Better in their words…

I won’t post many of Glenn Greenwald pieces; I want to honor the subscription paywall. But I think it this one is really, really good and hits on some critical issues going on now [and the past 5-6 years] between agencies of the US Govt. and “bid tech”. Long, but important enough for you to read. mrossol

Source: Washington Expands the War State – by Glenn Greenwald

Monologue:

That old cliche that the only two things certain in life are death and taxes needs an amendment, at least if you’re an American. Something else is just as certain and inevitable. Namely, the U.S. budget for military and intelligence agencies will increase every year no matter what, the U.S. is, and for decades has been, the largest military spender in the world by far. The statistics are by now familiar. The U.S. spends more than the nine highest-spending nations combined that come after it. Of all the world’s military spending, if you aggregated it all from every nation into one pile, 38% of it is from U.S. spending.

And it’s not as if the U.S. spends so much more on its military because it has more than anybody else. Of the world’s top ten military spenders, the U.S. also spends the second-highest share of its gross domestic product, just after Saudi Arabia. What’s most impressive is how inventive and resilient is this web of a multi-tentacle war machine, which Dwight Eisenhower, 61 years ago, dubbed the “military-industrial complex”. No matter what is going on in the world, they always find — or concoct — reasons why the military budget must grow no matter how inflated it already is.

Since the end of World War II, the prime justification for pouring so many of our national resources into the coffers of weapon manufacturers was the Cold War. The premise that the United States faced a grave and existential global threat from Soviet Communism and thus had to conduct a series of hot wars, proxy wars, and cold wars on every continent on the earth overthrowing governments in South America, Asia, and the Middle East; installing and propping up dictators; decades-long wars in Korea and Vietnam, in Central America, just an endless carousel of conflicts, wars and internal strife that always required more sophisticated weaponry and an always growing standing army.

But then the Soviet Union fell along with the Berlin Wall. The global Communist menace was no more. And in the late 1980s, under the first Bush administration into the 1990s, under Bill Clinton, Americans were promised what was called, quote, a “peace dividend”. The idea was that, without an existential threat to face any longer, military spending could and would be substantially reduced and Americans would enjoy all the benefits of newly funded public infrastructure, social programs, and tax breaks.

It worked, a little bit, for a short while. Military spending did gradually decrease in the late 1980s and early 1990s — though always with the U.S. far in the lead in global military spending — but just a few years later, it plateaued…

…No more decreases, no more peace dividends. In part because the Clinton administration found new wars, inventing the concept of “liberal interventionism” to lead the U.S. into an ugly and sustained war in Yugoslavia, which CNN, back in 1999, dubbed “Madeleine’s war” — represented by Madeleine Albright’s response to the view of Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that the U.S. should only involve itself in wars with a clear goal and decisive force, a test which General Powell argued the U.S. involvement in the war in Yugoslavia did not even come close to meeting. As CNN related, Albright responded: “What’s the point of having the superb military you’re always talking about how we can’t use it?” As Powell later recalled: “I thought I would have an aneurysm”.

But Albright got her way. That war went on for years and incidentally led to a fairly vicious U.S. bombing campaign over Serbia based on the demand that Kosovo be granted independence from Serbia. It finally was — after it became clear that a majority of people in Kosovo favored such independence — and that led to a refusal to recognize this independence by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, a longtime ally of Serbia, who warned that this would create a precedent that could destabilize much of Europe, given how many provinces after World War II were shoved into countries to which they felt no affinity.

When that argument was ignored in Kosovo given independence, Putin then used that Kosovo precedent to justify first his 2008 invasion of Georgia to liberate two Russian-speaking provinces that clearly identified far more as Russian than Georgian, and is now using the same precedent to justify the annexation of Crimea, in 2014, everyone agrees their citizens overwhelmingly prefer to be under the rule of Moscow than Kyiv; and now is doing the same for similar Russian speaking populations in Eastern Ukraine — just a reminder of how great and widespread and enduring the consequences of various optional U.S. wars typically are.

So, as you can see from the chart, again, the U.S. enjoyed a tiny, fleeting “peace dividend” that began quickly to dissipate as the country fell further and further into armed conflict in the Balkans. And then, of course, came the 9/11 attacks and the 20 years of wars, regime change operations, and multi-country bombing campaigns in various countries that followed it. Military spending quickly doubled after 9/11, with almost no opposition — given that anyone questioning that was vilified as a sympathizer of al-Qaida, just as anyone questioning Cold War spending was deemed a communist supporter, and anyone questioning the military budget now, in Ukraine, is deemed a Kremlin asset. The numbers change, they keep going up, but the tactics never do.

On top of just pure military spending, after 9/11, the U.S. poured billions and billions more into related national security bureaucracies. A whole new one was created in 2002 with the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security. A few Democrats, such as the triple-amputee war veteran, Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, questioned the necessity for a new sprawling national security bureaucracy, only for Rick Wilson — then a Republican scumbag consultant, now a scumbag with the Democratic Party PAC Lincoln Project — just for him to run ads morphing Max Cleland’s face into Osama bin Laden’s, suggesting that only secret lovers of al-Qaeda could possibly cause anyone to question the need for the Department of Homeland Security.

But that dynamic worked, and it meant that military spending exploded for 20 years as the U.S. under Bush-Cheney and then under Obama-Biden, went to war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya and bombed and tried to regime change all sorts of countries having nothing to do with 9/11: from Somalia and Yemen to Syria and the Philippines. When Trump negotiated the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and then Biden executed that withdrawal in 2021, the arms industry worried, they really did, about where their profits would come from now. There was no reason for that worry, though, as they would have known had they just studied some post-World War II history. A new justification for explosive increases in military spending quickly arrived, as it always has. Less than nine months after the U.S. left Afghanistan, Russia invaded Ukraine, in February of 2022, and all of Boeing and Raytheon’s problems were solved.

Just last week, Congress, with very little opposition, passed a military budget of $858 billion dollars, an amount that exceeded what the Biden administration requested by $45 billion. It was an 8% increase in 2021. The Biden administration’s request was, while we were all told that the War on Terror had finally come to an end after 20 years, this time we did not even get a pretense of a few months of a “peace dividend”. As The Times reported on that vote:

Congress on Thursday gave final approval to an $858 billion military policy bill that would increase the Pentagon’s budget by 8% … after lawmakers in both chambers overwhelmingly approved the mammoth, 4400-page legislation…

You can imagine how many of them who voted for it actually read it. It went on:

A far bigger tranche of military aid for Kyiv is expected to pass through Congress later this year. The Biden administration in November asked lawmakers to approve an additional $38 billion just for Ukraine. And despite growing voices in both parties questioning sending more money, bipartisan support for aiding the Ukrainians has remained strong.

This was not giving the Biden White House everything it wanted: it was giving it far more than it asked for. In March of this year, Biden’s defense secretary, former Raytheon board member, Lloyd Austin, announced their intent to seek a significant increase in military spending from the 2021 budget. He explained:

I am proud to join President Biden today in submitting the fiscal year 2023 budget […] This $773 billion budget request reinforces our commitment to the concept of integrated deterrence […] and preserves our readiness and deterrent posture against the threats we face today, the acute threat of an aggressive Russia and the constantly emerging threats posed by North Korea, Iran, and violent extremist organizations. And it absolutely supports our policy of U.S., global leadership of — and responsibility for — our vast network of alliances and partnerships. The fiscal year 2023 Defense Department budget request of $773 billion is a $30.7 billion, or 4.1% increase from the fiscal year 2022 enacted amount.

Note that the countries cited by Defense Secretary Austin as threats, grave threats justifying this increase of tens of billions of dollars — Russia, North Korea, and Iran — all spend a tiny fraction of what the U.S. spends on its military budget. Indeed, the top spender among those three countries, Russia, spends on its military every year an amount that is roughly 1/13 of what the U.S. spends and indeed the U.S. —  after just nine months of Russia’s war in Ukraine — has already spent more, regarding the U.S. involvement in and support for that war, than the entire Russian military budget for the year for all purposes.

Claiming that Russia is some grave threat to the United States would be like if Mike Tyson in the 1990s tried to convince you that he has to bulk up even further at the gym to guard against the grave threat posed to him by Gary Coleman. But this propaganda somehow works, and it works well. This New York Times headline from yesterday actually tells the whole story: “Military Spending Surges Create New Booms for Arms Makers.” Feel free to write it off to a coincidence if you want, but at the exact time that the bottomless market for U.S. transfers of taxpayer money to the weapons manufacturing industry dried up, when the last troops left Afghanistan and the War on Terror began to wind down, the U.S. amazingly found a new war to enter that provides a better than ever boom to that industry.

The Times explains:

The prospect of growing military threats from both China and Russia is driving bipartisan support for a surge in Pentagon spending, setting up another potential boom for weapons makers that is likely to extend beyond the war in Ukraine. Congress is on track in the coming weeks to give final approval to a national military budget for the current fiscal year that is expected to reach approximately $858 billion dollars — or $45 billion above what President Biden had requested. If approved at this level, the Pentagon budget will have grown at 4.3 percent per year over the last two years — even after inflation —  compared with an average of less than 1 percent a year in real dollars between 2015 and 2021 […] Spending on procurement would rise sharply next year, including a 55 percent jump in Army funding to buy new missiles and a 47 percent jump for the Navy’s weapons purchases.

Indeed, the only problem the U.S. arms industry now faces is that it is having trouble producing enough weapons to meet the ever-growing demands of the Pentagon and the Pentagon’s orders, which is now buying weapons as quickly as it can, both to send to Ukraine — somehow, presumably necessary to protect you and your family from something or other — as well as to replace its own stocks now rapidly depleted from sending its own arms to Ukraine.

More good news for that industry is reported by the Times:

“Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest military contractor, had booked more than $950 million worth of its own missile military orders from the Pentagon, in part to refill stockpiles being used in Ukraine. The Army has awarded Raytheon Technologies” –his board of directors Secretary Lloyd Austin just left right before joining the Pentagon – “more than $2 billion in contracts to deliver missile systems to expand or replenish weapons used to help Ukraine. “We went through six years of Stingers in 10 months,” Gregory J. Haines, Raytheon’s chief executive, said in an interview earlier this month, referring to 1,600 of the company’s shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles sent by the U.S. government to Ukraine. “So, it’ll take us multiple years to restock and replenish.”

It goes on:

The combination of the Ukraine war and the growing consensus about the emergence of a new era of superpower confrontation is prompting efforts to ensure the military industrial base can respond to surges in demand. The issue has become urgent in some cases as the U.S. and its NATO allies seek to keep weapons flowing to Ukraine without diminishing their own stocks to worrisome levels. The Ukrainian military has run through years’ worth of the missile production capacity of Western suppliers in a matter of months. At the same time, contractors remain concerned about investing to meet growing demand for weapons that could dry up again when the war ends or politics shifts course.

That move alone suggests $73 billion in additional munitions orders could be on the way in the next three years, contracts that will largely benefit the big players like Lockheed and Raytheon, according to an analysis by Myles Walton, a military analyst.

Now, remember, the whole point of this war is that it is necessary to enhance and fortify your safety and security and yet the war in Ukraine, on the other side of the world, in a country where the U.S. has no vital interest, is in fact radically depleting the United States’ own weapons supply — the supply that presumably would keep you safe in the time of an attack. But to see how great this has been, not for you, but for the weapons industry, let’s first look at the overall New York Stock Exchange market performance for 2022. It is a pretty grim picture.

There you can see a significant decrease from the beginning of the year to right now in that overall stock index. The stock for Northrop Grumman, however, by stark contrast, has been robust and has been jumping upward ever since Russia invaded. There you can see the line steadily increasing. The same is true for Lockheed stock, which has also had a banner year as the rest of the market has suffered — and you can see the increased rate in February as Russia invaded Ukraine.

Indeed, ever since the U.S. has turned the Ukraine-Russia war into its own proxy war, I have repeatedly asked one question: in what ways are the interests of American citizens advanced, or their security enhanced, by heavy U.S. involvement in this war all the way on the other side of the world, in a country in which Washington for decades said it has no vital interest in it —  no oil, minerals or anything else?

There is no answer because there are no benefits, only harms to almost every American citizen, except for that tiny sliver who are major stockholders in the U.S. arms industry or the bureaucracies of the U.S. Security State which have grown with it.

And now the only question faced by this industry is: how will we produce enough weapons to meet the demand we could have only dreamed of, even during the Cold War and after 9/11? Again, from the Times:

These trends help explain stock market performance of the major military contractors — a small group of which control the bulk of sales to the Pentagon. Lockheed and Northrop Grumman both have seen their stock prices jump more than 35 percent so far this year in a market whose main indexes are down overall for the year. […] ‘The trillion-dollar defense budget —  that is where we are headed’, said Lawrence J. Korb, who served as an assistant defense secretary during the Reagan administration and was once a vice president at Raytheon.

Even this guy, formerly in the Reagan administration, in the Pentagon, and once a vice president at Raytheon, is warning that there’s no longer any limit on military spending and that we’re headed for a trillion-dollar budget. Here’s what he says: “Nobody seems to want to make the tough choices. Even the Democrats now seem to be afraid to be seen as being soft on defense.”

He’s mocking the Democrats for refusing to play their traditional role and least questioning occasionally whether we’re spending too much on our military. The article goes on: “The biggest barrier for growth for major military contractors — the list includes Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, BAE, Northrop Grumman, and Huntington Ingalls Industries – is finding sufficient supplies of key components, such as microelectronics and missile warheads, as well as a steady supply of new employees to assemble all these items”. That’s what they are actually worried about now.

If all this sounds familiar, it should. Back in May, the Biden administration sought $33 billion more for the war in Ukraine. But just like it did with the defense budget, Congress just arbitrarily decided that wasn’t enough and just threw $7 billion on top of that request, making it a $40 billion expenditure to the war in Ukraine. Now, more than 20% more military spending for Ukraine than even the Biden White House sought. And that $40 billion wasn’t by far the first spending package for Ukraine, nor was it the last.

Indeed, in March, according to CNN, there was a $13.6 billion Ukraine aid package for that war that was already approved, and that $13.6 billion was depleted so quickly, they were back in May for another 40 billion and have several times come back with tens of billions of dollars more to no end in sight.

Now, there’s a major partisan component to this: that Reagan official was mocking Democrats for failing to uphold their traditional role of questioning whether the defense budget is too much — and indeed, to the extent there has been that questioning, it has more often than not come from the Republican Party, especially the populist or Trump wing. Remember, Trump ran in 2016 on complaints that the U.S. was involved in too many parts of the world, even as he was promising to modernize the military.

But at least in the military budget, while it passed overwhelmingly, there were some no votes that came both from the populist wing of the Republican Party, represented by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who voted no, as well as Bernie Sanders and the Squad who also voted no — once again, demonstrating that if those two sides could stop calling each other Nazis and Communists, there would be a lot more grounds than they want to admit for them to work together on.

Last year, in 2021, when Matt Gaetz was advocating that there’d be a cutoff of funds for the ongoing war in Afghanistan, a group, a bipartisan group of pro-war activists led by people like Adam Smith, the Democrat from Washington, who’s a major recipient of Boeing donations along with Liz Cheney, united to ensure there was a majority to continue that war. They wanted to actually block any funding for Trump’s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Matt Gaetz said, once we get to the full house, there can be a coalition of left-wing populists and right-wing populists to finally put a stop to it. But it barely materializes because as these votes show, the number of people in each party willing to vote no on these massive military budgets continues to be very low.

When it comes to the U.S. Security State, though, the partisan divide is even worse. At least there you see Republicans being willing to step up and say no. On that $40 billion expenditure to Ukraine that I mentioned for May, there were six or seven dozen no votes in the Senate and in the House, and every single one of them, every last one came from the Republican Party, every last Democrat from AOC and Bernie to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and everyone in between voted yes unanimously to send $40 billion more to Ukraine. When it comes to the intelligence community, the CIA, and the FBI, the democratic allegiance to those institutions is even worse.

Earlier today, the ongoing series of leaks about Twitter’s censorship policies known as the Twitter Files, had its latest installment from Michael Shellenberger. And one of the things he revealed was quite alarming, namely that the relationship between the FBI and Twitter was even closer and more integrated than we knew.

And in particular, one of the things he showed was that the decision to ban or censor The New York Post’s pre-election reporting on Joe Biden’s business activities in China and Ukraine came not externally at first, but internally, from the deputy general counsel of Twitter, James Baker, who had somehow landed at Twitter after serving as the general counsel of the FBI.

And there’s been subsequent reports showing that within each of these Big Tech firms that are censoring as a regime, integrated in them, our members of the US Security State, and that was certainly true for Twitter in general and for its very dramatic decision right before the election to brute censor all information about reporting when it comes to the Joe Biden’s business activities.

But there is no opposition of any kind from the Democratic Party to the CIA and the FBI generally or to this involvement in particular. And that’s because, as we can see here from this polling data that should be on your screen now, there has been a poll from Gallup, in September 2021, that asked Democrats what their views are of each federal agency, what percentage of Democrats view each department as doing a, quote, “Excellent” or “Good” job.

And towards the bottom, you can see the FBI and the CIA are extremely popular agencies among Democratic Party voters, 66% of Democrats — both in 2019, when Trump as president, and now in 2021, with Biden — 66% think the FBI does a great or a good job and 61% think that of the CIA, up a little bit from when Trump was president, when they still love the CIA ,when 55% of Democrats say that. So, a significant majority of Democratic voters like the CIA and the FBI and think it’s doing a great job.

By stark contrast, here you see the opinion of Republicans on exactly those same questions. Under the Biden administration, only 26% of Republicans think the FBI is doing an excellent or good job, and 25% of Republicans think that about the CIA. Now, that did go down from the Trump administration, but even in the Trump administration, Democrats had a higher opinion of the FBI and the CIA than Republicans did. And now that gap is enormous.

And that’s why you see almost no Democratic politicians willing to stand up and question or criticize the fact that the FBI and Homeland Security and the CIA are playing such a central role in how the Internet is censored and how Big Tech makes censorship decisions because those agencies are very popular among their voters. They regard these agencies, the FBI and the CIA, as benevolent and want them involved because, on some level, they observe, perceive correctly and validly that these agencies are on the side of Democrats.

And to call this a radical reversal or inversion of our politics is to understate the case. A staple of not just left-wing politics, but liberal politics in the United States for decades has been severe skepticism over the CIA and the FBI, especially when it comes to the role they play in our domestic politics. And that skepticism is almost gone, entirely, replaced by these agencies now becoming very popular among Democratic voters, something that changed only with the emergence of Donald Trump because they perceived, again correctly, that the CIA and the FBI were devoted as the U.S. Security State, in general was, to sabotaging Trump’s 2016 campaign, his presidency in 2020 campaign. And they, therefore, see these agencies as their allies, which is why no Democratic politician wants to stand up and criticize them.

I find this incredibly remarkable. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is supposed to represent the most left-wing prong of the Democratic Party. Supposed to be a leftist. She’s been on the national scene for four years now, more a social media star than an actual legislator. But she’s certainly very active on social media. And here are the full results of any searches for AOC’s mentioned in her 15,000 tweets — 15,000 tweets on virtually every topic you can think of — of the CIA. She never once mentioned the CIA. Never once. Ever since she emerged as a prominent politician in 2018. And just to underscore that dynamic, here’s Bernie Sanders, who used to be an old-school leftist who spent the 1980s traveling to Nicaragua and Cuba and warning of the CIA’s dirty wars in Latin America.

The CIA was one of his primary targets. Here’s Bernie Sanders. The sum total of Bernie Sanders’s mentions of the CIA, also very active on social media. Since he joined Twitter, he has one tweet mentioning the CIA and it says: “What happens if we don’t act boldly to combat climate change? The CIA says that a warming planet will increase international instability”. The only mention of Bernie Sanders of the CIA was one time, in 2016, when he cited it favorably to warn that the CIA was concerned about climate change.

That, in and of itself, beyond the polling data, shows you the complete absence of concern in left-liberal politics when it comes to the nefarious influence of the FBI and the CIA. If you search AOC’s Twitter feed for mentions of the FBI, you find several tweets, most of which are angry that the FBI isn’t being more aggressive in investigating and pursuing her domestic opponents, complaining that they’re not sufficiently aggressive against American white supremacists and white nationalists, even though the official position of the U.S. Security State for years now has been that the leading opponent of the United States or the leading threat to the U.S. homeland is not al-Qaida or China or Russia or Iran, but is right-wing extremism and white supremacist groups. But she still wants the FBI more active on U.S. soil. She wants it to have more powers. That’s her only critique of that institution.

Now, one of the revelations from before today from that Matt Taibbi that I found most significant was the fact that the FBI was submitting regular requests to Twitter about the locations of various Twitter users that the FBI said were spreading misinformation, including small accounts that were doing things like joking, saying, “Oh, I hope all Americans go out and vote Republicans on Tuesday.

Democrats on Wednesday”. Obviously, a joke, not actually trying to discourage people from voting, but even if they were, what business is that of the FBI’s? Their job isn’t to monitor. Their job is to monitor for crimes, not for what they regard as misinformation. And they were regularly not just warning Twitter to censor things based on misinformation but asking for location information of the people they regarded as doing so as Taibbi wrote, after looking at these documents: “What ‘law enforcement’ objective is served by asking for Billy Baldwin’s location information? Why is the FBI/ DHS in the business of analyzing and flagging social media content at all? When were these programs created and who approved them? When did that become the FBI or the CIA’s or Homeland Security’s role?” And more to the point, why isn’t it anyone in the Democratic Party objecting to this? We had some concerns expressed privately by Ro Khanna in 2020. But beyond that, since these Twitter Files emerged, almost nothing.

Now, here’s the FBI email itself that was sent to Twitter with all the Twitter accounts that the FBI wanted investigated. Now, if the excuse is, “well, we don’t really trust Matt Taibbi. He’s not a real journalist, because in order to be a real journalist, you have to work for those big media corporations like CNN or NBC or The New York Times and The Washington Post” — which is really how a lot of them think : he’s not a real journalist. He’s an independent journalist who doesn’t count, even though independent journalism has always occupied the noblest and most important part of U.S. journalism history –. ordinary citizens doing journalism is what the First Amendment protects.

A similar report came from The Intercept back in October, just two months ago, where the reporters can clip Ben Stein and Lee Fang got a hold of secret documents that showed, in the words of the headline: “Leaked Documents Outlining Homeland Security’s Plans to Police Disinformation Online.” And here’s the first paragraph of it: “The Department of Homeland Security is broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous” — Let’s read that again:

The Department of Homeland Security is broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents–  illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.

Now, this is something that one might have thought about in 2002, when questioning why the U.S. needed a Homeland Security Department on top of the FBI and the NSA and the Justice Department, and the CIA. It was concerns like this that it would end up in mission creep, that it would become a domestic police force doing things like trying to censor the Internet. And that’s exactly what it’s now doing. And yet there’s no complaint about this from the Democratic Party.

In fact, you have to go to right-wing media outlets like Fox News or the Twitter account of the House Judiciary Committee in order to hear things like, quote, “Does anyone still trust the FBI?”.  This is something that would have been basic for any self-identified leftist or even liberal two or three or four decades ago. This idea, “ Does anyone still trust the FBI?”, and now it comes from the House Republicans.

And then Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell of California answers: “Why do you hate the police?”. And in part, he’s obviously trying to invert their arguments about the Democrats that they hate the police but, in large part, he’s really protecting an agency that I just showed you is loved by his followers, by Democratic Partisans, who think very highly of the FBI and don’t want it questioned.

Now, here, too, is a quote that would have been completely normal from every leftist and now you have to hear it from Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who, in response to these latest revelations, said something that no Democrat has yet said, that you could have imagined coming at a burning in AOC’s mouth: “The FBI actively interfering in multiple elections is the biggest threat to our constitutional democracy today”. And he’s referring to the FBI’s role, in 2016, when manufacturing the Russiagate lie along with the CIA, and then, in 2020, creating another lie, that the Biden laptop material was Russian disinformation, which caused Big Tech to censor it.

Now, if you don’t trust Matt Taibbi and you don’t trust Twitter’s internal documents and you don’t trust The Intercept, how about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who earlier this year was talking to Joe Rogan and Rogan asked him about why Facebook censored and suppressed that story on Joe Biden’s laptops, claiming it was pending a fact check when the documents were completely true. And here’s what Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan:

Mark Zuckerberg: The background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us, some folks on our team. It was like, hey, just so you know, like you should be on high alert. That was, we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of a… that’s similar to that.

And then Facebook tried to backtrack and say that the FBI didn’t specifically want one of the documents. But you can see from Zuckerberg what we’re seeing from Twitter that the FBI throughout the year was trying to prime them.

Now, let me just show you what Democrats are doing in lieu of objecting, as Josh Hawley has done, as the GOP House Judiciary Committee has done, they’re attacking Taibbi and defending the integrity of the FBI. In a series of tweets, according to California Democrat Ted Lieu: “We would want social media companies to know if they are spreading misinformation, right?

It’s up to the companies what they choose to do with that information”, suggesting it’s a positive thing that we want the FBI notifying Twitter what to censor. Here he attacks Matt Taibbi: “Hilarious. Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi think it’s news to reveal a program the FBI lists ON ITS OWN WEBSITE. FBI created Foreign Influence Task Force in 2017. It has “private sector partnerships” with “U.S. technology companies”, including “threat indicator sharing”.

Even if you’re comfortable with the FBI having Big Tech partnerships to censor the Internet, this wasn’t about censoring foreign influence operations, but censoring documents that we know came from domestic sources, namely The New York Post from Hunter Biden’s laptop. And then when he was questioned on that, Ted Lieu, the Democrat from California, said: ”I answered the question multiple times. The FBI program started in 2017. Obviously, I approve of it because I can read the FBI’s own website.”

So that’s where we are politically. Almost nobody in either party is willing to object to the constantly exploding military budget that is consuming our budget and our economic future, not for the Cold War or 9/11, but for a war on the other side of the world that has nothing to do with us while the only people who benefit are arms manufacturers — and even worse, a complete inversion between the parties where the Democratic Party and its followers now revere the FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security, and, if anything, want them to have more power, including the power to interfere in our elections, while the only objections you hear to those agencies come from right-wing media, like Fox News and the Republican Party.

So, as I mentioned earlier today, the ongoing series of leaks about Twitter’s censorship policies known as the Twitter Files, reveal detailed new information about how the FBI and intelligence community, with operatives implanted inside Twitter, actively worked to discredit the New York Post’s pre-election reporting on Joe Biden’s business activities in China and Ukraine. Those efforts occurred even before the Post’s publishing of that story.

There were repeated warnings from the FBI of supposedly impending Russian “hack and leak operations” — operations that never materialized — as well as afterward, including emails showing former FBI general counsel, who magically became deputy general counsel of Twitter, James Baker, insisting to Twitter’s chief censor, Yoel Roth, that the Hunter Biden material was hacked and or forged and therefore must be censored.

No journalist covered the Hunter Biden laptop story and the efforts by the government and Big Tech to censor and suppress it, more closely than Miranda Devine, a columnist for The New York Post and author of the book “Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide.

In her column for The Post today, she described how Democrats led by Congressman Adam Schiff are now scrambling to maintain their ability to censor and control Big Tech platforms amid public outrage over the mounting evidence of collusion between the government and Big Tech. At the very same time, they’re waving the free speech banner. She writes: “In the dying days of his powerful reign as overseer of the nation’s intelligence agencies, abusing his access to the nation’s secrets, Schiff’s final assignment is to preserve the censorship regime his side of politics entrenched across Big Tech”.

For our Interview segment, we’ll speak to Devine about all of this and more.

The Interview: Miranda Devine

G.G.: Hi, Miranda. Thank you so much. As someone who’s really admired your work, I’m so delighted to have you on our show. Thanks for being here.

M.D.: Pleased to be with you, Glenn.

G.G.: So, let me begin by asking you, obviously, the Twitter Files are coming out daily, including today. And today the revelations concern a story that enraged me from a distance, but you up close, you actually work at the newspaper whose reporting was censored by a lot of these lies and by the FBI in Twitter’s relationship. What do you make of the Twitter Files in general and of the revelations today?

M.D.: Look, I think today is the first time we’re really getting to the knot of the problem at Twitter and, really, it’s all about the FBI, the FBI was coercing Twitter and, as you just said, Facebook and probably Google and YouTube and so on, to censor Americans, and our particular interest, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and it turns out they went to enormous effort to prevent our story. And how did they know to do that? Well, they knew because the FBI had been surveilling Rudy Giuliani, who gave us the hard drive. Rudy Giuliani had, of course, become President Trump’s private lawyer, and a month after that, the FBI took up this kind of surveillance warrant on him. So, during 2020, they were spying on his club. They would have had access in August of 2020 to the email, a very detailed and forensic email that came to Rudy Giuliani from the owner of the computer repair shop, John Paul Mac Isaac, who had a copy of the laptop and had given it to the FBI back in December 2019. So, they knew it was real.

They knew he was a legitimate guy. And suddenly he’s kept a copy of the hard drive and he has contacted Rudy Giuliani and spilled the beans on particularly the Ukraine, the corrupt energy company Burisma, that was paying Hunter Biden one million dollars a year. And that’s a very tricky subject for Joe Biden. And so, they knew that they had to just tell this story and had to crush it before it was born and to make sure it was dead on arrival. And then they would have also had access to my very few text messages with Rudy Giuliani, to let them know that the New York Post was working on the story and that it was imminent.

So, in September of 2020, we know that there was a…what’s called a ‘tabletop exercise’, I think, in which the FBI and Twitter, The New York Times, and The Washington Post all engaged in, run by the Aspen Institute. And that tabletop exercise was titled Burisma Leak. And it basically ran through a hypothetical scenario of exactly what happened: the laptop becoming public, the Burisma material becoming public, and being damaging to Joe Biden. Except there was a twist: “It was all fabricated by the Russians”. So, what they were doing was grooming these journalists and the Twitter employees into thinking that when they saw our story, which was inevitably going to be published before the election, they would immediately recognize it as the Russian hacking operation that the FBI had been warning them about for a month.

G.G.: So, Miranda, you know, I was just talking about kind of A decade-old values on the left, certainly a centuries-old value in journalism is that you don’t believe the intelligence agencies and what they tell you without at least getting some evidence before you assume it’s true. You know, I stick my career, as you know, on writing about the laptop, because as someone who’s worked on large archives, to me all the evidence of authenticity was present from the start — that I’ve used in the Snowden case and many others — to publish them. But what always amazed me was it was so clear that these journalists and these Big Tech companies that decided to proclaim this to be Russian disinformation — meaning ‘it came from Russia, was hacked by Russia, and the information was forged’ — never had any evidence for that because it was a lie. Why do you think they were so willing to nonetheless affirm it? I mean, we see Twitter internal communications where they say, ‘Oh, wow, we have to suppress the story. How can we do it? Let’s cite the hack policies’. But we have no evidence that it’s hacked because of course, we now know it was a lie. Why were these so willing to believe this lie? Both media outlets And Big Tech.

M.D.: And it wasn’t just believing the lie. They didn’t do just the basic reporting that you would do. You could just call up the people who were on the emails that we published and say: ‘Hey, did you get a copy of this email? Is this real?’. Tony Bobulinski was out there in public, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Cced in a lot of these emails, he had duplicates from them on his own phones that he handed on to the FBI and that we had as well. There was just no excuse not to track this down. So, it’s the willful gullibility of these national security reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, their desire, I guess, to get rid of Donald Trump. Everyone was on the same page.

So, when the FBI started seeding these lies into Twitter and into the main news organizations all pushing on an open door because they didn’t want Donald Trump to win and they didn’t want anything that was detrimental to Joe Biden to materialize just before the election. And also, I think there’s something a little more sinister, which is the fact that the CIA and the FBI, the intelligence apparatus, have managed to insinuate themselves into the ranks of reporters who, I guess, report on national security issues. They seem to be able to be anonymously coerced — the whole Russia collusion hoax was a symptom of that. The Washington Post and The New York Times won Pulitzers for a story that was just a tissue of lies and quite obviously dishonest, but they seemed to be gullible and trusting their sources. And I just have to turn back and say, you know, I’m unfortunately one of those people back in the Iraq War who believed what we were being told about WMD.

And I thought the FBI and the CIA were sort of, you know, they might be a few rotten apples, but they wouldn’t really lie about something so important. How naive and stupid was I? I think a lot of conservatives were like that, and a lot of us were ridiculed by the Iraq war as the dawning realization that actually what people like you on the left, Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, had been saying that we had dismissed as conspiracy theories of the left actually all ended up being true. And now the shoes on the other foot, I mean, it’s hilarious, I suppose if the intelligence services and the security apparatus are helping your side of politics, maybe you’re more likely to believe in them.

G.G.: You know, in addition to learning the lesson that the intelligence agency’s lied from the Iraq War, the other lesson was supposed to be that media outlets also said that they learned a lesson, which is that, you know, it wasn’t just Fox News. You know, no one needed Fox News. Conservatives were already on board because it was a Bush-Cheney war. What was needed was to convince liberals and that’s where The New Yorker came in, the New York Times came in, and the Atlantic. And what The New York Times said is “We realize now what we did so wrong, publishing story after story that was false on our front page from anonymous sources, which we’re never going to blindly trust the intelligence agencies again. We’re going to subject their claims to skepticism”.

And yet here we are, not even two decades later and I would say that trust in the intelligence agencies and the kind of review in the polling that, I don’t know if you heard that, among Democrats and liberals is higher than ever, they somehow have become convinced that these are the agencies that we most trust, not just in terms of what they tell us, but even to arbitrate truth and falsity. How has that happened that, you know, as you say, the tradition of the left and even liberals was to distrust this institution, and now that has been completely reversed? Why do you think that is?

M.D.: I guess the only thing I can think of is that, well, I mean, it could be corruption and also it’s just because the intelligence services were doing the dirty work that The New York Times wanted them to do, which was to dirty up Donald Trump, whom they despised. And once you convince yourself that Donald Trump is an existential threat to America, to democracy, then it’s kind of you don’t care what means people get the information that’s going to damage you.

You’re just going to accept it and run it blindly. But when I talk about corruption, I mean, we see today from the Twitter Files that Twitter received $3.4 million from the FBI for basically doing the dirty work of censoring Americans for nothing worse than telling a few jokes and certainly censoring The New York Post and stopping us being able to disseminate widely our story about, which is really about Joe Biden’s corruption, his family’s influence-peddling scheme, which would have if it had been widely disseminated, could have had an impact on the election. And then there are the one million dollars that the State Department paid to the Aspen Institute.

Now, this is a prestigious institute that has a lot of donor money from everyone, from George Soros to the Rockefeller Foundation, Bill Gates Foundation — and as I said, $1 million dollars from the State Department in 2020. And so, it’s an honor to get invited to the gigs, and maybe that’s what it is. Journalists are notoriously… they like to be duchessed anyway.

G.G.: So, let me talk about your column today. You know, I’ve had probably one of the biggest laughs I’ve had over the last several days as the very journalists and politicians who constructed the Big Tech censorship regime — by agitating for it and then complaining that it wasn’t being aggressive enough in terms of who was censoring, constantly complaining that too many people were being allowed to speak, not enough people were being silenced — suddenly decided to put on their cape of free speech activist because for the first time ever, instead of their enemies and adversaries being censored, they got targeted with 12-hour, 24- hour, very brief suspensions, and they were furious about it. And yet, at the same time, as you wrote today, the Democratic Party is continuing with its efforts to ensure that this censorship regime stays fortified. And you focused on Adam Schiff. What is it that he is doing and what are Democrats, in general, doing to keep this regime going?

M.D.: Well, Adam Schiff wrote a letter last week to Nick Clegg, from Facebook as well, basically warning him that he’d better not dismantle any of the censorship regimes in place, ostensibly around election so-called security, but really ‘do not do what Twitter has done. Do not go down that path. Or you could find yourself in a world of pain’. He followed up on Sunday with an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN, on “Face the Nation”, effectively saying the same thing.

You know, it was ostensibly about the Internet, it was supposed to be about Donald Trump and the charges against him today but it quickly morphed into another threat against all social media companies: that if they allow this dangerous speech, hate speech onto their platforms like Twitter is doing, and Twitter de-platforming or suspending journalists, then they would find that they would be now held accountable. They would lose their immunity and become just publishers and be liable for libel law and so on, and they’d lose the Section 230 protections. And that’s something that really has been held over the head of social media companies.

And it’s one of the reasons why they were so compliant. And if you remember Adam Schiff, who’s one of the most powerful people in Congress, head of the House Intelligence Committee, just lied. He’s lied about everything, from the Russian collusion stuff to the Ukraine impeachment, to the Hunter Biden laptop which he said was the Kremlin smear, accused — after The New York Times, the oldest newspaper in the country, fourth largest circulation, who published a perfectly accurate story — accused us of being agents of the Kremlin, publishing a Kremlin smear. So, he’s a liar. And he went with his committee to go and visit Twitter, and presumably Facebook, and Twitter employees — you can see from some of the Twitter Files — felt really quite pressured and intimidated by the fact that he was this powerful committee coming to visit them to make sure that they were being compliant.

G.G.: Yeah. You know, when I just went over a few statements from his fellow California Democrat, Ted Lieu, who I remember being excited about when he first ran for Congress because he really made his identity as a civil libertarian, central to his campaign. I mean, it wasn’t just like a throwaway line, it was something that he swore was going to be his primary focus: protecting the civil liberties of Americans. And for whatever reason, he became one of the leading Russiagate obsessives.

And obviously, as you say, if you get convinced, that Donald Trump is his existential threat to the United States, bent on installing a white supremacist dictatorship or turning the United States over to the Kremlin, it almost becomes irrational to become authoritarian in the name of stopping it — but he’s certainly someone who has fallen prey to that. His argument is, ‘look, all that’s really being demonstrated here is that the FBI and the CIA and Homeland Security are kind of making suggestions or they’re just like providing information like, hey, Twitter, here are some accounts we think you might want to look into’. And it’s completely up to the Big Tech companies whether or not they want to abide by it, whether or not they want to adhere to it, it’s purely optional. What do you think about that argument?

M.D.: Oh, well, I mean, it’s just nonsense. You can see from the Twitter files, the sort of pressure that was being put on by 80 FBI agents who were tasked to ask Twitter for location information of users to get them to so-called moderate, a.k.a. censor users, you know, just regular Americans cracking jokes with lots of following accounts. And Twitter would just get these parades of accounts that the FBI, these 80 agents controlled through, basically conducting a massive surveillance operation on Americans using Twitter.

And I just, you know, it’s so obvious that they felt intimidated. And at one point when Twitter said, look, we really haven’t seen much of this Russian or this foreign interference that you’re talking about on our platform, there really isn’t anything I mean, it’s really small not nine nothing accounts. They answer back they really are quite angry and they demanded that Twitter put that in writing and sent to them this flurry of articles from the media like Rolling Stone, about three Rolling Stone stories, a New York Times story, and it’s hilarious because those stories all quote, “anonymous sources about “Russian interference”, which presumably on the very intelligence agencies, including the FBI, that have been briefing those news organizations. And then they turn them around to Twitter, which is proof that there is Russian interference — a complete fiction that they had invented. And Twitter then felt quite pressured that they had to go and find something. And there really wasn’t much of that there. But they were just determined to make Twitter.

I think — because they wanted to prevent our story, they knew it was coming because they had been spying on Rudy Giuliani and they knew that we were about to publish a story that was going to be very damaging to Joe Biden and perhaps losing the election – and then, remember, they were allied with those 51 former intelligence officials whom James Baker is connected with through various think tanks. James Baker from the FBI went to Twitter.

The cross-pollination is incredible. And those 51 former intelligence officials, a few days after our story was published, wrote a letter that was really the final nail in the coffin for our story. They said that our story and the laptop, the emails we published had all the earmarks of a Russian information operation, and that was enough for the rest of the media to just dismiss it, not cover it, and treat it as if it was, in fact, Russian propaganda.

G.G.: Yeah. What always amazed me besides the fact that the only place where there are more former intelligence officials than Big Tech is in the corporate media is that that letter was actually more cautious than what the media said. The letter kind of said we admit we don’t have any evidence. It’s kind of like a little feeling inside of us. And the media took that and made it: this is Russian disinformation. Well… Miranda, we’re out of time, but I want to take this opportunity to thank you for all the reporting you’ve done. There haven’t been that many of us covering this story as reporters from the beginning, and I’ve really learned a lot from your work. It’s always very fact-driven and meticulous and never dogmatic or ideological. And so, I really appreciate the work you’ve done. I appreciate your taking the time to join us tonight.

M.D.: Thank you so much, Glenn, and vice versa, I admire your work very much and I’ve learned a lot from you. It’s funny that we’re on the other side of the ideological spectrum, but it seems like on these issues, increasingly left and right are finding common ground, at least if they’re honest and don’t want to be dictated to by spooks.

G.G.: Exactly. This exchange probably would have been unthinkable ten years ago, and yet here we are. Have a great evening. Thanks so much.

So that concludes our show for this evening. As always, we will be moving to Locals, the platform on Rumble for an interactive aftershow where we take your questions and respond to your feedback. For those of you watching, we really appreciate it. We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night here on Rumble at 7:00 pm Eastern. Live as always. Have a great night.