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https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/06/patrick-lawrence-journalists-on-journalists-crime/

Journalists-on-Journalists Crime

I’ve read a lot of smear since Fox News dismissed Tucker Carlson as its premier evening news presenter late last month. How could I not? It was everywhere, and more fecal matter is being flung Carlson’s way as we speak. My favorite in this line so far comes from The American Prospect. “Farewell to a Neo–Nazi Blowhard” was the head on its piece last week. Carlson, you see, is a “neofascist,” TAP wants us to know.

What hollow hyperbole. How few are the level heads in mainstream media these days. How cavalierly do our liberal media debase the English language. How difficult it is to take journalists seriously as they attack another journalist because his views do not match theirs.

What can we learn from all the unhinged denunciations we read daily? What do they tell us about the predicaments of independent minds in journalism—and no matter what you think of Carlson, he has one—and by extension independent journalism altogether? 

In my read, independent media are in a state of siege that has escalated markedly of late. Although he worked for a corporate-owned cable network, I take Carlson’s fate as symptomatic of an intensifying attack on any media that deviate from the national security state’s ever more rigorously enforced orthodoxies. 

The past week brings grim news of the determination of political elites and deeply insecure mainstream media to stifle dissent in wall-to-wall fashion. It is time to pay close attention. This is more now than the grousing of a few independent journalists such as your columnist. Everything up to how we live and think is at stake.

Setting aside all the dross casting Carlson as the Beelzebub of our profession, the remarks that stay in my mind are of another kind. Diana Johnstone, the distinguished Europeanist who has corresponded from Paris for decades, sent a brief note after Fox’s announcement, calling Carlson “the last free voice on mainstream television.” I paused and wondered if I agreed. And then decided I did. 

“The TV host paid the price because he tried the impossible: straddling the divide between corporate media and critical journalism,” Jonathan Cook, who I hold in the same high regard I have for Johnstone, wrote last week on his blog. “He exposed ordinary Americans to critical perspectives, especially on U.S. foreign policy, that they had no hope of hearing anywhere else—and most certainly not from so-called ‘liberal’ corporate media outlets like CNN and MSNBC. And he did so while constantly ridiculing the media’s craven collusion with those in power.”

Johnstone and Cook share an essential point. It is not about agreeing with everything Tucker Carlson had to say on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” his evening cable broadcast. They don’t and I don’t. This is about the presence of independent voices in American journalism. And Carlson has raised such a voice since Fox gave him a prime-time slot in 2016.  

I can’t but note that those celebrating Carlson’s dismissal the loudest are other journalists. They do this by marking him down as a neofascist or a crypto–Nazi or what have you. This has the effect of turning the Carlson case into a left-right question. I do not know Carlson but know people who do. The epithets just noted require no comment. The only way you can get away with calling him a racist—another common charge—is if you buy into the nonsense that all white people are racist because they are white people. 

No, the hoards of flunkies working for corporate media have it in for Tucker Carlson because he takes positions that are forbidden to them. Among these many, Carlson opposes the war in Ukraine, the military-industrial complex, covert coup operations in Cuba and elsewhere, Washington’s subterfuge at the United Nations and America’s imperialist project altogether. Carlson took Seymour Hersh’s report on the Biden’s regime’s covert op to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines for what it is: a tour de force piece of work by the premier investigative reporter now writing. Corporate-paid journalists detest Carlson for these things. I imagine there is a lot of subliminal envy attaching to Tucker Carlson’s professional performance over the years. 

This is not a left-right question. Not much is anymore when you come down to it, primarily because there is no left left in America to allow for right-left questions. I do not read Carlson as an ideologue of any sort. I read him as an independent mind feeling its way, correct on many things, wrong on just as many. 

Jonathan Cook, Glenn Greenwald and others have said all that needs saying about Tucker Carlson’s fate at Fox News. I am interested in this primarily as a case of journalist-on-journalist crime. This is not a right-left question, either. It is a question of independent thinking and dissenting perspectives and those who are fully on now for suppressing both. Tucker Carlson’s is a high-profile case and is complicated by Fox News’s place among corporate-owned media. Let us consider other developments that give us a fuller picture of what amounts to an intensifying war for control of “the narrative” and, at the horizon, our minds. 

“Tucker Carlson’s firing reveals how afraid the media is of independent journalists,” is the headline Jonathan Cook wrote for his blog last week. Entirely true, but media (a plural noun, incidentally) are not the only ones now fearful.

I have wondered ever since Elon Musk started releasing the Twitter Files last December how the national security state—and by extension the mainstream press and broadcasters, given the line between the two is now all but nonexistent—would manage to deflect the extraordinary revelations the Files contain. We’ve now got a top Silicon Valley social media platform caught dead-to-rights collaborating with the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security and the C.I.A. to suppress dissenting voices in the putrid swamp Twitter had become. The government’s covert intervention makes this a straight-out violation of the First Amendment, and I am sure that is not the only violation of the law. 

Well, National Public Radio tried to turn the matter into Musk’s right-wing revenge on liberals—a left-right affair once again. The New York Times went to default position and ignored the news as best it could. Other media followed suit. While I have many, many liberal friends who have either no idea the Twitter Files exist or little idea of what is in them, the damn things keep coming.

In mid–April, it was Mehdi Hasan to the rescue. Hasan, who has a record of this kind of thing, went on the air at MSNBC to (1) misrepresent Matt Taibbi’s reports on the Twitter Files, of which there are many at this point, and (2) denounce Taibbi on the basis of his, Hasan’s, misrepresentations. The next thing you know, some obscure congresswoman from the U.S. Virgin Islands, Stacey Plaskett, is running miles with Hasan’s (mis)report and calling for Taibbi to be tried for perjury for testifying falsely about the Twitter Files when he appeared in Congress under oath on March 9.   

There are some hard-to-believe details here. Plaskett alleges Taibbi perjured himself on the basis of a minor error contained in a Tweet he sent out after he testified. The error wasn’t in the testimony itself, but never mind: We want Taibbi on perjury charges and we will have him on perjury charges. 

Lee Fang, the perspicacious reporter who recently left The Intercept (a wise move) to start his own Substack newsletter, has revealed that Plaskett’s letter to Taibbi, wherein she threatened with up to five years in prison, “was a group effort that involved senior figures in the House Democratic Caucus.”

Fang wrote that after he asked Plaskett for a copy of the letter “a response to my inquiry was finally sent not by her staff, but by Earnestine Dawson, an advisor to House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries.” The metadata on the letter, Fang added, indicated it was written by Jacqui Kappler, a lawyer with the House Judiciary Committee, who works closely with ranking committee member Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., a been-around-forever Democratic log-roller who previously chaired the House Judiciary Committee. 

This is big, we have to assume. 

Hardest to believe of all is the conduct of Mehdi Hasan as he set this charade in motion. What a punk. But what can we expect from a young man who made his way into the mainstream by advancing himself as the mascot Muslim of orthodox liberals, quite prepared to do the slimy work? The Hasan-to-Plaskett handoff tells me we just witnessed barely masked collusion. I have three things to say about this. No, four.  

One, what Hasan and Plaskett are doing reflects a template that goes back at least to the leaks of Democratic Party mail in July 2016: Go after the messenger, dwell upon them relentlessly in news reports and ignore to the fullest extent what the messenger makes public. Government officials and reporters—senior officials such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken, senior reporters such as The Times’s David Sanger—now participate in role-playing exercises at the Aspen Institute, wherein the former train the latter to focus their coverage on the leaker, not what is leaked. 

Tucker Carlson’s case reads straight out of this template. You won’t see anything about the views he expressed on the air—only that he is a racist. Have you read much about what is actually in the Twitter Files? Same thing. I wonder: Will we soon read that Matt Taibbi has racist inclinations?   

Two, Hasan and Plaskett, and the Democratic cliques behind them, are after Matt Taibbi’s backside for alleging collusion between social media and various constituencies of government—and in their alleging give us an exquisite example, but precisely, of a media organization colluding with government. You want to know how the corruption revealed in the Twitter Files actually works? (Present tense, as this may well continue.) Hasan, Plaskett and the Democratic establishment have just shown you one way it is done. 

Three, Mehdi Hasan works for MSNBC, but goddammit, I want to know who else he may work for. It is time to ask these kinds of questions of such people. Anyone with knowledge of American media’s extensive Cold War collaborations with political and administrative power will appreciate this.  

Four, saving the worst for last. Congress threatening Matt Taibbi with jail time for his perfectly honorable work: Well, it does not get much graver when we consider the implications here for free speech, the practice of principled journalism and the future of our public discourse altogether. This is what has come of mainstream media’s refusal to defend Julian Assange against the similarly bogus charges leveled against him.   

I was out of the country when ScheerPost’s publisher, Bob Scheer, wrote to advise of “The New York Times’s hysterical crusade against this airman whistleblower,” referring to Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guardsman who now faces trial on espionage charges for sharing classified Pentagon documents with some group of video game addicts to which he belongs. “This is the same shoot-the-messenger tactic—disparaging a whistleblower while ignoring his message—that was used by critics of [Daniel] Ellsberg, whom The Times published a half century ago. They have gone off the rails.”

Off the rails is one way of putting it. And the reference to Daniel Ellsberg gives us a good idea of just how far the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record has strayed from anything legitimately called journalism. The apparently hapless Teixeira is a whistleblower of a peculiar kind, O.K. But while once The Times (along with The Washington Post) worked in secret with the man who gave the world the Pentagon Papers, both of these dailies just assigned reporters not to write fulsome analyses of the documents Teixeira leaked but to run down the leaker and effectively collaborate with the FBI’s manhunt. 

The Boston Globe gives us a good account of The Times’s role in chasing down the messenger in this case. Naturally, we now read that Teixeira turns out to be a racist with a givenness to violence. But of course. What would the Biden regime do without “far-right extremists” lurking under every American bed? 

The documents Teixeira effectively put into the public sphere through his chatroom  friends concerned the Pentagon’s pessimistic view of the Ukraine war and various other matters. Of these we have read but drips and drops, no more. The taker of the cake in this case is the press conference PBS broadcast from the Pentagon after Teixeira was arrested. Sheer spectacle. The reporters present, sounding all comradely with the Defense Department spokesman, didn’t want to know much about the contents of the Teixeira documents and what DoD had to say about them. No, they asked repeatedly what the military was going to do to prevent such leaks in the future. 

Think about that. Leakers must be stopped, this roomful of robots says. What are you going to do to stop them? Glenn Greenwald makes a neat edit of the taped press conference available via his System Update program:

Stacey Plaskett had the gall to refer to Matt Taibbi as “a so-called journalist.” That’s what these people are. They are the penny-ante scoundrels who populate the lower reaches of Cold War II as our discourse is narrowed to suit an information monoculture.  

Journalists—my take-home here—have fundamentally changed the function of the profession. There is among the great majority of mainstream reporters no longer even the pretense of independence from the powers they are supposed to cover. They openly serve now as the clerks of the political and administrative cliques they “report” upon. They give the impression they think this is their proper role.  

Know this, readers. Contemplate what this means to the world in which you live and move.  

And you thought Russiagate had finally gone away. 

So, I wrote last August, when the African People’s Socialist Party, the APSP, first found itself in trouble with the Justice Department for—the preposterous conceit—acting on behalf of Russia as a “foreign agent.” At the time, Justice indicted one Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, a 33-year-old Russian, who seems to have met members of the APSP and its associated organization, the Uhuru Movement, which are based in Florida and Missouri and live very modestly to put the best face on it. No one in either group was formally charged last summer, but the DoJ alleged nonetheless that they were guilty of “sowing discord,” “heightening grievances,” and “creating strife and division.”

I hope I don’t have to remind readers that sowing discord, heightening grievances, and creating strife and division are entirely lawful under the Constitution. Myself, I think these are three excellent undertakings—patriotic, indeed—given the state of our dilapidated republic. In any case, sowing discord in America in 2023 is like hauling sand to the Sahara. 

Late last month Attorney General Merrick Garland extended the charges from Ionov—a token target, after all—to four members of the APSP, including Omali Yeshitela, the group’s founder. They are accused of “weaponizing our First Amendment rights,” as Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew Olsen put it, “to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States.” Say whaa? The First Amendment was drafted to serve as a weapon, Mr. Olsen—against people such as your good self, I will add.  

 If you are not frightened yet, read on. You’re bound to get there.  

Now there is one thing that must be stated clearly before going any further. I understand that the APSP and the Uhuru Movement accepted small sums from Ionov from time to time and invested the dough—hundreds of dollars on some occasions, low thousands on others—in their various programs on behalf of African–Americans. If this proves so, these groups made a big mistake. However desperate you may be, however clean the contributions are of interference, you don’t accept them if they come from a foreign power—and certainly not from Russia given the frenzy of Russophobia that now grips us. It would be not only poor judgment; it would also weaken these groups as they fight the government’s case.

This case reeks of unlawful repression, but since when does that mean the DoJ will not prevail? “The department will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S. elections in service of hostile foreign interests,” Olsen said in the department’s press release, “regardless of whether the culprits are U.S. citizens or foreign individuals abroad.”

The new charges against American citizens carry a maximum sentence of 10 years; three of the APAP members charged could get another five if found guilty of acting as “foreign agents” and not declaring themselves as such.

There are a couple of ways to look at this case. One is to consider the cynical use Justice is making of a small group of activists who are more or less helpless to defend themselves against a force as powerful as the federal government. To put you in the picture as to who these people are, here is a little of what I wrote in last summer’s commentary:

The African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement are a half-century old this year [2022] and reflect thought that was current at the time of their founding: Pan–Africanism, an internationalist perspective on race and geopolitics, nonalignment, a Marxian political line. Uhuru is Swahili for freedom. … Among the prominent exponents of African socialism was Julius Nyerere, the gentlest soul among those towering leaders of the “independence era”—Nyerere, N’Krumah, Nasser, and Nehru, along with Sukarno, Lumumba, and various others. …

People of these persuasions are suddenly acting on behalf of the Russians? Get off my cloud. This case is outright cruelty by any other name. 

The other way to consider the latest from Atty. Gen. Garland is by way of the broader implications. I do not think Garland and his assistants give a hoot about the APSP or the Uhuru Movement. They chose to go after these groups precisely because they are so insignificant. It is the implications the Justice Department is after—the legal precedent. Garland and Olsen are using these two groups to establish that sowing discord and all the rest can be prosecuted, when this case concludes, as unlawful. 

This is not on the face of it a case concerning journalists and their publishers. But what this means for independent journalists and independent journalism should be evident after a brief moment’s thought.

I am reading about this matter in various independent media—on Caitlin Johnstone’s website, on Monthly Review’s website (good old MR) and hearing about it on Glenn Greenwald’s System Update. The last of these, having trained as a constitutional lawyer, is reliably good on these kinds of topics. 

I am not reading about this in the mainstream media, apart from a piece in The Washington Post that stays well clear of what the case means for free speech and journalism. This silence is indefensible. It makes corporate-owned media complicit, no less, as the authorities charged with upholding the First Amendment desecrate it on the ridiculous ground that sowing discord in our discordant nation is somehow a crime. 

Am I sowing discord in these paragraphs? It seems an absurd question, but now there are grounds to ask it—which is also absurd.  

Greenwald refers to the Justice Department’s case against the APSP as “criminalizing dissent.” We had better understand this as so. I am always one for naming things properly, getting the nomenclature right, as the first step to sound understanding. Dissent for the sake of it cannot be the point. Dissent for the necessity of it is the point. 

Footnote: What nerve Joey Biden has these days. At the White House Correspondents’ dinner last Saturday evening the president called upon the Russians to release Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter arrested on spying allegations in an arms-manufacturing industrial city in the Urals early last month. Biden’s punchline: “Our message is journalism is not a crime.” As someone dear to me asked, “Did even one correspondent stand up and say, ‘Mr. President, you steal the slogan of Julian Assange’s worldwide defense alliance. What about Assange?’” Not a single one: That’s not what correspondents do anymore. 

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/26/matt-taibbi-report-on-the-censorship-industrial-complex/

Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex

Introduction to a series of features about the new global speech-policing bureaucracy, uncovered in the Twitter Files and beyond 

Today you’ll find two new #TwitterFiles threads out, one by longtime Racket contributor Matt Orfalea, and another by Andrew Lowenthal, who worked for 18 years defending digital rights at EngageMedia and watched activists in his space slowly be absorbed by what we’re now calling “The Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

The two new threads collectively show the wide political range of revelations in the #TwitterFiles material, which have been slandered — absurdly — as a partisan exercise. Lowenthal, who in his “Insider’s Guide to ‘Anti-Disinformation’” describes himself as a “progressive-minded Australian,” printed a series of exchanges between journalists who attended a summer “tabletop exercise” at the Aspen Institute about a hack-and-leak operation involving Burisma and Hunter Biden, weeks before the actual event. When the actual scandal broke not long after, the existence of that tabletop exercise clearly become newsworthy, but none of the journalists present, who included David Sanger of the New York Times and current Rolling Stone editor Noah Schactman — said a word. Perhaps, as was common with anti-disinfo conferences, the event was off the record. (We asked, and none of the reporters commented). It doesn’t matter. Lowenthal showed how another “anti-disinformation” conference featured the headline speaker Anthony Blinken. He’s currently suspected of having “triggered” the infamous letter signed by 50 intelligence officers saying the Hunter Biden laptop story had the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

As Lowenthal writes: “See how it works? The people accusing others of “disinformation” run the biggest disinformation campaigns themselves.”

On the flip side, Orfalea found a document showing that both the Wikileaks account and that of Dr. Jill Stein were algorithmically added by Twitter to a list given the creepy name is_russian. This was one of two buckets of “Russians” Twitter was collecting, one called “A Priori Russians” (usually, accounts identified as Russian by 3rd party researchers), the other “Inferred Russians” (accounts that had “strong,” “medium,” or “weak” “signals” of Russianness, involving language, type of email account, location of IP address, tweet time, etc). Even Twitter’s own analysts noted that any system that “captured” Jill Stein as “Russian” spoke to the “overly broad nature of is_russian.” It was just such a “signals” or “marker”-based methodology that Twitter and other researchers used to identify “Russians” on the Internet, a methodology Twitter internally called one of “educated guesses,” concealing a company secret about identifying accounts linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency: “We have no realistic way of knowing this on a Twitter-centric basis.”

As Stein noted when I spoke to her yesterday, these unseen algorithmic tweaks to the political landscape have the effect of decreasing the visibility of political independents during a time of “record hunger for political alternatives.” Stein noted a Gallup poll just showed “identification with the Democratic and Republican parties is at an all-time low,” and said such digital meddling is “an outrageous excuse for political repression,” and “more that Joe McCarthy would be proud of.”

When Stella Assange was told about the is_russian list, she first speculated that any algorithm that demerited users based on location might produce false positives if account holders used, say, the Tor Browser, which could “randomly result in an RU exit node.” Since “Tor is an essential tool for civil liberties and privacy communities,” you could have people being tossed in a “Russian” bucket for the crime of trying to evade surveillance.

In another part of his thread, Orfalea notes that a Clemson University researcher hailed as a “troll hunter” in the press and used as a source by major media outlets, speculated that an account called @drkwarlord that was sharing a hashtag, #BloombergisRacist because the account was tweeting at odd hours:

That’s the “expert” opinion. Orfalea just called @drkwarlord, who laughed, “I’m a nurse at a hospital in Indiana. In 2020, I worked the night shift.”

Whether it’s suppression of a news story conservatives care about like the Hunter Biden laptop tale, or deamplification of a left-leaning Green Party candidate like Jill Stein, the #TwitterFiles consistently hit at the same theme, but it’s not partisan. It’s really summed up by something Stella Assange said, about the difference between Wikileaks and the “anti-disinformation” facsimile, Bellingcat. “Wikileaks coined ‘intelligence agency of the people.’ Bellingcat went with ‘for the people.’”

Civil society institutions, the media, politicians, and government are supposed to maintain distance from one another in democracy. The Censorship-Industrial Complex shows an opposite instinct, for all of these groups to act in concert, essentially as one giant, incestuous intelligence operation — not of the people, but paternalistically “for” the people, or so they believe. Journalists attend conferences where news happens and do not report it, breaking ranks neither with conference organizers, nor with each other. The Trump era has birthed a new brand of paranoid politics, where once-liberalizing institutions like the press and NGOs are encouraged to absorb into a larger whole, creating a single political cartel to protect against the “contagion” of mass movements. As Lowenthal notes, this explains why so many “anti-disinformation” campaigns describe language as a kind of disease, e.g. “infodemic,” “information pollution,” and “information disorder.”

Surrounded by the “disease” of dangerous political ideas, checks and balances are being discarded in favor of a new belief in banding together. The Guardian’s Luke Harding laid out this idea a few years ago, in a gushing review of a book about Bellingcat by its founder, British journalist Eliot Higgins:

Higgins thinks traditional news outlets need to establish their own open source investigation teams or miss out. He’s right. Several have done so. The New York Times has recruited ex-Bellingcat staff. Higgins approves of this. In his view, rivalry between media titles is a thing of the past. The future is collaboration, the hunt for evidence a shared endeavour, the truth out there if we wish to discover it.

Harding makes this sound cheery, but the rivalry of media titles is the primary (if not only) regulatory mechanism for keeping the press honest. If the Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC no longer go after each other for uncorrected errors — like the Hamilton 68 fiasco exposed in the #TwitterFiles, or Harding’s own infamous report that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort managed to have a secret meeting in London’s Ecuadorian embassy with the world’s most-watched human, Assange — they can and will indulge in collective delusions. A “shared endeavour” vision of politics is just a synonym for belief in elite concentration of power.

As noted in Lowenthal’s thread, the story of the #TwitterFiles and the Censorship-Industrial Complex is “really the story of the collapse of public trust in experts and institutions, and how those experts struck back, by trying to pool their remaining influence into a political monopoly.” The losers in any advancement of this story would include anyone outside the monopoly, and they can be on either the right or the left. The intense negative reaction by traditional press to the #TwitterFiles stories published to date is rooted in a feeling of betrayal. The new media leaders see themselves as doing the same service police officers in the stop-and-frisk era called “order maintenance,” pouncing on visible signs of discord or disruption. They’re gatekeepers, and the #TwitterFiles — classic old-timey journalism that assumes the public has a right to know things — represents an unacceptable breach of the perimeter.

Orfalea is also releasing today a video he compiled for the “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Titled “Eleven Minutes of Media Falsehoods, Just On One Subject, Just On One Channel,” it’s what’s left of a more ambitious plan the Racket team tried to put together as part of this wider series, whose first pieces are coming out today. Andrew and Matt’s material is coming out first, but in the next weeks you’ll be reading from a series of contributors in this “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” each looking at this subject from different angles.

The project started with a question: who’s on this list?

You’re looking at page 7 of a report by the State Department Inspector General from August, 2020, featuring the forgettable title, “Audit of Global Engagement Center Federal Assistance Award Management and Monitoring.” On the first page, the State IG explained it was auditing a new agency, the Global Engagement Center, which was housed in the U.S. State Department and dedicated to the fight against “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation.” The IG added some history:

In March 2016, President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13721, which required the Secretary of State to establish the Global Engagement Center (GEC). The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2017 then mandated that GEC “lead, synchronize, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.”

The report went on to say that in Fiscal Year 2018, the new anti-disinformation wing of the State Department received $98.7 million, including “approximately $78.7 million in congressionally appropriated funds, and $20 million transferred from the Department of Defense.” That was distributed among 39 different award recipients, whom the Inspector General was kind enough to list. Only, they redacted all but three names, none of which have what one would describe as vibrant online presences today: Park Advisors, the Democracy Council of California, and the CNA Corporation.

I first read this report in mid-February, roughly three months into the #TwitterFiles project. At the time, I was trying to learn more about Hamilton 68, the reporter-friendly anti-disinformation “dashboard” purporting to track a list of accounts linked to “Russian influence activities.” Internal Twitter emails showed executives reverse-engineered the Hamilton list and found it to be a fraud, mostly tracking not Russians but ordinary people here at home.

Multiple sources told me to look for Hamilton ties to the GEC. Among those who claimed to help design the site included a writer called J.M. Berger, who told me he’d been on the GEC payroll until about a month before the list’s launch (though he vigorously denied doing work on Hamilton for GEC). Hamilton’s public spokesperson Clint Watts, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, worked at GEC’s predecessor agency, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, or CSCC. The first head of GEC, former Time editor Rick Stengel, lauded the Hamilton 68 project in odd language, saying, “If only we’d had it during the election”:

Trying to answer these questions about a relatively small amount of money and 39 names, I soon realized the “anti-disinformation” world was awash in cash from a range of public and private sources, and we weren’t dealing with dozens of organizations but at least hundreds, many engaged in language-policing at scale. By early February, seeing that keeping track of which group did what was clearly too much work for one person to even begin to take on, I put out an APB for help mainly in trying to answer one question: exactly how big is this new speech bureaucracy?

#TwitterFiles reporters like Michael Shellenberger, and myself didn’t have much of a hint of what we were looking at until later in the project. That larger story was about a new type of political control mechanism that didn’t really exist ten years ago. In preparation for testimony before the House in March, Shellenberger gave it a name: the Censorship-Industrial Complex.

The allusion was an unpleasantly perfect fit. America was introduced to the original Military-Industrial Complex on January 17, 1961, in the farewell address of President Dwight Eisenhower. The former Commander of Allied Forces in Europe in WWII warned of something “new in the American experience”: an interlocking network of financiers, extra-governmental organizations and official bureaucracies who were organized around permanent arms production and who collectively wielded more power than kings, presidents, and other such titular authorities.

Ike forced Americans for the first time to think of power as suffuse, insuperable, and geographically indistinct, less like a king’s scepter than electricity running through a brain. In the context of the Military Industrial Complex, the Oval Office from which Eisenhower delivered his famous farewell was just a room, Eisenhower himself just a recoiling pile of bones and fluids, following a final stage direction:

The Censorship-Industrial Complex is much the same. Shellenberger coined the term while working with me on a #TwitterFiles project that began with a parallel mystery story: who had the power to muzzle a president?

We didn’t understand at the time, but the third, fourth, and fifth installments of the #TwitterFiles — about the three days of infighting at Twitter between the Capitol riots on January 6th and their decision to remove Donald Trump on January 8th — served as an introduction for all of us to the major components of a vast new public-private speech bureaucracy, one that appeared to have been founded in the United States, but was clearly global in scope.

The material you’ll be reading in the next week or so is designed to accomplish two things. The first task we settled on was to create, through interactive lists and other features, a quantitative map of the world Shellenberger described in his written testimony, a censorship industrial complex that:

Combines established methods of psychological manipulation… with highly sophisticated tools from computer science, including artificial intelligence. The complex’s leaders are driven by the fear that the Internet and social media platforms empower populist, alternative, and fringe personalities and views, which they regard as destabilizing.

In pursuit of that first goal, organized loosely around a thing we’ve been calling “The List,” Racket welcomed people like Lowenthal and Geneve Campbell, (formerly of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard). With their experience in the “anti-disinformation” space, Andrew and Geneve helped a team of journalists and researchers put together what we hope will be an accessible starter kit for everyday readers hoping to acquaint themselves with the biggest organizational names in the “CIC.”

The second goal had reporters like Aaron Maté, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Susan Schmidt, “The Hunt for Tom Clancy” writer Matt Farwell (a co-worker of my late colleague Michael Hastings), military-veteran-turned-reporter Tom Wyatt, the wonderfully obsessive Racket contributor Orfalea, and others attempt to tell the broader history of the new international censorship phenomenon.

Each took on different stories under the theme of the CIC, aided by leads from the Twitter Files, like: what was the genesis of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Trump-Russia investigation? How did the post-9/11 counter-terrorism project morph into a post-Trump counter-populism project? How does the development of the CIC fit with the broader history of American “information operations”? Does a CIC that claims to stop “fake news” actually create it — spoiler, it does — and if so, how many media stories need retracting, or at least an editor’s note, in the face of information found in the Twitter Files? Lastly, can the CIC target individuals, and if so, what would one particularly devastating test case look like? These stories will be coming out in the next weeks.

All the contributors to this report are independents. Many are not formally trained journalists, and some, like the tireless @Techno_Fog, represent a new kind of citizen journalism it seemed important to recognize. A major subtext of the CIC story is that ordinary people are going to have to build their own media and oversight institutions to represent them, as virtually the entire landscape of traditional institutional checks on power seems to have been compromised.

If the Military Industrial Complex was propped up by an “Iron Triangle” of donors, Congress, and quasi-private interest groups, the “CIC” is more like a four-legged animal: government, “civil society” organizations, tech companies, and a shocking fourth partner, news media. Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, a supposedly independent group that director Alex Stamos said was created in 2020 to fill the “gap” of what government couldn’t do by itself, did us the favor of creating a graphic representation of these four “major stakeholders”:

Note the way reports flow both to and from the media, which has completely rethought its role vis a vis the public. Over and over in the #TwitterFiles, we saw newspapers finking on their own readers instead of advocating for them. The typical progression involved a “civil society” organization like the Britain-based Center for Countering Digital Hate reaching out to reporters with lists of people or accounts deemed to be bad actors, followed by queries from those reporters to Twitter, demanding to know: why hasn’t this group been deleted? These voices? This idea?

One of the first observations Andrew made when he started looking through the Files was how bizarre it was to see “civil society organizations” holding tabletop exercises about election security with representatives of the military.

“‘Not the military’ is what civil society is supposed to mean,” he says. “They’re not supposed to be partners.”

Democracy relies on the dynamic tension between liberalizing institutions like the press, NGOs, and the media, but the CIC seeks to unite these groups and homogenize information flow. This is not only morally wrong, but ridiculous: there’s no way to keep a cap on 8 billion voices forever. The people you’ll be reading about in this series want to try, however. How? Raw numbers. Money. The sheer application of political will and computing power. As you’ll read and see, if they have to build one NGO for every human on earth, they’ll do it.

Franz Kafka dreamed up the “one gatekeeper per person” idea over a century ago as ironic metaphor in Before the Law, but the modern United States is moving in that direction as political reality. It’s the ultimate convergence of the huge-scale-waste approach to governance as perfected across generations of forever wars and Pentagon spending, and the authoritarian thinking that flowered all over in response to episodes like 9/11, Brexit, and the election of Donald Trump. The core concept is too much democracy and freedom leads to mischief, and since the desire for these things can’t be stamped out all at once but instead must be squashed in every person over and over and endlessly, the job requires a massive investment, and a gigantic bureaucracy to match.