Frances Haugen Is A Fake Whistleblower. So What?
Haugen affords the national security state the fake because they need to crack down on social media. We should encourage it.
Ours tries to be a subtle age but it is anything but. It is shambolic, absurd, gushing. It’s downright chatty and more than a little silly. It asks of you to believe absurdities for your own good but consent obtained by fraud is still fraud no matter how its dressed up.
Perhaps our betters, weaned on John Le Carré and Graham Greene, thought they might get one over on us. But we see all what’s up and we resent the op. It’s time to level with the people. I think they can handle it:
Everything public these days is an op. The only question is for whom to whom by whom.
Just tell us the truth: the intelligence community hates Facebook for refusing to play ball. That’s what this is about and that’s what this has always been about. And for many of us that’s more than enough. If you don’t trust the public with the truth you can’t earn their trust. If Uncle Sam politely said to the American people the truth — that Facebook is a threat to American way of life and to our efforts and friends abroad, particularly in the world’s hotspots — maybe a number of us would rally to the cause.
Can we please have some fireside chats or Churchillian language of all that awaits us?
New York Times reporter Mike Isaac notices the obvious: Haugen favors keeping Facebook intact and stopping encryption, which makes her rather unique when it comes to disliking Facebook.
New York Times columnist Ben Smith, of neocon New York Sun and neocon BuzzFeed fame, points out that neither Jessica Lessin’s The Information nor the left British deep state’s The Guardian made the cut.
Lessin, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who married Sam Lessin a former Facebook Vice President, shouldn’t be allowed into that consortium for obvious conflicts of interest.
“The Guardian, which won a Pulitzer Prize in public service in 2014 for its reports on secret surveillance by the National Security Agency — a series made possible by Mr. Snowden’s leaks — was another publication that got left out,” notes Smith in his latest column. But why not allow in the Guardian? Curious indeed.
Could it be because the U.S. intelligence community still resents what happened when their last “whistleblower” went to the British left’s paper of record? My, my.
The very pro-Russian narrative Max Blumenthal’s publication, The Grayzone, has pointed out that all the forces gathering around smack of the American intelligence community.
(Blumenthal’s father, by the way, is reportedly the one who advised Hillary Clinton to topple Qaddafi while having all sorts of conflicts of interest. Blumenthal père and fils coached Clinton through the Benghazi contretemps.)
Here’s The Grayzone which is well worth reading in its entirety.
A former employee of Facebook named Frances Haugen earned national renown after appearing before Congress on October 5, 2021 to accuse the company where she once worked of everything from poisoning the minds of young American women to aiding and abetting global evildoers.
While Haugen has presented herself as a “whistleblower” who risked it all to expose the secrets of the powerful, she was cultivated and legally represented by an organization led by former intelligence insiders with close ties to the US national security state.
Conservatives, including some of my friends, have picked up on the op being run and they resent it, calling it a “false flag.”
You lose the respect of the population when you lie to them. Let me tell you the truth.
Yes, Frances Haugen is a fake whistleblower. And so what? Is what she presented, you know, true?
She is a “fake because” in Scott Adams’s parlance. She exists to serve the narrative.Like Deep Throat before her she’s designed to achieve a purpose. She wants to change the underlying business model of Facebook with has become predatory.
Why should there be “state sanctioned conservatives” like Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk or Breitbart or Diamond & Silk? Why should Facebook be allowed to pick winners and losers in a world where Section 230 exists?
Let’s be honest about what’s actually going on. Many of the figures on the conservative movement have moneyed connections to foreign nationals and dual citizens who double as spies. If you call them out on this, they’ll call you a conspiracy theorist or work to end your career as they tried to do with me.
You should know how all these figures make their money and who pays who. This matters. Full stop. It’s why I ultimately designed to donate to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Yeah, we kind of should know who is funding the Federalist Society, especially as they produce so many federal judges.
So buyer beware. And you are buying in when you pay attention to these figures. You are giving them attention and that means you are giving them power.
We’ve already talked about Ben Shapiro’s ties to the Chinese-backed Wilks Brothers billionaires. Elsewhere we’ve explored the ties of Gawker to a Russian oligarch. We have probed the role of the Mercers, themselves connected to the Russians and Israelis, and their funding of much of the right.
Now this raises a disquieting question. Is censorship necessary and who ought to be doing the censoring? Should it be corporate interests as it was with me and Twitter?
Or should it be national security apparatus? And what accountability should there be for when they get it wrong?
And yes, maybe there ought to be censorship of foreign funded malefactors, even within the U.S. That foreign funding ought to be disclosed publicly rather than shadow banning or outright banning the speaker. And there should be a path back to mainstream respectability.
These are prudential, not political, questions.
They may well be questions that Facebook is unsuitable to address.
If we cannot stop these money flows, we should seek to disclose these foreign sources of influence and capital.
Foreigners should get out of our markets.
Real estate
Why do we allow so many foreigners to own property in our country?
Venture
Why do we allow foreign venture funds to invest in satellite companies? In genetics companies? In facial recognition companies? How should we feel about Sequoia, backed by the Chinese, investing in Chinese facial recognition but not American companies like Clearview?
Media
Why do we allow foreigners like the new German proprietor of Politico and Business Insider — Mathias Döpfner — to purchase influence in our society? Fun fact: Döpfner’s son works as the chief of staff to Peter Thiel. Why?
Or what about Carlos Slim, the Mexican monopolist, who owns Axios?
Politics
What can be done to keep foreigners out of our politics? Lev Parnas was convicted on all counts of campaign finance violations but this oddly doesn’t seem enough.
We could go on and on. Rep. Jeff Fortenberry was indicted for lying about taking Lebanese-Nigerian cash. There’s Andy Khawaja funneling money everywhere he could — to Clinton and Trump world alike. Who could forget the role that child molestor George Nader played? And what should we think about Tom Barrack or Imaad Zuberi and their foreign influence peddling?
Our campaign finance system has many holes, and I’m not even sure how many people realize who they’re taking money from! If you this a step further, everyone who took Adelson money, Blavatnik money, and, of course, Singer money, is complicit. And yes, that includes a lot of the Republican establishment, including the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence communities — Devin Nunes and Richard Burr.
Burr is now under investigation by the SEC. Nunes did a fundraiser with Paul Singer after it was revealed in the New York Times that he was funding the Fusion GPS dossier. Is Singer funding Nunes’s lawsuits against Twitter and CNN?
Was Citizens United itself a case funded by foreign actors and designed to make unlimited money flow into our elections? We might ask if Citizens United opened the door for foreign malefactors knowingly or unknowingly.
A recent Financial Times article points the way but those are not our only commanding heights.
The National Counterintelligence and Security Center wants to raise awareness about the links that Chinese companies have with the government, military and intelligence services. The effort is targeted on five sectors: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, semiconductors and autonomous systems.
OK, but what after “rais[ing] awareness?”
Are you funding the alternatives? If not, why not?
Until then, I’m sorry but Frances Haugen feels very much like Tracy Flick to me — just another good government type. We deserve better than casting calls for the American deep state. We deserve clear, honest explanations of why Facebook got where it got and how its considerable excesses can be curbed.
Indeed I think noting that Haugen is a “fake whistleblower” opens the door to a larger conversation about Facebook.
Facebook is not innocent for a number of its crimes, the damage done to teenage girls being the most universal hit that Haugen delivers. So too is its mass hypnosis of the world.
Yes, Haugen does want more censorship of Facebook and yes, that will disproportionately affect conservatives who have cut separate deals over the years to make money. (Jared Kushner and WinRed comes to mind, but so too does Ben Shapiro and Mark Zuckerberg’s weird bromance.)
And to be fair, the conservatives Haugen seeks to censor haven’t exactly been forthcoming about their source of funds. We deserve to know in a Cambridge Analytica world who is funding the disinformation campaign.
Our national security community missed a great opportunity to make taking down Facebook more bipartisan or even nonpartisan.
They could start by interviewing Palmer Luckey, who was fired for backing President Trump, or yours truly, who built Clearview with Hoan Ton-That.
What does Palmer Luckey think of Zuckerberg moving in on the metaverse when it was Palmer
Curious media players could also start by looking into Facebook’s considerable foreign ties, especially Sheryl Sandberg’s and Mark Zuckerberg’s, over the years.
If you want global power it comes with global responsibility.
Zuckerberg has been trying to reframe Facebook as a good weapon against China. OK, Mark. In Mark 2018 you struggled to answer if Facebook was an American company.