When it comes to the offense of tax-paid government thugs trying to silence free speech in the U.S., the only way more proverbial shoes could drop might be if an earthquake hit a cobbler’s shop.
Even as the Biden administration keeps running its FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) push to make social media platforms remove pro-liberty posts (until the moment the Supreme Court rules in the “Murthy v. Missouri” suit over just that kind of unscrupulous activity), and even after numerous investigative reports from MRCTV, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and more, the U.S. government appears to have been working another set of levers to silence us. These levers involve people inside and outside the government (many of whom went back and forth), Google, and Twitter, and appear to have sought to target not just social media, but the ability of pro-liberty Americans to engage in banking and in publishing on Amazon.
It's a monumental amount of research, put into concrete form in a massive 6,800 word report at Shellenberger’s Public (via Substack), at Taibbi’s Racket (via Substack), and released in segments on Shellenberger’s X account starting with a powerful May 23 introduction, and the research contains numerous key takeaways that tie many people and terminological threads within the vast government-corporate-censorship complex that tax-eaters and their tech allies have been constructing to silence dissent.
The best way to obtain a clear picture of this incredibly byzantine and dangerous “public-private” fascist gang is to note segments of the intro Shellenberger offers in his initial X Post:
“The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is the most famous of the 18 US government agencies that comprise the Intelligence Community (IC) of the United States of America. Unlike the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), the law strictly prohibits CIA employees or contractors from spying upon or running clandestine operations against American citizens on US soil.”
One must note here that the US Constitution does not sanction the existence of the CIA, and that the Fourth Amendment prohibits any clandestine spying on anyone, foreigner or citizen.
Shellenberger adds:
“But now, a new Twitter Files investigation reveals that a member of the Board of Trustees of the CIA’s mission-driven venture capital firm (InQ-Tel) and ostensibly ‘former’ IC and CIA analysts were involved in a 2021-2022 effort to take over Twitter’s content management system. The effort also involved: — a long-time IC contractor and senior Department of Defense R&D official who spent years developing technologies to detect whistleblowers (‘insider threats’) like Edward Snowden and Wikileaks’ leakers; — the proposed head of the DHS’ aborted Disinformation Governance Board, Nina Jankowicz, who aided US military and NATO ‘hybrid war’ operations in Europe; — Jim Baker, who, as FBI General Counsel, helped start the Russiagate hoax, and, as Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, urged Twitter executives to censor The New York Post story about Hunter Biden.”
Names such as Jim Baker and Nina Jankowicz are infamous, and they already have been cited for their efforts to silence us and portray factual pro-freedom info as “foreign propaganda” or “dangerous to public health.” But Shellenberger, Taibbi, and Gutentag expose much more, including the “public-private” efforts of these political cronies to get PayPal to debank dissenters, and to get Amazon to shut our economic and publishing doors.
“These existing or former IC employees, contractors, or intermediaries weren’t satisfied with simply controlling Twitter. They also wanted to use PayPal, Amazon Web Services, and GoDaddy in a totalizing effort to de-platform, de-monetize, and excommunicate from the Internet entirely those individuals that the IC et al. deems to be a threat.”
Indeed, it’s not just the “revolving door” government employees’ ties to corporations like Twitter or their friendships with Google execs that cause alarm. Simply looking at one figure, Jankowicz, offers insight into the links the IC has to “non-profit” think-tanks and to international conflicts in which the US has been deeply involved – conflicts such as the US-connected proxy-war in Ukraine.
In April of 2022, The Washington Examiner exposed Jankowicz’s ties to the corrupt “Steele Dossier” to trigger unconstitutional spying on Donald Trump, but the paper also exposed her connections to the Ukrainian government, the leftist Wilson Center, and the Fulbright Scholarship payout system.
“Nina Jankowicz, who was a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center and adviser to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship, confirmed a report Wednesday that she has been named executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board.’”
And Jankowicz’s ties to domestic attempts to silence us weave together with efforts of other Intel Community cronies.
Shellenberger reports that on June 11, 2020, Jankowicz released her book, “How to Lose the Information War,” in which she argued for fascist speech controls:
“In her book, Jankowicz compares the lack of regulation of speech on social media to the lack of government regulation of automobiles in the 1960s. She calls for a ‘cross-platform’ and public-private approach, so whatever actions are taken are taken by Google, Facebook, and Twitter, simultaneously.”
Mussolini, eat your heart out.
But Jankowicz’s points would just be “opinions” – offered via freedom of speech, ironically – if they were not connected to this government-corporate-think-tank-scholarship nexus, and this is where that web widens – exponentially – to reveal evident fascist connections to the Intel gang and a piece-by-piece construction of a political censorship complex.
Writes Shellenberger re Jankowicz’s book:
“’The Biden-Harris administration can, and should, take up many of the solutions outlined in this book,’ she writes. If the West is to win the ‘information war,’ it needs a whole-of-society response, like the US and NATO used in Eastern Europe. She praises a NATO cyber security expert for having created a ‘Center of Excellence.’ If that term sounds familiar to close observers of the Censorship Industrial Complex, it might be because Renée Diresta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, in 2021, promoted a ‘Center of Excellence’ in a Department of Homeland Security video she recorded, in which she made the case for the Disinformation Governance Board Jankowicz would later, briefly, head up. One year later, Jankowicz would work with an anti-disinformation consulting firm to Twitter staffed by ‘former’ IC analysts. Its name was Alethea Group.”
Here, Matt Taibbi offers key insights, at Racket, noting that a purported 2020 “hacking scandal” at Twitter saw the company hire “cybersecurity expert Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko” to address the problem.
“In late December of 2020, Zatko asked Twitter employees for visibility into their security arrangements. By the day after the Capitol Hill riot, on January 7, 2021, as reported in Public, Zatko recommended that Twitter hire an outside contractor.
‘I feel an external investigation may be quite valuable,’ he said, in a Slack chat. “I’d recommend Alethea Group for the disinformation angle.’
Alethea was an interesting choice. At the time only just founded in 2019, some of the firm’s initial capital came by way of a $10 million investment by Ballistic Ventures, led by Ted Schlein and Kevin Mandia. Schlein, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins, sat on the board of trustees of the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. When asked if In-Q-Tel funded Alethea Group, Schlein told Public, ‘This is a question either the company or InQTel should answer, not me.’”
It gets even more suspicious. Shellenberger reports that Alethea Group just happened to start hiring former CIA hacks, and, yep, Ms. Jankowicz.
“On July 28, 2020, a little-known teen and young adult book publisher released True or False: A CIA Analyst’s Guide to Spotting Fake News, by Cindy Otis, a former CIA analyst.”
Otis would be hired by Alethea in 2021, and, indeed, they hired Jankowicz in the summer of that year, as well.
And guess what Zatko and Alethea used as a lever to call for more censorship?
January 6th.
In the wake of the January incident, in March 24, 2021, Zatko emailed a 12-page report calling for more government-corporate-tied censorship, claiming: “The organizations and people behind this recommendation have the connection [sic] to get this in front of the right people in the administration.”
And in 2022, Alethea secured a $10 million investment from Ballistic Ventures, whose general partner is the aforementioned Ted Schlein. Schlein “provides counsel to the U.S. intelligence community, serves on the Board of Trustees at InQTel, and was recently named as a board member of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee.”
It’s all connected. It’s vast. It’s filled with feedback loops and what appear to be special favors, and it all pushes the idea of coercing or incentivizing social media, banking, and more to silence and debank us.
What I have offered is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, or one shelf in that proverbial cobbler’s shop. For all of this spy-novel-like tale, please read Mr. Shellenberger’s and Mr. Taibbi’s reports.
And please remember that as the feds overtly continue to see the FBI and others try to censor us until “Murthy v. Missouri” is decided in the Supreme Court, these backhanded, corporate-government efforts likely will continue beyond the ruling.
It will be up to us to sound the alarms about them and inform others of the corruption, often funded with our tax cash.