What Smith, Benz, Dyer, Taibbi and others are describing is a public-private, bi-partisan, U.S. Government-issue totalitarian project that is being funded with our tax money. Mark Steyn (who is currently recovering from two heart attacks–really hope he makes it) called the U.S. Capitol “a citadel of crap”. He was too kind.

https://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2023/01/07/toc-ready-room-7-jan-2023-border-disorder-project-censorship-church-redux/

Government-social media collusion to censor speech

This gigantic topic will be with us for some time, and I won’t try to fit in too much in this update.

Some essential resources and thinking aids were produced this past week on the matter, by journalist Lee Smith and one of his sources, Mike Benz.
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Mike Benz, quoted in the article, came in a bit later with a most useful thread on what he and Smith call the “whole-of-society” censorship effort (specifically with relation, mostly, to the Hunter Biden laptop and the on-the-fly voting arrangements for the 2020 election).
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Of particular note was Benz’s reference to measures adopted by multiple segments of society at essentially the same time: the fall of 2019.
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In January 2019, at the beginning of the 117th Congress, the Hill Democrats brought to the floor H.R. 1, the sweeping voting “reform” bill that included such measures as universal vote-by-mail and relaxed standards for timeliness of mailed ballots and signature-matching for vote integrity.
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In retrospect, the policy statements from the fall of 2019 about “protecting democracy” laid the groundwork with remarkably convenient timing for the whole-of-society censorship campaign that ensued in 2020.
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When the censorship apparatus is in place before the emergence of the problem (“COVID-19” versus the election), the “solution” (implementing the measures of H.R. 1), and its critics or dissidents, you have to give serious thought to which is the chicken and which the egg.

Interesting enough, but THIS is the important part.

But one final point. If I had any quibble with Lee Smith’s article, it would be the same slight over-focus I see among most commentators on the “intelligence community” as the government contingent pulling the strings on this.

Perhaps the intel community has to be no mystery to the observer, for the observer to be confident that the IC is not the deus ex machina in this sprawling scenario. It’s not. I say that without hesitation. The IC is the custodian of the tools, and when the visible manifestations come from the use of the tools, it can look like the custodian is the one with the plan and the fell intent.
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In the 2020 election cycle, the Twitter files show that CISA became a hub for the project to monitor and censor Americans’ social media speech, and the FBI was a key participant. In neither case was this about “intelligence.” It was putatively about homeland security and public infrastructure, because that’s how it could be justified as a government effort.

CISA and the FBI both became unnaturally empowered based on this justification, but intelligence, per se, wasn’t wielding the policymaking or decision power. Its tools were being drawn on to assemble the arena of operations. It’s really important to understand this. Systematic, whole-of-society abuse of intel’s tools cannot be ordered or master-minded by “intelligence.” Intelligence controls only its own tools; it doesn’t have the power to dragoon the other elements of society.

But extra-legal things only presidents and their top staff could once order up from intelligence are now available for exploitation at lower bureaucratic levels – and known to be so by people who aren’t in government office, and may well be getting things done through contractors and the revolving-door ministrations of Washington’s endless consulting firms (including law firms).
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Smith nails it better here, in recognizing that the whole-of-society effort has become, in effect, a rogue spy service in its own right, one much larger and farther reaching than the intel agencies formally chartered by the U.S. government can be:

In fact, the FBI’s penetration of Twitter constituted just one part of a much larger intelligence operation—one in which the bureau offshored the machinery it used to interfere in the 2016 election and embedded it within the private sector.
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As Smith so aptly says, this whole-of-society strategy isn’t merely about one election, or replacing Trump. It’s about replacing the Republic. I’ve written about that at length before as well, back when people thought the Obama administration’s motive for spying on and thwarting Trump was to preserve particular aspects of Obama’s policy “legacy,” or protect Hillary from exposure or prosecution. Those motives wouldn’t merit even an uncomfortable phone call, much less a whole-of-society enterprise, in the actual scope of what’s going on. …
The actual motive – replacing the Republic – is and always was too big to originate in the intel community. Though the evidence indicates they’ve been involved, it’s not men like James Clapper, Christopher Wray, or John Brennan who lay awake at night in 2016 or 2020 envisioning an America that isn’t America anymore. Nor is it their bureaucratic subordinates, at least not in the sense of wielding the power to order lawless activities.

Those men and women, custodians of the tools, have been tools themselves, if often willing ones, for people who operate at a different level, one at which the actors are mostly out of public office or have never been in it.
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Many of them are cultivated in the UN-sponsored global climate initiatives and Agenda 21. There’s no conspiracy theory in pointing this out. There is a consensus silence on it in the U.S. legacy media, especially as it affects the United States. But the participants are all real and have left a distinctive paper trail.
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Intel is involved, to be sure, and there can be utility in curtailing its tools (if that can actually be accomplished in the age of ephemeral digital footprints). The House is likely to take the easier route and confine itself to probing the custodians rather than taking on the decision-makers.

But if we care who’s trying to replace the American Republic, the custodians aren’t the droids we’re looking for.

UPDATE from a knowledgeable reader about the first item here:

The FAA’s Notice to Airmen system started as a teletype thing way back in the 40s and 50s. It was a way to make sure pilots knew about dangerous and different conditions on a short term basis.

The FAA has been dragging it along for years. Bureaucrats and Ass Protectors have been steadily adding stupid stuff to the system that turns a couple of bullet point things you need to know into pages and pages of reading before you go fly. Most of them are totally worthless waste of time.

It’s also not apparent whether the platforms the program is on are capable of the workload or it was hacked.

In a recent conversation with my pharmacist at [name redacted to protect the clerk], I learned that their national prescription records system is still based on the Commodore 64 — although how that’s even possible, I couldn’t begin to imagine.

I think not.
file:///C:/Users/Kate/Desktop/MEME%20gas%20range%20come%20and%20take%20it.webp

Got it in one.

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/heres-what-the-faa-has-been-focused-on-instead-of-keeping-planes-in-the-air/

The FAA’s mission-critical pilot safety alerting system crashed overnight, causing the agency to temporarily ground all outgoing air traffic across the country Wednesday morning and delay more than 6,500 flights. The FAA has had much to say about the system under Buttigieg’s watch, but not for matters relating to its functionality or upkeep. Rather, the agency announced in December 2021 that it had changed the system’s name from “Notice to Airmen” to “Notice to Air Mission,” a “more applicable term” that the agency said is “inclusive of all aviators and missions.”
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The air safety system’s name change came months after an FAA advisory committee issued a report in June 2021 recommending the agency replace a wide swath of words and phrases with gender-neutral terms. The updated language, the advisory committee said, would help combat unintentional bias and reflect a “more modern recognition that gender can be binary.”
…[what does that even mean these days?]…

Recommendations included replacing “airman” with “aircrew,” “manned aviation” with “traditional aviation,” and “cockpit” with “flight deck.”

The FAA took the recommendations to heart. The agency hosted a two-and-a-half-hour virtual inclusive language summit in November 2021 to discuss its initiative to adopt “gender-neutral and inclusive language” nationwide.
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The Transportation Department’s focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion is also reflected in its $26.8 billion budget request for the 2023 fiscal year.

The department said it would allocate funds to tackle climate change, address inequities, and advance “environmental justice.” The department requested $15.2 billion for the FAA to improve aviation safety and infrastructure, but said it would enact those improvements by promoting environmental justice, climate change mitigation, and “enhancing equity through more inclusive contracting and workforce development.”

I don’t actually have a problem with shifts to gender-neutral language when it’s not a mangling of verbiage. “Air Mission” instead of “Air Man” and “aircrew” are fine; I might even go with “flight deck,” although the traditional term has more pizzazz.

Anything else is linguistically inelegant, although sometimes it’s dangerously subversive instead of just being nonsense.
Kind of like “minor attracted persons” and “kinetic military action.”

https://www.cracked.com/article_16884_the-12-most-horrifically-misleading-euphemisms.html

Informal indeed, however the Miriam Webster is certainly problematic nowadays. To be changed to “Coastguarder?” Oh Noes! Too much implied aggression and hostility. What are they guarding after all? Privilege? (sarc)

They should be the Coastenablers, open seas and open borders!(sarc)

I expect the present Commandant will think of some way around the current awkwardness.