Base Instincts

U.S. military rejects victims of 2009 terrorist attack for the renaming of Fort Hood.

by Lloyd Billingsley for American Greatness

Fort Hood, Texas, is named after John Bell Hood, a West Point graduate and Confederate general. The Army wants to rename the base after the lateGeneral Richard Cavazos, a hero of the Korean and Vietnam wars. This selection bypasses qualified candidates with a history on the base, such asLieutenant Colonel Juanita Warman. 

An expert in post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, Warman received an Army Commendation Medal for service at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the  facility where soldiers injured in Afghanistan and Iraq received treatment before returning stateside. Warman loved her work and volunteered for flights to Iraq to care for soldiers. 

In 2009, Warman was posted to Fort Hood, where American troops were departing for duty in Afghanistan. She arrived on November 3 and two days later U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan shot Warman dead. She was 55, with two children, and not the only woman to perish that day. 

Amy Sue Krueger, born in 1980, enrolled at the University of Wisconsin but after 9/11 enlisted in the Army to join the war on terrorism. The mental health specialist volunteered for a mission to Afghanistan and in October 2009, Staff Sergeant Krueger, 29, arrived at Fort Hood. On November 5, Hasan shot her dead. The shooter seemed to have a preference for women. 

Francheska Velez was the daughter of Juan Velez, a Colombian immigrant who tried to join the U.S. military but didn’t meet the requirements. Francheska told him “Papi, lo voy hacer,” and duly joined up. Private Velez was deployed to Iraq but got pregnant and returned to begin maternity leave. At Fort Hood on November 5, 2009, Nidal Hasan targeted the 21-year-old, who yelled “My baby! My baby!” Hasan shot Velez in the chest and her unborn child was never counted among the 13 murder victims. 

“What I don’t understand is how this demented man could do this,” Juan Velez told reporters. “How could she die at the hands of her own people?” 

That calls for background on the shooter, and his rise through the ranks.

Born in 1970 to Muslim immigrants, Nidal Malik Hasan graduated from Virginia Tech and in 2003 completed psychiatry training at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. Hasan served his residency at Walter Reed Medical Center, where instructors cited his “pattern of poor judgment and lack of professionalism.” 

As the report “Lessons from Fort Hood” notes, during his residency and post-residency fellowship, Hasan demonstrated evidence of violent extremism, called himself a “soldier of Allah,” and wrote papers defending Osama bin Laden. Two officers described Hasan as a “ticking time bomb” but the Army promoted Hasan and considered him competent to counsel soldiers. 

On December 17, 2008, Hasan visited the website of radical Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaeda leader. Hasan sent a message to al-Awlaki and another on January 1, 2009. The messages were acquired by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in the San Diego Field Office. In early January 2009, the emails were sent to the FBI’s Washington field office and FBI headquarters. 

In May 2009, the Army promoted Hasan to major and two months later sent him to Fort Hood. On May 31, Hasan again emailed al-Awlaki about suicide bombers whose “intention is to kill numerous soldiers,” and “save his fellow people.” As Hasan explained, “this logic seems to make sense to me.” In another email to al-Awlaki, Hasan wrote, “Please keep me in your Rolodex in case you find me useful, and please feel free to call me collect.” 

The next month, the FBI’s Washington field office emailed the San Diego office: “Given the context of his military and medical research and the content of his, to date, unanswered email messages from al-Awlaki, WFO does not currently assess Hasan to be involved in terrorist activities.” The FBI then dropped the case until November 5, 2009. 

That day the soldier of Allah deployed an FN Five-seveN handgun fitted with laser sights, and carried a .357 magnum in reserve. At the Soldiers Readiness Center, Hasan slipped behind a desk, bowed his head in prayer, then stood up, yelled “Allahu akbar,” and began firing. At first he fired into the most densely packed areas then began targeting individual soldiers, including Captain John P. Gaffney, Specialist Frederick Greene, and civilian physician assistant Michael Cahill. 

Hasan shot Major Eduardo Caraveo, Staff Sergeant Justin Michael DeCrow and Specialist Jason Dean Hunt, who took a fatal bullet in the back. Hasan gunned down Privates First Class Aaron Thomas Nemelka Michael S. Pearson, and Captain Gilbert Russell Seager. Hasan’s head shot took out Pfc. Kham See Xiong of St. Paul, Minnesota. 

The wounded included Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford who took seven bullets from Hasan, including shots in the head and abdomen. His fellow soldiers commandeered a table and rushed Lunsford to triage. Hasan also grazed the right side of Staff Sgt. Shawn M. Manning and shot him in the left upper chest, left back, lower right thigh, upper right thigh, and right foot. 

And so on, for more than 30 others, including civilian police officer Kimberly Munley. Unlike the other victims, Munley was armed. She managed to wound the man FBI bosses claimed was not involved in terrorist activities. 

Consider also the response of the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.

Barack Obama, commander-in-chief of U.S. Armed Forces, failed to mention a single victim by name. The president called the mass murder “incomprehensible” and a “tragedy,” not an act of terrorism or an atrocity. The president also spared Nidal Hasan any open condemnation. His victims included African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, but the president raised no possibility of racist motivation.

The Defense Department called the attack “workplace violence,” not even “gun violence.” This was an effort to avoid portraying the attack as terrorism or combat, and to deny the victims the medals and benefits they deserved. In 2014, Obama declined to meet with Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford. Those are tough acts to follow but Vice President Joe Biden was up to the task.

“Jill and I join the President and Michelle in expressing our sympathies to the families of the brave soldiers who fell today,” Biden said in a statement. “We are all praying for those who were wounded and hoping for their full and speedy recovery.  Our thoughts and prayers are also with the entire Fort Hood community as they deal with this senseless tragedy.” The Delaware Democrat failed to name any soldiers who “fell,” and did not openly condemn the terrorist who murdered them.

In his August 2013 court-martial, Hasan admitted he was the gunman and told a judge he killed the soldiers to protect Muslims and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan. On August 23, 2013, the jury found him guilty of all 42 counts and sentenced him to death. The sentence has not been carried out. Nidal Hasan was able to “kill numerous soldiers” and keep his own life.

After Biden’s disastrous withdrawal last year from Afghanistan, with 13 American troops dead from a terrorist bomb, Hasan proclaimed. “We have won!!!”  This is what happens when the U.S. military retains a self-acknowledged jihadist. This is what happens when the FBI looks the other way at an obvious threat. And to answer Juan Velez, this is why Francheska Velez, Amy Sue Krueger, and Juanita Warman were killed at Fort Hood.

In 2022 moving forward, it’s all about memory against forgetting. Remember November 5, 2009, the deadliest mass shooting at a U.S. military facility and the most horrific terrorist attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001. The murder victims, including three women, were passed over for the renaming of the base where they perished. If their fellow soldiers, friends and loved ones thought that was part of a shameful coverup, it would be hard to blame them. 

X22, And we Know, and more- Nov 2nd

 

What a slow day. Here's tonight's news:

Unexplained Excess Deaths Are on the Rise

There are a half-million excess deaths in the United States that are unaccounted for—and the usual suspects do not add up to that many.

by Edward Ring for American Greatness

By a significant margin, and according to data reported weekly by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the death rate in America remains elevated. If nothing else is certain as Americans continue to cope with the most disruptive event in the last half-century, one fact is indisputable: As the number of cases of COVID-19 decreased over the past few months, they now account for less than half of this persistently elevated death rate.

In the six years before the COVID era, deaths in the United States averaged between 2.6 million and 2.8 million people per year. These averages are adjusted for population growth, and with a population as large as that of the United States, the numbers should be, and are, remarkably stable. During the three years immediately preceding 2020, for example, the population growth-adjusted death rate from all causes varied by only 1.5 percent.

None of that is true today. The increase in total deaths—deaths from all causes, not just COVID deaths—is up significantly. In the nine months in 2020 from April to December, a normal death count would have been 2.04 million. Instead, during that period, 2.57 million people died, 26 percent above normal.

Deaths in the United States from all causes in 2021 were also well above normal—3.46 million versus only 2.8 million if it had been a normal year, 24 percent over normal. So far in 2022, with complete data available through August, total deaths were 1.91 million, against a projected 2.21 million if it were a normal year, which is still up 16 percent. These numbers are shown graphically on the chart below.

To put these overages in perspective, in recent decades before COVID came along, a very bad flu season would mean an increase in total deaths, but typically not much more than the usual increases every flu season. This can be seen above, where the normal multi-year average (blue line) rises to a peak of around 60,000 total deaths per week during the worst month of flu season in January, then descends to around 50,000 per week in mid-summer. Even the H1N1 virus didn’t have a significant overall impact. Between 2009 and 2010, the CDC estimates around 12,500 Americans died from H1N1. That represents not quite a 0.5 percent increase in total deaths.

While it is encouraging that total excess deaths in the United States during 2022 so far are only up 16 percent compared to 24 percent in 2021 and 26 percent in the last nine months of 2020, they are still well above anything we have seen in the United States in the last 100 years. But more troubling is the fact that according to the CDC’s own data, most of these excess deaths cannot be attributed to COVID. In the chart below, the blue line plots the number of excess deaths over the past two-and-a-half years, and the gray line plots how many of those excess deaths are attributable to COVID. The gray line is consistently below the blue line.

Breaking this down to numbers reveals the following percentages of unexplained excess deaths. During the first nine months of the pandemic through December 2020, 32 percent of excess deaths were not reported as COVID deaths. During 2022, 29 percent of excess deaths were not reported as COVID deaths, and through the first eight months of 2022, 32 percent of excess deaths are unexplained by COVID. The most recent data are not encouraging. For the two most recent months for which we have complete data from the CDC—July and August—57 percent of excess deaths are notexplained by COVID.

These numbers cannot be dismissed. The sample sizes are too big. In July and August, 26,685 people were reported dead from COVID. But during those same two months, 62,576 more people died than should have died in a normal July and August. What can account for this?

Overall, since the COVID-19 pandemic began, from April 2020 through August 2022, the CDC reported 1,044,323 COVID-related deaths. But so-called excess deaths during that period, even when adjusting for population growth, are 1.5 million. There are a half-million excess deaths in the United States that are unaccounted for. The usual suspects do not add up to that many.

For example, suicides increased from 45,979 in 2020 to 47,646 in 2021. But there were 48,344 suicides reported in 2018, two years before the pandemic. Murders were up 30 percent in 2020 versus 2019, then up by another 6 percent in 2021. These are alarming trends. But they only account for about 7,000 excess homicides over pre-COVID averages. Deaths from drug overdoses are way up, over 22,000 more in 2021 compared to 2020, with 2020 drug overdoses up about 8,000 over 2019. Automobile fatalities were up by 4,000 in 2021 compared to 2020. All of this is alarming, but numerically they do not explain what we’re seeing.

Deaths from suicides, murders, drug overdoses, and automobile fatalities—all combined and over the past two-and-a-half years—may account for as many as 100,000 of the 500,000 unexplained excess deaths in the United States, and that’s being generous. 

What has killed the other 400,000 Americans during the COVID era, since we know it wasn’t COVID?

One suggestion, easily debunked, is that we have an aging population. It’s true our population is aging, but this still doesn’t explain the excess deaths. If you view what is known as a “population pyramid” for the United States as of 2021 (shown below), at the top you will see that America’s senior citizens, plotted by age, form a fairly smooth downward slope. But there is a blip on the slope, seen for men and women aged 75, i.e., born in 1946 in the first wave of the Baby Boom. How significant is this bulge in the slope, since people born in that year are nearing the end of the average life expectancy?

As it is, among Americans still living, about 890,000 more were born in 1946 than were born in 1945. It’s possible because people born immediately after World War II are just now beginning to pass through the years when they are most likely to die of natural causes, we will see higher overall death rates than we have seen in the years 2013 through 2019, a period during which death rates in the United States were stable from year to year. But wouldn’t COVID have finished them off, even if people approaching the ends of their lifespans are more numerous than usual?

America’s current age demographics may explain a small and temporary increase in the death rate in America today. But since only a small percentage of Americans actually die in the year corresponding to the average lifespan for their birth-year cohort, it is not a significant factor contributing to excess non-COVID deaths.

Other possible causes of excess deaths in the United States have been explored elsewhere and remain difficult to quantify. Clearly, there are increased incidents of disease fatalities that are the result of deferred diagnosis and deferred treatment during the pandemic. But even with access to complete data, any honest assessment would have to acknowledge many subjective assumptions and present a wide range of possible answers.

The elephant in the room, of course, is the new vaccines and to what extent excess deaths can be attributed to adverse events caused by hundreds of millions of Americans receiving multiple COVID shots. Data from the VAERS website (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) do not indicate nearly enough fatalities from the COVID shot to begin to explain a half-million non-COVID disease deaths in the past two years, but those numbers are widely disputed.

Without diving into that rabbit hole, it is sufficient to say excess deaths in the United States that aren’t caused by COVID might be primarily the sum of increases in suicides, murders, car accidents, drug overdoses, a disproportionately large number of 1946 babies reaching the limit of their life expectancy, and deferred diagnoses and deferred treatments. Or it might be something else.

Regardless of why, the percentage of excess deaths that remain unexplained by COVID has doubled in the past few months and now accounts for two out of three excess deaths. This bears close watching as life in the time of COVID goes on, and on, and on.

Ahead Of 2024, Media Ponder Aloud: How Dishonest And Manipulative Can We Be?

When they call for a ‘new journalistic tradition,’ what they mean is that they need a novel approach to influencing all future elections.

Eddie Scarry reporting for The Federalist

I’m enjoying all the “think” pieces and columns by anxiety-racked journalists who are forever coming up with new ways to say a version of, “Voters are way too stupid and we don’t trust them to do anything.”

Just last Friday The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle wrote at length about how much responsibility she attributes to herself and her peers in the media for getting Donald Trump elected in 2016. “It is no exaggeration to say he climbed into the presidency on the shoulders of the hundreds of journalists who kept treating his pronouncements as matters of epic importance,” she said, “even if it had been tapped out one-handed while schmoozing around Mar-a-Lago.”

In essence, McArdle believes that the media were mistaken to report on the public comments and expressions of a prominent figure who was running for president and who was hosting campaign rallies attended by thousands. In doing so, she believes voters didn’t really get the point, as polls showed Trump and many of his positions gaining popularity. “This was, to state the obvious, not the effect we were hoping for,” McArdle said.

But it’s not so much that McArdle believes she or her peers failed the public. She believes the voters did.

They were supposed to look at what the media were saying and come to the same conclusion as McArdle — that Trump and everything he represented was unacceptable.

That’s not what happened, and McArdle and the rest of the corrupt press want to make sure what did happen never happens again. And so, she said it was time for a “new journalistic tradition,” which essentially amounted to treating Trump and his pending return to Twitter as if neither exists. “Rather than leaping to condemn his every pronouncement,” she wrote, “we should treat Trump’s Twitter account the way we’d treat some random account with five followers and a penchant for rancid verbal attacks: as if it were generally beneath our notice.”

This is also known as a “blackout.”

McArdle’s former Post colleague Margaret Sullivan also said last month that “old-style journalism will no longer suffice” in political coverage. Instead, she said all her little friends should “be thinking about what coverage serves the public best.” In other words, what coverage serves her interest— the media’s interest.

I would quibble with some of the word choices that the media are using to describe their motives. When they call for a “new journalistic tradition,” or claim that “old-style journalism will no longer suffice,” what they mean is that they need a novel approach to influencing all future elections. Words like “dishonesty” and “manipulation” would be more appropriate. Otherwise, I appreciate their candor.

Biden Tweets Energy Policy – Lower Oil Prices and Increase Production, or He Will Raise Taxes and Increase Regulation

Sundance reporting for Conservative Treehouse 

Joe Biden does not write his tweets, that is certain.  However, whoever is writing on his behalf sure has an odd way of promoting administration energy policy.

In a Tweet last night [link here] Joe Biden demands oil companies’ lower prices and increase production, or he will raise their taxes and increase regulation:

In essence, lower the prices and increase production or Joe Biden will increase the prices and lower production.  How does this make sense?

Stunner for Democrats Drops in New Hampshire and Scrambles the Election Map

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

Hold on a second. Is New Hampshire actually in play for Republicans on November 8th? That’s the story from a stunning new poll that shows that Don Bolduc is leading Democrat incumbent Sen. Maggie Hassan.

Bolduc, a Donald Trump-endorsed candidate, was left for dead after winning the primary, with the assumption being that his negatives were too high and that he couldn’t draw support in a blue state. His fundraising was lackluster, and the national groups have been spending their finite resources in more “competitive” states.

Recently, though, it was revealed that Republicans were going back into New Hampshire to make last-minute ad buys for Bolduc, again putting the race on the table. That surprised a lot of election onlookers, but this new poll from St. Anselm says it’s the right move.

If this were just some random poll, I wouldn’t even bother to write this article. In this case, though, St. Anselm is a gold-standard poll for the State of New Hampshire. In fact, it’s the only state they deal with as pollsters, and they were, by far, the most accurate pollster there in 2020. When they put out a poll showing Bolduc leading, people pay attention.

Now, do I think New Hampshire is suddenly a toss-up? I wouldn’t go that far, but clearly, the map is expanding for Republicans while it continues to contract for Democrats. Arizona once thought to be “lean D,” is now firmly in play for Republican Blake Masters. Pennsylvania has swung wildly towards Republican Mehmet Oz. Meanwhile, in Georiga, Gov. Brian Kemp’s overperformance against Democrat Stacey Abrams threatens to pull Herschel Walker across the finish line without a run-off. Democrats had hoped to make headway in Nevada and Wisconsin, but those appear to be “lead R” at this point.

Back to Bolduc, he may still be the underdog, but Hassan’s low approval ratings mean we could be in for a shocker on election night. She’s struggled to gain her footing, never breaking 50 percent. That’s always a flashing red light for an incumbent.

I hate to get out over my skis because anything could happen, but you’ve got election analysts now suggesting Republicans could end up with 54 US Senate seats when all is said and done. You would have been laughed out of the room for suggesting that just a month ago.

Again, that’s not to say that Republicans will win 54 seats, but it is to point out that they are in a good position to get the majority. You’d always rather be the side with the most options, and the GOP has the most ways to get to their magic numbers. For Democrats to keep the Senate at this point, not only would you need to see zero polling error, but you’d need to see a polling error in their favor in at least one seat.

As I’ve covered extensively before, senate polling has systematically underestimated Republicans over the last four cycles. There is no reason to believe that doesn’t happen again. Either way, the GOP is in the driver’s seat. Winning in New Hampshire would just be icing on the cake.

Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth as Supreme Court Readies Another Landmark Decision

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

I don’t think anything will top the Supreme Court’s last term, where Roe v. Wade was overturned in favor of the Dobbs decision. Still, the fairly new conservative block on the court may just be getting started.

Wailing and gnashing of teeth commenced on Tuesday during oral arguments over whether college admissions can discriminate on the bias of race, i.e. affirmative action. All of the conservative justices expressed deep skepticism of the legality of such schemes.

Conservative-leaning members of the Supreme Court expressed a high degree of skepticism toward race-conscious admissions practices as lawyers for both universities presented their arguments. Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that such policies are “potentially dangerous and must have a logical end point,” while Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked attorneys for the University of North Carolina when the “sunset” for the policies can be expected. Justice Clarence Thomas said that he has “heard the word ‘diversity’ quite a few times” and does not “have a clue what it means.”

“College admissions are a zero-sum game,” Justice Samuel Alito added, according to a report from Reuters. “And if you give a ‘plus’ to a person who falls within the category of under-represented minority, but not to somebody else, then you are disadvantaging the other student.”

Numerous studies have indeed highlighted the disadvantages faced by Asian-Americans in college admissions processes seeking to reserve places for black and Hispanic students. One study from 2009 concluded that Asians required an SAT score approximately 140 points higher than white applicants, 270 points higher than Hispanic applicants, and 450 points higher than black applicants, according to a report from the Asian American Coalition for Education.

That the primary victims here of these college schemes are Asian has complicated the narrative for the left. They’d love to be able to spin this as a white vs. black thing, but it’s not. Asians are at an extreme disadvantage in college admissions into highly-rated and ivy-league schools. Needing an SAT score 450 points higher than a black applicant is just insanely unfair. It’s also clearly racial discrimination.

At UNC specifically, one of the colleges involved in the lawsuit, the numbers are lower but still skewed nonetheless.

One of the little-spoken facts about Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson is that she’s just not an impressive jurist. She talks a ton (by far the most vocal justice in this term), but rarely says anything profound and often makes mistakes. Seeing admissions broken down by SAT scores and then seeing the clear racial disparity isn’t enough for her to see how race factors in. Would she say the same thing if the tables were turned? Of course, she wouldn’t, because Jackson operates from a position of heavy partisanship. She sees an outcome she wants and twists herself toward that outcome instead of taking a neutral view of the facts.

Meanwhile, Justice Sonia Sotomayor continues to do Sotomayor things.

“De jure” means that someone has a right to something. Sotomayor is essentially saying that segregation is a right in her comment. What she meant to say was “de facto,” but I digress, we already know she’s not that bright.

Here’s the game the left wants to play with affirmative action. On the one hand, they want to argue it isn’t happening, which is one of the chief defenses being offered at the Supreme Court right now. On the other hand, they want to argue that it’s the greatest, most effective program in history. It’s the same “have it both ways” logic applied to Critical Race Theory in schools. The convolution is the point, and fewer and fewer people are buying it these days.

Suffice it to say, the usual suspects have been losing their minds since the oral arguments. I won’t give them exposure here, but one works for Slate (and is the worst legal analyst in existence) while the other is a regular on Joy Reid’s MSNBC dumpster fire. You can look up their Twitter feeds if you want a good laugh.

In the end, the Supreme Court is showing a return to ruling based on the plain letter of the law instead of pushing for preferred outcomes. Affirmative action is quite obviously illegal on its face, and the idea that constitutional protections only apply to certain races is ludicrous.

How The Surveillance State And Big Tech Colluded To Make Twitter ‘Disinformation’ The New Terrorism

Federal law enforcement agencies originally created to protect us from terrorists are now being used to protect us from ourselves.

by John Daniel Davidson for The Federalist

The late, great Angelo Codevilla maintained that America’s response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed because it adopted a law enforcement approach to what is essentially a foreign policy problem. He argued that the law enforcement approach — the idea that we could detect and disrupt terrorist plots before they come to fruition, and arrest those responsible — required the construction of a vast state security and surveillance apparatus that would eventually, when the terrorist threat subsided, be turned on American citizens.

As in so much else, Codevilla was prophetic.

Earlier this week, a deeply reported piece by Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang of The Intercept revealed an “expansive effort” by the Department of Homeland Security to curb speech it considers dangerous by pressuring tech platforms to engage in online censorship. Although DHS’s widely ridiculed “Disinformation Governance Board” was scaled back and then shut down earlier this year amid well-deserved criticism, “other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.”

The security apparatus that was erected to keep us safe from al-Qaida, it seems, is looking for something else to do now, so it has decided to become the arbiter of what constitutes false and dangerous information, and therefore what political opinions Americans are allowed to express online.

Citing a trove of documents connected to an ongoing lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, Klippenstein and Fang reveal a quiet pressure campaign by DHS “to try and shape online discourse” that involves frequent meetings and coordination with top tech and finance executives, and even “a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use.” At the time of this writing, the portal is still live.

What might DHS consider “inaccurate information” worthy of suppression? A whole host of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

Because “disinformation” isn’t clearly defined, it can be whatever DHS and the federal agencies under its purview say it is. And wouldn’t you know it, disinformation turns out to be whatever ideas and opinions contradict the official narrative of the Biden administration and Democratic Party leadership on major political issues.

No surprise, then, that Big Tech appears to be OK with this. Klippenstein and Fang quote a February text from Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, a former DHS official, to a DHS director, saying: “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.”

But not, perhaps, as hesitant as Masterson thinks. Emails and documents connected to the Missouri lawsuit show a close collaboration between DHS and top executives of social media firms such as Twitter. In 2018, Congress passed and President Trump signed a bill creating an office inside DHS called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. It was a response to some high-profile hacking of U.S. firms such as SolarWinds and Equifax, and the idea was for CISA to protect critical national infrastructure. 

But it didn’t take long for CISA to expand its definition of critical national infrastructure to include “misinformation and disinformation,” taking its cues from an advisory committee that includes Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s erstwhile head of legal affairs and policy, whom Elon Musk fired last week. Gadde was the co-author of a report in June urging CISA to take on an expansive role in policing online speech, calling on the agency to monitor “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online resources.”

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who has questioned the official government narrative on Twitter or Facebook over the last two years. Did you dare to speculate online that Covid might have come from a lab leak in China? If so, then as late as December of 2020 you were promoting what NPR (among many other outlets) called a “baseless conspiracy theory” for which there is “zero evidence.”

Problem is, things move fast in the world of real-time disinformation policing, and yesterday’s baseless conspiracy theory is today’s respectable viewpoint. A newly released Senate interim report reflects what most people’s common sense suggested to them a long time ago: that the pandemic was “more likely than not” the result of a “research-related incident.” 

Same with the Hunter Biden laptop story that broke ahead of the 2020 election. The story was dismissed by dozens of former top intelligence officials who claimed it was “Russian disinformation,” but we now know what anyone who bothered to look into the story knew in October 2020 — that it was all true. The laptop was real.

We also know, by Mark Zuckerberg’s own admission to Joe Rogan in August, that the FBI reached out to Facebook ahead of the 2020 election to tell them to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation. And now we know a little bit more about the FBI’s involvement. According to Klippenstein and Fang, the FBI was involved in high-level communications that allegedly led to Facebook’s suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on the laptop.

It should all outrage Americans who think the First Amendment should actually mean something, that people should be banned from the public square for expressing opinions the ruling regime dislikes. Indeed it’s hard to think of anything more un-American, and it’s not too much to say that this censorship represents a real threat to the survival of the republic.

One need not even engage the facile libertarian line that Twitter and Facebook are private companies and can do whatever they want. It’s enough to see the many ways powerful government agencies are now working hand-in-hand with private Big Tech firms to suppress online speech and censor political ideas the regime deems to be a threat. 

Codevilla was exactly right. A security and surveillance apparatus originally constructed to keep us safe from terrorists has been transformed into an instrument of domestic surveillance, and is now being used against us.