The bait and switch of election “security”: Timeline nuggets from a colluding cabal

A great deal has come out from the “Twitter files” about the collusion of federal government agencies, Big Tech and social media, legacy/left-wing media, and “civil society” organizations (think-tanks, self-appointed “watchdog” groups) to silence legitimate speech, and to do so on a thoroughly biased basis.

Although the pattern demonstrated in Twitter correspondence has related to several topics, one of the most important is suppression of reporting on Hunter Biden, his laptop, and the Biden family ties to foreign governments and companies.  The files, and testimony prompted by their revelations, have clarified that systematic collusion was behind suppression of information about the Hunter Biden laptop in the weeks just before the November 2020 election.

In fact, there’s good reason to posit a connection between suppression of the laptop story on social media,

Advertisement

Three mindsets that need a reset if we want a return to constitutional governance

Fear not: this will be brief. I’ve actually written at considerable length on these topics before, but all I want to accomplish here is to lay down a few markers, as a season of what promises to be incredible silliness bears down on us.

We’ll need touchstones with which to think about what’s going off the rails.  The basic problem is always more fundamental than the details by which we tend to navigate.  We come up with shallow hypotheses and explanations, but they’re situational and ultimately unsatisfactory.  I don’t propose to dictate what people conclude about causes and effects here, so much as suggest ways to think about our problem that are more fruitful than what we usually do.

One of the good effects of this is to adjust our thinking to a level as profound as the one the American Founders operated on,

Brief meditation on weaponized use of language: “DEI” and “disinformation”

I’m not quite sure why the “equity” in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) has suddenly become a hot topic in the conservative punditry.  It seems to have erupted in the last 72 hours.

But the eruption is a nice opportunity to drop a few observations on the use of language entailed in the DEI formulation.  I had occasion to tweet this weekend about the same use of language with the term “disinformation,” as it is deployed by Western cultural planners today, so I’m including that in the discussion.

I commend to you the discussions of others.

TOC Ready Room 16 December 2022: Censorship, gas lights, and Russia-Iran missile/drone adventure

A phenomenon has been developing in recent weeks that should raise our level of concern about the nature of public discourse, especially as brokered by the media.

It’s more than what the media, per se, are doing, however.  It has to do with “news” that purports to be coming from government, but is backed by no actual evidence, and is unverifiable in terms of whether it came from government at all, much less could be held accountable in any way.

We’ll have some examples below that clarify what I’m talking about.  To start with, however, a tweet exchange for orientation to the topic:

The enterprise highlighted by a timeline on FBI encounters with the Hunter Biden laptop

A 25 July 2022 letter from U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray is making the rounds.  In it, the senator informs Garland and Wray that he has received information from “whistleblowers” about biased assessment and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop and related probes in the fall of 2020.  The biased behavior allegedly came from Timothy Thibault, Assistant Special Agent in Charge at the FBI Washington Field Office (WFO), and FBI intelligence analyst Brian Auten.

The whistleblowers came forward in response to a May 2022 letter from Grassley asking for information on Thibault, in light of the special agent’s biased, partisan social media postings.  Grassley sent a letter on the same topic to the DOJ IG, also requesting information.

The timeline on the reported activities of Thibault and Auten is put in a very interesting light by juxtaposition with the known sequence of events surrounding the laptop.  A brief initial summary: