Free Marjorie Taylor Greene! Twitter, Covid and Our Oppressors
Collusion Between the Unaccountable & How #BlackLivesMatter Became Chinese
I’m often asked to sound off on Twitter suspensions as if my status as the first person to be suspended for my politics somehow imbues me with special knowledge.
Usually I demur. I’ve said what I had to say in my lawsuit against Twitter, a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court of California. I’m of the view that when you lose you should never breathe a word about your loss. You dust yourself off and get about the business of living. “Can’t win ‘em all,” you say, and pick your targets when and where you can. Never surrender, yes, but sometimes it’s good to have a tactical retreat.
Sometimes you can be too early. So, perhaps, it was with that lawsuit attempt. (In investing you are rewarded for patience. In politics, not so much.) You do what you can when you can as you can. I have the same attitude about criticism. "I do the very best I know how - the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what's said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference."
When it comes to Twitter I may have lost the court case but I won the argument. We need a culture of free speech on the Internet. This can’t be solved technologically — no matter what a web3 partisan or blockchain VC swears — it must be solved philosophically. And that means it must be solved politically.
Though Jack Dorsey lied to me about one day being able to have a Twitter account again I bore Jack no ill will. “Jack Dorsey is a beautiful man with the impossible job of making everyone happy,” I said to the Wall Street Journal in October 2020. And now he doesn’t have the job at all.
But the people who run Twitter now are ugly — and not even American. Say isn’t this foreign interference? If not why not?
The Twitter suspension of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is not about speech or antitrust. It’s about self government and self rule. Do the people rule? Do their representatives get to speak as they wish in the manner they wish?
You see Twitter is not a “business”: it is a battlefield. Our foreign adversaries know this well and flood it with disinformation and misinformation. They know that they can’t beat our technical surveillance and prefer instead to shape our information environment. They compromise our influencers with attention, money, or sex.
While other social media platforms have grown (or been subsidized by foreign governments) Twitter’s stock has stayed flat for years. There’s no growth and so there’s no talent. It is run by Indians and by Saudi spies who are happy to be here or not really working at all!
The bet that the very pro-Israel Paul Singer and Elliot Management had was that by forcing Jack Dorsey from Twitter that they might have control of the information space in much the same way that they had control over other American companies. You can read all about Singer’s efforts to outsource American jobs to Israel. Independent journalist Whitney Webb’s work is quite enterprising here.
It was probably inevitable that the twin maladies of our time — Big Pharma and Big Tech — would combine in a sort of perfect storm that would get to the question of self-rule. Do we live in a democracy? Or a technocracy? A republic? Or an oligarchy?
Most products in our society are held to a standard: do not harm the customer! Enterprising trial lawyers can and do sue if you sell a defective product and hurt someone. As well they should.
Neither Big Pharma nor Big Tech is accountable because they have been made legally exempt through Congressional edict.
Instead of refining their products and making sure that their products work both Big Pharma and Big Tech hide behind the shield that Congress has provided them. This isn’t the free market but the “free from consequence” monopoly. It’s “the right to poison” because your intentions were good. It’s a total denial of the skin in the game philosophy which makes capitalism possible. It’s a bailout out by government for defective, lazy product building. It’s a one-size fits all approach to a nation of 330 million individuals!
That shield has now become a sword by which both Big Pharma and Big Tech enforce their monopolies against public health and public square without suffering any consequences for any harm they might inflict.
In the case of Big Pharma their lobbyists rely on the Reaganite law which removes liability from “vaccines.” So naturally there’s an interest in calling whatever product Big Pharma makes a vaccine.
Never mind that the covid vaccine is not actually a vaccine. Nor that one of its originators of the “vaccine” was an actual spy for the Hungarian intelligence services. (Careful readers might sense a theme!)
And why should I listen to Bill Gates about my health anyway given that he was unable to do any vetting of those closest to him, like foreign-backed spy Jeffrey Epstein?
If one of the richest men in the world can’t due diligence why should we trust him on our health? How are we to take it when his efforts in Africa have led to more polio? At what point can we simply call him incompetent? Or worse?
Are we really supposed to trust a man who owes his start to the Maxwell spy family?
Public health in a multiracial society is a tricky topic and most of us steer clear from asking about it directly. Who exactly is the public and who decides what is healthy?
“Public health” is ultimately a political question—a prudential one — and in a society of 330 million individualists — each with their own genetics, lifestyle decisions, and habits — it’s impossible to get a sense of what works for everyone. We simply lack the information to make informed decisions.
Americans have solved this issue by devolving public health matters to the states. Why should sunny and outdoor Florida have the same covid policy as gloomy and indoor New York? Isn’t sunlight the best disinfectant? And don’t Los Angeles and DC have worse rates of covid than Florida?
Science can reveal some of the answers but science isn’t always as fast as the exigencies of the moment demand.
Worse yet, biology, unlike Newtonian physics, isn’t deterministic but probabilistic. You have to make the call with imperfect information. You may well be wrong and, if history is any indication, you most often will be. You can hope that the public is forgiving but sometimes they aren’t. It’s a lot to stake your reputation on.
There’s a tendency to reason by analogy but sometimes there are new problems that can’t be compared to the past. So it is with the novel coronavirus. It is a new problem and new problems can be informed by the past but sometimes require new information and new thinking.
It’s an exceptional case and philosopher Carl Schmitt described the state of exception as the sort of thing you need a sovereign for. But everything becomes an exception and that’s government by whim.
I have a personal heuristic that I use: What are the people who are most like me doing?
That requires self knowledge. Who am I most like? In the doctor’s office they ask about your family history. That’s a good start.
And sure enough very bad covid reactions seem to run in families.
But in the main I consult my genetics. I am principally (though not exclusively) a British-American and so I can consult Her Majesty’s National Health Service, the longest running health service in the world.
How are my kinsmen if not my countrymen faring? Pretty well, thank you.
I can test my own genetics against the U.K. Biobank which has done very good work on the genetic underpinnings of covid risk.
In fact — if you’ve done 23andMe or Ancestry — so too, can you. Simply go on over to Traitwell.com and upload your data.
Alas I can’t market that information to you on Facebook because the corrupt people who run our social media companies — who are in bed with Big Pharma — think it’s misinformation.
They’d rather you not know your risks. Just get the jab and shut up!
Oh, you have a family history of myocarditis? Too bad! Just get the jab and shut up!
We ought to have a conversation about the ways in which the public is lied to about natural immunity and that conversation should begin in Congress.
But there is no natural immunity lobby in Congress, except perhaps Thomas Massie, who, as far as I know, is the only electrical engineering major there. (We once discussed the electric circuit he was designing at the Capitol Hill Club.)
Nor would it be a problem if consumers were free to choose but they aren’t really free when they are compelled to get a jab or lose their job. That’s the highest level of compulsion. There is a strong doubling down on this right now, even as most of the country get antibodies via Omicron.
When you make an unscrupulous businessman unaccountable for his actions he will work to addict the public. He will seek to enslave them. Think of it: a business where you can face no liability for what you sell. You will either mandate your product addictive. Either way, the public isn’t really free, is it?
We’ve already discussed the genetic component of opioid addiction and the genetics of joining cults.
Conservatives, captured by the silly rhetoric of their think tanks, have said that they’ll build their own companies. How and with what money remained to be worked out.
The solution isn’t to run to GETTR (Chinese), or Parler (Russian), or Trump’s social media company (Chinese?) but to use politics to reform these companies.
We must force these tech companies to respect American values — or be destroyed.
Congressmen Ken Buck and Matt Gaetz have partnered with progressives and given the FTC needed power to break up the big tech monopolies. That’s a start.
Let me suggest some others.
Ban gouging by Big Pharma during pandemics. Just as you can’t gauge people during a national emergency so too should you be barred during a pandemic.
No paid advertising in a pandemic. Actually, no more paid advertising for the pharmaceutical industry, period. Why are we one of only two industrial countries that allows that sort of thing?
Covid tests should be cheaper (and not a Trojan horse for Chinese genetics gathering!)
It’s not a coincidence that the two industries which are the least accountable — Big Pharma and Big Tech — are the most mobbed up.
Let’s be real: the real reason that Twitter is suspending Marjorie Taylor Greene is the purchase that Big Pharma has on the Biden Administration and that Big Tech has on the Republican Party.
This May I marked the 6th year of my permanent suspension from Twitter.
It is indeed strange to live in a country where activists clamor for forgiveness for murderers and none for bloggers using an admittedly ill advised metaphor but here we are. Strange times indeed.
I tweeted a metaphor and got banned for life.
No one serious thinks I threatened Mr. McKesson. In fact they’ve gone out of their way not to make that claim publicly, lest I personally sue them for defamation.
Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo admitted I had broken no rules but I still had to go. Those emails were leaked. He’s never addressed them, of course, because no journalist has ever asked them about them.
In Costolo’s recent interview with The New York Times’s Kara Swisher he’s a bit more honest about how the CEO of Twitter has one of the most difficult jobs in tech. They all but make it up as they go along and of course they do whatever they can to protect their friends.
My friend Kara Swisher has the view that a private company can do whatever its leadership wants. When I pressed Kara on this point she said, “they are not always right and it does not matter since they are a private company.” How then can we discipline them?
I wonder how far this logic goes. Private companies can’t poison you. Can they? Isn’t it tantamount to a metaphorically sort of poisoning our most vulnerable people via Twitter or Facebook or Fox News when they are particularly susceptible, maybe even genetically, to brainwashing?
Later Costolo would use his own very violent metaphor to call for killing people. He was just joking, you see, so he’s a protected class, so protected in fact that he’s allowed to muck about with NFTs — whatever those are. Isn’t it odd that NFTs exploded right around the time the government announced it was investigating art and money laundering?
The real reason I was kicked off of Twitter is because I wasn’t as powerful as I would become. I spoke truth to power.
Instead I had threatened something far more essential — the myth making of McKesson. By pointing to his Bowdoin education I had threatened the image of McKesson — one carefully and artificially constructed over many years — and designed to ride legitimate objections to police excesses into political power.
McKesson, relying on his relationship with Twitter executives who had claimed rioting to be good for their business model, sought to have me banned. Rather than let it go, McKesson is spiteful and he continued to push for me being banned, most recently tattling on me when I published a map from a peer reviewed study showing the genetic underpinnings of extreme Covid.
How long this will go on until I’m allowed to have my Twitter account, I couldn’t say, but I will continue to make Twitter accounts when I have things to say.
During the Ferguson riots I worked diligently to expose the truth of these incidents under the mistaken apprehension that Americans want the truth on racial matters.
I did this because I had met George Zimmerman whose life was upended in his tragic yet legal shooting. The details of all the fraud that went on to try to jail Zimmerman are recounted in The Trayvon Hoax documentary. I recommend watching my friend Glen Loury discuss it in detail.
Though I had lost my Twitter account I had won the argument.
Kyle Rittenhouse was the high watermark. Americans seemed to answer defiantly. If the police won’t police us we will police us. They bought guns en masse.
And while the NRA may have become a front for Russian intelligence (thank you Tish James for cleaning it up!) many of these first time gun owners did so without so much as taking a class. (They should really take a class!)
And my technique of showing the previous criminal history of the person shot? It became something of a cliché. Bloggers began exposing the so-called victims in real time.
McKesson was soundly defeated.
Given the sheer size of the black population in Baltimore, they didn’t want what he was selling. And who could blame them? The problems of Baltimore can be solved with more policing not less and with more enforcement of quality of life crimes. I know this because my family lives in Baltimore and they tell me just that.
McKesson could push for using genetic genealogy or for facial recognition, both of which are proven to solve crimes but instead he’s pushing his own narrative.
Efforts to hold McKesson accountable for the kind of rioting he caused went all the way to the Supreme Court. Of course there’s a similarity between #BlackLivesMatter (Chinese) and Charlottesville (Russian vs. Israeli).
Both seek to use deeply divisive moments in our history and to balkanize America along racial lines.
Both seek a kind of consequence free existence and both need to be stopped.
The Chinese embrace of the Proud Boys through crowdfunding is a similarly cynical play.
By having Americans burn down their cities perhaps the Chinese expect to buy the criminal real estate up. Few recall that the Black Panthers were essentially a Maoist organization.
Social media has become a battlefield not a business.
Twitter IPOed in November 2013 at $41 a share. Today it trades at $43. It should be nationalized or destroyed. He who doesn’t control the memes won’t control the country. E pluribus unum is a meme worth dying to defend.