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Am I the only person disturbed that at the moment we as a nation have fallen so far and abandoned our founding principles so much that the primary protection for the right of free expression in the public square is a /Billionaire who decided to by a tech platform?’
What a horrible indictment of us as a nation in terms of throwing away what generations bequeathed us and paid for in blood.
By John Ruberry
On Friday night Substack journalist Matt Taibbi released the first installment of the Twitter Files, which outlined the efforts by Twitter, with assists from the Democratic National Committee, to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020. It’s a dynamite story–a political party worked behind the scenes with a Big Tech company to suppress a damaging news story about a presidential candidate, in this case Joe Biden, so he could defeat the incumbent, Donald J. Trump.
That tale of intrigue is something that you would think that you would find only in political thrillers. You know, the stuff of books, movies, or TV series. Except the Twitter scandal really happened. In response, the elitist mainstream media chose one of three tactics, or a combination of them, to confront this scandal: ignore, bury, or insult. In this post I’m going to discuss the first one in depth, and I’ll get to that in a moment.
But first a look back at an incident from 2005, the year I started my own blog, Marathon Pundit. What was then called the blogosphere was a relatively happy place. In comment threads and in behind-the-scenes emails, there was regular communication between conservative and liberal bloggers and journalists, even some camaraderie, at least here in Illinois. Politically our two camps didn’t agree on much–but there was one subject where we were in unison. All of the Illinois bloggers and mainstream media reporters hated the Reverend Fred Phelps and his twisted house of worship, the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas.
Some background: Phelps, who died in 2014, would bus in the few dozen members of his church, which then, as it does now, consisted only of the extended Phelps family, and protest at the funerals of soldiers and sailors killed in action in Iraq or Afghanistan. They held signs that read, among other things, “God Loves Dead Soldiers.” Phelps, who probably was in need of intensive psychiatric care, based his opinion on God and US military deaths on America’s acceptance of the gay lifestyle.
Back to Illinois: There was a Phelps protest in East Peoria, Illinois in 2005 at the funeral of a US Marine gunnery sergeant, who was killed in Iraq, which the local paper, the Peoria Journal Star reported on, but it left out the Westboro Church protest. And that infuriated Bill Dennis, who wrote the now-inactive Peoria Pundit blog.
Dennis had this say 17 years ago:
More than once, I’ve read the opinion that the media shouldn’t give Phelps and his people any “publicity.” Whether or not any particular groups gets publicity from news covering isn’t important. The news media needs to cover the news, whether or not it’s news we want to hear. It’s not the media’s job to keep us from having to hear ugly messages. The people who work in the information business need to reject the notion that the public is better off when it is kept in the dark. We wouldn’t tolerate the government doing that to us. Why does the media think it has the right to keep unpleasant news away from us?
It’s the news media’s job to answer questions, not to turn their head and pretend they didn’t hear the question.
The media’s opinion of what information should be provided to its consumers has now become dangerous. Big Tech, meaning of course Twitter, and as well as Google and Facebook, as well as traditional sources such as the legacy newspapers and broadcast networks, actively worked to suppress or ignore the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was revealed in October 2020 by the New York Post, as the presidential election season was underway. Yes, season–voting was already underway just about everywhere. Those media villains–I believe it’s fair to include those three Big Tech behemoths are part of the media–committed election interference. Think of a football game where the beat reporter for an NFL team is standing on the sidelines when the opposing team is about to score a touchdown–who then runs on to the field and tackles the player carrying the ball. Let’s call that wronged player “Trump.”
That’s what happened in 2020.
What is the slogan of the Washington Post, which has so far has written just one story about the Twitter Files? Oh yeah, “Democracy dies in darkness.” At least the most recent time Clay Travis checked, which was this morning, the New York Times hasn’t reported on Taibbe’s Twitter revelations. Travis Tweeted a few hours ago, “It has now been two days since @twitter & @elonmusk posted actual emails & correspondence of internal documents relating to the Hunter Biden laptop censorship in 2020. The @nytimes has still not covered the story at all.”
In a story published today CBS news barely mentions Taibbi’s scoop–but it attacked Twitter owner Elon Musk. Oh yeah, attacking. A whole bunch of leftist journalists, propagandists really, went into that attack mode I discussed earlier, vilifying Taibbi for performing superb journalism.
And in regard to that Phelps story from ’05, it wasn’t just the Peoria Journal Star committing the sin of omission. You remember I said that back in the day conservative and liberal bloggers and journalists used to interact regularly about stories. I can’t find the email I sent so long ago, but I reached out to a big shot left-wing Chicago newspaper columnist about what the Peoria Pundit and I saw as media malpractice. His polite reply to me was something like this, “But if we report on Phelps and his hateful protests, then we are only doing what he wants–giving him publicity.”
No, Mr. Newspaper Columnist, it is your job is to report the news. Not hide it, shape it, or twist it.
Democracy dies in darkness. So does the truth.
John Ruberry regularly blogs from the Chicago area at Marathon Pundit.
We have been pushing more and more people to seek mental health resources. That is a good thing, and will hopefully reduce the number of suicides and other mental health problems. But there is a stigma associated with seeking mental health services. People are afraid that they will be judged by others for seeking help, and it will have consequences.
Well, they aren’t wrong. And Hawaii recently proved it will absolutely treat you like a second-class citizen if you seek help for depression:
Michael Santucci, a cryptologic warfare officer from Fort Myers, Florida, saw a medical provider at a military hospital for feelings of depression and homesickness a few months after arriving in Hawaii last year, according to his lawsuit, filed in April. He wasn’t diagnosed with any disqualifying behavioral, emotional or mental disorder, the lawsuit said.
He later filled out forms to register his firearms with the Honolulu Police Department and indicated that he had been treated for depression, but noted it was “not serious.” Hawaii law requires registration of all firearms. Prior to acquiring a gun, an applicant must apply for a permit. Santucci needed such a permit even though he legally owned his firearms before arriving Hawaii.
Because Santucci answered “yes” on a form indicating he had sought counseling, the permit process was halted and his firearms were seized, his lawyers said.
Navy Times
Not just halted, but the corrupt police took his weapons.
For those who have never had to deal with the losers that do gun registration in Honolulu, let me illustrate the process. You bring 16 dollars and 50 cents in exact change to the police office. If you bring a 20 dollar bill, the lady behind the counter yells at you like Roz from the Monsters Inc movie. You get fingerprinted. You have a background check run. You get treated better at the DMV.
So, what did LT Santucci learn out of this? Probably to never be honest with the Honolulu PD ever again. That’s what everyone else reading this learned too. Even though Santucci never said he was going to kill himself or hurt anyone else, he was denied his rights. Any gun owner is now incentivized to not seek mental health for exactly this reason, putting them at higher risk of mental health issues.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the people that run the system want more gun owners committing suicide. Maybe its a feature, not a bug. We’ve seen a shift where homosexuality and transgenderism are no longer considered mental health problems, and we’ll encourage life-altering treatment when we should be encouraging people to better come to grips with the reality they live in. On the other side, telling a mental health practitioner that you struggle being deployed away from home is immediate grounds to remove your rights as a citizen. This is made all the worse by the fact that LT Santucci is raising his right hand every day to defend these people.
If that doesn’t make you mad, well, maybe you should seek treatment for that.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you enjoy these articles, why not donate to Da Tech Guy and purchase a book from the author!
One might be amazed how many reporters on the left spent yesterday on twitter attacking Musk and Matt Taibbi for releasing these documents, at least one would if you didn’t realize that these folks paychecks depend on them objecting.
This goes to show the difference between social media and standard media. For standard media a Friday night dump would be all about burring a story. However for a story that will spread via social media a Friday night weekend dump means more regular people will be free to read and spread it around, which is the whole point.
All that Musk has done has been about raising the profile of twitter. This document dump will do the same. That’s good news for all those advertisers who didn’t heed the left’s call to leave the platform but bad news to all who played along and lost their exposure to all those eyeballs.
This combined with the under oath testimony of an FBI agent being deposed is Missouri on their attempts to use big tech to swing the last election goes a long way in explaining why they went all in on stealing that election. If they fail and Trump wins then it’s bound to have been leaked to someone in the admin which might have resulted in a special prosecutor and/or investigation that would have been damning.
It’s very much worth noting that there were Democrat members of congress worried about this but their primary worry was what it would mean to section 230 defanging the friendly tech folks elsewhere at Facebook and Google and Youtube. In other words they were worried about not the acts but the Consequences they might lead to. A real test of the new GOP congress will be how deep they investigate this. If I’m McCarthy worried about getting the speakers chair I’d put out a statement at once saying I would name a committee at once and promise to load it with fire-eaters on the right.
Then let the consequences flow.
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