intelligence among the included government agencies.” The State Department did not clarify what “intelligence” refers to or what will be done with said information.

Jordan demanded the DHS provide more detailed information on the partnership by April 3.

“The Committee on the Judiciary is conducting oversight of how and to what extent the Executive Branch has coerced or colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor lawful speech,” the letter reads. “In light of recent public reporting that the [CISA] has partnered with at least one state government in a way that may target Americans’ speech online in the lead-up to the upcoming 2024 election, we write to notify you that documents about such partnerships are responsive to the Committee’s April 28, 2023 subpoena.”

https://www.scribd.com/embeds/715382868/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-dI7I48lQYKZzytDIZ0Rt

Jim Jordan sends letter to … by The Federalist

“The reporting about a partnership between CISA and the Pennsylvania Election Threats Task Force reinforces concerns that CISA is again partnering with third parties in a way that will censor or chill Americans’ speech,” Jordan wrote.

“The government’s involvement in this type of speech is particularly alarming because, as the Supreme Court has recognized, ‘the importance of First Amendment protections is at its zenith’ for ‘core political speech,’” the letter continued.

[READ NEXT: Government Censorship Op Targeted The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway, Sean Davis During 2020 Election]

Shapiro said the task force would “combat misinformation” but CISA, the DHS subagency which congressional Republicans have called the “nerve center” of federal censorship, has a history of targeting Americans and their free speech by smearing it as “misinformation” or “malformation.” CISA defines “malinformation” as anything “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

In other words, CISA has censored Americans for stating true information. For example, America First Legal obtained documents showing CISA created a six-point list in October 2020 warning of the risks of unsupervised mail-in voting. Publicly, however, the weaponized agency flagged social media posts highlighting those concerns as “disinformation” for Big Tech companies to censor.

CISA partnered with consulting firm Deloitte and asked for notifications of social media trends about “narratives relating to ‘Vote-By-Mail’ — and to flag specific social media posts for CISA’s awareness and attention.”

One of the posts Deloitte flagged was an October 2020 tweet from then-President Donald Trump in which he claimed there were “Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA.”

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

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Why CISA’s Censorship and Election Interference Work Is The ‘Most Insidious Attack on American Democracy’


BY: M.D. KITTLE | MARCH 05, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/05/why-cisas-censorship-and-election-interference-work-is-the-most-insidious-attack-on-american-democracy/

Cyber security illustration of lock on grid as shadowy characters pass.

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West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner last month eviscerated the Big Brother censorship operation known as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” the election integrity champion told officials from the FBI and CISA on a panel at the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) in Washington, D.C., according to Wired’s Eric Geller. While Geller did his best to defend the federal agency — under the suggestive headline, “How a Right-Wing Controversy Could Sabotage US Election Security” — its history of censorship and election interference validate Warner’s concern.

The agency’s work, particularly the extracurricular business CISA has conducted in recent years, has been rightly criticized for its massive overreach. A report released last fall by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government details just how CISA “Colluded With Big Tech And ‘Disinformation’ Partners To Censor Americans.”

“Although the investigation is ongoing, information obtained to date has revealed that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—an upstart agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has facilitated the censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries,” the congressional report states. 

The report goes on to assert that the shadowy agency has “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.” 

‘Platforms Have Got to Get More Comfortable With Gov’t’

Launched in 2018, CISA was supposed to be “an ancillary agency designed to protect ‘critical infrastructure’ and guard against cybersecurity threats,” the report notes. By 2020, the agency was “routinely” targeting what CISA officials claimed to be “disinformation” on social media. A year later, the agency had established a formal team devoted to what it decided was “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the latter of which CISA defines as “information based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In other words, factual information that is problematic to the Biden regime. 

CISA’s parent agency DHS launched the much-ridiculed and ultimately disbanded “Disinformation Governance Board” in 2022, to streamline the work of colluding with social media providers to shut down speech the government didn’t like or found inconvenient. 

A federal lawsuit filed by then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator, uncovered troubling conversations between the Biden administration and private companies about the pathways for removing information the government deemed false or misleading. A federal judge in a ruling last year barred the Biden administration from its censorship work, although the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the injunction when it took up the case.

Leaked documents obtained by The Intercept show that Microsoft executive and former DHS official Matt Masterson texted CISA director Jen Easterly in February 2022, saying “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.”

But it seems Big Tech was getting pretty comfortable with the Biden administration’s puppet enforcer. The Intercept report showed, among other alarming revelations, that Facebook operated a portal where Homeland Security could report allegations of “disinformation.”  CISA also has worked in concert with the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project, which is accused of conspiring with state, local, and federal government officials to trample the First Amendment rights of social media users, according to a class-action lawsuit. 

“But the EIP did not act alone. In fact, the EIP was created ‘in consultation’ with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, with the idea for the EIP allegedly originating from CISA interns who were Stanford students,”  The Federalist’s Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland wrote in May. 

‘Only a Matter of Time’ 

Facing more public outrage over its unconstitutional actions, the CISA audaciously insisted it merely plays an “informational” role. 

As the congressional report notes: 

  • CISA is “working with federal partners to mature a whole-of-government approach” to curbing alleged misinformation and disinformation.
  • CISA considered the creation of an anti-misinformation “rapid response team” capable of physically deploying across the United States. 
  • CISA moved its censorship operation to a CISA-funded non-profit after CISA and the Biden Administration were sued in federal court, implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional.
  • CISA wanted to use the same CISA-funded non-profit as its mouthpiece to “avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”  

The agency’s advisory committee, according to the report, worried that it would be “only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.” Incidentally, the advisory committee created a “Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee whose members included Vijaya Gadde — Twitter’s former chief legal officer who was “involved in censoring [the New York] Post’s Hunter Biden laptop” story. Gadde was also “behind the decision to permanently ban former President Trump from Twitter.”

‘Most Insidious Attack on American Democracy’

Geller’s Wired piece took aim at Warner, West Virginia’s outspoken secretary of state who is making a run for governor. At last month’s secretaries of state meeting, Warner “lambasted” CISA and FBI officials for “what he said was their agencies’ scheme to suppress the truth about US president Joe Biden’s son Hunter during the 2020 election and then cover their tracks,” Geller wrote, as if he is not privy to the same public documents and testimony confirming Warner’s assertions. In Geller’s account, the FBI was merely advising Twitter and Facebook to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation.

But how do you square the intelligence community’s “advisory” role after learning Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign prompted a former acting CIA director to “help Biden” by leading 50 colleagues to sign a letter spreading the false claim that damning emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop — published by the New York Post — were Russian disinformation? And all of that just weeks before the election.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the FBI and CISA officials did not respond to Warner’s charges and the meeting quickly went on, Geller reported before he quickly attempted to establish Warner as a dreaded “election denier,” noting that the secretary of state “attended an election-denier rally after Biden’s 2020 victory.” 

But Warner is no conspiracy theorist. The West Point graduate served nearly a quarter century in the U.S. Army and then worked with the State Department in Afghanistan, according to his bio. Warner knows about security threats. 

CISA’s activities are “the most insidious attack on American democracy that I know of in U.S. history,” Warner told The Federalist in an interview last week. He called the targeting and censoring of state-defined “disinformation” a “psychological operation against the American people” that is “as bad as it gets.” 

Warner said he has spoken to CISA officials multiple times but that they have yet to heed his calls for an after-action report on the 2020 election — to truly find out what went right and what went wrong. 

A Warning

It appears most state elections officials don’t want to deal with the actual threat of the Biden administration’s disinformation and political silencing campaign. 

“They know they will be lambasted by mainstream press,” Warner said. No one wants to be hit with the “election denier” label so effectively applied by the accomplice media. “It’s not easy, not politically expedient for them.”

Warner is one of the few speaking out against CISA and pulling away from involvement with the agency. But Geller worries Warner’s conservative colleagues will join him in breaking ties with CISA, as conservatives in Congress work to cut the budget of the abusive agency.  

“It remains unclear how many of Warner’s colleagues agree with him. But when WIRED surveyed the other 23 Republican secretaries who oversee elections in their states, several of them said they would continue working with CISA,” Geller wrote. 

“But others who praised CISA’s support also sounded notes of caution,” he added. 

They need only look at CISA’s record and its rhetoric in the agency’s brief existence to know that Warner’s warnings aren’t merely the stuff of a “right-wing controversy.” 

“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” CISA director Jen Easterly said at 2021’s RE:WIRED conference.

Apparently running roughshod over the First Amendment isn’t warning enough. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

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6 Takeaways from the Biden Admin’s Court Quest to Keep Censoring Americans Online


BY: JOY PULLMANN | AUGUST 14, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/14/6-takeaways-from-the-biden-admins-court-quest-to-keep-censoring-americans-online/

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On Thursday afternoon, three Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges heard Biden administration arguments to let government keep pressuring social media monopolies to ban ideas they don’t like from the internet. On July 4, a lower court had ordered the Biden administration to cease what it called “arguably … the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The Fifth Circuit paused that injunction on July 14 and heard oral arguments against it on Aug. 10 in Missouri v. Biden.

In this major case likely to hit the U.S. Supreme Court, the Biden administration is fighting to stop American citizens from sharing messages government officials don’t like. This case uncovered reams of White House and other high-level officials threatening internet monopolies with the end of their entire business model if they didn’t ban speech by Democrats’ political opponents.

“It’s far beyond the scope of what people realize,” says a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Zhonette Brown, of the public interest firm New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA).

Internal documents Twitter divulged under new owner Elon Musk provided more proof that social media monopolies are silencing Americans from Tucker Carlson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to millions of non-famous citizens at the behest of government pressure. Here are some key takeaways from Thursday’s oral arguments and earlier revelations from this massive First Amendment case.

1. By the Government’s Own Definition, It’s Censoring

Key to Thursday’s arguments was the question of coercion: Did government demands of internet monopolies equal coercion, or were those merely officials advocating for their views?

“If the government was doing something like that in a coercive manner, then that could be the subject of a proper injunction,” Department of Justice lawyer Daniel Bentele Hahs Tenny told the court in his opening remarks. “The problem is that what you would have to do is say, ‘Here is what the government is doing that’s coercive, and I’m enjoining that.’”

Judge Don Willett responded: “How do you define coercive?”

Tenny: “I don’t think there’s too much disagreement on this point. Coercive is where a reasonable person would construe it to be backed by a threat of government action against a party if it didn’t comply.”

That’s exactly what the government did, the voluminous documents already discovered in this case show. In just one of the examples, Meta executive Nick Clegg, a former high-ranking U.K. official, told his bosses Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg: “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content” (emphasis original).

Clegg also characterized to colleagues an interaction with Andy Slavitt, a White House Covid adviser, this way: “[H]e was outraged – not too strong a word to describe his reaction – that we did not remove this post” of a meme about trial lawyers getting 10 years of vaccine-injured clients from government mandates.

2. Government Officials Treated Internet Monopolies Like Their Subordinates

The Fifth Circuit panel demonstrated familiarity with the numerous examples of this kind of government behavior, such as this email exchange between White House digital director Rob Flaherty and Facebook, in which Flaherty swears at Facebook engineers, “Are you guys f-cking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”

“What appears to be in the record are these irate messages from time to time from high-ranking government officials that say, “You didn’t do this yet,’” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod told Tenny. “And that’s my toning down the language. … So it’s like, ‘Jump!’ and, ‘How high?’”

The judges also noted the White House publicly threatened the business model of all online communications monopolies through potentially revoking Section 230 and launching antitrust lawsuits. The lawsuit documentation shows leading Democrats making the same public threats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and multiple U.S. senators.

Joe Biden even threatened to hold Zuckerberg criminally liable for not running Facebook the way Biden wanted. In office, Biden also famously accused Facebook of “killing people” by not doing enough to spread the administration’s message and suppress opposing messages. FBI agent Elvis Chan‘s deposition in this case noted federal officials showed adverse legislation to social media monopolies’ leaders as examples of what the government would do to them if they didn’t ban Americans’ speech.

“It’s not like, ‘We think this would be a good public policy and we want to explain to you why that would be a good policy,” Elrod said. “There seems to be some very close relationship that they’re having these — ‘This isn’t being done fast enough’ you know, like it’s a supervisor complaining about a worker.”

3. Judges Likened Government Behavior to Mobsters

Tenny claimed there was no “or else” explaining what the government “would do” if the internet monopolies didn’t obey, so there was no government coercion present.

“This is an analogy, probably an inapt analogy, so if you’ll excuse me — like if somebody is in these movies we see with the mob or something. They don’t spell out things but they have these ongoing relationships and they never actually say, ‘Go do this or else you’re going to have this consequence,’ but everybody just knows,” Elrod replied. “And I’m certainly not equating the federal government with anybody in illegal organized crime, but there are certain relationships that people know things without always saying the ‘Or else.’”

Willett followed that up by commenting the case documentation makes it look like the government is “relying on a fairly unsubtle kind of strong-arming and veiled or not so veiled threats. ‘That’s a really nice social media platform you got there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

4. Censorship Is Election Interference

The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, John Sauer, initiated this case as Louisiana’s solicitor general. In representing state government interests to the judges, he noted that elected officials have to pay attention to what their constituents are saying online, or they won’t have a good read on what voters what them to do in office.

“We’ve gotta be able to craft messages and know what policies we’re adopting to be responsive to our citizens,” he summarized from statements submitted to the court from multiple state officials. “…Going back to 1863, as everyone knows, going back to the Federalist number 56 where [Bill of Rights author James] Madison said it, everyone knows state legislators have a sovereign interest in knowing what their constituents think and feel, and that’s directly impacted.”

When the federal government silences some Americans’ views online, Sauer said, it makes it harder for elected representatives to actually represent them. Two of the state injuries the plaintiffs assert against the federal government’s censorship are “Interference with our ability to hear our constituents’ voices on social media” and “interference with our ability to have a fair and unbiased process for our people to organize and petition the government for grievances.”

Court documents also revealed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a federal agency, set up a private entity to ban and throttle election-related online speech Democrats dislike. Much of the information choked by this algorithmic censorship operation is true, such as the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s laptop, investigations and members of Congress have noted.

“They invented a whole new word, ‘mal-information,’ to justify going after the censorship of true speech and ideas,” Sauer said last month in a public discussion of the case that YouTube banned.

5. Democrats Want Free Speech for Themselves While Banning It for Their Enemies

The oral arguments also got into the FBI’s 2020 election interference in telling online monopolies that The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was foreign disinformation. Tenny claimed the FBI refused to comment on the laptop because it was a pending investigation.

Yet the FBI and other federal intelligence agencies actually did comment on the laptop by calling it “foreign disinformation,” both privately to the internet monopolies and publicly. This was false, and the FBI knew it. The lower court ruled this deception constituted coercion because it caused people to act on false information.

As Ben Weingarten notes, these lies and FBI-demanded online content bans to protect them benefitted Joe Biden in the 2020 election:

According to Elvis Chan (pdf), an FBI official leading engagement with the social media platforms, while the bureau didn’t explicitly ask the companies to change their hacked material policies, it did frequently follow up to ask whether they had changed said policies, as the FBI wanted to know how they would treat such materials.

The judges almost broached an important question: If the First Amendment protects the FBI’s lies that Hunter Biden’s laptop was disinformation, for which not one federal employee has been disciplined, how can it allow for criminalizing the same behavior by average Americans by labeling their views “disinformation” and “mal-information”?

6. Today’s Internet Is Still Massively Rigged

Taibbi also noted that court documents show the Biden administration got mad enough to fire the F-bomb at social media companies when the algorithmic censorship they demand affected Biden’s Instagram account. Instagram instantly fixed the issue for the White House, but not for non-powerful Americans.

It’s clear from the case documents and other disclosures such as the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” that the algorithms controlling what Americans see online are now deeply, massively rigged. That rigging is multilayered. It includes all this government coercion of entities including Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Meta, Snapchat, Tiktok, and Twitter going back to at least 2017, as well as pressure operations from corporate media and internal employee groups.

Beyond algorithm changes, social media monopolies have also changed their terms of service in response to government demands, the NCLA attorneys noted last month. So government control of public discourse will continue even if the Fifth Circuit reinstates the injunction.

Tenny told the Fifth Circuit the Covid-era censorship that ignited this case is over because the government currently deems Covid not an emergency. In court, Sauer cited YouTube banning two weeks ago a video of attorneys discussing this case as more proof this massive censorship persists. He also cited court documents showing Americans still can’t post social media messages about censored topics.

“Attorneys present gave estimates ranging from a few weeks to two months for the panel to rule” on whether to reinstate an injunction against more of this government behavior, reported Taibbi, who attended the oral arguments in New Orleans, Louisiana. The previous injunction includes exceptions for crimes such as sex trafficking.

“The government wants to be doing something that it shouldn’t be doing, and they really, really want to be doing it,” said NCLA attorney John Vecchione in the discussion YouTube banned.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her latest ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her several books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

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Biden Admin Grew Censorship Complex To Silence True But Inconvenient ‘Malinformation,’ House Committee Shows


BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | JUNE 27, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/27/biden-admin-grew-censorship-complex-to-silence-true-but-inconvenient-malinformation-weaponization-committee-shows/

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The Biden administration’s war on so-called disinformation included a federal initiative to censor “malinformation,” information that is true but inconvenient to the Democrat ruling regime.

On Monday, lawmakers on the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government published an interim report on the Department of Homeland Security’s “disinformation” programs within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). According to the report, CISA “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media,” and has steadily expanded the scope of its censorship since 2018.

“In 2022 and 2023, in response to growing public and private criticism of CISA’s unconstitutional behavior, CISA attempted to camouflage its activities, duplicitously claiming it serves a purely ‘informational’ role,” the report reads.

CISA ultimately outsourced its dystopian censorship regime to third-party nonprofits and colluded with Big Tech companies to suppress information deemed incorrect or harmful to regime narratives. CISA, lawmakers wrote, “exploited its connections with Big Tech and government-funded non-profits to censor, by proxy, in order to circumvent the First Amendment’s prohibition against government-induced censorship.”

“This included the creation of reporting ‘portals’ which funneled ‘misinformation’ reports directly to social media platforms,” the report says.

The government’s disinformation efforts extended to the censorship of “malinformation,” defined by CISA as “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

“In other words, malinformation is factual information that is objectionable not because it is false or untruthful, but because it is provided without adequate ‘context’ — context as determined by the government,” lawmakers explained.

According to their report, CISA tried to “disguise the true nature” of the agency’s work by “removing references to surveillance and censorship” from its website. President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice also interfered with CISA public records requests to stonewall congressional oversight. The select subcommittee is still waiting on CISA’s compliance with subpoenas.

The select subcommittee held a hearing on the federal government’s disinformation efforts in March featuring two journalists behind the “Twitter Files,” Substack reporters Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger.

“American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy,” Shellenberger told lawmakers. “The censorship industrial complex combines established methods of psychological manipulation, some developed by the U.S. military during the global war on terror with highly sophisticated tools from computer science.”

“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests from every corner of government, from the FBI, the DHS, the HHS, DoD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA,” Taibbi added. “A focus of this fast-growing network … is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations or sympathies are deemed misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation. That last term is just a euphemism for ‘true but inconvenient.’”

MALINFORMATION = Information that’s TRUE, but INCOVENIENT.

Lawmakers made clear in their report Monday that the committee “will continue to investigate CISA’s and other Executive Branch agencies’ entanglement with social media platforms.”

The Department of Homeland Security isn’t the only agency in the Biden administration engaged in the censorship industry. The Biden State Department funded a “Disinformation Index” that blacklisted conservative websites from major advertisers.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

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