Project Veritas founder and CEO James O’Keefe announced earlier on Friday that Google/YouTube removed the expose’ and undercover story showing Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer’s Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations – mRNA Scientific Planner, discussing the company pursuing “Directed Evolution” a process to modify the COVID-19 virus. {Direct Rumble Link}
According to the reasoning provided by YouTube, as outlined by O’Keefe, the undercover interview violated the YouTube terms of service for disinformation around the COVID-19 vaccines. This justification despite the claim itself was coming from Pfizer, not Project Veritas. James O’Keefe explains.
The Cloak of Gyges grows ever LARGER!
The drama in the House of Representatives that ended on Jan. 7 with the late-night election of Kevin McCarthy as speaker after four days and 15 ballots revealed a Republican party coping with an identity problem, if not a crisis.
Is today’s Republican party conservative or populist? Is its patron saint Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump? Is it more intent on slashing government spending or preserving entitlement programs? Did it underperform in the 2022 midterm elections because it failed to mobilize its base or because it failed to reassure other voters wary of extremism? The divisive House debate offered no clear answers.
But Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri thinks he has one: The Republican party, he argues, needs to chart its path forward by becoming, finally and unequivocally, the party of the American working class.
Sen. Hawley advanced perhaps the most provocative midterm postmortem when he wrote a piece in the Washington Post declaring that “the old Republican Party is dead.” The much-anticipated giant red wave didn’t materialize in 2022, he wrote, because Republicans have failed to complete a necessary transformation into the party of working-class Americans, who have been drifting into its ranks for years.
Sen. Hawley is at the forefront of a coterie of younger Republicans, in Congress and think tanks, who advocate policies that would mark a sharp break from the conservative, free-market gospel that has been the backbone of the GOP for more than half a century. They argue for abandoning free trade in favor of a network of tariffs to protect American goods and jobs, swearing off cuts to entitlement programs on which the working class rely, breaking up big tech firms, clamping down harder on immigration and finding common ground with union workers.
The incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Jason Smith, promises “a tax code that supports the millions of working-class families.” Sen. Marco Rubio has sponsored legislation that would funnel billions in government help to build or rebuild critical industries on American soil. Sen. Tom Cotton has authored a bill to shift government spending away from college education and toward workplace training programs.
If this sounds like a new formula for activist government, Republican-style—well, it is. In an interview, Sen. Hawley argues that this pivot would represent not a break from Republican beliefs but a return to the principles that guided the GOP in the days of Theodore Roosevelt and William McKinley, when the party was “avowedly a nationalist party.” Moreover, he says the move is politically essential: “We are not a majority party currently. If we want to be a majority party, we have to bring these working-class voters back to us.”
Still, such a pivot will be difficult to execute, with as much potential to tear apart the Republican party as to transform it. The business community, a core constituency that underwrites many GOP campaign efforts, generally prefers free trade over government-managed trade, sees virtue in immigration, and hopes for organized labor to be curbed rather than encouraged.
Others in the party see peril in moving away from what has been a bedrock Republican philosophy: that free-market policies produce broad economic growth that benefits all Americans.
The movement is based on a premise that traditional Republican policies “somehow leave behind the working class,” says retiring Pennsylvania Sen. Patrick Toomey, a free-market conservative. “And of course that’s spectacularly wrong.” In his farewell address in the Senate in December, Mr. Toomey declared: “I hope we resist the temptation to adopt the protectionist, nativist, isolationist, redistributive policies that some are suggesting we embrace.” Others in the party, including some in the new, narrow majority in the House, consider the primary goal at the moment to be reducing government spending and debt, even if that means curbing entitlements.
And meanwhile, of course, Democrats aren’t simply going to let go of their traditional ties to unions and working-class voters. Indeed, President Biden took office vowing to reclaim such workers, and his administration is working on several fronts to rebuild those ties.
Two important forces are propelling this struggle. First, cultural issues and anxieties already have driven many working-class voters into Republican arms, making it necessary and perhaps inevitable that the party would consider doing more to accommodate their economic desires and needs.
Polling by The Wall Street Journal and NBC News in recent years shows the migration. The share of the Republican electorate made up of white voters without a college degree—a reasonable proxy for “working class voters”—has risen from 48% in 2012 to 62% this year. Similarly, VoteCast, a broad national survey of voters conducted by the Associated Press, found that white voters without a college degree picked Republicans over Democrats in 2022 congressional races by a margin of 65% to 32%.
“I think the most significant political shift of the past decade has been the socio-economic inversion of the two parties,” says Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. “Historically, the Republicans were the party of the rich, and the Democrats were the party of the working class.” Now, he contends, that is being reversed. Indeed, both the 2020 general election and the 2022 midterms showed that Republicans are making inroads not just with white working-class voters but with working-class Hispanics and Blacks as well.
Sen. Cruz says that GOP energy policies promoting continued fossil-fuel use, in contrast with Democrats’ focus on climate change, also should be a central part of the agenda. “If you’re a Teamster and Democrats have spent two years trying to shut down trucking across the country, voting for Democrats is profoundly against your interests.”
In some respects, the call for a new economic gospel focused on working-class needs represents an attempt to shift the Republican appeal away from the cultural issues—gay rights, abortion, gun control—that have created a bond with many working-class voters until now and toward economic policies to address their concerns about the loss of manufacturing jobs and declining purchasing power.
Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this shift came late last year, when Mr. Hawley and Mr. Rubio, along with four other Republican senators, voted to force railway companies to give unionized employees additional sick leave in a new labor contract. The measure failed, but the senators’ embrace of an attempt by the government to compel an industry to accept more liberal terms in a labor agreement represented a sharp turn away from traditional Republican reliance on the wisdom of free markets and business leaders.
The second factor is that former president Donald Trump, despite his flaws and the damage he has done to the party in other ways, showed the potential for the Republican party to expand its reach into traditional Democratic constituencies. Indeed, the move to become the working-class party merely represents a continuation, and perhaps culmination, of the trends Mr. Trump unleashed.
Tony Fabrizio, who was a pollster for both of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaigns, argues that Republicans can attract adherents for their ideas for government action now precisely because working-class voters think previous policies have ignored their needs. “The people who are most angry and feel most left behind by government are those voters,” Mr. Fabrizio says.
Political jockeying aside, the struggle for the hearts and votes of the working class continues a long quest to determine what economic philosophy best serves their interests in a 21st-century economy.
Ronald Reagan pushed the Republican party and the country as a whole to the right with his 1980 presidential election. In winning that year, he got the votes of thousands of “Reagan Democrats,” who detached from their traditional moorings in the Democratic party and voted Republican, at least in part out of a feeling that New Deal liberalism had run out of gas and was no longer working for them.
In the decades since, the economic picture for the working class has been mixed. The economic growth set off by the Reagan Revolution has, in fact, been good for a swath of American workers. Median household income has risen dramatically, to $70,784 in 2021 from $55,828 in 1984 in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to data from the St. Louis Fed.
At the same time, though, the manufacturing jobs that long had been the backbone of the working-class economy have been drying up, falling by 23% in the last three decades.
Meanwhile, the new globalized, tech-driven economy has produced growing income inequality between those at the top of the economic ladder and workers in the middle. Between 1980 and 2021, the gap between median income for those in the 90th percentile of American earners and those in the middle 50th percentile grew by 29%.
These trend lines have left many in the working class questioning both parties. Democrats’ traditional grip on the working class has loosened as the base of the party has shifted to wealthier, better-educated, socially liberal constituencies on the coasts. Ruy Teixeira, a political analyst who has long chronicled the political path of American workers, wrote a piece in the Atlantic just before last fall’s midterm elections titled “Democrats’ Long Goodbye to the Working Class.” He says in an interview: “We now have a situation where the Democrats regularly lose the working class vote.”
Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Democrat representing Michigan’s sixth district stretching west and south of Detroit, acknowledges that Mr. Trump “recognized the anxiety of people who‘d just seen their jobs go overseas and were worried about their retirement.”
But she also says that, under the Biden administration, Democratic policies have begun to reverse the trend lines, by spending billions of dollars on jobs improving U.S. infrastructure, creating clean-energy jobs and mounting efforts to bring back to the U.S. factories making, among other things, computer chips.
Rep. Dingell is launching within the House a new “Heartland Caucus,” a coalition of Democrats focused on advancing policies to benefit Americans residing in the broad center of the country. She frames that effort as part of a needed push by Democrats to reconnect with working-class voters, in workplaces as well as farms. “We have not lost them, but we have to remind them that we’re fighting for them,” she says. “We need to be in those union halls, we need to be on those family farms, we need to be in those veterans’ centers.”
On the Republican side, new-wave conservatives argue that Republicans have lost their way by expecting markets to work economic magic and by failing to acknowledge that market forces have been distorted by foreign competitors, particularly China.
Oren Cass, executive director of American Compass, a policy center that is in the forefront of rethinking traditional conservative economic ideas, says that the key for Republicans now is focusing on raising wages and “throwing out the supply-side conceit that if we make things better for capital and those with high incomes, everything will be better.”
Mr. Cass says it is noteworthy that this new conservative economic movement doesn’t automatically put individual tax cuts at the top of the priority list, as was long the case for Republicans. The flaws of that approach, he argues, were illustrated by the disaster that befell former British Prime Minister Liz Truss when she put forth a traditional, aggressive tax-cutting program only to see it lead to economic calamity and her rapid downfall.
Mr. Cass has worked with Sen. Cotton on his proposal for government-assisted workplace training and argues that Republicans can empower workers outside of the traditional big unions that Democrats support by prodding companies to put worker representatives on their boards. He also hopes recent legislation to boost domestic computer-chip production will be followed by similar measures to create incentives for American production of rare-earth minerals, electric-vehicle batteries and pharmaceutical components.
In a similar vein, Rep. Jim Banks, a leader of the House’s conservative Republican Study Committee, argued in a memo to Mr. McCarthy during the last Congress that Republicans should reverse their embrace of globalism. “For far too long,” he wrote, “both parties supported outsourcing working-class jobs overseas in the name of economic growth.”
Sen. Rubio, meantime, chides big corporations not only for shipping jobs overseas but also for embracing “woke” social views of the liberal left. He calls for a set of policies that penalize firms and investors that make certain investments in China and reward those who bring capital back to the U.S.
All this is enough of a departure from the past that it leaves some Republicans worried that their party is drifting toward mimicking Democratic reliance on government solutions and abandoning principles that have brought great electoral success.
“We have to get back to the basic principles of Reagan and Bush and build upon them, and add to those the questions of crime, education and, of course, inflation,” says Frank Fahrenkopf, a former national chairman of the Republican party.
The most difficult internal GOP debate may come on the question of entitlements—specifically the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs that make up a growing piece of the federal spending.
In the prolonged House debate over choosing a new speaker, lawmakers frequently bemoaned the rising federal debt and the spending that is driving that debt, framing the problem as a kind of national crisis. And those opposing Mr. McCarthy as speaker used their leverage to force into place procedures that will make it easier for them to compel big, across-the-board spending cuts to handle the problem.
That at least implies a willingness to curb the big entitlement programs as part of the corrective effort. Sen. Hawley argues that would be a mistake. “I would warn against immediately going to working-class people and saying, ‘The Social Security and Medicare benefits you have been paying for is where we are going to go first.’”
Note:
Mr. Seib retired last year as the Journal’s executive Washington editor and weekly Capital Journal columnist. He has served most recently as a fellow at the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas.
Martin Gurri,"The Fifth Wave: Twittermania, A twisted drama of faith, politics and media, in five acts"
ACT ONE: The Conversion of the Institutions
By the year 2020, every major institution of American culture had converted to the cult of identity. The virus of performative dogmatism, long incubated at the universities, suddenly spread with alarming rapidity, infecting news media in every format, social media like Facebook and Twitter, search engines like Google, the entertainment world including Hollywood and Broadway, professional sports, the scientific bureaucracy and the finance and investment sector. Even stodgy billion-dollar corporations like Coca-Cola and the supposedly disruptive innovators of Silicon Valley fell in line. Churches and synagogues mutilated their traditional doctrines to make room for the new faith. As with every religious revolution, names were changed and old idols toppled from their pedestals. Nothing like it had transpired since the days of emperor Constantine.
With the improbable rise of Joe Biden to the presidency and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, identity became the established church of the United States. Strident dogmas of reparational justice, gender fluidity and ecological deindustrialization were now enforced by the power of the federal government, the governments of large states like California and New York and local governments and school boards in places like Loudoun County, Virginia. The message was uniform and inescapable. Every source of authority sang the same words from the same hymn book. If you were a CEO wishing to court investors, trillion-dollar investment houses like BlackRock demanded proof of “environmental, social, and corporate governance” (ESG). If you were Joe Nobody but donated to a website that criticized the gender or Covid-19 orthodoxy, PayPal froze you out.
Heretics were sought out and punished. Bonfires were lit. Unlike earlier inquisitions, actual persons weren’t burned to death—but their jobs and reputations certainly were.
As I have noted elsewhere, the motive force behind the mass conversion of the elites was a longing for control. Identity is a minority sect that imposes itself by shaming and silencing contrary opinions, even among those it purports to protect. Most Blacks don’t wish to defund the police. Most Hispanics don’t believe in open borders. Most Democrats don’t think government programs should discriminate based on race or sex. But old-fashioned liberalism is dying away with the boomer generation, and the elites, distrusted by the public, deprived of institutional authority, have gambled on riding the tiger of rule by internet mob.
The Democratic Party, political home of the American establishment, succumbed to the virus without putting up much of a fight. Since we only get a binary choice, Democratic voters who disagreed with identity held their noses and went that way anyhow. (Republicans did the same with Donald Trump.) In this regard, the doddering Biden, though a hilariously bad missionary of the true faith, was found to have some usefulness as a withered fig leaf of liberal moderation.
The question then became how to extend control to the idolaters on the other side of the partisan divide. The answer was to deny them a voice in any forum where their words might confuse the faithful. The elites own most of the nation’s institutions, but they have a lock on the institutions of communications and messaging. They can marginalize Republicans and conservatives simply by keeping them out of the shared spaces in the public sphere—by condemning their opinions as a threat to democracy and deriding their facts as wild conspiracy theories or “misinformation.” As in the medieval Jewish ghetto, a wall was built around conservative figures and media, making them inaudible to a wider public. Though many Republicans read The New York Times, Democrats caught perusing Fox News are in danger of losing their souls. It doesn’t happen. As matters now stand in this country, the left speaks to everyone, but the right speaks only to itself.
The arrangement is inherently unstable: Identity, as I said, is unpopular, and the elites are hardly the most convincing advocates of an anti-establishment creed. But fear of losing political dominance is a powerful incentive. The established church can impeach, prosecute and hurl the Republican Trump into a digital netherworld—and can just as easily remove from public consideration a scandal touching the Democratic presidential candidate. That kind of control would have been envied by Joe McCarthy; the closest historical precedent is Woodrow Wilson’s noxious wartime censorship.
ACT TWO: Elon Musk as a Breach in the Wall
Only yesterday, Elon Musk was a hero to progressives. He had made the electric car sexy and organized a migration to Mars to save humanity from the coming ecological apocalypse. Musk voted for Barack Obama twice and for Biden once. When, on April 14 of last year, he offered to purchase Twitter, he clearly believed he was reconnecting progressivism to its liberal roots. “For Twitter to deserve public trust it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” he said. Famously, Musk characterized himself as “a free speech absolutist.” The elites took that for a declaration of war and changed their tightly synchronized minds about the man.
Humor and proportion were lost early in the episode. Nobody thought, “Well, let them have Twitter.” The establishment treated Musk’s bid as an existential threat. Cardinals of the church read their various writs of excommunication. Twitter in the hands of Musk was “dangerous to our democracy,” said Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren. “I am frightened for society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter,” quivered author Max Boot, adding: “For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.” The sleepy Biden White House briefly snapped awake to express concern about “the power of large social media platforms … over our everyday lives … tech platforms must be held accountable for the harm they cause.”
Free speech was hate speech. Free speech was racism. Free speech, once the equivalent of motherhood and warm puppies, was now a dire and awful thing. The church demanded control—and the tone was hysterical to the point of self-parody. My favorite shriek of horror over the affair came from David Leavitt (who describes himself as “an award-winning multimedia journalist”): “If Elon Musk successfully purchases Twitter, it could result in World War 3 and the destruction of our planet.” While this was undoubtedly funny, the sad reality is that journalists filled the front ranks of those who clamored for power to supervise truth.
Anti-identity voices could not be allowed to escape their ghetto. A system of control based on an unpopular, rigidly enforced version of truth could not afford competition, any more than could the regimes of, say, China or Cuba. At stake was the ability to demonize the opposition and protect Democratic candidates from their own blunders, as the country turned the corner into the 2024 presidential season. The frequent appeals to “our democracy” should be understood to mean the rule of the elites in perpetuity and the eternal supremacy of the established church. The arc of history so ordained it.
Nevertheless, the spectacle of elite panic and the abrupt devaluation of Musk—from idol to Nazi—testified to the fragility of the system no less than its intolerance.
A pregnant pause ensued when Musk tried to back away from the sale. It was a moment of false hope. On October 22, the purchase of Twitter went through at the mind-numbing cost of $44 billion. On November 28, after laying off 80% of the company’s workforce, Musk tweeted that documents revealing “free speech suppression” would “soon be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened …” On December 2, Twitter Files hit the fan.
ACT THREE: Twitter Files and the Methods of Cultural Domination
Musk initially invited Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger to examine the company’s internal Slack messages and emails. Taibbi and Weiss are fierce critics of establishment media; Shellenberger is a strong anti-establishment voice on energy and homeless policy. All are, in Weiss’ phrase, “politically homeless,” neither right nor left, but tend to write about aspects of the struggle between the elites and the public.
I happen to know all three and I subscribe to their Substack newsletters. They are clear thinkers and good writers but two traits, in my opinion, separate them from the pack: independence and integrity. Musk could have bought himself a passel of hired hacks who would have churned out whatever spin he wished. With these three authors he gave up control over the Twitter Files output in exchange for their ironclad credibility.
An enormous volume of information was filtered down to patchwork Twitter style. Since the format tends to lose the forest for the trees, we should fix our attention on what truly matters. Anyone with eyes to see could tell that a thumb was being pressed to the scales of the public sphere. Progressive cultural domination was never a question of superior arguments but of shutting down the other side. With Twitter Files, for the first time, we’ve gotten a glimpse into the byzantine machinery that makes such repression possible.
Although additional files continue to be made public, here, from my perspective, are the three most interesting revelations so far:
A company culture of control spawned tools and found targets to achieve that purpose. People didn’t go to work at Twitter to provide a service for the public. They were a bastion of the church. The job was to silence evil, mainly in the form of Trumpism, and to guard the carriers of revealed truth, who were all Democrats. A parallel world to reality was presented—one disfigured by delusional additions and crude amputations. To this purpose, “Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users,” Weiss learned. The targets were offenders against elite orthodoxy—a conservative activist, a right-wing talk show host, a Covid-dissenting doctor, among a host of others.
Twitter’s mission statement is “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.” That was the old idealism of the internet speaking. After conversion to the church, building barriers became the mission. Twitter was made into a closed pen in which heretical opinions disappeared without a trace or explanation. Top to bottom, the staff labored with zeal to add another brick to the wall—there was a joy in discussions of what constituted “violative” behavior equal in fervor to Talmudic commentary. Tools were designed that left disgraced users muttering in solitude. “The worst mistake I made,” stated Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder, “was in continuing to invest in tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus tools for the people using Twitter to manage it for themselves.” Because identity is a jealous God, Dorsey’s mistake was unavoidable.
Devotion to a higher truth overrode Twitter’s own rules and procedures, not to mention moral scruples, and made blatant lying necessary. Twitter executives expelled dangerous heretics from their digital congregation, then gave fraudulent pretexts for doing so. We know the pretexts were fraudulent because, after the fact, these executives spent inordinate amounts of time debating on Slack whether any of the company’s rules had actually been violated. Sometimes the federal government provided cover; more on this below. More often, management went with the grim Vietnam War axiom: “When in doubt, take them out.”
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Twitter quickly “handled” multiple requests from the Biden camp to smother unfavorable content. Trump, however, was first red-flagged then “deamplified” in the run-up to the election. Following the January 6 madness in Washington, D.C., he was banished from Twitter permanently, despite the painful inability of company leaders, manifested in internal messages, to find some reason in their copious rule book that would justify expulsion. “[I]n this specific case, we are changing our public interest approach for this account,” fudged Yoel Roth, a key player in the Trump affair who bore the ironic title of Head of Trust and Safety.
It should be understood that this was not a vast leftwing conspiracy but a striking instance of the elite hive mind at work and of the binding force of shared dogma: Trump, after all, was the Beelzebub of the established church. That force took the form of external pressure, as Democratic celebrities like Michelle Obama called for Trump to be evicted. It was also felt as internal pressure: 300 employees sent a letter to Dorsey, published by The Washington Post, demanding an end to Trump’s “violent, hateful rhetoric.” But the most potent pressure on Twitter executives was unquestionably psychological. Roth’s dream was “to drive change in the world” and he was certain there were “actual Nazis in the White House.” Action was redemption; when the ban was announced, employees fell into the Slack equivalent of a religious ecstasy.
Twitter management had gone on record as stating, “We do not shadow ban [i.e., secretly block users]. And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.” We now know both claims were false—the melancholy question that lingers is whether the people making them possessed enough self-awareness to realize it. One peril in building a delusional world is that you may end up living there.
The Biden administration, and the federal law enforcement and intelligence bureaucracies, are deep in the business of controlling media content. Defenders of Twitter’s political dogmatism argue that the company is a private entity and can do as it wishes: First Amendment protection of free speech applies only to government censorship. This argument, though technically correct, loses some of its validity when all major institutions promote the same orthodoxy using more or less the same words. It collapses when it becomes clear that the federal government has been acting the part of grand inquisitor and pushing content decisions on its “private sector partners.”
The wall of obedience to power built around the Covid-19 crisis was the thickest and most formidable of all. The surgeon general proclaimed an “infodemic” on the subject and said of the digital platforms: “We can’t wait for them longer to take aggressive action.” Biden accused social media of “killing people” by tolerating dissident opinions on vaccines. Under direct guidance from the White House, Twitter suppressed factual but contrarian information on the pandemic. Doctors and researchers who proposed alternate policies or reported flaws in the vaccine development process were muted or expelled. The White House singled out specific accounts it wished to eliminate. Twitter saluted and complied. (One account holder later sued; Twitter settled.) At a time when an open exchange of ideas was of existential importance, the administration chose to turn managing the pandemic into a department of the established church—and Twitter went along. The effects were literally incalculable.
Government surveillance and intervention took place under the pretense of blocking foreign influence. The FBI fronted a liaison process that included the Justice Department, Homeland Security and CIA. No crimes were said to be committed, no investigations had been authorized, but nonetheless, in a “constant and pervasive” series of meetings and messages with Twitter management, the FBI pushed for action on content and asked for “emergency disclosure” on users—essentially, solicitations for a warrantless search. A one-way platform, Teleporter, was set up at Twitter to receive such requests and at one point FBI reportedly deployed 80 people to work on social media-related issues. Given that the missions seemed increasingly to converge, it isn’t surprising that FBI personnel migrated to Twitter in large numbers. Among them was James Baker, who played a leading role in driving the investigation of Trump while at the FBI and became a strong advocate of expelling Trump after he moved to Twitter. Money changed hands, too: The FBI paid Twitter $3.4 million.
The overall purpose of the system was plain enough: to protect the Biden campaign and administration. I won’t repeat the sordid details surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop. It’s enough to say that the FBI lied to Twitter, Twitter lied to the public and the lies were blessed by 52 retired intelligence luminaries, most of them from CIA. In the parallel reality of the elites, the laptop story became a Russian disinformation hack. A potential scandal six weeks before a presidential election was repressed by both mainstream and digital media. I can’t recall an equal perversion of the truth in my long lifetime. But the system worked.
In secret, while posing as an independent platform, Twitter had allowed itself to become an instrument of control by the state and the party in power. The protection of democracy somehow entailed Chinese methods of handling information—and the lone poignant moment in Twitter Files came when an unnamed employee recognized the trend. “Maybe because I’m from China, I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation,” the employee worried. The concern was met with a volley of refutations and promptly dismissed as wrong-think.
ACT FOUR: The Establishment Ponders a Counterattack
The institutional elites dealt with the avalanche of revelations by pretending that nothing had happened. Musk’s antics, previously the cause of so much fear and loathing, now elicited elaborate yawns. Twitter Files were “old news,” “a distraction,” “a nothingburger”—mere sound and fury to titillate the public. This strategy relied on the principle that scandals, like fairies, will disappear if we deny their existence. That certainly had been the case with the laptop story.
Outside the conservative ghetto, the news media covered the content of Twitter Files obliquely or not at all. The episode was treated as an irrational craze that had suddenly swept over the nation, like the hula hoop. Nothing of substance was reported—it was the rule of omertà, the vow of silence. In a remarkable display of virtuosity, Ezra Klein published a long tirade about Twitter and social media on the “front page” of The New York Times without once mentioning the Files. But why was Klein so full of venom? Faithful readers of The Times, and of elite media generally, lacked the information to grasp what the fuss with Twitter was about.
The princelings of the federal bureaucracy found it harder to keep their cool. Shortly after being outed by Taibbi, the FBI struck back with an angry public statement. The relationship with Twitter, the statement claimed, was part of “our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.” The purpose of this activity was to provide “critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.”
This was alarming enough. When did this “tradition” of law enforcement “engagement” begin? What are the actual names of the “numerous” companies involved? From what—and whom—are they being protected? If the engagements also aim to protect the public, as the statement implied, why isn’t the information made public—what is the point of the top-down, secretive approach? That’s a formula for sowing distrust.
By the end of the statement, the FBI had truly lost its temper: “It is unfortunate,” it growled, “that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.” But Matt Taibbi has a track record. If you accuse him of conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, you’d better put your evidence on the table. Simply to call him names will rebound suspicion back on you. The FBI statement was a disgusting smear attempt: itself evidence of a debased government institution.
The ugly mood at the FBI suggests that the inquisitors of the church haven’t quite settled on a counterattack. The silence is provisional. Twitter Files, in the end, isn’t nothing. It can’t be waved off into oblivion. An adequately lurid tale must be concocted to distract attention: about sexual misconduct, say, or financial scandal. Everyone associated with the Files, from Musk to the cleaning persons at Weiss’ home, would do well to keep their ears open and their eyes peeled, because the hounds are surely on the hunt.
ACT FIVE: The Damage and the Fix
The absorption of the information sphere into the realm of politics could only be an unmitigated disaster. Forcing political considerations on every shared description of reality must lead to massive distortions and the erection of a parallel reality, one in which truth and falsehood perpetually shift and dance as in a fever dream. Successful action under such a regime becomes less important than a favorable political outcome. The appalling real-world incompetence of our government institutions is due in large part to this mindset.
The rise of an intolerant minority cult to the status of established church could only poison and degrade the practices on which American democracy has historically rested. “Established church” is a metaphor, but I find it all too apt: Identity preaches the fear of free speech, the persecution and silencing of discordant opinions and disdain of debate in any forum. As in Catholic Spain and Calvinist Geneva, our established church provides the means for a class of virtuous elites to retain control over politics and society. Eruption from below by a resentful public, when it comes, will likely smash at our institutions without regard for their usefulness.
That Twitter, a social media platform, became the theater of revelation for the sins of our progressive establishment is not entirely accidental. The digital, to the elites, has always been a darkling plain of perversion and lies. Access to the internet by the public has been the chief cause of a calamitous loss of control. The reaction, we have now learned, was government intervention in digital media—and it wasn’t restricted to Twitter. The FBI statement spoke of “numerous” companies, and Twitter Files mentioned Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, Pinterest, among others. The obvious goal was to bully the media into submission. The information sphere, where we conduct all our shared business, including politics, has in consequence suffered a traumatic (and justifiable) hemorrhage of trust.
What is to be done?
There’s no room for an established clergy in American politics or culture. We are too fractured, too multifarious: Imposing a faith from above will invite disorder and revolt. Believers in identity should be free to worship in peace but can’t be allowed to wield their power and money to force the rest of us into the pews. Disestablishing the church is political work—I will have more to say about this in coming months.
The internet must be made over into a frontier of freedom. For all his weirdness and large ego, Musk did us a favor by reminding us of what pluralism in information looks like. At the moment, liberating the web means a struggle against the mindless attack mobs of identity, who would give us a monolithic media and a culture of obedience. Ideological controls now in place must be torn down to the ground.
Eventually, the digital world, and social media especially, must be retooled on principles and algorithms that sustain behavior consistent with an open society. As Dorsey, the remorseful founder, has indicated, “Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.” Dorsey proposes a guiding principle: “Only the original author may remove content they produce.” User-owned networks could get there without asking anyone’s permission. Sriram Krishnan, one of the most perceptive minds in Silicon Valley, has made a powerful case for “transparent platform moderation,” a process whereby “social media platforms commit to publishing details of every account and content moderation decision.” Transparency is crucial for the public to decode, and pass judgment on, the tangled algorithmic matrix imposed by digital corporations.
None of this is hard if the will is there—but that is precisely our dilemma. At present we can’t agree on what is broken in the digital information sphere, or even whether anything is broken at all. Mighty institutions and shallow, short-sighted individuals crave control and are willing to shatter every norm of democratic sociopolitical life to obtain it.
Those of us who see the need for radical reform will encounter nothing but toil and trouble ahead. The conflict, which has already begun, will play out in a ruthless, shameless and bewildering manner. Because I am by nature a long-term optimist and have faith in the common sense of the American people, I’m betting that many of the needed changes will be put in place. But it won’t be easy.
Thomas Fazi, "How the Davos elite took back control: The WEF is insulating policy-making from democracy"
Thousands of the world’s global elite are convening in Davos this morning for their most important annual get-together: the meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Alongside heads of state from all over the world, the CEOs of Amazon, BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, Pfizer and Moderna will gather, as will the President of the European Commission, the IMF’s Managing Director, the secretary general of Nato, the chiefs of the FBI and MI6, the publisher of The New York Times, and, of course, the event’s infamous host — founder and chairman of the WEF, Klaus Schwab. As many as 5,000 soldiers may be deployed for their protection.
Given the almost cartoonishly elitist nature of this jamboree, it seems only natural that the organisation has become the subject of all sorts of conspiracy theories regarding its supposed malicious intent and secret agendas connected to the notion of the “Great Reset”. In truth, there is nothing conspiratorial about the WEF, to the extent that conspiracies imply secrecy. On the contrary, the WEF — unlike, say, the Bilderberg — is very open about its agenda: you can even follow the live-streamed sessions online.
Founded in 1971 by Schwab himself, the WEF is “committed to improving the state of the world through public-private cooperation”, also known as multistakeholder governance. The idea is that global decision-making should not be left to governments and nation-states — as in the post-war multilateralist framework enshrined in the United Nations — but should involve a whole range of non-government stakeholders: civil society bodies, academic experts, media personalities and, most important, multinational corporations. In its own words, the WEF’s project is “to redefine the international system as constituting a wider, multifaceted system of global cooperation in which intergovernmental legal frameworks and institutions are embedded as a core, but not the sole and sometimes not the most crucial, component”.
While this may sound fairly benign, it neatly encapsulates the basic philosophy of globalism: insulating policy from democracy by transferring the decision-making process from the national and international level, where citizens theoretically are able to exercise some degree of influence over policy, to the supranational level, by placing a self-selected group of unelected, unaccountable “stakeholders” — mainly corporations — in charge of global decisions concerning everything from energy and food production to the media and public health. The underlying undemocratic philosophy is the same one underpinning the philanthrocapitalist approach of people such Bill Gates, himself a long-time partner of the WEF: that non-governmental social and business organisations are best suited to solve the world’s problems than governments and multilateral institutions.
Even though the WEF has increasingly focused its agenda on fashionable topics such as environmental protection and social entrepreneurship, there is little doubt as to which interests Schwab’s brainchild is actually promoting and empowering: the WEF is itself mostly funded by around 1,000 member companies — typically global enterprises with multi-billion dollar turnovers, which include some of the world’s biggest corporations in oil (Saudi Aramco, Shell, Chevron, BP), food (Unilever, The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlé), technology (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple) and pharmaceuticals (AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna). The composition of the WEF’s board is also very revealing, including Laurence D. Fink, CEO of Blackrock, David M. Rubenstein, co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, and Mark Schneider, CEO of Nestlé. There’s no need to resort to conspiracy theories to posit that the WEF’s agenda is much more likely to be tailored to suit the interests of its funders and board members — the world’s ultra-wealthy and corporate elites — rather than to “improving the state of the world”, as the organisation claims.
Perhaps the most symbolic example of the WEF’s globalist push is the controversial strategic partnership agreement the organisation signed with the UN in 2019, which many view as having drawn the UN into the WEF’s logic of public-private cooperation. According to an open letter signed by more than 400 civil society organisations and 40 international networks, the agreement represents a “disturbing corporate capture of the UN, which moved the world dangerously towards a privatised global governance”. The provisions of the strategic partnership, they note, “effectively provide that corporate leaders will become ‘whisper advisors’ to the heads of UN system departments, using their private access to advocate market-based profit-making ‘solutions’ to global problems while undermining real solutions embedded in public interest and transparent democratic procedures”.
This corporate takeover of the global agenda, aided and abetted by the WEF, became particularly apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic. Global health policy and “epidemic preparedness” have long been a focus of the WEF. In 2017, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) — an initiative aimed at securing vaccine supplies for global emergencies and pandemics, funded by government and private donors, including Gates — was launched in Davos. Then, in October 2019, just two months before the official start of the outbreak in Wuhan, the WEF co-sponsored an exercise called Event 201, which simulated “an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic”. In the event of a pandemic, the organisers noted, national governments, international organisations and the private sector should provide ample resources for the manufacturing and distribution of large quantities of vaccines through “robust forms of public-private cooperation”.
So, it is safe to say that when the Covid pandemic broke out, the WEF was well-positioned to take a central role in the pandemic response. It was at the 2020 gathering in Davos, on January 21-24 — a few weeks after the novel coronavirus had been identified in China — that CEPI met with the CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, to establish plans for a Covid-19 vaccine, in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US. Later in the year, CEPI was instrumental in setting up Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (Covax), in partnership with the WHO, and in providing funding for several Covid vaccines.
These public-private and corporate-centred coalitions — all with ties to the WEF, and beyond the reach of democratic accountability — played a crucial role in promoting a vaccine-centric and profit-driven response to the pandemic, and then in overseeing the vaccine rollout. In other words, the pandemic brought into stark relief the consequences of the WEF’s decades-long globalist push. Again, it would be wrong to view this as a conspiracy, since the WEF has always been very candid about its objectives: this is simply the inevitable result of a “multistakeholderist” approach in which private and “philanthropic” interests are given greater voice in global affairs than most governments.
What is troubling, however, is that the WEF is now promoting the same top-down corporate-driven approach in a wide range of other domains, from energy to food to global surveillance policies — with equally dramatic consequences. There is a reason governments often seem so willing to go along with these policies, even in the face of widespread societal opposition: which is that the WEF’s strategy, over the years, hasn’t just been to shift power away from governments — but also to infiltrate the latter.
The WEF has largely achieved this through a programme known as the Young Global Leaders (YGL) initiative, aimed at training future global leaders. Launched in 1992 (when it was called Global Leaders for Tomorrow), the initiative has spawned many globalist-aligned heads of states, cabinet ministers and business leaders. Tony Blair, for instance, was a participant in the first event, while Gordon Brown attended in 1993. In fact, its early intake was packed with other future leaders, including Angela Merkel, Victor Orbán, Nicholas Sarkozy, Guy Verhofstadt and José Maria Aznar.
In 2017, Schwab admitted to having used the Young Global Leaders to “penetrate the cabinets” of several governments, adding that as of 2017, “more than half” of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet had been members of the programme. More recently, following Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s proposal to drastically cut nitrogen emissions in line with WEF-inspired “green” policies, sparking large protests in the country, critics drew attention to the fact that, in addition to Rutte himself having close ties to the WEF, his Minister of Social Affairs and Employment was elected WEF Young Global Leader in 2008, while his Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Sigrid Kaag is a contributor to the WEF’s agenda. In December 2021, the Dutch government published its past correspondence with representatives of the World Economic Forum, showing extensive interaction between the WEF and the Dutch government.
Elsewhere, the former Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe — who last year was forced to resign following a popular uprising against his decision to ban fertilisers and pesticides in favour of organic, “climate-friendly” alternatives — was also a devoted member and Agenda Contributor of the WEF. In 2018, he published an article on the organisation’s website titled: “This is How I Will Make My Country Rich by 2025”. (Following the protests, the WEF swiftly removed the article from its website.) Once again, it seems clear that the WEF’s role in forming and selecting members of the world’s political elites is not a conspiracy, but rather a very public policy — and one which Schwab is happy to boast about.
Ultimately, there is no denying that the WEF wields immense power, which has cemented the rule of the transnational capitalist class to a degree never before seen in history. But it is important to recognise that its power is simply a manifestation of the power of the “superclass” it represents — a tiny group amounting, according to researchers, to no more than 6,000 or 7,000 people, or 0.0001% of the world’s population, and yet more powerful than any social class the world has ever known. Samuel Huntington, who is credited with inventing the term “Davos man”, argued that members of this global elite “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations”. It was only a matter of time before these aspiring cosmocrats developed a tool through which to fully exercise their dominion over the lower classes — and the WEF proved to be the perfect vehicle to do so.
As of yesterday, McCarthy did not have enough votes to become Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Kevin McCarthy was former Speaker Paul Ryan’s pick to lead the House Republicans after Paul Ryan abruptly left Congress. He now is in the position of running for Speaker of the House following the GOP’s win in the November midterm election. However, his actions while in leadership are too much for many conservatives to support him as Speaker.
Rep. Matt Gaetz from Florida doesn’t believe that McCarthy, based on his record, is who is needed as Speaker.
Matt Gaetz: Americans Want an Honest and Hard-Working Speaker of the House – Not Kevin McCarthy
Last night FOX News reported that some Republicans believe McCarthy as Speaker would “continue past and ongoing Republican failures”.
McCarthy needs 218 votes to become Speaker. This House has 222 Republicans in it.
FOX reports:On Sunday afternoon, McCarthy met with GOP members to try and rally support for his speakership vote on Jan. 3, when the new Congress takes office. The embattled Republican leader conceded rank-and-file members will be allowed to call for the speaker’s removal, though he wasn’t clear about how many members would need to sign on to the motion, according to reports.If McCarthy wants to win the House he will have to win over some of these individuals or pick up some Democrats. Some believe he may give the Democrats unheard-of power in the House so he can win Speakership. This would prove that those Republicans who don’t want a Speaker McCarthy were right all along.
The meeting came after his letter on New Year’s Eve, titled “Restoring the People’s House and Ending Business as Usual,” which was his admission of the deep dysfunction of the House of Representatives and his pitch to make it right.
In response to McCarthy’s letter, GOP Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Chip Roy of Texas, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Andy Harris of Maryland and Andrew Clyde of Georgia, along with Rep.-elects Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida and Eli Crane of Arizona sent a letter of their own.
“Regrettably, however, despite some progress achieved, Mr. McCarthy’s statement comes almost impossibly late to address continued deficiencies ahead of the opening of the 118th Congress on January 3rd,” the letter stated. “At this state, it cannot be a surprise that expressions of vague hopes reflected in far too many of the crucial points still under debate are insufficient. This is especially true with respect to Mr. McCarthy’s candidacy for speaker because the times call for radical departure from the status quo – not a continuation of past and ongoing, Republican failures.”
Others believe that a different leader in the GOP will be selected. Individuals like Jim Jordan have been mentioned. Others believe that Congress needs a strong leader who could stand up to the Deep State and DC Establishment. President Trump’s name has been mentioned in this regard. He would certainly shake things up.
We’ll see what happens. The House is expected to vote for Speaker on Tuesday.
History shows that those in power rarely give it up.
