Swimming with Sharks

CJ Hopkins

So, Elon Musk’s new free-speech Twitter appears to be going extremely well. Critics of the official Covid narrative, and the official Ukraine narrative, and Elon Musk, are still being deplatformed, censored, and defamed, but, otherwise, you can tweet whatever you want!

If you want to tweet about how Elon is running Twitter almost single-handedly while personally caring for his nine hungry children and “being a journalist” without ever sleeping, or how he’s “driving down the cost of access to outer space,” or “improving life on Earth for humanity” while planning to exfiltrate himself and his family and friends in the military community (and anyone else who can afford a ticket) to Mars if something goes catastrophically wrong, or is otherwise heroically “doing God’s work,” go for it … you can tweet stuff like that all day!

OK, sure, if you don’t want to do that, and, instead, you want to tweet about the systematic destabilization and radical restructuring of global society that has been carried out by the global-capitalist ruling classes during the past three years, or the most insidious official propaganda and gaslighting campaign in human history, or if you want to tweet about neo-Nazis in the Ukraine, or anything else the Emperor Elonicus doesn’t want you to tweet about, well, not to put too fine a point on it, you’re fucked.

Fucked as in suspended, or censored, or “deboosted,” or “visibility filtered,” or maybe your account is just hidden from view behind one of these fake “sensitive content” warnings, exactly like it was on non-free-speech Twitter…

But whatever … that’s a small price to pay for the privilege of “shitposting” and “owning the libs,” which, that was the whole point of the Twitter takeover, wasn’t it (i.e., revenge, as opposed to actual free speech)?

Who cares if scientists, medical experts, and critics of the New Normal are still being censored? Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi editor of The Daily Stormer, is back! That will certainly stick it to those “shitlibs”!

And then there’s the release of the Twitter Files, which is turning into a le Carré thriller!

Yes, that’s right, Elonicus the Just is releasing in-house documentation of the rogue cabal of liberal “bad apples” that were arbitrarily censoring conservatives, not for any systematic ideological-narrative-enforcement reasons, but just because, well, you know, they’re liberals, or “leftists,” or “cultural Marxists,” or whatever!

Part Two, published by Bari Weiss on Thursday, focused on Twitter’s notorious blacklists, and included screenshots and other evidence of how Twitter executives censored, “deranked,” and otherwise intentionally disappeared and misrepresented information and political views they did not like and so decided that no one should be able to read. Part Three, published by Matt Taibbi last night, documented the censorship and eventual deplatforming of Donald J. Trump, who was The President of the United States at the time … so, yeah, another “nothingburger.”

Fortunately, it turns out, all this censorship, defamation, intentional deception of the public, interference in the political process, and so on, was the work of (you guessed it) a few “bad apples,” Yoel Roth, Parag Agrawal, Vijaya Gadde, and other “bad apples,” who have all been fired (or “exited”) by The Emperor Elonicus. So that’s all over now, and will never happen again, not as long as Elonicus reigns!

So, great, I’m glad that proof of the shenanigans that so many of us have been describing for years is finally definitively coming to light. However, eternal optimist that I am, I was hoping that the Twitter Files would at least broach the subject of how the global corporatocracy, and its government functionaries, and the state and corporate media, and global corporations like Twitter, have gone more or less full-blown totalitarian, and have been conducting a textbook Gleichschaltung campaign, imposing and enforcing ideological uniformity and systematically censoring those of us who have been questioning and challenging the official Covid narrative (and that destabilization and radical restructuring of global society that I mentioned above).

But let’s not get sidetracked by all that narrative stuff, or that global-capitalist totalitarianism stuff, or the countless people around the world that are dying “suddenly,” or “unexpectedly,” which, of course, has nothing to do with the multiple experimental “vaccinations” they were deceived and/or coerced into submitting to, which Twitter and the rest of the global-capitalist propaganda apparatus repeatedly assured us were “safe and effective,” and censored those of us who suggested that they might not be, or that we might not need to “vaccinate” every man, woman, and child on the planet.

All that stuff is water under the bridge. The important thing is American “red/blue” politics!

OK, before I get into the Twitter Files further, I need to do the “full-disclosure” thing. As I am sure you are aware, Elon Musk has chosen to release the selected Twitter Files to Matt Taibbi, and now also Bari Weiss, instead of, you know, just making them all public.

Well, I know Matt Taibbi. We communicate occasionally. He has blurbed a few of my books. I respect him. I like him. I am seriously biased toward Matt Taibbi. I would have Matt Taibbi’s babies if he let me. Basically, I am in in love with Matt Taibbi, and would probably be creepily stalking him right now if I lived in the USA instead of here in Germany. I don’t know Bari Weiss at all, but, from what I can tell, she seems like a nice lady.

All right, that’s my full disclosure. Let’s get back to those Twitter Files.

So, here’s the other thing that is bothering me (i.e., in addition to how this story is gradually devolving into a “red/blue” slugfest). You saw the news about how James Baker, the FBI guy who worked with the Clinton team on perpetrating the Russiagate hoax and had a hand in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, was “vetting” the Twitter Files before they were released.

Well, according to the story, Baker was doing this “vetting” unbeknownst to Elon Musk, who had apparently just accidentally forgotten to fire his Deputy General Counsel (who he had been aware of for at least eight months) when he fired all those other liberal “bad apples,” and so Elon, being totally “in the dark,” as it were, had absolutely no idea what Baker was doing to the Twitter Files until Bari Weiss caught it and brought it to his attention.

That bothers me…as in I do not believe it.

I want to be clear about what I’m saying. I’m not questioning Matt’s or Bari Weiss’ motives, or methods, and certainly not their characters. If I were in their positions, I’d be doing the same thing, getting my hands on as many “Twitter files” as possible and reporting the story that is there to report.

They are journalists. That is what journalists do. They have also been around the block a few times, so I assume they are aware that they are swimming with sharks. If they weren’t previously, they certainly are now, after this fishy Baker “vetting” business.

What I’m saying is, how can we trust what they are getting? How many files were “vetted” by Baker? Why was he still in a position to “vet” them? Who’s “vetting” the files now that Baker has been “exited”? Which files have been given to Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss and which files have not been given to them?

The reporting they are doing is like creating a collage; they can only work with the materials they are given, and the materials they are given will determine the story, or at least limit the nature and scope of the story.

Also, and notwithstanding my respect and disturbing affection for Matt Taibbi, neither Matt nor Bari Weiss have been particularly interested in covering the roll-out of the official Covid narrative, i.e., the most insidious propaganda and gaslighting campaign in human history, or the destabilization and radical restructuring of global society that I keep mentioning in this column and have been writing about, extensively, since March of 2020.

So, even if Musk has dumped the entire Twitter database on Matt and Bari Weiss, I doubt that either of them are going to be exactly chomping at the bit to report that story.

Seriously, just imagine if they did. If you think the corporate media’s reaction to Matt Taibbi’s initial Twitter Files release was brutal — and it certainly was — imagine what would happen if he and Bari told the story of Twitter’s role in the global New Normal Gleichschaltung campaign.

They would likely lose everything, publishers, book deals, literary agents, colleagues, friends. They would be excommunicated from the Hall of Seriousness, cast out into the outer darkness where the denylisted souls of “Covid-denying, conspiracy theorizing anti-vaxxers” moan into the void for all eternity.

Because telling that story would mean documenting everything…the fabricated “Covid cases” and “Covid deaths” statistics, the lies about the lockdowns, the masks, the “vaccines,” all of it, the whole New Normal megillah. Not how it’s “over now” because “the science changed,” but how the whole thing was one enormous PSYOP (regardless of whether or how much of it was intentional), how it was manufactured with lies and propaganda from the very beginning, in March of 2020.

Put yourself in Matt Taibbi’s and Bari Weiss’ position. If they tell that story, their lives will be destroyed. Go ahead, judge them if you want. I’m not interested in judgement, personally. I’m interested in seeing things as they are, and the way they are … well, we have a little quandary here, a quandary regarding the Twitter Files not turning out to be a limited hangout, or being perceived as a limited hangout.

And, so, in light of that little quandary, here is a proposal for Elon Musk. Maybe Matt, or Bari Weiss, or one of my “high-profile” right-wing readers can pass it on to him. You don’t have to tell him where it came from. It’s pretty simple. Here it is:

Share the Covid-narrative-censorship Twitter files with journalists who want to tell that story. Let Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss keep telling the story they are telling, which, make no mistake, is of historic importance (and is ultimately a part of the larger story that the Covid-narrative censorship is also part of), but share the files with other journalists who don’t have as much to lose, or who are willing to lose it to report the story, or who have already lost it and so don’t give a shit. If you actually meant “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” then how about a little Vox Populi, Elon?

If Elon Musk is serious about coming clean, and defending freedom of speech, and all that stuff, and not just whitewashing the company he just bought, and orchestrating an elaborate limited hangout, he can prove it by offering the Covid-narrative-censorship Twitter files to a few other journalists … journalists who want to report that story, who want to report that story right now, not two years from now, when no one cares anymore.

I have a hunch he might get a few takers.

CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.

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