Biden and FBI were purveyors of misinformation

 Charles Lipson:

We are beginning to find out just how bad it was. The FBI and other government agencies worked hand in glove with Twitter’s old management to suppress legitimate speech they didn’t like and shape a narrative they did. They did so repeatedly and secretly. So did the Biden presidential campaign and the Democratic National Campaign Committee. They institutionalized their close relations and communicated so often that Twitter executives could reply to their complaints with a single word: “handled.” We only learned how extensive this collusion was after Elon Musk bought the company.

The attacks on Musk for exposing the connections tell us just how much those on the left side of the political spectrum hate open discourse and transparency when it includes views they dislike. They regularly smear those views with hyperbolic terms such as white supremacist, transphobic, racist, fascist, or whatever comes to mind. They substitute name-calling for rational argument.

Today, sadly, the label “progressive” not only encompasses almost all universities and many woke corporations, it also includes much of the media, which is spewing vitriol at Musk instead of investigating the now-obvious malfeasance by Twitter’s previous management and the government agencies that worked so closely with the social media giant.

Why would an honest media be interested in this growing scandal? How about because it includes the following:A vast overreach by federal law enforcement,
Improper interference in domestic politics by multiple federal agencies, which they naturally kept secret to protect their meddling, and
A concerted effort by government agents and retired CIA officials to stop the spread of inconvenient information under the phony guise of “national security.” That included damaging information about Joe Biden’s family, which they suppressed just before the 2020 election. We now know that story, published by the New York Post, was true, and efforts to discredit it as “Russian disinformation” were false, perhaps knowingly so.

In the old days, when the American left was liberal instead of progressive, it would have been outraged by every aspect of this scandal. No more. The left’s tectonic shift shows us just how far progressive values have departed from older liberal ones.

The media, so proud of its progressive credentials, was happy to skip these stories when they first appeared, and they are happy to skip them now, even as the evidence accumulates. The media’s reticence is revealing. It underscores how they are willing to override their journalistic responsibilities when they conflict with their political preferences and ideology. That’s a scandal in its own right, and it’s why Musk had to turn to outsiders like Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Shellenberger, not the New York Times or Washington Post, to review Twitter’s documents. After Shellenberger reviewed them, he tweeted, “The FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020.” It would be interesting to know how they knew the NY Post was about to publish that material before it did so.

The key here is the role of government agencies. The DNC and the Biden campaign are perfectly free to promote whatever narrative they want. They are private entities, and they are free to work behind the scenes with private companies like Twitter. Likewise, Twitter is free to publish what it wants, though lying about it for years was dishonorable. But that freedom does not extend to the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Centers for Disease Control. As government agencies, they have absolutely no business trying to suppress public discussion that is permitted under the First Amendment or hide evidence they have done so. The CIA has no business at all – and no legal authority – to interfere in domestic American politics. If the agency did so by working through their former leaders, we need to know.

These government bureaucrats were clever enough to hide their role, at least until Twitter’s ownership changed. The mandarins of the administrative state managed to (1) salt Twitter and other social media sites with friendly, ex-FBI agents; (2) pay social media giants millions for their “staff work” to deal with agency requests; and (3) pressure rather than specifically order Twitter and others to suppress specific information on their sites. The Twitter files show the FBI did all of those. We need to know if other government agencies did the same thing and if their efforts were directed at other Internet behemoths besides Twitter. So far, both the bureaucrats and behemoths have been meta-silent.
...

The Biden administration and other government agencies violated the first amendment and suppressed truthful information to push their agenda and used the Covid pandemic as an excuse for doing so.