Stepping out into freedom

Given the fire-hose disgorgement of revelations about the behavior of the FBI, the CIA and their infiltration of the mainstream media, there is ample justification for believing that we are living in some dystopian, distinctly unfunny version of The Truman Show.

In the movie, the gormless Truman Burbank grows up thinking he is living a normal, happy life in a normal, happy town. Only gradually does he realize that something is amiss. Slowly, piece by piece, the awful truth dawns on him: his entire social world is a fabrication, a gigantic product-placement concession with him as the unwitting MacGuffin.

The deception is played for laughs, mostly. There are not many laughs in our Truman Show, the one in which the FBI hatches a fake plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, enlists some pathetic lowlifes to participate, then blows the cover and arrests the saps who joined them. One was just sentenced to sixteen years in the big house, another to nearly twenty.

In our Truman Show, various police and intelligence entities, including the FBI and the CIA, are in cahoots with Twitter, Facebook and other social media companies. We wouldn’t have known much about this except for the courageous action of Elon Musk, who everyone thought overpaid to acquire Twitter — $44 billion of the crispest — but who has been demonstrating almost daily that the deal was cheap at the price.

The journalists he has given access to Twitter’s files — including Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger — have ripped the putrid bandage off a suppurating orifice of deception, lies and politicized interference.

Glenn Greenwald provided a meticulously researched summary of that assault on his internet video show “System Update.” The episode in question exposes the FBI’s “propaganda partnership with Twitter.” Senior Twitter officials, Greenwald shows, met regularly with what amounted to FBI handlers. In the end, they “degraded Twitter into little more than a full-on Democratic Party activist machine, all while lying to the public about its function. This was a massive public fraud and 2020 election interference.”

Swirl that around in your mouth before swallowing: “a massive public fraud and 2020 election interference.” Forget about people screaming that you are a “conspiracy theorist” disseminating “disinformation.” In truth, you are acting as a documentary reporter.

Greenwald’s show aired on December 20 on the new(ish) video platform Rumble. If you don’t know Rumble, you should. It is the free-speech alternative to YouTube, that thoroughly compromised media outlet that is owned by Google, which itself is part of the surveillance apparatus of the regime.

The FBI emitted a blustering but ultimately pathetic denial that its hand-in-glove work with Twitter and other outlets was anything but normal investigative activity, designed to keep the public safe and free from “foreign influence” and perfidious “misinformation.”

The public centerpiece of this sorry development was the all-hands-on-deck effort — a successful effort — to bury the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop just weeks before the 2020 election. The FBI was there, leaning on Twitter (which didn’t require much pressure) to shove the potentially catastrophic revelation into the oubliette of pseudo-national-security censorship.

The story was first reported by the New York Post, the nation’s oldest newspaper and still its fourth largest. That didn’t matter. Twitter suspended the Post’s account and the deep state, abetted by its agents in the FBI, went to work to discredit the story. Presto, that regime media lapdog Politico pumped out a story about how more than fifty — count ’em! — senior intelligence officials dismissed the story as “Russian disinformation.”

But it wasn’t disinformation. And it had nothing to do with Russia. On the contrary, its sordid revelations were not just about Hunter Biden and his whores and drug use, but — far more damaging — Joe Biden’s possible role as “the big guy” receiving his 10 percent cut from Hunter’s business deals in China, Ukraine and elsewhere. Those deals, by the way, were secured only because Hunter was able to trade successfully on his father’s name as vice-president. Absent that suppression, there is a very good chance that Donald Trump would have been acclaimed president in 2020.

I understand there is a sense in which this is old and familiar news. If Hillary Clinton were in the room, I would expect to her to ask, “What difference at this point does it make?”

The answer is “a lot.” Yes, we’ve had warnings about what is happening now at least since Dwight Eisenhower, who in his farewell address, warned about the rise of a “military-industrial complex” whose unprecedented size and technological power could “endanger our liberties” and democracy.

Greenwald touched on Eisenhower’s warning in his video. He also mentions Senator Frank Church, who in the 1970s warned that “the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny” on American society.

We’re past the point where stage lights are falling out of the sky and landing at Truman Burbank’s feet. The question is: will we muster the wit and the courage to step out into freedom?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2023 World edition.