A Twitter Files Requiem

And so the "Twitter Files" Limited Hangout has come to its inevitable, ignominious end. It is over. The Twitter-Files story is dead. It isn't pining for the fjords. It is deceased, cadaverous, bereft of life. It has bought the farm and gone to meet its maker. It is Humpty Dumpty. It has fallen off the wall. Nothing can put it back together again.

I have to tip my hat to Elon Musk. It was quite an impressive limited hangout. The way Musk took the potential story of a global network of Intelligence agencies, corporations, NGOs, and assorted "disinformation experts" censoring, visibility-filtering, and otherwise neutralizing dissent as GloboCap executed the "shock-an-awe" phase of the roll-out of the "New Normal" over the last three years ... the way Musk took that potentially game-changing story by the throat and throttled it, played around with its corpse for a while like a cat, and then finally threw it down, squatted over it, and obstreperously, definitively defecated on it, that was ... well, quite impressive.

If you missed the final twists and turns in the Twitter-Files story (R.I.P), Matt Taibbi, who is currently attempting to enjoy a vacation at Disneyland with the wife and kids, published an update on Racket News, his "Twitter-killing" Substack newsletter, covering the juicy bits.

Here's the "money" paragraph, or most of it ...

"In doing all this Elon immolated the last remnants of any reputation he had as a free speech advocate and gave immeasurable succor to the assorted David Brocks, AOCs, and Renee DiRestas who view him as an antichrist. All can now point to his outbursts of cartoon censorship and argue individual eccentric CEOs are the real danger to free expression, not squads of executives working in oligopolistic secrecy with the FBI, DHS, and ten million Pentagon-funded Centers for Securing Whatever. It won’t be true, but Elon’s public meltdown will in the short run take a ton of pressure off these villains, while accelerating the piranha frenzy currently skeletonizing Twitter’s profits …"

What Matt can’t quite say (and I understand why) is that Elon’s meltdown will not just “give immeasurable succor” to the David Brocks, AOCs, and other functionaries and puppets who have demonized him, and “take a ton of pressure off these villains,” it will effectively kill the future of the story, and consign what has been reported so far to the “lunatic fringes” of the Internet, where no one “normal” will ever be forced to pay it any serious attention again.

That, my friends, is called a limited hangout. As I explained in a column in January …

"The way a limited hangout works is, if you’re an intelligence agency, or a global corporation, or a government, or a non-governmental organization, and you have been doing things you need to hide from the public, and those things are starting to come to light such that you can’t just deny that you are doing them anymore, what you do is, you release a limited part of the story (i.e., the story of whatever it is you’re doing) to distract people’s attention from the rest of the story. The part you release is the 'limited hangout.' It’s not a lie. It’s just not the whole story. You 'hang it out' so that it will become the whole story, and thus stop people from pursuing the whole story.”

I was besieged by irate Elon-worshippers, and "unfollowed," "unfriended," "unsubscribed to," and so on, for days and weeks after I published that column. Perhaps a few of them will get it now. The point is, it is over ... that was it. There are not going to be any "Covid Twitter Files." There aren't going to be any "Nuremberg trials." The Censorship Industrial Complex is not going anywhere. It is here to stay.

From now on, any further Twitter Files reporting -- any actual reporting on the Censorship Industrial Complex at all -- will be summarily dismissed as another episode of Elon's Flying Narcissistic Circus. There will be no more congressional hearings. Anyone who continues to cover the story (i.e., the actual story, not the Twitter Files) will be branded a minion of Elon Musk, "a right-wing extremist conspiracy theorist," no more serious than a "9/11 truther."

Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and less famous journalists like Jacob Siegel, who in a rational world would receive awards for their work, will be systematically, ritually, spat on. Others will simply be ignored. Mehdi Hasan and other hatchet men will parade around with permanent hard-ons spewing vitriol at anyone who even broaches the subject (i.e., the TV hatchet men will spew, not their hard-ons).

Interest in the story will precipitously decline.

Apparently, Musk's interest is already declining, and he is eager to "move on to the future."

Of course he is. His work is done.

Now, before anyone gets all jacked up and starts calling me a "conspiracy theorist," I don't believe any of this was intentional, or at least not a conscious plan on Musk's part -- I'm not quite that gibberingly paranoid -- but, if the Censorship Industrial Complex, or GloboCap (or whatever you need to call the multiplicitous, supranational network of governments, global corporations, NGOs, Intelligence agencies, oligarchs, media, and other such entities that are radically, aggressively restructuring "reality" in a distinctly totalitarian fashion) ... if those folks (or that ideological system) wanted to execute an elaborate limited hangout and immunize themselves against any further exposure of their Orwellian schemes to eliminate dissent and gaslight the masses, they could not possibly have done a better job than Musk.

Oh, and one more thing, and this is for you Musk fans.

Make sure to keep cheering for Elon to keep putting those hilarious affiliation labels on the Twitter accounts of the BBC, NPR, and all those other official propaganda outlets, instead of, you know, just getting rid of all the labels. With any luck, one day soon, we will wake up in a brave, new world where global corporations put labels (or warnings) on us all.

I have a hunch what mine might look like ...