It was (and is) riveting history, explaining the interaction of economics, geopolitics, and social momentum in international relations since the 16th century. One of the main themes of Kennedy’s history was the concept of imperial overstretch – that the relative decline of great powers often resulted from an imbalance between a nation’s resources and commitments. And Kennedy opined that the United States needed to worry about its own imperial overstretch.
Kennedy summarized his historical findings with a passage that has great relevance to 21st century global politics:
[I]t has been a common dilemma facing previous “number one” countries that even as their economic strength is ebbing, the growing foreign challenges to their position have compelled them to allocate more and more of their resources into the military sector, which in turn squeezes our productive investment and, over time, leads to the downward spiral of slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits overspending priorities, and a weakening capacity to bear the burdens of defense.
The timing of Kennedy’s book was bad. It appeared in 1987, yet two years later the United States won its long Cold War victory over the Soviet Union.
How could the U.S. be in decline when it just won an historic victory in what President John F. Kennedy called the “long twilight struggle?” But Paul Kennedy’s history was sound. Great power decline, as Kennedy showed in his survey of five centuries of international politics, usually takes a long time – often centuries. And “decline” in international politics is a relative term – a great power declines usually in relation to other powers. Decline does not mean collapse – though that sometimes happened–but it does signal a shift in the global balance of power.
And great power statesmen rarely appreciate that decline. President George H. W. Bush declared a “new world order” after the fall of the Soviet empire. His son, President George W. Bush, after the September 11, 2001, attacks made it U.S. policy to spread democracy throughout the world. He launched the Global War on Terror and the United States fought two long wars that in the end accomplished very little. In the meantime, China was rising economically and militarily, and soon would begin to flex its geopolitical muscles in the western Pacific and across Eurasia.
Kennedy’s book took the long view of history. Unipolar moments–a term coined by Charles Krauthammer–are just that: brief moments in history that do not erase long term trends. It is arguable that America’s decline began when President Woodrow Wilson and congress made the United States a belligerent in the First World War. Wilson and his “progressive” cohorts started the U.S. on the path to globalism, which after a brief interlude in the 1920s, was continued under Franklin Roosevelt’s administration which attracted “progressives” by the thousands to Washington, D.C., and government service. “Progressives” think they can use national power to make the world a perfect place. James Burnham brilliantly captured the progressive approach when he noted that progressives like Eleanor Roosevelt treat the world as their slum.
Our victory in World War II disguised that decline – it was another unipolar moment where the United States’ power appeared unchallenged relative to other great powers. The Truman administration took imperial overstretch to new limits. As Walter Lippmann and later George Kennan pointed out, the Truman Doctrine was a globalist’s delight, and its global reach required the institutionalization of the national security state–what President Eisenhower later called the “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower knew all about the military-industrial complex – he had been a part of it since the beginning of the Cold War and observed its growth and growing influence during his presidency.
It was Richard Nixon and his top foreign policy aide Henry Kissinger who recognized the existence of long-term relative decline that Paul Kennedy later wrote about in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Nixon and Kissinger understood history and the realities of international politics in Toynbeean terms. That is why they simultaneously pursued the opening to China and detente with the Soviet Union. Eurasia had to remain geopolitically pluralistic for the United States to be secure. Korea and Vietnam were symptoms of decline – wars that perhaps we should not have fought, or that we should not have had to fight, and that we refused to win, but that fed the beast of the military-industrial complex. And the roots of those wars also extended back to the Truman administration’s catastrophic “loss of China.”
Some observers in 1949 – including Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, and then-congressman Richard Nixon – recognized how disastrous the communist victory in China was to future American security. Taking the long view of history, our “tie” in Korea and loss in Vietnam pale in significance to the loss of China because China’s rise in the 21st century may end up being the proximate cause of America’s relative decline.
Toward the end of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Kennedy expressed the then-controversial belief that great power wars were not a thing of the past. “Those who assume that mankind would not be so foolish as to become involved in another ruinously expensive Great Power war perhaps need reminding that that belief was also widely held for much of the nineteenth century.” For three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States thought and acted as if great power wars were behind us. It took the Trump administration’s national security strategists – especially Elbridge Colby – to redirect our national defense strategy toward great power competition. Our sleepwalk through history ended with the simultaneous challenges of China and Russia. Paul Kennedy’s great book deserves to be remembered as a warning that the “end of history” is a dream.
S.Korea Fires Shots, Scrambles Jets After North Sends Drones Near Seoul
A rare and hugely significant incident occurred Monday along the heavily fortified border which separates the Korean peninsula. South Korea’s military has confirmed it fired warning shots and scrambled jets after the north sent drones that violated the south’s sovereign airspace.
It is reported to be the first such major territory breaching incident in a half-decade, also resulting in Seoul sending surveillance aircraft across the border in response. The North Korean drones penetrated deep into the south’s territory, resulting in civilian commercial flights to be temporarily grounded in and around Seoul.
“South Korea’s military detected five drones from North Korea crossing the border, and one traveled as far as the northern part of the South Korean capital region, which is about an hour’s drive away, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said,” according to The Associated Press.
“The military responded by firing warning shots and launching fighter jets and attack helicopters to shoot down the North Korean drones,” the report based on official military statements contines. “The attack helicopters fired a combined 100 rounds but it wasn’t immediately known if any of the North Korean drones were shot down, according to the Defense Ministry.”
Only one of the five drones was observed flying back across the border into North Korea, while the others disappeared from radar, according to the south’s Joint Chiefs.
Among surveillance countermeasures authorized in response, the Joint Chiefs said that its surveillance aircraft photographed sensitive North Korean facilities from which drones usually operate.
The south’s significant rapid response to the drones breaching the border resulted in a crashed manned aircraft. Seoul identified that one of its KA-1 light attack airplanes crashed while taking off, resulting in both pilots ejecting safely.
“Our military will thoroughly and resolutely respond to this kind of North Korean provocation,” Maj. Gen. Lee Seung-o, spokesman for the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a press briefing.
Tensions along the militarized border have already been high due to Pyongyang firing off a record number of ballistic and other missiles this year, including a pair fired last week toward Japan. With now days left in 2022, analysts have tracked over 90 missiles fired this year.
#BREAKING: South Korea has scrambled fighter jets and attack helicopters and has fired warning shots after North Korean drones violated its airspace
– North Korean drone flies over capital of Seoul
– A South Korean Ka-1 fighter jet crashed while fighting a North Korean drone pic.twitter.com/mJf2n1Dn1X
“North Korea has launched at least 92 ballistic and other missiles in 2022 — more than in any previous year,” The New York Times has tallied in a new report. “Each was in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions that ban the country from testing ballistic missiles, as well as nuclear devices.”
Monday’s fresh incident illustrates how close the rival sides of the Korean peninsula are to firing on each other’s military assets at any time. The Kim Jong-Un regime has also been expressing anger over recent US-S.Korea military drills which has featured US nuclear-capable bombers and F-22 stealth jets flying over the peninsula and regional waters.
THE TWITTER FILES: How Twitter Rigged The Covid Debate
Another day, another TWITTER FILES drop exposing the incestuous relationship between big tech and government.
Today’s edition, dropped by journalist David Zweig, focuses on ‘how Twitter rigged the Covid debate‘ by taking direction from both the Trump and Biden administrations (while at the same time trying to censor the former president). What’s somewhat notable is how aggressive government (and ex-government) officials were in trying to stifle free speech, while Twitter’s non-government-linked employees would often push back (and then totally fold) – a theme we’ve observed in previous drops. In one such instance, former head of Twitter’s Trust & Safety team Yoel Roth tells former FBI lawyer and then-Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker to calm his tits over a Trump tweet.
Of course, in the end the government typically got its way, as you will read below.
1. THREAD:
THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE
– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*
Zweig, who was granted access to internal files while on assignment for The Free Press, notes that “both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.“
What’s more, the censorship effort extended to Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others.
7. It wasn’t just Twitter. The meetings with the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. pic.twitter.com/OgOrRxBBBW
In July 2021, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a 22-page advisory concerning what the World Health Organization referred to as an “infodemic,” and called on social media platforms to do more to shut down “misformation.”
“We are asking them to step up,” Murthy said. “We can’t wait longer for them to take aggressive action.”
That’s the message the White House had already taken directly to Twitter executives in private channels. One of the Biden administration’s first meeting requests was about Covid, with a focus on “anti-vaxxer accounts,” according to a meeting summary by Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy.
They were especially concerned about Alex Berenson, a journalist skeptical of lockdowns and mRNA vaccines, who had hundreds of thousands of followers on the platform:
By the summer of 2021, the day after Murthy’s memo, Biden announced publicly that social media companies were “killing people” by allowing misinformation about vaccines. Just hours later, Twitter locked Berenson out of his account, and then permanently suspended him the next month. Berenson sued Twitter. He ultimately settled with the company, and is now back on the platform. As part of the lawsuit, Twitter was compelled to provide certain internal communications. They revealed that the White House had directly met with Twitter employees and pressured them to take action on Berenson.
The summary of meetings by Culbertson, emailed to colleagues in December 2022, adds new evidence of the White House’s pressure campaign, and illustrates how it tried to directly influence what content was allowed on Twitter.
Culbertson wrote that the Biden team was “very angry” that Twitter had not been more aggressive in deplatforming multiple accounts. They wanted Twitter to do more.
Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed that employees often debated moderation cases in great detail, and with more care for free speech than was shown by the government.
But Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted. As a result, legitimate findings and questions about our Covid policies and their consequences went missing.
There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process.
First: Much of the content moderation on Covid, to say nothing of other contentious subjects, was conducted by bots trained on machine learning and AI. I spent hours discussing the systems with an engineer and with an executive who had been at the company for more than a year before Musk’s takeover. They explained the process in basic terms: Initially, the bots were fed information to train them on what to look for—but their searches would become more refined over time both as they scanned the platform and as they were manually updated with additional chosen inputs. At least that was the premise. Though impressive in their engineering, the bots would prove too crude for such nuanced work. When you drag a digital trawler across a social media platform, you’re not just catching cheap fish, you’re going to snag dolphins along the way.
Second: Contractors operating in places like the Philippines were also moderating content. They were given decision trees to aid in their process, but tasking non-experts to adjudicate tweets on complex topics like myocarditis and mask efficacydata was destined for a significant error rate. The notion that remote workers, sitting in distant cube farms, were going to police medical information to this granular degree is absurd on its face.
Embedded below is an example template—deactivated after Musk’s arrival—of the decision tree tool that contractors used. The contractor would run through a series of questions, each with a drop down menu, ultimately guiding them to a predetermined conclusion.
Third: Most importantly, the buck stopped with higher level employees at Twitter. They chose the inputs for the bots and decision trees. They determined suspensions. And as is the case with all people and institutions, there was both individual and collective bias.
At Twitter, Covid-related bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas. Inevitably, dissident yet legitimate content was labeled as misinformation, and the accounts of doctors and others were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information.
Take, for example, Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kulldorff often tweeted views at odds with U.S. public health authorities and the American left, the political affiliation of nearly the entire staff at Twitter.
Here is one such tweet, from March 15, 2021, regarding vaccination.
Internal emails show an “intent to action” by a Twitter moderator, saying Kulldorff’s tweet violated the company’s Covid-19 misinformation policy, and claimed he shared “false information.”
But Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one that happened to be in line with vaccinepolicies in numerous other countries.
Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines. After Twitter took action, Kulldorff’s tweet was slapped with a “misleading” label and all replies and likes were shut off, throttling the tweet’s ability to be seen and shared by others, a core function of the platform.
In my review of internal files, I found numerous instances of tweets about vaccines and pandemic policies labeled as “misleading” or taken down entirely, sometimes triggering account suspensions, simply because they veered from CDC guidance or differed from establishment views.
For example, a tweet by @KelleyKga, a self-proclaimed public health fact checker with more than 18,000 followers, was flagged as “misleading,” and replies and likes disabled, for showing that Covid was not the leading cause of death in children, even though it cited the CDC’s own data.
Ukrainian Drone Attack On Airbase Deep Inside Russian Territory Kills 3 Soldiers
A fresh Ukrainian attack deep inside Russian territory has left three dead, Russian news agencies are reporting Monday, which further describe that an enemy drone was intercepted before debris came down on bystanders below.
The Ukrainian drone was inbound over a military base in southern Russia identified as Engels airbase in the Saratov region, which is located more than 600km from the Ukrainian border. “On December 26, at around 01:35 Moscow time, a Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle was shot down at low altitude while approaching the Engels military airfield in the Saratov region,” the Russian defense ministry said in a statement.
“As a result of the drone’s wreckage falling, three Russian technicians who were at the airfield were fatally injured,” the statement added, as quoted in TASS. The ministry said that no aircraft were damaged in the attack, with Saratov governor Roman Busargin telling local residents there is “absolutely no threat” at this time.
Given the drone attack from Ukraine set off some degree of panic, Busargin additionally warned the public that “All stories about the evacuation from the city are blatant lies, created far from the borders of our country.”
The incident marks a rare moment in which three Russian military personnel were killed while at a base far away from the front lines of conflict in neighboring Ukraine. Engels is also known to host advanced hypersonic and nuclear-capable bombers.
Currently there’s speculation that the drone may have directly impacted the base, and that Russian authorities are advancing the narrative that it was intercepted by anti-air defenses in order to deny the Ukrainians a ‘successful’ military operation, and for Kremlin leadership to save face. Related to the speculation and rumors, the Saratov governor had additionally warned against residents spreading “fake information.”
Monday’s deadly incident is actually the second known instance of the more than 10-month long war that Engels air base came under Ukrainian attack.
Multiple videos have been widely circulating purporting to show the moment of impact – though Russian authorities say the drone was shot down “at low altitude”, resulting in explosions or debris crashing on the ground…
Reportedly, there was an explosion followed by a siren at the Engels air base in Russia pic.twitter.com/oXIcr7jHpZ
On Dec.5 Ukraine’s military mounted simultaneous drone assaults on an air base in Ryazan, in western Russia which hosts nuclear-capable strategic bombers, and also Engels base.
That earlier Engels strike had constituted the deepest the Ukrainians had ever attacked inside of Russia proper.
Another video of last night’s explosion at the Russian strategic aviation base Engels-2 near Saratov.
This is a dangerous, escalatory trend which could result in Russia expanding its operation – also given just days ago President Putin for the first time referenced the “war” in Ukraine (as opposed to the heretofore officially sanctioned language of “special military operation”). There are remaining fears that Belarus could formally join Russia’s invasion by sending ground forces.
Feeling emboldened by a handful of successes, including prior attacks and bombings in Crimea, Ukraine forces will likely try to continue hitting targets inside Russia, also as their capability grows given they have been supplied with ever-longer range rockets from the US and NATO countries. Another key question remains as details are still emerging from Monday’s drone attack: is this another example of US intelligence assisting Kiev with targeting Russian military assets?
It shouldn’t surprise us if 2023 turns out to be atypical and disruptively transformational in ways few believe possible.
It seems expectations about 2023 cleave neatly into two camps: the dominant mainstream view is that 2023 will be economically difficult due to a mild recession, but this will be nothing more than a run-of-the-mill recession.
Inflation will likely moderate but remain higher than recent averages. Everything else–politics, social issues, entertainment, fashion, social media, etc.–will continue on whatever path it is currently on.
In other words, 2023 will be much like any other year.
The implicit assumption in the mainstream view is that historical cycles are figments of fevered imaginations. The flow of human history is entirely contingent and follows no pattern or cycle.
The much smaller “outlier” camp sees the potential for a disruptive transformational year.
Those of us who conclude cycles are based on the ebb-and-flow dynamics of credit, energy and human nature and are therefore not just real but consequential despite their predictive imprecision see 2023 as a potential pivot in cycles which entered a new phase in the 2020-2021 time frame.
This cyclical shift isn’t a result of Covid or the response to Covid. It’s the result of diminishing returns and the exhaustion of the dynamics which powered the previous era: hyper-financialization, hyper-globalization and low-cost, abundant energy.
In terms of human nature, confidence and complacency rise and fall, euphoric greed and panicky fear ebb and flow and as Peter Turchin has demonstrated, order and disorder take turns as reasons to cooperate decay into reasons not to cooperate.
Once the costs exceed the rewards, people lose the incentive to support the status quo with their labor and participation. They drift away (what I term opting out) or reduce their effort to align with the diminished rewards and opportunities to advance their own interests.
The Russian economist Kondratieff famously observed how credit cycles between expansion and contraction, and this cycle powers economic expansion or contraction.
The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter outlines a dynamic in which the advantages of adding complexity to a social / economic system are substantial at the beginning but as the returns from additional complexity diminish, the costs eventually outweigh any gains and the system decays.
The success of adding complexity is institutionalized by the status quo, which then clings to this strategy even as the returns on adding complexity become negative and thus destructive.
I call this “doing more of what’s failed.”
Other systems analysts (Donella Meadows et al.) have illuminated the nonlinear character of systemic transformations. Ugo Bardi calls this “The Seneca Cliff”: systems which expanded slowly and steadily can decay and collapse quite suddenly and violently, surprising everyone who took the previous stability as permanent.
Systems follow their own rules, and so unlike politics, our opinions don’t change the results.
All of these dynamics are (in my analysis) clearly visible in the global status quo. The rational conclusion is the risks of disruption, disorder and conflict as things decay and fall apart are relatively high.
While some trends and conflicts can last for decades (the Thirty Years War in Europe, the Cold War between the US and the USSR), diminishing returns on status quo “solutions” that no longer work as anticipated tend to unravel on the periphery which then spreads quickly to the core.
Those economies and societies which are hidebound / centralized politically and economically are brittle because they lack the systemic means to adapt quickly and successfully to diminishing returns and seismic shifts in price and the availability of essentials.
Brittle systems that lack the structural means to adapt decay and collapse. This is scale-invariant, which means this is equally true of households, small businesses, global enterprises, nations and empires.
There are many such brittle systems in the global status quo, and to expect all of them to remain stable as diminishing returns start yielding negative returns (i.e. cost more than they produce in gains) and scarcities drive prices higher than the bottom 90% can afford as inflation reduces the purchasing power of their earnings–this expectation is based on a confidence that past trends are essentially permanent and every system in the world today will adapt successfully to scarcity, disorder and the reversal of financialization and globalization.
Maybe this will be the case, but given all the dynamics that are so readily visible, it would be prudent to consider the potential for dominoes falling on the periphery (i.e. in “places that don’t matter”) will soon be toppling dominoes in the core centers of power and control.
In my analysis, the dominant dynamic is always natural selection. Our opinions and projections don’t change anything. What divides the systems that endure and become stronger and those that decay and collapse is their evolutionary vigor, which is a function of decentralized competition, transparency, sharing of information and experimentation that is rewarded rather than punished.
Simply put: systems that view dissent and disorderly churn as threats will decay and collapse because the most powerful forces of adaptability are dissent and disorderly churn.
It shouldn’t surprise us if 2023 turns out to be atypical and disruptively transformational in ways few believe possible.
* * *
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Tesla Suspends Ops At Shanghai Plant One Day Sooner Than Expected
Tesla has officially halted production of its Shanghai plant one day before it was planned, Bloomberg reported over the holiday.
The EV maker was expected to halt production – as we noted in a previous article – but continued swirling questions about demand are once again surfacing after the company shut down operations at the key location earlier than expected.
Recall back on December 9th we wrote that the company was shutting down operations late this month due to upgrades at the plant and waning consumer demand.
As part of the shut down, Model Y and Model 3 production lines are expected to be suspended. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Model 3 production could resume in early January, though Model Y output disruptions could be prolonged. A source said Model 3 production could be suspended again later in the month for the Chinese New Year. They added that this would allow for more upgrades and equipment maintenance to produce an enhanced version of the model.
Reuters also reported on the planned shut down earlier this month, citing two people who said that the suspension of the assembly line would result in a 30% reduction in Model Y production for the month. They added this type of production halt wasn’t a common practice for the plant.
“The Shanghai factory, the most important manufacturing hub for Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company, kept normal operations during the last week of December last year,” Reuters said.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg also said that slumping Chinese demand would result in the factory reducing production by 20% from full capacity.
Despite a report from Shanghai Securities Journal calling it “false information” at the beginning of the month, it now looks like the the report was accurate. And, with Tesla now shutting down one day prior to expectations, more questions than answers about demand are likely being raised.
Reuters reported last month that Tesla plans a revamped version of Model 3 to cut production costs and boost the style of the five-year-old electric sedan. Tesla has also cut prices in the second-largest economy in the world to stay competitive with domestic bands.
Three Power Substations Attacked In Washington State On Christmas Day
Increased sabotage incidents on the US power grid are very concerning. On Christmas Day, three substation facilities were vandalized in Pierce County, Washington, plunging thousands of customers into total darkness, according to ABC News.
Two of the power substations were operated by Tacoma Public Utilities and one by Puget Sound Energy. The Pierce County Sheriff’s Department said all three were attacked, but there are no “motives or if this was a coordinated attack on the power systems.”
The sheriff’s office said nothing was stolen from the substations, while equipment was only vandalized. There was no mention of what devices were damaged or the tool to inflict damage.
“Unfortunately, the impacts to our system from today’s deliberate damage are more severe in some places than initial testing indicated. Some customers will be restored closer to 8 AM tomorrow,” Tacoma Public Utilities wrote in a statement on Sunday.
The Tacoma substation attacks follow “deliberate attacks” on two power substations in North Carolina early this month. Duke Energy personnel found bullet holes in transformers.
We’ve asked the question of who is intentionally sabotaging the US power grid. In the first eight months of the year, there were 106 attacks on the electrical grid, the highest number ever recorded in a single year.
Swiss Government Rejects Third-Gender Option On Official Records
Years from now, historians will look back at the Swiss government’s decision to reject the introduction of a third gender option on official records as some sanity has returned to Europe. But the prevailing trend across the bloc is neighboring countries have added ways for residents to identify as nonbinary.
AP News reported the governing Federal Council said, “the binary gender model is still strongly anchored in Swiss society.” The council rejected two proposals from parliament on Wednesday to introduce a third-gender option or no-gender option for official records.
“The social preconditions for the introduction of a third gender or for a general waiver of the gender entry in the civil registry currently are not there,” the council continued.
According to the government, such options would require too many changes to the country’s constitution and laws at national and cantonal levels. They added now wasn’t the right time to overhaul the system, citing a 2020 report via the national ethics commission.
Meanwhile, third-gender options on official documents are allowed in several European countries, including Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Norway, and Belgium. An increasing number of western countries are passing laws allowing a third-gender option.
What’s absurd is that western governments are normalizing third-gender options where biology or, let’s say, “science” only says there are two: man and woman — that’s it.
Woke gender ideology is disinformation because science says people generally either have XX (male) or XY (female) chromosomes.
When historians and archaeologists dig up graves from those in the western world hundreds of years from now, there will be no way to decipher which of the 72 genders those remains are. Instead will be either male or female.
The “Twitter Files” have now officially had more sequels than Planet of the Apes and can be difficult to absorb. Thus, I don’t think they’re getting the attention they deserve.
For those of you not following the “Twitter Files” drops, let me catch you up on what I believe are some of the most important parts:
The FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million to censor conservatives.
The FBI pressured Twitter to give them information that would legally require warrants, though they did not have warrants.
Leading up to the 2020 election, the FBI would eventually hold weekly meetings with Twitter and tell them whose tweets to squelch and which accounts they wanted to be suspended. Almost all were those of conservatives.
The FBI knew the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, they knew it was coming out — weeks before the 2020 election — and they told Big Tech to expect a “Russian disinformation” drop and squelch the story. That means the FBI corrupted the election to help Joe “totally showered with his daughter, Ashley” Biden.
There are so many former FBI employees at Twitter that they have their own Slack channel.
FACT-O-RAMA! Hunter’s laptop proves beyond a doubt that the Biden family took in tens of millions of dollars from Chinese companies linked to the commies for no discernible work. The FBI pressured Big Tech firms to downplay the story, even making it unsharable, even thought the FBI knew the laptop was real. The commie bum-lickees at Twitter were happy to play along, even going so far as to suspend the account of the the NY Post for releasing the Hunter laptop story.
In response to the “Twitter Files” detailing how the FBI-Twitter circle jerk was real, the bureau called the allegations “conspiracy theories” but never actually denied its relationship with Twitter.
Elon Musk provided the world with an early Christmas present on Saturday with Twitter Files Pt. IX. I’ll sum it up so you can avoid the Twitter mess and get to the relevant facts:
The FBI was a portal, specifically the San Francisco office, for other government agencies to get to Twitter to surveil and censor Americans.
Hiding under the title of Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), actors from local police departments to the Department of Defense (DOD) and the CIA were watching and censoring Americans — not foreigners.
Twitter wasn’t the only Big Tech firm hip-deep in spooks. The feds had their fingers in Verizon, Reddit, Facebook, Microsoft, and, for some reason, Pinterest.
As the 2020 election neared, the FBI-FITF assailed Twitter with hundreds of requests to censor Twitter accounts and tweets. There were so many requests that Twitter execs had to come up with a system to prioritize them.
FBI employees were tasked with doing word searches on Twitter, looking for violations of Twitter policies — instead of chasing actual criminals.
The FBI had roughly 80 agents working with Big Tech companies. It is unclear how many members of the DOD, CIA, etc. were involved
CENSOR-O-RAMA! Articles written by our own Matt Margolis are marked on Twitter as “unsafe.” Matt is doing something right. Be more like Matt!
What Have We Learned?
We have learned the FBI is not the only government agency censoring and surveilling Americans. Twitter was a veritable “pig pile” when it comes to spying on We the People. The DOD, CIA, and even local police had their fingers in the pie. And Twitter was only one of the pies. Other Big Tech firms, including Facebook and Verizon (pssst that’s a cell phone carrier), were in on the game. Big Brother is watching. We are being spied on, and frequently silenced. Well, at least those of us who speak out against the Stalin-like censoring and surveilling of Americans.
All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”
– Sun Tzu, the Art of War
In recent years, prominent national security officials and media outlets have raised alarm about the unprecedented effects of foreign disinformation in democratic countries. In practice, what they mean is that democratic governments have fallen behind in their command of the methods of information warfare in the early 21st century. As outlined herein, while information warfare is a real and serious issue facing democratic governments in the 21st century, the war on disinformation, as currently practiced, has backfired spectacularly and done far more harm than good, as evidenced most clearly by the response to COVID-19.
We begin with the definitions and history of a few key terms: Censorship, free speech, misinformation, disinformation, and bots.
Censorship and Free Speech
Censorship is any deliberate suppression or prohibition of speech, whether for good or ill. In the United States and countries which have adopted its model, censorship induced by governments and their appendages is constitutionally prohibited except in the narrow category of “illegal speech”—e.g., obscenity, child exploitation, speech abetting criminal conduct, and speech that incites imminent violence.
Because censorship involves the exercise of power to silence another individual, censorship is inherently hierarchical. A person who lacks the power to silence another cannot censor them. For this reason, censorship inherently reinforces existing power structures, whether rightly or wrongly.
Though the United States may be the first country to have enshrined the right to free speech in its constitution, the right to free speech developed over centuries and predates the Western Enlightenment. For example, the right to speak freely was inherent to the democratic practices of the political classes in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, even if it was not enshrined in words. This is only logical; because these systems treated all members of the political class as equals, no member of the political class had the power to censor another except with the consent of the body politic.
The right to free speech developed and receded in fits and starts over the coming centuries for a number of reasons; but in accordance with George Orwell’s view of institutional evolution, free speech developed primarily because it afforded an evolutionary advantage to the societies in which it was practiced. For example, the political equality among Medieval British lords in their early parliamentary system necessitated free speech among them; by the 19th century, the cumulative benefits of this evolutionary advantage would help make Britain the world’s primary superpower. The United States arguably went a step further by enshrining free speech in its constitution and extending it to all adults, affording the United States a still greater evolutionary advantage.
By contrast, because censorship depends on and reinforces existing power structures, censors tend especially to target those who seek to hold power to account. And, because the advancement of human civilization is essentially one unending struggle to hold power to account, this censorship is inherently incompatible with human progress. Civilizations that engage in widespread censorship therefore tend to stagnate.
Misinformation
Misinformation is any information that is not completely true, regardless of the intent behind it. A flawed scientific study is one form of misinformation. An imperfect recollection of past events is another.
Technically, under the broadest definition of “misinformation,” all human thoughts and statements other than absolute mathematical axioms are misinformation, because all human thoughts and statements are generalizations based on subjective beliefs and experiences, none of which can be considered perfectly true. Moreover, no particular levels or “degrees” of misinformation can be readily defined; the relative truth or falsity of any information exists on a continuum with infinite degrees.
Accordingly, because virtually all human thoughts and statements can be defined as misinformation, a prerogative to identify and censor misinformation is extraordinarily broad, depending entirely on the breadth of the definition of “misinformation” employed by the censor in any given instance. Because no particular “degrees” of misinformation can be defined, an official with a license to censor misinformation could censor virtually any statement at any time and justify their action, correctly, as having censored misinformation. In practice, because no man is an angel, this discretion inherently comes down to the biases, beliefs, loyalties, and self-interests of the censor.
Disinformation
Disinformation is any information shared by a person who knows it to be false. Disinformation is synonymous with lying.
Disinformation goes back centuries and is far from limited to the Internet. For example, according to Virgil, toward the end of the Trojan War, the Greek warrior Sinon presented the Trojans with a wooden horse that the Greeks had supposedly left behind as they fled—without informing the hapless Trojans that the horse was, in fact, filled with the Greeks’ finest warriors. Sinon could rightly be considered one of history’s first accounts of a foreign disinformation agent.
In a more modern example of disinformation, Adolf Hitler convinced Western leaders to cede the Sudetenland by making the false promise, “We want no Czechs.” But just a few months later, Hitler took all of Czechoslovakia without a fight. As it turned out, Hitler did want Czechs, and much more besides.
Technically, disinformation can come just as easily from a source either foreign or domestic, though how such disinformation should be treated—from a legal perspective—is very dependent on whether the disinformation had a foreign or domestic source. Because the greatest challenge in distinguishing simple misinformation from deliberate disinformation is the intent of the speaker or writer, identifying disinformation presents all the same challenges that people have faced, since time immemorial, in identifying lies.
Is a statement more likely to be a lie, or disinformation, if someone has been paid or otherwise incentivized or coerced to say it? What if they’ve wrongly convinced themselves that the statement is true? Is it enough that they merely should have known the statement is untrue, even if they didn’t have actual knowledge? If so, how far should an ordinary person be expected to go to find out the truth for themselves?
Just like lying, disinformation is generally considered negative. But in certain circumstances, disinformation can be heroic. For example, during the Second World War, some German citizens hid their Jewish friends for years while telling Nazi officials that they did not know of their whereabouts. Because of circumstances like these, the right to lie, except when under oath or in furtherance of a crime, is inherent to the right to free speech—at least for domestic purposes.
Defining “foreign disinformation” further complicates the analysis. Is a statement “foreign disinformation” if a foreign entity invented the lie, but it was shared by a domestic citizen who was paid to repeat it, or who knew it was a lie? What if the lie was invented by a foreign entity, but the domestic citizen who shared it did not know it was a lie? All these factors must be considered in correctly defining foreign and domestic disinformation and separating it from mere misinformation.
Bots
The traditional definition of an online bot is a software application that posts automatically. However, in common usage, “bot” is more often used to describe any anonymous online identity who is secretly incentivized to post according to specific narratives on behalf of an outside interest, such as a regime or organization.
This modern definition of “bot” can be difficult to pin down. For example, platforms like Twitter permit users to have several accounts, and these accounts are allowed to be anonymous. Are all of these anonymous accounts bots? Is an anonymous user a “bot” solely by virtue of the fact that they’re beholden to a regime? What if they’re merely beholden to a corporation or small business? What level of independence separates a “bot” from an ordinary anonymous user? What if they have two accounts? Four accounts?
The most sophisticated regimes, such as China’s, have vast social media armies consisting of hundreds of thousands of employees who post to social media on a daily basis using VPNs, allowing them to conduct vast disinformation campaigns involving hundreds of thousands of posts in a very short timespan without ever resorting to automated bots in the traditional sense. Thus, Chinese disinformation campaigns are impossible to stop algorithmically, and even difficult to identify with absolute certainty. Perhaps for this reason, whistleblowers have reported that social media companies like Twitter have effectively given up on trying to police foreign bots—even while they pretend to have the issue under control for purposes of public relations.
Information Warfare in the Present Day
Owing to the seriousness with which they’ve studied the methods of information warfare, and perhaps to their long mastery of propaganda and linguistics for purposes of exercising domestic control, authoritarian regimes such as China’s appear to have mastered disinformation in the early 21st century to a degree with which Western national security officials can’t compete—similar to how the Nazis mastered the methods of 20th century disinformation before their democratic rivals.
The magnitude and effects of these foreign disinformation campaigns in the present day are difficult to measure. On the one hand, some argue that foreign disinformation is so ubiquitous as to be largely responsible for the unprecedented political polarization that we see in the present day. Others approach these claims with skepticism, arguing that the specter of “foreign disinformation” is being used primarily as a pretext to justify Western officials’ suppression of free speech in their own countries. Both arguments are valid, and both are true to varying degrees and in various instances.
The best evidence that national security officials’ alarm about foreign disinformation is justified is, ironically, an example so egregious that they have yet to acknowledge it happened, seemingly out of embarrassment and fear of the political fallout: The lockdowns of spring 2020. These lockdowns weren’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan and had no precedent in the modern Western world; they appear to have been instigated by officials with strange connections to China based solely on China’s false claim that their lockdown was effective in controlling COVID in Wuhan, assisted in no small part by a vast propaganda campaign across legacy and social media platforms. It’s therefore essentially axiomatic that the lockdowns of spring 2020 were a form of foreign disinformation. The catastrophic harms that resulted from these lockdowns prove just how high the stakes in 21st century information warfare can be.
That said, the astonishing failure of Western officials to acknowledge the catastrophe of lockdowns seems to speak to their unseriousness in actually winning the 21st century information war, justifying skeptics’ arguments that these officials are merely using foreign disinformation as a pretext to suppress free speech at home.
For example, after the catastrophic lockdowns of spring 2020, not only did national security officials never acknowledge foreign influence on lockdowns, but on the contrary we saw a small army of national security officials actually engaging in domestic censorship of well-credentialed citizenswho were skeptical of the response to COVID—effectively exacerbating the effects of the lockdown disinformation campaign and, conspicuously, making their own countries even more like China.
The Orwellian pretext for this vast domestic censorship apparatus is that, because there is no way to properly identify or control foreign social media bots, foreign disinformation has become so ubiquitous within Western discourse that federal officials can only combat it by surreptitiously censoring citizens for what the officials deem to be “misinformation,” regardless of the citizens’ motivations. These officials have thus deemed well-qualified citizens who oppose the response to COVID-19 to be spreading “misinformation,” a term which can encompass virtually any human thought or statement. Depending on their underlying motivations and loyalties, the actions of these officials in surreptitiously censoring “misinformation” may have even been an intentional part of the lockdown disinformation campaign; if so, this speaks to the multi-level complexity and sophistication of information warfare in the 21st century.
There are signs that some of the primary actors in this vast censorship apparatus were not, in fact, acting in good faith. For example, Vijaya Gadde, who previously oversaw censorship operations at Twitter and worked closely with federal officials to censor legal and factual speech, was being paid over $10 million per year to act in this role. While the dynamics and definitions of misinformation and disinformation are philosophically complex, and Gadde may have legitimately not understood them, it’s also possible that $10 million per year was sufficient to buy her “ignorance.”
These problems are exacerbated by the fact that honest institutional leaders in Western countries, typically of an older generation, often don’t fully appreciate or understand the dynamics of information warfare in the present day, seeing it as primarily a “Millennial” problem and delegating the task of monitoring social media disinformation to younger people. This has opened up a promising path for young career opportunists, many of whom have no particular legal or philosophical expertise on the nuances of misinformation, disinformation, and free speech, but who make lucrative careers out of simply telling institutional leaders what they want to hear. As a result, throughout the response to COVID-19, we saw the horrifying effects of disinformation effectively being laundered into our most venerated institutions as policy.
Winning the 21st Century Information War
While the dynamics of information warfare in the early 21st century are complex, the solutions need not be. The idea that online platforms have to be open to users of all countries largely harkens back to a kind of “kumbaya” early-Internet ideal that engagement between peoples of all nations would render their differences irrelevant—similar to late-19th century arguments that the Industrial Revolution had made war a thing of the past. Regardless of how widespread foreign disinformation may actually be, the fact that national security officials have secretly constructed a vast apparatus to censor Western citizens for legal speech, supposedly due to the ubiquity of foreign disinformation, lays bare the farcical notion that online engagement would resolve differences between nations.
It’s morally, legally, and intellectually repugnant that federal officials in the United States have constructed a vast apparatus for censoring legal speech, bypassing the First Amendment—without informing the public—on the pretext that the activities of foreign regimes which have been deliberately permitted on our online platforms have gotten so out of control. If foreign disinformation is anywhere near that ubiquitous in our online discourse, then the only solution is to ban access to online platforms from China, Russia, and other hostile countries that are known to engage in organized disinformation operations.
Because the effects of foreign disinformation can’t be accurately measured, the actual impact of banning access to our online platforms from hostile countries isn’t clear. If disinformation alarmists are correct, then banning access from hostile countries could have a significant ameliorative effect on political discourse in democratic nations. If skeptics are correct, then banning access from hostile countries might not have much effect at all. Regardless, if federal officials really don’t think there’s any way to allow users in hostile countries to access our online platforms without circumscribing the United States Constitution, then the choice is clear. Any marginal benefit that’s gained from interactions between Western citizens and users in hostile countries is vastly outweighed by the need to uphold the Constitution and the principles of the Enlightenment.
